Erased: The Murder of Elma Sands

I don’t usually like dramatizations, but this podcast did a great job interpreting 200-year-old testimony to bring this trial to life. The frequent ads are annoying, but the series makes up for it with good writing and a constellation of talented actors for all the many witnesses. I especially appreciated the historical context added by the host’s narration, and how she always circles back to centering Elma’s story, which got lost in the trial itself. Then ending was especially poignant. I think a lot of listeners were expecting a more erudite delivery, but this series encapsulates the motto “show, don’t tell” – it’s more of a radio show than historical nonfiction.

The dramatization uses way too much modern language. No one in this podcast speaks the way a person in the 18th century would. It’s really distracting and made it hard to really imagine the situation as a whole. Super disappointing, since there isn’t a lot out there on the Elma Sands case.

INCREDIBLE! A MUST LISTEN TO

The problem with this dramatization of the Levi Weeks trial is not the modernized language (some may like and others dislike it), and it’s not that the podcast interprets the story as a miscarriage of justice for Elma at the hands of the Patriarchy (which is a plausible but not inevitable interpretation). It’s that, whether by creative choice or a misunderstanding of the source material, the podcast fictionalizes three crucial facts. First, the dramatization makes much of the use of an affidavit from a witness - Ms. Watkins - who could not attend the trial in person. The podcast presents this as an ambush by the defense of the hapless prosecutor, who doesn’t get to cross examine the potentially important witness. But the transcript of the trial says that the affidavit was collected with the prosecutor present in advance of the trial - it wasn’t unfair, and it wasn’t an ambush. Second, the podcast incorrectly presents the official coroner’s examination as happening after Elma’s landlady displayed her body for the city to see, and uses that timing to question the credibility of the defense’s medical testimony. That’s backwards - the coroners met first, and that undermines some of the prosecutions apparent ‘evidence’ from street doctors that Elma had been strangled. Finally - and this may be a result of the same confusion - the podcast describes Elma’s body as ‘eviscerated’ when it was drawn from the well and put on display. But the official record says the body was barely scratched when drawn from the well. Elma’s body was opened during the coroner’s exam, so it was certainly ‘eviscerated’ after that, when it was displayed publicly. That detail is important because it goes to the question of whether and how Elma was murdered. What’s particularly frustrating about these inaccuracies is that a more careful account might actually do a better (and less ham handed) job of building the anti-Patriarchy critique. Because there was another, much more plausible suspect - and the fact that he was able to deflect serious scrutiny for Elma’s murder is absolutely a reflection of social and legal disregard for women at the time. A book that does a much more balanced job of telling this story is Duel with the Devil (2013). It’s also the basis for a one-hour podcast, the 2/8/24 episode of History of Trial, worth listening to either instead of or in addition to this one.