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  • Writer's pictureDerek Faraci

Jack in America


This Article Originally Ran On Blumhouse.com


In the early days 1891 a new century was fast approaching, and hints of what the 20th Century would bring could be found if you knew where to look. In March of that year, Jesse Reno built the first escalator. The Wrigley Company opened for business on April 1, selling soap. Over the course of a year, Wrigley would switch from soap to baking soda to gum. Arthur Conan Doyle was busy writing his first Sherlock Holmes story for THE STRAND MAGAZINE.


All of this, all these things that foreshadowed the coming of a new age meant jack shit to Edward Fitzgerald, the night manager of the East River Hotel in New York. The East River Hotel wasn’t what we would consider a nice spot for a nap; the NEW YORK JOURNAL called it a “festering resort of vice and misery”, and the clientele fit that description well. On any given night, Edward would rent out the rooms, which were no bigger than a jail cell, to drunken sailors, opium-addicted dock workers, and prostitutes. Over the years, Edward had seen it all, from simple fist fights to murders; he had seen so much that the sight of a dead body had about as much effect on him as seeing a squirrel in a tree, which is to say it had no effect at all.


As the sun rose on that late April day, Edward went on his rounds, making sure that last night’s lodgers had vacated their rooms. A quick opening of the door and a peek into the small rooms was all he needed. If the door was locked, he would knock to wake the lodger, reminding them that they had to get the hell out. The door to room 31 was one of the locked ones.


Edward knocked, then waited. When no one responded, he knocked again, louder this time. Still, there was no response. After going through the motions a third time, Edward forced the door open and looked inside. He quickly closed the door and ran to call the police.


Carrie Brown was born in England sometime in 1834. As a child, she and her family moved to America where they lived a rather normal life. As she grew up, Carrie fell in love with a respectable man; a sea captain from Massachusetts. They married and had three children. Carrie Brown had what many would consider a perfect life; how she ended up alone in New York with no skills or job is a mystery lost to time.


Some that knew Carrie during her happier times say that her tendency to drink ruined her family life. Others say that since she was a child, Carrie dreamed of being an actress and chose to leave her family to give the theater a shot. For a time, Carrie’s acting career seemed to be working. She became a part of the theater crowd of New York and found that she had a special affinity for Shakespeare. When she would have a few drinks, Carrie would sometimes break into a monologue written by the Bard, much to the enjoyment of her actor friends.


Sadly, this lifestyle wouldn’t last long. Carrie was older than most of the others trying to make it in theater, well over fifty, and soon enough, she found that the roles were harder and harder to come by. Like so many other women have been forced to do, Carrie turned to prostitution to make a living. With the prostitution came more drinking, not the fun kind of drinking, but the forget the past kind of drinking. As in the past, after a few too many, Carrie would break into a Shakespearean monologue - the other ladies gave Carrie a nickname to fit her drunken outbursts of theater; Old Shakespeare.


By 1891, Carrie’s life was about as bad as a life could get. When she bumped into her friend Alice Sullivan, Carrie admitted that she had not eaten in a number of days. Alice bought her friend a cheese sandwich, and the two women spent the day together. Just after sundown on April 23, Carrie and Alice had a dinner of corned beef and cabbage at a Christian mission before heading out to find some men willing to pay for a few minutes of affection. Alice watched as Carrie went off with a man they only knew as Frenchy. Later in the night, Carrie stopped in a pub and had a drink with a friend named Mary Healy. Mary watched Carrie leave the pub with a man she only knew as Frenchy.


Hours later, Carrie showed up at the East River Hotel and rented room 31. With her was a man that Mary Minter, the maid at the hotel, described as “about 32-years-old, five feet eight inches in height, of slim build with a long sharp nose, and a heavy mustache of light color. He wore an old black derby hat, the crown of which was much dented.” Carrie and the man signed in as C. Nicolo and wife, then headed to their room, a pail of beer with them.


Sometime around 2 a.m., the sharp-nosed man left the East River Hotel. Carrie Brown wasn’t with him.


When police arrived at the East River Hotel on the morning of April 24, they weren’t prepared for what they found. Carrie Brown laid on the bed, naked and dead, her clothes wrapped around her head. Her body had been cut open and disemboweled. As they came closer, the police saw that Carrie had been stabbed multiple times. When they turned her over, they found that an ‘X’ had been carved into her left buttock. Sitting on a table was a sharpened, bloody knife with a wood handle.


History didn’t record who was the first person to think it or say it - maybe everyone thought it at once, like a nightmare shared by the entire city. Maybe it was Edward Fitzgerald or one of the officers who arrived at the scene. Whoever it was that first thought it, their theory spread across New York and the world in record time. Evening editions of newspapers carried the warning…


Jack the Ripper was in America.


For Thomas F. Byrnes, New York City’s head detective and Superintendent of Police, the headlines stung. It had been three years since Jack the Ripper terrorized London and in that time, Byrnes had become famous for calling out the London police for their inability to solves the murders. Byrnes had, on multiple occasions, claimed that if the Whitechapel murders had happened in New York, the police would have the killer ”in the jug in 36 hours.” Byrnes knew that he would now need to prove his statements correct or he would become a joke.


As it was, Byrnes already had a difficult relationship with the press. Stories of police brutality and bribes were common, and the press consistently placed Byrnes at the top of the corrupt pyramid. The detective knew that the press would push the idea of Jack the Ripper being in New York just to hurt his reputation, and he would do everything he could to stop them.


Byrnes’ first move was to point out the inconsistencies between the Ripper murders and Carrie Brown. Jack the Ripper didn’t cover the faces of his victims, and he didn’t leave the murder weapon behind. The press all but ignored these points and kept with the idea that Jack the Ripper was responsible.


Byrnes had officers track down Carrie Brown’s associates, as well as Mary Minter, and put them into protective custody. Learning of the Frenchy connection, and unsure if it was one man, or two men with the same nickname - Frenchy was a popular nickname in the Fourth Ward at that time - the police began to bring in and question anyone called Frenchy.


By the 27th of April, Inspector Byrnes announced to the press that they knew who the killer was. Byrnes explained that the killer was an Algerian man who was “a cousin of one of the suspects who was arrested.... This suspect was known in Water Street as 'Frenchy'... Possibly that is also the name of his cousin, the murderer.” Byrnes claimed that the cousins were well known in the Fourth Ward as being “the most vicious creatures in the quarter’’ the women who worked the streets of the Fourth Ward affirmed Byrnes’ story - they claimed that the cousins, who the press called Frenchy 1 and Frenchy 2, were known to abuse women.


Further reports on Frenchy 2 came out, revealing, among other things, that his name was Arbie La Bruckman, and he was born in Morocco but had moved to London. Further digging revealed that La Bruckman had been arrested in London just after Christmas 1889 on the suspicion that he was Jack the Ripper. La Bruckman claimed that he stood trial and was acquitted but in reality, no one ever stood trial for the Jack the Ripper murders.


After the papers reported on La Bruckman, new information came in from the Glenmore, a hotel a few blocks from the East River Hotel. According to witnesses, a man fitting La Bruckman’s appearance, came to the Glenmore in the early hours of the 24th of April looking to rent a room. The desk clerk refused to rent a room to the man because his hands and shirt were covered in fresh blood. When the man asked to use the restroom, the desk clerk again denied him.


La Bruckman was found and taken into custody in New Jersey. A New York detective was sent to interview him, and after a brief talk with La Bruckman, the detective concluded that he was not the killer. Shortly after, Inspector Byrnes revealed to the press that the police had taken the killer into custody the day after the murder. The man, Frenchy 1, was Ameer Bin Ali.


Ameer Bin Ali spoke French and lived in the East River Hotel in room 33, across the hall from room 31. According to Byrnes, a blood trail from room 33 led directly to room 31. This was, by all accounts, a lie. On the morning of the 24th, the police, with press close behind, searched every room in the East River Hotel. There was no blood trail reported at that time. When reporters pointed out that Ali did not resemble the description of the man that Mary Minter saw Carrie Brown with, Byrnes responded that Minter could not be trusted because she was “an opium fiend, and has associated with Chinamen.”


It was clear that Byrnes and the New York police were using Ali as a scapegoat, and the press had no problem reporting it as such. Ameer Bin Ali was charged with the murder of Carrie Brown and went to trial. Closing arguments were done on July 3rd, and within hours, the jury, who wanted to be done with the trial and be with their families for the Fourth of July, came back with a guilty verdict. One of the jurors later claimed that members of the jury were bribed or threatened by police to find Ali guilty. Still, the ruling stood, and Ameer Bin Ali was sentenced to life in prison for second-degree murder.


After the trial of Ameer Bin Ali, the press kept a closer eye on Inspector Byrnes. As the papers focused on the corruption in the New York police and in Tammany Hall, Byrnes’ found himself tangentially caught in a number of scandals. In 1895, the newly named Police Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, forced Byrnes to resign. Byrnes became an insurance investigator and opened a detective agency on Wall Street. He died of stomach cancer in 1910.


Journalists Jacob Riis and Charles Edward Russell continued to report on the Carrie Brown murder and the trial of Ameer Bin Ali, forcing the police to reopen the case. In 1902, after serving eleven years in Sing Sing prison, Ali was released when Governor Benjamin Odell became convinced that the blood evidence had been tampered with. Ameer Bin Ali reportedly left America and returned to Algeria. After that, there is no information on him.


Carrie Brown’s body was claimed by her daughter and brought back to Salem, Massachusetts. She was laid to rest in a family plot beside the grave of her son.

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