The East River Ripper: The Mysterious 1891 Murder of Old Shakespeare

By George R. Dekle Sr.

Innocent or guilty, or a more nuanced truth, in this Ripper-style killing

Shortly after NYPD Chief of Detectives Thomas Byrnes publicly criticized the London police for failing to capture Jack the Ripper, he received a letter purportedly from Jack himself saying New York was his next target. Not long after, Byrnes was confronted by his own Ripper-style murder case in the death of Carrie Brown, a.k.a. “Old Shakespeare,” a colorful character who worked as a prostitute and had a penchant for quoting Shakespeare. Given the near-hysteria surrounding this vicious murder soon after the Jack the Ripper murders in London, people were worried that Jack might have actually come to America.

The detective bureau finally arrested Amir Ben Ali, an Algerian immigrant. The newspapers, however, immediately criticized Byrnes for moving too quickly, suggesting that he had tried to save face by pinning the crime on an easy target.

When the verdict of murder in the second degree was announced, the papers erupted in anger and disbelief. With the aid of the French consulate, they embarked on a 10-year campaign to have Ben Ali pardoned and finally won his release by producing new evidence. Immediately upon Ben Ali’s departure for France, fresh evidence of his guilt surfaced.

Was Ben Ali falsely convicted or falsely exonerated? And if he did not commit the murder, then who did? Issues of false convictions, fake news, illegal immigration, police corruption, and racial prejudice are common tropes in today’s news cycles. The East River Ripper demonstrates that these are not simply matters of recent vintage and seeks to answer such questions in trying to determine whether and in what way justice miscarried.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Release date: Aug 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781631014574

Book preview

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The East River Ripper

TRUE CRIME HISTORY

Twilight of Innocence: The Disappearance of Beverly Potts  ·  James Jessen Badal

Tracks to Murder  ·  Jonathan Goodman

Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome  ·  Albert Borowitz

Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon  ·  Robin Odell

The Good-bye Door: The Incredible True Story of America’s First Female Serial

Killer to Die in the Chair  ·  Diana Britt Franklin

Murder on Several Occasions  ·  Jonathan Goodman

The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories  ·  Elizabeth A. De Wolfe

Lethal Witness: Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Honorary Pathologist  ·  Andrew Rose

Murder of a Journalist: The True Story of the Death of Donald Ring Mellett  ·  Thomas Crowl

Musical Mysteries: From Mozart to John Lennon  ·  Albert Borowitz

The Adventuress: Murder, Blackmail, and Confidence Games in the Gilded Age  ·  Virginia A. McConnell

Queen Victoria’s Stalker: The Strange Case of the Boy Jones  ·  Jan Bondeson

Born to Lose: Stanley B. Hoss and the Crime Spree That Gripped a Nation  ·  James G. Hollock

Murder and Martial Justice: Spying and Retribution in World War II America  ·  Meredith Lentz Adams

The Christmas Murders: Classic Stories of True Crime  ·  Jonathan Goodman

The Supernatural Murders: Classic Stories of True Crime  ·  Jonathan Goodman

Guilty by Popular Demand: A True Story of Small-Town Injustice  ·  Bill Osinski

Nameless Indignities: Unraveling the Mystery of One of Illinois’s Most Infamous

Crimes  ·  Susan Elmore

Hauptmann’s Ladder: A Step-by-Step Analysis of the Lindbergh Kidnapping  ·  Richard T. Cahill Jr.

The Lincoln Assassination Riddle: Revisiting the Crime of the Nineteenth Century  ·  Edited by Frank J. Williams and Michael Burkhimer

Death of an Assassin: The True Story of the German Murderer Who Died Defending

Robert E. Lee  ·  Ann Marie Ackermann

The Insanity Defense and the Mad Murderess of Shaker Heights: Examining the Trial of Mariann Colby  ·  William L. Tabac

The Belle of Bedford Avenue: The Sensational Brooks-Burns Murder in Turn-of-the-Century New York  ·  Virginia A. McConnell

Six Capsules: The Gilded Age Murder of Helen Potts  ·  George R. Dekle Sr.

A Woman Condemned: The Tragic Case of Anna Antonio  ·  James M. Greiner

Bigamy and Bloodshed: The Scandal of Emma Molloy and the Murder of Sarah

Graham  ·  Larry E. Wood

The Beauty Defense: Femmes Fatales on Trial  ·  Laura James

The Potato Masher Murder: Death at the Hands of a Jealous Husband  ·  Gary Sosniecki

I Have Struck Mrs. Cochran with a Stake: Sleepwalking, Insanity, and the Trial of

Abraham Prescott  ·  Leslie Lambert Rounds

The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of

Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875  ·  Gordon H. Shufelt

Cold War Secrets: A Vanished Professor, a Suspected Killer, and Hoover’s FBI  ·  Eileen Welsome

The East River Ripper: The Mysterious 1891 Murder of Old Shakespeare  ·  George R. Dekle Sr.

THE EAST RIVER

RIPPER

The Mysterious 1891 Murder

of Old Shakespeare

George R. Dekle Sr.

© 2021 by George R. Dekle Sr.

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-60635-426-1

Manufactured in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical reviews or articles.

Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.

25  24  23  22  21 5  4  3  2  1

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1Murder at the House of All Drinks

2Have They the Ripper?

3The Inquest

4The Trial Begins

5The Prosecution Case

6The Defense Case

7The Jury Speaks

8A Pardon for Frenchy?

9Who Killed Old Shakespeare?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Numerous people and institutions have assisted me in the research and preparation of this book, and I owe a debt of gratitude to every one of them. In no particular order, those who assisted me are as follows:

The Lawton Chiles Legal Information Center at the Levin College of Law gave me full access to all their online legal research databases. The Lloyd Sealy Library of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice graciously provided me with access to microfilms of the transcripts of the coroner’s inquest and trial of George Frank. Joan Bailey, in charge of interlibrary loan at the Wilson S. Rivers Library and Media Center at Florida Gateway College, assisted me by procuring the loan of the transcripts and the library staff gave me access to a microfilm reader. Katie Davis, a graduate assistant in Special Collections and Archives at the Kent State University Library, assisted in getting access to a copy of an ancient article on the murder. Maurice Klapwald, assistant manager of Interlibrary and Document Services of the New York Public Library, assisted me in getting access to an old magazine article on the murder written by one of the reporters who covered the case. Rossy Mendez, head of Research Services in the New York City Public Archives, helped me with getting access to the district attorney’s file of the case. Records Services at the New York State Archives in Albany assisted me with access to George Frank’s prison records and with documentation of the petition for pardon to Gov. Benjamin B. Odell. Richard H. Underwood, Edward T. Breathitt Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College of Law, and author of the excellent Gaslight Lawyers: Criminal Trials and Exploits in Gilded Age New York, was able to answer some questions for me and give me advice on how to get access to hard-to-find references. My daughter, Laura Dekle, graciously used her artistic talent to transform barely legible illustrations from ancient newspapers into crisp, clean line drawings. Main Street Printing in Lake City, Florida, printed and reprinted the numerous drafts of my manuscript.

Numerous online databases allowed access to newspapers, books, and periodicals that proved essential to writing a full account. The databases were, in no particular order: William S. Hein & Company, https://heinonline.org/; the Internet Archive, https://www.archive.org/; the Hathi Trust Digital Library, https://www.hathitrust.org/; Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/; Google Books, https://books.google.com; Google Scholar, https://scholar.google.com/; JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/; Newspapers.com, https://www.newspapers.com/; Genealogybank, https://www.genealogybank.com/; NYS Historic Newspapers, https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/; and Chronicling America, Historic American Newspapers, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge my wife, Lane, who has suffered through the writing of this and eight previous books, and whose proofreading and critique has always been insightful and on point.

INTRODUCTION

The East River Ripper

In Eugene Borchard’s 1931 book, Convicting the Innocent, you will find an account of the wrongful conviction of Amir Ben Ali,¹ who was arrested for the mutilation murder of Carrie Brown, a prostitute, at the East River Hotel in New York City in 1891. The murder resembled the Whitechapel Ripper murders, and the press began speculating that Jack the Ripper had come to America. According to the standard version of the story, Thomas F. Byrnes, the New York chief of detectives, had earlier criticized Scotland Yard for failing to arrest the Whitechapel Ripper, so a failure to make an arrest in his Ripper case would have been an embarrassment.

Byrnes tried to avoid embarrassment by manufacturing a case against Amir Ben Ali, an Algerian immigrant who went by the name of Frenchy. The evidence consisted mainly of the fact that Frenchy had slept at the hotel the night of the murder, and bloodstains—which only the police had noticed—led directly down the hall from the victim’s room to Frenchy’s room. Frenchy’s bungling court-appointed counsel failed to call the witnesses who could testify there were no bloodstains in the hall, and Frenchy was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life.

One of the reporters, Jacob Riis, did not give up on Frenchy, and over the years he gained sufficient stature and reputation to recruit many influential supporters for his campaign to pardon Frenchy. Eleven years after Frenchy’s arrest, Riis and his allies retained a top-flight attorney to argue for a pardon; the attorney obtained previously unknown evidence of Frenchy’s innocence; and he filed a petition for pardon with Gov. Benjamin B. Odell. Based on the newly discovered evidence and an affidavit from Riis that there were no bloodstains in the hallway, Governor Odell granted Amir Ben Ali a full pardon, and Frenchy later sailed back to France. It is a heartwarming story of how a crusading journalist saved an innocent man railroaded with evidence manufactured by corrupt and ambitious police officers. But the story gives as reliable an account of the case as The Last of the Mohicans gives of the French and Indian War.

This book will, for the first time, give an accurate history of the East River Ripper case. It will not give an infallible account of what really happened. No history can do that. All history can do is reconstruct an account of what probably happened. The more numerous and reliable the sources, the more meticulous the historian, the more accurate the history can be, and no effort has been spared in making this history as true to what really happened as humanly possible. Research for this book has included a thorough examination of the contemporary news accounts, the memoirs of the participants, the transcript of the inquest, the trial transcript, and the New York City district attorney’s case file. It has uncovered evidence that should establish that the newspapermen were not heroic, the police did not corruptly manufacture evidence, and the defense team was competent. But did Frenchy kill Carrie Brown? After all the evidence is considered, the final chapter will propose three possible answers to that question.

1

Murder at the House of All Drinks

At approximately 3:00 a.m. on August 31, 1888, someone attacked Mary Ann Nichols as she walked the streets of London’s Whitechapel district. Many people heard her cries for help, but nobody came to her aid. The man cut Mary Ann’s throat, nearly severed her head, and repeatedly slashed her torso. One gash reached from pelvis to breastbone. The police theorized Mary Ann’s death might be connected to two prior mutilation murders in Whitechapel.¹ Emma Ellis Smith had met her death on April 4, 1888, when someone drove a stake into her vagina, and three days later Martha Turner had suffered thirty-nine stab wounds.²

The body count quickly climbed. On September 8, 1888, someone cut Annie Chapman’s throat from ear to ear, ripped open her torso, removed her bowels and heart, and tied part of her intestines around her neck.³ Then on September 23, 1888, they found the body of an unidentified young woman near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The body bore mutilations like those inflicted on Chapman and Nichols.⁴ The next two killings came on September 30, 1888, with the mutilation murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catharine Eddowes.⁵

On October 2, 1888, workers found the dismembered body of a woman on the Thames embankment. The killer had hacked off her head, arms, and legs, then wrapped her torso in a rough cloth and tightly bound it with cord. The police theorized that a pair of arms recently found at Pimlico and Lambeth came from this body.⁶ On November 9, a bill collector found Mary Jane Kelly’s slashed and eviscerated body in her bedroom.⁷ Then came a lull in the action.

In early July 1889, the London police received a letter signed Jack the Ripper, claiming that he was about to resume his work. July 16, 1889, dawned upon the discovery of the still-warm body of Alice McKenzie in Whitechapel. The killer had cut her throat to the spine and repeatedly slashed her abdomen.⁸ On September 10, 1889, PC William Pennet discovered a decomposed, headless, legless torso under a railroad arch on Pinchin Street in the Whitechapel district.⁹ Investigation led the authorities to identify the body as Lydia Hart.¹⁰ With the death toll at twelve, the killings in Whitechapel went into another hiatus, but nobody believed that they had permanently stopped.

The inability of real police detectives to solve the baffling series of murders may have contributed to the immense popularity of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, who made his debut approximately six months before the first Ripper murder. Holmes’s inaugural case, A Study in Scarlet, first saw publication in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887.¹¹ Holmes’s next adventure, The Sign of the Four, appeared in the February 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, just five months after the murder of Lydia Hart.¹² Holmes certainly outshone Scotland Yard as a solver of crime, but in fifty-six short stories and four novels, Arthur Conan Doyle never pitted him against Jack the Ripper.

Doyle may have shied away from the prospect of having his hero tackle the Ripper, but other authors had no such compunctions. In September 1889, a playhouse in the Château d’Eau theater district of Paris staged an enormously successful production titled Jaques L’Eventreur (Jack the Ripper).¹³ A contemporary American reviewer called it the most horrible play ever shown on the French stage. Writing that only France would allow the production of such a grisly play, the reviewer predicted it would have a long run, as anything original in the way of horrors is sure of a success in the Paris of to-day.¹⁴

By the end of the play, a heroic police officer identifies the Ripper as a disgraced English nobleman. It seems the Ripper blamed the White-chapel slum dwellers for his fall from grace and swore to wreak terrible vengeance upon them. The detective who ends the carnage is as colorful a character as Sherlock Holmes. Decked out in a gaudy uniform festooned with medals, he curses like a sailor and drinks coqtailles like a fish. He is Det. Insp. Thomas Byrnes, chief of detectives for the New York Metropolitan Police Department.

The real-life Byrnes, who had nothing to do with the stage play, bore little resemblance to his fictional alter ego except in his ability to catch criminals. A child of the New York slums, Byrnes enlisted in Ellsworth’s Zouaves at the outbreak of the Civil War and fought in the disastrous Battle of Bull Run, where Confederate Gen. Thomas J. Jackson earned the nickname Stonewall. According to legend, when Byrnes’s enlistment expired, he joined the New York Metropolitan Police Department, where he distinguished himself during the Draft Riots of 1863, a civil insurrection that Abraham Lincoln put down by diverting troops fresh from the Battle of Gettysburg to the streets of New York. Before the arrival of the soldiers, Byrnes had supposedly saved the life of a superior officer and single-handedly confronted a mob bent on destroying the Colored Orphan Asylum on the corner of 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue.¹⁵ Although the mob burned the asylum to the ground, no children lost their lives.¹⁶ These acts of heroism purportedly accelerated Byrnes’s rise through the ranks of the Police Department.

The legend falls short of the facts. Our Police Protectors, the 1885 history of the New York Police Department, vividly describes the Draft Riots and the assault on the asylum, but it says nothing about Byrnes defending the asylum.¹⁷ The Draft Riots occurred in July 1863, and Byrnes did not join the Police Department until December 10, 1863.¹⁸ Byrnes served as a patrolman for five years, and then began a meteoric rise in the hierarchy of the Police Department. In 1868 he earned his promotion from patrolman to roundsman, and in 1869 he became a sergeant. He made captain in 1870, and on March 12, 1880, he became chief of detectives.¹⁹ He would eventually retire from the force as chief of police.²⁰

Byrnes took over a Detective Bureau that the New York Times described as a group of incompetent political hacks whose inability to solve crime was exceeded only by their lack of industry.²¹ The day of his appointment, Byrnes set up an office on Wall Street and drew a line in the sand, promising to arrest on sight any criminal venturing south of his Fulton Street dead line. Byrnes then enforced the dead line with an iron fist. His detectives made over three thousand arrests and confiscated approximately $600,000 worth of contraband before the underworld became convinced that Byrnes meant business and quit crossing the line. As his next official act, Byrnes put twenty-one of the twenty-eight detectives back into uniform. Pursuing a policy of recruiting good men rather than political hacks, he increased the bureau’s size from twenty-eight to forty and instituted new procedures designed for proactively gathering intelligence information on criminal activity. Byrnes not only implemented many modern methods of detective work, he also pioneered the use of an enhanced interrogation technique called the third degree.²² He wrote Professional Criminals of America, a book that every self-respecting American detective bureau had in its library; and he oversaw the collection of a Rogue’s Gallery of two thousand photographs of known criminals from all over the United States.²³

Byrnes had such preternatural self-control that the reporters on the police beat dubbed him the Sphinx of Manhattan.²⁴ Writing in 1890, journalist Julian Hawthorne described Byrnes as a big, handsome, powerfully built man, with a strong chin topped by a heavy moustache. His step was light, his bearing easy and alert. He had a penetrating gaze, a melodious voice, and a good-humored, agreeable disposition. When the need arose, though, Hawthorn said that Byrnes could be as severe and unrelenting as Rhadamanthus himself.²⁵ In classical mythology Rhadamanthus was one of the underworld’s implacable judges of the dead, who, according to Virgil,

Hears and judges each committed crime;

Enquires into the manner, place, and time.

The conscious wretch must all his acts reveal,

Loth to confess, unable to conceal.²⁶

In his memoirs, journalist Jacob A. Riis, who felt no love for Byrnes, called him a big policeman, with unique virtues and vices not likely to be found in another officer. Although Riis believed that Byrnes was unscrupulous and a policeman with all the failings of the trade, Riis was willing to admit that he made the detective service great.… He left no one behind him fit to wear his shoes.²⁷ Riis correctly assessed Byrnes’s virtues. Byrnes made the New York City Detective Bureau one of the most advanced, innovative, and successful investigative agencies in the United States, if not the world. Francis L. Wellman, who prosecuted some of Byrnes’s most notorious cases, described him as the terror of the underworld—a veritable Sherlock Holmes.²⁸ The Harrisburg Patriot probably came closer to the mark when it called him the American Vidocq, comparing him to the legendary French detective, Eugène François Vidocq, founder of the French police de sûreté.²⁹ In short, the New York Times did not err when it called Byrnes the world’s greatest ‘thinking detective,’ with a record of captures in famous crimes which surpassed all his rivals.³⁰

The zenith of the Ripper mania in London corresponded with the zenith of Byrnes’s international fame as the greatest crime fighter of the age. In an obvious allusion to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, the San Francisco Examiner called Byrnes the Lord High Executioner of wrongdoers.³¹ The king of Italy so admired Byrnes that he offered the inspector a gold medal, and Byrnes touched off a minor diplomatic incident when he refused the honor.³² Inevitably, the British press compared Byrnes’s Detective Bureau to Scotland Yard, and the Yard suffered in the comparison. London’s Pall Mall Gazette summed up the differences between the two detective agencies with the observation that The main difference between the London and New York detectives is that Inspector Byrnes’s men catch the thieves.³³

With the news media making such comparisons, it was only natural that members of the press would ask Byrnes himself how he would fare against a Ripper-style murderer. Francis L. Wellman, who prosecuted Byrnes’s Ripper case, recalled in his memoirs that at the height of the Ripper mania, Byrnes boasted to the newspapers that if the Ripper tried anything like that in New York, Byrnes would have him in jail within forty-eight hours.³⁴ Journalist Charles Edward Russell, writing some forty years after the fact, recalled that Byrnes said, We’d have him within thirty-six hours.³⁵ A diligent search of numerous online newspaper databases has failed to uncover any report of such a boast by Byrnes.³⁶ The closest thing to such a boast came in a statement Byrnes made to the American press on October 3, 1888, a little over a month into the Ripper’s reign of terror. Byrnes said that he thought the London police ought to have already caught the Ripper, and he outlined the tactics he would employ against the killer. He ended his remarks by saying, But pshaw! what’s the use of talking; the murderer should have been caught long ago.³⁷

A portion of Byrnes’s critique found its way into print in the London Star,³⁸ and the article may have prompted a reporter for London’s Pall Mall Gazette to take the opportunity to interview Byrnes about his department and its innovative methods. The reporter wrote, I commenced by asking him the regulation question, how he would catch Jack the Ripper. Byrnes’s reply displayed somewhat more tact than the quote reprinted in the London Star: I don’t think I would be justified in criticizing the police methods in London, when I don’t know the circumstances, and am 3,000 miles away from the spot. Police-inspectors all over the country have been giving their opinions about it, and I think they were a set of fools for opening their mouths. I will say, however, that the people of New York wouldn’t have put up with what [London Police Commissioner] Warren did for a moment.³⁹

Less than four months after Byrnes’s comments appeared in the London Star, the New York Times reported that the Police Department had received a letter from Jack the Ripper. It read: You think that ‘Jack the Ripper’ is in England, but he is not. I am right here, and I expect to kill somebody by Thursday next, and so get ready for me with your pistols, but I have a knife that has done more than your pistols. Next thing you will hear of some woman dead. Yours, truly. JACK THE RIPPER. Whether the letter really came from Jack the Ripper, and whether Byrnes’s comments in the London Star precipitated the letter are open to serious doubt. The letter, addressed to Captain Ryan of the 35th Street Station, came with two cents postage due.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, it stirred up some excitement in New York City.

In the waning days of 1890, another letter purporting to come from Jack the Ripper made the New York papers. Addressed to the editor of the New-York Herald and written in red ink, it said:

Have just written to Inspector Byrnes telling him I am over in America and ready for some good work. Arrived in Teutonic just lately on voyage talked with fellow passengers about myself. Wonder where Jack the Ripper is now? say they. Ah! I wonder, say I. Oh, it was rare sport. Rolled over in bed at night laughing, fit to die at the thought.

I’ve had a good rest now and finished with Whitechapel. I’ve been to Paris, where I did a little slashing; but it wasn’t up to much; then to Vienna, and stayed a long time, but didn’t do any work; my hand shook too much. I wanted a good long rest and plenty of walking about.

Now I’m all right, ready for any amount of good jobs and I mean to have them! Have studied all my plans carefully. They can’t fail. Look for news of me in a day or two hence, somewhere down town. With compliments of the season, I remain, yours,

JACK THE RIPPER.⁴¹

Then the other shoe fell. On the morning of April 24, 1891, personnel of the East River Hotel in New York City’s Fourth Ward slum discovered the mutilated body of an aged prostitute lying on a blood-soaked bed in room 31. Papers nationwide ran lurid headlines:

Is Jack Here? A Murder Like One of the Ripper’s.⁴²

Jack the Ripper.⁴³

A Woman Butchered. Horrible Discovery in a New York Lodging House. A Lewd Female Murdered in a Manner Suggestive of the Notorious Jack the Ripper.⁴⁴

Horrible Murder. The Bloody Exploits of Jack the Ripper Duplicated in the City of New York. A Poor Nymph du Pave Murdered, Disemboweled and Otherwise Disfigured by a Demon Who Left No Trace. Several Arrests Made.⁴⁵

In Whitechapel Style. Horrible Butchery of an Unknown Woman in New York. The Body Hacked in Such a Manner That the Police Believe a Jack the Ripper is Plying His Trade of Murder in Gotham.⁴⁶

The Ripper at Work. A Whitechapel Murder in a New York Lodging House. A Woman Known as ‘Shakespeare’ Found Dead and Mutilated in Her Bed—No Clew to the Fiend.⁴⁷

The East River Hotel, located on the corner of Water Street and Catharine Slip in New York City’s Fourth Ward, was also known as the Fourth Ward Hotel, and the sailors who frequented the place called it The House of All Drinks. A first-time visitor to New York might think the hotel’s layout strange. The ground floor consisted of a saloon, and the upper floors had rooms for rent. In his memoirs, Francis Wellman called it a Raines Law hotel.⁴⁸ Such hotels were designed to get around the Raines Law, a state statute that prohibited the sale of alcoholic beverages on Sunday anywhere except in a hotel. Resourceful bar owners circumvented the law by putting a saloon on the ground floor of a multistory building and renting rooms on the floors above it. It has been estimated that Gilded Age New York boasted over a thousand Raines Law hotels where men could buy liquor on the ground floor and women’s bodies in the rooms above.⁴⁹ For twenty-five cents, an unaccompanied lady could rent a room at the House of All Drinks. If she had a male companion, the price doubled. A dime would procure a pail of rancid beer, and the woman’s body would fetch whatever price she negotiated with her male companion. The staff seldom entered any names in the hotel register, and when they did, the names were usually false.

The East River Hotel (Redrawn from New York Evening World, 3rd ed., April 25, 1891)

The East River Hotel’s barroom had a low ceiling, with a floor so grimy that you could not tell whether you were walking on boards or a dirt floor. At one side of the barroom stood a big iron stove. At the other side stood the bar, stained yellow along its sides from the tobacco-chewing customers’ habit of spitting on it instead of into a spittoon. The grimy top of the bar bore the chars and burns of the innumerable cigars and cigarettes that had been put out on its surface. Behind the bar stood a narrow shelf holding bottles labeled whiskey, gin, brandy, and so forth. What the bottles actually held was anyone’s guess. The most that could be said for certain was that the liquid in the bottles contained alcohol. At one end of the bar stood a huge keg containing stale beer. On a busy night, a thick fog of cigar and cigarette smoke would make it hard to see, but the pungent smoke could not hide the stink of unwashed bodies.⁵⁰ Off to the side of the barroom stood a smaller drinking area reserved for ladies and their guests. In this area, called the box, ladies would meet with and entertain potential customers, haggle over prices, and make the assignations that would send them upstairs to share a filthy bed in a tiny room.⁵¹

On the morning of April 24, 1891, Edward Fitzgerald, the first broom janitor at the East River Hotel, climbed the stairwell from the barroom on the ground floor to the squalid rooms above. He performed many functions at the hotel, and this morning he had to inspect the upper floors to make sure the guests had vacated all the rooms and to collect the keys left in the rooms. The inspection of the lower floors went without incident, but when he reached the top floor, he found the door to room 31 locked. Taking his passkey, he opened the door and looked inside. On the bed lay the nude, contorted body of a female guest, her head wrapped in her clothing. She had her stomach ripped open; her entrails pulled out and piled on the bed; an X carved on one buttock; and her genitals repeatedly slashed. Blood dripped from the bed into a puddle on the floor. Fitzgerald did not stay to perform a close inspection.⁵² He rushed downstairs and told the hotel housekeeper, Mary Corcoran, that he had found a woman in room 31 and she had blood all over her. Corcoran went upstairs, looked into the room, and rushed back down.⁵³

They had to notify the police, but first they had to pretty things up as well as possible. The register had no entry for room 31. This would not look good when the police arrived to investigate. Nor would the bar’s track record for homicides. Although the hotel tried to be a safe place for prostitutes to ply their trade, several killings had occurred there. Tommy Thompson, the head bartender, had once used a cavalry saber to kill a belligerent sailor, and a prostitute had previously been found murdered in the very room that presently held the mutilated corpse.⁵⁴ None of these incidents had caused much public concern, but this latest killing would certainly generate massive public interest because the killer had carved his victim in a manner so reminiscent of Jack the Ripper. Bartender Thompson entered C. Knicklo and wife into the register as the occupants of room 31.⁵⁵ The police would spend many fruitless hours searching for the nonexistent Knicklo before Thompson admitted the falsehood. After the register had been doctored, the hotel’s proprietor, James Jennings, went to the Oak Street Police Station. He found the desk sergeant, McCarthy, on duty and made a full report.

Richard O’Connor, the precinct captain, rushed to the hotel with ward detectives Griffin and Doran.⁵⁶ Although an eighteen-year veteran of the Police Department, O’Connor had become a captain only two months before. As a sergeant of detectives, he had gained a reputation for his encyclopedic knowledge of the denizens of the criminal underworld and for knowing criminal law and procedure better than many practicing lawyers. Having once been a Central Office detective assigned to the district attorney’s office, O’Connor knew how to put a case together for presentation to a jury.⁵⁷ In recognition of his skill as a detective, the press called him Hawkshaw Dick.⁵⁸

O’Connor got to the hotel at 10:00 a.m. and had a brief conversation with Thompson, the bartender. He then went straight upstairs to view the crime scene. A cursory examination of the room revealed a bloody knife lying on the bed next to the body. It was a black-handled table knife with a blade some four inches long. The end of the knife had either been broken or ground off to make a sharp point. O’Connor also noticed the pool of blood on the floor under the bed. It was about the size of the bottom of a water pail. After a brief inspection of the room, he placed Patrolman John F. Mullarky at the bottom of the stairwell leading up to the rooms to keep gawkers from contaminating the crime scene. He then went to police headquarters on Mulberry Street to notify the chief inspector. It took no more than twenty minutes to get to headquarters, where he briefed Inspector Byrnes on the situation. He then returned to the scene with Det. Michael Crowley and another detective. He got there by 11:00 a.m. and was present for the coroner’s examination of the scene. It was not until 4:00 p.m. that O’Connor made his most controversial discovery—a faint trail of blood spots leading from room 31 to room 33 across the hall.⁵⁹

Patrolman Mullarky maintained crime scene integrity until the arrival of Coroner Schultze, who immediately began to demonstrate why appointed medical examiners are preferable to elected coroners. Ability to win an election was the only qualification for holding the coroner’s post, and it was possible to have a coroner who knew nothing whatsoever about medicine. For example, at one time a former professional prizefighter and Tammany Hall muscleman, Richard Croker, held the post of coroner.⁶⁰ Schultze was a medical man, but he had no idea how to conduct a criminal investigation. In a recent high-profile murder case that his office had investigated without asking for help from the police or district attorney, Schultze had neglected to order an autopsy, lost a critical piece of tangible evidence, and lost the transcript of his coroner’s inquest. It was only through the Herculean efforts of assistant district attorneys Francis L. Wellman and Charles E. Simms, both of whom we shall meet later, that the case was saved and a conviction obtained.⁶¹

Schultze’s first official act upon arriving at the scene was to allow a gaggle of newspaper reporters to accompany him up to the top floor, where he found the