East River Ripper

Dekle Sr. George R.

Description

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

Sujets

• Histoire
• Nueva York
• True crime
• History of the Americas
• New York

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 31 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781631014574
• Langue: English

Extrait

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
1 Murder at the House of All Drinks
2 “Have They the Ripper?”
3 The Inquest
4 The Trial Begins
5 The Prosecution Case
6 The Defense Case
7 The Jury Speaks
8 A Pardon for Frenchy?
9 Who 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 co