Carrie Brown

Case background and investigation

Carrie Brown was a longtime resident of the Bowery district of Manhattan who was nicknamed "Shakespeare" or "Old Shakespeare," reportedly because she liked to quote the playwright. According to the New England Historical Society, she was born Caroline Montgomery in the early 1830s, married a man named Charles Brown, and lived for a time in Salem, Massachusetts, where she had children before moving to New York in the 1860s. Sources disagree about her exact age: the New England Historical Society describes her as 56 at her death, while Smithsonian Magazine gives her age as 60.

On the night of April 23, 1891, Brown took a room at the East River Hotel, a lodging house on the Manhattan waterfront, in the company of a man. According to Murder by Gaslight, the pair were entered in the register as "C. Nicolo and wife." The next morning, April 24, a hotel employee found her body in Room 31. Accounts agree that she had been strangled and that her body had been mutilated with a knife. The man who had accompanied her was gone, and so was the key to the room.

The killing came less than three years after the Whitechapel murders in London, and newspapers speculated that "Jack the Ripper" had come to New York. No evidence was ever found to support that idea. Within about 32 hours, according to Smithsonian Magazine, police arrested Ameer Ben Ali, an Algerian man known locally as "Frenchy," who had been staying in a room across the hall. The prosecution relied largely on testimony that a trail of blood led from Room 31 to his room.

Ben Ali's trial opened in late June 1891, and on July 3, 1891, the jury found him guilty of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to Sing Sing; Smithsonian Magazine reports that he was transferred in 1893 to the state asylum for insane criminals at Matteawan. He maintained that he was innocent.

Doubts about the verdict grew over the following decade. Journalist Jacob Riis, who had been at the scene, stated in an affidavit that he had seen no blood in the hallway. A New Jersey businessman, George Damon, came forward to say that a hired man who left his employment shortly after the murder had left behind a bloody shirt and a key stamped with the number 31, as recounted by Murder by Gaslight from contemporary newspaper reports. In 1902, Governor Benjamin Odell Jr. commuted Ben Ali's sentence, and he returned to Algeria after about eleven years in custody.

No one else was ever charged. The identity of the man who checked into the hotel with Carrie Brown has never been established, and the case is regarded as unsolved. Brown was buried in Salem, Massachusetts, according to the New England Historical Society.