Gruesome New York: Murder, Madness, and the Macabre in the Empire State: Gruesome, #4

By Nick Vulich

Gruesome New York is a collection of true-life stories - most of them rescued from old newspaper accounts published over 100 years ago. Only a few of the events in this book - have ever made it into print, except maybe in musky-old county histories. Even then, they are lucky to rate a paragraph.

Read them now, if you dare!

Included inside: The murder of Helen Jewett in 1836. The killing of Carrie Brown, better known as Old Shakespeare, back in 1891. Lizzie Halliday, who murdered five people, including her husband in the early 1890s. And, don't forget Roxalana Druse. She chopped up her husband and cooked him in the kitchen stove to eliminate the evidence.

Of course, there's more, but you get the idea. Gruesome New York covers eighteen brutal New York murders that occurred between 1836 and 1920.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Vulich
• Release date: Jan 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393749714

Book preview

Gruesome New York

Murder, Madness, and the

Macabre in the Empire State

Copyright © 2020 / 2023 Nick Vulich

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Table of Contents

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Did the Real Jack the Ripper Kill Shakespeare?

The Killer Had Pig Eyes and a Big Snout

The Curious Case of Dorcas Doyen

She Chopped Up Her Husband and Cooked Him on the Kitchen Stove

A Double-Murder in Chapel Alley

Women Are More Savage Than Men

She Was A Tenderloin Girl and A Beauty

Captain Jim Lost His Head in the Tenderloin

Did the New York Police Manufacture a Plot to Assassinate the President?

I Killed President McKinley Cause I Done My Job

Do You Think I’m Crazy Enough to Kill My Meal Ticket?

Rise and Fall of Monk Eastman

Murder of Amelia Gregory

I Supposed You Were Smart Enough to Know Who Did It

Saved by Three Soft Carolina Bartlett Pears

She Had Small Feet and Little Bits of Hands

Kill me. I’m Too Dangerous to Live

Short Takes

Another Headless Torso in Manhattan

Louis the Lump and the Coney Island Murders

For God’s Sake, Get Up

Summer of the Strangler

She Killed Her Mother with A Shoemaker’s Hammer

Haunted Houses and Ghosts of Old New York

About the Author

Footnotes

Did the Real Jack the Ripper Kill Shakespeare?

W

hen sixty-year-old prostitute Carrie Brown, better known to east siders as Old Shakespeare, turned up slashed and dissected in a sleazy Bowery hotel, police got to wondering if Jack the Ripper had crossed the pond. 

The Evening World headline asked the question everyone was thinking. Was Shakespeare killed by the real Jack the Ripper?[1]

Shakespeare walked into the East River Hotel accompanied by a sailor on the evening of April 23, 1891. The next morning when bellboy Eddie Fitzgerald turned out the prostitutes who overslept, he found Shakespeare’s dismembered body in room 31. 

The police quickly focused their investigation on the occupant of room 33, just across the hallway from Shakespeare’s room. Fitzgerald told police he took Frenchy, an Algerian immigrant, up to room 33 the night before and lit a candle for him. The man snuck out at 5 a.m. the next morning. 

Police Captain Richard O’Connor found blood drops in the hallway leading from room 31 to room 33. Room 33 had blood on the door panel and the doorknob. Inside the room, detectives found blood spatters on the bed. 

Coroner’s inquest 

Ameer Ben Ali, also known as George Frank or Frenchy No. 1, couldn’t read, write, or speak more than a spattering of English. During the inquest, he struggled to understand what was going on.[2]

A reporter for the Evening World described Frenchy as tall and awkward. He weighed about 160 pounds and was maybe 35. Tattoos of dancing girls, serpents, and other strange eastern scenes covered his sinewy arms.

Mary Miniter, the assistant housekeeper at the hotel, said: Old Shakespeare arrived at the hotel at about 9:30. She had a few drinks with a man who was maybe 32 and had a light mustache. She didn’t know who the man was, just that it wasn’t Frenchy. But the police had their doubts about Mary. She was a well-known opium and morphine fiend and consorted with Chinamen.[3] They would only trust her testimony so far.

Eddie Fitzgerald testified that Frenchy paid for the room in pennies. He counted twenty-five of them out on the counter.

The East River Hotel was a pretty seedy place run on a don’t ask, don’t tell basis. The rooms were no bigger than a box—about 6 feet x 6 feet. A tall man would have had to curl his legs up or lie diagonally to fit inside. Instead of asking clients to sign in, the registrar made up strange-sounding names and wrote them in the register the next morning after all the guests checked out. 

Autopsy

After closely examining the body, the doctors decided the killer drew the point of the knife just cutting the skin along the left side of the abdomen to the groin, and again from the abdomen down the leg almost to the knee. On the right side of the abdomen are two parallel scratches.

On the back of the left hip, they found two long gashes that formed an X, similar to the mark which Jack the Ripper was accustomed to make upon the wall by the side of each of his London victims.[4]

Once he opened Shakespeare up, the murderer disemboweled her and cut out several sections of her colon. He also scooped out the left ovary, as was the custom of Jack the Ripper. 

There was not much blood in the arteries after death. If the cuts in Shakespeare’s body had been made before death, explained Dr. Edson, the blood would have spurted out in different directions. In the case of a well-nourished person, if there was no intervening membranes to interfere, it would spurt several feet into the air from such wounds as this woman had received.[5]

The coroner’s jury deliberated just 22 minutes before finding Frenchy guilty. They ruled that Carrie Brown, alias Shakespeare, had come to her death from asphyxiation at the hands of Ameer Ben Ali, alias Frenchy."[6]

Newspapers soon began calling Frenchy Jack the Ripper because of the style of the murder. 

Trial

Frenchy didn’t have a good reputation with the east side girls.

He had been at the same hotel with the 260-pound Mary Ann Lopez six or seven months before Shakespeare’s murder. The next morning Frenchy sunk his teeth deep into her arm until Mary Ann broke down and gave his dollar back. She reached down and yanked back her sleeve to prove she still carried his teeth marks.[7]

Mary Harrington, who ran a house of ill repute down the street from the East River Hotel, caught Frenchy choking Dublin Mary nearly to death. She chased him down the street with her son’s baseball bat. Dublin Mary, according to one reporter, was the nastiest-looking woman of the Bowery crew. She was big, fat, and ugly.

On the day Old Shakespeare died, Alice Sullivan saw Frenchy talking with her at the corner of Oak and James Streets. Alice spent the night with Frenchy at Mrs. Harrington’s house on Oliver Street the day before Shakespeare’s murder. He paid her three dimes and four nickels, or about fifty cents.

Eddie Fitzgerald found the body while making his rounds. One of his morning duties was to rouse the ladies who overslept. Most of the guys were in the habit of sneaking out at some point during the night. The ladies didn’t have anywhere else to go except the street, so they savored every last-minute inside—even in a seedy dive like the East River Hotel.

Carrie Brown was a middle-aged lady, between sixty and sixty-two-years-old, who had been working in the area for fifteen years. She was highly intelligent, fond of quoting Shakespeare, and even fonder of alcohol. Most people in the neighborhood knew her as Shakespeare, Old Shakespeare, or Jeff Davis. 

Her maiden name was Caroline Montgomery. Once upon a time, she married a sailor named John Brown, and they lived a fairytale life together in Salem, Oregon. The Captain left Carrie a bundle of money when he died. She spent most of her time in New York locked up on Blackwell’s Island or in institutions trying to beat the habit. 

Old Shakespeare got released from Blackwell’s Island just a few days before her death.[8]

During the investigation, it came out that there was a second Shakespeare. She stood a few inches taller than Old Shakespeare and had haunted the East Side for about ten years. She spoke five languages, knew all the lines to Shakespeare’s plays, and usually toted a book under her arm wherever she went. Like Old Shakespeare, she was over-fond of drink. The police had hauled her in at least fifty times for drunkenness and soliciting. 

Steve Brodie, who ran a saloon in the Bowery, said Shakespeare was the only woman allowed in his saloon. Her recitations amused his customers. She told them she had a wealthy husband who lived on West Thirty-second Street. She’d been unfaithful five times, the sixth time, he tossed her out on her ass and got a separation, but he still gave her money whenever she needed it.

Frenchy took the stand and testified through an interpreter. He served eight years in the French forces of the Turkish Army. Frenchy took a bullet in the shoulder and leg at the battle of Tizzeooza. The blood on his clothes and in his bed was easily explained. He took a bullet in battle twenty-years-before, and the wound still bled out now and then. He showed doctors the wound, but they dismissed it because that type of wound wouldn’t contain intestinal fluids.

The jury listened to testimony for eight days before finding Frenchy guilty of murder in the second degree. They sentenced him to life in prison. Frenchy was taken to Sing Sing Prison after his conviction, then transferred to Auburn Prison towards the end of July. 

When the trial was over, a reporter for The Evening World interviewed Police Chief Byrnes. The chief thought Frenchy got off easy. He deserved to die. 

When asked if he thought Frenchy was Jack the Ripper, the chief