Carrie Brown : Murder In The East River Hotel

Seems a very reasonable timeline, Howard.

She wasn't menopausal in 1891, so I lean towards her being a bit younger than you, perhaps, closer til 40 than 50.

If she was 40 in 1891, she was 30 when her husband died and 18-20 when they got married. So perhaps a tad older. How many children named Alice were born in White Plains NY in 1851-1855?

Her parents would probably have been in their 50s when they moved from White Plains to Henry. It's a good bet they knew someone there, perhaps Alice's sister, or another relative or acquaintaince.

I wonder of the John Leonard she was arrested with was John Leonard of the Burnt Rag-gang, an african-american criminal with a violent streak.
Lots of stories about him robbing, beating and shooting people, but he seems to get off lightly every time - perhaps no-one wanted to testify against him, like in this story, where he uses a gun to beat up two people and struggle with a third, yet no one saw him use it!

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From NY Dispatch, August 4, 1878

Now, there is one more thing that science shows, and which cannot be contradicted—it is demonstrated as surely as a mathematical proposition—and that is, that the blood on this man’s shirt not only was not menstrual blood—that they can tell, and they say it was not menstrual blood—but it was the blood of a dead person. The blood in his nails was the blood of a dead person, the blood on his door is the blood of a dead person. She was strangled, Dr. Jenkins says. She got her death from asphyxiation. The marks of the assassin’s hand are in her throat. Her tongue was protruding, and there is blood in the lungs. She was strangled to death. The moment that life goes from the body, the arteries, as you well know, and as everybody knows, will not spurt. During life, the arteries will spurt. There is life in the blood. The moment you take the oxygen from the body and asphyxiate the blood, you lose the life of the blood. The blood under the microscope shows it to be in that shape. The moment you kill a person, the blood loses its elasticity, and the globules go into that shape. And so, science can tell beyond contradiction the blood that flowed from a living or dead subject. In all the blood on this man’s shirt, and all the blood on this man’s clothes, and on the bod, and on the floor, is blood without the elasticity of blood flowing from a living person, and blood in a state showing that it was a dead person’s blood, and it was her blood mixed with her intestinal fluid at the same stage of digestion, from the same human subject with the same proportion of red and white corpuscles; and these gentlemen tell us that it is demonstrated to them, not as an opinion, but as an absolute, decided scientific fact, and that the man from whom the shirt was taken, stained with that blood, was the assassin of that woman. And, as I have said, is it not the hand of God, writing the name of the assassin on the wall?




[1] Wellman’s opening statement comes from Crime in New York, 1850, 1950: People of the State of New York versus George Frank, Trial # 16, Reels ## 4-5. Lloyd Sealy Library, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, 1891, pages 5-39.

[2] This remark by Lawyer Friend is not in the transcript. It is taken from “Invoking the Microscope,” New York Sun, June 30, 1891

The laborious task of creating a clear copy of this text was undertaken by Bob Dekle, author of East River Ripper, The Mysterious 1891 Murder of Old Shakespeare ( 2021, Kent State Press).

At 5 o’clock the next morning, Fitzgerald who had been up all night, in charge of the bar—the bar was closed, but he was in charge of the bar room—at 5 o’clock in the morning his duty it was to sweep out the bar, and he was sweeping it out when his attention was attracted by a man sneaking, as he uses the term, along the wall, with his head turned in towards the wall. It was nothing unusual for men to go out at 5 o’clock in the morning, but they ordinarily walked out directly and stopped at the wash stand, there being no water in the rooms upstairs, and then washed themselves and passed out through the bar into Catherine Street, through the main entrance. But his attention was attracted, as he says, by this man who was apparently sneaking out, keeping close along to the wall—the wall farthest from him—that is, farthest from his angle of vision, Fitzgerald’s—and he had his face turned in toward the wall. It was the wall of the “box” that I have spoken of. He looked at him, because he was running along in this way, and he recognized the defendant, and saw him shoot out of the box into the other entrance and into Water Street.

At about 10 o’clock that morning, Mary Corcoran, the regular Housekeeper, in going to the top floor, found the door of Room 33 was locked, and opened it with her pass key, and there saw a naked body on the bed, and pools of blood on the floor. She slammed the door and ran out and ran downstairs and called upon this Eddie Fitzgerald. He went up and opened the door and saw the same sight that had driven Mary Corcoran away. The door was then locked, and the police were notified.

Captain O’Connor was the first to arrive. He got several detectives—Sergeant Crowley and Detective Griffin, and they together went up into this room, and made an investigation. They found Carrie Brown’s body. However, hours afterwards she was identified as Carrie Brown. They found the body lying on the bed with the back to the door, and the head was covered with underclothing, and the neck was tied with the apron string, and the clothes tied around it. Otherwise, the body was naked. The backside was turned to the door. They found that the blood had come from the wounds in the body of this woman, and had soaked through the mattress and had run from the edges of the mattress to the floor, forming a pool of blood on the floor, and there were other traces of blood on the sheet and other parts of the floor, where the blood had apparently been rubbed with the foot.

The woman was strangled to death. Her mouth was open, her tongue was hanging out. She had likewise been cut in her abdomen by a dull knife which had not readily cut, but there had been two or three attempts to make each cut that was made in her body. There was one cut from about here (indicating) on the abdomen through to the ****—a cut six or eight inches deep, penetrating the smaller intestine and running into the bowels, and there was another and separate cut going back from the **** and separating the perineum between the **** and the rectum. And there were several other separate cuts five or six inches deep in the woman’s body. The police began to investigate the premises. They first found that the candle in Room 33, it being a whole candle—it being the custom in that hotel to give a “green” or fresh candle to each person who occupied a room—was burned down and exhausted. They found in Room 31—33 being directly opposite—three feet and a half across the way, a room that had been occupied by this defendant—they found on the door of that room bloodstains, as though a person whose hands were covered with blood had touched the door, it opening inward. And there they saw the prints of the fingers and a streak of blood which had dropped down on the side of the door. On the inside of the door and corresponding to where the hand would come, if the door was pushed open and closed with the hand was another spot of blood. They found in the hallway leading in between the two rooms three spots of blood, three droppings of blood on the wall. On the chair in Room 33 they found blood on the edge of the chair, blood on the candles, in Room 33, and one spot of blood on the woodwork or floor of Room 33.

They then naturally made inquiries as to who had occupied Room 33, and it was to find out from Eddie Fitzgerald that a man known as “Frenchy,” the dark man known as “Frenchy,” tall and thin and black, had occupied Room 33.

By going around among the women who were accustomed to sleep and drink in this hotel, they soon found out the man whom the women called “Frenchy,” and who corresponded to the description given by Eddie Fitzgerald as the man who occupied that room.

That evening, at about 8 o’clock, the arrest of the defendant occurred. He was arrested by Officer Lang. Officer Lang went up to him and said, “Come along with me. I want you.” He walked along with him and said, “Where did you sleep last night?” And the Frenchman said, “I slept in Brooklyn.” He said, “Well, you slept in Brooklyn?” The defendant said, “Yes. Me do nothing; me do nothing.” He had not been accused of doing anything. He had been simply asked where he slept. So the officer said, “Well, come along with me.” They walked along to the East River Hotel. They went in and Saw Eddie Fitzgerald, and Eddie Fitzgerald immediately identified this man as the man whom he let in between 12 and 1 o’clock the night before, he had given him 25 pennies in payment for Room 33, and the description he had given to Sam Shine, when Sam Shine complained of his letting a man go up there to that floor—and when he gave him these 25 pennies in payment for this room. They, therefore, took him to the station house.

Meanwhile, they had identified the dead body as that of Carrie Brown, known by the nickname of “Shakespeare” in that vicinity.

Carrie Brown was a woman who was born in Salem, apparently of respectable parents and of a respectable life, at first, but who had gradually drifted into the life she led, and into the very dregs of New York City, and in this vicinity which you visited today, and had become a low woman of the town, not an inhabitant of a house of ****, but one who had her own room and earned the money that she lived on by going with sailors and the men of the class of the defendant, going with them to the East River Hotel, and other assignation houses in that vicinity.

Now, after this man was arrested, every effort was made—every possible effort—to allow him to clear himself. It was seen that he did not speak the English language well. It appears that he speaks the English language well enough to come and travel to this country and get along here for 15 months and consort with all these women. Well, he didn’t speak English well, and every effort, as I say, was made to allow him to clear himself. An officer who speaks French fluently was put in charge of him, and he was asked everything that he could be asked to give him an opportunity to clear himself. In the first place, he was asked by the officer where he slept that night. Having been identified by this boy, Fitzgerald, and having been taken to this hotel, he admitted that he slept at the East River Hotel, and that he occupied Room 33 in that hotel that night.

When they began to strip him and search him, they discovered that he had a great mass of blood on the front of his shirt, and that his socks were soaked with blood on the heel, and in the instep, and they immediately took an ivory nail cleaner and cleaned his nails.

Detective Aloncle, who is the French officer or detective that I spoke of, asked him where he got the spot of blood that was there—how could he explain it. He said that about ten days before he had been in Jamaica, and there he had met a girl in the streets to whom he took a fancy, and he had taken her to a Frenchman’s, named Joseph, who kept a hotel near there, and that he gave her three francs and some beer and had connection with her; that she was unwell at the time, and that he had got this blood from connection with her during her courses.

That seemed a natural explanation of it—certainly a shrewd and cunning one, and not an ignorant one, and so they went to investigate. They went to Jamaica. They hunted all around for a Frenchman by the name of Joseph who kept a hotel in the neighborhood, and they could find no trace of any man or anything of the kind, and they came back and told him that they could not find any Frenchman by the name of Joseph who kept a hotel there, and could not find any such place and asked him if he was willing to go with them and point out the place, and he said, “Why, certainly,” and consented to go, and they took him up on his proposition, and at about 5 o’clock in the morning they took him with Aloncle and another police officer and asked him to show where Joseph kept the hotel. He took them across the ferry and on to the Brooklyn Elevated, and finally, when they got pretty well along in Brooklyn, he said to them, “What I told you was not true. Me know no woman in Jamaica. Me got the blood in New York, staying with a woman at 49 Oliver Street, yesterday morning.” He may have said two or three mornings before—at all events, the morning of the murder—Thursday morning. He said, “She was sick. I went with her at 49 Oliver Street.” And they said, “what have you brought us out here for? How do you know the locality?” And he said, “Well, I was arrested out here, and was in the jail here.” So they took him to the police station, and he was identified by the clerk or by the police justice there, and it was found that he had been in the Queens County Jail, and they took him to the Queens County Jail, and there he was examined by the people who were in the charge of the jail and identified as having served 30 days for vagrancy, with splints tied around his left  arm. He had been released from that jail on the 12th of April.

Good finds, Howard.

I don’t know why she’d claim to have been at hersister’s when it was already known that she’d gone to jail several times

    This is the newspaper reference to Alice's trial in 1881.

    How could she have learned of her husband's death ( in May)  if she was in prison?
    What did she do?  Write a letter to her sister or parents???
    This is the larceny for which she received two years.

    On another note....look who the Judge was.

     






    New York Times
    March 11, 1881
    *************
   



Q. When did your husband die?
A. 1881, 11th of May.    <<<<<<<<<<<< Year corrected.
Q. Did he die in the City and County of New York?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Where did you live at the time?
A. When he died?
Q. Yes?
A. I lived in White Plains.     <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<She was in prison
Q. Then you did not reside in New York City?
A. Not when he died.
Q. Did he reside with you at the time of his death?
A. No, sir; he resided with his mother.
Q. With his mother? (No answer).
Mr. Friend: I don’t want his name. I respect the memory of the dead too much.
Q. You were not at the bedside of your husband when he died?
A. No, sir.
Objected to.
Q. You were then living a life of shame, weren’t you?
A. No, sir; I was living with my folks.   <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<a lie.
Q. Whom do you mean?
A. I mean my mother and father and my sisters.
Q. And they lived where?
A. They did live there in White Plains.     <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Q. Are they alive?