Carrie Brown : Murder In The East River Hotel

While the following resolves nothing in the case, it is interesting that Paul Fuller, an attorney with Coudert Brothers law firm, seems to be
arguing for and, at the same time, against blood being found up on the fifth floor of the hotel.


Pardon for clemency presented to Governor Odell in early December 1901.
Submitted by attorney Paul Fuller, of Coudert Brothers Law Firm, Manhattan

New York, December 2, 1901

Before His Excellency Benjamin B. Odell, Jr., Governor of the State of New York.

Application For The Pardon Of George Frank, Otherwise Known As Amer Ben Ali


Another element in the case which added to the absence of the key weighed in the balance against the prisoner was the presence of blood spots between the room where the woman was murdered and the room occupied by the prisoner. These according to the report made by the District Attorney who conducted the trial, consisted of three drops of blood in the hallway, and spots or daubs of blood on the paper of the hallway and on the panel of the prisoner's door. It may be noted here that three drops of blood and daubs or spots easily made with as many more drops is an unlikely record to be left behind him by an assassin groping in the dark after mutilating his victim with what the District Attorney described as 'myriad' knife wounds covering every part of the body and limbs., perforating the intestines, and according to the inference meant it to be drawn from the analysis of the nail cleanings, plunging his hands into the intestines of his dead victim in such a manner that the filth under his nails retained twenty-four hours later traces of intestinal fluid and of partly digested food. Apart from the intrinsic improbability of such a result, there is the further significant fact that the night clerk Fitzgerald who discovered the murdered woman does not testify to the presence of these blood marks. Their presence, it is stated, was a revelation of the police scrutiny that followed. We now have the testimony of two men of experience in the investigation of the crime, reporters of the Evening Sun at the time of the murder and specially detailed to attend to police work, who were the first or among the first to visit the scene of the murder and who examined the ground in search of clues, and these men attest under oath that in their careful examination and search for a clue they saw no blood spots where these were afterward reported by the police. No motive, surely no reasonable or adequate motive can be suggested for this solemn attestation by men whose standing depends on the good opinion of the community, other than the desire to see justice done to a helpless prisoner. And there is one significant circumstance which corroborates their positive recollection. No blood spots are reported on the knobs or panels of the door of the murdered woman's room, and yet it is inferred against the prisoner that in the brief transit across the hall to his own room, blood dripped on the floor, he daubed the walls in his groping and soiled the panels of his door on both sides, in opening it and again in closing it, while in unlocking and locking the door of the room in which the butchery has just been perpetrated no sign of blood was left behind.
Another inference which must be drawn from this story in order to fasten the crime upon the prisoner is that after committing the fiendish crime he quietly crept back to his own room and remained there until morning when he could have walked out into the street beyond reach, as did the last known companion of the murdered woman who was seen with her at ten o'clock that night and has never been heard of since.
The affidavit of Berbenich suggests how the blood spots came to be there.


There could have been a woolly mammoth in room 31, and Fitzgerald would probably have not seen it.

There have been many crime scenes in which the victim was murdered with by a knife with a minimal amount of blood
eventually being found on the perpetrator. Locard's Exchange Principle states, "Every contact leaves a trace".
There was blood found on Ali, which we won't go into here.
At first, Fuller scoffs at the blood claimed to have been found....and yet at the end of the paragraph, reminds Governor
Odell that Henry Berbenich's affidavit offers a suggestion as to how the now-existent blood got to those places.

Thanks for trying, Pete.