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Convicting the Innocent: Errors of Criminal Justice
(1932)
by Edwin M. Borchard
Case #12
“Frenchy” -- Ameer Ben Ali
NEW YORK
On the southeast corner of Catherine Slip and Water
Streets, on the Manhattan water front of the 1890's, there flourished the
East River Hotel, a squalid drinking place and bawdy resort. At nine o'clock
on Friday morning, April 24, 1891, the night clerk, Eddie Harrington, made
his rounds of the hotel rooms, routing out all those who had not already
left. Most of the rooms had been vacated. Room 31, however, was still
locked. He rapped lightly -- no reply; louder knocks -- no reply. Eddie
applied his master key to the door. Peering in, he was petrified by the
ghastly sight of the mutilated body of “Old Shakespeare,” a dissolute woman
of sixty, a habitué of the neighborhood. She was a former actress, and
received her nickname because she frequently quoted the Bard's plays when
tipsy. Her name was Carrie Brown.
Eddie, greatly excited, rushed to the first floor to spread the news and
call for the police, who soon arrived, accompanied by newspaper reporters.
The coroner took charge of the body.
An examination of the body showed that the woman had been strangled,
atrociously slashed by a filed-down cooking knife, which was found on the
floor by the bed -- and upon her thigh was cut the sign of the cross. As a
murder this was a challenge to Chief Police Inspector Thomas Byrnes, who was
justly proud of his record for solving crime mysteries. The cross on the
victim's thigh gave the case a special significance. It was the mark of
“Jack the Ripper,” the notorious London murderer who had baffled Scotland
Yard by his nine brutal killings of women in the streets of London from
December, 1887, to January, 1891. The New York Police Department had chided
the London police about the “Ripper” and boastfully let it be known that if
the latter appeared in New York with his evil doings, he would be in the
“jug” within thirty-six hours.
On April 25, 1891, the day after the murder, the New York newspapers
headlined the arrival of “Jack the Ripper.” Inspector Byrnes and his force
concentrated upon solving the crime. Investigation showed that “Old
Shakespeare” had arrived at the hotel at about eleven o'clock with a male
companion half her age, who gave a name which was written down by the clerk
as “C. Knick.” They were assigned Room 31, to which they repaired with a tin
pail of beer. Several of the hotel hang-abouts saw the man and were able to
supply descriptions of him--a medium-sized, stocky, blond, seafaring man.
This man vanished and was never apprehended. The police combed the water
front for him in vain.
Some of “Old Shakespeare's” acquaintances were found, among them Mary Ann
Lopez, who had a frequent visitor known in the neighborhood as “Frenchy.”
Although a decided brunet, Frency's general appearance was otherwise not
greatly different from the description given of the man who spent the night
in Room 31; so Frenchy was arrested, among numerous others, for questioning.
He professed not to be able to speak English. Many languages were tried on
him until it appeared that he spoke Algerian Arabic -- he was an Algerian
Frenchman, named Ameer Ben Ali.
On April 25, Frenchy was a suspect. On April 26, the newspapers carried a
police statement that he was probably implicated as being a cousin of the
murderer. On Wednesday, April 29, the case was still unsettled, with the
police apparently at sea. Detective Kilcauley of Jersey City reported to the
police that a conductor employed on the New Jersey Central was very sure he
had carried the murderer to Easton on his train. All the while, Frenchy was
kept in the star cell at the police station.
On April 30, Inspector Byrnes gave several reporters the news that the case
against Frenchy was complete, and that the police were convinced that he was
the murderer. It was admitted that Frenchy was not “Old Shakespeare's”
companion during the fatal night, but it was said that Frenchy had spent the
night in Room 33, across the hall from the murder chamber, and that after
the other man had left, Frenchy had crept across the hall, robbed his victim
and killed her, and then crept back into his own room. As sketched by the
Inspector, the evidence against Frenchy consisted of blood drops on the
floor of Room 31 (the murder chamber), and in the hall between Rooms 31 and
33 (Frenchy's room); blood marks on both sides of the door of 33, as if the
door had been pushed open by bloody fingers and then closed; blood marks on
the floor of Room 33, on a chair in that room, on the bed blanket, and on
the bedtick (there were no sheets). Blood was said to have been found on
Frenchy's socks, and scrapings from his finger nails indicated the presence
of blood. His explanations as to how the blood got on him were investigated
and found to be false. Some of Carrie Brown's professional sisters said that
Frenchy consorted much with “Old Shakespeare” and occupied Room 31 with her
only the previous week.
On this same day (April 30), Frenchy, who by this time was called Frenchy
No. 1, to distinguish him from other “Frenchies” involved in the case, was
arraigned before Judge Martine and was formally committed to jail for the
murder. Since the prisoner was unable to employ counsel, Judge Martine
appointed Levy, House and Friend as his counsel. On May 1, Frenchy was
removed to the Tombs.
At about this time it was learned that the prisoner had served a vagrancy
term in March and April in the Queens County Jail and that two of his fellow
prisoners there, David Galloway and Edward Smith, had reported that Frenchy
had a knife like the one used in the murder.
On Wednesday, June 24, 1891, Frenchy's trial opened before Recorder Smyth.
An interpreter from his own Algerian village had been found in New York. The
state was represented by Assistant District Attorneys Wellman and Simms, and
the police force by Inspector Byrnes and four officers. In addition to
evidence bearing upon the facts as related by the Inspector to reporters on
April 30, the prosecutors called many witnesses from the lowest stratum of
New York life, to prove that Frenchy had been living a sordid life, and,
particularly, that he was accustomed to staying at the East River Hotel and
to wandering from room to room at night. On cross-examination, the
credibility of these witnesses was thoroughly attacked.
The climax of the trial came on Wednesday, July 1, when District Attorney
Nicoll himself took charge of the trial and
called Dr. Formand of Philadelphia as an expert witness. Dr. Formand
testified that he had made tests of samples of the blood found on the fatal
bed in Room 31, in the hallway, on the door to Room 33, inside Room 33, and
on Frenchy's socks, and found that they all contained intestinal contents of
food elements, all in the same degree of digestion -- all exactly identical.
This led to the direct inference that all of these bloodstains resulted from
blood flowing from the abdominal wound of the deceased. The Doctor stated
that he would be willing to risk his life upon the accuracy of his tests.
Dr. Austin Flint and Dr. Cyrus Edson corroborated Dr. Formand's testimony,
and concluded the case of the state against Frenchy.
On July 2, the defense opened. After calling Constable James R. Hiland of
Newtown to prove that when Frenchy was arrested in Queens County, he had no
knife, the defense counsel put the defendant on the stand. He was asked
about his life history, his eight years of service in the French army, and
his movements in this country. Finally he was asked, “Did you kill Carrie
Brown?” These words had hardly been translated into Arabic when Frenchy
jumped to his feet, lifted his hands over his head, looked skyward, and
fairly screamed in Arabic -- he appeared to be having hysterics. No one
could quiet him. Finally he sank back into his chair exhausted, and the
translator gave the gist of Frenchy's plea: “I am innocent. I am innocent,
Allah il Allah [God is God], I am innocent. Allah Akbar [God is great]. I am
innocent. O Allah, help me. Allah save me. I implore Allah to help me.”
Frenchy made a bad witness, at times appearing to understand English and
again pretending not to understand questions even when interpreted into his
own tongue. He consistently denied killing “Old Shakespeare,” but he became
badly tangled up time and again upon cross-examination.
The defense called several medical experts to testify that the substances
found in the various blood exhibits did not necessarily all come from the
intestine, but that they might have come from other parts of the body. Each
of these experts, however, was forced to admit that Dr. Formand was at the
top of his profession and that they had high regard for his opinion.
The prosecution added an interesting bit of evidence by showing that
Frenchy's tallow candle had been burned for more than an hour in Room 33 on
the night of the murder, implying that he had been sitting up for some
definite purpose. Testimony was submitted to show that he left the hotel at
five o'clock the following morning, and that he “slinked” out of the door in
a guilty manner.
The jury soon returned a verdict of guilty of second-degree murder. The
Inspector and the prosecutors were much disappointed; but it was apparent
that a compromise had been made by the jury. On July 10, 1891, Ameer Ben Ali
was sentenced to Sing Sing for life.
The newspapers and the public had taken great interest in the case. The
newspapers reported fully the testimony of each witness and the case was
avidly followed by thousands. There was little disapproval of the verdict.
Newspaper men, among them Jacob A. Riis and Charles Edward Russell, who had
been assigned to the case from the very beginning, were far from satisfied
that this presented a true solution to the murder, and felt that it could
never be unraveled until the police had found the man who had gone to Room
31 with “Old Shakespeare.” However, the public authorities rested when
Frenchy went to Sing Sing to spend the remainder of his days -- soon to be
transferred to the hospital for the criminal insane at Matteawan.
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Persistent rumors drifted back to New York among
seafaring men that the murderer had quietly gone to sea, bound for the Far
East. These tales could never be substantiated.
At the turn of the century, however, brighter days came to the penniless
Frenchy. An application for a pardon on his behalf, based upon new evidence,
was submitted to Governor Odell. It was established that just prior to the
murder a man answering the description of the murdered woman's companion had
been working for several weeks at Cranford, New Jersey, that this man was
absent from Cranford on the night of the murder, and that several days
thereafter he disappeared entirely. In his abandoned room was found a brass
key bearing a tag 31 (the key exactly matched the set of keys at the East
River Hotel) and a bloody shirt. From evidence previously adduced, it was
quite certain that the murderer had locked the room when he left it. There
never was any evidence to connect Frenchy with the key. The principal
evidence against Frenchy had been the reported bloody trail between the two
rooms, which, even as testified to at the trial, consisted of very small and
faint blood marks. There were submitted to Governor Odell numerous
affidavits of disinterested persons, described by the Governor as “persons
of credit, some of whom had had experience in the investigation of crime,”
to the effect that these persons had visited the hotel room on the morning
following the murder, and prior to the arrival of the coroner, and that
after careful examination they had found no blood on the door of either room
or in the hallway. It was to be inferred that the bloodstains, found by the
police on the second day following the murder, had been made at the time of
the visit of the coroner and the crowd of reporters when the body was
examined and removed. It was further pointed out that even according to the
police testimony there was no blood on or near the lock or knob of the door
to the murder chamber which the murderer presumably unlocked, opened,
closed, and relocked. This new evidence in the Governor's opinion demolished
the case against Frenchy.
The application for executive clemency was based solely upon the ground that
Frenchy was innocent. The Governor concluded his report on the case, after
reviewing the facts, as follows : “To refuse relief under such circumstances
would be plainly a denial of justice, and after a very careful consideration
of all the facts I have reached the conclusion that it is clearly my duty to
order the prisoner's release.”
Frenchy's sentence was commuted on April 16, 1902, and it is understood that
the French government arranged for his transportation back to his native
Algerian village.
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Frenchy's conviction was apparently due to the
zealousness of the New York police in seeking to sustain their boast that
the murders which had baffled the London police would not be left unsolved
in New York. In Frenchy they found a helpless scapegoat, and there is some
ground to believe that the case was worked up against him by insufficient
attention to the obvious operative facts. Why no better effort was made to
trace the woman's companion or to account for the missing key to Room 31 is
not easy to understand. That key was also the key to the mystery. As to the
blood spots in the hall and on the door of Room 33, the conclusion seems
inescapable that they were not there when Clerk Harrington discovered the
murder. How they got there, we shall not venture to say. Let it be assumed
that careless visitors dragged the blood around. Nor is it clear how the
blood got on Frenchy; there is something very strange about that, which the
testimony leaves vague and uncertain. Some of the reporters thought that
there was no blood originally on Frenchy, or, if there was any, that it had
nothing whatever to do with the murder. The evidence of the experts also
seems to have been untrustworthy. In spite of the neatly woven case against
Frenchy, the jury evidently had grave doubts, for in such a case a verdict
of second-degree murder is not natural. It was manifestly a compromise
between a belief in guilt and innocence. Frenchy was also penniless and the
assigned counsel could not command the funds to run down the man who had
occupied Room 31. The fact that entirely disinterested persons unraveled the
mystery attests the weakness of the prosecution's case and justifies the
inference that Allah had apparently not altogether deserted Frenchy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. State of New York, Public Papers of Governor Odell (1902),
pp. 272-277.
2. New York Sun, April 25-30, 1891; May 1-4, 1891; June 25-30,
1891; July 1-4, 11, 1891.
3. Russell, Charles Edward. “Old Shakespeare,” Illustrated Detective
Magazine (October, 1931).
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