Murder of Carrie Brown
American prostitute
Carrie Brown (c. 1834 – April 24, 1891) was a New York City prostitute who was murdered and mutilated in a lodging house. She is occasionally mentioned as an alleged victim of Jack the Ripper. Although known to use numerous aliases, a common practice in her occupation, she supposedly won her nickname of Shakespeare for her habit of quoting William Shakespeare during drinking games. She has often been referred to as Old Shakespeare in later news articles and books and contemporaneous newspapers.
The murder
The badly mutilated body of Brown, a longtime Bowery prostitute, was found in a room in a squalid lodging house known as the East River Hotel on April 24, 1891.
Newspapers were quick to report the murder as proof of the alleged arrival in America of Jack the Ripper, whose murders of prostitutes in London's Whitechapel district were well known during the time. News of the possibility that Jack the Ripper had arrived in New York City posed a challenge to NYPD Chief Inspector Thomas Byrnes, who had criticized Scotland Yard for its inability to capture Jack the Ripper.
Suspect and trial
As the murder of Brown was soon becoming one of the most publicized in the city's history, pressure was on Byrnes to solve the murder as quickly as possible, and an Algerian named Ameer Ben Ali (who also went by "Frenchy" or "Frenchy No. 1") was arrested for the murder soon after.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5046211. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1834 and 1891.
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This entry incorporates text from “Murder of Carrie Brown” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.