It was a story as old as time: A beautiful young country girl, seduced and abandoned by a wastrel suitor, condemned to a life of shame. But that wasn’t the whole story.
Alice Nace was born and raised in Allen County, Ohio, where, in the early 1850s, she succumbed to the pleadings of a silver-tongued wastrel and found herself completely cut off from family and friends. Her father threw her out of the house with curses and her friends ostracized her, turning deaf ears to her pleas for solace. Her heartless beau, scoundrel that he was, brought her to Cincinnati and dumped her at one of the Queen City’s most notorious brothels, the infamous “Twin Bricks” on the north side of the Canal, east of Elm Street.
The Twin Bricks was the sort of establishment in which the vilest crimes were rarely solved because no one ever saw anything. It was the last place visited by George Tabor, a still-respectable young man exploring the seamier side of town. He fell into a dispute with another patron, who shot George in the head at point-blank range. An extensive inquest failed to uncover a single credible witness…