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THE MURDER OF MR MAYBRICK, 1889

Judges cannot ever be truly impartial, being inevitably led by their own opinions, background, education, sex and social position to exhibit an occasionally less than objective attitude to the accused, especially if the accused is a woman. Such bias was shown by the learned gentlemen who judged Edith Thompson, Alma Rattenbury, Ruth Ellis – and Florence Maybrick.

Miss Florence Elizabeth Chandler was an American, a Southern belle from Alabama, who at the age of eighteen married Mr James Maybrick in London on 27 July 1881. She was the daughter of a banker from Mobile, and she and her future husband met on the White Star liner Baltic when she was on a tour of Europe with her mother. He was a forty-two-year-old English cotton-broker, a frequent visitor to America. His two brothers disapproved of the match, believing that Florence was as flighty, as suspect, as her thrice-married mother, Baroness von Roques.

The Maybricks settled in Liverpool in 1884, eventually purchasing an imposing mansion, Battlecrease House (complete with modern flush toilets), in a southern suburb of the city called Aigburth. Living beyond their means, they were attended by four servants: a cook, two maids, and a nanny called Alice Yapp, who looked after the two young Maybrick children, a boy and a girl. Mrs Maybrick was given £7 a week by her husband to pay not only for the food and domestic requirements but also all the servants’ wages. Naturally, she was soon in debt.

James Maybrick was a boorish, irascible man, and a lifelong hypochondriac. Ever complaining of being out of sorts, of pains and numbness and problems with his liver and his nerves, he was a believer in homoeopathic medicines, and was forever swallowing pills and pick-me-ups to improve his health and sexual potency; the mixtures included strychnine and arsenic. ‘I think I know a good deal of medicine,’ he once told a doctor.

He maintained a mistress on the side, as Florence discovered by chance in 1887. The unhappy young woman found some consolation in the arms of one of her husband’s Liverpool friends, a tall and handsome young bachelor, Alfred Brierley, whom she met at a dance at Battlecrease House. In March 1889, the couple spent a weekend together in a London hotel. Mrs Maybrick made the arrangements. They planned to be there a week, but for some reason they left the hotel – Flatman’s in Henrietta Street – on the Monday, when Brierley paid the bill; Mrs Maybrick spent the rest of the week with friends. She said later: ‘Before we parted, he gave me to understand that he cared for somebody else and could not marry me, and that rather than face the disgrace of discovery he would blow his brains out. I then had such a revulsion of feeling I said we must end our intimacy at once.’ She returned to Liverpool on Friday, 28 March.

The next day, she went to Aintree with her husband for the Grand National. There she happened to meet Brierley, and despite her revulsion and her husband’s wishes, she left his carriage and walked up the course with the young man. Maybrick was furious. She returned home on her own. He arrived ten minutes later. There was a row and at one point he punched her. Alice Yapp said later: ‘I heard Mr Maybrick say to Mrs Maybrick: “This scandal will be all over the town tomorrow!” They then went down into the hall, and I heard Mr Maybrick say: “Florrie, I never thought you would come to this.” They then went into the vestibule, and I heard Mr Maybrick say: “If you once cross this threshold you shall never enter these doors again!’” Mrs Maybrick had in fact ordered a cab and threatened to walk out of the house, but Nanny Yapp intervened, reminding her of her children – ‘I put my arm around her waist and took her upstairs. I made the bed for her that night and she slept in the dressing-room.’

On Sunday, Mr Maybrick made a new will, excluding his wife. She went to see the family doctor, Dr Hopper, who said later:

She complained that she was very unwell, that she had been up all night … and she asked my advice. I saw that she had a black eye. She said that her husband had been very unkind to her … and he had beaten her … She said that she had a very strong feeling against him, and could not bear him to come near her.

She wanted a divorce. But the doctor was able to effect a reconciliation. She asked her husband’s forgiveness for considerable debts she had incurred (£1,200) and he paid them off – presumably with difficulty, as he was in debt himself.

On 13 April, Mr Maybrick journeyed to London on business connected with his wife’s debts and stayed with his bachelor brother, Michael Maybrick, a singer and composer, in his flat in Wellington Mansions, Regents Park. Using the pseudonym Stephen Adams, Michael composed such hymns as ‘The Holy City’ and ‘Star of Bethlehem’. James Maybrick consulted Michael’s doctor, complaining of pains in his head and numbness in his right leg. After an hour-long examination the doctor concluded there was very little wrong with him, apart from indigestion, and he prescribed an aperient, a tonic, and liver pills. Mr Maybrick returned to Liverpool on 22 April.

Soon after this, he met a friend of his – Sir James Poole, a former mayor of Liverpool, in the Palatine Club – who said later: ‘Someone made the remark that it was becoming the common custom to take poisonous medicines. [Maybrick] had an impetuous way and he blurted out: “I take poisonous medicines.” I said: “How horrid! Don’t you know, my dear friend, that the more you take of these things the more you require, and you will go on till they carry you off?”’ The previous year, in June, Mrs Maybrick had visited Dr Hopper. He said later: ‘She told me that Mr Maybrick was in the habit of taking some very strong medicine which had a bad influence on him; for he always seemed worse after each dose. She wished me to see him about it, as he was very reticent in the matter.’

There seems no doubt that he was an eater of arsenic, among other poisons, and three American witnesses at the trial vouched that he often took arsenic in a cup of beef tea, saying it was ‘meat and liquor to him’ and ‘I take it when I can get it.’ A chemist from Norfolk in Virginia attested to the fact that Mr Maybrick’s consumption of ‘liquor arsenicalis’ given in a tonic, increased over eighteen months by 75 per cent.

On or about Monday, 23 April, Mrs Maybrick bought one dozen flypapers from a chemist in Aigburth. She told him that the flies were troublesome in her kitchen. Each paper contained about one grain of arsenic, although the experts at her trial disagreed about the actual amount, saying it depended on whether the arsenic was extracted by boiling the papers or by soaking them in cold water.

On or about that Monday, flypapers were seen by the nanny and a maid soaking in a basin on the Maybricks’ bedroom wash-stand. Mrs Maybrick later explained that the arsenic which she extracted from those flypapers was for a cosmetic preparation, a face-wash, something she had used for years; she wanted to clear up some skin trouble before going to a ball. A hairdresser, Mr Bioletti, later agreed that there was ‘an impression among ladies that it is good for the complexion’. It was also used, he said, as a depilatory.

The following Saturday, the 27th, Mr Maybrick felt funny and was sick. He went to the Wirrall Races in the afternoon, got wet in the rain, and later dined with friends; his hands were so unsteady that he upset some wine.

On Sunday morning the children’s doctor, Dr Humphreys, was sent for. Mr Maybrick was in bed, complaining about pains in his chest and his heart, caused, he said, by a strong cup of tea. He was afraid of becoming paralyzed. The doctor prescribed some diluted prussic acid, and forbade him to drink anything other than soda water and milk. Mrs Maybrick told the doctor that her husband had taken an overdose of strychnine. Two months earlier she had spoken to him about her husband’s habit of dosing himself with strychnine and had written in some concern to his brother, Michael, saying she had found a certain white powder which her husband habitually took. When Michael obliquely asked his brother about this, James Maybrick expostulated: ‘Whoever told you that? It’s a damned lie!’

Dr Humphreys saw his patient again on 29 and 30 April. He concluded that Maybrick was a chronic dyspeptic and put him on a diet. On the night of 30 April, Florence Maybrick went to a fancy-dress ball with her brother-in-law, Edwin, a bachelor cotton merchant, who was staying in Battlecrease House after a recent visit to America.

James Maybrick was back in his office on Wednesday, 1 May. Said brother Edwin: ‘Mrs Maybrick gave me a parcel to take to his office … It contained a brown jug in which there was some farinaceous food in liquid form [Barry’s Revalenta]. My brother poured the liquid into a saucepan and heated it over the fire, and he then poured it into a basin and partook of it. He remarked: “The cook has put some of that damned sherry in it, and she knows I don’t like it!”’

By Friday, Maybrick was ill again and Dr Humphreys was summoned about 10 am. He later stated: ‘I found Mr Maybrick in the morning-room on the ground floor. He said he had not been so well since the day before, and he added that he did not think my medicine agreed with him. Mrs Maybrick was present and said: “You always say the same thing about anybody’s medicine after two or three days.”’ Dr Humphreys’s advice was ‘to go on the same for two or three weeks’. He went away and was called back at midnight. In the interim Mr Maybrick had gone out and had a Turkish bath. He was now in bed; he had been sick twice and complained of gnawing pains in his legs.

On Saturday, his hands felt numb, and he was constantly sick. The doctor told Maybrick he should ‘abate his thirst by washing out with water or by sucking ice or a damp cloth’. On Sunday, his sore throat and foul tongue troubled him; Valentine’s meat juice was prescribed as well as the prussic acid solution. Mrs Maybrick then thought that a second opinion was unnecessary. She said: ‘He has seen so many [doctors] and they have done him so little good.’ She was in constant attendance on him day and night, sleeping in the dressing-room adjacent to the Maybricks’ bedroom.

At 8.30 am on Monday, 6 May, Dr Humphreys was back. ‘I told [him] to stop the Valentine’s beef juice … I was not surprised at it making Mr Maybrick sick, as it made many people sick.’ Humphreys now prescribed some arsenic, Fowler’s solution, which contained in all 1/25th of a grain, and that evening the patient was fed with Brand’s beef tea, some chicken broth, Neave’s food, and some milk and water. He continued to vomit, and a blister was applied to his stomach. On Tuesday morning he seemed better and told Dr Humphreys: ‘I am quite a different man today.’ Nonetheless, a second opinion was now sought by Edwin Maybrick. His choice, Dr Carter, arrived about 5 pm. Carter’s conclusion was that the patient was suffering from acute dyspepsia, resulting from ‘indiscretion of food, or drink, or both’. He prescribed a careful diet and small doses of sedatives. Both Carter and Humphreys thought Maybrick would be well in a few days.

But on Wednesday, 8 May, there was a general turn for the worse. Two of the invalid’s friends, Mrs Matilda Briggs and Mrs Martha Hughes (they were sisters), called at the house in the morning and were told by Nanny Yapp about the soaking flypapers and other suspicious matters. Mrs Briggs took immediate action. She told the exhausted wife to send for a trained nurse. She spoke to Edwin. She also telegraphed Michael Maybrick in London – ‘Come at once. Strange things going on here.’

The nurse arrived at 2.15 pm. About three o’clock, Mrs Maybrick came to the garden gate and gave Alice Yapp a letter to post. The young nanny was minding the Maybricks’ three-year-old daughter and walked to the post office with the child. On the way there the letter, according to Alice, was dropped in the dirt, and needed a new envelope. At any rate, she read the letter, failed to post it and handed it over to Edwin about half-past five. The letter was addressed to A. Brierley and had been written in reply to a somewhat frosty missive from him suggesting that he and Florence did not meet again until the autumn. Mrs Maybrick had written:

Dearest – Since my return I have been nursing M day and night – he is sick unto death! … And now all depends upon how his strength will hold out … We are terribly anxious … But relieve your mind of all fear of discovery now and in the future. M has been delirious since Sunday and I know now he is perfectly ignorant of everything … and also that he has not been making any enquiries whatever!

This was reported to Michael when he arrived from London that night. Edwin instructed the nurses to let no one else attend his sick brother, while Michael discussed the family’s suspicions with Dr Humphreys.

The following day the patient was weaker, complaining of much pain in his rectum: he now had diarrhoea. His faeces and urine, a bottle of brandy and a bottle of Neave’s food were all examined for arsenic. None was found.

That evening the cook (also called Humphreys) was followed downstairs by Mrs Maybrick, who said: ‘I am blamed for all this.’ ‘In what way?’ asked the cook. ‘In not getting other nurses and doctors,’ Mrs Maybrick replied. She went into the servants’ hall and began to cry. She said her position in the house was not worth anything, that Michael Maybrick, who had always had a spite against her, had turned her out of the master’s bedroom. The cook, who thought her mistress had been ‘very kind’ to Mr Maybrick and ‘was doing her best under the circumstances’, was much moved and said: ‘I would rather be in my own shoes than yours.’

Nurse Gore came on duty at 11 pm and gave her charge some Valentine’s meat juice, and noticed how Mrs Maybrick removed the bottle (which had been provided by Edwin) and took it into the dressing room. She closed the door; a few minutes later she returned, placed the bottle in a ‘surreptitious manner’ on a bedside table, and sent the nurse to fetch some ice. Mrs Maybrick later explained:

After Nurse Gore had given my husband beef tea, I went and sat on the bed beside him. He complained to me of being very sick and very depressed and he implored me then to give him this powder, which he had referred to early in the evening, and which I had declined to give him. I was overwrought, terribly anxious, miserably unhappy, and his evident distress utterly unnerved me. He had told me that the powder would not harm him, and that I could put it in his food. I then consented.’ But, she said, he didn’t take any of the powder, as he was asleep when she returned to the bedroom; later he was sick. The bottle was later found to contain half a grain of arsenic.

On Friday, 10 May, James Maybrick was much weaker, with a very faint but rapid pulse; he was very restless and his tongue was foul. He was given sulphonal, nitro-glycerine, cocaine (for his throat) and some phosphoric acid (for his mouth). In the afternoon, Michael Maybrick caught Mrs Maybrick changing medicine from one bottle to another. ‘Florrie! How dare you tamper with the medicine!’ he cried. No arsenic was later found in the bottle that he removed.

Later on that day, the duty nurse, Nurse Gallery, was administering some medicine, assisted by Florrie, when the patient said: ‘Don’t give me the wrong medicine again!’ That evening, according to Nurse Wilson, Mr Maybrick, who was now delirious, said to his wife: ‘Oh, Bunny, Bunny, how could you do it? I did not think it of you.’ ‘You silly old darling,’ said Mrs Maybrick. ‘Don’t trouble your head about things.’ Later, Mrs Maybrick said her husband had been referring to a whispered conversation she had had with him, confessing to her affair with Brierley, assuring him it was over, and asking for his forgiveness.

On Saturday, 11 May, the doctors had a consultation after midday and concluded that their patient would never recover: his case was hopeless. His children were brought to him at 5 pm. James Maybrick died some three hours later. Florence Maybrick swooned and then retired to her bed in the dressing room. She was more or less confined there by the dead man’s brothers while a hasty search was made of the bedroom and the house by the servants, the nurses, the doctors, the brothers and Mrs Briggs.

A sealed packet with a red label that read Arsenic, Poison (`for cats’ had been added) was found in a trunk. Arsenic was later detected in an imperfectly cleaned jug of Barry’s Revalenta and in two ordinary medicine bottles. Several small bottles and a scrap of handkerchief were discovered in a chocolate box: the scrap had traces of arsenic. Three bottles found in a man’s hat-box contained varying solutions of arsenic. In another hat-box were a glass and another handkerchief: both bore traces of milk and arsenic. More traces were found in the pocket of Mrs Maybrick’s dressing gown. There was enough arsenic in the house to poison fifty people.

On Monday, 13 May, a post mortem was carried out by Doctors Carter, Humphreys and Barron. They concluded that death had been caused by some irritant poison acting on the stomach and bowels. But when the body was exhumed on 30 May, less than half a grain of arsenic (two grains would have been a fatal amount) was the total found in his liver, kidneys and intestines. There was none in his stomach, spleen, heart or lungs. There were, however, traces of strychnine, hyoscine, prussic acid and morphia.

In the meantime, Mrs Maybrick had been detained on suspicion of causing her husband’s death. She had been removed to the hospital in Walton jail, after a magistrate formally opened the investigation in her bedroom, but not before a letter she wrote to Brierley – ‘Appearances may be against me, but before God I swear I am innocent’ – was intercepted by Mrs Briggs and given to the police.

When Mrs Maybrick appeared at the brief magisterial hearing on 13 June, she was hissed at by a large number of women as she left the court. She hoped her trial would take place in London. ‘I shall receive an impartial verdict there,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘which I cannot expect from a jury in Liverpool, whose minds have come to a “moral conviction” … The tittle-tattle of servants, the public, friends and enemies, besides their personal feelings for Jim, must leave their traces and prejudice their minds, no matter what the defence is.’ She was advised otherwise, and the trial began at Liverpool Summer Assizes on Wednesday, 31 July 1889.

There was an all-male Lancashire jury, including three plumbers and two farmers. Mrs Maybrick was defended by Sir Charles Russell, QC, MP, later the Lord Chief Justice. The medical experts agreed that Mr Maybrick had died of gastro-enteritis, but disputed whether this had been caused by arsenic, impure food or a chill. The defence claimed that there was an absence of most symptoms usually associated with arsenical poisoning, that the deceased had overdosed himself and died of natural causes, that Mrs Maybrick had no need to adopt the clumsy and uncertain contrivance of soaking flypapers (so openly) to get arsenic, when so much was available elsewhere in the house. She gave no evidence, but made an ill-advised statement, explaining her reasons for soaking the flypapers and what she was doing with the meat juice.

The summing-up of the judge, Mr Justice Stephen, who was himself a very sick man, lasted two days. It was a rambling peroration, not without some errors of fact, laying emphasis on the accused’s admitted adultery with Brierley. The judge said:

For a person to go on deliberately administering poison to a poor, helpless, sick man, upon whom she has already inflicted a dreadful injury – an injury fatal to married life – the person who could do such a thing must indeed be destitute of the least trace of feeling … Then you have to consider … the question of motives which might act upon this woman’s mind. When you come to consider that, you must remember the intrigue which she carried on with this man Brierley, and the feelings – it seems horrible to comparatively ordinary innocent people – a horrible and incredible thought, that a woman should be plotting the death of her husband in order that she might be left at liberty to follow her own degrading vices … There is no doubt that the propensities which lead persons to vices of that kind do kill all the more tender, all the more manly, or all the more womanly, feelings of the human mind.

The jury, after an absence of three-quarters of an hour, found Florence Maybrick guilty of murder. Before sentence of death was passed she said: ‘With the exception of my intimacy with Mr Brierley, I am not guilty of this crime.’

The judge was booed as he left the court. Meetings were held, letters were sent, petitions organised, and articles written (by doctors and lawyers) decrying the verdict – there was no appeal court then. Leading Americans, including the President, brought pressure to bear on the English authorities. The Home Secretary and the Lord Chancellor reviewed the case and interviewed the judge. Meanwhile, in Liverpool, Mrs Maybrick heard the gallows being erected in Walton jail.

Then, on 22 August, the Home Office announced that the sentence had been commuted to penal servitude for life, without ‘the slightest reflection on the tribunal by which the prisoner was tried’ and with ‘the concurrence of the learned judge’. A message announcing the reprieve reached Walton jail at 1.30 am on 23 August, three days before the date set for Florence’s execution.

Despite further efforts to obtain her release, Florence Maybrick remained in jail for fifteen years. The first nine months of her sentence were spent in solitary confinement; she was fed on bread and gruel, wore a brown dress marked with arrows and had to make at least five men’s shirts a week. Her imprisonment began in Woking jail and ended in Aylesbury. She was freed on 25 January 1904, when she went to France and visited her aged mother before returning to America, where she had not been for more than twenty years. For a time she was something of a celebrity and wrote a book called My Fifteen Lost Years. Soon after it was published, the Court of Criminal Appeal was established in 1907.

She died in squalor, surrounded by cats in a Connecticut cottage, on 23 October 1941. She was seventy-eight. It was fifty-two years since her husband’s death and many years since the death of the judge, Mr Justice Stephen. He retired soon after the trial and died in a lunatic asylum.