The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

Florence Maybrick was an American abroad, and Americans in particular are fascinated by her ordeal, accused of the cruellest of murders in the bombazine bosom of Victorian England. She was a looker (men considered her the most beautiful woman in Liverpool) whose feckless upbringing as a southern belle and coquettish drawl affronted the provincial hypocrisies and pretensions of Cottonopolis and damned her as a scarlet adulteress. A nosy children’s nanny intercepted a letter from Florence to her lover. Another servant at Mrs Maybrick’s house witnessed her mistress soaking flypapers in water, a time-honoured way of obtaining arsenic. Shortly after this, her drug-popping husband James, twenty-three years her senior, died, evidently of arsenical poisoning. Florence Maybrick’s trial for murder and subsequent sentence of death (commuted at the last moment to life imprisonment) quickly became an international cause célèbre. Some modern commentators have called it the English Dreyfus case. Of it, Raymond Chandler wrote:“The question will never be settled… It’s just too damned difficult.” Was it murder? Was Florence a cunning and determined poisoner who persisted in her efforts to dispose of her husband despite the hourly surveillance of a suspicious and hostile family circle? Or was she the grand victim of Victorian hypocrisies, so acutely personified in her dead husband? Of the many treatments of the Maybrick case, this from 1962 by Maurice Moiseiwitsch is perhaps the most approachable. It comes from a selection of five famous trials, Moiseiwitsch’s only venture into true crime; he was mainly a novelist, but in the sixties he also wrote a biography of his famous uncle, the Russian virtuoso pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch. In this account of the puzzling Maybrick saga, Maurice Moiseiwitsch combines a strong narrative drive with a balanced and lucid assessment of the complex medical evidence.

(i)

James Maybrick was an eccentric, an oddity so rare that even amongst the English, who pride themselves on their eccentricity, he must be considered a queer fish. He worried constantly about his health, but even amongst hypochondriacs he was an eccentric because, not content with taking innumerable patent medicines to improve it, he indulged in all sorts of experiments with powerful drugs and poisons taken as “pick-me-ups”-jaborandi, cascara, strychnine, henbane, morphia, prussic acid, papain, iridin and arsenic; above all, arsenic, which seemed to be his favourite. When he died more than a hundred bottles of medicine were found in his home, twenty-eight more in his office, and boxes and packages of arsenic in the house, enough to kill more than fifty normal healthy people.

He was regarded as perfectly sane, and went about his business in the ordinary way; he married and begot children; he indulged in gallantries, he quarrelled with his wife. In short, apart from his grisly and dangerous hobby of taking poison, he behaved unexceptionally.

He died at his home, Battlecrease House, Aigburth, on 11 May 1889, at the age of fifty, and the only remarkable feature of his death that one can be really certain about is that his constitution had been able to withstand for many years the fiendish and unnatural assaults to which he had subjected it.

Hypochondria, as we know today, is a psychological illness, and a very interesting one, existing on two levels of the unconscious mind: on the more obvious and superficial level the sufferer is so worried about his health that he becomes addicted to patent medicines or drugs or both; but at a deeper level there is some hidden emotion which causes the worry, and this is a self-destructive wish for which the worrying is the safety valve or defence factor. The true hypochondriac has in fact erected a barrier of artificial medical aids to protect himself from some secret impulse to harm himself, even destroy himself. It is for this reason that rational arguments by doctors that “there is nothing really wrong with you” have little or no effect; they do not touch the underlying emotion which is the cause of the unending struggle between the self-destructive and self-preservative instincts.

Maybrick’s hypochondria was clearly an outstanding, a classical example of this tug-of-war. He was constantly seeing doctors about his “symptoms”, asking them to give him prescriptions to bolster his natural powers of resistance against disease and then, in response to some deeper impulse, reinforcing these innocuous prescriptions with toxics or potent drugs in such a reckless manner as would frighten a normal person out of his wits. He took arsenic over a period of years, saying that this was a stimulant known to the “Styrian peasants”, quoting freely from De Quincey’s writings in support of his drug-taking habit-ignoring the difference of the effect of opium from the result he unconsciously sought.

Shortly before his fatal illness Maybrick had a domestic quarrel with his wife, Florence. He gave her a black eye and the lady threatened to leave him, but was then persuaded to change her mind for the sake of their children. During the course of his illness, Mrs Maybrick wrote a letter to a man called Brierley, giving it to the children’s nurse to post. Instead of posting it, the young woman secretly opened and read it, and its contents seemed to have such a significant character that she gave it to Maybrick’s brother, Edwin. Immediately after Maybrick’s death, Florence Maybrick herself fell ill from emotional and nervous exhaustion. Whilst still confined to her room, she was told that she was in the custody of the police.

She was charged with the murder of her husband at the Liverpool Assizes, convicted and sentenced to death on 7 August. On 22 August she was reprieved and her sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life.

This was the case presented on behalf of the prosecution by Mr John Addison, Q.C.:

James Maybrick was a cotton broker or merchant, a native of Liverpool. In the earlier part of his business career he travelled a good deal in America where in 1881 he made the acquaintance of an eighteen-year-old daughter of a banker, Florence Elizabeth Chandler, and they were married in July 1881, in London. Maybrick was twenty-four years older than his wife. Four or five years later, the Maybricks settled permanently in Liverpool, where he carried on his business. There were two children of the marriage, a boy and a girl.

From the beginning of 1889, the household consisted of the Maybricks; a children’s nurse, Alice Yapp; a housemaid, Bessie Brierley; a cook, Elizabeth Humphreys; and a housemaid and waitress, Mary Cadwallader.

James Maybrick was a strong and healthy man and attended his office regularly, but he complained a good deal of his liver and nerves and of generally feeling “out of sorts”. From 1881 Dr Hopper, who was the family doctor, prescribed for him from time to time. Maybrick had rather exaggerated notions about his ailments, and even feared that he was developing paralysis, but the doctor treated him with medicines of the sort given to people of sedentary habits, nerve tonics having the usual ingredients, nux vomica and homoeopathic doses of strychnine. Neither Dr Hopper nor Maybrick’s three brothers, who visited or saw him fairly regularly, had known him to be ill during the eight years since the marriage. The bookkeeper, Smith, and Lowry, another employee at Maybrick’s office, had often heard him complain about his liver, and he often discussed remedies for his ailments with them.

On 16 March Mrs Maybrick had to telegraph to a hotel in London for a bedroom and sitting room to be reserved for Mr and Mrs Maybrick. Receiving no reply, she wrote to the landlord, giving details as to the sort of dinner which the visitors would like to have, saying that her “sister-in-law” was inexperienced in such matters. On the 21st she left Battlecrease House to go to London. The reason she had given her husband for this trip was that she had an aunt who was undergoing an operation and who wanted her comfort during convalescence. This was repeated to Alice Yapp, who was requested to forward letters to another hotel in London.

On the morning of the 22nd she was found having breakfast with a man called Brierley. They stayed together as man and wife at the hotel for two days. Brierley was a Liverpool broker who had clearly made her acquaintance before coming to London.

She returned home on the 28th. The next day, the Maybricks went to the Grand National Steeplechase. Maybrick returned in the evening, she following him some ten minutes later. It was evident to the servants that they had quarrelled. He began to protest about a “scandal that will be all over Liverpool tomorrow”; a cab was sent for. “If you leave this house, you will never enter it again,” came the patriarchal mid-Victorian threat. The nurse put her arm round Mrs Maybrick’s waist and coaxed her upstairs to see her younger child. In the end the danger of an open rupture was averted and she consented to remain; but husband and wife were not on speaking terms now and the nurse made up a bed for Mrs Maybrick in the dressing room adjoining the bedroom, where she slept that night.

Early the next day, Mrs Maybrick went to see an old friend of the family, Mrs Briggs, who had known husband and wife since they were married. She confided in her that at the Grand National meeting, in spite of her husband’s orders, she had left their carriage to go with Mr Brierley. They had quarrelled over this and her husband had struck her in the eye.

Mrs Briggs did what she could to heal the breach and took her to see the family doctor, Hopper, who also did his best to patch up the quarrel. Dr Hopper succeeded, as far as he could see, in making things up between husband and wife. Maybrick was persuaded to settle some debts of hers to money-lenders for £1,200.

About a fortnight later Maybrick went up to London to consult with his brother, Michael, about the arrangement to pay these debts. He made certain complaints about not feeling well, which made Michael suggest that he should consult his own doctor, Charles Fuller.

Although Maybrick made a lot of his “symptoms”, saying he had pains in the head and numbness, Dr Fuller diagnosed dyspepsia, recognizing that his patient was hypochondriacal; he gave him a tonic as prescription, and tried to cheer him up by explaining that there was nothing seriously wrong with him.

At some time between the 15th and 20th, Mrs Maybrick went to a local chemist and amongst other purchases obtained a dozen fly-papers, giving as a reason for buying them that she was being troubled by flies in the kitchen. These fly-papers, if boiled, yield up to two or even three grains of arsenic each. The housemaid, Bessie Brierley, tidying Mrs Maybrick’s bedroom, later saw these fly-papers soaking in the basin. Her attention was drawn to them because they had been covered by a towel. There were no flies in the kitchen, and in any case to soak them first in water would not be a practical way of ensuring that they caught flies.

On 20 April, Maybrick was in London, and called once more to see Dr Fuller, who slightly altered his prescription, which was made up at Clay and Abraham’s, chemists. None of the bottles obtained from Dr Fuller’s prescription contained arsenic as originally made up; yet after Maybrick’s death, when an investigation was made of their contents, it was discovered that to one of them arsenic had been added.

Maybrick developed serious illness on the 27th. The Wirral races were held that day, and that morning he complained of nausea-he was said to have been sick-numbness in his limbs, and considerable pain. Mrs Maybrick told the nurse, Alice Yapp, that the master had taken an overdose of the medicine prescribed by the London doctor. On the other hand, she told Dr Humphreys, their children’s doctor, who visited him the next day, that she attributed his illness to some bad brandy which he had drunk at the races and for which she had given him an emetic of mustard and hot water. Dr Humphreys’ diagnosis was dyspepsia.

The next morning, Monday the 29th, he seemed to be better, the sickness and pain gone, although his tongue was rather more furred.

Whilst he was still in bed under doctor’s orders, Mrs Maybrick went to another chemist and, amongst other purchases, obtained yet more fly-paper, two dozen sheets.

On the 30th, Maybrick was better and was allowed to go to his office, but the next day he took some liquid food with him to the office in a jug-food prepared for him by his wife. (Being on a diet, during the next three days his lunches at the office were specially prepared by Mrs Maybrick.) His condition varied; he usually felt better in the evenings; but after lunch on Thursday, 2 May, he definitely felt worse. This jug was examined and, although it had been cleaned by the charwoman, traces of the food still remained and on analysis they were found to contain particles of arsenic.

Maybrick took to his bed on Friday morning and was visited by Dr Humphreys. He complained that he had not felt well since lunch the previous day. Later that night, Dr Humphreys was called again, and then his patient complained for the first time of deep-seated pains in the thighs and hips. He had been sick twice; there were indications of straining of the rectum. He was given morphia for relief.

On Saturday he was a good deal worse; he could keep nothing down and could eat nothing. Mrs Maybrick was told to apply some moistened handkerchiefs to his mouth to ease his frightful thirst. Later, one of her handkerchiefs was found to have traces of arsenic.

The doctor recommended that he should try to take some beef essence, and subsequently in this, too, were found traces of arsenic.

The condition of the patient varied from day to day, and these fluctuations, these alternating recoveries and sudden relapses suggested not the logical progression of normal illness with its climactic peak but the sort of reaction of a normal constitution to the effects of small repeated doses of poison; first succumbing to the unnatural onslaught and then fighting it off rapidly (provided of course it was not a fatal dose). Thus on Monday Maybrick was unwell and in pain, and complained that his mouth felt as though it was full of hair; on Tuesday he definitely seemed better.

Following a suggestion from Mrs Maybrick, a Dr Carter was called in for a second opinion, who diagnosed acute dyspepsia from the following symptoms: vomiting, diarrhoea, intense thirst, pain in the throat “as though there was a hair in it”.

On the same day, Alice Yapp saw Mrs Maybrick pour some medicine from one bottle to another, but no special importance could be attached to this rather unusual act, although it seemed to show that she had the complete handling of his medicines.

Mrs Briggs, visiting the patient, thought it right to send for a trained nurse and sent a telegram to Michael, Maybrick’s brother, asking him to come at once to Liverpool. In fact, Alice Yapp had already told Mrs Briggs about the fly-papers soaking in the basin; the whole household now suspected that Mrs Maybrick was planning mischief. When Nurse Gore arrived to look after Maybrick, his brother Edwin told her that no one except the nurses was to be allowed to look after him.

Mrs Maybrick gave Alice Yapp a letter to post that afternoon, addressed to A. Brierley, Esq., at an address in Liverpool. Nurse Alice took the letter to the post, but dropped it in the mud and, deciding it was not in fit state to be sent, opened it and, being compelled now by curiosity or suspicion or both, read it. She then decided to show it to Edwin Maybrick, who kept it without informing his sister-in-law about what had happened to it.

The important correspondence between Mrs Maybrick and Brierley included a letter which he had written to her on 6 May. The letter read as follows:

My dear Florie, I suppose now you have gone I am safe in writing to you. I don’t quite understand what you mean in your last about explaining my line of action. You know I could not write, and was willing to meet you, although it would have been very dangerous. Most certainly your telegram yesterday was a staggerer, and it looks as if the result was certain, but as yet I cannot find an advertisement in any London paper. [This clearly refers to possible investigations that might have led to discovery of what had passed between them at the hotel in London.] I should like to see you, but at present dare not move, and we had better perhaps not meet until late in the autumn. I am going to try and get away in about a fortnight. I think I shall take a round trip to the Mediterranean, which will take six or seven weeks, unless youwishmetostayinEngland. Supposing the rooms are found, I think both you and I would be better away, as the man’s memory would be doubted after three months. I will write and tell you when I go. I cannot trust myself at present to write about my feelings on this unhappy business, but I do hope that some time hence I shall be able to show you that I do not quite deserve the strictures contained in your last two letters. I went to the D. and D., and, of course, heard some tales, but myself knew nothing about anything. And now, dear, “Goodbye,” hoping we shall meet in the autumn. I will write to you about sending letters just before I go.

A.B.

Her letter in reply, intercepted by Nurse Yapp, read:

Dearest, your letter under cover to John K. came to hand just after I had written to you on Monday. I did not expect to hear from you so soon, and had delayed in giving him the necessary instructions. Since my return I have been nursing M. day and night. He is sick unto death. The doctors held a consultation yesterday, and now all depends upon how long his strength will hold out. Both my brothers-in-law are here, and we are terribly anxious. I cannot answer your letter fully today, my darling, but relieve your mind of all fear of discovery now and in the future. M. has been delirious since Sunday, and I know now that he is perfectly ignorant of everything, even of the name of the street, and also that he has not been making any inquiries whatever. The tale he told me was a pure fabrication, and only intended to frighten the truth out of me. In fact he believes my statement, although he will not admit it. You need not therefore go abroad on that account, dearest; but, in any case, please don’t leave England until I have seen you once again. You must feel that those two letters of mine were written under circumstances which must even excuse their injustice in your eyes. Do you suppose that I could act as I am doing if I really felt and meant what I inferred then? If you wish to write to me about anything do so now, as all the letters pass through my hands at present. Excuse this scrawl, my own darling, but I dare not leave the room for a moment, and I do not know when I shall be able to write to you again. In haste, yours ever,

Florie

At the time the letter was written, Maybrick was by no means “sick unto death”, nor had he been delirious since Sunday; the doctors had certainly not given up hope of his recovery contrary to the implication in the phrase: “all depends upon how long his strength will hold out”. As for the general tone of the correspondence, it seemed clear that Mrs Maybrick was still in love with Brierley, still anxious to see him, and very concerned that he might leave her for the “round trip to the Mediterranean”. The secrecy with regard to this correspondence, the letters received under cover and the tactical manœuvring implied in her request for an early reply because “all the letters pass through my hands at present” indicate a scheming mentality, a character that does not flinch from intrigue.

At six-thirty on the evening the letter was intercepted Nurse Gore noticed that a tumbler was missing. Mrs Maybrick produced it, saying that cold water had to be put in the medicine, otherwise it would burn the patient’s throat. Nurse Gore would not give the medicine to the patient from this tumbler, but emptied it into a sink in the housemaid’s closet. Whether or not from this cause, arsenic was later traced in the sink.

Dr Carter saw Maybrick on Thursday the 8th and noted a symptom, tenesmus, straining and retching of such intense degree, that he was not satisfied with the earlier diagnosis of acute dyspepsia, and suspected that the cause might be the action of an irritant poison.

At eleven o’clock at night Nurse Gore opened a fresh bottle of Valentine’s juice essence. Mrs Maybrick took the bottle out of the bedroom into the adjoining dressing-room, was absent for about two minutes and then returned with it. She asked the nurse to fetch some ice, but the nurse would not leave the room. Then Mrs Maybrick, in a hesitant and uncertain manner, as though she was undecided what to do, put the bottle on the table and later, when the patient awakened, removed it from the table and put it on the wash-stand. In this bottle, traces of arsenic were later discovered.

The next day, when the relief nurse, Callery, was offering some medicine to Maybrick, his wife tried to persuade him to take it. He said to her, “You have given me the wrong medicine again.” Mrs Maybrick said, “What are you talking about? You never had the wrong medicine.” At a quarter to five that day another nurse, Wilson, heard Maybrick say to his wife, “Oh, Bunny, Bunny, how could you do it? I did not think it of you.” He repeated this twice, and Mrs Maybrick replied, “You silly old darling, don’t trouble your head about things.”

Maybrick had become gravely ill now; the doctors gave up hope of his recovery on Saturday morning, and his children were taken to see him. He died in the evening.

Immediately after his death, Michael Maybrick organized a search of the house with the nurse and the housemaid. In a closet they found a box containing children’s clothes, and amongst these what was formerly a chocolate box but which now contained a parcel marked “Arsenic: Poison” and written after it the words “for cats”. This contained a very large quantity of arsenic, the equivalent of many lethal doses. There was also found a handkerchief in which some trace of arsenic was later discovered. In the dressing-room were found bottles on men’s hat-boxes containing a large quantity of arsenic in solution and solid arsenic, enough to kill a number of people. A trace of arsenic was found in the pocket of a dressing-gown worn by Mrs Maybrick.

The post-mortem examination of the deceased showed that all the organs were healthy; the kidneys showed traces of arsenic, and in the liver a weighable quantity was found. Dr Stevenson, an eminent toxicologist with many years’ experience, was of the opinion that death had been caused by repeated small doses of arsenic, which would not necessarily leave much residue in the body. It is not the arsenic which is found in the system that kills, but that which passes away.

(ii)

This was the very formidable case for the prosecution, one which appeared, on the face of it, all but impossible to answer. It seemed that the only possible defence would be the sort of ingenious fiction which incorrigible and desperate criminals sometimes foist on an embarrassed and unhappy defence counsel-a defence usually based on some extraordinary coincidence or remarkable circumstance.

In this case, the defence exceeded the most ingenious fiction that was ever put forward by a blushing barrister, because it combined the extraordinary coincidence with the remarkable circumstance, a combination which would make the average writer of murder stories blench; and yet-there was no doubt of it-this was not the imaginings of a desperate criminal but the sober truth as testified by impartial, respectable, intelligent and even distinguished witnesses. The prosecution had a seemingly irresistible case; the defence, in theory, had an irrefutable answer.

To summarize them, the extraordinary coincidence was that James Maybrick was addicted to arsenic and for many years had practised the habit of taking just the dosage which the prosecution had charged his wife with giving to him; and the remarkable circumstance was that two vastly experienced toxicologists (one specializing in the treatment of arsenic for venereal disease) were just as certain as Dr Stevenson was to the contrary that the deceased had not died as a result of arsenical poison.

As though these were not enough, there was yet a third factor which could have been offered by the defence but perhaps was not put forward because it was felt that the jury had enough argument to acquit without it, and this was that in a case where the judge repeatedly admitted that he could not understand the complexities of the medical evidence sufficiently to arrive at any decision about it, it would be impossible to expect a lay jury to bear the responsibility of such a decision in the case of a capital charge.

Let us first examine the question of whether or not Maybrick died from arsenical poisoning. If the defence could be said to have established a reasonable doubt about this, then that was the end of the matter. Whether or not Maybrick was poisoned in this way would settle whether or not he was murdered.

Dr Thomas Stevenson, examined by Mr Addison for the Crown, was a lecturer on forensic medicine and chemistry at Guy’s Hospital, London, and acted officially for the Home Office and Treasury in cases where highly specialized knowledge of toxicology was required. He examined and analysed parts of the body, he had taken note of the doctors’ reports about Maybrick’s symptoms during his illness, and he had no doubt that the patient had died from the effects of arsenic.

His main symptoms had been those attributable to irritant poisoning; during his more serious illness all his symptoms might be attributed to it; and they resembled those of arsenic more closely than of any other irritant. The amount of arsenic found in the body was about half a grain and that had been known to prove fatal, given at one dose.

Dr Rawdon Macnamara, examined by Sir Charles Russell for the defence, had been President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland; he was a Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, Professor of Materia Medica at the Royal College, and had for many years been senior surgeon at the Lock Hospital, Dublin. He had had to administer arsenic to patients in a very large number of cases, on several occasions to “saturation” point; sometimes, owing to the peculiarities of the patients, excessive doses had to be administered.

He had found that the strongest symptoms in the case of saturation was the redness of the eyelid where the lashes come out upon it. Another strong symptom was a marked peculiarity in the pit of the stomach, “about the size of a shilling, and that shilling burning hot, and thus spreading gradually down until the arsenic is eliminated”. Vomiting is at first copious, violent and persistent; the purging is of a severe character at first, but it passes into ineffectual effort.

He thought that the symptoms of sickness described by Dr Humphreys indicated inflammation of the stomach or bowels rather than arsenical poisoning. Dr Humphreys’ temporarily successful treatment for the stomach inflammation would have been effective in the case of gastro-enteritis, but not against arsenical poisoning. Dr Macnamara had never in the case of arsenical poisoning encountered either the symptom described as “like a hair in the throat” which had so distressed Maybrick, or the symptom of tenesmus preceding purging. Nor had he known his arsenic-saturated patients to experience the symptom of cramp in the calves of the leg.

“Now,” Sir Charles said, “bringing your best judgement to bear upon the matter, you have been present at the whole of this trial and heard the evidence, in your opinion was this a death from arsenical poisoning?”

“Certainly not.”

This was pretty direct stuff: none of the qualifications or reservations which medical experts use as safeguards against marginal doubt. Dr Macnamara’s experience of arsenical effects on the human constitution was certainly as considerable as that of anyone in medicine, and the clarity of his view cannot be doubted. An experienced doctor is rather like an expert art-dealer: what may appear indistinguishable features to a layman he can define, individualize and classify almost at a cursory glance. But in the minds of the jury the constantly described symptoms such as purging, vomiting, numbness and all the attendant horrors that accompany gastro-enteritis took on a character of unpleasantness almost indistinguishable from the effects of poisoning. Dr Macnamara’s evidence came after the jury had been subjected for several hours to medical evidence of a singular nastiness.

First had come the prosecutor’s address, in which he had gone over the symptoms of arsenical poisoning and in conscientious detail described every one of the doctors’ and nurses’ observations of Maybrick’s unhappy symptoms throughout the entire period of his illness. The doctors and nurses were then called, examined, cross-examined and re-examined on them. There followed the expert evidence of the analyst, Mr Davies, who had examined kidneys, bowels, liver, stomach and excretions. And lastly came Dr Stevenson, the toxicologist, who summed up, shed light, corrected, qualified, defined and described similar cases in his experience. He was cross-examined on all this, and then Mr Addison re-examined him at length.

Next there was the defence’s opening speech with its references to the medical history of Mr Maybrick, followed by the evidence of doctors, druggists, chemists and specialists, continuing for hours and featuring arguments of this character:

“You say that you saw no mention of petechiae. Did you notice that Dr Humphreys said he saw them there?”

“Well, he said he saw something of the kind, I believe. But I think afterwards that he said that they were of a brilliant arborescent appearance, which would be the result of something else, and not petechiae. The petechiae of arsenical poisoning have a linear dotted appearance and not arborescent.”

In such a forest even the giant redwood towering to the sky is lost; to be more explicit, the wide and clear divergence of opinion between eminent specialists on the two sides-which seemed to establish a reasonable doubt as to whether Maybrick had in fact died as a result of arsenical poisoning-was lost sight of in the unending cross-talk. Every doctor and specialist made his own individual interpretation of the symptoms, and these followed each other in what could only have been a bafflingly complex sequence to the lay mind (and in the medical sense, even the judge must be included under this description); and the most conscientious efforts to explain the finer points, the shades of distinction of viewpoint so important to the true diagnosis, only aggravated the bewilderment. To the untrained mind there is clearly a limit to the reception and retention of exotic phraseology and technical information.

In essence, the reason for the divergence of opinion by the medical specialists was failure to agree about characteristic symptoms and the minimum amount of arsenic expected to be found in the organs of the deceased. (The highest estimate of this found in the organs examined was half a grain, and a lethal dose was said to be two grains.) There was no arsenic found in the vicinity of the body, that is in its exudation, and no trace in the urine. The small amount found could be explained by the fact that Maybrick was in the habit of taking arsenic, which can remain in the body for a period of up to five months.

Dr Tidy, a distinguished specialist in forensic medicine and, like Dr Stevenson, employed by the Home Office as an analyst, said that if Maybrick had died from arsenic he would be a “toxicological curiosity”; he threw the whole weight of his authoritative knowledge on the side of the defence, giving a detailed account of food-poisoning, which was suggested as an alternative cause of gastro-enteritis-he explained that as “trifling” an irritant as a particle of gooseberry skin could produce the complaint. He pointed out that none of the four distinctive symptoms of arsenical poisoning had been manifested by the deceased.

These observations and opinions, as strongly expressed as those of Dr Macnamara, were stated, however, between prolific and prolix medical explanations, some of which must have been quite incomprehensible to a jury. For example, “As regards the appearances of the stomach-that is, the description given of redness at the cardiac end of the stomach, the natural colour and the red appearances at the pyloric end?” “Conjoined with the duodenum and with such other parts, I would say that these are perfectly consistent with death from gastro-enteritis.” And such general unexplained observations as “I am of the opinion that gastroenteritis does not occur idiopathically.”

Mr Justice Stephen’s contribution to the medical explanations, which formed the larger part of a summing-up lasting two whole days, was a curious mixture of adroitly concealed cynicism about the capacity of the jury to form a valid opinion about this part of the evidence and an exposition of it so dilatory that it could have only aggravated the confusion in the jury’s minds.

“The subject and the evidence in this case,” he said, “is but one of the many instances which has satisfied me, if I had not already been satisfied of it before, that medicine and everything connected with medicine is so much a matter of fact and experience of facts which do not readily present themselves for inspection, that you never can arrive at medical conclusions with anything like the same degree of certainty in your conclusions as you are entitled to expect in science which deals with mathematical demonstration or legal argument. I would not for the world say anything disrespectful of a science to which we all owe so very much; but it is science based upon more or less conjecture, and good sense and good fortune in making guesses.”

Having reached this conclusion, he presumably entrusted the jury with the task of making the guesses which he hoped by good fortune would be the right ones.

Later he said: “The doctors-the medical men-who do not believe in the arsenic, do not believe that the symptoms of that sort were the symptoms of arsenic; and that is, of course, of great importance-although I fear that we are there getting amongst questions which I have already warned you are really, speaking quite plainly, too difficult for us. At all events, they are too difficult for me.”

Then, after a lengthy analysis of the arsenic question: “I am very sorry I can do so little to help you in this great matter, but it is a great relief to me that, under the constitutional law of this country, it is you who have to decide the case and not I.”

This modest thought was expressed repeatedly later in his summing-up:

“Of course, speaking with precision, such a thing as an absolutely idiopathic disease can hardly exist at all; it could not arise except by some means, though one does not always know what it is. The doctors are divided in opinion, and, of course, I cannot answer the question whether there was arsenical poisoning or not.” And: “I should have to go into them [the medical arguments] at the expense of saying a good many things which had better not be said, and of showing my own extreme ignorance of the great difficulty of the subject.”

Later, referring to the medical controversy, he remarked: “It is extremely difficult to decide in this matter. It is a special science, of which I know nothing, and of which, I think, it is very unlikely that any one of you could possibly know very much. It is not a kind of knowledge that is likely, in the ordinary course of affairs, to fall to your lot. Two eminent men are put forward as very great authorities on this subject, and they both arrive at different conclusions on the matter; and the point in dispute is one upon which I cannot myself profess to form an opinion; and I don’t see how to suggest to you that you should form an opinion.”

The sort of evidence on which the jury however still had the responsibility of forming an opinion is typified by this further quotation:

“He [Dr Stevenson] says, ‘I found rather more arsenic than Mr Davies,’ and then he gives some calculations. He says, ‘I had 28 ounces of liver out of 48 ounces, which the liver weighed, and I found 27-1000ths of a grain. I actually weighed from the liver.034 of sulphide of arsenic, equivalent to.026 of a grain of white arsenic,’ and he makes out.087 or.091 of a grain-altogether 100-1000ths of a grain, or 1-10th of a grain, and this would be less. I cannot convey to your minds, or to any human being’s mind, anything to enable you to attach any meaning to figures representing such very small quantities… The globules of blood in a man’s body are so small that there are more than a billion, but really that conveys no idea whatever to our minds.”

It seems obvious from these repeated doubts about the possibility of arriving at any conclusion on this question that the judge should have at least warned the jury in the strongest terms to use great caution in examining this part of the evidence, and made plain to them that if, as was likely, they could not form an opinion, then this must constitute a genuine doubt as to whether murder had been committed. He appeared to do the very opposite: to indicate to the jury that if they could not decide on this evidence, they might minimize its importance, suggesting that the objectivity of the medical witnesses might be doubtful.

“You know perfectly well,” he told them, “that there is such a thing in scientific and legal questions… as subtle partisanship, which very much diminishes the value of the evidence given under such circumstances… The mere fact of a man coming into a Court and swearing this, that and the other, does not by any means give a reason for unqualified belief in what he says.

“You have to take off a good deal of discount from the testimony of skilled witnesses on the ground of their becoming, probably insensibly to themselves, advocates rather than witnesses. I certainly would not like to be invidious, and I would not do so unjust a thing as to impute in this awful inquiry advocacy to those gentlemen who have given the Court the benefit of their experience. Well, you must exercise your own free judgement, free from all unnecessary modesty about your own opinion, and free from all unnecessary respect for the opinions and special knowledge of men especially acquainted with these things.”

This invitation to the jury not to be unduly modest about their own opinion simply because it was based on ignorance, and not to be unduly respectful of the opinions of others merely on the grounds that they knew what they were talking about, was the only attempt Mr Justice Stephen made to solve the anomalous situation in which laymen had to reach a decision in a matter where experts could not agree. His reference to partisanship or advocacy, insensible or otherwise (quite unwarranted in the case of the medical witnesses called, for neither side made any such imputations about the other) was not really removed from the jury’s mind by his immediate retraction; the doubt had been implanted; a spoonful of tar can spoil a barrel of honey, and a chance remark may have an undue significance at a critical moment of decision.

It is obvious that the jury accepted the direction not to be unduly modest about their capacity for judgement of medical evidence, and did in fact judge it; and that they also took heed of the suggestion not to be unduly respectful of specialists’ opinion. They either decided it was wrong or “subtly partisan” or they simply dismissed it from their minds. The last seems the most likely, because, whilst the experts took hours to expound their point of view, the jury only took about thirty-five minutes to reach a decision.

This part of the evidence, the “contrariety of expert opinion” as Sir Charles Russell put it, raises an interesting and controversial issue. In the case of the imponderable or the incalculable in some important question of evidence, would it not be wise for the judge to implement his discretionary powers and direct the jury to bring a verdict in favour of the prisoner? These powers are used of course when the judge believes that the weight of evidence brought by the prosecution is clearly insufficient to prove a charge, and that the danger of a perverse decision by the jury must be obviated. In the Maybrick case a different problem faced the court-not that of insufficient evidence, for there was prosecution evidence in profusion about arsenical poisoning, but that of the jury’s incapacity to judge the facts. With such conclusive evidence before him of the jury’s inability to form a decision as to whether or not a murder had been committed, for the judge to proceed with the case seemed to defy reason and commonsense; it was, by implication, a tacit invitation, to the jury to dismiss the whole of this part of the evidence from their minds.

Mr Justice Stephen went even further than this, the implicit character of the invitation assuming an ominously explicit form when towards the end of his marathon summing-up he said: “There are three or four circumstances in the case which are circumstances of very grave suspicion indeed; and where you find a case in which this dreadful accusation is made and is accompanied by circumstances which, apart from the physical, chemical and medical aspects of the case, are of such a character as are likely to produce suspicion, you must consider how far they corroborate the other evidence that has been given… Supposing you find a man dying of arsenic, and it is proved that a person put arsenic in his plate, and if he gives an explanation which you do not consider satisfactory, that is a very strong question to be considered.”

The sinister illustration devised by Judge Stephen to point his meaning undoubtedly gave tremendous force to this part of his summary; and the point seemed to be that “corroboration” of “other evidence” might be assumed by suspicious surrounding circumstances, this “other evidence”, it might be inferred, being the medical. The emotionally potent turn of language and the judge’s failure to add the customary rider that suspicion, however grave, does not actually amount to proof, undoubtedly had a strong effect on the jury.

(iii)

The second and equally powerful buttress of the defence was the extraordinary coincidence, that is, the evidence brought to show quite conclusively that for many years Maybrick had been in the habit of taking arsenic in large doses approximating to these which the prosecution claimed had brought about his death.

The defence’s claim was so surprising, and the facts so unusual, that the greatest consideration had to be given to the evidence supporting it. It is worth examining this evidence in some detail, but before doing so it is of interest to try and establish the cause of Maybrick’s eccentric addiction.

As previously indicated, his hypochondria took a very serious form. Those who knew him-his friends, the doctors, his brothers, his wife-frequently noted his preoccupation with his health; he was obsessed with it; he would discuss his symptoms, whether real or imagined, interminably; he would visit chemists for the purpose of trying varieties of cures: tonics, “pick-me-ups”, stimulants, sedatives, patented brands, druggists’ concoctions, his own privately prepared mixtures, doctors’ prescriptions, anything that a friend recommended. He consulted his own family doctor but, not content with that, took advice from the children’s doctor, his brother’s, his friends’; he would get through a medicine at twice the rate prescribed and simultaneously ring the changes on other medicines, many of them containing strong drugs, thus imbibing several mixtures at once for the same ailment, a circumstance quite unknown to any of the doctors treating him. His stomach was a pharmaceutical-toxicological depository. Wherever he stayed he surrounded himself with medicines; his closet and medical cabinet were minor arsenals; shortly after his death a bottle found on one of his hat-boxes contained enough poison to kill a dozen strong men.

Maybrick clearly was a neurotic, a fact not appreciated in those days. At the trial he was judged a normal person with an idiosyncrasy: he had a taste for arsenic rather in the manner you took snuff. Snuff and arsenic were both stimulants, arsenic stronger stuff than snuff, certainly, but the general principle was the same. That was the defence’s line. Sir Charles did a neat piece of theatrical demonstration of this. Examining a witness who had been sent to purchase arsenic for Maybrick, he asked: “Did you go to the druggist’s?” “Yes, sir,” said the witness. “Were you asked who it was for?” “Yes.” Sir Charles, taking out a large snuff-box: “Did you state?” “Yes.” “And brought it back?” “Yes.” Sir Charles, helping himself to a pinch of snuff: “What did you get?” “A very small package; not so long as the box you have in your hand.” The witness pointed to the snuff-box, which Sir Charles flourished eloquently.

That was the method a skilful barrister employed to impress a point on the jury’s memory, associating one form of stimulant with another.

The point was well made and established, but it was a weak point, not really convincing; the judge later expressed his scepticism, and the jury no doubt shared it. Sir Charles referred to the habit of opium-eating as practised by De Quincey to explain the form of addiction that might have motivated Maybrick; and the judge wouldn’t have it. He was equally unimpressed by the other argument based on the alleged habits of Styrian peasants. Sir James Stephen failed to see what the habits of Styrian peasants had to do with the behaviour of an English gentleman, merchant and cotton broker, residing in Liverpool. He was probably quite right.

An explanation in modern psychiatric terms would be far more convincing. In the absence of a proper clinical study this can only be tentatively suggested in a broad theoretic frame-work. In the case of aggravated hypochondria-the form that it took with Maybrick-the theory is that this excessive pre-occupation with building up the normal powers of resistance to ill health springs from the deep-seated unconscious desire for self-destruction. Now it is not of course suggested that Maybrick was suicidal in the sense we normally understand it; he did not deliberately or knowingly plan to do away with himself. Unquestionably, however, there was in him morbidity, a deep fascination with illness and possibly death; and there is considerable authority supporting the concept of an almost universal unconscious “death-wish” which wages a never-ending contest with the instinct of self-preservation, and which psychoanalysts believe expresses itself in the general pattern of our lives.

The dark hinterland of the mind holds its secrets even from the inward eye, and to Maybrick perhaps the effects of arsenic produced an intoxication with the thought of death. We shall never know, but if it did, and he did thus contrive his own destruction, tortuously, deviously, unknowingly but inexorably, then Mrs Maybrick’s innocence (which otherwise we cannot assume, although a reasonable doubt certainly exists about her guilt) must be accepted. Whatever the reason for it, there can be no doubt that Maybrick took arsenic more or less regularly for very many years.

Sir Charles called witnesses from America where, it will be remembered, Maybrick had stayed for some time. The first of these was Nicholas Bateson of Memphis, who remembered Maybrick well. In 1877, Maybrick had chills and fever, and for about three months was given a prescribed treatment by a Dr Ward, consisting of arsenic and strychnine. Maybrick was nervous about his health and complained of other symptoms than the chills and fevers: numbness and cramp in his hands and limbs. He feared paralysis. Obviously he impressed Bateson with his ill health or imagined ailments.

R. Thompson, formerly a master mariner, recalled that Maybrick took him to a druggist one day and collected some small packages. The shop assistant used words that Thompson found curious. “Now, Mr Maybrick, be careful,” he said as he handed his customer the purchases. Thompson was a good friend of Maybrick’s and, concerned at this strange warning, later went back to the chemist’s to speak privately with the assistant. He saw Maybrick afterwards and spoke to him frankly: “I believe, Mr Maybrick, you are in the habit of taking a dangerous and noxious drug.” “What is that?” Maybrick challenged. “Arsenic,” Thompson told him. “Who the devil told you?” demanded Maybrick, who was sometimes very sensitive about his drug-taking. “I asked the druggist’s assistant at the store and he told me you are in the habit of taking it. It’s a pity.” “Damn his impudence!” said Maybrick.

“He was very touchy about the subject,” Thompson said finally, which suggested that Maybrick tried to conceal the habit. (Mrs Maybrick had told both Dr Hopper and Michael Maybrick about her husband’s drug-taking habits some time before his death. She was concerned about it and tried to enlist their help to break him of the habit, a point which was admitted by the two men in earlier evidence. Indeed she wrote specially to Michael about it, and when he tackled his brother on the subject, Maybrick reacted just as violently as in the outburst against the shop assistant: “It’s a damned lie!” Even if she had cause to lie later, there was clearly no reason for Mrs Maybrick to lie about such a thing at the time, and the strength of Maybrick’s reaction suggests that the accusation had touched him on a sore point.)

Thomas Stansell, a former servant of Maybrick and Bateson in Norfolk, Virginia, had “three or four times” been sent to a druggist to purchase arsenic for Maybrick, sometimes in a packet, sometimes in a bottle, and Maybrick put it into a teaspoon and stirred it into a cup of beef tea. (This was exactly the style of concoction Mrs Maybrick was later charged with giving him.) Stansell was told to give Maybrick’s name at a special shop, Santos and Barrowes, on Main Street, where the druggist seemed to know exactly what to give him when he called.

Edwin Garnett Heaton of Anfield, Liverpool, a retired chemist who had thirty-seven years’ experience, described how he had recognized Maybrick from a photograph that had appeared in a daily paper. He had called at the police station and at the solicitors acting for Mrs Maybrick with a most remarkable account of his dealings with the deceased.

For seventeen years he had carried on business in a shop in Exchange Street. For a very large part of this time-more than ten years-he had known Maybrick as a customer who purchased regularly from him a tonic known as a ‘pick-me-up’, to which he instructed Heaton to add liquorarsenicalis, about four drops at first but later increased to seven. This he would drink down in the shop. He would call for it fromtwotofivetimesaday. A dose of seven drops was about.07 of a grain; five doses would therefore total.35 of a grain. (It will be remembered that Dr Stevenson said he had known half a grain to be a fatal dose; and slightly less than half a grain was estimated to have been found in the deceased.) When Maybrick was to be away from home, he would get a bottle containing between eight and sixteen doses.

Here then was the clearest evidence of addiction. That such doses could be sustained by any ordinary constitution was extraordinary, and that such a habit should be practised by a reputed hypochondriac seemed to give a new twist to the meaning of hypochondria. A daily dosage, continued for weeks and months (and reinforced with additional purchases in bulk in cases of absence for a day or two), when one such dose was considered practically lethal by the Home Office pathologist!

Finally, Sir James Poole, a businessman and formerly Mayor of Liverpool, was called by Sir Charles. He was a member of the Palatine Club, which had been Maybrick’s club, and he recalled that he had had a conversation with Maybrick which turned on the use of poisonous drugs for medicinal purposes. “He had an impetuous way,” Sir James Poole said, “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?’ ”

This must be the “clinching” proof: evidence from a witness of the highest repute, who was not even asked a single question in cross-examination.

As far as Mrs Maybrick’s own dabbling with fly-papers was concerned, the defence was ready with the answer that she needed a certain extract of arsenic to mix with toilet ingredients according to an old recipe for cosmetics. She had to attend a ball. The preparation was supposed to be good for the skin and effective as a remover of unwanted hair. She was sensitive about a skin complaint and when she bought the fly-papers she had told the sort of social white lie that women often tell tradesmen, that the fly-papers were needed because she was being troubled by flies in the kitchen. She had made no attempt to conceal her purchase of the fly-papers; she had gone to her local shop, where she was well known, and she had ordered them to be delivered at her address, and they were brought by a boy who left them on the hall-stand. Neither did she attempt to conceal her extraction of arsenic from the fly-papers, which she left to soak all day in a basin in her bedroom where they could be seen by the maid who came to tidy up, and in fact were seen by her. Had she wished to conceal this she could of course have left them to soak at night in the basin.

Evidence of the use of arsenic in cosmetic preparations was given by James Bioletti, a hairdresser and beauty specialist of thirty years” experience, who said that the recipe was asked for sometimes, particularly for use as a depilatory, although it was also supposed to be good for the complexion. Its chief purpose seemed to be to remove superfluous hair from the upper lip and arms. The use of it for such an intimate purpose was probably the reason for Mrs Maybrick’s minor pretence that she needed the fly-papers for the kitchen.

In his address, Sir Charles made the point that with all the arsenic available to her in that extraordinary household-the packet marked “Arsenic: Poison for cats” and the bottles of solid arsenic and arsenic in solution-had she wished to poison her husband, it would have been entirely unnecessary to extract arsenic from fly-papers. It was a very strong argument, indeed, if rather an obvious one.

Sir Charles, however, seemed to have overlooked an even stronger point. The purchase of these fly-papers for the extraction of arsenic, whatever its purpose-either to poison or to make a cosmetic preparation-clearly indicated that Mrs Maybrick was unaware of the existence of all this other arsenical substance in the trunk or on the hat-boxes, and proved beyond reasonable doubt that it was Maybrick who had hoarded this deadly toxic; and the facts that could be inferred from this, as we shall see, would have enabled the defence to counter the most devastating part of the prosecution’s case.

According to the law at the time, the prisoner was not allowed to give evidence, but the judge permitted a statement to be made by her which was to be prepared by her without any advice from counsel, and during the preparation of which she was to remain incommunicado. At the conclusion of all the other evidence for the defence, Sir Charles asked her if she wished to make the statement, and she said she did.

She said, “My lord, I wish to make a statement, as well as I can, to you-a few facts in connection with the dreadful, crushing charge that has been made against me, namely, the wilful and deliberate poisoning of my husband, the father of my dear children. I wish principally to refer to the use of the fly-papers and to the bottle of meat essence. The fly-papers were bought with the intention of using as a cosmetic. Before my marriage, and since, for many years I have been in the habit of using a face-wash prescribed for me by Dr Greggs, of Brooklyn. It consisted principally of arsenic, tincture of benzoin, elder flower water, and some other ingredients. This prescription I lost or mislaid last April, and, as at the time I was suffering from slight eruption of the face, I thought I should like to try to make a substitute myself. I was anxious to get rid of this eruption before I went to a ball on the 30th of that month. When I had been in Germany many of my young friends there I had seen using a solution derived from fly-papers, elder water, lavender water and other things mixed, and then applied to the face with a handkerchief well soaked in the solution. I used the fly-papers in the same manner. But to avoid the evaporation of the scent it was necessary to exclude the air as much as possible, and for that purpose I put a plate over the fly-papers, and put a folded towel over that, and another towel over that. My mother has been aware for a great many years that I have used an arsenical cosmetic in solution.

“I now wish to refer to the bottle of meat essence. On Thursday night, the 9th of May, 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 over-wrought, 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. My lord, I had not one true or honest friend in that house. I had no one to consult and no one to advise me. I was deposed from my position as mistress in my own house, and from the position of attending upon my husband, notwithstanding that he was so ill. Notwithstanding the evidence of the nurses and servants, I may say that he wished to have me with him. He missed me whenever I was not with him; whenever I went out of the room he asked for me, and for four days before he died I was not allowed to give him a piece of ice without its being taken out of my hand. When I found the powder, I took it into the inner room with the beefjuice, and in pushing through the door I upset the bottle, and, in order to make up the quantity of fluid spilled, I added a considerable quantity of water. On returning to the room, I found my husband asleep, and I placed the bottle on the table by the window. When he awoke, he had a choking sensation in his throat, and vomited. After that he appeared a little better, and as he did not ask for the powder again, and as I was not anxious to give it to him, I removed the bottle from the small table, where it would attract his attention, to the top of the washstand, where he could not see it… Until Tuesday, the 14th of May, the Tuesday after my husband’s death, and until a few minutes before Mr Bryning made this terrible charge against me, no one in that house had informed me of the fact that a death certificate had been refused, and that a post-mortem examination had taken place; or that there was any reason to suppose that my husband had died from other than natural causes. It was only when Mrs Briggs alluded to the presence of arsenic in the meat juice that I was made aware of the nature of the powder my husband had asked me to give him. I then attempted to make an explanation to Mrs Briggs, such as I am stating to your lordship, when a policeman interrupted the conversation and put a stop to it. In conclusion, I have only to add that, for the love of our children, and for the sake of their future, a perfect reconciliation had taken place between us, and that on the day before his death I had made a full and free confession to him and received his entire forgiveness for the fearful wrong I had done him.”

Sir Charles asked for leave to bring two witnesses to whom the statement had been made before the inquest, but Mr Justice Stephen could not allow it; he said he could not go beyond what the law permitted.

Mrs Maybrick could not, according to the law, be cross-examined and then re-examined on this statement.

A superficial reading of this statement by Mrs Maybrick suggests that it was a very dangerous one to her. The whole of her case had been built on the twin supports that it was extremely doubtful that Maybrick had died from arsenical poison and that there was a strong possibility, even likelihood, that if he had it had been self-administered. Both these supports had been severely undermined by her admission that she had prepared a “white powder” to give to him.

In a few seconds the whole of the admirable and well-nigh irrefutable part of the defence dealing with the medical evidence and Maybrick’s private history of addiction to arsenic, suggesting that, had he died from it, he had poisoned himself, was cast into doubt. She had prepared a “white powder”, reluctantly, under protest, not knowing what it was, if she were to be believed, and in the end putting it out of his reach on a wash-stand-nevertheless, there was this white powder, and it was she who had doctored his prescribed medicine at a time when he was dangerously ill.

Sir Charles, in a long, closely-reasoned and brilliant final speech, dealt with everything fully except the statement of Mrs Maybrick, that is, with all the evidence except the part that most damaged it.

About the statement he said: “I will not enlarge on it. I leave it to speak with such effect on your ears and hearts as the circumstances under which it was delivered, and the way in which it was delivered, and the tone in which it was delivered and the inherent probabilities of the delivery itself will suggest to you what ought to be its proper and legitimate result.” This was an eloquent and moving observation, but no grist to the mill of advocacy.

Mr Addison had no hesitation in “enlarging” on the statement; he climaxed his speech with as deadly a reference to its content as was heard at the Assizes. Until he came to deal with Mrs Maybrick’s statement he was labouring under the difficulties of the prosecution case, and had referred only briefly to its most important part, the medical evidence; but dealing with Mrs Maybrick’s statement, his argument suddenly became rejuvenated in direction and force. The judge later commented on its impressiveness.

Mr Addison said: “Now we get to the 9th. I can hardly help having a feeling of regret that the terrible statement which has been made today should have been made. I cannot help thinking, if my friend with his art had not intended to leave this case enshrouded in mystery and doubt, it is a great pity that statement was ever made… She stated that she had put a white powder in the glass because he asked her to do so, and had said it would do him no harm. Well, gentlemen, I shall stop here for a moment… If she had done it innocently, why did she not tell the nurse? What was the necessity for concealment? Why were the doctors and the nurses not told about it? What necessity was there to keep it quiet and secret? It was not a time when she could put a white powder in his food innocently or unsuspiciously. She had said he was dying… Is not that an extraordinary time to put a white powder in?”

Undoubtedly this was the strongest challenge presented by the prosecution, and it could no longer be answered. It could not, because the time was past, the opportunity gone.

Yet it could have been answered; answered in anticipation. The material was there, the evidence. It is one of the most responsible parts of an advocate’s function to anticipate the arguments and interpretations of fact by the other side. That Mrs Maybrick was doctoring a sick man’s medicine on her own admission was a dangerous weapon in the prosecution’s armoury. A defence had to be constructed in anticipation of its challenge; and there was a strong defence.

If it could be established that Mrs Maybrick had acted innocently, that she did not know, had no way of knowing, that the white powder was arsenic, had no reason to suspect that it was, then the iron in the core of the prosecution challenge was broken. The evidence was there to establish strong proof of this.

Mrs Maybrick needed arsenic, whatever its purpose. This was a first premise, established and agreed by both sides. In order to procure it she went to a local shop and bought fly-papers, had them sent to her, soaked them in water for hours and made a solution. Now, had she known there was arsenic available in the household, clearly there would have been no need for her to go shopping for it or make the further elaborate preparations for extracting it. Had she wished to poison her husband she would have used the solution and not the white powder specifically referred to. As, in fact, she did use a white powder without knowledge of what it was, it would have been on her husband’s instructions.

Could it be argued that she should have known, and should have consulted others, and should have suspected that it was poison? On the rock of innocence of the arsenical content of the white powder the subsidiary sea of accusations must break. She was not being tried for imprudence or even downright foolishness. She was not being tried for neglect to ensure the best remedy for her husband’s treatment. And why, ifshewereinnocent, should she suppose a white powder was poison? The poison was all in the minds of the people about her.

Sir Charles’s failure to deal with this white powder had further repercussions: Mr Justice Stephen took up the matter in his summing-up. He wanted to know where she got it from. This could have been elicited if it had been possible to cross-examine Mrs Maybrick; she explained after her trial how her bedridden husband indicated one of the places where these powders had been put.

A closer study of Mrs Maybrick’s statement would have provided Sir Charles with more ammunition. Her explanation as to how this cosmetic was applied, “to the face with a handkerchief well soaked,” was a very reasonable one; a handkerchief or a piece of cotton fabric is the only way to apply a liquid solution to the skin, and it had been shown that a handkerchief of Mrs Maybrick had been fairly soaked in arsenical fluid. Now, the prosecution had indicated that she had moistened her husband’s mouth with a damp handkerchief when he was unable to keep anything down, but they did not dare to connect the two things directly; it was altogether too ghoulish a supposition. She had no need, even if she wanted to poison her husband, to moisten his parched mouth with arsenical fluid-she had other opportunities to drug his food or medicine. To suggest that she was so callous that she would have refreshed her suffering husband’s avid thirst with arsenic was to suggest that she was worse than an ordinary murderess, that she was some sort of predatory vampire, morally insane.

Sir Charles might have had the courage to put this issue squarely to the jury: either his client was a monster or the practical explanation that she had given about the cosmetic solution must be accepted. Had it been put in this way, even the most cynical and prejudiced juryman might have flinched from an absolute condemnation. The explanation she had given about the fly-papers was then the true one, and that inference would have opened a wide breach in the prosecution’s case.

An appeal of this sort is of course partly an emotional one, but since emotional prejudice about her adultery had started the whole chain reaction of suspicion and throughout coloured the minds of judge and jurymen, Sir Charles would have been justified in fighting fire with fire.

The defence might well have endeavoured to obtain every sort of corroboration of this cosmetic preparation-in addition to the beauty specialist’s testimony-and in particular of Mrs Maybrick’s previous habit of using this form of treatment. After her trial, her mother in fact did produce an affidavit to support her statement-and there were two other affidavits by her servant and a solicitor’s clerk in Paris-that described the discovery of the prescription by a Dr Bray of New York for a face-wash with an arsenical base. Had this evidence been made available at the trial, there could have hardly been any doubt that the solution found in one of Mrs Maybrick’s handkerchiefs had been put there for the purpose she had ascribed to it in her statement.

As the matter stood at the end of the trial, the arsenic-soaked handkerchief, with its terrible unresolved implication, cast a fearful shadow on the jury’s minds. Both sides shirked the issue: the prosecution dared not suggest that it was a murder instrument applied to the lips of a man tortured with thirst, and Sir Charles seemed afraid to tackle the problem by a direct attack. Even during the most truculent moment of the judge’s summing-up, no attempt was made to establish the dreadful link, but inevitably reference was made to the lethal nature of the handkerchief. The jury were left with the responsibility of reaching a decision from which the defence had retreated, and the emotionally charged atmosphere in which they had to pass a verdict on this adulteress must have been appallingly aggravated.

A final comment on the defence’s treatment of the medical controversy is that, whilst the exposition of the facts was clearly and admirably made, there was no attempt to impress on the jury a method by which they could judge them impartially. This was all the more important as the judge had clearly revealed his prejudice and Sir Charles could not hope for a balanced and objective view of the case in the normal progress of events during the summing-up. He of course pleaded that the facts should be judged without prejudice on account of the unhappy woman’s domestic sins, but an altogether stronger and more effective plea was indicated. It was necessary to suggest to the jury a method of mental approach if they were to fulfil their duty in all conscience and without bias. It is not easy to propose how this could have been done, but an illustration or even a piece of theatre-like the mildly impressive “business” with the snuff-box-would have served the purpose.

In such matters the simplest method is usually the best: a really good illustration or analogy to reinforce the logic of the argument. If the jury had been asked to decide on a technical question which did not involve the poisoning of a husband by an adulterous wife but, say, an argument between two eminent art experts on the authenticity of a Rembrandt, they would have listened coolly to the technicalities propounded and then, when asked to give their decision, have unhesitatingly said, “Why ask us? We can’t tell who is right-not to any degree of reasonable certainty. We are not art experts.”

It is never effective merely to tell people to beware of their prejudices in making a judgement. People don’t have prejudices; they merely hold opinions strongly. It’s the other people, who don’t hold these opinions, who are prejudiced!

(iv)

Prejudice was by far the most important factor that operated against what is sometimes called the logic of the situation. It was a case of Victorian puritanism, of course, but there was an aspect of it which made it almost unique: it began its work and, assuming that this may have been a miscarriage of justice, its terrible mischief even before there was any incident to establish the chargeable offence. The murder by poison of James Maybrick by his wife, Florence, was in the minds of the members of the household whilst he was still alive. It was in the minds of the servants, who had passed it on to Maybrick’s brothers, and thence it reached the nurses and, finally, the doctors. And, because of the underhand nature of these suspicions, the charge never came out into the open, so that Mrs Maybrick never had a chance to answer it and (an even more depressing commentary on human behaviour) the doctors never had a chance to tackle the problem of Maybrick’s sickness from the standpoint that he might be a victim of arsenical poisoning. Apparently the doctors were the last to hear about it, all the servants and relatives having priority, and none of them having the moral courage to act in a way that might have saved Maybrick’s life.

Suspicions were actively raised in the minds of the servants on 8 May on the discovery that Mrs Maybrick was soaking fly-papers (although nobody made the slightest move to confiscate the results of her experiments); but the reason for suspicion may be traced to the earlier domestic fracas at the Wirral races, which resulted in Mr Maybrick bestowing a black eye on his spouse. They came home by separate ways, it will be remembered, and then the conflict was resumed by argument until Nurse Alice Yapp prevented a final breach by prevailing on Mrs Maybrick to go upstairs with her and look at her younger child-a commendable appeal to the lady’s maternal sensibility which stopped her from departing summarily in the cab specially summoned for that purpose.

Now there were fly-papers in soak in Mrs Maybrick’s washbasin and Nurse Yapp summoned another member of the household staff to come and look; there were conferences below stairs; and a telegram was dispatched to Maybrick’s brother, Michael, by a “friend of the family”, Mrs Briggs, after consultation with another lady, also a friend of the family, which read: “Come at once; strange things going on here.” Brother Edwin, staying with the Maybricks, was informed about these strange goings-on.

Then later that day, Mrs Maybrick gave Alice Yapp the letter addressed to A. Brierley to put in the post, which Alice secretly opened, read and, without, of course, telling Mrs Maybrick what she had done, gave to Edwin, who also read it and kept it to show to brother Michael.

It was only the next day, after the letter and the gossip had gone the rounds of the whole household, staff, friends of the family and relatives, that the matter was put to Dr Humphreys and Dr Carter, who were bewildered and embarrassed by the revelation of Mrs Maybrick’s infidelity, and somewhat concerned by the fly-papers, but did not demand an explanation from the one person it would be reasonable to assume they should have asked.

Nobody asked Mrs Maybrick for an explanation. She was spied on, interfered with, prevented from attending to her husband’s medical needs. Her movements were carefully studied. When she transferred a bottle to a wash-stand, a manoeuvre was immediately suspected. When she asked the nurse to fetch some ice from another room, it was assumed that the request was made so that she could be free from observation. Every conversation with her husband was attentively listened to and carefully reported; odd remarks, taken out of their context, were carefully selected for future reference.

As an example of the methods employed by her spies at this period, the following is an extract from the cross-examination of Nurse Yapp:

“Now, with regard to this letter, you had heard the name of your mistress coupled with the name of Brierley before you got the letter?”

“Never.”

“Why did you open the letter?”

“Because Mrs Maybrick wished that it should go by that post.”

“Why did you open that letter?”

No reply.

“Did anything happen to the letter?” (This by the judge.)

“Yes, it fell in the dirt, my lord.”

“Why did you open that letter?”

“I opened the letter to put it in a clean envelope.”

“Why didn’t you put it in a clean envelope without opening it?”

No reply.

“Was it a wet day?”

“It was showery.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes.”

“Will you undertake to say that? I ask you to consider. Was it a wet day?”

No reply.

“Aye or no?”

No reply.

“Was it a wet or a dry day?”

No reply.

‘If, as you suggest, this fell in the mud and was wet, there is no running of the ink on the direction. Look at it.”

“No, sir.”

“Can you suggest how there can be any damp or wet in connection with it without causing some running of the ink?”

“I cannot.”

“On your oath, girl, did you not manufacture that stain as an excuse for opening your mistress’s letter?”

“I did not.”

By Mr Addison: “Did you suspect your mistress?”

“No, sir.”

“When you saw the fly-papers did you suspect her?”

“No, sir.”

“Why did you look at them?”

“I thought that Bessie Brierley had made a mistake when she said there were fly-papers in the bedroom.”

“Was that your reason?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When you did see them, what then?”

“I did not think anything of them.”

“When you opened the letter, you still thought nothing of it?”

“Yes, when I saw what was in the letter.”

“Was that the first time that you had any suspicion about it?”

“No, sir. I had been told of soup and bread and milk, and things tasting differently.”

“Had you been told this by some of the other servants?”

“Yes.”

“By which of them?”

“By Cadwallader and the cook.”

“By Cadwallader and the cook Humphreys?”

“Yes.”

“That was before you opened the letter?”

“Yes.”

Evidence of this sort leaves us with the unhappy feeling that the court was in danger of extending the mischievous and sensation-seeking work of a group of gossip-mongers.

The local and most of the national press titillated their readers’ minds in exactly the same manner as suspicion activated the tastebuds of Cadwallader and the cook Humphreys. (Incidentally, arsenic has hardly any taste at all and would not normally be detected in food of any flavour.) Long before her trial, Mrs Maybrick’s case had so stirred the emotion of the respectable local residents that a serious problem arose as to whether it would be wise to try her at the Liverpool Assizes. In a letter to her mother, the accused woman wrote:

“I sincerely hope the Cleavers [her solicitors] will arrange for my trial to take place in London. I shall receive an impartial verdict there, which I cannot expect from a jury in Liverpool, whose minds have come to a “moral conviction” enattendant, which must influence their decision to a certain extent. The tittle-tattle of servants, the public, friends, and enemies, and from a thousand by-currents, besides their personal feeling for Jim, must leave their traces and prejudice their minds, no matter what the defence is.”

Her counsel was to take the bolder course of deciding for a trial in Lancashire-it was hoped no doubt to establish by this a show of confidence, even strength, and it would be invidious to be wise after the event and criticize her advisers.

At the inquest, the prosecution went so far as to introduce evidence about what one lady heard Mrs Maybrick say in a purely light-hearted manner. During a game of cards at a hotel, there was an argument between a Mrs Samuelson and her husband, and the wife exclaimed, “I hate you.” Mrs Maybrick said, “You must not take any serious notice of that; I often say I hate Jim.” This was a little too much even for Victorian lack of sophistication, and Mrs Samuelson was not called at the trial.

In charging the grand jury at the trial, Mr Justice Stephen gave a clear indication of his views as to how adultery could be associated with a murderous enterprise: “But certainly if she stood in these relations to him [Brierley], I hardly know how to put it otherwise than this, that, if a woman does carry on an adulterous intrigue with another man, it may supply every sort of motive-that of saving her own reputation; that of breaking through the connection which, under such circumstances, one would think would be dreadfully painful to the party to it. It certainly may quite supply-I won’t go further-a very strong motive why she should wish to get rid of her husband.” He rattled all the weapons in the prosecution’s armoury-the fly-papers, the letter to Brierley in which she had said that her husband was “sick unto death”, the arsenic in the body and so on. Finally, he saw fit to utter a grim jest: when a barrister later applied to him to fix a date for another case which was to follow Mrs Maybrick’s trial, he said, “But Sir Charles may plead guilty.”

Thus, from the outset, it was made plain that the judge allied himself with the popular condemnation of the young woman-she she was only twenty-six when she stood trial for her life-and his words must have seemed as bleak as the hissing she had heard from a group of self-righteous housewives at the magistrate’s hearing.

In such an atmosphere, the prospect of an objective appraisal of difficult and technical evidence was a remote one. The defence struggled gallantly to dispel the prejudice, but the handicaps were formidable, not the least being the monumental antagonism of the judge. But there is a possibility that there was another, unsuspected handicap.

The case clearly required a defence counsel who would enter the arena with a pugnacious determination to counter the “immorality” issue as quite irrelevant to the medical controversy over whether in the first place Maybrick had died as a result of arsenical poisoning; and it would have been wise to brief an advocate of strong, independent views about such an issue, someone who in those days would have been known as a “free-thinker”. Sir Charles Russell was a fine and conscientious advocate, but he was a Roman Catholic. It cannot be suggested for a moment that he did not do his conscious best to dispel the cloud of moral odium that surrounded the accused, but in his private soul he could not but have regarded her with some degree of repugnance; and when it came to dealing squarely and strongly with the so-called motive of adultery, some unconscious manifestation of repugnance may have tempered the full combative force of his advocacy.

Whether or not an “adulterous intrigue” is ever a strong motive for crime and, in particular, capital crime, is a question on which there is a great deal of dissension. Crimes of passion are extremely rare, far more exceptional than is popularly supposed. On the continent, where such crimes are considered to be far more frequent than in England, guilty passion or jealousy is rarely found to be the true motive for them. One usually finds that the wife killed her husband’s lover not through jealousy or anger over the estrangement of her husband’s affection, but because he had bought the other woman an expensive fur coat.

The famous trials of recent history show that relatively few charges have been made against alleged perpetrators of crimes of passion or adulterous intrigue, and these have almost always resulted in acquittal. Thus: Adelaide Bartlett-acquitted; Madeleine Smith-not proven; Mrs Rattenbury-acquitted; Mrs Barney-acquitted. As for Mrs Thompson, many criminologists believe that she had been guilty of nothing more than trying to make herself appear interesting to her lover by devising murder plots. Ruth Ellis shot down and murdered her lover, and her case is almost unique; and hers was an act of blind impulsiveness that cannot be categorized as a plot, deliberately planned and coldly executed over a period of time.

When one takes into account that during the last hundred years millions of acts of adultery were committed, millions of “adulterous intrigues” ran their course, and hundreds of thousands of cases of divorce (if not millions) in which adultery was cited as grounds for dissolution of marriage were brought before the courts, there seems no reason to name a special connection between adulterous situations and capital crime. Mr Justice Stephen’s charge to the grand jury, in which he suggested that an adulterous woman would have “every sort of motive”, could not have been supported for a moment in the light of human experience.

The letter to Brierley, the one produced in evidence to show a reason for murder, was almost indistinguishable from thousands of such letters produced in the divorce courts. Her “he is sick unto death” was written at a time when her husband was, in fact, seriously ill, and although the doctors’ prognosis was not as pessimistic as her phrasing, other members of the household may well have considered him critically sick. Compared with the number of cases of proved murder by poisoning, how many deaths have been caused by common gastro-enteritis or kindred complaints?

A wronged husband had died; the automatic assumption was that the wife had a motive for his murder; but what of the motives she had for not assuming such a terrible burden of guilt-the permanent black shadow on her conscience; the apprehension of exposure and punishment; the fear of divine retribution; the knowledge that her husband’s image was permanently borne on the features of her children; and, surely, the knowledge that there must be other practical ways of solving the problem of an unhappy marriage? Florence Maybrick was a woman of intelligence, good character, moral up-bringing, normal sensibility, tender feeling for her children. These consequences would certainly have occurred to her in planning such a crime.

We know, too, that some days before her husband’s death she felt herself under a cloud of suspicion, felt deposed from her position of mistress of the home, prevented from attending to her husband in the normal way. “Why are you tampering with the medicine?” she was asked by a brother of Maybrick, when she innocently tried to extract some sediment from a bottle.

If she were guilty, would she not have realized what they suspected and made hasty efforts to have her husband cured? Would she have persisted in her plan of doctoring meat extracts with white powders? Would she have left an arsenic-stained handkerchief to be found later? Would she have left packets of arsenic, bottles of arsenical fluid, the letters from Brierley? Would she have entrusted the letter to her lover to someone else to post?

The prosecution conceded that this behaviour might seem remarkable-well, no matter, she was vague and overwrought. Yet it was the prosecution’s case that Florence Maybrick was a woman capable of deliberate planning and the coldest calculation, capable of seeing her scheme through, stage by stage, over many days, in the face of the suspicion of servants, family friends, relatives, nurses and doctors, and of outwitting every one of them.

When her husband died, four of the fly-papers were thrown in the fire and burned, but not by her-by one of the servants who no doubt had a vague sense of compassion and fear for her mistress. Mrs Maybrick did not even empty the arsenical face lotion scented with toilet ingredients which was later found. Yet the prosecution presented her as a cold-blooded, scheming woman.

It might have been expected that, as the judge devoted two whole days to his summing-up, there would have been ample time to deal with these matters so that the strongest implications could be drawn from them; but they were hardly touched upon. On the other hand, such was his concern to show every possible unfavourable circumstance that he even revealed the contents of letters that the prosecution did not submit as evidence.

There was an extraordinary denouement to this. When he left the court, Mr Justice Stephen was accorded the reception which lately had been suffered by the accused woman-he was loudly hissed.

(v)

Considerable surprise and disquiet greeted the verdict on Mrs Maybrick, and it was said that some half a million people signed the petitions for her reprieve. The medical controversy continued interminably without any clear result other than that no resolution of it was possible. Mrs Maybrick was sentenced to hang for a murder which was never proved to have been committed.

More affidavits were sworn by independent and reliable witnesses to the effect that Maybrick was an incurable taker of arsenical concoctions. A Mr Valentine Blake, an industrial chemist who used the poison in the manufacture of a substitute cotton fabric, had been prevailed upon to give Maybrick a hundred and fifty grains. Another affidavit by a Canadian master mariner revealed that Maybrick habitually took arsenic. “I am now taking enough arsenic to kill you,” he once told him.

There was a commutation of the sentence to life imprisonment after the gallows had already been erected. The announcement of the reprieve included the observation that “although the evidence leads clearly to the conclusion that the prisoner administered and attempted to administer arsenic to her husband with intent to murder, yet it does not wholly exclude a reasonable doubt whether his death was in fact caused by the administration of arsenic.”

Or, in the words of Sir Charles Russell, “Mrs Maybrick is to suffer imprisonment on the assumption of Mr Matthews the Home Secretary that she has committed an offence, for which she was never tried by the constitutional authority, and of which she has never been adjudged guilty.”

In spite of repeated attempts to free her, the wretched woman was not released until she had served fifteen years’ imprisonment-a punishment roughly equivalent to six penalties for attempted murder.