Chapter IX: The Maybrick Case

On July 31, 1889, one the most remarkable poisoning cases on record was tried before Mr. Justice Stephen, at the Liverpool Assizes. The trial, which lasted eight days, excited the keenest interest in the locality and throughout the country, especially as the principal actors in the tragedy were people of good social position and well known. The accused, Mrs. Florence Maybrick, wife of a Liverpool merchant, was charged with causing the death of her husband by administering arsenic to him.

About the end of April, 1889, Mr. James Maybrick, who lived at Grassendale, near Liverpool, was seized with a peculiar illness, of which the main symptoms consisted of a rigidity of the limbs and a general feeling of sickness which quite prostrated him, and eventually confined him to bed. The local medical man who was called in to attend him, attributed the cause to extreme irritability of the stomach and treated him accordingly. Becoming puzzled by the persistent sickness and the rapidly increasing weakness of his patient, he called a physician in consultation. From this time he grew considerably worse and severer symptoms set in, which caused the doctors to suspect the cause was due to some irritant poison. This was confirmed by the discovery that arsenic had been placed in a bottle of meat-juice that was being administered to the sick man. At the instance of the physician called in consultation, trained nurses were placed in charge, and a close watch kept on the patient, but without avail, and he died on May 11.

From statements made to the police, suspicions were aroused, Mrs. Maybrick was arrested, and eventually charged with the wilful murder of her husband.

From evidence given at the trial, it transpired that the relations between husband and wife had not been of the most cordial character for some time. There were frequent disagreements, and just before Mr. Maybrick was taken ill there had been a serious quarrel, resulting from his wife’s relations with another man. The lady resented the accusation, and a separation was contemplated. The fatal illness then intervened, during the first portion of which Mrs. Maybrick nursed her husband. A letter addressed to her lover, which she had given to a nursemaid to post, was opened by the girl and handed to Mr. Maybrick’s brother, trained nurses were called in and the sick man placed in their sole charge. This letter, which formed one of the strongest pieces of evidence against the accused, revealed the connection between Mrs. Maybrick and her lover, and conveyed the intelligence to him that her husband was “sick unto death.” Evidence was also given by the servants of fly-papers having been seen in process of maceration in water in Mrs. Maybrick’s bedroom. The trained nurses also gave evidence concerning the suspicious conduct of Mrs. Maybrick in tampering with the medicines and meat-juice which were to be administered to the patient. These suspicions culminated in the discovery of arsenic in a bottle of meat-juice by one of the medical attendants. Considerable quantities of arsenic were found by the police in the house, including a packet containing seventy-one grains, mixed with charcoal, and labelled “Poison for cats.”

The analytical examination was conducted by Dr. Stevenson and Mr. Edward Davis, a Liverpool analyst, who discovered traces of arsenic in the intestines, and 0·049 of a grain of arsenic in the liver, traces of the poison being also found in the spleen. Arsenic was also found in various medicine bottles, on handkerchiefs, in bottles of glycerin, and in the pocket of a dressing-gown belonging to the accused. Dr. Stevenson stated that he believed the body of the deceased at the time of death probably contained a fatal dose of arsenic.

The scientific evidence adduced at the trial was of a very conflicting character. On one hand, the medical men who attended the deceased, and the Government analyst, swore they believed that death was caused from the effects of arsenic; while on the other, Dr. Tidy, who was called for the defence, stated as an expert that the quantity of arsenic discovered in the body did not point to the fact that an overdose had been administered. He believed that death had been due to gastro-enteritis of some kind or other, but that the symptoms and post-mortem appearances distinctly pointed away from arsenic as the cause of death. Dr. Macnamara, ex-president of the Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland, also stated that in his opinion Mr. Maybrick’s death had not been caused by arsenical poisoning and that he agreed with Dr. Tidy that the cause was gastro-enteritis, unconnected with arsenical poisoning. For the defence, it was also urged that the deceased man had been in the habit of taking arsenic in considerable quantities for some years. In support of this, witnesses were called to prove that he had been in the habit of taking a mysterious white powder, and that while living in America, he frequently purchased arsenic from chemists, who knew he was in the habit of taking it. A negro, who had been in the service of the deceased in America, also deposed to seeing him take this white powder in beef tea.

Sir Charles Russell, in his speech for the defence, stated that Mr. Maybrick had been in the habit of taking arsenic for many years, and was a man who prided himself on his knowledge of medicine. What was more likely than that he should have had a supply of that poison in the house, and that he had ultimately dosed himself to death with it?

After the last witness for the defence had left the box, Sir Charles Russell held a rapid consultation with Mrs. Maybrick. A glance of dissatisfaction crossed his face as he turned to the judge and asked if the prisoner might make a statement. The judge replied in the affirmative and the accused woman rose to her feet, and in a low voice broken by emotion read the following plea from a written paper she held in her hand, amid the breathless silence of those in court:—

“My Lord, I wish to make a statement, as well as I can, about a few facts in connection with the dreadful and crushing charge against me—the charge of poisoning my husband and father of my dear children. I wish principally to refer to the fly-paper solution. The fly-papers I bought with the intention of using the solution as a cosmetic. Before my marriage, and since for many years, I have been in the habit of using this wash for the face prescribed for me by Dr. Graves, of Brooklyn. It consisted, I believe, 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 an eruption on the face, I thought I should like to try and 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 among my young friends there, I had seen used a solution derived from fly-papers soaked in elder-flower water, and then applied to the face with a handkerchief well soaked in the solution. I procured the fly-papers and used them in the same manner, and to avoid evaporation I put the solution into a bottle so as to avoid as much as possible the admission of the air. For this purpose I put a plate over the fly-papers, then a folded towel over that, and then another towel over that. My mother has been aware for a great many years that I have used arsenic in solution. I now wish to speak of his illness. On Thursday night, May 9, after the nurse had given my husband medicine I went and sat on the bed beside him. He complained to me of feeling very sick, very weak and very restless. He implored me then again to give him a powder which he had referred to earlier in the evening, and which I declined to give him. I was over-wrought, terribly anxious, miserably unhappy, and his evident distress utterly unnerved me. As he told me 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 the house. I had no one to consult, no one to advise me. I was deposed from my position as mistress of my own house, and from the position of attending on my husband, and notwithstanding that he was so ill, and notwithstanding the evidence of the nurses and the servants, I may say that he missed me whenever I was not with him; whenever I was out of the room he asked for me, and four days before he died I was not allowed to give him a piece of ice without its being taken out of my hand. I took the meat-juice into the inner room. On going through the door I spilled some of the liquid from the bottle, and in order to make up the quantity spilled I put in a considerable quantity of water. On returning into the room I found my husband asleep. I placed the bottle on the table near the window. As he did not ask for anything then, and as I was not anxious to give him anything, I removed it from the small table where it attracted his attention and put it on the washstand where he could not see it. There I left it. Until Tuesday, May 14, the Tuesday after my husband’s death, till a few moments before the terrible charge was made against me, no one in that house had informed me of the fact that a death certificate had been refused—or that there was any reason to suppose that my husband had died from any other than natural causes. It was only when a witness alluded to the presence of arsenic in the meat-juice that I was made aware of the nature of the powder my husband had been taking. In conclusion, I only wish to say that for the love of our children, and for the sake of their future, a perfect reconciliation had taken place between us, and on the day before his death I made a full and free confession to him.”

It was evident from Sir Charles Russell’s manner when he rose to make his final appeal that Mrs. Maybrick had made her statement against his wish, but he still fought valiantly in her cause, and urged that if it had not been for the act of infidelity on her part there could be no motive assigned in the case, and surely, he declared, there was a wide difference between the grave moral guilt of unfaithfulness and the criminal act involved in the deliberate plotting, by such wicked means, the felonious death of her husband. He closed his eloquent and brilliant appeal by putting two questions to the jury:—

1. Was there clear, safe and satisfactory unequivocal proof that death was in fact caused by arsenical poisoning?

2. Had the accused woman administered that poison, if to the poison the death of her husband was due?

On the eighth day of the trial the judge summed up the evidence and the jury retired at 3.15, and had barely been absent thirty-eight minutes when they returned to the court with the verdict of “Guilty.”

On being asked by the clerk if she had anything to say, Mrs. Maybrick replied “I have been found guilty, but excepting my moral fault I am not guilty.” The judge then passed sentence of death.

[_Copyright._

BOTTLE OF MEAT JUICE AND A BOTTLE CONTAINING MEAT JUICE AND WATER
EXHIBITED IN THE MAYBRICK CASE.
]

The sentence aroused considerable feeling and the country was divided into two parties, one protesting that Mrs. Maybrick was innocent, and the other that she was guilty. An agitation was at once made for a reprieve, which ended in a respite being granted and the sentence being commuted to penal servitude for life.

For some years afterwards efforts were continually made to secure Mrs. Maybrick’s release, and successive Home Secretaries investigated the circumstances of the case, but always decided the conviction must stand. Sir Charles Russell frequently affirmed his belief in Mrs. Maybrick’s innocence, and attributed the jury’s verdict to his remarks upon the moral aspect of the case, and even after he became Lord Chief Justice of England he stated his personal belief that she was not guilty.

The late Lord Moulton, who was an eminent scientist as well as a great lawyer, took a deep interest in this case, and in a letter to the writer, written in 1899, stated:

“The point of interest was one of evidence as to the cause of death. I have always been of opinion that—taking into consideration the fact that the deceased was an arsenic-eater—there was no evidence that he was poisoned. The weight of the medical testimony was in favour of that view, but that was not the main point. In my opinion the testimony for the prosecution entirely failed to support the onus which lay upon it. The witnesses could not point out anything inconsistent with non-poisoning.”

“This case,” says Sir William Willcox, “is interesting from the fact that the proof of fatal poisoning rested on the presence of 0·049 grain of arsenic in the liver, the minimum fatal dose being about two grains.”

Whether Mrs. Maybrick did actually administer arsenic to her husband _with intent to kill him_ she alone could tell. On her own confession she admitted having given him a certain white powder for which he craved, of the nature of which, however, she said she was ignorant. There can be no doubt this powder was arsenic. If she did not know the powder was arsenic and did not give it with intent to kill him, then surely such a web of circumstantial evidence has never before been woven round one accused of having committed a terrible crime.