Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England

by Honeycombe, Gordon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  MRS PEARCEY

  THE MURDER OF MRS HOGG, 1890

  Women rarely commit murder. Those who have done so have generally been poor, illiterate, aggressive if not volatile, mentally unstable, and poison is their usual method of bringing death. More than half (thirty-seven) of the women hanged for murder (sixty-eight) between 1843 and 1956 were poisoners. The murders women commit are mostly domestic ones – of a child, husband or lover, and occur when the murderess can no longer endure the anguish of a relationship or a situation. Children have often been murdered by women in a kind of misdirection of their anguish – as a substitute for the husband or lover, or for the suicide of the murderess herself. A very few women have murdered for gain, to improve their economic or social conditions. Some murder out of spite. Associated causes of murder where women have been concerned are sexual frustration, nymphomania, lesbianism, post-natal depression, the menopause, alcoholism and feeble-mindedness. In the case of Mrs Pearcey, sexual jealousy has been mooted as the mainspring of the murders she committed. They are more likely to have arisen from circumstances similar to those described in Congreve’s famous sentence: ‘Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.’

  Mrs Pearcey was not, in fact, married. Her real and maiden name was Mary Eleanor Wheeler. But when she went to live with a man called Pearcey, she assumed the name and title of his wife, retaining both when, for reasons unknown, he left her. Male reporters later portrayed her as being tall and powerful, with striking almost masculine features, a full figure and fine eyes.

  A woman correspondent of the Pall Mall Budget described her as being ‘a woman of about five feet six, neither slight nor stout. There is nothing of the murderess in her appearance; in fact, she is a mild, harmless-looking woman. Her colouring is delicate and her hands are small and shapely. But she has not a single good feature in her face. Her eyes are dark and bright … Her mouth is large and badly formed, and her chin is weak and retreating.’

  Eleanor Pearcey’s emotional instability and depressing loneliness – her nearest relatives were an aged mother and an older sister – seem to have led her into a series of affairs, further solaced by drink. In 1890, at the age of twenty-four, she was on her way to being a full-time courtesan. The three rooms she occupied on the ground floor of 2 Priory Street, Kentish Town, were paid for by an admirer, Mr Crichton of Gravesend in Kent, who called on her once a week. The rooms were small but attractively furnished. On the left of the entrance hall of the house was her front parlour, in which there was an upright piano; folding doors opened on to a bedroom overlooking the yard at the rear. There was a tiny kitchen.

  Another admirer was a furniture remover, Frank Samuel Hogg. Him she apparently loved; she used to put a light in her window to let him know when she was free. A feckless, sentimental and selfish man, who had known Eleanor Pearcey for some time, he was vain enough, it appears, to imagine that all women who looked on him loved him, and was pleased to be proved right. One conquest, however, turned out to be a careless triumph in more ways than one. She became pregnant, and such was the weight of her family’s opinion, backed up by several large brothers, that Frank Hogg was persuaded to marry her. The marriage was not happy, and when his wife, Phoebe, a large, plain woman, duly produced a baby girl, also called Phoebe, this apparently so lowered her bearded husband’s self-esteem and increased his self-pity that he used to speak of suicide to his young bosom-friend, Eleanor Pearcey. He would weep in her arms and bemoan his wretched state, adding his frustrations to hers. As an alternative to suicide he talked of emigration. Both were anathema to Mrs Pearcey.

  Although she had known Phoebe Hogg before her marriage to Frank Hogg and had been friends with his sister Clara – the actual relationship between the three women appears to have been quite complex – Mrs Pearcey seems to have become increasingly jealous of Mrs Hogg and full of hate. Apparently Eleanor Pearcey felt that Frank was essential to her happiness and that the realisation of his happiness must be her prime aim. She wished to be his wife, to have him all to herself.

  In her letters she besought him not to kill himself, to go on living for her sake if not for his. In one, she wrote:

  You ask me if I was cross with you for coming only such a little while. If you knew how lonely I am you wouldn’t ask. I would be more than happy if I could see you for the same time each day, dear. You know I have a lot of time to spare and I cannot help thinking. I think and think until I get so dizzy that I don’t know what to do with myself. If it wasn’t for our love, dear, I don’t know what I should really do, and I am always afraid you will take that away, and then I should quite give up in despair, for that is the only thing I care for on earth. I cannot live without it now. I have no right to it, but you gave it to me, and I can’t give it up.

  It must have seemed that her emotional dilemma could only be resolved by the destruction of Phoebe Hogg, and all Mrs Pearcey’s passionate envy and frustration focused on the other, older woman, who had the benefit of Frank’s company every night and every day.

  Frank and Phoebe Hogg lived with his sister Clara and his mother in rooms at 141 Prince of Wales Road, Kentish Town. On Thursday, 23 October 1890 Mrs Hogg (now aged thirty-one) received a note from Mrs Pearcey inviting her to 2 Priory Street for tea. She showed the note to her sister. It said: ‘Dearest, come round this afternoon and bring our little darling. Don’t fail.’ But Mrs Hogg was for some reason unable to go there that day. Her sister later told the police that Mrs Pearcey had once invited Phoebe to go with her to Southend and look over an empty house.

  The next day, Friday the 24th, Eleanor Pearcey gave a small boy a penny to deliver a second note, and this time, without telling anyone where she was going, Phoebe Hogg left her house about 3.30 pm and set out, pushing her daughter in a bassinette or pram down Kentish Town Road and into Royal College Street towards the drab little road (now Ivor Street) where Mrs Pearcey lived. Mrs Hogg pulled the pram up the steps and parked it in the narrow entrance hall. Carrying the child, she then followed the younger, smaller woman either into the front parlour or into the pokey kitchen at the end of the hall.

  It was in the kitchen that Phoebe Hogg was slaughtered, despatched with a poker and more than one knife. Her skull was fractured and her throat so severely cut that her head was almost severed from her body. It seems that Mrs Hogg was not easy to kill, that she struggled and fought for her life: the arms of both women were bruised. Two window panes were broken and the kitchen’s walls and ceiling were spattered with blood. Mrs Pearcey’s neighbours heard what they called ‘banging and hammering’ at about four o’clock. Another neighbour said she heard a child screaming – or what sounded like a child. But like most good neighbo
urs they hesitated to intrude, readily assuming in a noisy neighbourhood, where cries and fights were not unknown, that the rumpus was in some way connected with workmen repairing a pub on the corner.

  Afterwards, Mrs Pearcey probably washed her hands and the weapons, took off and washed her top-skirt, tried to scrub out the bloodstains on a rug, on the curtains and on an apron. At some point she heaved the body of the murdered woman into the pram, in which the little girl, whether alive or dead, also lay. She covered them both with an antimacassar. About six o’clock Mr and Mrs Butler, who lived in the second floor flat at the top of the stairs, returned separately to 2 Priory Street. Both knocked against the bassinette parked in the darkened hallway: Mrs Pearcey heard them and called out to each of them to take care.

  Some time after this, when it was quite dark, she put on her bonnet and went out, bumping the pram down the few steps at the front door on to the pavement and, turning right, wheeled her dreadful load away from the house into Chalk Farm Road, then up Adelaide Road and into Eton Avenue. Pushing the weighty pram before her, she sought some deserted place in the gas-lit streets where she might unburden herself, unobserved, of the pram and what it contained. The body of Mrs Hogg was deposited by a partly built house in Crossfield Road, near Swiss Cottage. The child was dumped on some waste land in Finchley Road.

  By now the child was dead, having suffocated, it is said, in the pram – no signs of violence were found on her. On the other hand, the little girl may have been suffocated in the house, perhaps by a cushion. The child is unlikely to have remained silent while her mother was murdered, or when both were put in the pram.