To this we can add another voice, accusing the accuser. I concur with the absconding soldier Robert Reeves that together with his brother Edwin, Michael Maybrick is James Maybrick’s murderer. I believe I’ve presented ancillary evidence in support of the imputation. Reeves said nothing of arsenic, but accused Michael of planning to use a rather different poison. It’s an intent shared by somebody who mailed a letter to Scotland Yard claiming to have ‘particulars of the Bradford murder’, which itself shares calligraphy with that of the Liverpool Document.
My comment on it concludes with a reproduction from one of its pages in parallel with the letter in question. I know nothing of graphology, but that doesn’t invalidate a comparison. On top is handwriting from the ‘Diary’, and below it the letter referencing the murder of Johnnie Gill.
Both texts feature a spontaneous enlargement of the letter ‘S’. This might legitimately be argued away as coincidence, but in context I think it cannot. ‘I am preparing a draught that will kill & leave no marks,’ brags the letter’s author, and as far as James is concerned, it didn’t. Yapp brought the children in for him to kiss, and he died at 8.40 that evening in a room stuffy with people. His pal George Davidson held him to the last, while Charles Ratcliffe looked on. His brothers Michael, Edwin and Thomas were there, as were Mrs Briggs, Mrs Hughes, Nurse Wilson and the attendant physicians.
It seems the doctors were prepared to nominate gastroenteritis as the cause of death; but Michael wasn’t having any of that. ‘Now wouldn’t that cork you,’ wrote Ratcliffe, ‘a musical composer instructing a physician how to diagnose his case? Old Dr Humphreys made a jackass of himself. After James died he and Dr Carter expected to make out the death certificate as acute inflammation of the stomach [but] after Humphreys had a conversation with Michael, he refused to make a certificate to that effect, but said there was strong symptoms of arsenical poisoning, though Doctor Carter still insisted that it should be inflammation of the stomach.’85
RUSSELL: Had it not been for the suggestion of arsenic, were you prepared to give a certificate of death?
DR HUMPHREYS: Yes.
FITZJAMES STEPHEN: Then if nothing about poisoning had been suggested to you, you would have certified that he died of gastritis, or gastro-enteritis?
DR HUMPHREYS: Yes, my Lord.86
‘Humphreys was afraid of Michael,’ wrote Florence Aunspaugh.87
After their friend’s death, Ratcliffe and Davidson quit the property, leaving the others to their grief and mourning, which focused on the traditional frenzy of ransacking the house in an attempt to flesh out evidence against the newly-made widow while simultaneously hunting for James’s will. It’s therefore apparent that the episode with the papers that had caused him so much vocal distress had nothing to do with it.
Florence was forced into brief consciousness. ‘Edwin Maybrick was leaning over me,’ she recalled many years later:
he had my arms tightly gripped and was shaking me violently. ‘I want your keys – do you hear? Where are your keys?’ I tried to form a reply, but the words choked me and once more I passed into unconsciousness. Consciousness came and went. During one of these interludes Michael Maybrick entered. ‘Nurse,’ he said, ‘I am going up to London. Mrs Maybrick is no longer mistress of this house. As one of the executors I forbid you to allow her to leave this room. I hold you responsible in my absence.’ Towards the night of the same day I said to the Nurse [Wilson], ‘I wish to see my children.’ She walked up to my bed and in a cold deliberate voice replied, ‘You cannot see Master James and Miss Gladys. Mr Michael Maybrick gave orders that they were to leave the house without seeing you.’88
She was never to see them again. And no one was allowed to see her. ‘My wife and myself called,’ wrote Ratcliffe, ‘and were told by Mrs Briggs that Mrs Maybrick was too sick to receive any company. Sutton and his wife called, Holloway and his wife, Hienes and his wife, and numerous others. They were all told the same thing. No one could see Mrs Maybrick.’89
Still in her dress, with neither food nor drink, Florence was left in her own filth. Although she could not know it, she was already serving the first of the five thousand four hundred and seventy-five days she was to remain in captivity.
On the third day she heard ‘a tramp of many feet coming upstairs’. A crowd of men entered, one of them stationing himself at the foot of the bed. He was a policeman by the name of Inspector Isaac Bryning, and he addressed her as follows:
Mrs Maybrick, I am a superintendent of the police, and I am about to say something to you. After I have said what I intend to say, if you reply be careful how you reply because whatever you say may be used in evidence against you. Mrs Maybrick, you are in custody on suspicion of causing the death of your late husband James Maybrick, on the eleventh instant.90
She was charged with causing the death of ‘Mr Maybrick’s brother’ – even this junk in subliminal subservience to Michael.
This foolish illustration appeared in the Illustrated Police News of Saturday, 1 June 1889. It depicts Nurse Wilson comforting Florence with a supportive holding of hands. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Wilson was in the league of hags, as treacherous a reptile as the Briggs sisters or Yapp.
While Mrs Maybrick was unconscious her enemies had searched the house, and the police had later searched it with them. From the moment Bryning stepped into Battlecrease House he was told who the perpetrator was, and thereafter investigation fizzled. He thought he had it nailed, and not an eyebrow was raised, nor a question asked of the squad led by the bereaved musician who were hauling arsenic out of wherever they looked and waving it in the air like a prize. Briggs, Hughes, Yapp and the Maybrick brothers (excluding Thomas, who had left) were allowed free rein by the constabulary to ‘find’ what they liked and accuse who they liked – and all accused Florence Maybrick.
This was, supposedly, a crime scene, and the coppers stood about it scratching their nuts while ‘evidence’ was planted and evidence found. Yapp had found a packet of arsenic labelled ‘Poison For Cats’, and without further ado its owner was determined as the incapacitated widow. This was most unlikely. Florence was a lover of cats, owned three, doting on one which was her constant companion. Why would she want to poison a cat? While searching for keys to the safe (which hopefully contained the will), Briggs discovered a clutch of love letters from Brierley and Edwin,91 and of course a packet of arsenic. Both became trophies.
The house was suddenly awash with arsenic. Where had it all come from? Any partially-brained copper in Liverpool could have traced it back to the corpse upstairs, and with a little effort, back to Valentine Blake and his gift in respect of ramine. They only needed to ask any one of James’s pals at the Cotton Exchange to be told he was an arsenic head. But that wasn’t the news they wanted to hear. Instead, they were operating under the instructions of a psychopath, and like a gang of animals destined to become mutton, they accepted every word out of his criminal mouth and arrested Florence.
An honourable Judge, Sir Edward Parry, a world away from the state lackey Fitzjames Stephen, later wrote: ‘A very strong point in the prisoner’s favour was that the Crown never proved that she had brought any powdered arsenic into the house. Why should she have purchased flypapers to procure an arsenic solution, either for cosmetic or for evil purposes, if she was already possessed of considerable quantities of powdered arsenic?’92
Ask Alice Yapp. Or better still, ask the Irish Judas who failed on this crucial point. Parry’s comment was written in 1929. In 1926 the then Chief Constable of London gurgled up a bit of twaddle that would seem to discredit it. At the time of the Maybrick frame-up, Sir William Nott-Bower was Boss Cop of Liverpool. He was of the Anderson ilk of police, bedecked in the same helmet and similarly indifferent to truth. The only difference between them was that rather than do his lying in The Times, Nott-Bower published his in a book.
Describing it as ‘a curious sequel to the case, not, I think hitherto known to the public’, Nott-Bower writes that soo
n after Mrs Maybrick’s conviction,
a highly respectable Liverpool chemist, carrying on business in the centre of town, came to the police and said he wished to make a confession on a subject which he had come to the conclusion he should make known to them.
He went on to say, that in the Spring of 1889, Mrs Maybrick drove up to his shop in a dogcart, and asked him for powdered arsenic to kill cats, and he supplied her with a considerable quantity which she took away with her.
A week or two later she drove again to his shop, and told him she had lost the arsenic she had had from him, and asked for more, and he again supplied her. He was afraid to tell the police of this, as he feared the consequences to himself.
The police subsequently compared the chemist’s handwriting with the handwriting on the label – ‘Arsenic – Poison For Cats’ – upon the box, taken from the trunk belonging to Mrs Maybrick, and found the two handwritings to be identical.
It afterwards came to my knowledge that the fact of the supply of this arsenic by the chemist was known to the defence at the time of Mrs Maybrick’s trial.93
That this goon should be in charge of anything beyond a municipal urinal is extraordinary. How could he possibly be Boss Officer of Liverpool’s police? His yarn is both fantastic and absurd, self-destructing in the first paragraph by an oxymoron he’s too dim to understand. On the one hand he needs his phantom chemist to be ‘highly respectable’, so as to give credibility to his story; and on the other he tells us the man sold the arsenic outside the law. How respectable is that? Had he actually done it he wouldn’t be respectable at all, but in prison.
Nott-Bower says the defence (his emphasis) was aware of this purchase of arsenic, which is baffling. Russell and his team falsely claimed to have had the utmost difficulty in finding anyone to attest to James Maybrick’s gargantuan arsenic addiction, yet easily discover this chemist before he’s reported himself to the police?
He says the chemist gave Florence two lots of arsenic because she had ‘lost’ the first. Where did she lose it? She’s got two young children in the house whom she adores, and she ‘loses’ a package of deadly poison? She has a husband who scours Liverpool for arsenic – ‘I find difficulty in getting it here,’ he complained to Valentine Blake – yet she arrives at a random pharmacy and instantly scores? If such an obliging chemist had existed in the middle of Liverpool, James would have discovered it years before Florence turned up ‘in a dogcart’. James was a junkie, on an eternal prowl for arsenic. In his zoo of medicine bottles the names of twenty-seven different pharmacies appear, and this idiot copper expects his readers to believe that he missed this one ‘in the centre of town’?
Nott-Bower’s tale is horseshit, every half-witted word of it, and the whole thing was later revealed as a scandalous invention. It seems a majority of the Victorian constabulary were good for nothing but lying. They were a kind of tea-brewing Cosa Nostra, as corrupt as anything in the slums of Naples. Its masters were degenerates like Charlie Warren, Robert Anderson, and that lamentable little moron running Bradford, James Withers. It was men like these, in association with a psychopath, who sacrificed Florence Maybrick’s life.
Michael Maybrick’s refusal of a death certificate led to an autopsy two days later in James’s own bedroom. Drs Carter and Humphreys performed it under the guidance of Dr Alexander Barron, a professor of pathology at the Royal Infirmary. They removed various organs for analysis, and no arsenic was found.
Despite this negative outcome further inquisition was initiated, comprising of two magisterial hearings and the sitting of a coroner’s court. ‘The enquiry was opened by Mr Samuel Brighouse, the coroner of South West Lancashire,’ reported the Liverpool Mercury, ‘yesterday morning [14 May] at the Aigburth Hotel. The only witness was Mr Michael Maybrick of London, a brother of the deceased.’
We’ve become accustomed to the expedient of lying out of the mouths of coroners, and this one doesn’t disappoint. Mr (later Sir) Samuel Brighouse and his acolytes were right off the pages of Swift. Brighouse hauled in a jury and told them: ‘The result of the post mortem examination was that poison was found in the stomach of the deceased in sufficient quantity to justify further examination.’ This was a lie, or as Macdougall put it, it is ‘a matter for strong observation that this statement was a false one’.94 No poison had been found in the stomach of the deceased.
‘The appearances of the post mortem,’ deposed Humphreys, ‘were consistent with congestion of the stomach, not necessarily caused by an irritant poison.’95 It was a prognosis supported by Carter and Barron. ‘An irritant poison might be bad food or bad wine, or an indiscreet dinner,’ said Barron; ‘it might be bad tinned meat, bad fish, mussels, or bad food of any kind.’96
What it definitely wasn’t was arsenic from flypapers. So, Robert Reeves aside, we’re left with the rest. Was Florence discovered by Michael Maybrick stuffing corned beef into a medicine bottle, or known to have marinated putrid mussels? There was no arsenic, there wasn’t even any rotten meat. A coroner’s business was to determine cause of death, and now he had it, and Florence should have been free of all accusation that very day.
But that wasn’t the business Michael and the bewigged minions were into. Following an adjournment, an extraordinary conversation ensued between Brighouse and the foreman of the jury. His name was Dalgleish, a Freemason and a close associate of James, and he had a statement to make. He said that, just prior to the Wirral races, ‘he had met James Maybrick, of whom he was a personal friend, in the train, and had seen him take a powder out of his waistcoat pocket and take it, and that he’d asked him what he was taking, and that he replied strychnine’.97 Our noble coroner didn’t want to hear anything about it, and summarily dismissed Dalgleish as foreman. It was a hooligan suppression of evidence. Had Russell known of this deposition, it would obviously have been of more than casual interest to the defence. It was another wide-open door for Florence Maybrick.
Russell did know of it, but like this whelp of a coroner, kept his trap shut. ‘Not one word about this appears on the depositions,’ writes Macdougall, ‘nor was a word said about it either before the magistrates or the jury.’98 On resumption of the inquest on 5 June, Russell’s junior, Mr (later Sir) William Pickford, had got wind of Dalgleish’s statement and interposed:
PICKFORD: I understand a communication was made to you, Mr Coroner, on the first sitting by a gentleman, originally sworn in as Foreman of the Jury, and I should like to know whether it is proposed to call him.
BRIGHOUSE: No.
PICKFORD: I understand it was something so important that the gentleman thought he ought not to sit upon the jury? But should rather appear as a witness for the defence?
BRIGHOUSE: I feel certain it is not relevant. The Foreman went to view the body, and then made a statement. I communicated it to Mr Steel, as acting for the relatives, and to Superintendent Bryning, and I said: ‘If you think this statement is useful to you, and that it is evidence, and that the Foreman ought to appear as a witness, then I will discharge him.’ They both thought it would be a better course to discharge him, and I did so.
Such incendiary evidence wasn’t ‘useful’ to them at all. As Macdougall makes clear, ‘Mr Dalgleish’s statement that the man was physicking himself with strychnine immediately before his illness was, of course, not likely to be useful to the police or to Michael Maybrick.’99
They all concluded that a man self-dosing with deadly poison in a capital case of murder by poisoning was ‘not relevant’, as Mr Brighouse so daintily put it. Needless to say, Dalgleish never appeared as a witness. Meantime, Pickford was still flapping about to try to discover what it was he’d said.
PICKFORD: I rather gathered it had been a statement favourable to my client, Mrs. Maybrick, or contrary to the theory set up against her? Do you say it was a matter which you would not allow to go before the jury?
BRIGHOUSE: I ought not to tell the jury. The gentleman [Dalgleish] called upon Mr Cleaver and gave his statement, and therefore i
t rests with Mr Cleaver or Mr Bryning to call him.
This was bullshit of a high order. The law required the coroner to examine ‘all witnesses without distinction’.100
Notwithstanding that, we know who Bryning was, but who’s this geezer Cleaver, and what might be his interest in hearing a statement so favourable to Mrs Maybrick? Well, actually not a lot, other than that he’d been appointed, or rather imposed, as the solicitor for her defence. When the horror bloomed, Florence had cabled her legal representatives in New York – at least she thought she had. The communication was intercepted by Michael, and held back until he could get his own man in. From the get-go it’s apparent that Arnold Cleaver was ‘in the loop’, a member of a cabal Bro William Pickford was poised to join.
PICKFORD: I understand it was a statement as to the cause of illness made to this gentleman, but whether it would be evidence as to the cause of death, I don’t know. I confess I’ve not the knowledge you have as to what is evidence at investigations of this kind.
BRIGHOUSE: I have ruled against it.
PICKFORD: I say no more about it, if you do not think it right to go before the jury.
Someone was tugging hard at Brighouse’s strings, and Pickford was in process of having his attached.101 ‘The coroner took it upon himself,’ writes Macdougall, ‘to keep this statement from the coroner’s jury, because if it had been put before them, it is a fair presumption that they would not have exposed Mrs Maybrick to the expense and to the risk of trial. This incident illustrates the way in which these proceedings were conducted, and points to the conclusion that the provisions of our Law for the protection of persons against False Accusations were not observed by Mrs Maybrick’s accusers, or by the officers of the Law, by whom these criminal proceedings were set in motion and administered.’
They All Love Jack Page 71