The proper verdict was asphyxia following strychnine poisoning caused by eating partridge, with insufficient evidence to show how the strychnine came to be in or on the partridge. The jury, after a consultation of five minutes, returned with an open verdict.
What is the solution of the mystery involved in this extraordinary case? Misadventure may be ruled out, as even if the partridges had picked up strychnine in Manchuria, it could not have been absorbed into the flesh of the birds. It is also most unlikely that a poison such as strychnine could have got into the partridges by accident. It must, therefore, be concluded that the strychnine must have been deliberately introduced into the birds by some person with the object of killing both Lieutenant Chevis and his wife.
The Home Office expert in his evidence said he concluded that a considerable quantity of strychnine must have been present in the birds, and as the flesh was so strongly impregnated with the poison it would appear as if a solution had been injected.
Strychnine hydrochloride occurs in small white crystals, the maximum dose being one eighth of a grain. It is only soluble in about forty parts of water, but it dissolves in about eighty parts of alcohol. Its taste is characteristic and extremely bitter. Sprinkled on the back of a bird, even in the form of a powder, it would not be absorbed into the flesh. It is a drug so readily recognizable from the taste that even an enemy would hesitate before using it to murder an unsuspecting person.
An obvious question arises; does a clue lurk in the cruel telegram sent from Dublin to the father of Lieutenant Chevis? How did the sender of that message know of the tragedy before it was published in the Press? There could have only been one object in sending it, and that was to express the sender’s delight that the murderer had succeeded in his purpose.
No motive can be assigned for the perpetration of the crime, but the fact that the brutal telegram was addressed to the victim’s father shows that the sender knew the anguish it would cause.
Taking all the circumstances known into consideration, one is led to the conclusion that the murder was the work of a homicidal maniac who had a fancied grievance against the family.
Armed with a hypodermic syringe charged with a solution of strychnine, which could be made from the tablets sold for that purpose, he would watch for his opportunity. The meat-safe was open to anyone outside the bungalow, and it would be but the work of a moment to inject the contents of the syringe into the birds and to slip away without being seen. The strychnine would thus be absorbed into the flesh of the birds and the cooking afterwards would assist it.
That murder was intended there can be no doubt. Whoever the unknown miscreant may have been, he was never traced in spite of all the efforts of the police, and the mystery of the murder of the unfortunate young officer remains a mystery still.
FLORENCE MAYBRICK
(James Maybrick, 1889)
Maurice Moiseiwitsch
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 con
fined 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 flypapers, giving as a reason for buying them that she was being troubled by flies in the kitchen. These flypapers, 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 flypapers 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 flypaper, 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 pois
on; 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 flypapers 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 you wish me to stay in England. 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.
The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes Page 20