The Diary of Jack the Ripper - The Chilling Confessions of James Maybrick

by Harrison, Shirley

  But the discovery most sinister to the prying eyes of Florie’s adversaries was a packet on which was written, in red ink: ‘Arsenic. Poison for Cats’. On the other side was a printed label saying ‘poison’. Inside was a mixture of arsenic and charcoal. Michael wrapped the packet in paper and affixed the family seal. Florie was devoted to cats and her supporters believed that the label, which was not in her handwriting, must have been a joke by Nurse Yapp and her friend Alice Grant, the gardener’s wife.

  An ‘Important Statement’ appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette of June 15th, stating that ‘the probable explanation of the package found labelled “Poison for Cats”, may be found in the fact that a kennel of dogs near to Battlecrease House — which caused great annoyance to the deceased — were poisoned and arsenic found in their bodies upon examination. It is alleged that the deceased was suspected, after his death, of poisoning the dogs.’

  How strange that, as happened so often during Florie’s trial, this evidence — albeit rumour — was never produced, when its inclusion could have provided useful support for her case and some further insight into the terrible truth about James Maybrick’s other life. But at the time the full significance of this story was not understood. Nobody had appreciated, as the Diary had shown, how James Maybrick’s sometimes sadistic sense of humour could have turned on Florie.

  The haul of medicines gathered from all over the house was then turned over to the police. The list that was handed later to the chemical analyst is truly astonishing — not for the finger it points at the unhappy wife, but for the picture it paints of a man enslaved by drugs. Everyone in that house had access to huge quantities of drugs. It was an outrage that Florie, alone, should be charged with administering poison. She was a victim of whispered gossip.

  The analyst, Mr Edward Davies, said at Florie’s trial that he had found enough arsenic to ‘kill two or three people’. His evidence was so technical that it was quite beyond the comprehension of witnesses, the jury or even the judge himself. In the end, it seems only six items contained any arsenic and that these were not in a form suitable for murder! For example, the arsenic stain found in Florie’s dressing gown pocket could well have come from the handkerchief with which she wiped her face after using arsenical products. Such explanations were not forthcoming at the trial.

  Alexander MacDougall is scathing in his attack on Davies’ unreliability and the inaccuracy of his methods and results. Of all the things in the list which did contain arsenic, ‘the whole of them might have been swallowed together and all would not have contained sufficient to kill anybody.’

  Years later, Florie Maybrick wrote her autobiography, My Fifteen Lost Years, in which she described those terrible days after her husband’s death:

  Slowly consciousness returned, I opened my eyes. The room was in darkness. All was still. Suddenly the silence was broken by the bang of a closing door which startled me out of my stupor. Where was I? Why was I alone? What awful thing had happened? A flash of memory. My husband was dead. I drifted once more away from the things of sense. Then a voice, as if a long way off, spoke. A feeling of pain and distress shot through my body. I opened my eyes in terror. My brother-in-law, Edwin Maybrick, was bending over me as I lay upon my bed. He had my arms tightly gripped and was shaking me violently. ‘I want your keys? Do you hear? Where are your keys?’ he exclaimed harshly. I tried to form a reply but the words choked me and once more I passed into unconsciousness.

  The day after Maybrick’s death, Florie told her nurse-cum-jailer that she wanted to see her children. ‘You cannot see Master James or Miss Gladys,’ she recalled the nurse answering in a cold, deliberate voice. ‘Mr Michael Maybrick gave orders that they were to leave the house without seeing you.’

  ‘I fell back upon my pillow, dazed and stricken, weak, helpless and impotent,’ Florie wrote. ‘Why was I being treated like this?.. my soul cried out to God to let me die… the yearning for my little children was becoming unbearable.’

  Bobo and Gladys were sent away temporarily with Nurse Yapp to friends, and eventually went to stay with their former nanny, Emma Parker, who had married and was now Mrs John Over. Within days, they had lost both parents as well as the familiar comfort of the nursery at Battlecrease House. Their mother, the former Southern Belle who had fallen in love as a girl and exchanged her affluent cosmopolitan circle in America for the secure claustrophobia of middle-class Victorian Liverpool, was now a widow and a prisoner in her own home. She was suspected by family and friends of her husband’s murder.

  On May 14th, three days after her husband’s death, the rumours surrounding Florie were to become formal allegations. As she herself described it:

  Suddenly the door opened and Dr. Humphreys entered. He walked silently to my bedside, felt my pulse and without a word left the room. A few minutes later I heard the tramp of many feet coming upstairs. They stopped at the door. The nurse advanced and a crowd of men entered. One of them stepped to the foot of the bed and said to me: ‘Mrs Maybrick, I am the Superintendent of Police and I am about to say something to you. After I have said what I intend to say be careful how you reply because whatever you say may be used as evidence against you. Mrs Maybrick, you are in custody on a suspicion of causing the death of your late husband, James Maybrick, on the eleventh instant.’

  Earlier that day the coroner had decided that ‘poison was found in the stomach of the deceased in such quantities as to justify further proceedings.’ A policeman was stationed in Florie’s room, although there was no likelihood of her escaping. The officer would not even let her close the door night or day. On the day of Maybrick’s funeral, Thursday May 16th, Florie awoke to the sound of muffled voices and hurrying footsteps. She was told abruptly by the nurse ‘the funeral starts in half an hour.’

  At first, Florie found herself barred from the bedroom where her husband’s coffin, covered with white flowers, had already been closed. She wrote in her book:

  I turned to the policeman and nurse. ‘Leave me alone with the dead.’ They refused. I knelt by the bedside and was able to cry the first tears which many days of suffering had failed to bring… Calmed, I returned to my room and sat near a window, still weeping.

  Suddenly the harsh voice of the nurse broke on my ears. ‘If you wish to see the last of the husband you murdered you had better stand up.’ I stumbled to my feet and clutched at the window sill, where I stood, rigid and tearless until the hearse had passed from sight. Then I fainted.

  * * *

  The Baroness, in her bombasine best, burst on Battlecrease House the following day in response to a grudging telegram from Michael. ‘Florie ill and in awful trouble’ it read, without bothering to mention Maybrick’s death.

  ‘Edwin met me in the vestibule and took me into the morning room,” wrote the Baroness later. ‘He was much agitated…he then went on to tell me in a broken way that Michael had suspected, and the doctor thought, that something was wrong… the nurse said Florie put something in the meat juice.’

  The Baroness stormed upstairs and tried to speak to Florie in French. When Florie told her mother that she was suspected of poisoning Maybrick, the Baroness replied, ‘If he is poisoned, he poisoned himself. He made a perfect apothecary’s shop of himself.’

  On Saturday morning, May 18th, the Baroness consulted Florie’s solicitors, the brothers Arnold and William Cleaver, of the firm of Cleaver, Holden, Garnett and Cleaver. While she was in their office a telegram arrived announcing that Florie was about to be removed from the house. Thirteen legal and medical men had arrived by train and gathered around Florie’s bed. Both Arnold and William Cleaver arrived before the Baroness and were already among the assembled party. There had been a huddled consultation in the drive beforehand, watched eagerly by a crowd of reporters and onlookers. The Cleavers agreed not to object to a remand.

  The Baroness arrived as Florie was being led away. ‘I went up to my bedroom which looked out on the front,’ she recalled, ‘to try and see her face as they put my child into
the cab and they turned the key and locked me in…. they hurried her away in so unseemly a manner that even her handbag with toilet articles was left behind… The nurse snatched up my cloak and hat and put them on her and they hustled her into an armchair, she being too weak to stand, and she was carried to the cab.’

  * * *

  A few weeks after Maybrick’s death, his friend Charles Ratcliffe wrote a long letter to John Aunspaugh in Atlanta, Georgia. This letter is recalled in Trevor Christie’s book, Etched in Arsenic and formed a part of Florence Aunspaugh’s personal collection of memorabilia.

  The letter shows a dramatic personal view of events leading up to Maybrick’s death, especially as Ratcliffe was a long-standing friend of the family and a reliable witness. It is a harsh, but most likely a true assessment of the trap set to catch Florie.

  This was a great shock to me. I had been expecting a tragedy within the family but was looking for it from the other party. James had gotten wise to the Flatman hotel affair and I was expecting him to plug Brierley at any time.

  Ratcliffe explains how Maybrick came home from the Wirral races on April 27th and began dosing himself ‘as usual’. He talks in the letter of ‘female serpents’ — mistakenly he says ‘old lady’ Briggs showed the Brierley letter to Edwin, whereas we know it was Nurse Yapp who spilt the beans. He then says that Edwin, ‘Deep in the mire himself,’ paid no attention to it:

  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. After Humphreys had a conversation with Michael he refused to make a certificate to that effect but said there were strong symptoms of arsenical poisoning… Now wouldn’t that cork you. A musical composer instructing a physician how to diagnose his case. Michael, the son of a bitch, should have his throat cut. Mrs Maybrick was sick in bed when James died. He had only been dead a few hours when Michael… searched the house and in her [Florie’s] room they claimed to have found quantities of arsenic, thirteen love letters from Edwin, seven from Brierley and five from Williams [a solicitor]… I always thought the madam was dumb, but I must frankly admit that I did not consider her that dumb as to leave her affairs accessible to anyone… Edwin is in bed with nervous prostration, Tom and Michael are seeing to it that he leaves England and Michael says Edwin’s letters will never be produced in court…

  During those same weeks following Maybrick’s death, the newspapers in Liverpool began their own trial, carrying a torrent of abusive, hysterical articles in which they presented evidence and formed judgements, even before Florie had been charged formally. The Liverpool Echo ran a regular column entitled ‘Maybrickmania’. As the Liverpool Review acknowledged, ‘The Maybrick case is a stroke of good fortune for the papers.’

  On May 28th, lawyers, witnesses, spectators and a battery of journalists jammed into the old police court in Wellington Road. The acoustics were terrible and for 12 hours the journalists took their notes, as the Liverpool Echo described, ‘standing up between serried ranks of policemen, on their knees, sometimes on the backs of learned counsel and in various other awkward positions, for it was found impossible to hear at tables assigned to them.’ They had gathered for the Coroner’s Inquest and the sensation it caused was only the beginning.

  The unholy muddle of contradictory evidence, lies and mistakes that followed has proved impossible to disentangle. In Britain, such an inquest is not a trial; its task is to establish only the cause of death. But, in 1889, it could also apportion blame and in the Maybrick case there were many anxious to hear the verdict. The foreman of the jury, Mr Dalgleish, who turned out to be a friend of the deceased, admitted that on the day of the Grand National Maybrick had told him he took strychnine. He was immediately dismissed, and the evidence he had about Maybrick’s drug habit forgotten. Mr Fletcher Rogers then became foreman and impressed everyone with the way he discharged his duties.

  Florie was still too ill to attend the inquest, so she did not hear witness after witness restate the whispered gossip of her domestic staff. They talked about the fly papers, the meat juice and the ‘poison for cats’ and, above all, the letter to Brierley. Florie’s adultery was offered as the prime motive for the murder. In Victorian eyes, a woman’s adultery was a crime worse than all others.

  The actual cause of Maybrick’s death seemed to be of secondary interest. And in any case, despite what the coroner had asserted immediately after the the post-mortem, no measurable amount of arsenic had been found in his body. Nevertheless, the coroner insisted that the inquest be adjourned in order that the stomach and its contents might be chemically analysed. As a result, on May 30th, the torch-lit exhumation of James Maybrick took place in Anfield cemetery.

  * * *

  Florie made her first appearance at the coroner’s court on June 5th. Hissed at by the women, who outnumbered men by two to one, she sat in the anteroom while the remaining evidence was given. Brierley was sitting at the back of the court with his father but he and Florie did not meet and he was never asked to give evidence.

  This was to be the day of the doctors, and one by one they gave their preliminary findings. They were followed by Mr Flatman, proprietor of Flatman’s, in Covent Garden, in which Florie and Brierley had stayed. Then came Alfred Schweisso, a waiter at the hotel, who identified Florie and Brierley. He later recanted his testimony in a letter to MacDougall on January 18th 1890, in which he said, ‘With regard to Mr Brierley. Of course I should not have recognised him at all if it had not been for the police; but as I was for the prosecution I went by their orders which I am sorry for now for they acted in a very shameful manner… I could not recognise him when he came; but a policeman came up and showed me where Mr Brierley was… it was a regular got up job.’

  Next to appear in the box was Thomas Lowry, the clerk who had been sent out of the office to buy a saucepan, basin and spoon for Maybrick’s Revalenta tonic. He was followed by the charwoman, Mrs Busher, who washed the utensils, and Mrs Briggs, who led the search of the house. Next day the court heard from Edwin, from Frederick Tozer, the assistant at Clay and Abrahams, one of the dispensing chemists who supplied medicine to James, and the police.

  Finally, the analyst Edward Davies reported that as a result of the exhumation, he had found unweighable amounts of arsenic in Maybrick’s intestines, an estimated one-thousandth of a grain in his kidneys, an estimated one-eighth of a grain in his liver and nothing anywhere else in his body.

  When I sought an opinion on this from Dr Glyn Volans of Guy’s Hospital, London, he told me, ‘Although a man may have been dosing himself on arsenic and strychnine for years they simply did not have the forensic techniques to detect it accurately. It is quite understandable that so little arsenic was found in Maybrick’s body. It is equally understandable that they did not pinpoint the true cause of death.’

  Then, Mrs Hughes was called in to identify the infamous letter from Florie to Brierley. Despite the lack of evidence, the jury — most of whom, said the local press, had been guests of the Maybricks at one time or another — decided that James Maybrick died ‘from the effects of an irritant poison administered to him by Florence Elizabeth Maybrick and that the said Florence Elizabeth Maybrick did wilfully, feloniously and with malice aforethought kill and murder the said James Maybrick.’

  On June 8th 1889, a truly shocking death certificate was issued for James, by the registrar James McGuire. Florie had not yet been put on trial and had not been accused in court. Yet the cause of death was given as ‘irritant poison administered by Florence Elizabeth Maybrick. Wilful murder’!

  * * *

  To avoid the long drive back to Walton Jail, on the edge of the city, the authorities sent Florie to the tiny Lark Lane Lock-Up. There she was kindly treated and fed with food brought in from a local hotel. The wives of cotton merchants and brokers rallied to her support and kept her clean and clothed. A reporter from the Liverpool Post, who called to see her, wrote:

  She is supplied with a little tab
le which is placed close to the entrance of her cell. She is allowed to take as much exercise as she pleases in the corridor and when tired sits at the table which is covered with a snow white cloth. On it were two books, one with crimson binding, the other in less conspicuous colours. She reads the comments on her case with the liveliest interest and indulges occasionally in sarcastic references to anything which does not please her, She is somewhat wayward in her manner.

  The spark was still there.

  On June 13th Florie, in heavy mourning, was taken to the magisterial inquiry (rather like a magistrates’ court today) in Liverpool’s Islington courthouse to hear the evidence against her for the very first time. She listened as one by one, her servants, brothers-in-law and doctors testified.

  Even at this stage the doctors did not agree with each other about the cause of death and admitted to having insufficient understanding of Maybrick’s condition. Moreover the proceedings were remarkable for what they left out. In particular, no one mentioned that no trace of arsenic had been found in faeces and urine samples taken from James only days before his death. Equally remarkable was the fact that, of all the wealth of material that was submitted, in the end all that remained beyond dispute was that in March, Florie and Brierley had spent two nights at Flatman’s Hotel in London. But that, it seemed, was enough for a capital charge!

  Florie was committed for trial on July 26th and removed to Walton Jail. Crowds ran booing after her carriage as it pulled away from the court. Local photographers were quick to capitalise on the story. Shops carried huge window displays of the Maybricks, including one sensational photograph (long since lost) of Florie and Brierley together at the Grand National. Battlecrease House became a tourist attraction, with dozens of rubber neckers pointing ghoulishly to the windows of the room where Maybrick died.