The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (32 page)

As an example of the methods employed by her spies at this period, the following is an extract from the cross-examination of Nurse Yapp:

“Now, with regard to this letter, you had heard the name of your mistress coupled with the name of Brierley before you got the letter?”

“Never.”

“Why did you open the letter?”

“Because Mrs Maybrick wished that it should go by that post.”

“Why did you open that letter?”

No reply.

“Did anything happen to the letter?” (This by the judge.)

“Yes, it fell in the dirt, my lord.”

“Why did you open that letter?”

“I opened the letter to put it in a clean envelope.”

“Why didn’t you put it in a clean envelope without opening it?”

No reply.

“Was it a wet day?”

“It was showery.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes.”

“Will you undertake to say that? I ask you to consider. Was it a wet day?”

No reply.

“Aye or no?”

No reply.

“Was it a wet or a dry day?”

No reply.

‘If, as you suggest, this fell in the mud and was wet, there is no running of the ink on the direction. Look at it.”

“No, sir.”

“Can you suggest how there can be any damp or wet in connection with it without causing some running of the ink?”

“I cannot.”

“On your oath, girl, did you not manufacture that stain as an excuse for opening your mistress’s letter?”

“I did not.”

By Mr Addison: “Did you suspect your mistress?”

“No, sir.”

“When you saw the fly-papers did you suspect her?”

“No, sir.”

“Why did you look at them?”

“I thought that Bessie Brierley had made a mistake when she said there were fly-papers in the bedroom.”

“Was that your reason?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When you did see them, what then?”

“I did not think anything of them.”

“When you opened the letter, you still thought nothing of it?”

“Yes, when I saw what was in the letter.”

“Was that the first time that you had any suspicion about it?”

“No, sir. I had been told of soup and bread and milk, and things tasting differently.”

“Had you been told this by some of the other servants?”

“Yes.”

“By which of them?”

“By Cadwallader and the cook.”

“By Cadwallader and the cook Humphreys?”

“Yes.”

“That was before you opened the letter?”

“Yes.”

Evidence of this sort leaves us with the unhappy feeling that the court was in danger of extending the mischievous and sensation-seeking work of a group of gossip-mongers.

The local and most of the national press titillated their readers’ minds in exactly the same manner as suspicion activated the tastebuds of Cadwallader and the cook Humphreys. (Incidentally, arsenic has hardly any taste at all and would not normally be detected in food of any flavour.) Long before her trial, Mrs Maybrick’s case had so stirred the emotion of the respectable local residents that a serious problem arose as to whether it would be wise to try her at the Liverpool Assizes. In a letter to her mother, the accused woman wrote:

“I sincerely hope the Cleavers [her solicitors] will arrange for my trial to take place in London. I shall receive an impartial verdict there, which I cannot expect from a jury in Liverpool, whose minds have come to a “moral conviction”
en
attendant
, which must influence their decision to a certain extent. The tittle-tattle of servants, the public, friends, and enemies, and from a thousand by-currents, besides their personal feeling for Jim, must leave their traces and prejudice their minds, no matter what the defence is.”

Her counsel was to take the bolder course of deciding for a trial in Lancashire—it was hoped no doubt to establish by this a show of confidence, even strength, and it would be invidious to be wise after the event and criticize her advisers.

At the inquest, the prosecution went so far as to introduce evidence about what one lady heard Mrs Maybrick say in a purely light-hearted manner. During a game of cards at a hotel, there was an argument between a Mrs Samuelson and her husband, and the wife exclaimed, “I hate you.” Mrs Maybrick said, “You must not take any serious notice of that; I often say I hate Jim.” This was a little too much even for Victorian lack of sophistication, and Mrs Samuelson was not called at the trial.

In charging the grand jury at the trial, Mr Justice Stephen gave a clear indication of his views as to how adultery could be associated with a murderous enterprise: “But certainly if she stood in these relations to him [Brierley], I hardly know how to put it otherwise than this, that, if a woman does carry on an adulterous intrigue with another man, it may supply every sort of motive—that of saving her own reputation; that of breaking through the connection which, under such circumstances, one would think would be dreadfully painful to the party to it. It certainly may quite supply—I won’t go further—a very strong motive why she should wish to get rid of her husband.” He rattled all the weapons in the prosecution’s armoury—the fly-papers, the letter to Brierley in which she had said that her husband was “sick unto death”, the arsenic in the body and so on. Finally, he saw fit to utter a grim jest: when a barrister later applied to him to fix a date for another case which was to follow Mrs Maybrick’s trial, he said, “But Sir Charles may plead guilty.”

Thus, from the outset, it was made plain that the judge allied himself with the popular condemnation of the young woman—she she was only twenty-six when she stood trial for her life—and his words must have seemed as bleak as the hissing she had heard from a group of self-righteous housewives at the magistrate’s hearing.

In such an atmosphere, the prospect of an objective appraisal of difficult and technical evidence was a remote one. The defence struggled gallantly to dispel the prejudice, but the handicaps were formidable, not the least being the monumental antagonism of the judge. But there is a possibility that there was another, unsuspected handicap.

The case clearly required a defence counsel who would enter the arena with a pugnacious determination to counter the “immorality” issue as quite irrelevant to the medical controversy over whether in the first place Maybrick had died as a result of arsenical poisoning; and it would have been wise to brief an advocate of strong, independent views about such an issue, someone who in those days would have been known as a “free-thinker”. Sir Charles Russell was a fine and conscientious advocate, but he was a Roman Catholic. It cannot be suggested for a moment that he did not do his conscious best to dispel the cloud of moral odium that surrounded the accused, but in his private soul he could not but have regarded her with some degree of repugnance; and when it came to dealing squarely and strongly with the so-called motive of adultery, some unconscious manifestation of repugnance may have tempered the full combative force of his advocacy.

Whether or not an “adulterous intrigue” is ever a strong motive for crime and, in particular, capital crime, is a question on which there is a great deal of dissension. Crimes of passion are extremely rare, far more exceptional than is popularly supposed. On the continent, where such crimes are considered to be far more frequent than in England, guilty passion or jealousy is rarely found to be the true motive for them. One usually finds that the wife killed her husband’s lover not through jealousy or anger over the estrangement of her husband’s affection, but because he had bought the other woman an expensive fur coat.

The famous trials of recent history show that relatively few charges have been made against alleged perpetrators of crimes of passion or adulterous intrigue, and these have almost always resulted in acquittal. Thus: Adelaide Bartlett—acquitted; Madeleine Smith—not proven; Mrs Rattenbury—acquitted; Mrs Barney—acquitted. As for Mrs Thompson, many criminologists believe that she had been guilty of nothing more than trying to make herself appear interesting to her lover by devising murder plots. Ruth Ellis shot down and murdered her lover, and her case is almost unique; and hers was an act of blind impulsiveness that cannot be categorized as a plot, deliberately planned and coldly executed over a period of time.

When one takes into account that during the last hundred years millions of acts of adultery were committed, millions of “adulterous intrigues” ran their course, and hundreds of thousands of cases of divorce (if not millions) in which adultery was cited as grounds for dissolution of marriage were brought before the courts, there seems no reason to name a special connection between adulterous situations and capital crime. Mr Justice Stephen’s charge to the grand jury, in which he suggested that an adulterous woman would have “every sort of motive”, could not have been supported for a moment in the light of human experience.

The letter to Brierley, the one produced in evidence to show a reason for murder, was almost indistinguishable from thousands of such letters produced in the divorce courts. Her “he is sick unto death” was written at a time when her husband was, in fact, seriously ill, and although the doctors’ prognosis was not as pessimistic as her phrasing, other members of the household may well have considered him critically sick. Compared with the number of cases of proved murder by poisoning, how many deaths have been caused by common gastro-enteritis or kindred complaints?

A wronged husband had died; the automatic assumption was that the wife had a motive for his murder; but what of the motives she had for
not
assuming such a terrible burden of guilt—the permanent black shadow on her conscience; the apprehension of exposure and punishment; the fear of divine retribution; the knowledge that her husband’s image was permanently borne on the features of her children; and, surely, the knowledge that there must be other practical ways of solving the problem of an unhappy marriage? Florence Maybrick was a woman of intelligence, good character, moral up-bringing, normal sensibility, tender feeling for her children. These consequences would certainly have occurred to her in planning such a crime.

We know, too, that some days before her husband’s death she felt herself under a cloud of suspicion, felt deposed from her position of mistress of the home, prevented from attending to her husband in the normal way. “Why are you tampering with the medicine?” she was asked by a brother of Maybrick, when she innocently tried to extract some sediment from a bottle.

If she were guilty, would she not have realized what they suspected and made hasty efforts to have her husband cured? Would she have persisted in her plan of doctoring meat extracts with white powders? Would she have left an arsenic-stained handkerchief to be found later? Would she have left packets of arsenic, bottles of arsenical fluid, the letters from Brierley? Would she have entrusted the letter to her lover to someone else to post?

The prosecution conceded that this behaviour might seem remarkable—well, no matter, she was vague and overwrought. Yet it was the prosecution’s case that Florence Maybrick was a woman capable of deliberate planning and the coldest calculation, capable of seeing her scheme through, stage by stage, over many days, in the face of the suspicion of servants, family friends, relatives, nurses and doctors, and of outwitting every one of them.

When her husband died, four of the fly-papers were thrown in the fire and burned, but not by her—by one of the servants who no doubt had a vague sense of compassion and fear for her mistress. Mrs Maybrick did not even empty the arsenical face lotion scented with toilet ingredients which was later found. Yet the prosecution presented her as a cold-blooded, scheming woman.

It might have been expected that, as the judge devoted two whole days to his summing-up, there would have been ample time to deal with these matters so that the strongest implications could be drawn from them; but they were hardly touched upon. On the other hand, such was his concern to show every possible unfavourable circumstance that he even revealed the contents of letters that the prosecution did not submit as evidence.

There was an extraordinary denouement to this. When he left the court, Mr Justice Stephen was accorded the reception which lately had been suffered by the accused woman—he was loudly hissed.

Considerable surprise and disquiet greeted the verdict on Mrs Maybrick, and it was said that some half a million people signed the petitions for her reprieve. The medical controversy continued interminably without any clear result other than that no resolution of it was possible. Mrs Maybrick was sentenced to hang for a murder which was never proved to have been committed.

More affidavits were sworn by independent and reliable witnesses to the effect that Maybrick was an incurable taker of arsenical concoctions. A Mr Valentine Blake, an industrial chemist who used the poison in the manufacture of a substitute cotton fabric, had been prevailed upon to give Maybrick a hundred and fifty grains. Another affidavit by a Canadian master mariner revealed that Maybrick habitually took arsenic. “I am now taking enough arsenic to kill you,” he once told him.

There was a commutation of the sentence to life imprisonment after the gallows had already been erected. The announcement of the reprieve included the observation that “although the evidence leads clearly to the conclusion that the prisoner administered and attempted to administer arsenic to her husband with intent to murder, yet it does not wholly exclude a reasonable doubt whether his death was in fact caused by the administration of arsenic.”