He took great risks, killing where he did and displaying the bodies as he did. But that must have been part of his murderous urge, the thrill of the kill. And he killed in order to cut, not strangle his victims, swiftly and savagely using his knife. And if his victims knew him, at least by sight, they would not have felt unduly alarmed, especially if his manner and appearance were unexceptional, and not evidently those of a maniac or murderous psychopath, as fiction pictures him, but pleasant and persuasive, as actual murderers often are.
From the many statements made by witnesses who might have seen him before or after the murders, some generalisations might be made – he was about thirty, about 5 ft 6 in and wore a hat or cap and had a moustache. And he probably lived in or near Flower and Dean Street, selecting his victims from among the many prostitutes he lived among.
THE MURDER OF MR MAYBRICK, 1889
Judges cannot ever be truly impartial, being inevitably led by their own opinions, background, education, sex and social position to exhibit an occasionally less than objective attitude to the accused, especially if the accused is a woman. Such bias was shown by the learned gentlemen who judged Edith Thompson, Alma Rattenbury, Ruth Ellis – and Florence Maybrick.
Miss Florence Elizabeth Chandler was an American, a Southern belle from Alabama, who at the age of eighteen married Mr James Maybrick in London on 27 July 1881. She was the daughter of a banker from Mobile, and she and her future husband met on the White Star liner Baltic when she was on a tour of Europe with her mother. He was a forty-two-year-old English cotton-broker, a frequent visitor to America. His two brothers disapproved of the match, believing that Florence was as flighty, as suspect, as her thrice-married mother, Baroness von Roques.
The Maybricks settled in Liverpool in 1884, eventually purchasing an imposing mansion, Battlecrease House (complete with modern flush toilets), in a southern suburb of the city called Aigburth. Living beyond their means, they were attended by four servants: a cook, two maids, and a nanny called Alice Yapp, who looked after the two young Maybrick children, a boy and a girl. Mrs Maybrick was given £7 a week by her husband to pay not only for the food and domestic requirements but also all the servants’ wages. Naturally, she was soon in debt.
James Maybrick was a boorish, irascible man, and a lifelong hypochondriac. Ever complaining of being out of sorts, of pains and numbness and problems with his liver and his nerves, he was a believer in homoeopathic medicines, and was forever swallowing pills and pick-me-ups to improve his health and sexual potency; the mixtures included strychnine and arsenic. ‘I think I know a good deal of medicine,’ he once told a doctor.
He maintained a mistress on the side, as Florence discovered by chance in 1887. The unhappy young woman found some consolation in the arms of one of her husband’s Liverpool friends, a tall and handsome young bachelor, Alfred Brierley, whom she met at a dance at Battlecrease House. In March 1889, the couple spent a weekend together in a London hotel. Mrs Maybrick made the arrangements. They planned to be there a week, but for some reason they left the hotel – Flatman’s in Henrietta Street – on the Monday, when Brierley paid the bill; Mrs Maybrick spent the rest of the week with friends. She said later: ‘Before we parted, he gave me to understand that he cared for somebody else and could not marry me, and that rather than face the disgrace of discovery he would blow his brains out. I then had such a revulsion of feeling I said we must end our intimacy at once.’ She returned to Liverpool on Friday, 28 March.
The next day, she went to Aintree with her husband for the Grand National. There she happened to meet Brierley, and despite her revulsion and her husband’s wishes, she left his carriage and walked up the course with the young man. Maybrick was furious. She returned home on her own. He arrived ten minutes later. There was a row and at one point he punched her. Alice Yapp said later: ‘I heard Mr Maybrick say to Mrs Maybrick: “This scandal will be all over the town tomorrow!” They then went down into the hall, and I heard Mr Maybrick say: “Florrie, I never thought you would come to this.” They then went into the vestibule, and I heard Mr Maybrick say: “If you once cross this threshold you shall never enter these doors again!’” Mrs Maybrick had in fact ordered a cab and threatened to walk out of the house, but Nanny Yapp intervened, reminding her of her children – ‘I put my arm around her waist and took her upstairs. I made the bed for her that night and she slept in the dressing-room.’
On Sunday, Mr Maybrick made a new will, excluding his wife. She went to see the family doctor, Dr Hopper, who said later:
She complained that she was very unwell, that she had been up all night … and she asked my advice. I saw that she had a black eye. She said that her husband had been very unkind to her … and he had beaten her … She said that she had a very strong feeling against him, and could not bear him to come near her.
She wanted a divorce. But the doctor was able to effect a reconciliation. She asked her husband’s forgiveness for considerable debts she had incurred (£1,200) and he paid them off – presumably with difficulty, as he was in debt himself.
On 13 April, Mr Maybrick journeyed to London on business connected with his wife’s debts and stayed with his bachelor brother, Michael Maybrick, a singer and composer, in his flat in Wellington Mansions, Regents Park. Using the pseudonym Stephen Adams, Michael composed such hymns as ‘The Holy City’ and ‘Star of Bethlehem’. James Maybrick consulted Michael’s doctor, complaining of pains in his head and numbness in his right leg. After an hour-long examination the doctor concluded there was very little wrong with him, apart from indigestion, and he prescribed an aperient, a tonic, and liver pills. Mr Maybrick returned to Liverpool on 22 April.
Soon after this, he met a friend of his – Sir James Poole, a former mayor of Liverpool, in the Palatine Club – who said later: ‘Someone made the remark that it was becoming the common custom to take poisonous medicines. [Maybrick] had an impetuous way and he blurted out: “I take poisonous medicines.” I said: “How horrid! Don’t you know, my dear friend, that the more you take of these things the more you require, and you will go on till they carry you off?”’ The previous year, in June, Mrs Maybrick had visited Dr Hopper. He said later: ‘She told me that Mr Maybrick was in the habit of taking some very strong medicine which had a bad influence on him; for he always seemed worse after each dose. She wished me to see him about it, as he was very reticent in the matter.’
There seems no doubt that he was an eater of arsenic, among other poisons, and three American witnesses at the trial vouched that he often took arsenic in a cup of beef tea, saying it was ‘meat and liquor to him’ and ‘I take it when I can get it.’ A chemist from Norfolk in Virginia attested to the fact that Mr Maybrick’s consumption of ‘liquor arsenicalis’ given in a tonic, increased over eighteen months by 75 per cent.
On or about Monday, 23 April, Mrs Maybrick bought one dozen flypapers from a chemist in Aigburth. She told him that the flies were troublesome in her kitchen. Each paper contained about one grain of arsenic, although the experts at her trial disagreed about the actual amount, saying it depended on whether the arsenic was extracted by boiling the papers or by soaking them in cold water.
On or about that Monday, flypapers were seen by the nanny and a maid soaking in a basin on the Maybricks’ bedroom wash-stand. Mrs Maybrick later explained that the arsenic which she extracted from those flypapers was for a cosmetic preparation, a face-wash, something she had used for years; she wanted to clear up some skin trouble before going to a ball. A hairdresser, Mr Bioletti, later agreed that there was ‘an impression among