A sealed packet with a red label that read Arsenic, Poison (`for cats’ had been added) was found in a trunk. Arsenic was later detected in an imperfectly cleaned jug of Barry’s Revalenta and in two ordinary medicine bottles. Several small bottles and a scrap of handkerchief were discovered in a chocolate box: the scrap had traces of arsenic. Three bottles found in a man’s hat-box contained varying solutions of arsenic. In another hat-box were a glass and another handkerchief: both bore traces of milk and arsenic. More traces were found in the pocket of Mrs Maybrick’s dressing gown. There was enough arsenic in the house to poison fifty people.
On Monday, 13 May, a post mortem was carried out by Doctors Carter, Humphreys and Barron. They concluded that death had been caused by some irritant poison acting on the stomach and bowels. But when the body was exhumed on 30 May, less than half a grain of arsenic (two grains would have been a fatal amount) was the total found in his liver, kidneys and intestines. There was none in his stomach, spleen, heart or lungs. There were, however, traces of strychnine, hyoscine, prussic acid and morphia.
In the meantime, Mrs Maybrick had been detained on suspicion of causing her husband’s death. She had been removed to the hospital in Walton jail, after a magistrate formally opened the investigation in her bedroom, but not before a letter she wrote to Brierley – ‘Appearances may be against me, but before God I swear I am innocent’ – was intercepted by Mrs Briggs and given to the police.
When Mrs Maybrick appeared at the brief magisterial hearing on 13 June, she was hissed at by a large number of women as she left the court. She hoped her trial would take place in London. ‘I shall receive an impartial verdict there,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘which I cannot expect from a jury in Liverpool, whose minds have come to a “moral conviction” … The tittle-tattle of servants, the public, friends and enemies, besides their personal feelings for Jim, must leave their traces and prejudice their minds, no matter what the defence is.’ She was advised otherwise, and the trial began at Liverpool Summer Assizes on Wednesday, 31 July 1889.
There was an all-male Lancashire jury, including three plumbers and two farmers. Mrs Maybrick was defended by Sir Charles Russell, QC, MP, later the Lord Chief Justice. The medical experts agreed that Mr Maybrick had died of gastro-enteritis, but disputed whether this had been caused by arsenic, impure food or a chill. The defence claimed that there was an absence of most symptoms usually associated with arsenical poisoning, that the deceased had overdosed himself and died of natural causes, that Mrs Maybrick had no need to adopt the clumsy and uncertain contrivance of soaking flypapers (so openly) to get arsenic, when so much was available elsewhere in the house. She gave no evidence, but made an ill-advised statement, explaining her reasons for soaking the flypapers and what she was doing with the meat juice.
The summing-up of the judge, Mr Justice Stephen, who was himself a very sick man, lasted two days. It was a rambling peroration, not without some errors of fact, laying emphasis on the accused’s admitted adultery with Brierley. The judge said:
For a person to go on deliberately administering poison to a poor, helpless, sick man, upon whom she has already inflicted a dreadful injury – an injury fatal to married life – the person who could do such a thing must indeed be destitute of the least trace of feeling … Then you have to consider … the question of motives which might act upon this woman’s mind. When you come to consider that, you must remember the intrigue which she carried on with this man Brierley, and the feelings – it seems horrible to comparatively ordinary innocent people – a horrible and incredible thought, that a woman should be plotting the death of her husband in order that she might be left at liberty to follow her own degrading vices … There is no doubt that the propensities which lead persons to vices of that kind do kill all the more tender, all the more manly, or all the more womanly, feelings of the human mind.
The jury, after an absence of three-quarters of an hour, found Florence Maybrick guilty of murder. Before sentence of death was passed she said: ‘With the exception of my intimacy with Mr Brierley, I am not guilty of this crime.’
The judge was booed as he left the court. Meetings were held, letters were sent, petitions organised, and articles written (by doctors and lawyers) decrying the verdict – there was no appeal court then. Leading Americans, including the President, brought pressure to bear on the English authorities. The Home Secretary and the Lord Chancellor reviewed the case and interviewed the judge. Meanwhile, in Liverpool, Mrs Maybrick heard the gallows being erected in Walton jail.
Then, on 22 August, the Home Office announced that the sentence had been commuted to penal servitude for life, without ‘the slightest reflection on the tribunal by which the prisoner was tried’ and with ‘the concurrence of the learned judge’. A message announcing the reprieve reached Walton jail at 1.30 am on 23 August, three days before the date set for Florence’s execution.
Despite further efforts to obtain her release, Florence Maybrick remained in jail for fifteen years. The first nine months of her sentence were spent in solitary confinement; she was fed on bread and gruel, wore a brown dress marked with arrows and had to make at least five men’s shirts a week. Her imprisonment began in Woking jail and ended in Aylesbury. She was freed on 25 January 1904, when she went to France and visited her aged mother before returning to America, where she had not been for more than twenty years. For a time she was something of a celebrity and wrote a book called My Fifteen Lost Years. Soon after it was published, the Court of Criminal Appeal was established in 1907.
She died in squalor, surrounded by cats in a Connecticut cottage, on 23 October 1941. She was seventy-eight. It was fifty-two years since her husband’s death and many years since the death of the judge, Mr Justice Stephen. He retired soon after the trial and died in a lunatic asylum.
THE MURDER OF MRS HOGG, 1890
Women rarely commit murder. Those who have done so have generally been poor, illiterate, aggressive if not volatile, mentally unstable, and poison is their usual method of bringing death. More than half (thirty-seven) of the women hanged for murder (sixty-eight) between 1843 and 1956 were poisoners. The murders women commit are mostly domestic ones – of a child, husband or lover, and occur when the murderess can no longer endure the anguish of a relationship or a situation. Children have often been murdered by women in a kind of misdirection of their anguish – as a substitute for the husband or lover, or for the suicide of the murderess herself. A very few women have murdered for gain, to improve their economic or social conditions. Some murder out of spite. Associated causes of murder where women have been concerned are sexual frustration, nymphomania, lesbianism, post-natal depression, the menopause, alcoholism and feeble-mindedness. In the case of Mrs Pearcey, sexual jealousy has been mooted as the mainspring of the murders she committed. They are more likely to have arisen from circumstances similar to those described in Congreve’s famous sentence: ‘Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.’
Mrs Pearcey was not, in fact, married. Her real and maiden name was Mary Eleanor Wheeler. But when she went to live with a man called Pearcey, she assumed the name and title of his wife, retaining both when, for reasons unknown, he left her. Male reporters later portrayed her as being tall and powerful, with striking almost masculine features, a full figure and fine eyes.
A woman correspondent of the Pall Mall Budget described her as being ‘a woman of about five feet six, neither slight nor stout. There is nothing of the murderess in her appearance; in fact, she is a mild, harmless-looking woman. Her colouring is delicate and her hands are small and shapely. But she has not a single good feature in her face. Her eyes are dark and bright … Her mouth is large and badly formed, and her chin is weak and