Was Florence Maybrick really a killer?

Aug 1 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

More than a century after she walked free from jail a new book questions whether Florence Maybrick should ever have been convicted of poisoning her husband. Laura Davis reports

AT THE end of her life, there was nothing left to suggest Florence Maybrick had once been anything other than a strange old lady who had died, wrapped in blankets held together by safety pins, among her colony of stray cats.

Among her effects were a recipe for a feline gastritis cure, an address book with the letter G ripped out, two rosaries and a few photographs.

The one clue to her tragic story – to her former life as the Alabama belle partial to handbags made of velvet and silk who became one of Britain’s most infamous poisoners – was a family Bible containing a list of ingredients for a facial wash.

This single piece of paper, though it was not presented during her trial at St George’s Hall, in Liverpool, in 1889, is a key piece of evidence in the case.

It was Florence’s excuse for purchasing large quantities of arsenic, a component of the wash, which the prosecution argued she had mixed into her husband’s food.

Her story has been repeated for more than 100 years with all the macabre relish of a Victorian gothic thriller, but a new book claims she was the victim of sexual injustice.

”Throughout the trial and her appeal she was judged for having had an affair but James (her husband) was not. It was sexual double standards and Florence suffered for it,” explains Victoria Blake, author of Mrs Maybrick.

Her account of the trial and of the months leading up to the death of Florence’s husband, James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton merchant, at their Aigburth home is remarkably detailed. Victoria traced events through original court records, official correspondence and press cuttings held at the National Archives in London, before coming to the conclusion that it was an unsafe trial.

“Irrespective of whether she was guilty or not, she should not have been found guilty. I went backwards and forwards over whether she did it or not because it isn’t conclusive. On the evidence she should not have been convicted,” says Victoria, a published crime novelist.

The story began, as so many Liverpool stories do, on a boat – in this case a transatlantic liner, the SS Baltic. Florence, a petite 18-year-old with violet blue eyes, had spent much of her childhood being educated by private governesses in Europe, where she had picked up fluent French and German. James was a portly 42-year-old with large eyes and drooping moustaches.

They met in the bar and by the time they disembarked in Liverpool eight days later, they were engaged to be married.

Four years into their marriage they moved with their two children into Battlecrease House, in Aigburth, a three-storey mansion with 20 rooms which still stands today.

It was here that James would take his last breath after prescriptions of Valentine’s meat juice, Du Barry’s Revalenta Arabica invalid food, sulphonal, nitroglycerine, cocaine, phosphoric acid and Fowler’s solution of arsenic failed to restore him.

One of the most striking details of Victoria’s account of events is the sheer amount of arsenic used by the household, and indeed by many Victorians.

James Maybrick was found to have died from arsenic poisoning, yet a doctor prescribed him medicine containing the drug. When Battlecrease was searched, 139 jars and bottles containing many different concoctions, prescribed by 29 different doctors, were found as well as another 26 bottles in his office.

Inside a chocolate box in Florence’s trunk was a package labelled “Arsenic. Poison for cats”, two bottles of white fluid and a brown paper parcel of yellow powder.

Several small bottles were discovered in James’ hat boxes and a further container of liquid was found inside a table.