The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (30 page)

An explanation in modern psychiatric terms would be far more convincing. In the absence of a proper clinical study this can only be tentatively suggested in a broad theoretic frame-work. In the case of aggravated hypochondria—the form that it took with Maybrick—the theory is that this excessive pre-occupation with building up the normal powers of resistance to ill health springs from the deep-seated unconscious desire for self-destruction. Now it is not of course suggested that Maybrick was suicidal in the sense we normally understand it; he did not deliberately or knowingly plan to do away with himself. Unquestionably, however, there was in him morbidity, a deep fascination with illness and possibly death; and there is considerable authority supporting the concept of an almost universal unconscious “death-wish” which wages a never-ending contest with the instinct of self-preservation, and which psychoanalysts believe expresses itself in the general pattern of our lives.

The dark hinterland of the mind holds its secrets even from the inward eye, and to Maybrick perhaps the effects of arsenic produced an intoxication with the thought of death. We shall never know, but if it did, and he did thus contrive his own destruction, tortuously, deviously, unknowingly but inexorably, then Mrs Maybrick’s innocence (which otherwise we cannot assume, although a reasonable doubt certainly exists about her guilt) must be accepted. Whatever the reason for it, there can be no doubt that Maybrick took arsenic more or less regularly for very many years.

Sir Charles called witnesses from America where, it will be remembered, Maybrick had stayed for some time. The first of these was Nicholas Bateson of Memphis, who remembered Maybrick well. In 1877, Maybrick had chills and fever, and for about three months was given a prescribed treatment by a Dr Ward, consisting of arsenic and strychnine. Maybrick was nervous about his health and complained of other symptoms than the chills and fevers: numbness and cramp in his hands and limbs. He feared paralysis. Obviously he impressed Bateson with his ill health or imagined ailments.

R. Thompson, formerly a master mariner, recalled that Maybrick took him to a druggist one day and collected some small packages. The shop assistant used words that Thompson found curious. “Now, Mr Maybrick, be careful,” he said as he handed his customer the purchases. Thompson was a good friend of Maybrick’s and, concerned at this strange warning, later went back to the chemist’s to speak privately with the assistant. He saw Maybrick afterwards and spoke to him frankly: “I believe, Mr Maybrick, you are in the habit of taking a dangerous and noxious drug.” “What is that?” Maybrick challenged. “Arsenic,” Thompson told him. “Who the devil told you?” demanded Maybrick, who was sometimes very sensitive about his drug-taking. “I asked the druggist’s assistant at the store and he told me you are in the habit of taking it. It’s a pity.” “Damn his impudence!” said Maybrick.

“He was very touchy about the subject,” Thompson said finally, which suggested that Maybrick tried to conceal the habit. (Mrs Maybrick had told both Dr Hopper and Michael Maybrick about her husband’s drug-taking habits some time before his death. She was concerned about it and tried to enlist their help to break him of the habit, a point which was admitted by the two men in earlier evidence. Indeed she wrote specially to Michael about it, and when he tackled his brother on the subject, Maybrick reacted just as violently as in the outburst against the shop assistant: “It’s a damned lie!” Even if she had cause to lie later, there was clearly no reason for Mrs Maybrick to lie about such a thing at the time, and the strength of Maybrick’s reaction suggests that the accusation had touched him on a sore point.)

Thomas Stansell, a former servant of Maybrick and Bateson in Norfolk, Virginia, had “three or four times” been sent to a druggist to purchase arsenic for Maybrick, sometimes in a packet, sometimes in a bottle, and Maybrick put it into a teaspoon and stirred it into a cup of beef tea. (This was exactly the style of concoction Mrs Maybrick was later charged with giving him.) Stansell was told to give Maybrick’s name at a special shop, Santos and Barrowes, on Main Street, where the druggist seemed to know exactly what to give him when he called.

Edwin Garnett Heaton of Anfield, Liverpool, a retired chemist who had thirty-seven years’ experience, described how he had recognized Maybrick from a photograph that had appeared in a daily paper. He had called at the police station and at the solicitors acting for Mrs Maybrick with a most remarkable account of his dealings with the deceased.

For seventeen years he had carried on business in a shop in Exchange Street. For a very large part of this time—more than ten years—he had known Maybrick as a customer who purchased regularly from him a tonic known as a ‘pick-me-up’, to which he instructed Heaton to add
liquor
arsenicalis
, about four drops at first but later increased to seven. This he would drink down in the shop. He would call for it
from
two
to
five
times
a
day
. A dose of seven drops was about .07 of a grain; five doses would therefore total .35 of a grain. (It will be remembered that Dr Stevenson said he had known half a grain to be a fatal dose; and slightly less than half a grain was estimated to have been found in the deceased.) When Maybrick was to be away from home, he would get a bottle containing between eight and sixteen doses.

Here then was the clearest evidence of addiction. That such doses could be sustained by any ordinary constitution was extraordinary, and that such a habit should be practised by a reputed hypochondriac seemed to give a new twist to the meaning of hypochondria. A daily dosage, continued for weeks and months (and reinforced with additional purchases in bulk in cases of absence for a day or two), when one such dose was considered practically lethal by the Home Office pathologist!

Finally, Sir James Poole, a businessman and formerly Mayor of Liverpool, was called by Sir Charles. He was a member of the Palatine Club, which had been Maybrick’s club, and he recalled that he had had a conversation with Maybrick which turned on the use of poisonous drugs for medicinal purposes. “He had an impetuous way,” Sir James Poole said, “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?’ ”

This must be the “clinching” proof: evidence from a witness of the highest repute, who was not even asked a single question in cross-examination.

As far as Mrs Maybrick’s own dabbling with fly-papers was concerned, the defence was ready with the answer that she needed a certain extract of arsenic to mix with toilet ingredients according to an old recipe for cosmetics. She had to attend a ball. The preparation was supposed to be good for the skin and effective as a remover of unwanted hair. She was sensitive about a skin complaint and when she bought the fly-papers she had told the sort of social white lie that women often tell tradesmen, that the fly-papers were needed because she was being troubled by flies in the kitchen. She had made no attempt to conceal her purchase of the fly-papers; she had gone to her local shop, where she was well known, and she had ordered them to be delivered at her address, and they were brought by a boy who left them on the hall-stand. Neither did she attempt to conceal her extraction of arsenic from the fly-papers, which she left to soak all day in a basin in her bedroom where they could be seen by the maid who came to tidy up, and in fact were seen by her. Had she wished to conceal this she could of course have left them to soak at night in the basin.

Evidence of the use of arsenic in cosmetic preparations was given by James Bioletti, a hairdresser and beauty specialist of thirty years” experience, who said that the recipe was asked for sometimes, particularly for use as a depilatory, although it was also supposed to be good for the complexion. Its chief purpose seemed to be to remove superfluous hair from the upper lip and arms. The use of it for such an intimate purpose was probably the reason for Mrs Maybrick’s minor pretence that she needed the fly-papers for the kitchen.

In his address, Sir Charles made the point that with all the arsenic available to her in that extraordinary household—the packet marked “Arsenic: Poison for cats” and the bottles of solid arsenic and arsenic in solution—had she wished to poison her husband, it would have been entirely unnecessary to extract arsenic from fly-papers. It was a very strong argument, indeed, if rather an obvious one.

Sir Charles, however, seemed to have overlooked an even stronger point. The purchase of these fly-papers for the extraction of arsenic, whatever its purpose—either to poison or to make a cosmetic preparation—clearly indicated that Mrs Maybrick was unaware of the existence of all this other arsenical substance in the trunk or on the hat-boxes, and proved beyond reasonable doubt that it was Maybrick who had hoarded this deadly toxic; and the facts that could be inferred from this, as we shall see, would have enabled the defence to counter the most devastating part of the prosecution’s case.

According to the law at the time, the prisoner was not allowed to give evidence, but the judge permitted a statement to be made by her which was to be prepared by her without any advice from counsel, and during the preparation of which she was to remain incommunicado. At the conclusion of all the other evidence for the defence, Sir Charles asked her if she wished to make the statement, and she said she did.

She said, “My lord, I wish to make a statement, as well as I can, to you—a few facts in connection with the dreadful, crushing charge that has been made against me, namely, the wilful and deliberate poisoning of my husband, the father of my dear children. I wish principally to refer to the use of the fly-papers and to the bottle of meat essence. The fly-papers were bought with the intention of using as a cosmetic. Before my marriage, and since, for many years I have been in the habit of using a face-wash prescribed for me by Dr Greggs, of Brooklyn. It consisted principally of arsenic, tincture of benzoin, elder flower water, and some other ingredients. This prescription I lost or mislaid last April, and, as at the time I was suffering from slight eruption of the face, I thought I should like to try to make a substitute myself. I was anxious to get rid of this eruption before I went to a ball on the 30th of that month. When I had been in Germany many of my young friends there I had seen using a solution derived from fly-papers, elder water, lavender water and other things mixed, and then applied to the face with a handkerchief well soaked in the solution. I used the fly-papers in the same manner. But to avoid the evaporation of the scent it was necessary to exclude the air as much as possible, and for that purpose I put a plate over the fly-papers, and put a folded towel over that, and another towel over that. My mother has been aware for a great many years that I have used an arsenical cosmetic in solution.

“I now wish to refer to the bottle of meat essence. On Thursday night, the 9th of May, after Nurse Gore had given my husband beef tea, I went and sat on the bed beside him. He complained to me of being very sick and very depressed, and he implored me then to give him this powder, which he had referred to early in the evening and which I had declined to give him. I was over-wrought, terribly anxious, miserably unhappy, and his evident distress utterly unnerved me. He had told me that the powder would not harm him, and that I could put it in his food. I then consented. My lord, I had not one true or honest friend in that house. I had no one to consult and no one to advise me. I was deposed from my position as mistress in my own house, and from the position of attending upon my husband, notwithstanding that he was so ill. Notwithstanding the evidence of the nurses and servants, I may say that he wished to have me with him. He missed me whenever I was not with him; whenever I went out of the room he asked for me, and for four days before he died I was not allowed to give him a piece of ice without its being taken out of my hand. When I found the powder, I took it into the inner room with the beefjuice, and in pushing through the door I upset the bottle, and, in order to make up the quantity of fluid spilled, I added a considerable quantity of water. On returning to the room, I found my husband asleep, and I placed the bottle on the table by the window. When he awoke, he had a choking sensation in his throat, and vomited. After that he appeared a little better, and as he did not ask for the powder again, and as I was not anxious to give it to him, I removed the bottle from the small table, where it would attract his attention, to the top of the washstand, where he could not see it . . . Until Tuesday, the 14th of May, the Tuesday after my husband’s death, and until a few minutes before Mr Bryning made this terrible charge against me, no one in that house had informed me of the fact that a death certificate had been refused, and that a post-mortem examination had taken place; or that there was any reason to suppose that my husband had died from other than natural causes. It was only when Mrs Briggs alluded to the presence of arsenic in the meat juice that I was made aware of the nature of the powder my husband had asked me to give him. I then attempted to make an explanation to Mrs Briggs, such as I am stating to your lordship, when a policeman interrupted the conversation and put a stop to it. In conclusion, I have only to add that, for the love of our children, and for the sake of their future, a perfect reconciliation had taken place between us, and that on the day before his death I had made a full and free confession to him and received his entire forgiveness for the fearful wrong I had done him.”

Sir Charles asked for leave to bring two witnesses to whom the statement had been made before the inquest, but Mr Justice Stephen could not allow it; he said he could not go beyond what the law permitted.