The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (31 page)

Mrs Maybrick could not, according to the law, be cross-examined and then re-examined on this statement.

A superficial reading of this statement by Mrs Maybrick suggests that it was a very dangerous one to her. The whole of her case had been built on the twin supports that it was extremely doubtful that Maybrick had died from arsenical poison and that there was a strong possibility, even likelihood, that if he had it had been self-administered. Both these supports had been severely undermined by her admission that she had prepared a “white powder” to give to him.

In a few seconds the whole of the admirable and well-nigh irrefutable part of the defence dealing with the medical evidence and Maybrick’s private history of addiction to arsenic, suggesting that, had he died from it, he had poisoned himself, was cast into doubt. She had prepared a “white powder”, reluctantly, under protest, not knowing what it was, if she were to be believed, and in the end putting it out of his reach on a wash-stand—nevertheless, there was this white powder, and it was she who had doctored his prescribed medicine at a time when he was dangerously ill.

Sir Charles, in a long, closely-reasoned and brilliant final speech, dealt with everything fully except the statement of Mrs Maybrick, that is, with all the evidence except the part that most damaged it.

About the statement he said: “I will not enlarge on it. I leave it to speak with such effect on your ears and hearts as the circumstances under which it was delivered, and the way in which it was delivered, and the tone in which it was delivered and the inherent probabilities of the delivery itself will suggest to you what ought to be its proper and legitimate result.” This was an eloquent and moving observation, but no grist to the mill of advocacy.

Mr Addison had no hesitation in “enlarging” on the statement; he climaxed his speech with as deadly a reference to its content as was heard at the Assizes. Until he came to deal with Mrs Maybrick’s statement he was labouring under the difficulties of the prosecution case, and had referred only briefly to its most important part, the medical evidence; but dealing with Mrs Maybrick’s statement, his argument suddenly became rejuvenated in direction and force. The judge later commented on its impressiveness.

Mr Addison said: “Now we get to the 9th. I can hardly help having a feeling of regret that the terrible statement which has been made today should have been made. I cannot help thinking, if my friend with his art had not intended to leave this case enshrouded in mystery and doubt, it is a great pity that statement was ever made . . . She stated that she had put a white powder in the glass because he asked her to do so, and had said it would do him no harm. Well, gentlemen, I shall stop here for a moment . . . If she had done it innocently, why did she not tell the nurse? What was the necessity for concealment? Why were the doctors and the nurses not told about it? What necessity was there to keep it quiet and secret? It was not a time when she could put a white powder in his food innocently or unsuspiciously. She had said he was dying . . . Is not that an extraordinary time to put a white powder in?”

Undoubtedly this was the strongest challenge presented by the prosecution, and it could no longer be answered. It could not, because the time was past, the opportunity gone.

Yet it could have been answered; answered in anticipation. The material was there, the evidence. It is one of the most responsible parts of an advocate’s function to anticipate the arguments and interpretations of fact by the other side. That Mrs Maybrick was doctoring a sick man’s medicine on her own admission was a dangerous weapon in the prosecution’s armoury. A defence had to be constructed in anticipation of its challenge; and there was a strong defence.

If it could be established that Mrs Maybrick had acted innocently, that she did not know, had no way of knowing, that the white powder was arsenic, had no reason to suspect that it was, then the iron in the core of the prosecution challenge was broken. The evidence was there to establish strong proof of this.

Mrs Maybrick needed arsenic, whatever its purpose. This was a first premise, established and agreed by both sides. In order to procure it she went to a local shop and bought fly-papers, had them sent to her, soaked them in water for hours and made a solution. Now, had she known there was arsenic available in the household, clearly there would have been no need for her to go shopping for it or make the further elaborate preparations for extracting it. Had she wished to poison her husband she would have used the solution and not the white powder specifically referred to. As, in fact, she did use a white powder without knowledge of what it was, it would have been on her husband’s instructions.

Could it be argued that she should have known, and should have consulted others, and should have suspected that it was poison? On the rock of innocence of the arsenical content of the white powder the subsidiary sea of accusations must break. She was not being tried for imprudence or even downright foolishness. She was not being tried for neglect to ensure the best remedy for her husband’s treatment. And why,
if
she
were
innocent
, should she suppose a white powder was poison? The poison was all in the minds of the people about her.

Sir Charles’s failure to deal with this white powder had further repercussions: Mr Justice Stephen took up the matter in his summing-up. He wanted to know where she got it from. This could have been elicited if it had been possible to cross-examine Mrs Maybrick; she explained after her trial how her bedridden husband indicated one of the places where these powders had been put.

A closer study of Mrs Maybrick’s statement would have provided Sir Charles with more ammunition. Her explanation as to how this cosmetic was applied, “to the face with a handkerchief well soaked,” was a very reasonable one; a handkerchief or a piece of cotton fabric is the only way to apply a liquid solution to the skin, and it had been shown that a handkerchief of Mrs Maybrick had been fairly soaked in arsenical fluid. Now, the prosecution had indicated that she had moistened her husband’s mouth with a damp handkerchief when he was unable to keep anything down, but they did not dare to connect the two things directly; it was altogether too ghoulish a supposition. She had no need, even if she wanted to poison her husband, to moisten his parched mouth with arsenical fluid—she had other opportunities to drug his food or medicine. To suggest that she was so callous that she would have refreshed her suffering husband’s avid thirst with arsenic was to suggest that she was worse than an ordinary murderess, that she was some sort of predatory vampire, morally insane.

Sir Charles might have had the courage to put this issue squarely to the jury: either his client was a monster or the practical explanation that she had given about the cosmetic solution must be accepted. Had it been put in this way, even the most cynical and prejudiced juryman might have flinched from an absolute condemnation. The explanation she had given about the fly-papers was then the true one, and that inference would have opened a wide breach in the prosecution’s case.

An appeal of this sort is of course partly an emotional one, but since emotional prejudice about her adultery had started the whole chain reaction of suspicion and throughout coloured the minds of judge and jurymen, Sir Charles would have been justified in fighting fire with fire.

The defence might well have endeavoured to obtain every sort of corroboration of this cosmetic preparation—in addition to the beauty specialist’s testimony—and in particular of Mrs Maybrick’s previous habit of using this form of treatment. After her trial, her mother in fact did produce an affidavit to support her statement—and there were two other affidavits by her servant and a solicitor’s clerk in Paris—that described the discovery of the prescription by a Dr Bray of New York for a face-wash with an arsenical base. Had this evidence been made available at the trial, there could have hardly been any doubt that the solution found in one of Mrs Maybrick’s handkerchiefs had been put there for the purpose she had ascribed to it in her statement.

As the matter stood at the end of the trial, the arsenic-soaked handkerchief, with its terrible unresolved implication, cast a fearful shadow on the jury’s minds. Both sides shirked the issue: the prosecution dared not suggest that it was a murder instrument applied to the lips of a man tortured with thirst, and Sir Charles seemed afraid to tackle the problem by a direct attack. Even during the most truculent moment of the judge’s summing-up, no attempt was made to establish the dreadful link, but inevitably reference was made to the lethal nature of the handkerchief. The jury were left with the responsibility of reaching a decision from which the defence had retreated, and the emotionally charged atmosphere in which they had to pass a verdict on this adulteress must have been appallingly aggravated.

A final comment on the defence’s treatment of the medical controversy is that, whilst the exposition of the facts was clearly and admirably made, there was no attempt to impress on the jury a method by which they could judge them impartially. This was all the more important as the judge had clearly revealed his prejudice and Sir Charles could not hope for a balanced and objective view of the case in the normal progress of events during the summing-up. He of course pleaded that the facts should be judged without prejudice on account of the unhappy woman’s domestic sins, but an altogether stronger and more effective plea was indicated. It was necessary to suggest to the jury a method of mental approach if they were to fulfil their duty in all conscience and without bias. It is not easy to propose how this could have been done, but an illustration or even a piece of theatre—like the mildly impressive “business” with the snuff-box—would have served the purpose.

In such matters the simplest method is usually the best: a really good illustration or analogy to reinforce the logic of the argument. If the jury had been asked to decide on a technical question which did not involve the poisoning of a husband by an adulterous wife but, say, an argument between two eminent art experts on the authenticity of a Rembrandt, they would have listened coolly to the technicalities propounded and then, when asked to give their decision, have unhesitatingly said, “Why ask us? We can’t tell who is right—not to any degree of reasonable certainty. We are not art experts.”

It is never effective merely to tell people to beware of their prejudices in making a judgement. People don’t have prejudices; they merely hold opinions strongly. It’s the other people, who don’t hold these opinions, who are prejudiced!

Prejudice was by far the most important factor that operated against what is sometimes called the logic of the situation. It was a case of Victorian puritanism, of course, but there was an aspect of it which made it almost unique: it began its work and, assuming that this may have been a miscarriage of justice, its terrible mischief even before there was any incident to establish the chargeable offence. The murder by poison of James Maybrick by his wife, Florence, was in the minds of the members of the household whilst he was still alive. It was in the minds of the servants, who had passed it on to Maybrick’s brothers, and thence it reached the nurses and, finally, the doctors. And, because of the underhand nature of these suspicions, the charge never came out into the open, so that Mrs Maybrick never had a chance to answer it and (an even more depressing commentary on human behaviour) the doctors never had a chance to tackle the problem of Maybrick’s sickness from the standpoint that he might be a victim of arsenical poisoning. Apparently the doctors were the last to hear about it, all the servants and relatives having priority, and none of them having the moral courage to act in a way that might have saved Maybrick’s life.

Suspicions were actively raised in the minds of the servants on 8 May on the discovery that Mrs Maybrick was soaking fly-papers (although nobody made the slightest move to confiscate the results of her experiments); but the reason for suspicion may be traced to the earlier domestic
fracas
at the Wirral races, which resulted in Mr Maybrick bestowing a black eye on his spouse. They came home by separate ways, it will be remembered, and then the conflict was resumed by argument until Nurse Alice Yapp prevented a final breach by prevailing on Mrs Maybrick to go upstairs with her and look at her younger child—a commendable appeal to the lady’s maternal sensibility which stopped her from departing summarily in the cab specially summoned for that purpose.

Now there were fly-papers in soak in Mrs Maybrick’s washbasin and Nurse Yapp summoned another member of the household staff to come and look; there were conferences below stairs; and a telegram was dispatched to Maybrick’s brother, Michael, by a “friend of the family”, Mrs Briggs, after consultation with another lady, also a friend of the family, which read: “Come at once; strange things going on here.” Brother Edwin, staying with the Maybricks, was informed about these strange goings-on.

Then later that day, Mrs Maybrick gave Alice Yapp the letter addressed to A. Brierley to put in the post, which Alice secretly opened, read and, without, of course, telling Mrs Maybrick what she had done, gave to Edwin, who also read it and kept it to show to brother Michael.

It was only the next day, after the letter and the gossip had gone the rounds of the whole household, staff, friends of the family and relatives, that the matter was put to Dr Humphreys and Dr Carter, who were bewildered and embarrassed by the revelation of Mrs Maybrick’s infidelity, and somewhat concerned by the fly-papers, but did not demand an explanation from the one person it would be reasonable to assume they should have asked.

Nobody
asked Mrs Maybrick for an explanation. She was spied on, interfered with, prevented from attending to her husband’s medical needs. Her movements were carefully studied. When she transferred a bottle to a wash-stand, a manoeuvre was immediately suspected. When she asked the nurse to fetch some ice from another room, it was assumed that the request was made so that she could be free from observation. Every conversation with her husband was attentively listened to and carefully reported; odd remarks, taken out of their context, were carefully selected for future reference.