The Aigburth Poisoning

The case

After James Maybrick died at Battlecrease House in May 1889, the police searched the house and found arsenic almost everywhere: in bottles, in packets, in a trunk and in the dressing gown of his wife, Florence. There was enough to kill a great many people. The question that dominated the Liverpool trial that summer, and the fifteen years of argument that followed, was whose arsenic it was, and whether it was what killed him.

Florence Elizabeth Chandler was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1862, the daughter of a banker who died before her birth. She met James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton broker more than twenty years older, on an Atlantic crossing, and they married in London in July 1881. They settled in Aigburth, in the comfortable southern suburbs of Liverpool, and had a son and a daughter. Outwardly they were a successful couple; privately the marriage was failing. He kept a mistress, and was a hypochondriac who took patent medicines and, according to his own chemist, arsenic as a tonic. She ran up debts, and in the spring of 1889 she spent a night at a London hotel with a younger cotton broker, Alfred Brierley. After the Grand National in March the couple quarrelled violently, and divorce was discussed.

James Maybrick fell ill on 27 April 1889. His doctors treated him for indigestion, but he grew worse over the following fortnight. In the meantime it emerged that Florence had bought arsenical flypapers and soaked them in water, which she said was to make a cosmetic face wash. On 8 May the children's nurse, Alice Yapp, opened a letter Florence had written to Brierley and handed it to the family. James's brothers Edwin and Michael took charge of the house and of the sickroom, and Florence was in effect confined. A bottle of Valentine's meat juice that she had handled was later found to contain arsenic, though it was never given to the patient. James Maybrick died on 11 May.

The post-mortem found only a small amount of arsenic, well short of a recognised fatal dose. An inquest nonetheless returned a verdict against her, and she was sent for trial. The case opened at St George's Hall, Liverpool, on 31 July 1889 before Mr Justice Stephen, with John Addison prosecuting and Sir Charles Russell defending.

Russell argued that a man who had dosed himself with arsenic for years could not safely be said to have died of it, and medical witnesses on both sides disagreed about the cause of death. Florence made a statement from the dock, which was permitted at the time: she said her husband had begged her to put a powder in the meat juice. The judge's summing up ran over two days and dwelt heavily on her adultery. On 7 August the jury convicted her after less than an hour, and she was sentenced to death.

There was an immediate outcry in Britain and the United States. On 22 August the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, commuted the sentence to penal servitude for life, reasoning that although she had administered poison with intent to kill, there was reasonable doubt that arsenic caused her husband's death. Critics pointed out that this meant she was imprisoned for attempted murder, a crime she had never been tried for. With no court of appeal in existence, her only remedy was the Home Office, and repeated petitions failed. She served almost fifteen years in Woking and Aylesbury prisons and was released in January 1904.