Florence Maybrick too was soon to suffer their ceremonious perversions. Meanwhile, her brother-in-law wrote a letter from London:
Jany 16 88 [sic: 1889]
Dr Boss
… I am still in London after my trip to Bradford. I shall remain still for a time. I am preparing a draught that will kill & leave no marks those I shall give it to will fall in various places, either being run over or die from its effect for the future I am Scarlet Runner should you wish for particulars of the Bradford mystery give me a corner in the echo …119
What’s immediately noticeable about this letter is that for the first time the Ripper is abandoning the blade in favour of poison. He’s ‘preparing a draught that will kill & leave no marks’. In view of the fratricidal scenario fermenting just off Regent’s Park, we can say with hindsight that James Maybrick should never have made his forthcoming trip to London to see his brother’s doctor. What he prescribed, or rather what Michael Maybrick sent in place of it, would later become notoriously known as ‘the London Medicine’.
Meanwhile, Craven was engrossed in Barrit’s defence. With admirable zeal he’d demolished every last fibre of the prosecution’s case: ‘We should have played havoc with their medical evidence,’ said Hime. In respect of Dyer it emerged that he’d often ‘given information to the police on other matters on previous occasions’.120 A respected tradesman was prepared to testify that he’d seen Dyer in the street, and as a joke had said to him, ‘Withers is wanting you to give evidence in the Barrit case.’ ‘I know nothing about the murder,’ the imbecile had replied. Fortunately for Barrit the incident could be attested to by two others present.
Withers’ star witness was beginning to look like no witness at all, and it didn’t help that the defence had traced three workmen prepared to swear on oath that they were in Back Belle Vue at the time of Dyer’s hallucination. ‘A discussion took place,’ reported the Bradford Observer, ‘and two of them produced their watches to see the time, which therefore they could have fixed beyond all question.’ It was precisely 6.20 a.m. ‘After stopping together for about five minutes, two of them walked up Back Belle Vue, passed the stable, and went into Lumb Lane, and at that point heard the town clock strike 6.30.’
Needless to say, none of them saw Barrit, or more to the point the man who could have hanged him. This isn’t surprising, because as his mother was to confirm, at 6.20 on the morning of 29 December, John Thomas Dyer was at home in bed asleep.121
Dyer wrote to the milkman while he sat in prison awaiting his fate. Enclosed in the envelope as a complement to the idiot’s text was a Salvation Army tract titled ‘Jesus Will be Our Judge’.122
March 12 1889
Dear Barrit
My case has closed and your to, but the his day coming, that you and me will after stand on a better shore and we will after tille wath we hive done down here. But late salvation John Thomas Dyer will be him[?] him as he meats him on the greate with shrone and Jesus will be our judge and the Bad shall go to hell and There watch him save shall enter into a heavenly crown. But we do no for quite well and you too … that hell his full of you no watch like them what was sent to prison a week or two agor. Dear sir, you cane not Blame for you been in prison, Because I did not go tille it in the twon hall. But I told a boy and he told it to police, and I was fast to tille wath I had see But the case his clear and I hope that if you are not the man God will bless you in all shapes and formes. But if you are mark my words you shall fall like snow worter. Now I will see you on the happy shore by and by and happy welkimming
John Thomas Dyer123
Matthews was going to have to put this into a witness box, and without getting into the mechanics of his rarefied thinking, he decided to abandon the case. Bro McGowan was all sympathy for Barrit’s terrible ordeal, though the law made no provision for compensation. At least Barrit was proved innocent, and walked free. But, hanged or not, he’d served his purpose by transporting the murder of Johnnie Gill into the comfortable world of bafflement.
‘It was wrapped in the most profound mystery,’ concluded the Bradford Telegraph, which on 13 March 1889 interviewed the Chief Constable. Withers was happy to agree. ‘The case was as much a mystery as ever,’ he said, ‘and the Treasury had been as much puzzled at what course to adopt as the people in Bradford.’124
If crooks in the Treasury, and this numbskull in a helmet, had listened to the people of Bradford, the police would have been hunting a criminal who could easily have been caught. The people of Bradford knew on day one that the Ripper killed Johnnie Gill. I leave the last words of this chapter to him. With his characteristic sneer and in respect of his concern for the apprehension of the Fiend, he wrote pledging that he would ‘turn in his own brother’125 if necessary. And that is precisely what he did.
17
‘The Spirit of Evil’
I pray that one day some-one will prove my innocence.
Florence Maybrick
Anyone who knew anything about James Maybrick knew two things. 1) He was a Freemason. 2) He was a junkie.
James ran on junk. His entire nervous system was wet through with arsenic. He put it in his wine, he put it in his tea, and he put it in his food. Maybrick’s drug-taking was so well known amongst his contemporaries that it all but defined him. He swallowed arsenic like a condiment, and never said no to the occasional shunt of strychnine. Both were potentially lethal, but over the years he’d developed a gargantuan tolerance, and to kill him with either would have required enough to flatten an elk.
In loony paradox he was also a ‘hypochondriac’, in perpetual anxiety about his health while relentlessly doing everything he could to destroy it. After his death 163 medicine bottles were found distributed between his home and his office. There were fifty-one different medicines, both patent and prescribed, in his dressing room alone. ‘He made a perfect apothecary’s shop of himself,’ said Baroness von Roques, ‘as we all know.’
Everyone did know. A close friend and a captain in the cotton-shipping business, John Flemming, remembered Maybrick in action at his office in Norfolk, Virginia.
He was cooking in a small pan above an oil stove. I saw him deposit a grey powder in his food resembling light-coloured pepper.
‘You would be horrified, I daresay,’ said he, ‘if you knew what this powder is.’
‘There’s no harm in pepper,’ said Flemming.
‘It is arsenic,’ said Maybrick. ‘I am now taking enough arsenic to kill you.’1
The minimum fatal dose of this colourless, odourless and tasteless metallic poison is two grains (about a match-head) for an adult human. Maybrick could swallow treble that and go back for a chaser. ‘He used to call continually at my shop,’ recalled a Liverpool pharmacist, Edward Heaton, ‘sometimes four or five times a day, for what he called his “pick-me-up”, but which was liquid arsenicalis.’2
Such statements about Maybrick were commonplace on either side of the Atlantic. Ten days before his death another seafaring friend, the aforementioned Captain P.J. Irving of the White Star Line, had come to dine with the Maybricks at Battlecrease House. His host was amiable enough, although Irving sensed something was amiss. Cornering Edwin after dinner, he asked why James was looking so quag. ‘Oh, he’s killing himself with that damned strychnine,’ was the younger brother’s reply.3
It didn’t unduly surprise Irving to hear that Maybrick was poisoning himself, because ‘everybody knew Jim was always taking some medicine or another. His office was more like a chemist’s shop than anything else.’ In a press interview published after the ‘trial’, Irving related how he had met Edwin and James that same day at the latter’s offices in Knowsley Buildings, Liverpool West: ‘He picked up a glass which he partly filled with water, and then pulled out of his breast pocket a small packet, the contents of which he emptied into the glass, and afterwards drank the whole concoction.’4 It was probably strychnine.
But it wasn’t strychnine or arsenic that killed James Maybrick. Arsenic was his drug of ch
oice, and getting hold of enough of it was more often than not an ongoing obsession. Even by Victorian standards there were strict rules on its acquisition. Since the Poisons Act of 1851, arsenic was no longer sold raw, and even small quantities had to be mixed, by statute, with indigo, charcoal or soot. For a man with a habit like Maybrick’s, these restrictions were an impediment, and so, like all addicts, he scored wherever he could.
In February 1889 he got lucky – more than lucky, he hit the jackpot. A young salesman by the name of Valentine Blake had come to Liverpool in hopes of revitalising ramine grass as a viable substitute for cotton. It was to be made by an entirely new chemical process, superior to anything preceding it, and as chance would have it, James was chosen to hear about it.
Like everyone else in cotton he despised ramine, but he became animated when he heard about the secrets of the new production method, which apparently involved copious amounts of the magic ingredient As2O3, or arsenic trioxide. Addiction took over, and thereafter the conversation turned on Blake’s naïvety and Maybrick’s craftiness. ‘Maybrick asked me whether I had heard that many inhabitants of Styria, in Austria, habitually took arsenic internally and throve upon it?’ When Blake acknowledged that he had, Maybrick then shifted his focus from the stoned-yodellers to an individual, in this instance one of the world’s most notorious degenerates. Had Blake heard of Thomas de Quincey and his seminal work on junk, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater? Another confirmation stimulated further interest in Maybrick, and Blake must have wondered what had happened to the ramine. But, ever anxious to sell it, he played along with the de Quincey theme, speculating on how any man could possibly take nine hundred drops of laudanum a day.
‘One man’s poison is another man’s meat,’ retorted Maybrick, and then got down to it: ‘There’s a so-called poison which is like meat and liquor to me.’ Dare Blake ask what that might be? ‘I don’t tell everybody,’ said Maybrick, ‘and wouldn’t tell you,’ but seeing it was Blake who had mentioned it, it was arsenic. ‘I take it when I can get it, but the doctors won’t put any into my medicine except now and then as a trifle, that only tantalises me. Since you use arsenic,’ he continued, ‘can you let me have some? I find a difficulty in getting it here.’5
The upshot was a quid pro quo deal. Maybrick would do his best with the ramine grass, and Blake would make a present of all the arsenic that was left over from his employer’s now perfected experiments – in all, about 150 grains. Later that month Blake returned to Liverpool for further discussions and delivery on the agreement. That evening Maybrick walked through his front door with enough arsenic to slab the immediate neighbourhood.
Although he was considered so by himself and probably everyone else, Maybrick wasn’t actually a hypochondriac at all. What he was, was sick from trying to stay well. He’d been swallowing poison for years, doubling the dose of anything prescribed, and then wondered why he felt ill. It was this insane cycle of drug-taking to ameliorate the effects of drug-taking that brought him constantly into the presence of doctors, and that Michael Maybrick saw over the Christmas of 1888 as an opportunity to exploit.
James travelled to London to see Dr Fuller at his brother’s apartments on Sunday, 14 April 1889, and again on the following Sunday, 21 April, when he saw Fuller at his house. ‘He was a man who seemed inclined to exaggerate his symptoms,’ said Fuller; ‘he complained of pains in his head and of numbness, and said he was apprehensive of being paralysed.’ After an hour of examination Fuller could find little wrong with him: ‘I told him he was suffering from indigestion, and that I was perfectly certain there was no fear of paralysis. He seemed a nervous man. It is almost impossible to say what is the cause of constant disturbances in the nerves.’6
How about strychnine, although James told Fuller nothing of that, or of the arsenic either. In ignorance of his visitor’s pernicious ‘pick-me-ups’, Fuller prescribed two anodyne palliatives, ‘one an aperient, and the other a tonic with liver pills’. Neither contained the remotest trace of anything poisonous, and whatever ‘medicine’ followed these visits (notoriously ‘the London Medicine’) was concocted and sent via the mails by Michael Maybrick.
Getting James down to London to see Fuller was part of an emerging strategy, a ‘campaign’ as the Ripper called it, of which Florence was already a part. Although neither of them could have known it, both were key protagonists in a miasma of wickedness which, from a psychopathic point of view, couldn’t have looked rosier.
In the previous month, March 1889, Florence had also travelled to London, booking rooms in the names of ‘Mr and Mrs Thomas Maybrick’ at Flatman’s Hotel, Henrietta Street. Flatman’s was situated in one of the capital’s most fashionable areas, and Mrs Maybrick wore her most chic of Parisian togs – staff at the hotel said they had never seen such pretty shoes. Florie had every reason to look her best. She was in town for two entirely different but organically interlocking reasons. The first was to seek legal advice on a separation from the fifty-year-old junkie, and the ancillary and primary reason for this was a consolidation of permanence with the man she loved.
How utterly tragic was this woman’s fortune. She was a one-sided Romeo and Juliet. It was for a night in bed with Alfred Brierley that a senile judge was to sentence her to death.
In the shadows of Saturday, 23 March 1889, under the sobriquet of Thomas Maybrick, Brierley slipped into the hotel for some dick fun. Apparently it didn’t go too well. Maybe he got the guilt in respect of his friendship with James; maybe he simply didn’t love her. ‘He piqued my vanity,’ wrote Florence years later. But either way, she was never going to kiss Alfred Brierley again.
In the ordinary daylight came regret. He had told her that he loved another, and Flatman’s had become a place where they rent rooms. Meantime, amidst her sorrow and putting on the pretty shoes, something sinister was in progress outside the hotel. Hostile eyes watched with interest. She and Brierley left Flatman’s early on Sunday afternoon, agreeing that they should never meet in such circumstances again.
For the next three nights she stayed at Kensington Gardens with the family of John Baillie Knight, an intimate family friend who had known Florence since she was a little girl. The following day, Monday, 25 March, her ever solicitous brother-in-law Michael called at the Baillie Knight house in Kensington and took Florence out to dinner and a show. At least, that’s what he claimed in a subsequent newspaper interview which appeared in the New York Herald after the ‘trial’. He was trying to play the concerned relative, pretending that his sister-in-law’s impending death sentence was nothing to do with him. ‘Nothing would please me more,’ he said (knowing nothing like it was going to happen), ‘than to hear that the Home Secretary’s decision is that Mrs Maybrick shall go free. It has been published that I never liked her, that I avoided her house. All this is untrue. My relations with her were always pleasant. Only three weeks before my brother died – the day after she was with Brierley in London, in fact – I took her to dine at the Café Royal in Regent Street, and took her to the theatre, does that look like I disliked and distrusted her?’7
No, it looks like lying. He was lying because it was he who had hounded her to the very steps of the gallows, and he was lying over this ‘fantasy soirée’ at the Café Royal. It was in fact not three but seven weeks before James was murdered; moreover, there was no way Michael Maybrick took Florence Maybrick or anybody else out to dinner on that last Monday in March 1889.
Throughout the day and into the night of 25 March 1889, Michael was organising and later brown-nosing at a smoking concert he’d directed on behalf of the Artists Volunteers.
Florence returned to Liverpool on 28 March. It isn’t known if she and Brierley met again during her London stay, or whether the Metropolitan Police were still watching her after she had left the hotel on Sunday the 24th. ‘One of the strangest features of this strange case,’ wrote the author Trevor Christie, ‘was a subsequent article in the New York Herald’s London edition, to the effect that the police trailed M
rs Maybrick to the Hotel, and kept her under surveillance throughout her stay. The police saw her drive up to Chapel Place, and watched that part of the building. They were aware of “John’s” having driven her to the Grand Hotel and the theatre, and they produced a photograph of that person which the Landlord of the House immediately identified.’8 This was John Baillie Knight.
‘The [Flatman’s] waiter, Alfred Schweisso,’ continued the Herald, ‘who gave evidence for the prosecution at Liverpool, says he does not want to testify in any more criminal cases at Liverpool or elsewhere, as he wasn’t treated well.’ Schweisso had been bullied by the police, made to say what he knew was nonsense. It would be premature to get into the so-called ‘trial’ or its preliminaries. Suffice it to say that the Crown couldn’t have got up its phoney and criminally wicked charges without a parroted testimony from this waiter.
So corrupt were these proceedings, so palpable the stitch-up, that in a remorseful confession Schweisso wrote to Alexander Macdougall,9 a Scottish barrister who, with hopeless fortitude, was campaigning to prove Mrs Maybrick’s innocence:
I should be too glad to do that which would be of assistance to your Committee in getting Mrs Maybrick released. I am very sorry that I did not act as I ought to have done, inasmuch as it was a matter of life and death. But I was really afraid of the consequences that might happen. I will give you an instance. When I arrived at the Coroner’s inquest I met an Inspector. He said, ‘Will you be able to recognise Mrs Maybrick?’ I said I should not. He said, ‘Keep with me, and I will take you so as you can see her, because you will be sworn, whether you can recognise her or not.’ I saw her twice before I was taken to recognise her by order of the Coroner. You are aware that at the Coroner’s Court the Coroner dealt chiefly on Mrs Maybrick’s movements in summing up, and that it was published in the local papers that the case would be quashed up. I told the Inspector this. He said, I have seen it myself, but I have a different opinion, for it’s going to end against her.
They All Love Jack Page 64
