The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (28 page)

Her letter in reply, intercepted by Nurse Yapp, read:

At the time the letter was written, Maybrick was by no means “sick unto death”, nor had he been delirious since Sunday; the doctors had certainly not given up hope of his recovery contrary to the implication in the phrase: “all depends upon how long his strength will hold out”. As for the general tone of the correspondence, it seemed clear that Mrs Maybrick was still in love with Brierley, still anxious to see him, and very concerned that he might leave her for the “round trip to the Mediterranean”. The secrecy with regard to this correspondence, the letters received under cover and the tactical manœuvring implied in her request for an early reply because “all the letters pass through my hands at present” indicate a scheming mentality, a character that does not flinch from intrigue.

At six-thirty on the evening the letter was intercepted Nurse Gore noticed that a tumbler was missing. Mrs Maybrick produced it, saying that cold water had to be put in the medicine, otherwise it would burn the patient’s throat. Nurse Gore would not give the medicine to the patient from this tumbler, but emptied it into a sink in the housemaid’s closet. Whether or not from this cause, arsenic was later traced in the sink.

Dr Carter saw Maybrick on Thursday the 8th and noted a symptom, tenesmus, straining and retching of such intense degree, that he was not satisfied with the earlier diagnosis of acute dyspepsia, and suspected that the cause might be the action of an irritant poison.

At eleven o’clock at night Nurse Gore opened a fresh bottle of Valentine’s juice essence. Mrs Maybrick took the bottle out of the bedroom into the adjoining dressing-room, was absent for about two minutes and then returned with it. She asked the nurse to fetch some ice, but the nurse would not leave the room. Then Mrs Maybrick, in a hesitant and uncertain manner, as though she was undecided what to do, put the bottle on the table and later, when the patient awakened, removed it from the table and put it on the wash-stand. In this bottle, traces of arsenic were later discovered.

The next day, when the relief nurse, Callery, was offering some medicine to Maybrick, his wife tried to persuade him to take it. He said to her, “You have given me the wrong medicine again.” Mrs Maybrick said, “What are you talking about? You never had the wrong medicine.” At a quarter to five that day another nurse, Wilson, heard Maybrick say to his wife, “Oh, Bunny, Bunny, how could you do it? I did not think it of you.” He repeated this twice, and Mrs Maybrick replied, “You silly old darling, don’t trouble your head about things.”

Maybrick had become gravely ill now; the doctors gave up hope of his recovery on Saturday morning, and his children were taken to see him. He died in the evening.

Immediately after his death, Michael Maybrick organized a search of the house with the nurse and the housemaid. In a closet they found a box containing children’s clothes, and amongst these what was formerly a chocolate box but which now contained a parcel marked “Arsenic: Poison” and written after it the words “for cats”. This contained a very large quantity of arsenic, the equivalent of many lethal doses. There was also found a handkerchief in which some trace of arsenic was later discovered. In the dressing-room were found bottles on men’s hat-boxes containing a large quantity of arsenic in solution and solid arsenic, enough to kill a number of people. A trace of arsenic was found in the pocket of a dressing-gown worn by Mrs Maybrick.

The post-mortem examination of the deceased showed that all the organs were healthy; the kidneys showed traces of arsenic, and in the liver a weighable quantity was found. Dr Stevenson, an eminent toxicologist with many years’ experience, was of the opinion that death had been caused by repeated small doses of arsenic, which would not necessarily leave much residue in the body. It is not the arsenic which is found in the system that kills, but that which passes away.

This was the very formidable case for the prosecution, one which appeared, on the face of it, all but impossible to answer. It seemed that the only possible defence would be the sort of ingenious fiction which incorrigible and desperate criminals sometimes foist on an embarrassed and unhappy defence counsel—a defence usually based on some extraordinary coincidence or remarkable circumstance.

In this case, the defence exceeded the most ingenious fiction that was ever put forward by a blushing barrister, because it combined the extraordinary coincidence with the remarkable circumstance, a combination which would make the average writer of murder stories blench; and yet—there was no doubt of it—this was not the imaginings of a desperate criminal but the sober truth as testified by impartial, respectable, intelligent and even distinguished witnesses. The prosecution had a seemingly irresistible case; the defence, in theory, had an irrefutable answer.

To summarize them, the extraordinary coincidence was that James Maybrick was addicted to arsenic and for many years had practised the habit of taking just the dosage which the prosecution had charged his wife with giving to him; and the remarkable circumstance was that two vastly experienced toxicologists (one specializing in the treatment of arsenic for venereal disease) were just as certain as Dr Stevenson was to the contrary that the deceased had not died as a result of arsenical poison.

As though these were not enough, there was yet a third factor which could have been offered by the defence but perhaps was not put forward because it was felt that the jury had enough argument to acquit without it, and this was that in a case where the judge repeatedly admitted that he could not understand the complexities of the medical evidence sufficiently to arrive at any decision about it, it would be impossible to expect a lay jury to bear the responsibility of such a decision in the case of a capital charge.

Let us first examine the question of whether or not Maybrick died from arsenical poisoning. If the defence could be said to have established a reasonable doubt about this, then that was the end of the matter. Whether or not Maybrick was poisoned in this way would settle whether or not he was murdered.

Dr Thomas Stevenson, examined by Mr Addison for the Crown, was a lecturer on forensic medicine and chemistry at Guy’s Hospital, London, and acted officially for the Home Office and Treasury in cases where highly specialized knowledge of toxicology was required. He examined and analysed parts of the body, he had taken note of the doctors’ reports about Maybrick’s symptoms during his illness, and he had no doubt that the patient had died from the effects of arsenic.

His main symptoms had been those attributable to irritant poisoning; during his more serious illness all his symptoms might be attributed to it; and they resembled those of arsenic more closely than of any other irritant. The amount of arsenic found in the body was about half a grain and that had been known to prove fatal, given at one dose.

Dr Rawdon Macnamara, examined by Sir Charles Russell for the defence, had been President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland; he was a Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, Professor of Materia Medica at the Royal College, and had for many years been senior surgeon at the Lock Hospital, Dublin. He had had to administer arsenic to patients in a very large number of cases, on several occasions to “saturation” point; sometimes, owing to the peculiarities of the patients, excessive doses had to be administered.

He had found that the strongest symptoms in the case of saturation was the redness of the eyelid where the lashes come out upon it. Another strong symptom was a marked peculiarity in the pit of the stomach, “about the size of a shilling, and that shilling burning hot, and thus spreading gradually down until the arsenic is eliminated”. Vomiting is at first copious, violent and persistent; the purging is of a severe character at first, but it passes into ineffectual effort.

He thought that the symptoms of sickness described by Dr Humphreys indicated inflammation of the stomach or bowels rather than arsenical poisoning. Dr Humphreys’ temporarily successful treatment for the stomach inflammation would have been effective in the case of gastro-enteritis, but not against arsenical poisoning. Dr Macnamara had never in the case of arsenical poisoning encountered either the symptom described as “like a hair in the throat” which had so distressed Maybrick, or the symptom of tenesmus preceding purging. Nor had he known his arsenic-saturated patients to experience the symptom of cramp in the calves of the leg.

“Now,” Sir Charles said, “bringing your best judgement to bear upon the matter, you have been present at the whole of this trial and heard the evidence, in your opinion was this a death from arsenical poisoning?”

“Certainly not.”

This was pretty direct stuff: none of the qualifications or reservations which medical experts use as safeguards against marginal doubt. Dr Macnamara’s experience of arsenical effects on the human constitution was certainly as considerable as that of anyone in medicine, and the clarity of his view cannot be doubted. An experienced doctor is rather like an expert art-dealer: what may appear indistinguishable features to a layman he can define, individualize and classify almost at a cursory glance. But in the minds of the jury the constantly described symptoms such as purging, vomiting, numbness and all the attendant horrors that accompany gastro-enteritis took on a character of unpleasantness almost indistinguishable from the effects of poisoning. Dr Macnamara’s evidence came after the jury had been subjected for several hours to medical evidence of a singular nastiness.

First had come the prosecutor’s address, in which he had gone over the symptoms of arsenical poisoning and in conscientious detail described every one of the doctors’ and nurses’ observations of Maybrick’s unhappy symptoms throughout the entire period of his illness. The doctors and nurses were then called, examined, cross-examined and re-examined on them. There followed the expert evidence of the analyst, Mr Davies, who had examined kidneys, bowels, liver, stomach and excretions. And lastly came Dr Stevenson, the toxicologist, who summed up, shed light, corrected, qualified, defined and described similar cases in his experience. He was cross-examined on all this, and then Mr Addison re-examined him at length.

Next there was the defence’s opening speech with its references to the medical history of Mr Maybrick, followed by the evidence of doctors, druggists, chemists and specialists, continuing for hours and featuring arguments of this character:

“You say that you saw no mention of petechiae. Did you notice that Dr Humphreys said he saw them there?”

“Well, he said he saw something of the kind, I believe. But I think afterwards that he said that they were of a brilliant arborescent appearance, which would be the result of something else, and not petechiae. The petechiae of arsenical poisoning have a linear dotted appearance and not arborescent.”

In such a forest even the giant redwood towering to the sky is lost; to be more explicit, the wide and clear divergence of opinion between eminent specialists on the two sides—which seemed to establish a reasonable doubt as to whether Maybrick had in fact died as a result of arsenical poisoning—was lost sight of in the unending cross-talk. Every doctor and specialist made his own individual interpretation of the symptoms, and these followed each other in what could only have been a bafflingly complex sequence to the lay mind (and in the medical sense, even the judge must be included under this description); and the most conscientious efforts to explain the finer points, the shades of distinction of viewpoint so important to the true diagnosis, only aggravated the bewilderment. To the untrained mind there is clearly a limit to the reception and retention of exotic phraseology and technical information.

In essence, the reason for the divergence of opinion by the medical specialists was failure to agree about characteristic symptoms and the minimum amount of arsenic expected to be found in the organs of the deceased. (The highest estimate of this found in the organs examined was half a grain, and a lethal dose was said to be two grains.) There was no arsenic found in the vicinity of the body, that is in its exudation, and no trace in the urine. The small amount found could be explained by the fact that Maybrick was in the habit of taking arsenic, which can remain in the body for a period of up to five months.