MAYBRICK POISONING CASE.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1125, 12 May 1911, Page 6

MAYBRICK POISONING CASE.

DEATH OF PRINCIPAL WITNESS. By Telcurarjh—Press Association—Copyrieht Chicago, May 10. Mrs. Florence Maybrick, who is living here, has learnt of the death of her once favourite son, .Tames, the principal, though innocent, instrument of her conviction on a charge of poisoning her husband. She says her son has been dead to her for twenty years. A FAMOUS .MURDER TRIAL. In 18S9, Mrs. Florence Maybrick was sentenced to death at Liverpool for the wilful murder of her husband. Logically (wrote Mr. Stead in reviewing the case in the "Review of Reviews" some time after) Mrs. Maybrick should have been hanged. Mr. Matthews, however, was Home Secretary, and Sir Fitzjames Stephen was the judge, and between them they contrived to make as nice a botch of the whole business as wrong-headedncss on one side and semi-dotage on the other could have brought about. Not daring to carry out the capital sentence, they evaded the gallows by a solemn declaration that there was a reasonable doubt whether any murder had ever been committed; and then, instead of sending. Mrs. Maybrick for trial on the charge of attempting to poison, they commuted the sentence passed for murder to penal servitude for life. Mr. Labouchere, who was one of the most strenuous believers in her guilt, admitted sorrowfully that Mr. Matthews by his explanation had knocked the bottom out of the whole ease against Mrs. Maybrick. Mrs. Maybrick was accused of administering arsenic to her husband. In the evidence, it was stated that Mr. Maybrick regularly drugged himself with arsenic.

The conviction that a verdict of "Not Guilty" was inevitable was so firmly entertained that, both the Liverpool evening papers printed special editions announcing a verdict of "Not Guilty," and sold them in the streets. When the jury returned, after an absence of. thirty-eight minutes, with a verdict of "Guilty," the sensation was overwhelming. Even the judge felt it, and in passing, sentence of death he placed the whole responsibility upon the jury and the jury alone. Out-side-the ebullition of feeling was almost unprecedented. I do not remember any case in 'which the public protested so vehemently against the decision of a court of law. Nor was it only the general public. Every member of the Bar present at the Assizes, with the addition of the Recorder of Liverpool, signed the mc-. morial in her favour.

In 1905 Airs. -Maybrick was released, and settled in America, her native country. Three years later she wan a suit in tho Virginian courts, for the recovery of a-large estate. The property recovered was described as 2! million acres of land in Virgina, West Virginia, and Kentucky, .and the estimated value was one and a half million pounds sterling. An account of the cafe, stated that the property was transferred to a man named Armstrong, formerly their counsel, by Mrs. Maybrick and her mother, Baroness Roquc, in a cell of tho Liverpool Courthouse, when Mrs. Maybrick was about to be sentenced for poisoning her husband in 1899. Roth women were, they declared in the suit, in a state of mental and physical collapse, and their signatures were illegally procured under duress and misrepresentation.