The Maybrick case : a treatise on the facts of the case, and of the proceedings in connection with the charge, trial, conviction, and present imprisonment of Florence Elizabeth Maybrick / by Alexander William MacDougall.

Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Maybrick case : a treatise on the facts of the case, and of the proceedings in connection with the charge, trial, conviction, and present imprisonment of Florence Elizabeth Maybrick / by Alexander William MacDougall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    as the breath was out of the body of James Maybrick, and while search for the widow was lying in that mysterious speechless swoon, Michael p/emises and Edwin Maybrick, with Mrs. Briggs and Mrs. Hughes as coad- (See x>o»t.) jutors, usurped control in that house, sent the children away, and five of the inmates of that house, viz. : Michael Maybrick, Edwin Maybrick, Mrs. Briggs, Mrs. Hughes, and Alice Yapp, set to work to find, and said they found—for the finding of these things by these five people is a suspicious circumstance—they went straight to places open and accessible to everybody, and only to those places, and put their hands, without any difiiculty, upon large quantities of arsenic in all sorts of forms, arsenic mixed with char- coal '* poison for cats, bottles of arsenic in a state of solution, and arsenic in crystals, enough altogether to poison fifty people, and a remarkable circumstance in connection with these things is that, although these five people found this arsenic in places open and accessible to everybody, nobody had ever seen any of it in the house before, and nobody at the trial could say where it had all come from, and that except what these five people found in this curious way, while Mrs. Maybrick was lying in that mysterious speechless swoon, nobody else ever found anything in the house which would have killed a mouse. There was another suspicious circum- stance connected with this finding of arsenic after death by these five people, and that was that Alice Yapp found the packet labelled Arsenic, poison for cats, on Saturday, the 11th, a few hours after death, and brought it to Michael and Edwin Maybrick, who sent for Mr. Steel at midnight, as a solicitor, to advise them, and who did advise them to seal it up in a sealed package and lock it up in the cellar, and that though Michael Maybrick, Edwin Maybrick, Mrs. Briggs, and Mrs. Hughes (in the presence of each other as wit- nesses), found the other things on the next morning, Sunday, the 12th, it was not until 8-.30 p.m. on that night that these people gave particulars of what they found on Sunday morn- ing to Inspector Baxendale (who then look possession of them), And did not even then tell liim about the *' Arsenic, poison for cats, which Alice Yapp had found the night before, and which Mr. Steel, a solicitor (and who might have been uiseful as a witness), hud regarded as of so much importance as to advise its being made a sealed package of and locked up in the cellar. Now, why did not Superintendent Bryning and Inspector Baxendale suspect any of these people who had produced these things in such a curious way ] Why did he select Mrs. Maybrick alone out of all the in- mates of that house, and say to her—