The Temuka Leader TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER, 24, 1889. THE MAYBRICK CASE.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1947, 24 September 1889, Page 2

The Temuka Leader TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER, 24, 1889. THE MAYBRICK CASE.

The full report of the great Maybrick case is now before us, and a most extraordinary case it is. Had Mrs Maybrick been a woman of good character there is not the smallest room for doubting that she would have been acquitted, and this is what lends to the case a peculiar aspect. Mrs Maybrick was convicted not on the strength of the evidence that tended to show she had poisoned her husband, but on the evidence of her guilty intimacy with Brierly, which she very fully admitted. It was proved beyond doubt by several witnesses that Mr Maybrick had been in the habit of taking arsenic for years, and that he took it in large quantities. This one fact would account for arsenic being found in the house, and it would also indicate that it would be difficult to

poison one so well accustomed to take it. To back this up Dr Tidy, an analytical chemist of the Home Office, doubtless a very high authority, stated that the symptoms of Maybrick’s illness were not those of arsenic poisoning. Moreover, he said that the result of the analysis of the contents of the stomach was quite consistent with death from gastritis or gastro-enteris. Dr McNamara, another eminent physician, swore that in his opinion death resulted from from gastroenteritis. and arsenic pills labelled “ Mr Maybrick ” were found in a drawer in his room. Sir John Poole and others swore they knew the deceased took a large amount of arsenic. There was nothing to connect Mrs Maybrick with the poisoning except that she was found to haye scraped the arsenic off fly papers, and that a handkerchief saturated with the poison was found in the pocket of her dressing gown. She explained that she used the scraping of the fly-papers to make a cosmetic for her face, and it appears to us that the saturated handkerchief is more consistent with that statement than with the one that she carried it about with her to use it in killing her husband. The judge, however, summed up against her. They must, he said, take the question of motive into consideration, Mrs Maybrick had carried on an illicit intercourse with Brierly. She had gone to London to meet him, and stayed with him at a hotel as h’s wife, and it was a remarkable fact that he was not the first man who was at the hotel with Mrs Maybrick under questionable cir-

cumsfcances. She wrote to Brierly, addressing him as “Dearest,” and telling him her husband was “sick unto death,” while as a matter of fact, according to the medical evidence, her husband was much better on the day she wrote that letter. From this the judge inferred that she must have some foreknowledge of her husband’s death, and that she wished to convey this knowledge to Brierly with the view of continuing their intimacy. It was this letter condemned her. It certainly looks bad, but then there is the evidence that Maybrick was accustomed to take the poison, and that the symptoms were inconsistent with arsenic poisoning.' They were/according to the doctors above mentioned, more of the symptoms of gastroenteritis, which might have been produced by having caught a chill at a ball <he had recently attended. To us there appears good and reasonable grounds for doubting that Mrs Maybrick ever poisoned her husband. He was old ; she was young, beautiful, and unfaithful, but she could have been all that, and yet be no murderess. The fly-papers and the Tetter to Brierly was all the evidence against her, and though both are strong they were net sufficient to condemn a person te death. We are not surprised therefore that the verdict created a sensation, and that the public interested themselves in the case to an extent which ultimately resulted in her sentence being commuted to penal servitude for life.