Florence Chandler was a southern belle from Alabama, whose mother was married to minor aristocracy as Baroness Roques. Growing up in the South of the ante-bellum and Confederacy periods she met a Liverpool cotton broker named James Maybrick. James romanced her, and married her. This, despite the production of children, was not a good thing.
James was a Victorian womanizer, but he fully expected that his wife would always be faithful. If she had some support group around her she might have, but James' family and friends disliked her. So did her servants, like Alice Yapp her maid, and her next door neighbor Matilda Briggs. Only one of her in-laws, a brother-in-law named Edwin Maybrick liked her...possibly because they fell in love. After this affair ended Florence picked up a new affair with one of James' friends, Alfred Brierley. They met on one occasion during the running of the Grand National race in 1889. But James learned of it - and gave Florence a black eye.
Shortly afterward Florence bought some flypaper - which was coated with arsenic. It was later claimed she used it (as many women did) to get the arsenic by soaking the paper for her complexion. However, James suddenly ill. Florence nursed him, and he got worse. He finally died. Yapp, her friendly servant, would later report overhearing James making statements like, "Bunny, how could you!" (Bunny being Florence's nickname). His family finally came in, pushed Florence out of the sick room, and tried to help James - but James died. An autopsy showed arsenic in his body.
Florence's trial in July 1889 was the biggest murder trial of that period (had Jack the Ripper been brought to trial his trial would have been bigger - but more of Jack later). Her defense counsel was Sir Charles Russell, the former Attorney General (and future Lord Chief Justice). Russell pointed out the harsh situation Florence had from most of her husband's family, his friends, the neighbors, and the servants (Yapp's testimony left that worthy without any decent reputation for loyalty, a necessity in a service position). Russell also found flaws in the arsenic theory. First, James used arsenic - he was a hypochondriac who used self-medication with many arsenic based medicines (to the point where he might be called an arsenic eater). Second, the actual dose that killed James was not traced properly.
Unfortunately, the case was presided over by Mr. Justice Sir James Fitzjames Stephen. He was a leading expert on the criminal law (and his history of the criminal law is still in use today). But Sir James had recently had a nervous breakdown. He gave a fair summation on the first of two days in court, but his concluding day was full of errors of fact, errors of law, sentences that went nowhere, and statements that showed a lack of any common knowledge (he admitted not knowing what the Grand National was). He did attack Florence as an adulteress - which was true, but had nothing to do with her being a poisoner. In the end, the jury followed his odd instructions and convicted her.
Sentenced to hang, Florence's supporters protested vigorously. In the end her sentence was reduced to life imprisonment (she would serve 15 years before her release in 1904), and possibly she never committed the crime. Sir James was speedily retired, and died in an asylum in 1894. Florence retired to the U.S., became a poor recluse, and died in Connecticut in 1941.
Her case has never been forgotten, but it gained further notice in the last fifteen years. In the early 1990s a diary surfaced in Liverpool (where the Maybricks lived) supposedly by James Maybrick, in which he claimed he was Jack the Ripper! This diary is not universally accepted (in fact many feel it is a fabrication), but it added a whole new dimension to the 1889 poisoning case: If she did it, did Florence (wittingly or unwittingly) avenge the East End women of London?
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