The little cottage was silent. Neighbor Conkrite, getting no answer to his knocking, finally pushed open the door and walked in. Cats brushed against his legs, ran like shadows through the dilapidated room, crouched and stared at him, with soundless mews. Crumpled on a bed lay their mistress, the old woman known around South Kent, Conn, as Mrs. Florence Chandler, the "cat woman." She was dead.
To Victorian England, 50 years ago, she had been better known as Florence May-brick. Convicted of poisoning her husband, she had been the principal in a mystery which intrigued nearly half the world.
On the day before the Confederate privateer Florida ran the Yankee blockade and sailed into Mobile Bay, a wealthy Mobile banker, William Chandler, celebrated the birth of his daughter, Florence Elizabeth. The following year, 1863, William Chandler died and his widow took her infant daughter to Europe. There the mother married a swaggering German cavalry officer, Baron Adolf von Roques. Florrie Chandler grew up as a Europeanized American. She went to school in Germany and France, returned to New York for occasional visits with her maternal grand mother. On one of her transatlantic trips she met James Maybrick, an English cotton broker, 24 years older than she. A year later, aged 18, she married him.
In 1884, Maybrick took his small, lovely bride to Liverpool, to live at Battlecrease, the Maybrick family home in suburban Aigburth, remote from the gaslit streets and noisy docks of the port. Florrie entered vivaciously into Aigburth's fashionable life. Only apparent flaw in her happiness was the antagonism her husband's brothers showed her. She bore two children. It looked like a happy marriage. But in those days all marriages were trademarked "Heaven." James Maybrick turned into a hypochondriac, morbidly dosed himself with drugs. Worse, Florrie suspected that he was unfaithful. She herself found a lover, went to meet him in London, where she had a three-day Victorian romance, at Flatman's Hotel. Then she went home to her husband and an apparent reconciliation. Next evening, returning from the Grand National Steeplechase, she and her husband quarreled violently; he struck her.
A month later, early in May, James Maybrick took to his bed, complaining of nausea and pains in his legs. Daily he grew worse. On the morning of the 8th, the children's nurse decided that something sinister was afoot. She confided in a friend of the Maybricks, who telegraphed to Brother Michael Maybrick, a London songwriter: "COME AT ONCE; STRANGE THINGS GOING ON HERE." The nurse's suspicions had been aroused by the sight of Florrie Maybrick soaking flypapers in water. The flypapers contained arsenic. Through the servants' quarters crept the horrified conviction that Florrie was poisoning her husband. In the parlor, Brothers Michael and Edwin whispered together, looked askance at the sister-in-law they had never accepted.
Next night, when the nurse was feeding the sick man some "Valentine's meat juice" from a fresh bottle, Florrie briskly entered the room, picked up the bottle and disappeared into the adjoining room.