The Maybrick case and the flypaper
Liverpool, England, 1889
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton merchant, fell ill on 27 April 1889 and died on 11 May at home, in the Aigburth district. A hypochondriac, he had taken patent medicines and arsenic as a tonic for years, and a local chemist confirmed he had sold him arsenic for a long time. Even so, suspicion fell on his wife, Florence, an American born in Alabama, many years younger than her husband.
Three things weighed against her: in April she bought flypaper containing arsenic at a local chemist's and left it soaking in water, for a face lotion, she said; the household nanny intercepted an incriminating letter she wrote to a lover, Alfred Brierley, and handed it to her husband's brothers; and a nurse said she had tampered with a bottle of beef extract, in which arsenic was later found, although the sick man never drank from that bottle. A search of the house turned up enough arsenic to kill dozens of people.
Sources
In the game
Flypaper
A Victorian mansion in Aigburth, Liverpool, May 1889. Theodore Halloway, a 51-year-old cotton merchant, died in his own bedroom after two weeks of stomach pains.
Florence was tried at St George's Hall in Liverpool and sentenced to death on 7 August 1889 by Justice James Fitzjames Stephen. Amid public protest and doubt over the cause of death, the Home Office commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. She left prison in 1904, returned to the United States and died in Connecticut in 1941. The game borrows the flypaper in the basin, the beef extract bottle and the intercepted letter; characters, investigation and outcome are fiction.
