As all Valentine’s meat-juice bottles look alike, Mr. Michael Maybrick showed sufficient caution to say he could not identify the bottle shown him; but Nurse Gore, to whom every act of mine, however innocent, was fraught with “surreptitiousness” and “suspicion,” balked at no such scruples, but boldly testified that the bottle produced in court was the identical one that Mr. Michael Maybrick “took from the washstand,” even though at the inquest, when his memory was freshest, he testified that he took it from the table.
It should be remembered that my statement to the court was to the effect that I put a powder (its nature unknown to me) in the meat-juice bottle I had in my hands. Yet no bottle containing a powder, or in which a powder had been dissolved, appeared in evidence. According to the analyst, the bottle submitted to him contained arsenic that had been put in in a state of solution. Now it resolves itself to this: either I uttered a falsehood about the powder and really introduced a solution, or another bottle was substituted for the one I had for two minutes in my possession.
The contention of the prosecution was that I “invented” the powder, precisely as it was contended I “invented” the face-wash prescription which was found after the trial. If I “invented” the powder, how did I come by the solution? If I had had arsenic in solution in my possession, would I have gone to the trouble of making a solution for a face wash by the clumsy method of soaking fly-papers? Is not the proposition quite absurd on its face—that I should openly call attention to a method of arsenic extraction with the object of murder, when I already had the means at my command?
Finally, let it be borne in mind, as stated by Justice Stephen himself as a remarkable fact, that no arsenic was traced to my procurement or found in my personal belongings (save and except the innocuous fly-papers), and I may add that no arsenic was traced to any one connected with the case, except to my husband.
I say it is absolutely clear that the bottle of Valentine’s meat juice which Mr. Michael Maybrick took possession of and handed to Dr. Carter is not the same bottle which Nurse Gore saw me place on the washstand. There should be no flaw in the identity of the bottle which was handed to the analyst and the one which was in my hands, and I think the reader will say that it is impossible to conceive a greater flaw in any evidence of identity than shown by these witnesses of the prosecution at the inquest, when their minds were freshest as to their respective parts in this incident, and at the trial.
Those of my readers who follow the analysis of the testimony as presented by Messrs. Lumley & Lumley can hardly have failed to be impressed by the fact that I was surrounded by unscrupulous enemies, by people who not only had extraordinary knowledge as to where to look for deposits of arsenic, but also remarkable intuitions that arsenic had been administered before any evidence of the presence of poison had been analytically proven.
In the above I have not aimed to make an analysis of the testimony, such as, for example, on the evidence now available, Lord Russell could have made; I have simply endeavored to satisfy my readers that I have substantial grounds for asserting my innocence before the world.
Florence Elizabeth Maybrick.