The Cat Woman

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.

When she came back she ordered the nurse to get some ice, and placed the bottle on a washstand. (When chemists later analyzed the meat juice, they found that it contained half a grain of arsenic.) Two nights later Maybrick died. Florrie was arrested. In gloomy Walton Gaol, Florrie sank to the stone floor, crying, "Oh, my God, help me," and fainted.

Crowds hissed her as she was driven to her trial in the prison van. Her dressy friends flocked to see the trial, carrying opera glasses and basket lunches. Florrie's counsel was Sir Charles Russell, later Lord Chief Justice. Her defense: that May-brick had long been addicted to drugs of all sorts, including arsenic; that it was at his own insistence that Florrie had put some "white powder" into his meat juice; that the cause of death had not been fixed with any certainty (which was true); that she had soaked the flypapers for arsenic to use as a face lotion, a common cosmetic practice of the day.

Not so easily explained was a curious collection found in Florrie's trunk and in various places in the house: a package labeled "Arsenic--Poison for cats," three bottles with arsenic in them, a rag and a handkerchief impregnated with arsenic, other lethal odds & ends which doctors said were enough in sum to poison 50 people. Florrie was convicted, sentenced to be hanged.

But public opinion did not underwrite the verdict. While the gibbet was being erected outside her cell, medical men and newspapers insisted on her innocence.

Queen Victoria commuted Florrie's sentence to life imprisonment.

For 15 years she suffered the indignities and ordeals of English prison life, while her mother, the Baroness, spent a fortune trying to win her release. Cardinal Gibbons, U.S. Secretary of State James G. Elaine and Ambassador Robert Lincoln added their appeals. At last, in 1904, Florrie was freed.

She returned to the U.S., finally settled in Connecticut. Her two children were dead. The Baroness had died, impoverished. For a while, Florrie was supported by friends of the family, then she became the ward of her kindly neighbors, who knew her only as Mrs. Chandler. Clothes unkempt, face like a withered apple, "Mrs. Chandler" wandered over the Berkshire foothills, visited the village store, chatted amiably with neighbors. Boys at nearby South Kent School, who had never heard of Florrie Maybrick, carried Mrs. Chandler's bundles for her, occasionally chopped her firewood. Her closest friend was the late Miss Clara C. Dulon, housemother at the school. When Miss Dulon died, Mrs. Chandler lost her only confidante.

Among her few pathetic effects, neighbors last week found a scrapbook of yellowed clippings--the strange newspaper story of her life. After a brief service in the South Kent School chapel, Florrie Maybrick was buried on the hill, next to her friend, Miss Dulon. Up to her deserted cottage rolled an A.S.P.C.A. car, to take away the cats.

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