UBC: Colquhoun, Did She Kill Him?

[truepenny]

Did She Kill Him?: A Victorian Tale of Deception, Adultery, and Arsenic by Kate Colquhoun

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a better book than Colquhoun's first, Murder in the First Class Carriage possibly because her material gave her a better thesis to explore. It's a bad title, though, because that question, "Did she, Florence Maybrick, kill him, her husband James?" is one that Colquhoun studiously does not answer. Her opinion is clear--Florence Maybrick was too stupid to commit murder successfully--but she doesn't give an answer.

And she's right not to. At this point, at this remove and with the spectacular trainwreck of Victorian medicine in the way, it's impossible to know if James Maybrick was deliberately poisoned, if he poisoned himself with quack medicines (and quite possibly died of withdrawal from arsenic, because--interesting point of order--once you habituate your body to it, you can't stop taking it), or if he was poisoned by the medicines his doctors prescribed him. And if he was deliberately poisoned, it's not at all clear that it was Florence who did it. She's just the one with the big pink-neon motive.

What is abundantly clear is that Florence Maybrick was convicted of murder because it was proved she'd committed adultery. The prosecution couldn't even actually prove that James Maybrick died of arsenic poisoning, much less that anyone deliberately poisoned him, much less that Florence was the poisoner. But the judge (Virginia Woolf's uncle) believed whole-heartedly that a woman who committed adultery was a woman who would commit murder, and he told the jury to believe that, too, and never mind the confusing medical evidence, it doesn't really matter. And the commutation of her sentence actually only compounded the judicial error, because it was the Home Office saying, "We are sure she killed him, even though the evidence doesn't support that claim. Therefore we will punish her for something we can't prove she did, but, hey, we won't kill her! (Even though the correct sentence for what we are sure she did is death.) Win-win!" The words "moral certainty" get used a lot.

Colquhoun does a good job of laying out some very confusing evidence (the chronology of when which symptoms started and when Maybrick was given what is tangled at best), and she makes it clear that Florence Maybrick was quite desperately stupid. (No, you do not give the letter you have written to your lover to the children's nurse to post, especially when you know she doesn't like you.) Also that Florence was judged guilty of murder by her husband's family before James was even dead.

So did she kill him? I don't know, but I know there was more than enough reasonable doubt to secure her acquittal, and even if she was a monster, the fact that she was sentenced to death instead makes judge and jury monsters, too.



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