A Flypaper Case For Monday Mystery...!

Reasonable doubt can be a very good thing in some cases, often meaning the difference between life and death.

Public opinion is also a good thing to have on your side if you are being tried for murder. Often it can swing the scales of justice enough to make the courts take a good look at the punishment handed out.

The Case Of The Stickily Suspicious Flypaper

Florence Maybrick was an American Southern belle who’d married an Englishman named James Maybrick more than twice her age. A hypochondriac, James made a habit of imbibing small amounts of poison as tonics.

When he died in Liverpool in spring 1889, no one could tell for sure whether the arsenic found in his system had been administered by him or by someone else. After all, doctors were also in the habit of prescribing poisons to their patients.

Florence had been seen soaking arsenical flypapers in water and was having an affair, so she came under suspicion. She had a good excuse, though, claiming to be making a cosmetic wash for her face. Although she was sentenced to hang, the public’s objection to the unfairness of that verdict caused her to be consigned to prison for 15 years instead. Whether she really was guilty is anybody’s guess, though there seems to have been lots of room for reasonable doubt.

I took this murder story from the site Listverse. They have several more mystery stories , if you like that sort of thing.

Coffee out on the patio this morning. Care for some watermelon?