It was the mid-1990s, and Norfolk librarian Peggy McPhillips’ phone rang.
It was someone with a British accent. The person wanted to know if the library had any handwriting samples of a James Maybrick, a British cotton merchant who lived in Norfolk during the late 19th century.
McPhillips was used to getting requests. But more calls came in the months that followed, all asking for the same, all from callers who seemed to have English accents.
Why are you so interested in this man’s handwriting, she asked one caller.
Because, the person answered, he may have been Jack the Ripper — the clue was his penmanship.
Maybrick’s name has been floated for decades as a prime suspect in the infamous, grisly 1888 London murders that targeted women. A diary purporting to belong to the killer, and confessing his misdeeds, was linked to Maybrick, though its authenticity is in question.
Maybrick’s own life story, however, is perhaps equally riveting.
It includes debauchery across continents, arsenic addiction and his own wife being charged with his death.
Maybrick spent about a decade in Norfolk off and on, living in what’s now the Freemason historic district.
McPhillips, who retired last year but heads the Norfolk Historical Society, never found a sample of Maybrick’s writing. But she was always intrigued by the local connection to some of history’s most notorious, unsolved murders thousands of miles away.
“I thought, ‘Oh wow. Jack the Ripper here in Norfolk.'”
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Maybrick was born in Liverpool on Oct. 24, 1838, into a well-respected family. His father was parish clerk at St. Peter’s Church and Maybricks before him had served the church.
Little is known about his early life, but he enjoyed playing cricket with his three younger brothers and it’s thought that he attended Liverpool College.
Just around the corner from the family home was the notorious Museum of Anatomy, “reputed to contain the greatest number of preserved anatomical specimens in Britain,” according to the book “The Diary of Jack the Ripper.”
When Maybrick was about 12, a carriage heading to the museum overturned, spilling hundreds of wax-model body parts and creating a ghastly scene. Living near such a place would have allowed anyone to pick up basic anatomical knowledge, the book’s author noted.
By his early 30s, Maybrick formed Maybrick and Company, Cotton Merchants with his brother, Edwin.
In 1874, he set sail to Norfolk to establish a branch office. Nearly half of all cargo ships in Norfolk took their wares to Liverpool.
He found a relatively small, swampy city still recovering from the bloodshed of the Civil War, which had ended nine years earlier, and the yellow fever epidemic of 1855.
It was booming in other endeavors. Buildings and ports crammed along the Elizabeth River and the city had more than 240 bars, gambling parlors and brothels in its downtown. Norfolk would soon be called “the wickedest city in the United States” by one New York publication. The Virginian-Pilot wrote that downtown “wallowed in sin.”
Maybrick fit in. He was described as well-liked; an engaging, educated and tenacious man whose face was punctuated by heavy-lidded gray eyes and a drooping mustache. He dressed well, per Victorian custom, including fitted suits.
Maybrick rented quarters on West York Street with a fellow cotton broker, Nicholas Bateson, and a Black servant named Thomas Stansell. The neighborhood was up-and-coming. During the yellow fever crisis, people had escaped to “country houses” there where it was considered to have better air, McPhillips said. Streetcars were still drawn by horses, and Freemason Street was home to the city’s first gas-powered streetlight.
Maybrick could walk to work at the Norfolk Cotton Exchange, located near where Town Point Park now stands. He joined the gentlemen’s Virginia Club, which still exists in Norfolk and claims Maybrick as its most infamous member. He split his time between Norfolk in the cotton-picking season and home in England.
At some point he developed malaria and took quinine to treat it. When that did no good, he turned to strychnine and arsenic, thought to be cures. Men also sometimes took arsenic thinking it improved their virility. Maybrick bought the substances from chemists such as Santo’s on Main Street and C.F. Greenwood’s in Freemason.
Stansell, his servant, later recalled that Maybrick sent him many times to buy it and would mix it into beef tea to drink. Stansell was surprised by the amount of pills and potions in Maybrick’s office.
“I am,” the cotton merchant once told him, “the victim of free-living.”
Bateson recalled his roommate being fixated on his health and increasingly obsessed with cures.
Thus began Maybrick’s cycle of arsenic addiction fueled by hypochondriac tendencies.
Maybrick spent plenty of time in local brothels. Two or three times a week, he sought the companionship of the “notorious woman” Mollie Hogwood and her establishment on Church Street. Her parlor furniture was described as “of the most costly character” and the bordello’s floors “elegantly carpeted with the finest velvet fabric.”
Hogwood — alternately referred to as Mary or by the last name Howard — had been orphaned by yellow fever. She was said to own more diamonds than any Norfolk woman of her class.
But even she would say later in an affidavit that Maybrick was a man of “different moods and fancies.”
In 1880, he sailed home. During the voyage, Maybrick, then 42, became entranced by 17-year-old Florence Chandler. She was wealthy, Alabama-born and reportedly a niece of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Her mother’s third marriage, to a German baron, made her a part of European nobility.
They married at St. James Church in Piccadilly in London and returned to Norfolk in 1882 with a son. They rented a house on West Freemason Street.
But by 1884, the cotton trade was declining amid a surge in coal. James resigned from the Cotton Exchange.
The Maybricks returned to England, embarking on a much more tumultuous, and deadly, chapter.
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In the late 19th century, London’s East End was squalid and violent, neglected in favor of new, posh developments happening to the west.
The Whitechapel neighborhood was particularly dreadful, full of dark alleyways, low-rent housing and thousands of prostitutes. Violence against women of the trade was common, though rarely discussed or reported.
But from August through September of 1888, five women were slaughtered within a mile of one another.
“A strangely horrible murder took place at Whitechapel this morning,” The New York Times reported after the third. The head of the woman had been severed, her body cut to pieces.
“The murders are certainly the most ghastly and mysterious known to English police history,” the Times reported eight days later on Sept. 1, following the fourth murder. The woman’s throat was cut, body “ripped up.”
Later that month, someone started sending taunting letters to police and news agencies, claiming to be the killer.
He called himself Jack the Ripper.
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Earlier in the year of the murders, the Maybricks moved to a wealthy suburb of Liverpool into the palatial Battlecrease House. It had an orchard, stable and small lake with fish — plenty of space for their son and now daughter to roam. Rumor had it a murder had taken place at the house years before.
It was across from the Liverpool Cricket Club, where the couple were members. The Maybricks also enjoyed wine and horse racing.
For those in their social circle, the Maybricks appeared to be the ideal family. But not long after they settled back in Britain, their marriage was imploding.
Florence learned that James had kept up a decadeslong affair with a Sarah Ann Robertson — some records refer to her as having his surname and several of his children.
James and Florence reportedly started sleeping in separate bedrooms. She began an affair with a younger man named Alfred Brierley, enraging her husband.
The family was running into financial difficulties as well.
There was an economic downturn and Florence’s extravagant spending racked up debt. James still had his arsenic habit. He began to worry as much about his finances as he did about his health.
Friends noted he seemed to be aging rapidly, despite being in his 40s. His brother-in-law was concerned about his behavior. James reportedly gave Florence a black eye.
In April of 1889, he fell seriously ill, at one point blaming it on inferior sherry. Then, on May 11, he died. He was 50.
Florence was arrested.
Five years earlier, two Liverpool women had been convicted of murdering people by extracting arsenic from flypaper.
A servant saw flypaper soaking in a bowl in Florence’s room and concluded “the mistress is poisoning the master.” Florence would say later that she was making a solution for herself; arsenic-based mixtures were commonly used as a face wash.
But the domestic staff also found James’ beef tea mixed with arsenic, which his wife said was what he liked.
Florence was tried and swiftly convicted in a proceeding that emphasized her affair.
The trial made news on both sides of the Atlantic, including in Norfolk. Many people from the couple’s Virginia days gave testimonies about James Maybrick’s arsenic use. One mariner, John Fleming, said Maybrick told him he took the arsenic for strength.
The New York Times wrote that “there is no doubt in the minds of any of the Norfolk people who knew the Maybricks during their residence here, but that the husband who was a confirmed arsenic eater who killed himself by an overdose of the drug.”
Nevertheless, Florence was sentenced to death.
“At that time I was suspected by all — or rather, people were not sufficiently just to content themselves with suspicions,” she later wrote in an autobiography. “They condemned me outright, and, unheard, struck at a weak, defenseless woman.”
Feminists and legal analysts alike later expressed outrage at the case. Many “prominent southerners” in America signed a petition on Florence’s behalf, according to the Atlanta Constitution in 1891.
The judge who presided over the trial died in an insane asylum just a few years after the verdict.
Florence spent 15 years in prison until eventually her sentence was reduced — after the death of Queen Victoria. The queen had reportedly not wanted to release “so wicked a woman.”
Florence returned to the States, penniless and ruined. It was only when she died in Connecticut in 1941, at age 79, that locals learned of her storied past.
The Virginian-Pilot headline announcing her death was pointed: “Aged Woman, Who Married in Norfolk, Was Convicted of Poisoning Husband, Dies in Shack Amidst Her Many Cats.”
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For 133 years, the identity of Jack the Ripper has remained elusive.
The murders draw in keyboard vigilantes the world over and have spawned a seemingly infinite list of suspects.
In 2019, the Journal of Forensic Sciences published a paper naming the killer as Aaron Kosminski, a Polish barber who, authors claimed, had left traces of blood and sperm on a shawl of one victim. But even that paper has been disputed.
As for James Maybrick, his name wouldn’t start appearing in Ripper forums until more than a century later, in 1992.
That year, a Liverpool scrap metal dealer named Michael Barrett claimed a friend had given him a diary that belonged to the killer.
“I give my name that all know of me, so history do tell, what love can do to a gentleman born,” the diary is signed. “Yours truly, Jack the Ripper.”
Frenzied attempts followed to verify the diary, which is laced with profanity and horrific descriptions of violence against women.
In her bombshell 1993 book, “The Diary of Jack the Ripper: The Chilling Confessions of James Maybrick,” Shirley Harrison concluded that Maybrick was the author.
She and other believers cite the diary’s references, including “returning to Battlecrease” and “visiting Michael,” the name of Maybrick’s brother in London.
Harrison posits that Maybrick was incited to violence by drug-fueled rage at Florence’s extramarital affair. The arsenic habit had driven him criminally insane, she wrote.
He would have been familiar with the Whitechapel area through visiting his brother and his mistress, who lived nearby.
Since Harrison’s book was published, however, the authenticity of the diary has been heavily debated.
Barrett, the scrap metal dealer, admitted to forging the diary, then retracted his confession multiple times. Forensic tests on the diary have reached mixed conclusions about the ink’s age.
More recently, some have claimed that the diary was found by electrical contractors under the floorboards of Battlecrease in the 1990s.
A second piece of evidence against Maybrick — also in dispute — emerged in the form of a pocket watch that allegedly belonged to him. The watch was engraved with “J. Maybrick,” “I am Jack” and the initials of the five murder victims.
Eagle-eyed researchers have also spotted what appear to be the initials “F.M.” — thought to be Florence Maybrick — written in blood in a photo of one of the Ripper victims.
Michael Maybrick, James’ brother, has even been accused of being the killer and framing his brother.
James, meanwhile, is sometimes named as another mysterious serial killer, another string of murders supposedly committed by the Ripper: the Servant Girl Annihilator, who preyed upon women in Texas in 1884 and ’85. Maybrick was in Texas for work at the time of the crimes.
His guilt is still debated on Jack the Ripper forums.
Were the “seeds of his sinister and evil behavior sown during his years in Virginia?” asks the “Big Book of Virginia Ghost Stories.”
McPhillips, the retired Norfolk librarian, said she spent time looking into city records, searching for any unsolved macabre murders that could’ve been linked to Maybrick. She came up short.
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It wouldn’t be unusual to hear James Maybrick’s name still muttered in Freemason on a dark October night.
Dr. Guy and Lisa Trengove-Jones hosted a ghost tour for several years that included him. They compiled research on spooky stories, and volunteer actors dressed up for the roles, hoping to bring local history alive.
In the few images of Maybrick that survive, he boasted a bushy walrus mustache, three-piece suit and top hat, a look loved by the actors.
“That was a fun one,” Trengove-Jones said. “Everybody wanted to play Jack the Ripper.”
She always thought Norfolk should open some sort of Maybrick museum for so-called Ripperologists who travel in search of clues. People still visit the Battlecrease House in Liverpool, for instance. The family’s gravestone in England has been vandalized.
Her research makes Maybrick her favored Ripper suspect. But she doesn’t think authorities can ever truly close the case.
The former Norfolk resident will always remain a suspect.
Katherine Hafner, 757-222-5208, katherine.hafner@pilotonline.com
A note on sources: Most of the information in this story was based on the following materials: newspaper archives of The Virginian-Pilot and its predecessors; “The Diary of Jack the Ripper” by Shirley Harrison; “A Poisoned Life” by Richard Jay Hutto; “The Maybrick A to Z” by Christopher Jones; History.com; Smithsonian Magazine; and The Guardian. Help was also provided by Troy Valos of the Sargeant Memorial Room at Norfolk’s Slover Library and Robert Hitchings of the Wallace Memorial History Room of the Norfolk County Historical Society.