The Murder, the Millions, the Meat Juice, and Mrs. Maybrick: An International Sensation Arrives in Richmond

Everyone in Richmond knew exactly who Florence Maybrick was and why her story was such a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. Richmonders, like the rest of the country, were avidly following her progress, reading on the front page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch on August 24, 1904, that Mrs. Maybrick had landed in New York and was once more in her native country after barely avoiding the hangman and having spent fifteen years in an English prison on a charge of murder.

Richmond’s most famous patent medicine, Valentine’s Meat Juice, played a prominent role in the investigation and trial of Florence Maybrick for murdering her husband.

Twenty-four years earlier, Francis Chandler met James Maybrick on the transatlantic liner Baltic, in 1880. She was an eighteen-year-old beauty from Mobile, Alabama, and he was a 42-year-old successful English cotton merchant. By the time the Baltic got to Liverpool, the pair were engaged to be married, and the ceremony took place in London the following spring. The first few years of marriage were happy and produced two children. James was often away from his family, managing his cotton business from both England and an office in Norfolk, Virginia, which was then a center of the cotton trade.

James had his foibles, though, and one was a high degree of hypochondria and another was a mania to self-medicate, leading to addiction to some exotic drugs and poisons. Among the many preparations he used was arsenic, which had many more uses in nineteenth-century homes than today. The substance was used in many patent medicines, such as “Dr. Simms Arsenic Complexion Wafers,” which were supposed to produce a “beautiful transparency, remove wrinkles, brighten the eyes, and raise the spirits.”

Arsenic was also used in flypaper, which were adhesive strips that held flies once they landed and then killed them with poison in the glue. A toxic liquid could be produced by soaking flypapers in water, and as one of Mrs. Maybrick’s biographers noted the deadly broth was bitter to taste, “…to administer the solution it had to be disguised in something that covered the color and the taste – strong tea, coffee, brandy, sherry, or meat juice were ideal for this purpose.”

An advertisement for Valentine’s Meat Juice from the collection of the Valentine Museum.

References to “meat juice” in relation to the Maybricks could only mean one thing for Richmonders, and that was the internationally known tonic, Valentine’s Meat Juice. Invented in Richmond in the early 1870s by Mann Valentine as a stimulant for his ailing wife, the meat juice was sold in distinctive two-ounce little brown bottles, each of which was said to contain the essence of four pounds of meat. It became one of Richmond’s leading exports and was distributed to sick people across the world who wanted to experience the meaty tonic’s “power to sustain and strengthen.”

Even Richmond’s C.F. Sauer Company, which was best known for its spice business, attempted to break into the popular patent medicine market. This advertisement for “Sauer’s Nerve and Bone Oil” is from 1909.

James Maybrick’s health began to decline and he ordered more unidentifiable medications (some of which may have contained strychnine) from a doctor in London. His Liverpool physician tried a variety of treatments and medicines on his patient. In one three-day period, Maybrick was prescribed “Fowler’s solution of arsenic,” which was one percent white arsenic and in addition, a morphine suppository. Throughout this roller coaster of medicine, and drugs and poisons, a staple of James Maybrick’s self-prescribed regimen was always Richmond’s Valentine’s Meat Juice.

A biographer of Florence Maybrick described her husband’s last day on May 10, 1889: “James was weakening. More medicine was prescribed: sulphonyl, nitroglycerine, cocaine, and phosphoric acid.” He died that night, beginning a chain of bewildering accounts and accusations. Florence seemed to incriminate herself with purchases of flypaper, handling a bottle of Meat Juice that was later found to contain arsenic, and acting suspiciously with little effort to conceal evidence. Florence embarked on an affair just months before her husband’s death, and when that was revealed in court it only added to the sensationalism of the case.

Tried for the murder of her husband, Florence Maybrick was convicted and sentenced to hang. Her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and she served fifteen years (some in solitary confinement) before being pardoned in 1904.  She was estranged from her daughter and her son and never saw them again after her imprisonment.  Ironically, her son died in 1911 after accidently ingesting cyanide. 

The story of her trial, conviction, imprisonment and eventual release would be enough drama for one lifetime, but there was another, perhaps even more incredible facet of her life. Florence and her mother Caroline von Roque (the widow of a minor French nobleman) had claim to exactly 2,532,304 acres of land in the mountains Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky. The claim dated back to the Revolutionary War and was a bequest by the United States government to von Roque’s ancestor who had assisted the American cause. No funds were ever transferred to Baroness Roque or Florence Maybrick, and their suit was for these funds rather than the vast amount of land itself. “The history of the case is weird and interesting,” said the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1908, “revealing scraps of French life, German titles, English prisons, and fabulous wealth in coal veins supposed to lie hidden beneath wild and undeveloped regions of Virginia mountain lands.”

Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 10, 1905.

The title to the land was clouded, to say the least, and Florence and her mother were going to court to receive funds for their interest in the complicated title and claim von Roque’s inheritance. “Mrs. Maybrick will come to Richmond to testify,” reported the Richmond Times-Dispatch on February 14, 1905. This whole scandalous circus of Florence Maybrick, her mother, her lawyer, a legal team opposing her, and a herd of reporters were all descending on Richmond for an expected resolution to the case. “It is understood, however, that the suit, which has lagged for years, will now be pushed to a finish.”

The Hotel Richmond (today the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Barbara Jones Building), with its leafy roof garden, was convenient lodgings for Mrs. Maybrick and her mother while in Richmond. The hotel was only a block away from City Hall where the Chancery Court was located.

The trial began in the Chancery Court on May 11, 1905, and Florence Maybrick and her mother faced a crowd of curious Richmonders who were eager to see this internationally famous personality. Maybrick, dressed in a “gray street gown, with a touch of subdued color in her hat and costume,” was described by a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch as “wonderfully well preserved, despite her hardships.” Her mother, Baroness von Roque, wore black and appeared to be “seventy years of age but still possessed of much vitality and unclouded intellectual powers.”

A crowd of curious Richmonders followed the famous Florence Maybrick and her mother across the light court of what is now called Old City Hall and into the Chancery Court.

The case brought by Mrs. Maybrick and her mother devolved into a long series of depositions taken in New York, Washington, and Richmond, coming down to some fine legal points and many hearings. Hovering in the background was the indisputable fact that the land in question had been broken up into many parcels, either owned now by big forestry companies, coal mines, or thousands of squatters who occupied the vast areas involved in the case. In December 1906, Maybrick and her mother returned to Richmond to once again press their case before the court.

A photo of Florence Maybrick shares the cover of a 2015 edition of her autobiography with an image of a bottle of Valentine’s Meat Juice.

When not in Richmond defending her legal rights, Florence Maybrick spoke on the popular Chautauqua lecture circuit on the subject of prison reform. In 1905 she wrote Mrs. Maybrick’s Own Story: My Fifteen Lost Years about her trial and conviction. In her book, Maybrick maintained that if she had the funds from her American inheritance, she could have paid for bringing a Norfolk pharmacist to testify at her murder trial and that testimony would have proven her innocence. 1906 saw Florence Maybrick embark on a lecture tour, speaking on the need for prison reform. In December 1908, a small article appeared in the New York Times: “Mrs. Maybrick Wins.”

The Chancery Court in Richmond ordered a complete accounting of deeds and titles to the thousands of acres involved in the Maybrick case and a review of all transactions between Maybrick, her mother, and D.W. Armstrong, their former lawyer responsible for the distribution of the funds.  It is unclear how much money, if any, Florence Maybrick and her mother won as a result of their lengthy legal pursuits.

Maybrick’s “vast fortune” seemed to dissipate somehow over the course of years into legal fog and static, leaving her destitute. Her mother died in 1910. The advent of radio killed the lecture circuit and Florence withdrew from the public, living quietly for decades in a cottage full of cats on the grounds of South Kent Boy’s School in Connecticut.  She died there in October 1941 and was buried on the grounds of the school chapel.

Florence Maybrick’s grave marker in South Kent, Connecticut only identifies her by her initials. Photo by Ron Suresha on FindaGrave.com.

It would be half a century before Richmonders again recalled Florence Maybrick and her tumultuous life. In 1992 a handwritten diary supposedly kept by Jack the Ripper identified James Maybrick as London’s most famous murderer, bringing Maybrick’s death and his wife’s conviction back into the public eye. Controversy ensued, and several books were published authenticating the diary, each one declaring the case definitely solved and Maybrick positively identified as the famous killer. Expert analysis of the manuscript, however, finally confirmed it was a hoax and Warner Brothers Books, Inc. cancelled its publication in 1993, but not before the Richmond Times-Dispatch speculated that James Maybrick may have actually started his criminal activity during the period he lived in Norfolk.

The most recent mention of Florence Maybrick in the news was in a 1994 Times-Dispatch article about a Williamsburg glassblower who was making reproduction Valentine’s Meat Juice bottles. The article listed various “Claims to Fame” associated with the original product: its use as the secret ingredient in the House Dressing at the Commonwealth Club, the mention of Valentine’s patent medicine in a 1937 Agatha Christie novel, and “In the late 19^th Century Maybrick case in England, a woman poisoned her husband by tampering with his Valentine’s Meat Juice.” This last judgmental description of Florence Maybrick ended a story vividly followed by Richmonders for more than a hundred years, but never more so than when Mrs. Maybrick herself came to town. 

- Selden