Upon Which Mrs. Maybrick May Be hanged
BRIERLY SPEAKS OUT AT LAST
Liverpool, Aug. 13.
Monday, Aug. 26, has been fixed upon as the day for the execution of Mrs. Maybrick, who was last week convicted of poisoning her husband. The petition circulated in Liverpool in behalf of the prisoner has received 100,000 signatures. Mr. Lincoln, the United States minister, and many members of the American colony in London have signed a petition for the convicted woman's reprieve.
For the first time since he became publicly identified as Mrs. Maybrick's paramour, Albert Brierly has talked with the knowledge that his statement would appear in print. Brierly is tall and slender, about 38 years old; his face is sallow and clearly cut. He wears a light mustache and pointed chin beard.
"I have been maligned, persecuted and misjudged in every way," he said. "It has broken up my business and will cause me to leave this city, but I am a man and I have made no complaint. I only desire that the terrible misfortunes of the woman, whose treatment has been scarcely fair, may not be further increased through me. Before the proceedings against Mrs. Maybrick were initiated or talked of I had arranged for a vacation in the shape of a tour about the Mediterranean. I made my preparations without thought that any trouble was coming to her. The last interview I had with Mrs. Maybrick was on April 6. I wish you would make note of that and let the public judge how far those three meetings, long previous to Mr. Maybrick's death, justify the assumption all through the trial, and particularly by the judge, that she and I were on the closest terms of intimacy, and hand in hand, so to speak, in the whole matter."
"I think the judge laid unnecessary and unfair stress on the motive. The John business was an error from beginning to end and it told terribly against her. The letter from John was a perfectly innocent letter from a perfectly innocent party. It was the view the judge took of it that made it tell so heavily on the jury. And, furthermore, I cannot keep from blaming the judge for his unauthorized and stated assumption that the intimacy between Mrs. Maybrick and myself, which ended on March 21 last, was in progress during all the period which the trial covered."
"Has your statement made Monday morning covered the ground?"
"Yes, this ground and more. I have placed it in the hands of her solicitors for presentation to the home secretary."
The most important bearing of Mr. Brierly's statement is something which appeared, not in but between the lines. The curious facts and strange motives which underlie this case from beginning to end are something amazing, and the half has not been told. One thing is certain, however, and that is that if Mrs. Maybrick is executed she will have been done to death by a woman.
Certain facts have developed which throw a very peculiar light on Brierly's statement. The whole of the domestic quarrel which followed the Grand National meeting was caused by a woman. The woman was herself in love with Brierly, and it was she who, through Maybrick, made the trouble. She was a near relative of a woman who constituted herself public prosecutor before Maybrick's death, and to that end was a most skilled traitress to Mrs. Maybrick during all the time of the proceedings, in which the latter gave her full confidence.
