James Maybrick was a well known cotton merchant in Liverpool. The mysterious emergence of the so-called Maybrick journal in 1992 however, immediately thrust him to the forefront of credible Ripper suspects. Regardless of the Diary's authenticity, the story of James Maybrick is remarkable in its own right. Convicted of his murder in 1889, Maybrick's wife was sentenced to be hanged. The trial, by any standard, was a horrible travesty of justice. Within two years, the trial's presiding judge died in an insane asylum. Fifteen years later, Florence Elizabeth Maybrick was finally released from prison. Here is the remarkable story.