The criminal trial of Mrs Florence Maybrick, held in Liverpool, England during the height of the British Empire 1889, is widely regarded as one of the greatest travesties of justice in British legal history. Mrs Maybrick was tried for murdering her husband via arsenic poisoning. However, the trial became a morality trial when the learned judge, Mr Justice James Fitzjames Stephen, linked Mrs Maybrick's demonstrated adultery to her alleged desire to physically remove her husband by administering poison. The jury, which pronounced a guilty verdict, consisted of twelve untrained and unschooled men who were unable to grasp the technical evidence and were probably unduly influenced by the judge's summing-up and by the professional status of one of the medical witnesses for the prosecution. The case is a timely reminder today for an international audience of the fallibility and inherent weaknesses of the legal system and the desperate need to retain Courts of Criminal Appeal within the courts system.

For over a hundred years, the mystery of Jack the Ripper has been a source of unparalleled fascination and horror, spawning an army of obsessive theorists and endless volumes purporting to finally reveal the identity of the brutal murderer who terrorized Victorian England. But what if there was never really any mystery at all? What if the Ripper was always hiding in plain sight, deliberately leaving a trail of clues to his identity for anyone who cared to look, while cynically mocking those who were supposedly attempting to bring him to justice? In They All Love Jack, the award-winning film director and screenwriter Bruce Robinson exposes the cover-up that enabled one of history's most notorious serial killers to remain at large. More than twelve years in the writing, this is no mere radical reinterpretation of the Jack the Ripper legend and an enthralling hunt for the killer. A literary high-wire act reminiscent of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, it is an expressionistic journey through the cesspools of late-Victorian society, a phantasmagoria of highly placed villains, hypocrites, and institutionalized corruption. Polemic forensic investigation and panoramic portrait of an age, underpinned by deep scholarship and delivered in Robinson's inimitably vivid and scabrous prose, They All Love Jack is an absolutely riveting and unique book, demolishing the theories of generations of self-appointed experts—the so-called Ripperologists—to make clear, at last, who really did it; and, more important, how he managed to get away with it for so long.

Florence Maybrick was a 19-year-old Alabama belle when she married cotton-broker James Maybrick in 1881. She was convicted of his murder in 1889 after arsenic was found in his corpse. However, it was never established whether she administered the poison, or whether Maybrick himself, a hypochondriac who used arsenic and other tonics, took the fatal dose. Her death sentence was commuted to imprisonment and she served 15 years before her reprieve in 1903. This 'bloody history' tells the compelling tale of a ruined marriage and its infidelities, examining the murder, trial and controversy through Home Office files held at the National Archives and features new photographs of Mrs. Maybrick. It concludes with a bizarre twist: James Maybrick became a Jack the Ripper suspect in 1992.

Florence Maybrick was the first American woman to be sentenced to death in England--for murdering her husband, a crime she almost certainly did not commit. Her 1889 trial was presided over by an openly misogynist judge who was later declared incompetent and died in an asylum. Hours before Maybrick was to be hanged, Queen Victoria reluctantly commuted her sentence to life in prison--in her opinion a woman who would commit adultery, as Maybrick had admitted, would also kill her husband. Her children were taken from her; she never saw them again. Her mother worked for years to clear her name, enlisting the president of the United States and successive ambassadors, including Robert Todd Lincoln. Decades later, a gruesome diary was discovered that made Maybrick's husband a prime Jack the Ripper suspect.

This text is a bloodcurdling confession of an horrific killer that unfolds a terrible Victorian tale of jealousy, depravity and love.

In this analysis of his diary, investigative Shirley Harrison explains all about the origins of the text, the rigorous scientific analysis it has endured and reveals startling new information about Maybrick's shadowy background.