Lyric and Story: Jimmy Fuller

The Maybrick Saga

The lyric below pretty much tells the story except to say that it's unlikely Bunny poisoned her husband. There was testimony given at the trial that James was taking much more arsenic and strychnine than his doctor was prescribing. There was also testimony given that it was impossible to extract enough arsenic from flypaper to kill a man. It seems that Alice Yapp's meddling stirred up a hornet's nest. It's my belief that the phrase "to shut your yap" or to "be yappy" came from this story. I have no real evidence to support this, but it was such a huge story at the time in Europe and North America that it seems like too much of a coincidence not to be the case.
As for the Jack the Ripper connection, all the suspects have their supporters, and those that support James as being the one say that his diary has never been proven to be a hoax.
And as for Jimmy Fuller, it seems he came full circle from his father's fate to his own.

Lyric: Jimmy Fuller
©2001 Wayne Krewski (SOCAN)  All rights reserved.

"Jimmy Fuller" can be found on the CD   "Stories From Rossland"
It can also be found on the live CD    "The Miners Hall Concert"

In 1881 a British captain of the sea married a
southern belle, a banker's daughter from Mobile, Alabama.
James Maybrick was 42; Florence Chandler, Bunny to her friends,
only 18, but a bride with a new life in England.
In 1882 came a son named James, but they called him Bobo.
The father left the sea and became a Liverpool cottonbroker.

The spring of 1889 brought trouble to the Maybrick house;
James had a mistress and Bunny met a lover at the Flatman's Hotel in London
The family doctor Fuller brought them back to each other but
James took ill after years of taking arsenic and strychnine his doctor prescribed;
but often on his own as many testified.

Alice Yapp, the housemaid came across some flypaper soaking in some water;
Bunny was extracting arsenic to make a face lotion.
Alice was meddlesome and she got suspicious, she thought that Bunny was poisoning her husband.
Edwin and Michael, brothers of James came to see for themselves.
The next afternoon Bunny gave Alice a letter to post, addressed to Mr. Brierly,
her lover from London; Bunny never knew suspicions were mounting.

Alice set off to post the letter with young Jimmy carrying the mail,
but he dropped Bunny's letter in the mud;
that was the excuse Alice needed to justify opening the letter.
Four days later James was dead and Bunny was sentenced to hang, but after a
public outcry in England and America her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

Young Jimmy went to live in London with his uncle Michael, but somewhere along the way
he took the name of Fuller, the family doctor.
Many years later a diary was found in which Maybrick claimed to be Jack the Ripper,
but in the end the diary turned out to be a hoax.
In nineteen-and-four Bunny was set free and went to America, while Jimmy came to Rossland
and worked as an assayer and surveyor at Le Roi Mine.

On the 10th of April, 1911, Jimmy Fuller was the Chief Assayer,
and engaged to be married to Marion Martin, and well liked by everyone.
About 2 pm he was working in his office having missed his lunch when he stopped for a sandwich
in the middle of a test. On his desk were three beakers, two with cyanide and one with water.

Fred Peters, the foreman of the mine, got a call from Jimmy in distress.
They found him on the steps to his office, dead of cyanide poisoning.
On his hand he still wore an asbestos mitt and a pair of metal tongs lay beside him on the steps;
on his desk half a sandwich and a tipped over beaker of cyanide.
Poor Jimmy Fuller he was such a bright light, but he couldn't escape the darkness of his past;
he dropped his mother's letter, helped send her to prison, and he drank from the wrong beaker, ending his own life.