The darkened bedroom in which James Maybrick died, at dusk on a Saturday in May 1889, is today Paul Dodd's sunny sitting-room, overlooking Liverpool Cricket Club. He grew up at Battlecrease.
Murder devotees have always visited. "Three coachloads a week," Mr Dodd grumbles, "and 50 people wandering in the garden." But now a new generation of crime crawlers makes the trek to Riversdale Road: Ripperologists.
It is possible that, as well as being the victim of a murder, James Maybrick may also have been the world's best-known serial killer. In 1992, more than a century after his death and Florence's subsequent trial, a diary surfaced. It was signed Jack the Ripper, and was apparently written by Maybrick. The suggestion - later denied - was that an electrician, working on Battlecrease House, had found the diary while rewiring and taken it away.
The diary puzzle is thick with theories. One is that it was stolen from Battlecrease by a servant after James Maybrick's death. Eventually, it came into the possession of Florence Maybrick's illegitimate grandson and passed, in turn, to his daughter.
Whatever its provenance, the "Ripper diary" put Battlecrease House back in the public glare. "I got into the Ripper thing myself at first," admits Mr Dodd, a 51-year-old deputy head teacher, "but with different people claiming different things and the whole media ferment, it all became stressful."
Mr Dodd's father bought the house after the war for £2,000 and split it into two flats. In the mid-1960s, when Paul Dodd returned from his Oxford studies, he found that his father had sold the grounds to a builder for a "mews development". The river view and Gothic-sounding Battlecrease name vanished, too.
Inside, number 7 remains intact. Through a huge stained-glass window, moted sunlight glints on the original staircase of American pine. Massive folding doors open to reveal the Maybricks' huge private ballroom, complete with the original, intricate cornicing.
In the late-1880s, the philandering Maybrick lorded it over Battlecrease House like one of Liverpool's merchant princes. But his cotton-broking business was on the slide and he had ordered Florence to cut back on household expenses.
"I would gladly give up the house tomorrow and move somewhere else," she confided to her mother, "but Jim says it would ruin him outright. For one must keep up appearances."
Battlecrease was a house of smoke and mirrors. "A current of mystery seemed to circulate all around, which gave you an uncanny feeling," their American visitor recalled, "a feeling that something was going on that you could not understand. In the yard, you would see the servants conversing in low tones. If anyone came up they would stop abruptly and disperse."
During Maybrick's last illness the same suspicious and hostile servants scrutinised Florence hourly. A nosy nanny intercepted a letter to a lover, another caught her soaking flypapers in water, a time-honoured way of extracting arsenic. Her brothers-in-law sequestered her two children. "My lord," she pleaded with the trial judge, "I had not one true or honest friend in that house."
Convicted of murder, Florence was spared a hanging and served 15 years of a life sentence before returning to America. She died in 1941. The historian Professor William D Rubinstein recently declared himself "more than 90 per cent convinced" that Maybrick was the Ripper, but Paul Dodd remains "befuddled".
He believes Mrs Maybrick was probably innocent. Not so Raymond Chandler. "I'm pretty well convinced that the dame was guilty," he said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/4809485/Inside-story-Battlecrease-House.html