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Originally posted by harry
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When I read Tom's chapter, "The One that Got Away", I thought that the connection between Millous and the Brady Street attack was somewhat tenuous but at least Tom had found a document to hang a connection on which showed the admittance of a woman with some kind of cut arm on the night of the murder. It was something. A genuine discovery.
After MysterySinger posted his information about Esther Mallows on 2 May I went back and looked more carefully at Tom's chapter to check exactly when Margaret "Millows" was admitted to hospital and it seemed clear from what Tom wrote that it must indeed have been at some point between 10am on 30 August and 3:45am on 31 August. I had not seen any of the documents Tom was relying on and he did not explain any further what they said, so I was relying entirely on Tom's summary.
Perhaps you can imagine my surprise when I learnt from MrBarnett on JTR forums two days later that the record, in fact, shows MM being admitted under the date of 1 September, at least 20 hours after the reported attack in Brady Street. How or why Tom missed this or didn't mention it in his book remains a mystery to me to this day.
I was further surprised when Tom claimed on JTR forums that MrBarnett had misread the document, although my suspicions were aroused when he refused to explain how he had done so.
I was even more surprised when Tom posted in this forum that MrBarnett's claim that MM was admitted to hospital on 1 September was no more than a result of him being "petty and jealous" (#207). I could not see a hint of this MrBarnett's posts which seemed to contain very reasonable, fair and pertinent questions.
Let me tell you, Harry, the surprise continued when, in response to MrBarnett asking him when MM was admitted, Tom replied "she went to the hospital on the same morning Nichols was murdered. She would have been treated at that time". How could he possibly have known this? And then he added "Whenever the paperwork was filled out doesn't really matter" (#212). This suggested to me that Tom was more than "a little confused" over the detail but that he had entirely misread and misunderstood the one new document that he had managed to obtain for his book. He seemed to think that the date of 1 September reflected the date that the paperwork was filled out, which struck me as a very odd thought because an administrator of a hospital admission record would not do this.
Despite MrBarnett attempting to explain the document to Tom, he still refused to concede an inch. He said to him(#223): "Gary, you're not getting it. There is when something happened and when it was recorded. They needn't be the same thing and, in fact, rarely are. You're zeroing in on one thing and choosing to remain blind to all the other stuff". Worse he added, "you just keep discounting all the stuff you don't like Gary. You seem to enjoy that" thus further suggesting that MrBarnett's motives were somehow improper, simply because he was challenging Tom's interpretation of a document.
Having read Tom's inadequate responses, and unhappy with the injustice of his insults directed at MrBarnett, it was at this point (#225) that I intervened in the thread to ask Tom a very simple question in an attempt to clarify what was now a very muddled situation due to Tom's vague replies:
"Do you accept that the woman in question was admitted to hospital on a different day to the attack on Nichols or are you saying that MrBarnett has read the London Hospital records wrong?"
There was no answer to this question from Tom so I had to try again in #231 ("what date was MM admitted to hospital?") and in #232 ("Do you accept that the woman in question was admitted to hospital on a different day to the attack on Nichols or are you saying that MrBarnett has read the London Hospital records wrong").
Tom's response now moved to the childish, ignoring the question in #231 but answering the question in #232 as "yes" (#234), thus not answering it all. At the same time, he started accusing me of "doing what Gary does. Isolating one item and obsessing on it" and claiming that I was somehow taking him "out of context" although I had no idea how.
I had to repeat my question from #231 ("what date was MM admitted to hospital?") before getting a straight answer which was a follows: "Aug. 31st".
By now, Tom had had days to consider this "detail" but he still couldn't get it right. He was, it seems, answering out of hope, based on his desire for his theory about MM having been attacked in Brady Street to be true. Quite simply not the proper approach to this or any other historical matter.
When, in response, I asked him how he explained the heading of "Sep 1" on the document and whether he was saying that Debra Arif, who had by now stated that the record clearly showed MM being admitted on 1 September, was wrong, Tom ignored my first question and to the second didn't answer but simply said "Are you trying to get me killed?" (#239).
By now it was like pulling teeth trying to get any sensible answers from Tom, in what one would have hoped is a sensible forum for adult researchers and those interested in JTR.
Further posts from me to try and elicit information produced this from him, writing about himself in the third person (#267):
"Tom has not 'misread a document, nor does Tom generally heed a command to 'explain himself".
So he was still claiming not have misread the register but in the very same post he now put forward a new angle:
"The archivist who provides these records had these as people being admitted on August 31st".
"I trusted the archivist to whom I paid my monies" he added.
So his information was coming from the archivist. Or was it? Note that strange wording. He wasn't told anything by the archivist. It was just that the archivist "had" it as 31 August. What exactly did that mean?
One had to read a subsequent post on JTR forums to understand that the archivist had not told Tom anything at all and that Tom had, apparently, assumed that the document he had been provided with by the archivist contained only those individuals admitted between 10pm on 30 August and 3.30am on 31 August, on the basis that this was all he had asked for. Apparently it hadn't occurred to him that such a request was impossible to be fulfilled because there are no times of entry on the documents and he had, one assumes, ignored the September dates on the document, if he ever saw them.
That's just about all we have had from Tom. No retraction of his claim that MrBarnett misread the document and no admission that he himself did misread it. One has to tease out clues from his posts that he does now seem to accept that MM was admitted on 1 September, although he has hardly stated this in terms. It has not, in my view, been a full and frank response to the questions that have been asked of him.
From a personal perspective what I would have to say is even worse is the attempts made by Tom to smear me personally by impugning my motives in posting on this subject. He has tried to link my posting to the fact that he got my name wrong when acknowledging my contribution to his book, something I didn't even understand when he first made the claim. He described it as "misattributing a source to someone else instead of yourself" (when for me it was just a case of him getting my name wrong) and claimed that this was what I believed him to be "REALLY guilty of" and, for some strange reason, believed that this had "unsettled" me (#296). It was so far from unsettling me that it wasn't on my mind at all at time which is why I couldn't even understand what he was trying to say. He's made some other strange posts about me too but they all seem to have been intended to distract from the narrow point that I was trying to get clarification about.
It's been a sorry story. On past performance, Tom, if he responds at all to this, will no doubt post a glib comment rather than a sensible and serious response, which will be another sad thing.
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