25 YEARS OF THE DIARY OF JACK THE RIPPER: THE TRUE FACTS by Robert Smith

[Observer]

Well yes, perhaps in the original story, but the revised story is that Anne gave Tony the Diary tied up with string and asked him to pass it on to Mike (without Tony having even looked at it apparently).

Yes, equally unlikely.

[Henry Flower]

Well yes, perhaps in the original story, but the revised story is that Anne gave Tony the Diary tied up with string and asked him to pass it on to Mike (without Tony having even looked at it apparently).

You mean, Either Mike was lying about the Diary and/or about Tony, or Anne was lying about Tony and/or the Diary, or Anne had been lied to by Tony, or Tony had lied to Mike, or the builders/electricians had lied to (or about) any of the above? Or any two or all three of them in combination? At various stages of their changing stories? You're telling me that's the provenance we have for this thing? A bunch of money-grubbing cretins who can't get their stories straight for ten minutes at a time?

You know what? I'm beginning to suspect it's a modern forgery!

I'm not kidding! I'd be willing to bet one of Mrs Flower's homemade custard tarts that this silly thing isn't the florid-yet-convenient written confessions of Jack the Ripper after all

[Pcdunn]

Thanks for the replies, all.

Who was this guy Tony, anyway, who supposedly knew Mike and may or may not have had something to do with getting the diary into his hands?
Was he the writing type?
If not the true author of the diary, did he conspire with that person to get the thing before public eyes?

Re Anne's own story of the book being a "heirloom", what is wrong with it being a lie she contrived in order to try to get back at Mike?

Finally, I am not sure I agree with Smith's explanation for the wait before the diary was taken to London to a literary agent. He says it was to allow for the typescript to be made, and to research both Jack and Maybrick. Fair enough, but why ask for a Victorian diary? Smith's idea that he wanted to see one for comparison purposes is weak, I think.

[peg&pie]

It seems a vast amount of the back and forth is arguments about opinions and semantics.

Obviously I can't speak for others but I must say IMO, without cast iron proof nothing is proved.

I DO NOT believe the diary is genuine, but no amount of coincidences, luck or unexplained wording constitutes proof. Yes it heavily implies one solution but not definitively.

Science and learned men both get proven wrong from time to time as we learn more, we cannot be so conceited as to be right all the time. Learning is based on having an open mind receptive to being corrected.

I need to be 101% sure, I need the smoking gun.
I wouldn't want anyone convinced so easily either way on my jury!

[Darryl Kenyon]

One of the main concerns about the diary is that there are so many revised stories about its provenance, you don't know where to start. It's like as soon as one story starts having holes blown into it, Its " Ahhh but that isn't true, This is what really happened "

[Henry Flower]

It seems a vast amount of the back and forth is arguments about opinions and semantics.

Sure, but there's a fair amount of historical research on the thread too, and that old-fashioned stuff called 'reasoning'.

Obviously I can't speak for others but I must say IMO, without cast iron proof nothing is proved.

Then you must define your terms. Is 'cast iron' proof different from standard proof? By those standards gravity has not been proved, neither has natural selection by evolution, and neither has 95% of accepted human history. It's naive and blinkered to give anyone in this debate a burden of proof that is higher even than that required for a capital murder conviction.

I DO NOT believe the diary is genuine, but no amount of coincidences, luck or unexplained wording constitutes proof. Yes it heavily implies one solution but not definitively.

You're tilting at windmills, as well as stating the obvious. There may be no cast iron conclusive proof. But there is a huge preponderance of evidence in one direction.

Science and learned men both get proven wrong from time to time as we learn more, we cannot be so conceited as to be right all the time. Learning is based on having an open mind receptive to being corrected.

Agreed - and learning is also easier when you stop insisting on things like definitive cast iron 100% conclusive proof. The Diary isn't a DNA case. The Diary is more JonBenet than OJ.

I need to be 101% sure, I need the smoking gun.

Good luck with that! History may not be too accommodating of your needs. I guess the fact that the guy who gave the Diary to the world confessed at one stage to forging it with his wife doesn't count for much in your eyes? Given the undoubted fact that its provenance has been the subject of repeatedly changing stories (ie - 'lies') doesn't that confession (even though subsequently retracted) count as a fairly smoky gun?

I wouldn't want anyone convinced so easily either way on my jury!

And if my loved one had been murdered I wouldn't want you on the jury! With respect, I'd want someone who looked at the totality of the evidence and held only to the standards required - beyond a reasonable doubt - rather than insisting on a level of pure epistemological certainty that simply might not be attainable, and would see my loved one's murderer walk free.

That sounded rather melodramatic. Apologies for that. Our 6 month old gave us a rather sleepless night

[Henry Flower]

One of the main concerns about the diary is that there are so many revised stories about its provenance, you don't know where to start. It's like as soon as one story starts having holes blown into it, Its " Ahhh but that isn't true, This is what really happened "

'Revised stories' - or, as we used to call them - 'lies'.

[Sam Flynn]

The link to the article, which I have entitled, "Robert Smith and the Maybrick Diary: The False Facts Exposed!", is:

http://www.orsam.co.uk/maybrickthefalsefacts.htm

Re Martin Earl's advert in Bookdealer, I see that, only four lines down from the request for a used/part-used Victorian diary, the following books are also being sought...

Jones/Lloyd: The Ripper File
Farson: Jack the Ripper
F.S. Shew: Hand of the Ripper

It could be purely coincidental, of course, but might Earl have been asked for these items by the same customer who requested the blank(ish) diary?

[peg&pie]

Without wishing to drag out this same argument over again, I will try to be succinct.

Any cast iron proof is something that is incontrovertible.

For example,
Historically proving Maybricks whereabouts at the time of one of the murders. It was a possibility his whereabouts could have been known to conflict, but they don't.

Let's say the admission, prosecution and incarceration of an electrician for theft.

Conclusive lab tests that are repeatable and consistent in their results. I.E proper science.

A forger with the same hand writing that stands up graphologically.

ETC, there's probably loads more. To kill the diary stone dead, or give it provenance.

We again come down to personal opinions. But in my mind, if there is even the slightest chance however slim, I can Not convict.

Again I am inclined to the modern forgery, chiefly on the research done here, but open minded enough to accept alternatives.

Biggest problems for me are not anachronistic phrases, these problems cannot be proven beyond doubt, nor the poste house nonsense.

I trouble over breasts on the table, "thought they belonged there". Forger taken this from newspaper reports pre '88?
The poem bothers me, seems to be from the Dr.Dutton non existent files.

There are a few other issues but they've been debated to death already.

I need something to conclusively kill this thing dead. My brain won't stop wondering and highly improbable just won't cut it. It's in our human nature to abhor a problem with mutually exclusive answers, and we should never stop looking for proper answers because highly likely or almost certainly can be wrong.

[Henry Flower]

Without wishing to drag out this same argument over again, I will try to be succinct.

Any cast iron proof is something that is incontrovertible.

For example,
Historically proving Maybricks whereabouts at the time of one of the murders. It was a possibility his whereabouts could have been known to conflict, but they don't.

Let's say the admission, prosecution and incarceration of an electrician for theft.

Conclusive lab tests that are repeatable and consistent in their results. I.E proper science.

A forger with the same hand writing that stands up graphologically.

ETC, there's probably loads more. To kill the diary stone dead, or give it provenance.

We again come down to personal opinions. But in my mind, if there is even the slightest chance however slim, I can Not convict.

Again I am inclined to the modern forgery, chiefly on the research done here, but open minded enough to accept alternatives.

Biggest problems for me are not anachronistic phrases, these problems cannot be proven beyond doubt, nor the poste house nonsense.

I trouble over breasts on the table, "thought they belonged there". Forger taken this from newspaper reports pre '88?
The poem bothers me, seems to be from the Dr.Dutton non existent files.

There are a few other issues but they've been debated to death already.

I need something to conclusively kill this thing dead. My brain won't stop wondering and highly improbable just won't cut it. It's in our human nature to abhor a problem with mutually exclusive answers, and we should never stop looking for proper answers because highly likely or almost certainly can be wrong.

Yes, I see where you're coming from, and I share the frustration if I'm honest. It would be nice to have something that would not only persuade the unbiased in one direction but would also force the true believers to admit, "yep. It's a modern fake. We're done here." I just don't think that's going to happen, and I'm perhaps more persuaded than you are by the Poste House error, the one off instance, the copying from the list, the breasts error that you mention, and mostly the absolute and apparently ongoing web of lies surrounding the provenance, which just doesn't happen with a genuine artifact.

But yes, something wholly and categorically irrefutable would be just lovely.

[David Orsam]

Fair enough, but why ask for a Victorian diary? Smith's idea that he wanted to see one for comparison purposes is weak, I think.

That's a really key question. Had Mike simply asked for a Victorian diary I could have just about accepted that he wanted to compare the Maybrick diary to a genuine Victorian diary. It would still have been a pretty daft and even crazy thing to do - based, as it must have been, on the assumption that all Victorian diaries were basically the same - but it's not totally beyond the bounds of reason that, without thinking it through, he impetuously placed an order for a Victorian diary.

The problem is that it wasn't an impetuous action of his, it was a calculated attempt to obtain a Victorian diary with a specified minimum number of blank pages. And, under the terms of the advert, he would have been perfectly happy to have acquired an entirely blank (unused) diary.

I've never seen a sensible explanation for this (and Robert Smith certainly doesn't provide one, preferring to ignore the blank pages aspect of the advert entirely). Even those who think the Diary is old and/or genuine are usually forced to concede that Mike must have wanted the blank pages in order to write something in that Victorian diary.

The suggestion that this would have been a copy of the text of the Maybrick Diary which he had in his possession doesn't make any sense to me because he could have written this out just as well in a cheap exercise book.

An obvious explanation is that he was searching around for a book in which to write a forged diary. This is certainly what he said in his affidavit:

"I finally decided to go ahead and write the Diary of Jack the Ripper. In fact Anne purchased a Diary, a red leather backed Diary for £25.00p... When this Diary arrived in teh post I decided it was of no use, it was very small. "

If he was lying about this there is the paradox that it shows what a good and imaginative liar he was because he has cleverly woven a true story about the acquisition of a Victorian diary into what we are told is a wholly false story about him and Anne forging the diary in front of their daughter.

Not only that but the timeframe fits beautifully because he said in his affidavit that after a two day practise run the Diary was written out from a typed script, and some dictation, in 11 days which fits the amount of time available for him to have received the Victorian diary, rejected it, acquired the scrapbook, and then forged the Diary in time to bring it to London on 13 April 1992.

[David Orsam]

Transcript question

Last page of the Diary.

Smith's transcript says, "God I pray will allow me at least that privilege".

Privilege is not an easy word for everyone to spell and I'm not convinced the author of the diary got it right.

To me, under a magnifying glass, it looks like "privilage".

In fact, it rather looks like the first attempt at the word was "privalage". Then the first "a" has been roughly converted to a sort of "i".

The first "i", mind you, doesn't really exist, absent the dot, and without that dot it is "prvalage"

The two dots over this word seem to be much more firmly written, with more pressure applied, than any of the others in the same paragraph and don't quite match the pressure used to write the word.

What does anyone else think about the spelling?

[Sam Flynn]

Motive and inspiration

But yes, something wholly and categorically irrefutable would be just lovely.

This isn't categorical by any means, but it's always struck me that the emergence of the diary happened at a time when popular interest in the Ripper case had seen something of a boom. I looked at the more important books, films and TV programmes about, or inspired by, Jack the Ripper, and this the result:

1927 Hitchcock's silent movie "The Lodger"
1929 Leonard Matters' "The Mystery of Jack the Ripper" (quite rare)
1932 Remake of "The Lodger" movie, aka "The Phantom Fiend"
1939 William Stewart's "JTR: A New Theory" (very rare and hard to find)
1944 Yet another remake of "The Lodger" featuring George Sanders
1950 British movie "Room To Let" (set in 1904, so not about the 1888 case)
1953 Jack Palance movie "Man in the Attic"
1953 Allan Bernard's anthology "The Harlot Killer"
1959 Donald McCormick's "Identity of JTR"
1959 Robert S Baker's movie "Jack the Ripper"

1965 Tom Cullen's "Autumn of Terror"
1965 Sherlock Holmes movie "A Study in Terror"
1965 Robin Odell's "JTR in Fact and Fiction"
1971 Edward Shew's "Hands of the Ripper" (novelisation of 1972 movie)
1971 Spike Milligan's Phantom Raspberry Blower makes his debut as a stand-alone TV comedy short
1972 British movie "Hands of the Ripper"
1972 Dan Farson's "Jack the Ripper", with MJK1 photo made public for the first time
1973 Six-part TV series on JTR with popular detectives Barlow and Watt
1975 Richard Whittington-Egan's "Casebook on JTR"
1975 Don Rumbelow's "Complete JTR" (again featuring MJK1, and a load of other info)
1975 Elwyn Jones and John Lloyd's "Ripper File" (novelisation of Barlow and Watt series)
1976 Stephen Knight's "JTR: The Final Solution" published, making a huge impact
1976 Spike Milligan's spoof "Phantom Raspberry Blower" a huge hit on the popular Two Ronnies show
1976 Jess Franco's movie "Jack the Ripper" released
1977 Yorkshire Ripper scare kicks off in earnest, with massive press coverage
1978 Wearside Jack letter sent to Yorkshire Police (incl. claim of an unattributed murder in Preston)
1979 Bob Clark's movie "Murder by Decree"
1979 Nicholas Meyer's movie "Time After Time"
1979 More from Wearside Jack, the hoax tape this time; both the tape and letters generate huge publicity
1981 Sutcliffe arrested/tried as the Yorkshire Ripper. Wearside Jack letters/tape shown to be hoaxes
1983 Hitler Diaries hit the British press
1984 Hitler Diaries protagonists go on trial
1986 Robert Harris publishes "Selling Hitler", an account of the Hitler Diaries hoax
1987 Melvin Harris' "JTR: The Bloody Truth"
1987 Peter Underwood's "JTR: One Hundred Years of Mystery"
1987 Martin Howells and Keith Skinner's "The Ripper Legacy"
1987 Fido's "Crimes, Detection & Death of JTR"
1988 JTR centenary. Significant UK-wide press coverage
1988 Hugely popular Michael Caine mini-series airs on British TV
1988 "Secret Identity of JTR" documentary/trial-by-TV with Hazelwood, Douglas, Ustinov etc
1989 Maybrick centenary in the press. Particularly high coverage in Liverpool
1989 Melvin Harris' "The Ripper File"
1990 Paul Begg's "JTR: The Uncensored Facts"
1990 Jean Overton-Fuller's "Sickert and the Ripper Crimes"
1991 Melvyn Fairclough's "The Ripper and the Royals"

I grouped the pre-1960s stuff together, as most of it is sensationalist nonsense, or at best unreliable. It's really only from Tom Cullen in 1965 that we begin to see serious books about the case, with increasing amounts of detail: reproductions/faithful transcripts of Ripper letters, inquest details, photographs etc. Increasingly, there are popular movies and TV programmes about the case itself, as opposed to the imagined plots/characterisations of earlier films like The Lodger. We even see parodies of the Ripper case in hugely successful comedy shows, which is why I make no apology for including The Phantom Raspberry Blower twice in the list.

I couldn't possibly find, or list, all the newspaper articles devoted to the Ripper over the decades, but I shouldn't be surprised if it followed the same pattern - i.e. comparatively little before the mid-1960s, but increasingly more prevalent and detailed coverage through the 1970s and 1980s.

There were, of course, other events during this period which, although unrelated to either Maybrick or Jack the Ripper, could have acted as a source of inspiration to anyone aspiring to write a hoax JTR diary; the Yorkshire Ripper case and its attendant "Wearside Jack" hoaxes were a press and media sensation, and the Hitler Diaries hoax had also featured prominently in the news. Needless to say, the centenaries of the JTR murders and the Maybrick case resulted in renewed interest in the in the press (the latter in Liverpool, at least), with more detail being presented to an interested public.

Bearing the above in mind, it strikes me that the period spanned by the 1970s to the early 1990s provided the perfect conditions to inspire a would-be hoaxer to write the Diary of Jack the Ripper; furthermore, it is only during this period that the relevant information needed to write the diary came into the public domain. No previous historical period comes anywhere near close.

[DirectorDave]

Can someone remind me again what excuse was given that we would gloss over the fact that the handwriting does not match the will?

I'm sure had the scripts looks remotely similar it would have been lauded as positive proof of the diary's authenticity...but because they don't it does not really matter anyway.

This whole fiasco is like a pyramid selling scheme where the ones at the bottom are still ploughing in their money in the hope of enrichment while those at the apex are sunning their arse on a beach somewhere in tropics.

[GUT]

Can someone remind me again what excuse was given that we would gloss over the fact that the handwriting does not match the will?

I'm sure had the scripts looks remotely similar it would have been lauded as positive proof of the diary's authenticity...but because they don't it does not really matter anyway.

This whole fiasco is like a pyramid selling scheme where the ones at the bottom are still ploughing in their money in the hope of enrichment while those at the apex are sunning their arse on a beach somewhere in tropics.

I think the excuse varied by who gave it.

1. Arsenic
2. Split personality

Are the two I remember at the moment.