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

[GUT]

The biggest problem I've got is there have been too many lies told about it, which lie am I meant to believe is the truth?

[Henry Flower]

The biggest problem I've got is there have been too many lies told about it, which lie am I meant to believe is the truth?

Quite agree, GUT - I've said it once and I'll say it again, if this document were genuine (and by 'genuine' I mean either the real deal or an old hoax) then there simply shouldn't be this forest of lies about its provenance.

We can posit rationalizations for all of them, but why should we need to? Too. Many. Lies.

And therefore, too many liars.

[Sam Flynn]

The biggest problem I've got is there have been too many lies told about it, which lie am I meant to believe is the truth?

As Sherlock Holmes should have said: "Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be a sign that you've screwed up somewhere"

[David Orsam]

It's all very simple guys.

To understand anything that has been said on this matter, you just need to know that the exact opposite is true.

So when Mike, Anne and their eleven year old daughter all said in unison that Mike got the Diary from Tony, that of course means he didn't get it from Tony.

When Billy Graham said the Diary had been in his family for about 100 years that meant it had then been in his family for about 1 year.

When the first document expert to examine the Diary said it's a fake and modern he meant to say it is genuine and very, very, old.

When the electricians say that they didn't find the Diary under the floorboards, well, of course, that means they did.

[GUT]

It's all very simple guys.

To understand anything that has been said on this matter, you just need to know that the exact opposite is true.

So when Mike, Anne and their eleven year old daughter all said in unison that Mike got the Diary from Tony, that of course means he didn't get it from Tony.

When Billy Graham said the Diary had been in his family for about 100 years that meant it had then been in his family for about 1 year.

When the first document expert to examine the Diary said it's a fake and modern he meant to say it is genuine and very, very, old.

When the electricians say that they didn't find the Diary under the floorboards, well, of course, that means they did.

And let's not forget a sworn statement "I forged it" .... "no I didn't".

[David Orsam]

Melvin Harris is regularly trashed in some quarters but he seems to have been spot on about certain things. Here is what he said about 20 years ago in his "Guide Through the Labyrinth" article:

"Feldman (p128) tells us that in February 1993 he met Anne together with Mike and their daughter Caroline. At one point Caroline was cross-examined by Paul Begg and Martin Howells. They "were relentless" admits Feldman, and they forced out of her statements that seemed to confirm Mike's story. But did they? Or was the girl going along with a pre-rehearsed family tale? Feldman thinks not: "Caroline told the truth; that is all a kid of eleven can do.” Really? Try telling that yarn to any experienced schoolteacher!"

As we've seen, according to Feldman, Caroline confirmed to Paul Begg and Martin Howells that Mike received the Diary from Tony Devereux (in 1991), something which we are now being told cannot possibly be true. So Harris, it seems, got it right.

Yet, it is that very article* to which Shirley Harrison responded by producing a short extract from Mike Barrett's 'research notes' to counter Harris' claim that there was a 'nest of forgers', albeit accidentally omitting to mention that those notes had been "re-typed" and "tidied-up" by Anne.

What has always amused me about Harrison's response is her comment "I have no intention of dissecting this latest analysis of the case against the Ripper Diary". No, I bet she didn't! Not when she had Mike Barrett's 'research notes' to throw at Harris.

*She says in her book that she is responding to a 30-page document entitled "The Maybrick Hoax - A Fact File for the Perplexed" which was no doubt the original title of an article which has been broken into a number of pieces and which must have included "A Guide to the Labyrinth" because she references some of the contents of that article in her response.

[David Orsam]

And let's not forget a sworn statement "I forged it" .... "no I didn't".

Yes indeed GUT and the opposite of one of those two statements is certainly true!!!

[Herlock Sholmes]

As Sherlock Holmes should have said: "Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be a sign that you've screwed up somewhere"

I think that your mis-quote is better than mine Sam

[caz]

Hi Caz,
Apologies for the surprise. Perhaps I should explain. Since the great server crash I’ve usually avoided “diary” threads like the plague, as trying to type a response to some of the outlandish posts leaves my hands cold. But noticing who the OP was in this instance, my curiosity was piqued.

I happened to catch in one of Paul Begg’s posts and in relation to early influences, that he mentioned McCormick's book. Then realizing that his sentence structure might imply that he helped write it, he - obviously tongue-in-cheek - clarified that it was the first Ripper book he had read. I replied, in the same spirit, that was too bad as he might have been able to shed some light on the “Eight Little Whores” controversy. And there it lay, as I suspected few people on the boards today would even catch it, until Observer obviously did and fleshed it out enough that I could see there was a familiarity with an old pre crash debate. And thus, I noted that Observer was very observant, which is a fact.

You are correct about Fieldman and once McCormick's research became controversial and the provenance of the little ditty questionable, some back peddling on its correlation with the verses in the “diary” would be necessary. Fieldman never lacked in proposing theories first, then setting out to prove them. He seemed to have a field day (no pun intended) with the lineage of the Maybrick family itself. Of course, regarding the poetry, Shirley Harrison - as of the latest edition of her book - apparently believes there is a correlation, based on the mention of Henage Court in the poem and a policeman named Spicer claiming to have stopped a man near there on the night of the double murder who, according to Harrison, resembled Maybrick - a fine example of confirmation bias I must say.

Hi Cris,

Thanks for this. I must have missed where Paul Feldman did any back pedaling. I thought he would have pooh-poohed the claim that McCormick wrote the poem and carried on believing it was around in Maybrick's day.

My own argument has always been that I couldn't really care less when that particular counting rhyme was thought up or when, because there is no reason why the prankster(s) couldn't have thought up a handful of appropriate lines of their own at any time and without any assistance from "Eight Little Whores".

I believe it was Carl Sagen who said that we humans are very good at deceiving ourselves. And we will find all kinds of reasons to believe something, even if common sense dictates otherwise.

Wise man. I couldn't agree more. Common sense dictates that the humble old counting rhyme is God's gift to serial murder.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Except Harrison knew. She had learned that Barrett had a copy in his attic all along and despite her open attempts to rectify it...she couldn't.

I wonder how she learned that, Cris? It wasn't from Mike "pants on fire" Barrett by any chance, was it?

Mike told Shirley at least two tales from Liverpool concerning the source of the Crashaw quote. 1) He found it in the library [and he must have done at some stage because he named the book and it was there on the shelves] and 2) he then recalled he had had a source of his own, in an allegedly out-of-print volume, allegedly donated by Sphere books for the Hillsborough appeal.

Unfortunately, in one of her paperbacks, Shirley has Mike giving the year as 1987 [two years before the disaster], which seems a highly unlikely mistake for any Liverpudlian to make, so I can only assume this was a typo. But another problem is that the Sphere book in question would have been brand new in 1989, not out-of-print and certainly not used, according to Robert Smith. But when Mike finally handed over the volume he claimed to have had 'all along', and diary researchers eventually obtained it, it was obviously a used copy, with the early pages [not related to Crashaw] well-thumbed.

One of the most comical things about this whole saga is how the people involved kept tripping over each other.

To be fair, Mike Barrett did keep sticking his foot out.

I agree it has been a hugely comical saga in all sorts of ways and the laughs just keep on coming.

Love,

Caz
X

[Harry D]

Quite agree, GUT - I've said it once and I'll say it again, if this document were genuine (and by 'genuine' I mean either the real deal or an old hoax) then there simply shouldn't be this forest of lies about its provenance.

We can posit rationalizations for all of them, but why should we need to? Too. Many. Lies.

And therefore, too many liars.

And yet people still want to believe.

[Abby Normal]

And yet people still want to believe.

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL*



*usually followed by disappointment

[ohrocky]

If the two individuals who are supposed to have found the Diary in Battlecrease are denying that they found any such thing it is going to be a little bit difficult to establish what they told Mike Barrett when they spoke to him, if they, in fact, ever met the man and gave him anything.

But it is rather hard to believe that that they did not tell him where it came from at the time. Well the whole thing is rather hard to believe. In Shirley's 2003 book we are told that one employee of Portus and Rhodes recalls picking up two employees from Battlecrease "At the end of one day" at which time one of them said "I've found something under the floor boards. I think it could be important".

If I were digging around an old building and found anything that I believed "could be important" (and therefore potentially valuable), the last thing I would be doing with it would be handing it over to the local "old soak"!

There is not even a ring of truth IMO to the workman finding the diary under the floorboards story.

But as others have pointed out, there have been so many lies surrounding the diary, to say nothing of Barrett's constantly changing stories, that even if the truth were there, somewhere, it's likely to be buried under the multitude of lies, never to see the light of day.

My view is that the diary is a fake. Whilst it would be of academic interest to establish whether it is an old fake or a modern fake, (and I believe modern because of David Orsam's "one off instance" challenge) it doesn't really matter. It is a fake.

[caz]

Of course, as everyone knows, there is not a shred of evidence that Mike blabbed about the diary to anyone prior to 9th March 1992.

Well, except to his daughter, Caroline, of course.

According to Feldman, in the presence of Paul Begg and Martin Howells, the following occurred:

"Paul and Martin were relentless. The poor kid [Caroline] had barely sat down in the car when they started a cross examination. 'Do you remember when your dad came home with the diary? Do you remember whether your dad phoned Tony and asked him where he got the diary from? Do you remember the row when your dad told your mum he was going to it published?'…Caroline remembered clearly the day her dad came home with the diary. She remembered her dad pestering Tony, and she could not forget the row between her mother and father. Caroline told the truth; that is all a kid of eleven can do."

Now, that is curious because Tony (Devereux) died in August 1991. How did Caroline recall her dad pestering Tony about the Diary at least seven months before he even knew of its existence? Or did Mike speak to dead people? Or was it a physical impossibility?

I believe this was in 1993, wasn't it? Would she have recalled whether Mike had made these pestering phone calls some 20 months before, or more like a year? Was she asked? Would she have known it was some chap called Tony on the other end, or was she gradually led to assume so, by the two people who most needed her to, and the two people she had the least reason not to believe?

If Mike was pestering some other chap, an electrician who happened to live in the same road as Tony Devereux, for instance, would she have known his name wasn't Tony, or recalled that the phone calls were made in Spring 1992 as opposed to the summer of 1991? Did she even know Tony, or know when he died?

Some people might call what Caroline told Paul Feldman, Paul Begg and Martin Howells "evidence" that Mike was in possession of the Diary prior to March 1992, and some people clearly have done, but now it doesn't fit the new theory it can be safely discarded and forgotten about as if it never existed.

And some people are capable of accepting if they got it wrong and going where the evidence drags them, kicking and screaming if necessary, even if it leads away from a scenario they may once have held dear, or merely found to be the least implausible [whether that be an Anne via Devereux provenance or Barrett forgery].

Some people might call that sort of behaviour a sign of weakness and a subject for ridicule, but clearly for them there can be no turning back; no reassessment of their beliefs in the face of any new information; no possibility of admitting it even to themselves if they backed the wrong horse - the one that was due at the glue factory when the race began.

Some people can never, ever, be seen to be wrong, can they David? And I'm looking at you.

I may be wrong, but I happen to think that those of us who can and do adapt with the evidence have a better chance of survival than those who don't possess that ability.

Love,

Caz
X

[Sam Flynn]

My view is that the diary is a fake. Whilst it would be of academic interest to establish whether it is an old fake or a modern fake, (and I believe modern because of David Orsam's "one off instance" challenge) it doesn't really matter. It is a fake.

The issue with the diary's use of the phrase "one off instance", in the specific way in which it uses it, has been known for quite some time. I myself raised the issue eight or nine years ago, and I know I wasn't the first to do so. In 2008/9, I used Google Books searches to count how frequently certain diary phrases turned up, and when those phrases first appeared in print. From that, I was able to produce graphs like the one below, which should speak volumes about when the diary was most likely to have been written:



The details will have changed slightly since I did my original survey, but I would expect the overall findings to be broadly the same. Namely, that if we see the three phrases "one off", "top myself" AND "spreads mayhem" occurring in the same document, the likelihood is that it was written in the latter third of the 20th Century.