Who was the author of the 'Maybrick' diary? Some options.

[Sam Flynn]

Having listened again to the Tom Baker-narrated documentary on the Diary, this statement is made: "Inscribed very faintly on the inner cover of the Victorian watch was 'I am Jack', James Maybrick's signature and the initials of Jack the Ripper's victims, plus two more that the author of the diary had claimed he'd murdered in Manchester". Were there two additional sets of victims' initials after all? If not, how did that nugget of misinformation find its way into the script?

[caz]

Darryl,

I believe that report has been posted on this Forum, but a long time ago. I've seen it before. One small point: the report states that chloroacetamide is a relatively modern development as a preservative; however, it's listed in the Merck Catalogue of 1857. I think its main early use was as an insecticide, and I don't know if it was used in inks or paper around the late 1880's. I would guess not.

Graham

Not sure it really matters, Graham, since no chloroacetamide has been found in the diary ink in anything like the quantity needed to act as a preservative. The minute trace found by one outfit - AFI - and not repeated by anyone else, has been put down to contamination from poor testing methods and controls.

Be nice to have something fresh to debate - I thought this was dead and buried years ago.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

I would just point put that Mike, in his original affidavit, didn't claim to have written the Diary: he said his wife wrote it (somewhat oddly, he states this was because his own writing was too distinctive ), whilst he dictated.

Hi John,

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Mike was goaded into including his estranged wife as a co-conspirator because of her own 'in the family' story, told in the immediate wake of his original boast, back in June 1994, that the diary was all his own work.

Add to that the fact that she was now working with the hated Feldman on a family connection back to the Maybricks, and Mike's original claim had been quickly retracted, and received with much incredulity by diary researchers on all sides, and you have a recipe for an angry and humiliated abandoned husband to drop Anne in it, to get some revenge as well as some much needed credibility back into his forgery claim. A neat trick really, considering all the times he had needed her to polish up his act before the diary came along to put the mockers on everything.

Love,

Caz
X

[Graham]

Hi Caz,

just checked the relevant pages of Feldman's book, and have to say that the whole Watch thing, certainly with regard to the part played by Mr Dundas, seems to be a right old dog's breakfast! It also seems that after Mr D effectively denied to Feldman that the watch he serviced was the Verity that Albert had bought off Mr Murphy, he then later goes on to swear an affidavit per investigation by Alan Grey, that the watch was the one Albert bought! Sorry, but I am easily confused......

Ref: P 218 of Ripper Diary there appears to be no correction, per your recent post, that Dundas' timing was erroneous. Does this mean, in effect, that the authors accepted Dundas's version of events at that time?

OK, no more chloroacetamide, then! I've kicked the habit!

Graham

[caz]

You're missing the point, purposely or not. There would be no wearing, or ageing to the inside back cover over the years, none. How could there be? The forger of the watch didn't have his thinking cap on when he set out to forge the marks on the watch, he would have best been served to have left the marks as they were immediately after he scratched them into the watch.

Possibly, Obs, but I'd have preferred to hear this from Drs Turgoose and Wild. No offence. They seemed to think that scratches made on that inner surface of soft metal would show signs of considerable age after many decades, and that it would be very difficult for anyone to add those signs artificially. But maybe they were in the wrong job and should have swapped places and been armchair detectives instead.

But first your forger must have polished out the existing scratches [which Murphy saw in 1992 - but the forger wouldn't have known that in 1993] so completely that even electron microscopy would fail to detect they were ever there. Then the forger must have carved the Maybrick signature and the JtR markings into the newly pristine surface. Then they must have added some superficial scratches on top, to mimic what was there when they started work on it, so nobody would notice anything different.

If you are saying the forger then made a fatal error, by trying to make every scratch look very old and worn, when you'd expect them all to have looked as sharp as a new pin, whether they'd been put there yesterday or in 1888, then you really should be writing to Drs Turgoose and Wild to tell them where they missed a trick. I'm sure they will both be grateful.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Hi Caz,

just checked the relevant pages of Feldman's book, and have to say that the whole Watch thing, certainly with regard to the part played by Mr Dundas, seems to be a right old dog's breakfast! It also seems that after Mr D effectively denied to Feldman that the watch he serviced was the Verity that Albert had bought off Mr Murphy, he then later goes on to swear an affidavit per investigation by Alan Grey, that the watch was the one Albert bought! Sorry, but I am easily confused......

Ref: P 218 of Ripper Diary there appears to be no correction, per your recent post, that Dundas' timing was erroneous. Does this mean, in effect, that the authors accepted Dundas's version of events at that time?

OK, no more chloroacetamide, then! I've kicked the habit!

Graham

Hi Graham,

Towards the bottom of page 218:

According to Dundas, Murphy ['Mr Stewart'] had contacted him just a month after he examined it in 1992. Someone had got their dates wrong.

We left it to the reader to work out who had got his dates wrong.

But I have to assume Murphy wasn't contacting Dundas in 1992 about any JtR markings.

Love,

Caz
X

[Sam Flynn]

Possibly, Obs, but I'd have preferred to hear this from Drs Turgoose and Wild. No offence. They seemed to think that scratches made on that inner surface of soft metal would show signs of considerable age after many decades, and that it would be very difficult for anyone to add those signs artificially. But maybe they were in the wrong jobs.

You may have a point there, Caz. To my mind, the right people to make pronouncements on how much wear and tear one might expect to see on the inside of a watch case would be jewellers or horologists, not materials scientists.

[caz]

Great post Katrup. Post #353 illustrates the points you make to a tee. Your point about the selling of books might well apply here. I brought this up some months ago. Is there another rip off book on the horizon?

Not by me there's not. How very dare you?

Seems you didn't read that post very carefully, or didn't understand the implications for your 1993 bandwagon hoax theory.

Why am I not particularly surprised?

Once again, you see but you do not observe, Observer.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Paul Feldman mentioned two watches in his book. I mentioned this some time ago and was told to stop "listening to Feldy". It seems the person who advised me to "stop listening to Feldy" is now suggesting there is a possibilty that there were two watches.

No, only one Maybrick watch, Obs. Dundas was describing a different watch entirely when he said, quite rightly, that there were no JtR markings on it. We don't need two of the buggers.

Do keep up.

Regardless of how many watches there were Mr Dundas repaired Murphy's watches, and when asked couldn't recall the marks scratched into the "Maybrick watch".

Well he wouldn't, would he, or he'd have been the one to make the 'discovery' and you'd all now be accusing him of forging it.

There's no doubting the fact that he would have examined the marks of all the watches he repaired...

Not according to the Murphys, who said the repair to Albert's watch would not have required Dundas to 'examine' the inner surface where the markings are.

I contend that if the name Maybrick had been in evidence then he would have remembered it. He didn't remember it.

Barely visible to the naked eye; not on a surface Dundas needed to look at anyway; and he'd have done the repair over a year before being asked about it, not just a month or so - which might well explain why he was thinking of a different watch.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

And if dear old Jim was boasting in the Diary about bumping off a couple of unfortunate ladies in Manchester, where were their initials on the Watch?

The thot plickens.

Graham

Since no reports of those murders have ever come to light, one wonders what initials could have been used to represent them, regardless of who put the best known five in the watch.

"Excuse me, love, could you give me your full name - no aliases please - before I try to slaughter you and rummage around in your innards?"

"Mad for it. The name's Wendy. Wendy Copscomb."

"WC? Hmmm, I'll leave it thanks."

Love,

Caz
X

[John G]

Hi John,

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Mike was goaded into including his estranged wife as a co-conspirator because of her own 'in the family' story, told in the immediate wake of his original boast, back in June 1994, that the diary was all his own work.

Add to that the fact that she was now working with the hated Feldman on a family connection back to the Maybricks, and Mike's original claim had been quickly retracted, and received with much incredulity by diary researchers on all sides, and you have a recipe for an angry and humiliated abandoned husband to drop Anne in it, to get some revenge as well as some much needed credibility back into his forgery claim. A neat trick really, considering all the times he had needed her to polish up his act before the diary came along to put the mockers on everything.

Love,

Caz
X

Hi Caz,

Yes, you might well be right: at the end of the day, it's all about instinct and impressions. It's also worth pointing out that, in Mike's original affidavit, he not only claims that his wife wrote the Diary, she also purchased the red diary.

However, if his primary motivation was gaining revenge on Anne, why implicate TD as well? What had he done to offend him?

Then there's the matter of patterns of behaviour. Thus, in his affidavit he makes it abundantly clear that he was the creative brain behind the Diary, whereas as Anne was basically working under his direction. However, as I've pointed out, Mike had a long history of making wildly exaggerated claims about his achievements.

I also think that whoever was the real driving force behind the Diary must have been highly motivated: otherwise these hoaxes would surely be much more common. Does that sound like Mike to you? After all, he spent several years as a house-husband whilst his wife worked as a secretary.

You possibly don't share this view, but my overall impression is that the Diary was well-written, at least from a psychological point of view. And if it wasn't, why are we still debating its authenticity over a quarter of a century later?

Returning to Mike's affidavit, it's obviously written in an extremely sloppy style. I mean, just consider this one sentence: "At about the same time as all this was being discussed by my wife and I. I spoke to William Graham about our idea. This was my wifes father and he said to me its a good idea..."

Why the full stop after the first "I"? And, of course, "wifes" should be "wife's" and "its" should be "it's."

I therefore ask myself, could an individual, who appears to be only semi-literate and poorly motivated, have even of conceived of the Diary? Could he be responsible for the content-the real creative and driving force behind the hoax- even assuming Anne actually wrote the Diary whilst he dictated? Personally, I think it unlikeky.

[caz]

sounds like the watch forgers didn't read the diary forgers close enough.

How could they, Abby? The diary had yet to be published when the watch discovery was made!

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

If the diary hadn't been published, how could the watch hoaxer know there were two extra victims? The very fact that the diary and watch don't corroborate each other on this particular point is a strong indicator that they were created by independent hoaxers.

BTW, the diary doesn't name the victims (canonical or otherwise) anyway. If the watch-hoaxer had known the contents of the diary, he might as well have made up the extra initials; that he didn't is also consistent with his being independent of whoever faked the diary.

If we suppose the diarist put those extra two murders in just for jolly, not knowing or caring if anyone would find two real cases that might fit the bill, isn't it just as well in that case that no names were mentioned, either in the diary or as initials in the watch? How would "Sir Jim" have known those names? He did mention MJK by name in the diary, but she was the only one to receive that 'honour'.

Love,

Caz
X

[Sam Flynn]

If we suppose the diarist put those extra two murders in just for jolly, not knowing or caring if anyone would find two real cases that might fit the bill, isn't it just as well in that case that no names were mentioned, either in the diary or as initials in the watch?

I don't think that either hoaxers would have worried unduly about such things, Caz - and why should they have, in those pre-Internet days? It's mainly due to the Internet, digitized newspaper archives and court records, coupled with sophisticated search engines, that we're able to find such things so easily today. Who, apart from the most tech-savvy, could have predicted all this in the early 1990s?

I see no reason at all why the watch hoaxer shouldn't have thrown in, for example, a "JJ" and an "MS" just for jolly, if they'd known that the diary indicated two extra victims. In the 1990s, it was unlikely that it could have been conclusively proven that no "EJ" or "MS" had been murdered; indeed, we'd struggle to do so now. On the other hand, they might have struck it lucky if the murders of an "Elizabeth Jones" and/or "Mary Smith" were - eventually - found, so it was practically a shot to nothing.

They could safely have included a pair of made-up initials on the watch, which would only have reinforced the idea that its owner was also the fiendish "James Maybrick" of the diary if, that is, they knew that the diary had put two "bonus" victims up for grabs. The fact that they didn't speaks volumes to me.

[John G]

Hi Gareth,

Sorry to interject. Good point about the internet. However, whilst a hoaxer might reasonably have assumed that the average Joe or Jane would be unlikely to subject the Diary to close analysis, surely they couldn't have expected the same response from respected JtR researchers, such as Paul Begg, Keith Skinner, and Stewart Evans.