One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[c.d.]

Goodness me, Harry - of course it does!

Why would you make such a bizarre claim?

Hello Iconoclast,

It would be extremely helpful to those of us who do not have the diary in our possession to have the exact quote that you keep referring to.

c.d.

[c.d.]

If Maybrick left the initials on the wall as a means to taunt the police it was not particularly ballsy of him. Certainly leaving his own initials would be but that of his wife? Might as well leave the initials of the dog that lives three doors down from you.

Or was this some message directed to his wife? Did he tell her what he did? Did he expect her to somehow learn of it and be frightened of him? Seems rather pointless when you think about it in this light.

c.d.

[Iconoclast]

If Maybrick left the initials on the wall as a means to taunt the police it was not particularly ballsy of him. Certainly leaving his own initials would be but that of his wife? Might as well leave the initials of the dog that lives three doors down from you.

Or was this some message directed to his wife? Did he tell her what he did? Did he expect her to somehow learn of it and be frightened of him? Seems rather pointless when you think about it in this light.

c.d.

Are you, to turn your argument around, implying that it wasn't possible for Maybrick to have chosen the letters 'FM' to mean his wife and that he couldn't possibly have considered that that was a rerlevant thing to do?

If it meant something to Maybrick, then that would explain why he did what he did.

[Iconoclast]

Hello Iconoclast,

It would be extremely helpful to those of us who do not have the diary in our possession to have the exact quote that you keep referring to.

c.d.

Which quotation, c.d.? The quotation you offer from me gives few clues (I post a lot, as you may have noticed).

Buy the book, man. I can't take your comments seriously on a James Maybrick thread on the Jack the Ripper Casebook when you don't even have the book. By implication, I'm taking it as read you've not read any of the four published works either?

If you want to understand the journal, you need to read at least one of the four published works. If you're just spinning out your day, you'll need someone else to do your referencing for you.

[MsWeatherwax]

Does anyone happen to have a cropped photograph showing the initials/area that the initials are in?

I'm afraid that I can't see anything resembling the letters 'F' or 'M' anywhere in that picture.

[GUT]

Nor can I.

[MsWeatherwax]

Not just me then! I've just spent the last 20 minutes or so staring at multiple pictures of varying quality and I can say with complete honesty that there are patterns visible on the wall in some of them, and not in others. I quite frequently see what looks like a cross on the wall to the side of the bed, but in some pictures it's just a vertical line and in others, not visible at all.

Again...if anyone can provide a crop of the area in question, I'd be genuinely very interested.

[Joshua Rogan]

I don't think the initials are visible on the photo in the Casebook victims section (at least, not on my screen). But they can be made out in the picture in Philip Sugden's book, if you have a copy. They appear on the wall where it meets the bed, above her left hand.
For what it's worth, here is a closer view of the Casebook version;

[Pcdunn]

Ms. Weatherwax-- you might also try this thread on Casebook, in which an alternate theory is suggested that the initials are carved into Mary's arm and leg, but are upside down, so "the fools" can't see them.

http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?t=6599&highlight=Mary+Kelly+room+photograph

I don't really believe in the initials, I must say.

[Caligo Umbrator]

Hi, MsWeatherwax.

This thread has a few pics on page 1,2 and 12. probably worth a quick scroll through.
http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?t=389

I was looking at them just a while earlier, so fortunately still had the tab open.

Yours, Caligo

[c.d.]

Which quotation, c.d.? The quotation you offer from me gives few clues (I post a lot, as you may have noticed).

Buy the book, man. I can't take your comments seriously on a James Maybrick thread on the Jack the Ripper Casebook when you don't even have the book. By implication, I'm taking it as read you've not read any of the four published works either?

If you want to understand the journal, you need to read at least one of the four published works. If you're just spinning out your day, you'll need someone else to do your referencing for you.

Hello Ike,

Well you are off my Christmas card list that's for sure. I mean really how hard would it be to extend a courtesy to a fellow poster?

c.d.

[GUT]

Hello Ike,

Well you are off my Christmas card list that's for sure. I mean really how hard would it be to extend a courtesy to a fellow poster?

c.d.

Not unusual unfortunately.

[MsWeatherwax]

Hi, MsWeatherwax.

This thread has a few pics on page 1,2 and 12. probably worth a quick scroll through.
http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?t=389

I was looking at them just a while earlier, so fortunately still had the tab open.

Yours, Caligo

Thank you Caligo, and thank you also PCDunn.

Well. Given that the quality of the photo (and the many, many associated copies) is understandably awful, they are alarmingly clear when pointed out. Unfortunately, that only makes me question them...if they're that clear in an extremely questionable, beaten up old picture they should have stuck out like a sore thumb in the actual room. I can buy the Police not noticing them if they were smaller, but honestly...that big and no mention? They're at least 4 inches high, if not more.

I'm happy to be shown to be wrong, but this just feels like pareidolia to me, as someone else mentioned earlier.

[Caligo Umbrator]

Hi, c.d.


I typed up a small portion of the segment being discussed.

"An initial here and a initial there
would tell of the whoring mother

I had a key,
And with it I did flee.
The hat I did burn,
for light I did yearn.
And I thought of the whoring mother
A handkerchief red,
led to the bed
And I thought of the whoring mother.

A whores whim
caused Sir Jim,
to cut deeper, deeper and deeper
All did go,
As I did so,
back to the whoring mother.
An initial here and an initial there
will tell of the whoring mother.

I left it there for the fools but they will never find it. I was too clever. Left it in front for all eyes to see. Shall I write and tell them? That amuses me. I wonder if next time I can carve my funny little rhyme on the whores flesh?" (Jack & Harrison, S. (1993). The Diary of Jack the Ripper. New York: Hyperion. (p.244-5))

The 'the whoring mother' is, the diary earlier implies, a characterisational phrase intended to represent his wife, Florence.

The section from which the above part was taken, is generally considered to relate to the scene in Mary Kelly's room and the events during and immediately after the murder.
The author endeavors to weave into his narrative some of the better-known features of that crime: the uncertainty over the whereabouts of the key, the belief that items of clothing had been burnt in the fireplace to provide light, the red handkerchief familiar to us from its mention in Hutchinson's statement.
Despite the enormous amount of detail the killer would have had at his disposal regarding the commission of the murders, the writer of the diary chooses to include only the information that is commonly known. It answers no questions - other than those to which we already know the reply. Should the killer have picked up a pen and taken to recording his crimes on paper, then we might perhaps know the circumstances as to where or how he met Kelly, the time of day the murder took place, the manner of its execution, the colour of the walls in the victim's room, or a thousand other things that would surely seem important only to the murderer.
Instead of revelations for each murder, we are offered a greatest hits list of already established facts. The author is treading on safe ground; he is aware that in the mid to late 1980's relevant case documents, once thought forever lost, were rediscovered or returned and yielded to us new information. The creator of the diary appreciates the possibility that more such information may come to light at any moment and show the writer for a forger. The avoidance of such exposure necessitates the adherence to known facts or the creation of elements so vague that they can never be verified, such as the supposed but as yet undiscovered Manchester murders.


"to cut deeper, deeper and deeper". is followed in the same stanza by "An initial here and an initial there". What appears to be a clear reference to the terrible mutilations administered upon the body, becomes distinctly less so upon a second and third reading.
The author seems more to be indicating that something has been 'cut deeper' into the flesh of the victim. Possibly the writer of the diary is inviting us to imagine that he carved significant letters in various places upon the corpse. He then goes on to "wonder if next time I can carve my funny little rhyme on the whores flesh", further implying he has already inflicted some specific symbolic injuries and partly disguised them within other wounds.
What he certainly isn't talking about here is daubing bloody initials on the wall. The two letters that appear just above the bed are so close as to be nearly attached to each other, not 'here' and 'there' as is suggested by the text. Had the author wished us to consider the initials on the wall to be his work, then we might expect he would have delighted in telling us and surely we would have been reading something more like this:

'dead
red
wall
fish
cut
slash
write
whore
bleed
bled
sweet
all
seen

I gave her mash and fish
it seems a fitting dish
for the whore smelled like fish-wife
then with a slash I took her life.

My fingers they were red,
with sweet blood where she bled
and now she is dead
all trickle from the whore,
on the wall I did write
I drew it on the wall,
it can be seen by all
but the fools they will see nought'


Leaving all that speculation aside, I would draw your attention to the written records of Dr. Bond and Dr. G.Bagster Phillips, which together indicate no less than five times that the panels of the wall immediately beside the bed were affected with arterial spray and subsequent splatters of blood.

Bond: "The bed clothing at the right corner was saturated with blood, & on the floor beneath was a pool of blood covering about 2 feet square. The wall by the right side of the bed & in a line with the neck was marked by blood which had struck it in a number of separate splashes."(MEPO 3/3153 ff.10-19, )

Bagster Phillips: "I am sure the body had been removed, after the injury which caused death, from that side of the bedstead which was nearest to the wooden partition previously mentioned. The large quantity of blood under the bedstead, the saturated condition of the palliasse, pillow, and sheet at the top corner of the bedstead nearest to the partition leads me to the conclusion that the severance of the right carotid artery, which was the immediate cause of death, was inflicted while the deceased was lying at the right side of the bedstead and her head and neck in the top right-hand corner".(The Daily Telegraph,1888, November 13,)

Bond: "arterial blood was found on the wall in splashes close to where the woman's head must have been lying".(HO 144/221/A49301C, ff. 220-3)

Bond: "he must have attacked from in front or from the left, as there would be no room for him between the wall and the part of the bed on which the woman was lying. Again, the blood had flowed down on the right side of the woman and spurted on to the wall."(HO 144/221/A49301C, ff. 220-3)

Bond: "the corner of the sheet to the right of the woman's head was much cut and saturated with blood".(HO 144/221/A49301C, ff. 220-3)

Clearly, both doctors observed significant quantities of blood towards the right-hand side of the bed and believed the body had been adjusted leftward in position after death. Bond specifically describes sprays and splashes as being visible on the wall at the same place that the 'F' and 'M' appear to be. It is quite evident that these 'letters' are in fact composed of arbitrary spurts of arterial blood.

Yours, Caligo

[Iconoclast]

Hi Caligo,

So many profound assumptions!

How is that you know the mind of the author? Did you actually write the 'forgery' yourself? You are labouring so heavily under the weight of your assumptions that they have defined your very view!

The fact that the journal author has chosen to write the 'commonly known' facts - I assume - could equally refelct the fact that the facts are 'commonly-known'!!! After all, the case has been well-studied over the years.

Of course there was arterial blood spray. I can't imagine anyone denying that the cutting of someone's throat is likely to cause it. You might even expect it! That doesn't preclude the possibility that the killer left initials on a wall. It just doesn't! And those initials have a reference (however tangential you may feel they are) in the journal - and that was new in 1992 (despite Simon Wood's attempts to get there first in 1989). To say that the initials are blood splatters is simply infantile. They are well-formed members of the alphabet, and no amount of wishful cursing them away will change that.

If the author was Maybrick and he was Jack and he chose to write in the egocentric style of the journal, that was his right. Not sure what gives you the right to suggest that the journal is a forgery becuase you wouldn't have written it that way?

The easiest way to dismiss the journal - recall, it is pretty much the only artefact we have to work with in 128 years since the murders - is to simply say, "Jack wouldn't have written a journal", or "I would have written it this way if I was Jack". Et cetera!

Easy equals sloppy. Sloppy thinking fools the chattering classes. Fool the chattering classes and you've 'won' the argument.

Sad, but true. In truth, the journal represents a clear account of the murderer and why he acted, whether we feel that is rational or not. And if a forgery, well, a Liverpool cotton merchant whose wife was tried for his murder? Inspirational, outlandish, and yet still in the public domain open to debate after 24 long years. No Hitler diaries this. No Mussolini musings. This thing cannot be disproven - not one fact about it or within it can do so, and that is why Maybrick remains the most popular choice for Jack the Slash!

Ike