One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[StevenOwl]

I think it is somewhat telling that despite a very detailed description of a hoax which had cost people tens of thousands of pounds (which Mike sadly reinvested up a wall), our friends from Scotland Yard simply looked up at the Heavens and tutted derisively.

'The World's Greatest Forger', he claimed. And the luckiest too given that he was allowed to get away with it despite fessing up!

Ike

That's THE most telling thing about Barrett's confession IMO; he went to the police with it, having trousered over £40k, and they neither prosecuted him nor made him pay any of his earnings back. How does that work? How??

[ChrisGeorge]

Or why indeed a true one? It cost him dear either way, so he must have had his own powerful reasons at the time. Why do so many disturbed people make false confessions? How many people make true confessions which are rejected by the authorities for lack of evidence to take them further?

Love,

Caz
X

Hi Caz

I think it's clear enough that such people covet being the center of attention. They like the focus on themselves, which gives them an importance they would not otherwise have had.

Best regards

Chris

[caz]

The fact that Mike thought himself to be a creative person would explain why he thought himself capable of creating the diary in the first place.

I don't want to labour the point but I keep having to repeat that Mike claims to have had the assistance of his wife. A lot of people don't believe that Jeffrey Archer wrote all those novels on his own and that his wife must have helped him. Lots of creative people need really good editors to make their work readable.

The question is, did Mike claim that Anne's were the real brains behind the diary? If not, was he lying about this, or just confused over the nature and extent of each other's input? Why would he be dictating it for Anne to write into the guard book if it was largely her own work? Would she have considered him capable of drafting it, while she just checked it through and corrected any errors?

Wasn't Anne's own book on Florie Maybrick ghost written?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Hi Caz

I think it's clear enough that such people covet being the center of attention. They like the focus on themselves, which gives them an importance they would not otherwise have had.

Best regards

Chris

I agree entirely, Chris. And Mike thought Paul Feldman was on a mission to steal all his thunder and take his baby from him, by telling the world it rightfully belonged to Anne, who was a Maybrick.

It's a messed up world, ain't it? I mean, who'd have thought you would have Donald Trump as your President, eh?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

How does the word "sensible" translate to "incapable of making a spelling mistake"?

Via the dictionary Anne could have consulted?

The thing about dictionaries is you only use them if you think you can't spell a certain word. If you think you know how to spell that word then having all the dictionaries in the word isn't going to help you.

If I only think I know how to spell a word I tend to be completely anal about checking - even in emails which are not for public consumption. I suspect our diarist included the odd misspelling and shaky grammar (in a style similar to those humorous pieces in Punch) to help portray 'Sir Jim' as a jumped-up, self-important nobody, who fancied he was a whole lot smarter and better with words than he actually was. But if correct spelling had been considered at all important by Mike and Anne, I would have expected a dictionary to have been constantly at hand rather than leave things to chance.

So who do you have down as the one who was so sure rendezvous was spelled rondaveau that they didn't bother to check? Mike? Anne? Both?

Curiously, when I look at the facsimile I find it really difficult to be sure how the word is spelled where it matters, and it looks to me like it could be 'rondavous', 'rendavous' or even 'rendevous'. It is the transcript which plumps for 'rondaveau'.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Yes, I'm aware he has said different things at other times but I'm concentrating on what he said in his affidavit.

How very convenient for you, David.

If you can demonstrate to me untruths in his affidavit then that's great - please go ahead - but let's stick to his affidavit and not worry about what he has said at times other than when swearing his affidavit.

No, let's not. If Mike was aware that his affidavits must contain the truth, and if he was suddenly willing and able to provide it (apart from the dodgy dating), what does that say about the dog's dinner of fact and fiction he had come up with previously? If he could work out, by January 1995, what had been real and what had been fantasy throughout 1994, who waved the magic wand? Or was he very much aware (as Alan Gray believed and ticked him off about) that he had been telling lie after lie after lie after lie and that now he would need to buckle down and try to come up with the straightest story he had told to date?

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

Or was he very much aware (as Alan Gray believed and ticked him off about) that he had been telling lie after lie after lie after lie and that now he would need to buckle down and try to come up with the straightest story he had told to date?

I honestly believe that the Walter Mitty-type personality genuinely believes that every new twist in the story is the one that is now to be believed and actually confirms that by acting with equal amounts of sincerity and indignation depending upon the reaction their latest twist receives. In this respect, I don't honestly think Mike thought he was lying as such. I believe that his world-view included the possibility that he could tell multiple versions of the same set of events without this creating any sense of conflict or discomfort for him - not that each previous verson was a lie as such but, rather, that each previous version had not quite been the best slant on events. And I believe that he could do that without feeling that any previous version was wrong or that - therefore - he was being in some way untruthful in the telling.

DO has laboured over MB as hoaxer but it is ceasing to be a labour of love. For MB to have been involved in the hoax:

• He would have had to get away with confessing all without charges
• He would have had to be telling the truth and yet have erred in so many basic respects in his various accounts
• He would have had to have a memory of genuinely sievelike qualities to have confused 1992 with 1990 when he was only in 1994.

It's been borderline interesting, this long debate, but it's time for me to get back to my writing up my thesis which clearly demonstrates that Gandhi wrote the hoaxed journal of Jack the Ripper.

PS Yes, I did have to check the spelling of 'sieve' before I used it ...

[caz]

Yes, but one of the things he said in his affidavit was that the 1891 diary was purchased before the attempt at forging the Diary.

Now that we know that 1891 diary was acquired on 26 March 1992, we cannot ignore this fact which suggests that, had Barrett been aware it when drafting his affidavit, he would presumably have been able to state that the Maybrick Diary was forged at some point between 26 March and 13 April 1992.

As I have already said to you (but you have ignored), Barrett also told us that it took only 11 days for the Diary's text to be written out. He could have said two months, or six months but he just happened to give us a time period which fits in perfectly with the time period between acquiring the 1891 diary and presenting the Maybrick Diary to Doreen.

Bit of a bummer for you then that he recalled purchasing the guard book in 1990, two years before his purchase of the 1891 diary, followed almost immediately by the supposed writing of 'the' diary in 11 days, followed almost immediately by taking it to London.

Bear in mind that some people in this forum couldn't believe that the Diary could possibly have been written out in only 11 days. So why didn't Barrett select a much longer period of time?

What did Barrett think he was doing in the two years between bidding for the guard book in 1990 and taking it to London in April 1992?

Such questions are likely to resist all our attempts at sensible answers.

I also have to bear in mind that Barrett's plan with the 1891 diary would have necessarily involved him in ripping out the early pages of that diary with writing on, in circumstances where a few days later he presented Doreen with a diary that had its first 64 pages ripped out.

You may have to; I don't.

Since he failed to specify what kind of 'diary' he needed, and what kind of diary he needed like a hole in the head, it turned out to be the latter - more like an appointments diary for 1891, which would have required (at the very least) the ripping out of a page here and a page there, to be left with the blank pages he asked for in between, rather than all together at the end.

If that advert was really meant to provide a book that could contain all of Mike and Anne's hard work, it wasn't their finest hour, was it?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Two questions

1. How did that get back at Anne?

In July 1994 she announced that the diary had been in her family for years. This was a bombshell for Mike, whichever way one looks at it. He had claimed only the previous month that he had forged the thing himself. If he could get the goods to make his claim believable, and drag Anne into the mire with him, he could take back control of his baby - the diary, that is (he could do less about his estranged daughter at that point) - and punish Anne at the same time. The last thing Mike wanted the world to believe was that Anne had been pulling his strings from the start and had some personal connection with the diary which had bugger all to do with him.

2. How come so many believe some things he says and not others, and how do they decide which is which.

No idea, GUT. It's a mystery to me. That's why I always require reliable independent confirmation of anything and everything he has ever said, no matter if he was in confession mode at the time or not.

Love,

Caz
X

[David Orsam]

Here is what you wrote, David:

You must admit, your wording is at best ambiguous, at worse entirely misleading. You seemed to be saying that I had responded in that way, otherwise your accusation: 'as I knew you inevitably would' and 'this is an utterly futile response' makes no sense. You knew nothing of the kind because I did not, nor ever would have made the utterly futile response you had wrongly anticipated and kindly drafted for me.

Perhaps a little more care with your wording (not to mention your presumptions about what I would inevitably post if I failed to see you trying to avoid me doing so - if that even makes sense) would not go amiss. Here's a little tweak to demonstrate what I mean:

'Caz – this is the very reason why I asked you to take my earlier posts into account before replying to me: in the hope that you wouldn't respond (as I thought you might) by saying that, because O&L searched their records for 1990, Barrett couldn't have acquired the scrapbook in 1990, so that this claim is "a demonstrable untruth". If you had been thinking of such a response, it would have been an utterly futile one if the answer is that Barrett got his chronology wrong.'

And then I would simply have reassured you that such an utterly futile response was all in your mind, but could not have been further from mine.

Do you see the crucial difference?

What a complete waste of time, quibbling over a drafting point. And I prefer my original reply, thanks.

[David Orsam]

I don't believe he got it from O&L

Right, and if that's the case, he must have known he didn't get it from O&L so you are saying that he was telling a deliberate falsehood in his affidavit when he said he bought it from O&L in January 1990. It was, in other words, a statement known by him to be untrue and made in order to deceive. It's not a delusion or an error. It's a downright lie, according to you.

[David Orsam]

IHave you not read all the contradictory claims Mike made, which we refer to in Ripper Diary? Are you saying he didn't have to try and figure out which claims to include in his sworn statements and which ones to reject as the product of a drink befuddled mind? If he was confused over the dates of the critical events, he was equally confused over the events themselves, including how the kidney shaped stain got in the diary, to name just one. So how was he able to recall and sift through each and every claim he had made to various people, and to keep mental hold of those which reflected reality - if any - and let go of all the nonsense, if he had only been deceiving himself up until that point and hadn't known what was real and what was not? How did he gain the sudden clarity he needed in order to describe the main events as they happened, if not when? If he relied on his own confused mind to sort it all out, how did he do it?

Well if he finally decided to tell the truth in his affidavit it might not have been as complicated as your long paragraph suggests.

[David Orsam]

I think it is somewhat telling that despite a very detailed description of a hoax which had cost people tens of thousands of pounds (which Mike sadly reinvested up a wall), our friends from Scotland Yard simply looked up at the Heavens and tutted derisively.

"Telling"? What does it tell you though? That Scotland Yard investigated Mike Barrett's confession and found it to be untrue?

Or that they didn't bother to re-open the 1993 investigation (into Robert Smith) because there was no victim complaining of being defrauded?

[David Orsam]

That's THE most telling thing about Barrett's confession IMO; he went to the police with it, having trousered over £40k, and they neither prosecuted him nor made him pay any of his earnings back. How does that work? How??

There's nothing illegal about writing out a diary of Jack the Ripper as if it was written by Maybrick into a Victorian guard book. You or I could do it at any time if we want to. The crime is in the fraud and deception when obtaining or conspiring to obtain money from someone else, which requires a victim. But who was the victim here? Well the diary was sold to Robert Smith of Smith Gryphon but did he file a complaint after reading Barrett's affidavit? Not as far as I am aware. In fact, he was the one investigated by the police. He published the Diary but by that time it was well known that it could be a work of fiction and there was a caveated sticker on the book so members of the public were not defrauded.

The police also can't just make someone pay their earnings back. They don’t have the power. So that's how that works.

Ultimately any attempt to argue that Barrett's affidavit is untrue on the basis that Scotland Yard did not prosecute him is doomed to failure.

[David Orsam]

If I only think I know how to spell a word I tend to be completely anal about checking - even in emails which are not for public consumption.

And if you are anal then everyone else in the world must be too?

I suspect our diarist included the odd misspelling and shaky grammar (in a style similar to those humorous pieces in Punch) to help portray 'Sir Jim' as a jumped-up, self-important nobody, who fancied he was a whole lot smarter and better with words than he actually was.

Well there we are then. A deliberate spelling mistake and no dictionary needed to be consulted.

But if correct spelling had been considered at all important by Mike and Anne, I would have expected a dictionary to have been constantly at hand rather than leave things to chance.

Well then, if you really think my unanswerable point that someone who thinks they knows how to spell a word doesn't look it up is answered by your own "anal" behaviour, the answer must be that they either didn’t consider correct spelling as important and/or – as you suggest - included deliberate mis-spellings which Maybrick could have made.

Why are you wasting time with these non-points?