One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[caz]

Like I said, if he had forgotten that the diary had been forged only shortly before he presented it to Doreen, and thought it had happened some time before this, then none of the obvious available clues would have helped him.

So he was overseeing Anne putting the final touches to the diary around April 11th - or let's be generous here and have him spotting and acquiring the guard book a day or so before the end of March, and the eleven days starting on March 30th and ending on April 9th? He had his invitation from Doreen for April 13th, just four days away, and they were working to that deadline, but by the second half of 1994, with Alan Gray on board, he remembered their labour of love had taken them precisely eleven days to transfer into the guard book, after receiving and rejecting the little red diary, but had totally forgotten the impending deadline and why they barely had more than eleven days to write the thing?

Anne was the breadwinner at the time if I recall, so unless she took time off work to do the writing in her skilfully disguised hand, they presumably only had the evenings and one or two weekends to knuckle down to the task.

Love,

Caz
X

[David Orsam]

I will merely counter that by saying it's not possible for the typed transcript to have been seen by anyone before Mike acquired the guard book if I am correct in my understanding that he got it with the writing already in situ.

But I haven't asked you if anyone saw the typed transcript before Mike acquired the guard book! The only reason I've mentioned the transcript has been to make the point that there was no need for Mike to write out extracts in an 1891 diary for Doreen in March 1992 if a transcript was being prepared for Doreen in that same month.

[David Orsam]

Our respective positions must be clear by now to one another and to anyone who has not yet lost the will to read our posts. I doubt there will be any resolution or meeting of minds anytime soon, so is it time to agree to disagree?

It's entirely up to you Caz. All I can say is that your position as to why Mike wanted an unused or partly used diary from the specific 1880-1890 period with a minimum of 20 blank pages is not clear to me at all. In fact, I really can't fathom it.

[David Orsam]

I do hope Orsam, David will not live to regret the time spent in their wake on a similar cause.

As I've mentioned, the only thing of any real interest to me is whether the Diary was written by Maybrick and I'm satisfied that this is already disproved by the author's use of the phrase "one off instance".

The identity of the forger is of far less interest to me but until a satisfactory explanation is provided for Barrett's hunt for a Victorian Diary with blank pages, I have to assume he was involved and, that being so, until the story as set out in his affidavit is disproved, I have to assume that what he said in that affidavit is probably what happened, to a greater or lesser extent.

[David Orsam]

I'm glad you have referred again to the 'great effort and expense' it took the Barretts (Mike the effort and Anne the expense) to obtain the little [about 3" x 2"] red diary for 1891, because it contrasts rather starkly with a scenario beginning with its arrival in the post around March 27th or 28th 1992 and its immediate rejection as useless.

I don't quite follow the contrast. Are you saying that Mike possessed psychic powers and, therefore, should have known that the red 1891 diary would be useless before he had it in his hands?

[David Orsam]

Mike supposedly then has a brainwave and saunters into town to check out what Outhwaite & Litherland might be auctioning off and bingo! In hardly any time at all and with almost no effort he is confronted by the large black guard book, grinning evilly up at him and boasting an elegant sufficiency of juicy blank pages. Quick as a flash Mike bids for and wins his prize and tucks it under his arm, imagining how thrilled the little woman will be with him when he gets home.

And lo it came to pass that by All Fools' Day the Barretts were warming to their task and after eleven days and eleven nights the pen was put down. On Twelfth Night they did celebrate with a pint down the Saddle, and the next morning - April 13th - Anne whipped out her ink-stained hankie, wiped a tear from her eye and blew her nose (or did I get that the wrong way round?) before waving it proudly (the hankie, not her nose) at the departing figure of her hubby as the train conspired with them to get him to his appointment with Doreen on time.

Now if I believed God created the world in seven days, I might also believe the Barretts could have created the diary between rejecting the little red one in the closing days of March (after the great effort and expense to acquire it) and Mike showing off his big black one by mid-April.

But some things require too big an ask.

You are making the mistake of starting from the outcome and working back to wonder in awe at what appear to be some unlikely events that produced that outcome. That's exactly the same error as working back from my existence today to wonder in awe at the unlikely events have got me here.

I mean, the odds of a man (my father) meeting a particular woman (my mother), out of all the women in London (or the world) in the 1960s, and then beginning a relationship and then actually ensuring my conception, which could only have happened at one particular moment in time, are ridiculous and then you have to remember that this happened with each of their parents and then each of their parents. The idea that all of the extraordinary coincidences that needed to happen for me to be created could actually have happened is absurd. I simply should not be alive. My existence is impossible!

You see, in the same way that I wouldn't be alive if my parents hadn't met each other, if Mike hadn’t found a sufficiently blank diary there would have been no Maybrick Diary. He ended up finding one. But nothing was inevitable.

The scenario that I am proposing for the Diary is very simple. As at 10 March 1992, Mike is desperate for a blank or partly used Victorian diary because he has (a) the idea to make Maybrick the Ripper (b) some form of draft diary text and (c) serious interest from Doreen.

But where does he obtain a diary from the correct period in which to write the Diary? It has to be from the correct period otherwise the paper won't pass the simplest of tests. If he can't find one, the entire idea will need to be abandoned.

He has a Writers' Year Book and he finds an entry for a bookfinding company. He instructs them to begin a search for a diary from the period with blank pages. After a week or two they tell him that they have managed to locate an 1891 diary which (presumably) has a sufficient number of blank pages. He agrees to buy it – there are no other options - but when it arrives it's really too small to be of use.

So now he is stuck. He happens to have the (not unreasonable) idea to go to an auction and he sees a Victorian guard book for sale. It's not ideal because it contains photographs but beggars can't be choosers and the pages with photographs can be removed. Yes of course he gets lucky in finding the guard book in time but if he hadn't got lucky we wouldn't be discussing the story today.

As the basic idea and, presumably, some form of draft of the text of the diary, was already in existence, eleven days would have been more than sufficient for someone to write out the text which could have been transcribed in no more than two or three days. On the basis of 11 days, if the Diary had been purchased on Saturday 28 March the job would have been finished by 7 April.

Once they have the finished product, there is no point whatsoever in undue delay. As far as I am aware, there is absolutely no visual or scientifically testable difference between a manuscript written one week ago or one year ago. If you have any reason to think differently isn't about time for you to say so?

[David Orsam]

We agree then. Barrett's description cannot be trusted to reflect the truth, and doesn't tell us if he was even trying to tell the truth.

If the second sentence is supposed to be a summary of my views then you are in error - one could even say you are not speaking the truth!

Mike could well have been telling the truth as he remembered or understood it. The problem is that we don't know what the objective truth is. If you can tell me exactly how O&L conducted their sales then please go ahead and do so.

[David Orsam]

David, if you have to start mucking about with the words Mike chose to use for his best shot at confessing to forgery, you are on a slippery slope and a hiding to nothing. What you are in effect suggesting here is that Whay was so dim that he would have been totally incapable of reconciling Mike's description with the actual sales process O&L had always followed, with not much more than a single word change from "receipt" to "ticket". Any reasonably intelligent person would surely have said: "That's not really how we have ever operated, but it's possible he was mistaking his receipt for a ticket", instead of which Whay rejected Mike's account outright with his "never".

It is not correct that I have had "to start mucking about" with Mike's words. I've said from the beginning that there could be a confusion about the use of the words "ticket" and "receipt".

Let me ask you this Caz. Are you seriously expecting Mike to have been able to provide perfect recall of an auction house purchase system from three years earlier (assuming it was 1992)? It would be difficult enough even for me to do this I think, and I have quite a good memory, but when we take his alcoholism and ill health into account it's pretty unrealistic isn't it?

And I have no idea whether Kevin Whay was too "dim" to reconcile Mike's account with the actual process. The reason I have no idea is that, at least in the quotes provided, Kevin Whay does not explain what the actual process of O&L was.

In order to assess Mike's account I would have expected to know how O&L actually conducted their auctions and how this process was different to what Mike described. But Whay does not, apparently, provide this information.

We have had a member of this forum who has attended auctions tell me that if you substitute "receipt" for "ticket" then Mike's account describes how auctions are generally conducted. Can I not assume that O&L conducted their auctions like most other auction houses? Or are you saying they had some kind of unique revolutionary system that only they used?

[David Orsam]

So he was overseeing Anne putting the final touches to the diary around April 11th - or let's be generous here and have him spotting and acquiring the guard book a day or so before the end of March, and the eleven days starting on March 30th and ending on April 9th? He had his invitation from Doreen for April 13th, just four days away, and they were working to that deadline, but by the second half of 1994, with Alan Gray on board, he remembered their labour of love had taken them precisely eleven days to transfer into the guard book, after receiving and rejecting the little red diary, but had totally forgotten the impending deadline and why they barely had more than eleven days to write the thing?

I find your new emphasis on the fact that Mike had an invitation from Doreen for April 13th quite amusing. Previously you asked me about the "indecent haste" in Mike showing the Diary to Doreen only days after the final ink went on the paper but now you provide a complete explanation for the timing, being due to a fixed meeting date!

The so-called "indecent haste" in other words is wholly explained by a need to provide the diary to Doreen on 13th April.

Mind you, there's no mention of this "invitation" in Inside Story. All it says on page 2 is that, after Doreen spoke to Mike [Williams] on 10 March, she sent him a letter confirming that looked forward to meeting him "in due course", with no date mentioned.

The book states that there was a subsequent telephone conversation on an unspecified date in which Williams revealed his name as Barrett. If this call took place at any time after 7 April, at which time the Diary could have been finished (assuming a start date on 28 March), and Barrett was invited to the meeting on 13 April during this conversation, it would explain everything to your satisfaction wouldn't it?

In any event, had there been a problem, Mike could easily have come up with an excuse to postpone the meeting.

As for Mike remembering the number of days it took to complete the diary but not the year in which it was completed, the strange thing about memory is that a person can recall some facts or events perfectly yet forget other facts or events completely. Yes Caz, memory can do strange things. Are you not aware of this? Or did you know and you have now forgotten?

The point about Mike saying that it took 11 days to write the diary is that this just happens to fit in with a timescale which he didn't even seem to be consciously aware of when he wrote his affidavit. We only know it's a perfect fit because we know the date he acquired the 1891 diary and the date he met Doreen. Members in this very thread expressed incredulity that it could have been done as quickly as 11 days. Mike, who on your account was making it all up, could easily have said it took eleven weeks to do it. Why did he think he could have been done so quickly? Why only 11 days? That's the point I'm getting at.

[David Orsam]

Anne was the breadwinner at the time if I recall, so unless she took time off work to do the writing in her skilfully disguised hand, they presumably only had the evenings and one or two weekends to knuckle down to the task.

Well I have no idea whether Anne was working full time during that entire 11 day period or not but frankly the whole text of the Diary could have been transcribed over a long weekend if it was just a case of Mike reading or dictating and Anne writing it out. Eleven evenings (if you prefer to say evenings rather than days) would have been more than sufficient time to get the job done.

[Pcdunn]

As an observer with neither a horse in the race, nor a dog in the fight, I think it is somewhat ironic that Mr. Barrett swore to have been the author of the "Maybrick Diary", presumably to keep some control of it for himself-- only to now have that claim (and his subsequent denial of it) used as evidence that one really can't rely on anything he says.

My only question, I guess, is why did he deny his claim of hoaxing the book?

[Batman]

Predicted missing pages

[David Orsam]

My only question, I guess, is why did he deny his claim of hoaxing the book?

If you are referring to Mike's denial in an interview on 18 January 1995, he gave a reason for this denial in his subsequent affidavit on 26 January 1995 (in which he retracted this denial). For what it is worth, he said:

"On Wednesday 18th January 1995 when they all called at my home I was pressurised by them. Feldman's man Skinner came earlier than the others and started a tape recording off and my very words at the begining (sic) were, "FELDMAN YOU BASTARD GO AND GET ****ED, BECAUSE YOU ARE A BLOODY BIG MAN WITH A HELL OF A LOT OF MONEY AND AS FAR AS I AM CONCERNED, I WILL NEVER GIVE INTO YOU. I REFUSE TO BE BLACKMAILED". The tape carried on as the other three people arrived, Mrs Harrison, Sally Emmy, and a man who said, "he was an Independent Adviser'. I made reference on Tape that the hatred between Ann Barrett and I must stop. The Independent Advisor never said a word, but the others made it clear to me that if the 'Diary of Jack the Ripper' is genuine I would get my money in June 1995, however due to my Solicitor advising me some time before this meeting, that I had been granted legal aid to take Shirley Harrison to Court, along with Robert Smith and that if I stay quiet I would get my money, so this being the case I decided to collaboarate with these people and Anne's story by supporting the Diary., much to my regret but at the time I did not know what to do.

I was also afraid that if Anne and I get arrested for fraud what would happen to our daughter. I did not know who the Independent Advisor was and I felt a serious threat to me either through the Law or if I did'nt (sic) conform personal injury maybe. My wife has for the past 12 months kept my daughter away from me and used her to threaten me and blackmail me that I will not see her again if I don't co-operate.

...

I know its old hat and I am sick of trying to convince people about it but the truth is I wrote the Diary of Jack the Ripper and my wife Anne Barrett transcribed it onto the old photograph Album."

[David Orsam]

A good point that is.

[GUT]

As an observer with neither a horse in the race, nor a dog in the fight, I think it is somewhat ironic that Mr. Barrett swore to have been the author of the "Maybrick Diary", presumably to keep some control of it for himself-- only to now have that claim (and his subsequent denial of it) used as evidence that one really can't rely on anything he says.

My only question, I guess, is why did he deny his claim of hoaxing the book?

You need look no further than who was with him at the time of the denial.