One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[Omlor]

Still trolling, Soothy?

Well, you'll get tired of it eventually. And since you still won't have any actual evidence, Diary World will still be the land where nothing is ever new and nothing is ever real.

Just stopping by now that the election is over,

--John

[Soothsayer]

Still trolling, Soothy?

Well, you'll get tired of it eventually. And since you still won't have any actual evidence, Diary World will still be the land where nothing is ever new and nothing is ever real.

Just stopping by now that the election is over,

--John

Who won by the way?

[Crystal]

The use of ‘Poste House’ is uncomfortable for diary believers but is not in itself unequivocal proof of a hoax. The text does not say which ‘Poste House’ the author is referring to. We simply cannot know for certain that the reference was not to a ‘Poste House’ somewhere other than in Liverpool. Indeed, the context of its use in the diary seems to favour London rather than Liverpool.

Except there weren't any. I have just been through every available directory for contemporary London, and nope, sorry, no Poste House, Post House, Postehouse or Posthouse public house, inn, tavern or any other drinking place in London. Will that do for a fact?

Oh, wait, there is one (well, sort of...) in Yorkshire, in Rotherham. But the pub is called the Red Lion and it just happens to double up as a Post Office. Its a description 'Post House' rather than a name. Maybe this is the one in the diary?

The name is, as I thought, an anachronism. The Diary is a fake. The reference to the 'Poste House' is clearly meant to refer to the pub in Liverpool, which, as I have clearly shown, cannot be a genuine contemporary reference. It isn't uncomfortable, its factually erroneous. So that's that, isn't it?

Unless of course somebody would like to demonstrate that Maybrick was in Rotherham in 1888 or that he spent a lot of time in the Post Office - not the one in Liverpool, though, because it wasn't built until 1899.

[caz]

Hi Crystal,

May I suggest you hold your post horses a wee bit and keep all your post house observations to a single thread - preferably the one I posted to earlier, regarding Liverpool's original post house in Old Post Office Place, which is in sight of Maybrick's childhood home and a short hop to the station where he caught his train to Aigburth when he moved there in later life.

Post house would have been used only in the generic sense in the LVP, harking back to the days of the coaching inn. But it could be used, and still can, as a nickname for any number of pubs. So I could have told you that you wouldn't find a pub with any such name actually over its door back then. It would have been akin to naming a pub the 'Inn' or the 'Local'.

We would use the lower case these days for post house, but there is some evidence in the diary that whoever was writing did use capitals for certain nouns, not just proper nouns, where today most people wouldn't think to do so.

Anyway, shall we continue this on its rightful thread?

Love,

Caz
X

[Voyeur]

Who would want to believe the diary?

I mean, here we have one of the greatest mysteries of all time, and some "diary" allegedly written by some dude who was never a suspect just drops in our laps.

That's no fun.

It's like that guy who wanted to take credit for the murders just before he was hanged.

[brummie]

OK I admit that when I first read the diary I thought it 'felt' genuine as if it could have been the work of the kind of mind responsible for the murders. It was on further reflection doubt started to creep in, not because of anything written in the diary, but because of what was NOT in it! I believed that if I had just read the diary of a pshycopathic killer I would have gained knowledge of some detail however tiny and insignificant that only the killer would know or consider important enough to write about, and frankly I could find nothing about the killings I didn't know already. I would imagine that the kind of mind who would commit such killings and mutilations would only feel the need to write about them as a way of reliving the 'thrill' of the act, but the actual murders and the interaction with the prostitutes leading up to the killings is almost glossed over.Bearing this in mind and the confession by the alleged finder about how and when he forged the diary convinces me the diary is almost certainly a fake. Of course any forger choosing Maybrick as Jack would have to have been very lucky to use someone whose life, and death, had already been the subject of much scrutiny. Has anyone yet proved that Maybrick was elsewhere on the murder dates?

[halomanuk]

It was convincing from the start as people WANTED to believe (apart from us Ripperologists who wouldn't know what to do next !),but,it again was a fraud ,no matter how decent the 'effort' was ..

[Soothsayer]

I believed that if I had just read the diary of a pshycopathic killer I would have ...

I would imagine that the kind of mind who would commit such killings and mutilations would ...

Richard Dawkins ('The Blind Watchmaker', 'The Ancestor's Tale', inter alia) makes the point about those who believe that a creator agency (one of the many 'Gods' we have in the human world) designed the human eye that they invariably base their belief on the origins of the eye on the simple fact that they personally can't imagine how else it could possibly have happened. "I believe that the human eye is simply too complex to have ever simply evolved, therefore there must be a Creator at work". Dawkins calls this the Argument from Personal Incredulity. You could equally call it the Argument from Personal Vanity: My lack of imagination is all the evidence we require to prove beyond doubt that X can't possibly be true.

We see it here on the Casebook often. "X can't possibly be true because I personally find it hard to imagine it being true".

Often, it is reduced to the level of the absurd - for example, "I find it hard to believe it's the diary of Jack the Ripper because the author didn't use dates" - as if the author of the 'diary' ever once refers to it as a diary! Variations on this theme regularly populate these shores.

The argument in favour of the authenticity of the diary is supported by many circumstances. Some of these are integral to the text of the diary itself. For example, despite claims that the diary shows no new insight into the case, it is through the emergence of the diary that the cuts on Eddowe's cheeks have entered the wider public domain. The diary also provides the suggestion that the metal case in her possessions may actually have been the killer's. The diary brings our attention to the letters 'F' and 'M' on Mary Kelly's wall - the ones which not a single detractor of the diary's authenticity can see. "I am blind, therefore there can't be anything there to see!" shouts the Argument from Personal Vanity.

The diary has many supporters. Most of them are wise enough not to post on this site. The abuse generally speaking isn't worth the effort. This tends to make the Casebook a bit of an Old Boys Club of self-congratulation amongst those who have an overwhelming dread of the identity of Jack ever being resolved. They gang up, and they lambast, and they send each other little congratulatory messages - it all makes them feel so much more secure in the misguided belief that if ten people shout loudly, one person speaking quietly must necessarily be wrong.

The mass of circumstantial evidence underpinning the diary, and the fact that not a single example of incontrovertible error exists in the diary, truly ought to sustain the debate amongst us all. Something about this diary threatens people - so much so that the pharmacist regularly runs out of bottles of vitriol whenever anyone attempts to expand the debate beyond the screaming bullying of the playground.

Seventeen years and counting. James Maybrick remains the overwhelmingly most likely author of those terrible crimes. Every anonymous vote puts him so far out in front there may as well not be any other candidate. Not so on this Casebook! That speaks volumes about the paucity of the debate provided by this site.

[Sam Flynn]

Seventeen years and counting. James Maybrick remains the overwhelmingly most likely author of those terrible crimes.

How one can say that, when he's not even the "overwhelmingly most likely author" of the Diary, is optimistic to say the least.

Great post, nonetheless, Sooth.

[Ben]

I'm afraid the idea that a suspect's candidacy is somehow advanced by the number of "anonymous votes" is more than a little silly.

[Soothsayer]

... is more than a little silly.

Ooh, Ben, you know how to hurt a man ... the vitriol starts again!

[Soothsayer]

How one can say that, when he's not even the "overwhelmingly most likely author" of the Diary, is optimistic to say the least.

Hi Sam,

It's a well-proven technique for ensuring that Tom Mitchell's brilliant (some say, the best ever) thread remains the most responded to and viewed in the Maybrick canon here on the Casebook.

Don't blame the marketing - Rice Crispies don't really go Snap, Crackle, and Pop, you know!

(Or do they?)

[Christine]

I haven't read through all this thread, so I apologize for redundancy--but the various mistakes, the shaky provenance, the handwriting discrepancies, the use of a photo album with the beginning pages removed--are all strong evidence against the diary being legitimate.

The one thing that I know of that would be incontrovertible would be the presence of preservatives in the ink. Last I heard, there was strong reason to believe that the ink had preservatives in it, but that the tests on the diary were cut off. This came as a bit of a surprise, as authentic ink is easy to make and actual antique ink can even be bought on e-bay. But apparently the forgers used an ink that was designed to emulate antique inks, but not to the point of not containing modern preservatives.

So I'm still waiting for the definitive answer on the preservatives, which the owners seem unwilling to provide. That plus all the other problems, make the whole thing very sticky indeed. Given the lack of incontrovertible evidence for the diary's authenticity, I don't think the lack of incontrovertible evidence against it counts for much.

[Soothsayer]

Given the lack of incontrovertible evidence for the diary's authenticity, I don't think the lack of incontrovertible evidence against it counts for much.

As self-appointed master-defender of the diary on this site, Christine, I have to challenge this last thought.

To have a document which has yet to be unequivocally debunked in seventeen long years puts it in a league substantially higher than similar documents (including itself, ironically) which have yet to demonstrate unequivocal proof of their case.

I am unaware of any other document on record with such a record (although recent work on the Turin Shroud has apparently re-opened the possibility that that was not a fraud), and this really ought to make us take it a mite more seriously than most do on this site.

The possible use of an anachronism ('Post House'), the handwriting style, the misplacing of the breasts at the Kelly death scene are challenges, but not death knells. For every example which casts doubt on the diary, there are an equal number of extraordinarily unlikely 'coincidences' which play some part in supporting it.

To name but one - the example which for me is as close to incontrovertible proof of authenticity as we will probably ever get - is the initials ('FM') on Kelly's wall which are predicted by the text of the diary ('An initial here, an initial there will tell of the whoring mother' - Florence Maybrick, of course). Their existence on the wall in themselves is startling. The fact that the 'M' is exactly the 'M' used throughout the diary text (distinctive by its rising second half) is good enough for me. They say one thing and one thing only: either the diary is genuine, or else they were first seen by the forgers (Simon Wood in 1988 possibly excluded) and from this they worked the story backwards to Florence Maybrick, thence to her husband James Maybrick, a candidate never before considered (for obvious reasons - the fact that he was a Liverpool cotton merchant makes him an implausible Whitechapel murderer) but one for whom no evidence exists which makes his candidature impossible.

These two letters on the wall are so crippling to the debunkers' case against the diary that - extraordinarily - they simply claim they aren't there (no, seriously, they do - it's incredible, I know). This simply won't do. To deny evidence exists when so many can see it to me smacks of the last desperate vestiges of the scoundrel clinging to the lies which are nevertheless about to condemn them in a court of law.

As I have said previously on this site, this is a case of the Emporer genuinely parading down the street in his fine new clothes, and this time the crowd are laughing at him because they think he's naked!

[Graham]

Well....I dunno. When I read Shirley Harrison's and Paul Feldman's books shortly after they were published I thought, hmm, highly plausible, even though Feldman was obviously manic and obsessive and stopped at nothing to 'prove' his theory. Yet on subsequent readings (this, by the way, is long before I found Casebook) I began to feel that the whole 'Diary' thing was just too good to be true. It all seemed rather 'engineered' to me. The inclusion of the word 'Battlecrease' in the script of the Diary was far too obvious, for a start. But I do agree that the Diary has never been fully proven to be a modern fake - the analysis of the ink has never been properly fixed, and even 'Poste House' doesn't, for me at any rate, place the Diary in modern times. I used to think that perhaps it was an old forgery, written to get Florie off the hook, but written by whom? At whose request? And for who?

I never could, and can't, see the 'FM' on the wall. Yes, there are marks there, but I ain't convinced. And Simon Wood saw the letters a good 5 years before the Diary was made public. I'd viewed the photos of 13 Miller's Court 'n' times before I heard about Simon's discovery, and never saw the letters. And I still can't. And I don't deny the existence of the letters to debunk the Maybrick Candidacy - I just don't seem them!

The real mystery is: if the Diary is a modern fake, then why James Maybrick? The forger, if it is a forgery, could have picked 'his' Ripper out of literally millions of real Victorians about whom nothing was or is known, and no-one would have been any the wiser. So why Maybrick? If he didn't write it, then whoever did must have selected that particular gent for a reason. One thing is for sure, and that is that Mike Barratt didn't write it.

According to Feldman, Martin Fido told him that, quote, 'we can't fault it', or words to that effect. Was the inability for someone like Fido to find fault with the Diary because of serious research on the part of whoever wrote it, or sheer luck? To his credit, Feldman discovered a lot more about Maybrick than had previously been known, and if he did discover what Maybrick was up to on any or all of the murder nights, he never admitted as much. But he wouldn't, would he?

So was the Diary written for potential profit? Revenge? Mischief? I would [I]love[I] to know who wrote the Diary and for what reason, and I have this little gnawing suspicion that the answer may well lie with another Barratt, and she seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Still, who knows? If Steve Powell ever does get his book published (if he has actually written it, that is) then perhaps he'll shock us senseless. But somehow I doubt it.

Me, I just lurrrve a mystery...

Cheers,

Graham