One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[Iconoclast]

AND THIS IS ME ... [Thank you, Mike Yarwood*]

I'd like to make it clear here that my thoughts on the spirit behind the Gray-Barrett tapes (and I could be wrong here - I am reporting here on how I felt when listening to the tapes) is that they may very well have started off with a shared agenda of nailing those evil people from London who were diddling the vulnerable and innocent Mike Barrett out of his rightful fortune (we'll ignore for now the rather obvious fact that Barrett's brainless 'confession' to the Liverpool Post at the end of June 1994 had written-off hundreds of thousands of potential sales for the still relatively newly-published book) but that they soon evolved into something rather more sinister - namely, the barely-surreptitious attempts by Alan Gray on behalf of the viper Harris to find some concrete evidence of Barrett's actual guilt (which, of course, the viper was desperate to publish to put an end to the Maybrick tale) therefore my graydar very soon started to hint at some of those recordings being made without Barrett's knowledge.

As I say, I could be wrong, and it is certainly true that certain tapes do show that Barrett knew he was being recorded, but I am not convinced that every time Alan Gray popped 'round that Barrett knew he was going on the record.

When I get back to the tapes, I shall look out keenly for any evidence to prove or disprove my theory and share it with you all, my dear readers.

Ike

* PS For the pedants amongst us, of course Yarwood's catchphrase should have been, "And this is I ...".

[Iconoclast]

FROM KEITH SKINNER IN REPLY TO RJ PALMER, DEC 8, 2023 9.35PM ...

Originally posted by Keith View Post
"These were not sit down interviews with Mike but were sessions recorded by Alan using, I suspect, a concealed recorder which is what gives them their freshness and vitality.

Since listening to these tapes again I can confirm that Alan Gray was not using a concealed tape recorder but was openly using it so as to have an accurate record of what Mike Barrett was telling him. A paraphrased account of the recorded meetings between Gray and Barrett on November 6th 1994 and November 7th 1994 can be read on pages 151-155 of Ripper Diary: The Inside Story.

[rjpalmer]

FROM KEITH SKINNER:

Perhaps Palmer should also have consulted page 226 to remind himself that Alan Gray's theory also included his [Gray's] belief that Tony Devereux composed the story-lines for the diary.

Hi Keith. No need for me to consult it; I already stated this in my response to you dated 11-24-2023, 8:44 PM

Gray swore an affidavit in 1998 stating his belief that Anne HAD written the diary based on a storyline concocted by Tony Devereux.

This comes from pg. 226 of Ripper Diary.

All the best.

P.S. Please send any further commentary you might have by email. I have Tom Mitchell on "ignore" and might miss any future messages if I'm logged-in. Fortunately, I wasn't logged in when I noted the above. Ciao.

[Iconoclast]

FROM KEITH SKINNER IN REPLY TO RJ PALMER, DEC 8, 2023 8.44PM ...

2. In an explanation to this forum, Keith Skinner informed us there was no reason to hear the tapes because they contain no smoking gun and even Gray himself concluded that Mike and Anne had nothing to do with the hoax. In reality, Gray later signed a sworn affidavit stating his belief that Anne Graham DID write the diary.

My first and only meeting with Alan Gray was on August 10th 2004 in Liverpool. I did not record it or take notes. But thinking hard about it I have a feeling that Gray did say to me when I was leaving that his belief was Anne Graham had something to do with it and somehow Tony Devereux was involved. So I'm more than happy to concede that I was wrong and what we reported on page 226 of Inside Story (and which I should have consulted) was Alan Gray's position at the beginning of 1998.

Perhaps Palmer should also have consulted page 226 to remind himself that Alan Gray's theory also included his [Gray's] belief that Tony Devereux composed the story-lines for the diary.

[rjpalmer]

I want to make one final but somewhat important point about the Barrett/Gray tapes.

The following comes from Keith Skinner's recent explanatory message to Jon Menges, defending his decision to withhold the tapes.

"These were not sit down interviews with Mike but were sessions recorded by Alan using, I suspect, a concealed recorder which is what gives them their freshness and vitality.

I think this might be true--but I'm going from memory.

In this context, I merely ask you to please recall that Caroline Brown, in particular, but also Tom Mitchell, portray the Barrett/Gray 'partnership' as a 'clown car' comprised of two bumbling buffoons (to use a modern phrase) who were trying to prove the diary is a modern fake.

Barrett, we have been told, was desperate to do this in order to get back at Feldman, etc. etc.

But if this is a legitimate characterization of the situation, in all of its three-dimensional glory, then why, may I ask, was Gray obliged to secretly tape Barrett, as Keith Skinner suggests?

Wasn't this supposed to be a cooperative effort? Two men in a clown car?

If Barrett was fully cooperative, why didn't Gray just have the tape deck on the kitchen table?

Based on my memory of the one tape that I was allowed to hear, Brown and Mitchell are not giving the full story in all its necessary complexity.

It was not truly a matter of Barrett desperately trying to prove the diary was a modern fake and giving Gray all he had. As I remember it, Gray was trying to pull teeth and Barrett's cooperation came and went. Gray tried to convince Barrett that there would be money in a confession--a story of how he had faked the diary--but with no deal on the table, Barrett was, of course, not entirely buying that.

The impression I got--and still have--is that Barrett was playing all 'sides' for himself. In a sense, he was also 'playing' Gray, though I fully believe that some of what he said was true--as confirmed by independent sources and good, sound reasoning.

In brief, the situation was a lot more complicated and convoluted than how it is being portrayed--that's how I remember it.

[Iconoclast]

Do you know what, I have a suspicion that after almost 30 years of trying to make a purse out of a sow's ear, the argument in favour of Barrett-as-Hoaxer has hit a rather shuddering roadblock leaving its proponents with the dawning realisation that they have been following a road not as well driven as they had thought.

It's probably the complete lack of evidence that has finally led them to this impasse, I suspect. They have at last twigged-on that just having the testimony of a drunken, duplicitous alcoholic isn't quite the slam-dunk they had imagined it to be. Okay, so Lord Orsam managed to concoct a world which just about fitted Michael Barrett's affidavit of January 5, 1995, but the sole piece of available evidence for it proved to be utterly ambiguous - namely, the purchase of the little maroon diary from two years after James Maybrick died (you know, the one Barrett sought in case he needed to produce a genuine Victorian document at some point and didn't want to have to produce the actual Maybrick scrapbook itself).

They have attempted - really very pitifully indeed - to downplay the mind-bending coincidence of March 9, 1992. Well, you would, wouldn't you? However implausible it is in reality to ignore such an astonishing co-incidence of events. They have pulled out all the stops in attempting to downplay the reference to Florence Maybrick's initials in connection with tragic Kelly's room, but Dan Farson in 1973 buggered that little ploy well over twenty years before they even thought to scupper it. They have also made numerous attempts at ridiculing James Maybrick's highly idiosyncratic signature in the Victorian pocket watch which - given the wilful inadequacy of their attempts - makes you wonder quite how seriously they imagined their acolytes would keep believing despite the evidence that James Maybrick's known signature is in the back of that watch.

I can't begin to enumerate the myriad other details they have managed to downgrade, downplay, or vilify. Never with evidence, mind, because they haven't got any.

I think their days in the sun are over. Their arguments are spent, like damp squibs they have failed to bedazzle us all.

Shame really.

Not.

[caz]

Robert Smith did not simply report that anything submitted by Barrett (or anyone else) might have needed the guiding hand of a proofreader or editor; he said that an unidentified and unnamed inhouse writer actually cobbled Barrett's articles together from nothing more than a few select quotes submitted by Barrett.

There is no evidence for this, which is why I objected to it.

It was - and remains - Robert's professional opinion, based on years of experience in the trade and personal experience of the Barretts. That doesn't mean Robert was right about the finer details, but Palmer clearly thinks he can make something more of this, as if it has any possible relevance to who put the guard book in Mike's hand and the lead in his pencil.

Why couldn't Anne have made Mike's articles "acceptable to the publisher'?

Which is the EXACT question I've been asking for the past three weeks.

So why invent an inhouse writer willing to cobble together nothing more than quotes, turning them into a full-length article? Why has Anne suddenly vanished from the equation??

Palmer seems to have confused me with Robert Smith here. It is my opinion based on the claims of both Barretts [imagine that!] that Anne probably did make Mike's articles acceptable to the publisher, but I don't recall adding that they would have been published in the same form as they were submitted, without an in-house writer or editor tidying up Anne's tidying up. I recall submitting an article on my personal diary story [I dislike the word 'journey'] to Ripperologist in 2003, and I hardly recognised it when it appeared in print - nearly word for word, with no corrections needed, but the order of the paragraphs was completely changed, altering the whole look and how I had intended my story to be read. That took a fair bit of playing about with and I was not happy with the result.

I submit that handing in a muddle of quotes and hoping an in-house writer would do the rest would not be "acceptable to a publisher" and is not how magazines work.

Palmer's opinion has been noted.

What is the difference between the two Annes?

Palmer can tell us as he claims to have sufficient insight into the feminine mind to know what was in Anne's during March and April 1992.

A child could work that out.

Sorry, I clearly don't have any insight into a childish mind either.

I thus submit that the final version of the diary, complete with spelling errors, etc., does not contradict any of this, because---according to Anne herself---she didn't want the Diary published. She also stated that she didn't think it WOULD be published--because Mike's literary agents would "just send Mike packing" once they had seen it.

So how much effort was she really going to put into it?

Erm, handwriting 63 pages of largely her own composition according to Palmer. If a woman doesn't want her own written work published, she doesn't write the bloody thing in the first place for a husband who wants a best-seller out of it so he can drown in Scotch for the rest of his days. Abusive relationship or not, Anne had the wit to pretend she simply wasn't capable, if she had the wit to deceive him with a deliberately dumbed down effort.

Caz is making the error of thinking that Anne would have put as much effort into Barrett's hoax as she would have put into the submissions to Celebrity or to Shirley Harrison.

No, I'm saying she wouldn't have put any effort at all into handwriting something she didn't want Mike to try and publish. She'd have stopped trying as soon as she set eyes on the guard book.

[Tab]

They have been digitised Tab, but it's well beyond my ken, I'm afraid. At huge personal cost to me and Mrs Iconoclast, I employ a very experienced staff of freelance researchers, published authors, and very reliable plumbers working 24-7, sometimes day-and-night (sometimes longer) at my every bidding (even at teatime if necessary) at truly eye-watering rates (nothing is too good for my dear readers - even the absolutely stupid ones) so I suspect the recordings I have are about as good as we can hope to get.

Unless you know a really good app, of course?

Hi Ike,

Am I to understand from this that the audio has already been analysed and restored (by plumbers or otherwise)? If so when was this? Technology has come a long way, even in just the last year, so having the files looked at again for improvement might be worth it.

There are lots of drag and drop type audio clean up tools both online and downloadable that do their best to determine any obvious common issues and fix them. However, my feeling is that these tapes would require a more hands on approach to restoration, especially if there are recordings where the voices are barely audible due to the location of the tape recorder and/or background noise. I would definitely recommend Adobe Audition in this instance.

If you wanted to send over a 60 second clip of one of the tapes that is particularly bad/inaudible I can see what is possible and if it is worth pursuing further. Could be interesting.

Tab

[caz]

Either way, it is categorically false to imply that I lost or gave away the tape for any other reason than, being convinced that Barrett had inside information and was involved in what is an obvious modern hoax, I lost interest and moved on. This belief did not come directly from the tapes, but after studying ALL of the evidence, including the one tape to which I had access.

And right there is why it is pointless to imagine that Palmer's motive for rekindling that interest was ever in order to test and reassess his own convictions objectively. We have seen how his arguments are all constructed to keep the Barrett hoax kettle simmering away at all costs, and to dismiss or ridicule any evidence that threatens to pour cold water on his original convictions.

Personally, I no longer give much of a damn.

In which case, Palmer is correct - I must have zero insight into the masculine mind, because with every new post, covering every possible aspect of the diary saga, I get the polar opposite impression.

[caz]

Misrepresenting the authors?

Long before you started pointing fingers, I already gave the page number, the quote, and even pointed out that this 'crippling financial pressure' was originally based on the Barrett/Gray tapes. Strange behavior for someone who was trying to misrepresent anyone. By contrast, Tom Mitchell attributed it to something Mike had told Shirley Harrison.


That the authors, not being 'Barrett Believers' (isn't that what you like to call people?), would have also confirmed this with Anne Graham was a generous assumption on my part, but hardly a misrepresentation.

If, as you now inform us, neither Keith Skinner nor Seth Linder tried to confirm any of this with Anne Graham or independent financial records as I had assumed, and simply repeated Barrett's explanation without irony, challenge, or sarcasm, I am more than happy to apologize and give them an honorary membership to the Barrett Believers Club. We meet in Liverpool every third Wednesday.

But I'm not quite as petty as that. If this was the case, and all they were doing is reporting Barrett's own rationale, I suspect that they didn't challenge it because, unlike you and Ike, they realized that they couldn't crawl inside Barrett's brain and determine what pressure he may have personally felt in 1991-1992.

That's the rub, isn't? You can't prove that Barrett wasn't feeling pressure. For instance:



Again, you're fighting a losing battle and seem to have little insight into the masculine mind.

A house husband, whose wife is paying the bills, can't feel shame and pressure? Especially if what little money he was making had dried up and he's added to the problem by blowing money on drink and who knows what else?

Sounds like a very good reason to feel pressure.

I recently met a fellow in Hawaii who was under enormous pressure to buy a house--because he was living in his girlfriend's place, and he felt that a man should "pull his own weight." He had a perfectly good income (Barrett had none) and still felt pressure. Who are you to say otherwise?

And let me remind you that it is fairly commonplace for an alcoholic or a gambler to blame his woes on car payments or mortgage payments or "baby needs a new pair of shoes" when he largely did it to himself, so your argument again falls flat. That Barrett attributed the pressure he was feeling to something other than his own weaknesses (to mortgage payments, for instance) is not evidence that he wasn't feeling pressure, nor that he didn't have a motive.

Coming up for air: Let's remember that Ike is arguing that Barrett had NO INCENTIVE to create a bestselling hoax.

An unemployed writer, whose magazine gig had gone south, had NO INCENTIVE to write a bestseller.

This comes from the same source that believes that Barrett had all the incentive in the world to call up a literary agent within minutes or hours of seeing the possibly stolen Diary of Jack the Ripper in a pub in an attempt to get a publishing contract.

Suddenly his motivation for fast and easy profit has come to life?

It's ridiculous. It's a waste of time.

Barrett obviously had incentive to write. He bought an expensive word processor and submitted articles for two or three years.

No rational member of the public is going to believe there wasn't a motive.

Missing the point again, I see.

Mike claimed he faked the diary to pay his mortgage.

As I've previously observed, even the richest men and women on earth have a potential motive to make more money than they already have, so of course I agree that Mike would always have wanted more money than he had - if only to spend it on drink. As the late great Vivian Stanshall once quipped: "If I had all the money I spent on drink, I'd spend it on drink."

Considering the evidence of what Mike did with his diary money, and the fact that his house was repossessed, I submit that, just as Palmer himself repeats above, Mike was lying repeatedly from 1994 onwards about needing the money back in 1992 to pay the mortgage. Paying the mortgage was arguably the very last thing on his mind when he took the diary to London on 13th April 1992. If he was under a "crippling" [his word] financial pressure back then, it had bugger all to do with the mortgage, and more to do with where his next bottle of Scotch was going to come from if Anne refused to fund his booze habit any more.

The evidence clearly shows Mike was flat out lying about his stated reason for faking the diary, and yet Palmer still believes he was being truthful about having done so. That is why I called the financial motive argument a red herring. It could be applied to anyone, anywhere, so it's completely meaningless without a shred of evidence to support Mike's auction claim and the belief that he set out on the longest con of them all - getting his wife to fake Maybrick's diary - and not the shortest con, which would have been to beg, "borrow" or steal the bloody thing from an electrician who was working in Maybrick's former house on 9th March 1992. The financial motive, as Palmer himself points out after I had previously done so, would have been identical in either case, but the difference in time, effort and financial outlay required is massive.

Palmer has even admitted that Mike probably lied in 1999 about having retained proof of purchase of the guard book, so why anyone would accept a single claim the man ever made about his role in the diary story, and resort to insulting those of us - female and male - who have been given no reason to trust his word on anything, I find astonishing.

If Palmer has any male insight into the mind of a literary hoaxer, whose financial motive is starting to pay out healthy dividends, perhaps he would let us in on the secret of Mike's motive for confessing.

[rjpalmer]

As much as it pains me to write it, I can only conclude that 'Iconoclast' (Tom Mitchell) is deliberately spreading misinformation because I've already told him numerous times that what he is claiming above is NOT the case.

I was told there were 10-12 tapes.

I was only given, and only ever listened to, ONE of those tapes. As far as I know, I no longer have it and it has nothing whatsoever to do with me thinking it exonerated Barrett.

Now I'm told there are 15 tapes.

So, I've heard about 6.67% of their content.

As such, how could I possibly know what they do or do not contain?

Either way, it is categorically false to imply that I lost or gave away the tape for any other reason than, being convinced that Barrett had inside information and was involved in what is an obvious modern hoax, I lost interest and moved on. This belief did not come directly from the tapes, but after studying ALL of the evidence, including the one tape to which I had access.

I never wrote another peep about the Maybrick Hoax for something like 7 or 8 years, and only returned to the saga after Robert Smith published his book in 2017 and Caroline Brown and others began to claim, without any reasonable or convincing evidence, that the diary came from underneath Paul Dodd's floorboards--ie., Maybrick's bedroom floor.

Questions: Would Tom Mitchell know a 'smoking gun' if it grew teeth and bit him on the backside? He doesn't think Barrett's effort to find a blank Victorian Diary ('with at least 20 blank pages') in the weeks before showing up in London with an obvious hoax is a smoking gun, so please draw your own conclusions.

As I see it, here's where we stand.

In the past several months, we've seen posts from Tom Mitchell and/or Keith Skinner claiming three things.

1. In a post to Trevor Marriott on JTR Forums, they claimed that Barrett explained his various affidavits to Bob Azurdia in a taped interview. In reality, Barrett did no such thing, and even DENIED that he wrote a sworn affidavit admitting to the hoax, and when pressed on the matter, lied about its contents. This was NOT a deliberate effort to deceive Trevor Marriott; it was bad memories and bad interpretations of what Barrett had actually said.

2. In an explanation to this forum, Keith Skinner informed us there was no reason to hear the tapes because they contain no smoking gun and even Gray himself concluded that Mike and Anne had nothing to do with the hoax. In reality, Gray later signed a sworn affidavit stating his belief that Anne Graham DID write the diary.

3. In another post, we were informed that Martin Fido also concluded (not based on the tapes) that Anne was not involved in the hoax. In reality, Martin introduced his theory ('scenario') to this forum in the early 2000s that Anne DID write the hoax.

After considering the above, if you are still satisfied that Tom Mitchell, who apparently got the tapes from Keith Skinner, should be the sole gatekeeper and spokesman about their contents, feel free.

Personally, I no longer give much of a damn. The way I see it, the main reason they should be released is so Tom Mitchell or others can't misrepresent or 'spin' their alleged content into some weird approximation of what they believe to be the truth.

But, as I say, I don't care. I do care, though, that Tom keeps attempting to misrepresent my thought process or opinions.

And now, as I add Iconoclast, Gladiator, Soothsayer, and Tom Mitchell to my Ignore list, I bid him and the rest of you a happy Christmas season, or whatever holiday you might celebrate.

[Iconoclast]

Have these been digitised? Audio restoration is pretty straightforward these days - AI based DSP software is available to any Tom, Dick or Harry and can bring the most degraded unrecognizable audio back to life. I would be interested in giving this a go.

They have been digitised Tab, but it's well beyond my ken, I'm afraid. At huge personal cost to me and Mrs Iconoclast, I employ a very experienced staff of freelance researchers, published authors, and very reliable plumbers working 24-7, sometimes day-and-night (sometimes longer) at my every bidding (even at teatime if necessary) at truly eye-watering rates (nothing is too good for my dear readers - even the absolutely stupid ones) so I suspect the recordings I have are about as good as we can hope to get.

Unless you know a really good app, of course?

[Tab]

I have access to fifteen tapes of meetings between the ace Liverpool detective Alan Gray and his employer, the brilliant hoaxer Michael "Ex-Scrap Metal Dealer" Barrett.

Not all of them are equally audible. Many seem to have been recorded from Alan Gray's pocket and are probably now lost to us ...

Have these been digitised? Audio restoration is pretty straightforward these days - AI based DSP software is available to any Tom, Dick or Harry and can bring the most degraded unrecognizable audio back to life. I would be interested in giving this a go.

[Iconoclast]

Dear Readers,

I have access to fifteen tapes of meetings between the ace Liverpool detective Alan Gray and his employer, the brilliant hoaxer Michael "Ex-Scrap Metal Dealer" Barrett.

Not all of them are equally audible. Many seem to have been recorded from Alan Gray's pocket and are probably now lost to us, but the body of recordings which are audible enough are fully quorate to form an interesting observation.

And it is this.

Alan Gray made those recordings in order to catch Michael Barrett revealing the information which would categorically prove (or even just indicate if that was the best he could get) that the Maybrick scrapbook had been created by the erstwhile scrap metal dealer. Gray's role was to pass those recordings on to the viper Melvin Harris who passed those recordings onto - variously - Nick Warren and co. and eventually they found their way to those arch-anti-scrapbookists Lord Algernon Orsam and his lickspittle acolytes. They also (I don't know how) found their way into the hands of the authors of Inside Story.

So why am I telling you all this, my dear dear readers?

Well, how many Gray-Barrett tapes does it take to change a narrative? It would appear that it must be more than fifteen because not a single scrap of those tapes has ever provided the anti-scrapbookists with any ammunition whatsoever to argue that there is any evidence that Michael Barrett had a hand in creating the Maybrick scrapbook.

If any one of those tapes did, do you imagine for a moment we would have heard about it by now?

RJ Palmer - transient in possession of his copies - even discarded his or just casually gave them away to someone he can't now even remember - 'presumably' because he realised what is very obvious to anyone who has ever had the misfortune to sit through the hours of conversation between our latter-day Laurel and Hardy, namely, that there is not a scrap of evidence in favour of the argument that Michael Barrett had a hand in the creation of the James Maybrick scrapbook which solved the question of who Jack the Ripper actually was and - in sharp contrast - there was more than sufficient evidence of Michael Barrett's ceaseless lying and duplicity to make anything he ever said or WROTTED utterly inadmissible in court except on behalf of those arguing that he was a talentless, embittered, pissed-up loser who didn't care a jot about who or what he hurt if he thought his actions might get him even a tiny step closer to something he might want.

What should you conclude from this, dear readers? Well, it's simples. You should conclude that you are being sold a pup by those who attempt to give credence to the pisshead's utterly feeble attempts to prove he did something he didn't do. Believe those posters if you wish. Go on Lord Orsam's new blog and revel in how the truth can be twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools if you really want to be persuaded that the fanciful might be the actualité, but don't come running to me when it all goes horribly wrong and you realise how badly you have been let down by those you trusted to seek out the truth of this simple matter.

Ike

[Iconoclast]

Where on earth have I ever suggested such a thing? Always such amazing projection.

It's called an analogy, RJ, but I get it, it's okay, you didn't realise.