One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[Soothsayer]

Hi Sooth,
The Diary may have stood a half-way decent chance of more serious recognition had not Messrs Barrett and Feldman got hold of it. Between them they destroyed what bit of credibility it may have had ...

Yes, indeed. If the journal is ever proven to be genuine, it's provenance and timing will be forever the source of great bemusement to crime historians.

Until it is, of course, its provenace and timing present its critics with genuinely reasonable causes for disbelief in the journal and for confidence in their positions. I certainly can't blame them for that.

Speaking of blame, Mike Ashley has just posted an unreserved apology for his disasterous mismanagement of the club on the official website.

[Ally]

First, that "initial here, initial there" could very well have referred to him making slice and dice in her body for all you know. There is nothing like
On the wall, I left a scrawl". No, there is absolutely NOTHING that indicates what that is in relation to, except in the feverish imaginations of people who think that they are better able to glean the details of a ten times copied badly reproduced photograph, than the police who stood in the room and yet, somehow managed to overlook letters written in blood on the wall.

Y'all are so cute and gullible when you don't use the slightest tad bit of common sense. The faithful....can't reason with 'em, can't beat them till they snap out of it either.

[Soothsayer]

Aye, Right ...

First, that "initial here, initial there" could very well have referred to him making slice and dice in her body for all you know. There is nothing like
On the wall, I left a scrawl". No, there is absolutely NOTHING that indicates what that is in relation to, except in the feverish imaginations of people who think that they are better able to glean the details of a ten times copied badly reproduced photograph, than the police who stood in the room and yet, somehow managed to overlook letters written in blood on the wall.

Y'all are so cute and gullible when you don't use the slightest tad bit of common sense. The faithful....can't reason with 'em, can't beat them till they snap out of it either.

Yeah, fair point.

[Archaic]

Florie's Letter Understood In Its Proper Context

What you are describing are threats Maybrick may have made, or consequences he may have stressed to Florrie.
What Florrie referred to, however, was a tale he told!
The key to Florrie's comment in the letter has nothing to do with the age in which she lived other than her unfortunate coupling with history's most mysterious psychopath!

Soothy, Soothy, Soothy...OK, I tried to let you off easy, but here goes:
The phrase you quote from Florie's letter is taken out of context. Simply re-inserting the previous two sentences of the letter makes this plain. (damn; I hate typing) ''Dearest... I cannot answer your letter fully today, my darling, but relieve your mind of all fear of discovery now and in the future. M. has been delirious since Sunday, and I now know he is perfectly ignorant of everything, even to the name of the street, and also that he has not been making inquiries whatever! The tale he told me was a pure fabrication, and only intended to frighten the truth out of me. In fact he believes my statement, though he will not admit it. You need not go abroad on that account, dearest...''

Soothy, dear, the key to understanding Florie's statement has everything to do with the age in which she lived! She is clearly telling her Lover that her Estranged Husband DOES NOT KNOW HIS IDENTITY AS HER SECRET LOVER OR THE DETAILS OF THEIR AFFAIR! JM suspects her, but has no hard facts. He is trying to ''frighten the truth out of her,'' meaning the truth regarding her suspected love affair that she holds inside herself & refuses to share with him. Therefore JM does what a lot of upset people might do, which is to claim to know more detail than he does in order to surprise her into spilling the beans. Brierley, the coward, is already worried enough about being horse-whipped & socially ostracized that he is ready to flee the country! Florie is saying, ''Don't go, it's not necessary, he was just bluffing & really doesn't know a thing. I handled it.'' She is stressing her husband's UTTER IGNORANCE!

Now, the tale JM told to frighten her was the very simple & expedient one of saying, ''I know you are guilty of Adultery, so you might as well confess''. All he would need to take her to court, divorce her , shame & ruin her, AND take her children are a few small facts: Who, Where, & When. Eyewitnesses to what called ''Guilty Conversation'' simply had to testify in Court. Servants were often bribed to follow the 'guilty' party & then give testimony. There was a formula that had to be followed. JM already had the advantage of having all the household servants on his side, so I'm sure he used that threat, to.

He obviously made a scene, throwing around names, dates, hotels, streets, etc. But in fact HE GOT ALL THE DETAILS SO WRONG that it told her that not only did he NOT know the details of her affair, but he hadn't even tried very hard to find out by actually ''making inquiries!'' He was evidently too uncertain to do so, indicating that Maybrick was still at a very early stage in his suspicions toward her! (*This obviously destroys JM's purported motive to be JTR, too; sorry, Soothy.)

The point of the letter is that Florie has successfully snowed her drug-addicted husband & wants to relieve her cowardly boy-friend's unworthy mind by telling him this immediately. Now Maybrick is on his death-bed, and they are safe. The End.

Umm... that is, unless you think Florie actually poisoned him, which is another Crime Mystery entirely.
-Best regards from your friend with writer's cramp, Archaic

[Soothsayer]

Archaic makes a valid point regarding the interpretation of Florrie's letter to Brierley - it could indeed have been a reference to some fabricated version of her indiscretions as he perceived them. I have no argument with that, and he/she is to be commended for their logic. Nevertheless, it is not an argument which can be proven either way, and my own view remains as valid, certainly in the context of the journal.

So, we really do remain at a particular place: we have the only significant piece of evidence supporting any of the scores of Ripper candidates proposed over the years. Whether you feel the journal is a forgery or not, it is the only significant thing out there. Does anything concrete support the journal's claims to have been written by James Maybrick? At least three examples exist:

1) Florrie's letter to Brierley, with the quotation which Archaic has given a different case for, but which nevertheless exists and links to the journal - correctly or incorrectly.

2) The Diego Laurenz letter to the Liverpool Echo claiming to genuinely be Jack. Can anyone provide any other interpretation than that it was an oblique reference to ‘James Florence’?

3) The famous letters ‘FM’ on the wall of Kelly’s room – seen clearly by so many and denied by so many more (including the guy who first brought our attention to them, in the days before he couldn’t see them again – before they could be associated with anything as devastating to The Cult of Ripperology as a solution to the crime).

Stewart Evans has gone on record on this website as stating that the letters aren’t there. Bizarrely, he and Donald Rumbelow have used the latter’s Kelly photo in their ‘Scotland Yard Investigates’ which I came across this morning – bizarre because I’ve never seen the ‘FM’ more clearly than I did on page 184 of their book! (It appears to be the same version as that used by Trevor Marriott in his ‘21st Century Investigation’.) If the letters aren’t there and they have only appeared after copy became copy became copy (as has been claimed here), why do serious researchers publish books with those unreliable copies of copies of copies? They need to be removed from the public consciousness and their originals returned to the record going forward.

The journal is provided provenance by Anne Graham, wife of Michael Barrett. Here on this website, Michael and Anne are regularly pilloried – often in the most typically spineless and vitriolic fashion. I’m not convinced that either of them deserves such opprobrium. I have only ever seen Michael in the 1993 video which first hooked me on to the journal. At that time, he came across to me as a very straightforward, slightly overawed Scouser who had inadvertently stumbled across something quite sensational. I suspect that we would all have been similarly overawed in his shoes. Certainly, his provenance was awful. Despite that, Keith Skinner said on the video that those Ripperologists who had actually met Michael Barrett were more believing of him. I take that as symptomatic of Michael’s simplicity, honesty (at the time), and desire to be open about the journal.

Clearly, the tale deepened when Anne’s provenance emerged. Suddenly, we had a timeline, and a back story which included both Anne Graham and her father Billy Graham – two people who claimed to have owned the journal of the husband of the notorious Mrs Maybrick who was released from prison in 1904 and immediately took the surname Graham.

So the journal has provenance, though awkwardly so given Anne’s explanation for the involvement of Tony Devareaux. Nevertheless, she has provided the provenance which Michael could not. Her father supported the provenance, so either they were both lying, or else the journal is for real, or else it is a pre-1943 (when Billy Graham first saw it) forgery. The pre-1943 forgery is a tough one to argue due to the detail within it which is fundamentally post-1987. So we are more or less left with the twin possibilities: that the journal is genuinely Maybrick’s, or else that Anne and her father lied – possibly even wrote the journal. For the record, I assume people are innocent before they are found guilty, and I am convinced that Anne and Billy are innocent. I am unaware of even the slightest shred of evidence to suggest otherwise. I am also convinced that the journal is for real. It is very important to The Cult of Ripperology that the journal must never be acknowledged as genuine, so - for The Cult - Anne and Billy have to be either guilty of collusion in the forgery or else the forgers themselves.

Confusingly, Michael Barrett famously gave The Cult a Get Out of Jail Card when he declared that he had forged the journal. His solicitor immediately denied it, his sister denied her part in his confession, and he subsequently retracted his confession. Sadly, the die was set, and cunning malevolence was presumed over the sadder reality, which was that a desperately unhappy man needed to cling to what was left of his original ascendancy into the world of the famous. Had he ‘confessed’ at the apex of his fame rather than at the nadir of it, his case would have been far stronger. He chose the worst time to confess, just as the journal chose the worst time to emerge into the light. History will look unkindly on both for these reasons, but history cannot fairly condemn them in the eternal court of justice as history’s brief is clinging to the belief that the eternal jury will be all too easily swayed by the overwhelming criticism which The Cult has thrown up around the whole sorry case. I suspect that The Cult’s powers will be short-lived and that History will write more fondly of this inexplicable journal.

Pleasingly, from what we can now tell – in particular from Chris Jones on this website – Michael is finally now contented with his life, and proud of his house and garden. He seems for all the world to be an inherently simple man with uncomplicated expectations for himself. Deep down, that’s probably all of us. The journal, ironically, took him to his personal heaven through a very personal hell. He apparently now supports the authenticity of the journal (cf Chris Jones), and seems unlikely to ever retract his retraction.

In all of this, the role of Anne Graham has been key. If the journal is genuine, then - in the entire world - she is the only person who knows for certain whether or not the journal existed before 1987’s publication of hitherto unknown facts which are referenced in it. Only she knows whether it was gross coincidence that the journal’s author wrote ‘tin match box, empty’ when the original police list stated ‘tin match box empty’, and that the journal references three of Eddowes’ possessions in the same order that Martin Fido apparently did when he (and Donald Rumbelow separately) first published the police list. Only she knows whether or not the reference to ‘Oh costly intercourse of death’ was another freakish coincidence given that the man who brought the journal to the world’s attention had the particularly-obscure poem from which the line derived in his attic, and that he himself was the first to identify its source (but not from the version in his attic).

The list of good chances and coincidences goes on, and if the journal is genuine, only Anne can fairly marvel at the implausibility of them.

If the journal is a modern forgery, and she knew nothing of it, why would she provide it with provenance?

If the journal is a modern forgery, then frankly its author deserves our congratulations. To quote Bruce Robinson (scriptwriter for The Killing Fields) cited in Shirley Harrison’s updated (second) edition: If the Diary is a modern forgery – which I am sure it is not – and if I were the faker, then I would consider it to have been the summit of my literary achievement.

[Mr Chumley]

Blimey thats impressive analysis at work, I'm following this thread closley, as a newbie its fascinating that maybe the Maybrick line is the one after all..well possibly. After reading some of the other threads, and living in close proximity to the burial site of Michael, I wondered if James was Jack assuming the name aptly or otherwise of his other deceased sibling, and had visited his brother during this or shortly after the whitechapel events. I have so far been unable to find any direct link of a visit, and indeed as speculative as it is there may not have been one. The point being there was claimed that Jack may have possibly visited Portsmouth by the fact that one or two murders took place which had a similar MO, at least according to the press, one report being in the Independant newspaper, however this again may be speculation on the papers part in an attempt to increase circulation

[Mascara & Paranoia]

I thought whoever hoaxed the diary admitted to it? Either way, it's a load of BS.

[Soothsayer]

I thought whoever hoaxed the diary admitted to it? Either way, it's a load of BS.

Thanks for that. Good, solid analysis. Just what we've come to expect from The Cult of Ripperology and all of the lost souls which flock to it ...

[Mascara & Paranoia]

Well, it is. And you avoided the question: did anyone admit to it being a hoax or not?

[Ben]

Florrie's letter to Brierley, with the quotation which Archaic has given a different case for, but which nevertheless exists and links to the journal - correctly or incorrectly.

I don't know what you mean, Sooth.

If it's "incorrectly" tied in with the diary, it's not a "link", is it? I don't understand how anyone can interpret the tale referred to by Florrie as a admission to being Jack the Ripper, since it wouldn't remotely lend itself to frightening "the truth" out of her. "You're Jack the Ripper! How frightening! In that case, I'll tell you everything!".

It just doesn't work. Archaic's interpretation is far more persuasive.

The Diego Laurenz letter to the Liverpool Echo claiming to genuinely be Jack. Can anyone provide any other interpretation than that it was an oblique reference to ‘James Florence’?

It could have been the author's real name. It could have been someone implicating a real person with that name. The author's name could have been "James Lawrence" or someone trying to implicate a person with that name. The author could have plucked the name at random. Etc etc. All requiring far fewer speculative leaps that the suggestion that it was an "oblique" reference to James Maybrick and his wife.

The famous letters ‘FM’ on the wall of Kelly’s room

They're not there.

If they were, there's no possibility that the police would have overlooked them.

Best regards,
Ben

[Soothsayer]

Well, it is. And you avoided the question: did anyone admit to it being a hoax or not?

You give yourself away, I'm afraid, with your persistence.

1) Anyone who's anyone knows the story about Michael Barrett and his confession.

2) All the rest (including you) would have got it from my post had you bothered to read it.

As I say, you give yourself away ...

[Soothsayer]

I don't know what you mean, Sooth.

No, Ben, and you never have. Probably me, don't sweat it.

The Florrie letter has an entry which fits in with the journal.

The Diego Laurenz letter to the Liverpool Echo can be interpreted as James Florence. It could indeed have been the guy's real name (surely you weren't serious, Ben?), or his name may have been James Lawrence - but to my recollection, there has never been a suspect with that name. My point is, we can't prove anything (it's far too late for that!), but we can cite evidence which supports a candidate, and this letter certainly supports Maybrick.

Finally, of course the letters aren't there. What else do they tell you in The Cult? The moon's a balloon?

PS Please tell us you weren't serious that the guy signed the letter 'Jack the Ripper (Genuine)' then added his actual name? It's taken me 10 minutes to stop laughing at that one!

[Soothsayer]

No, Ben, and you never have. Probably me, don't sweat it.

The Florrie letter has an entry which fits in with the journal.

The Diego Laurenz letter to the Liverpool Echo can be interpreted as James Florence. It could indeed have been the guy's real name (surely you weren't serious, Ben?), or his name may have been James Lawrence - but to my recollection, there has never been a suspect with that name. My point is, we can't prove anything (it's far too late for that!), but we can cite evidence which supports a candidate, and this letter certainly supports Maybrick.

Finally, of course the letters aren't there. What else do they tell you in The Cult? The moon's a balloon?

PS Please tell us you weren't serious that the guy signed the letter 'Jack the Ripper (Genuine)' then added his actual name? It's taken me 10 minutes to stop laughing at that one!

While I'm on a theme, Ben. Do us all a favour. Tell us who in your humble opinion Jack actually was, and show us the evidence you have to back it up because you seem to feel you know it wasn't Maybrick.

I'll give you 120 years to answer, given that no-one else has managed anything in all that time.

Seems the power of The Cult is simply to Talk the Talk, rather than Walk the Ripper Walk.

[Ben]

The Florrie letter has an entry which fits in with the journal.

Well, you'll have to show me which one, because the entry about a tale being designed to frighten the truth out of Florrie doesn't tie in at all with the diary.

The Diego Laurenz letter to the Liverpool Echo can be interpreted as James Florence.

Only with an excessive amount of creative interpretation.

It could indeed have been the guy's real name (surely you weren't serious, Ben?), or his name may have been James Lawrence - but to my recollection, there has never been a suspect with that name.

Nor do we need one, since there's no reason to believe the real ripper wrote the letter in question. Yes, I was serious in my suggestion that he could have signed his real name. I don't consider it the most likely explanation, necessarily, but your incredulity at that suggestion is unwarranted, since false confessions to murder are fairly well known phenomenon. It's infinitely more likely to be correct, however, than the fanciful "Diego Laurenz = James Lawrence = James and Florence = James Maybrick" hypothesis.

Finally, of course the letters aren't there

Exactly, so stop saying they are.

[Mascara & Paranoia]

You give yourself away, I'm afraid, with your persistence.

1) Anyone who's anyone knows the story about Michael Barrett and his confession.

2) All the rest (including you) would have got it from my post had you bothered to read it.

As I say, you give yourself away ...

One: what, specifically, have I given away about myself? And two: you avoided to answer the question again.

Now, let me tell you what you've given away about yourself: your failure to supply me with a straight, blunt answer to a simple question, to my eyes at least, kind of implies that you don't like the answer to said question because it blows your case apart. Am I warm? Or is there another reason why you feel the need to be so evasive with your reply?