One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[Scott Nelson]

So many flaws with this theory. I can’t even begin to unravel them.

It's a work in progress. I'm not at all prepared for all of the pending potshots, but fire away.

[Scott Nelson]

What is the source for Eddie living on Fountains Road in March 1992? I believe this was his girlfriend’s house and he was there in the summer of 1993. Is this the address that P & R had for Eddie the previous year?

Hi RJ,

Sorry, I don't know.

[rjpalmer]

Hi RJ,

Sorry, I don't know.

He could have lived there, but offhand I don’t recall anyone showing that he did—just Barrett beating down his door 14 or 15 months later.

[Iconoclast]

Thanks Ike. I thought you may be coming around to considering a few merits of the theory as remotely plausible. Devereux gave the Diary to Mike, so Mike would have had it prior to August 1991. I don't think Eddie would have been aware that Tony gave the Diary to Mike prior to their later meeting in the pub, that is, until Mike told Eddie -- if he did at all.

Hi Scott,

As I say, it's an interesting thought. If The Miraculous Day was indeed a coincidence but the coincidence consisted only of the the man with the diary meeting on the same day the man who was helping out at Battlecrease House when the floorboards came up, then I guess it could well have worked as follows:

Pre-Aug 1991: Tony D gives Mike the diary
Mike researches it to the best of his ability
Mar 9, 1992: Mike happens to be in The Saddle when Eddie is also in and they chit chat away and Eddie mentions that he's spent some of the morning working on James Maybrick's floorboards, you know, the famous murder victim from Victorian times
Mike then thinks it's time he approached a publisher about the diary he's had for many many months (and/or he thinks what a timely day this would be for him to go on the record as having done so for the first time)

If it did happen this way, Mike never once used the opportunity for this false provenance, sticking rigidly to his Tony D story (when he wasn't claiming he had written it or he and Anne had written it or Anne had written it or he and Anne and Tony had written it, etc.).

As I say, interesting. Or, as Barry Davies said when Franny Lee scored a peach in the 1970s, "Interesting - very interesting!".

Keep 'em coming, Scott.

Cheers,

Ike

[Iconoclast]

He could have lived there, but offhand I don’t recall anyone showing that he did—just Barrett beating down his door 14 or 15 months later.

Good Morning RJ,

I am 99% certain that Eddie is listed at Christine's house in February 1992 but I've misplaced my source. I'll post it when I recall it.

Your Old Mucker,

Ike

[Scott Nelson]

Yeah, you have it essentially, Ike. Mike's first (and probably true) provenance is that he got it from Tony and I'm suggesting Tony rewrote it from an older Diary. Even when I read Shirley's book back in 1994, I thought this melodrama was likely based on an earlier story written by one of Maybrick's near-contemporaries. So I settled on the sneaky Harry Dam, who knew Michael Maybrick and the actor, George Grossmith and they probably wrote it together as a lark. This is just the sort of thing Harry Dam would have done, if you recall the Leather Apron stories. Another candidate could have been the playwright George Sims, but he had too much integrity.

[caz]

Hi Scott - I’m currently away from home, far away from any books or notes.

What is the source for Eddie living on Fountains Road in March 1992? I believe this was his girlfriend’s house and he was there in the summer of 1993. Is this the address that P & R had for Eddie the previous year?

Thanks for any elucidation.

Hi RJ,

Before you ask any more questions about sources, could you kindly respond to the questions you were asked in posts #6935, #6936, #6939 and #6940, including at least one about your own sources?

One source for Eddie's whereabouts in 1992, while employed by P&R, is presumably the man himself. Wasn't there a newspaper article you quoted from, which indicated that two of the electricians had admitted that they used the Saddle and may have discussed the "murder house" they had worked in?

They may of course have been referring to the summer of 1993, although I thought this was in response to questions about their lives and work before the diary emerged, and therefore whether it could have been taken from said "murder house" at any time during their employment?

Whether Eddie was admitting that he drank in Mike Barrett's local while employed by P&R [he was taken on in late November 1991 and made redundant in late July 1992], or claiming that he and another former workmate only began drinking there in 1993, would he not have made it clear that he didn't move in with his girlfriend until long after the diary was known to be in Mike's possession, if this had been true and he could have proved it? It was after all the awkward Saddle 'coincidence' that threatened Eddie, so he has had years to prove there was no connection, if he was still living in his Mum's house when Mike went public about owning the diary.

[caz]

Looking for something completely different just now in my files, by a strange coincidence the very first document facing me is a printed list of Fountains Road residents in both February 1992 and February 1993, and on both lists Eddie Lyons appears with his then girlfriend at No. 44A.

So I guess Eddie would have had a hard time denying that he was living there by March 1992.

RJ, I've shown you mine, so perhaps you would now show me yours - in particular, your source for the diary being ruled a 'fraud' by a court of law, nearly 3 decades ago?

Thanks ever so.

By the way, what I was looking for was the P&R worksheet for the week ending 19th September 1989, which was the only occasion prior to 9th March 1992 when the firm sent any employees to 7 Riversdale Road. On that occasion it was a three hour job on a faulty immersion heater, and the two men named did not feature in anyone's statements referring to the electricians supposedly involved or 'in the know' concerning the "old book" being found and taken from the house.

Feldman naturally could make no sense of this, from the names he was given by Colin Rhodes in April 1993, because he was working with the presumption that Tony Devereux had indeed given Mike Barrett the diary by the summer of 1991, just as Mike claimed, which was many months before any of the floorboard related work was done in Battlecrease, by the individuals he was in contact with. He had no real choice but to conclude they knew nothing and were just trying it on, because he had no good reason to think Devereux was dead before Mike had even acquired the scrapbook [nobody did at that time], and no reason to concern himself with when Doreen Montgomery first learned of its existence. Feldman therefore had no idea there could be any possible significance to do with the date Mike first called Doreen and what had gone on in Maybrick's old bedroom on the same day.

It's lazy for anyone to conclude with hindsight that Feldman and Shirley Harrison were right to reject the electricians' stories, when it's now clear that neither was in possession of all the salient facts at that time. Were they right to accept Anne's story instead?

I think we already know your answer to that one, RJ.

[Iconoclast]

It's a Lottery! - Orsam Books

Run for the hills, everyone, it's the numbers game again!

Well, we knew this day would come, and it has: Lord Orsam has posted on his Tiny Window onto the World (will he ever fix that ridiculous formatting issue which vaingloriously makes his articles seem longer than they really are??? - like a marketeer assuming that the price of a product will be understood by consumers as its underlying value, he seems to equate the apparent length of his articles with erudition) in reply to that recent turgid series of posts on simple probability theory which he demonstrates a profound lack of grasp over.

Basically, I can save you the time it would take to read his responses (and obviously the irritation of reading through a drainpipe) by summarising his various comments as thus:

His Most Insightful: It doesn't matter what subject at all I am talking about, I am right and the rest of the world is wrong.

Thus, unsurprisingly, it transpires that I know nothing of statistics and he is the doyen of yet another academic subject. Well good for him - it must be nice to sit in his Chigwell semi, imagining it's a mansion, thinking he's the smartest arse in town (when that's clearly I) and confusing his budgie for a butler, et cetera, but I am unmoved.

I will address a question the Dark Lord poses to me, however. Due to the sensational events surrounding his dramatic resignation from the Casebook, I have to report his actual question via the clumsy tool of paraphrase and it must therefore be read in your head as if in a darkened room by an actor putting on a Northern Irish accent, please:

How do I [the genius that is Iconoclast, obviously] calculate the odds of the double event happening 24 hours apart - so the second event happening one day later? [See link at top of this post if you want to read his actual question verbatim, but do remember to put electrician's tape over three-quarters of your screen so that it looks as though you are reading it in full-screen format.]

I say 'address' because it's Saturday morning and I'm a bit groggy from too much 1698 and Hobgoblin Ruby Ale last night so I may err in my consideration of his dastardly puzzle, but I think it's probably really rather easy to calculate. As ever, you must be clear about what question you are asking (this is a key learning for Voldemort's Shadow as he consistently addresses statistical questions which have not been asked and therefore - inevitably - comes up with solutions which trump nothing because they are simply goals scored on a school pitch whilst the rest of the nation is watching the Cup Final).

Let us be clear: we are not attempting to state the probability of any given unknown event occurring (for example, the likelihood that the Queen will sneeze this afternoon), but rather the likelihood of something which we know for a fact happened after some other event had happened happening on a specific day. I have no idea what the probability was that Trevor Stubbs of High Street, Pinchin, would ring Doreen Montgomery on March 10, 1992 with the mooted diary of Jack the Ripper, not do I have any idea of the probability that he will attempt to do so tomorrow. I'm not a soothsayer. Fortunately, that is not the question here.

So, the question being asked is essentially this: if the two events definitely occurred at all, what was the probability that one would occur on March 9, 1992, followed by the other on March 10, 1992? Well, it's definitely not 1/37,557 (nor indeed 1/37,558). Why not? Because the first event has now definitely occurred so the odds get reset from the day that the first event occurred. It has occurred, it is known, so now we are asking what were the odds that the second event - if it was definitely known to have occurred at least 24 hours after the first event occurred - would occur on March 10, 1992? Well, on March 10, 1992 that's a certainty - it's 1 over 1 which is 1 - only if we know the second event definitely followed the first event by at least 24 hours. On March 11, 1992, the odds that the second event would have occurred on March 10, 1992 was 1/2 (it was one event which by then could have occurred on either of two days). On March 12, 1992, the odds that the second event would have occurred on March 10, 1992 was 1/3. Et cetera. As time passes, the likelihood that the second event occurred on March 10, 1992 if the first event occurred on March 9, 1992 gets longer and longer (note, this is not to say the second event becomes less likely to have occurred as time passes because one of our critical premises is that we know it occurred so that bit is not in debate - it is certain - it is simply that the likelihood that it occurred on the day after the first event gets less likely if it occurred purely by chance alone).

So it's all a matter of perspective: when are we asking the question? September 25, 2021? Well, if we know the second event definitely happened (but we don't know when it happened) then the odds of it having happened on the day after the first event are clearly 1 (the number of times it happened) over X (the number of days which have passed since the first event happened). So by today that's about 1/10,000 that it would have happened on March 10, 1992.

What is critical here is being clear in your mind: we are not stating the probability of something possibly happening, we are stating the probability that something we know for a fact happened happened on any particular day.

Hey - I could be wrong, but I'm almost certainly not.

I thank you.

This is Major Misunderstanding, over and out.

[caz]

Well hello there, Iconoclastypoo!

The reason it has taken me until October 5 to see and respond to your colourful post from September 25, is that September 25 also happens to be Mr Brown's birthday. What are the chances??

The day after that, September 26, happens to be Little Caz's birthday. [A festive conception in both cases, probably explains why September 26 is the most common birth date in the UK, according to my daughter, reducing the coincidence somewhat of her birthday and Mr Brown's falling just one day apart.]

Mr Brown only returned to work today after a fortnight's leave, during which we had Little Caz and her lovely partner to stay - first time I have been able to hug my daughter since the summer of 2019. To me, that event was far more important than whatever bilge may have appeared on old Mouldywart's basement wall.

He could still be writing down there in 2031, and the March 9 double event will not have gone anywhere either, grinning down eternally from the first floor of Battlecrease, daring anyone to invent new ways to diminish its inconvenience.

I don't suppose the Saddle Sore one tackled the very next 'coincidence' involving Mike and Eddie, did he? Should really have been Charles and Eddie, considering their song 'Would I Lie to You?' was released in the summer of 1992. I digress. While Mike appears to have been stalling for time by telling Doreen, on March 10, 1992, that he was off to York later that week and would contact her again about the diary on his return, Eddie did a disappearing act for real, failing to return on Friday 13 March to the Skem contract, for which he had been taken on by P&R in the first place. Colin Rhodes thought it unlikely that Eddie would have gone on holiday in March, with two weeks of the contract left to go, while Doreen simply accepted that Mike was taking the family on a jolly to York during term time. He'd have had some ready answers about the city if she asked, as their summer holiday in 1991 was spent there. It was on their return when Mike learned that Tony Devereux had died unexpectedly while they were away.

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

Well hello there, Iconoclastypoo!

The reason it has taken me until October 5 to see and respond to your colourful post from September 25, is that September 25 also happens to be Mr Brown's birthday. What are the chances??

The day after that, September 26, happens to be Little Caz's birthday. [A festive conception in both cases, probably explains why September 26 is the most common birth date in the UK, according to my daughter, reducing the coincidence somewhat of her birthday and Mr Brown's falling just one day apart.]

Mr Brown only returned to work today after a fortnight's leave, during which we had Little Caz and her lovely partner to stay - first time I have been able to hug my daughter since the summer of 2019. To me, that event was far more important than whatever bilge may have appeared on old Mouldywart's basement wall.

He could still be writing down there in 2031, and the March 9 double event will not have gone anywhere either, grinning down eternally from the first floor of Battlecrease, daring anyone to invent new ways to diminish its inconvenience.

I don't suppose the Saddle Sore one tackled the very next 'coincidence' involving Mike and Eddie, did he? Should really have been Charles and Eddie, considering their song 'Would I Lie to You?' was released in the summer of 1992. I digress. While Mike appears to have been stalling for time by telling Doreen, on March 10, 1992, that he was off to York later that week and would contact her again about the diary on his return, Eddie did a disappearing act for real, failing to return on Friday 13 March to the Skem contract, for which he had been taken on by P&R in the first place. Colin Rhodes thought it unlikely that Eddie would have gone on holiday in March, with two weeks of the contract left to go, while Doreen simply accepted that Mike was taking the family on a jolly to York during term time. He'd have had some ready answers about the city if she asked, as their summer holiday in 1991 was spent there. It was on their return when Mike learned that Tony Devereux had died unexpectedly while they were away.

Love,

Caz
X

Well hello and backatcha Cazzykins!

How wonderful to hear of the double event (sort of) which is Mr Brown and Little Caz's birthdays. I thought you'd been affy quiet this last week or two. "Not like Caz", I thought, somewhat obviously. The whole baking-two-cakes-thing-and-I'm-not-even-on-Bake-Off must have distracted you from the wit and wisdom of the great wordy one from Chigwell?

Hand on heart, I worry not the wit and wisdom he is working on down down deep in his Chigwell Sir Robert Anderson shelter regarding all things numerical and their relative likelinesses of happening (he's probably even as I type calculating the chances of Little Caz's birthday falling on the day after Mr Brown's rather than on the same day and then planning on asking me 'cos he can't work it out).

No, what worries me is his remarkable claim that Florence Maybrick's initials are - in truth - not to be noted on Mary Kelly's monochrome murder scene which conveniently saves him from having to explain how someone had made clear and unequivocal reference to them when spending over four pages of his (or her) diary talking solely about what he had done to poor Mary's corpse and yet somehow that claim was incontrovertibly evidenced by the photograph taken of the event.

What keeps me awake at night is wondering from where he sources his limitless gall (I had understood it was in short supply due to a lack of trained European gall drivers) from which he has invested so much in his brilliantly-deflecting strategy of claiming he'd seen the original photograph and the 'FM' was not on it. "So that's that" he claimed, or something very similar.

I think not ye evil Lord of the dark shelters. You don't get to discount the most telling evidence of who Jack the Spratt McVitie actually was by simply stating that that evidence isn't there. Try telling that to Dan Farson when he published his paperback in 1973, or those violently anti-Maybrickians Sugden and Marriott who post-diary were content to provide to their sceptical readers equally clear records of tragic Florrie's shorties.

But - hey - Happy Belated Birthday to Mr Brown and Little Caz! I shall this very hour transcribe their happy events into my trusty Pocket Informant so that - as the generations pass - they will never again be able to say, "That Iconocast's a right miserable old sod - yet again he has failed to mark the auspicious days of the Switchblade's most fond companions".

And - always good to avoid a good 'switching' whenever possible - do you yourself carry the terrible burden of a day which inexorably chooses to age you when it could just as easily make you younger? I assumed that everyone had one until I recently asked Voldemort's Shadow what his was and he said he didn't have one. "So that's that?" I asked in shocked response, staggering back slightly from the steps of Battlecrease House like a wounded Michael Barrett. "Yes", hissed back the aristocratic answer, "That's that".

Anyway, dear readers, check out this YouTube video. It's very good ...

The Enduring Mystery of Jack the Ripper - YouTube

PS The chances of Little Caz's birthday falling on the day after Mr Brown's are probably 1-in-18. But don't ask me - I got this directly from the Dark Lord's myopic website.

Ike Iconoclast
One Year Older Every Day, Sadly, Though I Never Seem To Get Any Presents

[caz]

Stay here for the present, Ike, although you might have a long wait. Nearly three months after RJ Palmer posted the following:

Originally posted by rjpalmer View Post
The Maybrick Hoax was ruled a fraud in a court of law nearly 3 decades ago, when the Sunday Times was released from its non-disclosure agreement on the principle that the public was about to be scammed...

I'm still waiting for him to support this claim with some evidence, preferably in the form of an actual quote, as it appears to conflict with my own information.

If RJ will show me his, I might show him mine, but in the meantime I'm happy to assume he has nothing worth seeing and was talking through his hat.

Love,

Switchypoo
X

[rjpalmer]

Cheers, Yabs.

I have just added this info to my diary chronology.

While doing so, I was reminded of the following entry, from just nine days earlier, which was my summary of the article in question:

Saturday 27th November 1993
Article in Liverpool Daily Post:
'Scotland Yard challenged as Ripper diary row rages':
Scotland Yard was challenged last night to back up claims that diary is fake. In report being sent to CPS, a Met Police detective claims it was written after 1987 by an unknown hoaxer in L'Pool. But claim had angered diary supporters, who point out that the officer has never even seen the document. Police conclusion based on Rendell report.

Hi Caz.

I have no immediate plans to return to the asylum, though I do admit that I did write a response to your question some weeks ago. I may still get around to posting it, but am rather enjoying Ike's silence at the moment.

It is curious; one usually expects a certain amount of sectarian in-fighting when two conflicting theories exist, but the Maybrick Hoax is a clear exception to this universal rule. When left to your own devices, you & Ike have as little to say to one another as two ancient love birds. I would hope it is not the case, but perhaps Ike simply lacks the pluck to take you on tête-à-tête, despite your obvious rejection of his beliefs.

For now, I'm just stopping by briefly, thinking it might be worth pointing out an obvious contraction in your above analysis.

Kenneth Rendell invited Rod McNeill onto his team; McNeill, using his ion migration test, concluded the diary was written around 1920, give or take a few years.

Some months or years later, Rendell voiced doubt about these findings, and McNeil eventually revised his conclusion, but still insisted that the diary was written 'before 1970."

As such, it seems strange that the police opinion that the diary was created "after 1987" could have been "based on the Rendell report," when it drew no such conclusion.

According to Martin Fido, the Met detective was highly suspicious of Anne Graham. Could that have had anything to do with it?

All the best,

RP

[rjpalmer]

For the sake of clarity, I believe the scientist's name was Rod McNeil and not McNeill. Perhaps I've spent too much time around T. N. Cream, lately.

His conclusion was 1921 +/- 12 years.

[caz]

Hi Caz.

I have no immediate plans to return to the asylum, though I do admit that I did write a response to your question some weeks ago. I may still get around to posting it, but am rather enjoying Ike's silence at the moment.

It is curious; one usually expects a certain amount of sectarian in-fighting when two conflicting theories exist, but the Maybrick Hoax is a clear exception to this universal rule. When left to your own devices, you & Ike have as little to say to one another as two ancient love birds. I would hope it is not the case, but perhaps Ike simply lacks the pluck to take you on tête-à-tête, despite your obvious rejection of his beliefs.

For now, I'm just stopping by briefly, thinking it might be worth pointing out an obvious contraction in your above analysis.

Kenneth Rendell invited Rod McNeill onto his team; McNeill, using his ion migration test, concluded the diary was written around 1920, give or take a few years.

Some months or years later, Rendell voiced doubt about these findings, and McNeil eventually revised his conclusion, but still insisted that the diary was written 'before 1970."

As such, it seems strange that the police opinion that the diary was created "after 1987" could have been "based on the Rendell report," when it drew no such conclusion.

According to Martin Fido, the Met detective was highly suspicious of Anne Graham. Could that have had anything to do with it?

All the best,

RP

Wow, it's like listening to Boris Johnson ducking direct questions during PMQs, and answering questions he wasn't asked, thinking nobody will notice.

According to my sources, the Met detective was highly suspicious of Mike Barrett. There - a freebie for you, RJ, but you'd better hope the detective in question was more on the ball than our own dear Trev Marriott, who couldn't solve a burglary if Bertie Burglar handed himself in, dressed in a red and white striped jersey and carrying a bag with SWAG printed on it, and insisted on pleading guilty.

I note that the detective was only prepared to claim that an 'unknown' Liverpool hoaxer dunnit after 1987. Hardly surprising really. If he'd named Anne Barrett, she could have sued his arse and won.

I don't know who suggested to the Liverpool Daily Post in November 1993 that the police were basing their conclusion about the diary on the Rendell report, although this would certainly have provided a basis for concluding it wasn't Victorian and therefore they were investigating a 20th century hoax. But I do know that Rendell himself, at a later date, used Mike's 'confession' in support of his own opinion of the diary's modernity when communicating with Shirley.

It's pathetic how these people depended on the word of a hopeless liar like Mike, as if they had nothing more solid to go on - unless it's because they didn't.

Anyway, you managed to edit out the purpose of that post of mine by only posting part of it, so you could make a different point using the same article, without actually addressing the point I made about Mike Barrett's contradictory statements.

It's all part of the same disease - Bongo Fever.

And as for me and Ike, I do wish you'd stop curtain twitching and concentrate on the main issue of who the bloody hell actually wrote the diary, or made the scratches in the watch, and how it was all done. What Ike and I have in common is that we are immune to Bongo Fever. We were double jabbed years ago and have regular boosters to protect ourselves from the inanities of the unvaccinated.

I don't know what Ike's 'silence' has to do with your failure to address my very simple question raised yet again in post #6961, which only you can - or can't - answer.