One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[Iconoclast]

You'll eventually come to my favorite line from (I think) Claire:

“It is really irritating when you go on to some of these Jack the Ripper websites and they have like a scroll of the key subjects [sic? suspects?] and James Maybrick is on there and it’s like (in a voice of exasperation) “Oh come on, it was not FVCKING him.”

RJ - spoiler alert!

I'm only twenty-five minutes in and was still full of hope ...

[Iconoclast]

RJ - spoiler alert!

I'm only twenty-five minutes in and was still full of hope ...

Okay, listened to it now. Overall, light-hearted entertainment, 500 miles from Researchville, and heavily-influenced by Mike Barrett's confession so all-in-all a great podcast for Trevor Marriott to hone his analytical skills on.

Cheers, RJ.

[PaulB]

Yes, Paul, that's my interpretation of Keith's statement. If he's not implying this, I'd be curious to know what he is implying.

I could be misinterpreting Keith's point, of course, but he seems to be suggesting that the motive of Mike writing the affidavit is more important than addressing the content itself--a stance which throws our discussion into the realm of psychology and seems calculated to cast doubt on the affidavit without actually first ascertaining whether or not it is true.

Which is why I think the following are fair questions: other than wrong dates--which are a common error in documents-- what has been shown to be factually incorrect in Barrett's 5 January 1995 affidavit? And if the events that Barrett describes are true, what difference does his motive make?

Surely the first and foremost question when faced with a confession is determining whether or not it is true? If a man confesses to robbing a bank, and can prove that he did, indeed, rob the bank, do we need to know why he confessed? Why do people generally confess? By contrast, if his confession has been shown not to be true--and as far as I know, that is not yet been shown to be the case---only then do we need to hand the baton over to the psychologists.




I'm not sure he has. There's a fair amount of things about Barrett's affidavit that Keith hasn't explained over the years, primarily why he thinks Barrett needed a genuine Victorian Diary with 'at least twenty blank pages' (which we now know is what Mike requested) before bringing a hoaxed document to London for the first time. If, as Anne has claimed, the diary that Barrett purchased was bought for comparison purposes, why did he need twenty blank pages and, indeed, why would he have been entirely happy with a genuine Victorian diary entirely made up of blank pages? What can twenty blank pages tell someone that ten blank pages or even one blank page can't? I think most rational people would conclude that a person who is requesting a specific amount of blank pages intends to write something on them, which in turn suggests that Barrett's affidavit is a legitimate confession.

To me, the answer to this question is first and foremost, and I'd be curious to hear Keith's thoughts on this matter, especially since he once said he would eventually provide them.

All the best,

RP

Hi Roger,
I’m genuinely surprised that you say that, and that you’d seriously suggest it without first confirming that someone as respected as Keith actually did say it and mean it.

But the fact remains that looking at the reason(s) why a document was written is an important part of document analysis. For example, if the author’s purpose was to flatter someone, anything unflattering could have been omitted. As much as the facts may influence our interpretation or understanding of the document, the omissions might change them. I suspect that you already understand this, and also that your bank robber example is an apples and pears comparison. I would suggest that a bank robber confessing to the robbery, and providing proof, would be sufficiently unusual for you to question his reason(s) for doing so.

As for the Victorian diary, it looks suspicious to the point of being damning, but I’m not sure that anyone can elucidate. Mike bought it, Anne confirmed that Mike bought it, and apparently nobody asked those questions at the time. Now Anne isn’t talking to anyone, so the chances of asking her are slender.

[caz]

Not wishing to get into another debacle about odds, but it's probably relevant to note that there are some shared dates among the dated prescription bottles.
This implies JM did not go to his doctor/apothecary as often as argued. I count 14 dated bottles for 1888 but only 8 dates.

I do not know where the number 70 pr. year comes from; there are more than 70 items listed in MacDougall's appendix - approximately 167, I think, but MacDougall himself numbers them at about 250 - but not all of them are prescription items, some are simply empty bottles or similar, so they might have come from anywhere, at any time, being dated from 1884-1889, and will not necessarily have been purchased by JM, indeed some of them seem to be his wife's.

Overall, I fail to se how the dates on the bottles can have any relevance at all, since the forger could very easily have consulted MacDougall's book beforehand, to ascertain if there were any date discrepansies that invalidated the project or needed explaining.

Hi Kattrup,

What about the elephant in the room - the usual conclusion reached that the Barretts created the diary and relied on Bernard Ryan's book for much, if not all, of their Maybrick info?

From pages 29-30 of Ryan's paperback:

'He [Dr Hopper] also refrained from saying anything to Mrs Maybrick about a noticeable increase in the frequency of her husband's complaints. Though Maybrick had consulted him occasionally since his query about quinine in 1884, his visits now occurred weekly in the summer and autumn of 1888...

...In November, a Liverpool doctor noted for skill in treating nervous dyspepsia received James Maybrick as a patient. As Maybrick complained of ceaseless headaches over a period of three months, of a numbness of the left leg and hand after smoking heavily or taking too much wine, and of various skin eruptions, Dr J. Drysdale asked what medicine he had been taking...

...Dr Drysdale, who saw Maybrick three times in November and twice in December, entered a complete account of his patient's remedies in his diary...

...In the same year, a practising apothecary named Edwin Garnett Heaton, who was nearing retirement after thirty-seven years in business in Liverpool, observed a change in a prescription which he had been refilling almost daily for a year and a half... Now the dosage was increased to seven drops, and Heaton observed that his customer stopped in at least twice a day and sometimes as often as five times a day. In addition, when Maybrick was going out of town, he often had as many as eight to sixteen doses made up in advance...'

Parts of the above may have been music to the Barretts' ears, but without consulting other sources, I'd be buggered if I would have been happy with the rest of it, as a hoaxer taking my own hoax to market, without knowing if Ryan may have seen and kept detailed records of all these consultations, visits and remedies from the summer and autumn of 1888, or the dates when Maybrick picked up his extra doses for a trip away from Liverpool.

That would have been way too big a gamble for me to take in the 1990s, with my own husband at the time, our only daughter at school and my elderly widowed father in a nursing home - and that's without trying to disguise my hand while writing out the text prepared earlier with a man whose main pleasure in life was a drink or ten every evening.

But maybe that's just me.

And maybe Anne Barrett had balls of steel.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

It just reaffirms Jeff Hamm's view that statistics can be terribly counter intuitive.

Even an intelligent person can misjudge what constitutes "enormous good luck."

I suppose you can use it as an example of 'fuzzy thinking' by a critic of the diary, but I think Martin's views about the diary were sound. In the video, he comments that someone would have to be utterly barking mad to believe that the first two words of the Goulston Street graffito could be read as 'The James.'

The film editor did a nasty trick by immediately cutting to Colin Wilson.

But wasn't it Feldman who came up with, or was impressed by 'The James' thing? If so, Martin was suggesting that Feldman was "utterly barking mad".

Yet you tried to put Martin under Feldy's spell, first concerning the M and the F on the wall, which proved impossible, and then with his "enormous good luck" observation - which I would argue was perfectly reasonable, given your belief that the Barretts took their info straight from the pages of Ryan, trusting to beginner's luck that none of Maybrick's constant pick-me-up pick ups would be shown to clash with the ripper murder dates.

I would call that 'an utterly barking mad' thing to try, if I believed it happened that way. How the heck could anyone sane have expected to get away with it?

[Iconoclast]

And maybe Anne Barrett had balls of steel.

Here's the thing, though, Caz, Anne Barrett/Graham is now permitted to have whatever balls anyone wants her to have.

What started off as a very confident statement from Melvin Harris (Man of Integrity) that the hoaxer only needed three books to create what we got in 1992 has evolved gradually into pretty much every book ever written on the subject which says anything (however tenuous) that can explain how the hoaxer wrote what they wrote. If the current list of books used requires another, we'll just stick that one in too. I think - at last count - the Barretts needed about 467 books to create the scrapbook but - hey! - that's okay because that's what they must have done!

Melvin Harris may well have been an upstanding man of profound integrity (whilst publishing some utter mince about Robert Donston Stephenson) but he was absolutely **** at counting.

ike

[caz]

I cannot speak for others, but I personally give zero credibility to any of the affidavits. I disregard all of them as being of any value in understanding the truth.

The man demonstrated he was willing to lie under oath at least once by sheer virtue of the provenances changing. If you feel the need to give any of them credibility over another, then that is your prerogative.

I am looking to try and understand the truth that does not involve contradictory affidavits from Mike Barrett.

The provenance from Mike and Anne has changed at least three times, and I still don't believe any of them to be true. I cannot believe anything either have said under oath or not.

I see no value in cherry picking any of their provenance stories.

Hear hear, Ero.

What RJ needs is a motive. Not for Mike giving a false confession when the bottom had fallen out of his world. He should have given Eno's fruit salts a go, and let the world fall out of his bottom instead.

RJ needs a motive for Mike volunteering a true confession to fraud, and chucking his future booze money down the lavatory, when he was under no pressure to admit anything to anyone, and the police were no longer interested in him.

After Anne left Mike, taking their only child with her, he became an emotional wreck, increasingly frustrated over her refusal to have any more to do with him, or to let him see Caroline.

So what does a man do to try and get back in his estranged wife's good books, so she will allow him to see his beloved daughter again? RJ thinks he knows - it's obvious. He spills all the beans, revealing the truth that she, along with himself, her recently deceased father and his late drinking buddy, were all involved together in a criminal enterprise, with their daughter as a witness.

RJ doesn't think that would be an utterly barking mad way for any man to try and get back with his family. I mean, what woman could resist? "We robbed the bank together while our daughter was waiting outside with a Sunny Delight and a bag of Monster Munch. I still have the bank notes and the 'his and hers' balaclavas to prove it. Please clap the darbies on us. I'll only have any peace when we've all done time." I expect the police in RJ's neck of the woods get freely volunteered confessions like that every day, and the prisons are full of contrite bank robbers.

Back on planet earth, I see Mike as a desperate soul who needed some way - any way - to get a reaction out of his ex wife, the mother of his child. If that confession had been true, and Anne knew he could prove it, how in the name of sanity could that ever have produced the desired result of seeing them both again? On the other hand, making a series of false claims would have shown her how utterly miserable he must be to have sunk so low. Might even have stirred some pity in her, had she and Caroline not already suffered too much through his erratic behaviour.

Love,

Caz
X

[Trevor Marriott]

What RJ needs is a motive. Not for Mike giving a false confession when the bottom had fallen out of his world. He should have given Eno's fruit salts a go, and let the world fall out of his bottom instead.

RJ needs a motive for Mike volunteering a true confession to fraud, and chucking his future booze money down the lavatory, when he was under no pressure to admit anything to anyone, and the police were no longer interested in him.

What make you so sure the confession is false, when you nor anyone else has been able to negate the contents other than to highlight a date issue. Whoever penned/formulated that affadvit provided sufficient and accurate detail of how the hoax was perpretarated and who was involved.

On another issue why would anyone go those lengths to hoax a diary just for the fun of it unless they had an ulterior motive in mind.

But the police could have become interested in him after the affadavit was made public, that would have been dependent of what if anything he told the police in the first instance and whether or not they took a statement from him which later contradicted the affadavit.

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[Iconoclast]

Hear hear, Ero.

What RJ needs is a motive. Not for Mike giving a false confession when the bottom had fallen out of his world. He should have given Eno's fruit salts a go, and let the world fall out of his bottom instead.

RJ needs a motive for Mike volunteering a true confession to fraud, and chucking his future booze money down the lavatory, when he was under no pressure to admit anything to anyone, and the police were no longer interested in him.

After Anne left Mike, taking their only child with her, he became an emotional wreck, increasingly frustrated over her refusal to have any more to do with him, or to let him see Caroline.

So what does a man do to try and get back in his estranged wife's good books, so she will allow him to see his beloved daughter again? RJ thinks he knows - it's obvious. He spills all the beans, revealing the truth that she, along with himself, her recently deceased father and his late drinking buddy, were all involved together in a criminal enterprise, with their daughter as a witness.

RJ doesn't think that would be an utterly barking mad way for any man to try and get back with his family. I mean, what woman could resist? "We robbed the bank together while our daughter was waiting outside with a Sunny Delight and a bag of Monster Munch. I still have the bank notes and the 'his and hers' balaclavas to prove it. Please clap the darbies on us. I'll only have any peace when we've all done time.' I expect the police in RJ's neck of the wood get freely volunteered confessions like that every day, and the prisons are full of contrite bank robbers.

Back on planet earth, I see Mike as a desperate soul who needed some way - any way - to get a reaction out of his ex wife, the mother of his child. If that confession had been true, and Anne knew he could prove it, how in the name of sanity could that ever have produced the desired result of seeing them both again? On the other hand, making a series of false claims would have shown her how utterly miserable he must be to have sunk so low. Might even have stirred some pity in her, had she and Caroline not already suffered too much through his erratic behaviour.

Love,

Caz
X

Well hear hear to you too Caz!

It's a wonderful point you make: why on earth would Mike Barrett seek to reveal the hoax he had concocted given that the gravy train was rolling, he was happily pouring his wad down alleyway walls and toilets, and there was absolutely no reason whatsoever to confess anything (other than to keep his new friends Alan Gray and Melvin Harris happy, of course)?

His January 5, 1995 affidavit (I think it was this one, let's face it he made so many signed affidavits and statements - it's up to four now I think, one in April 1993 and three in January 1995?) stated that he had been trying to reveal the hoax since December 1993 via pretty much everyone he knew. Why? If he created the whole brilliant scheme in order to pay a mortgage they seemed to have had no problem paying for years before the scrapbook appeared, why did he suddenly get a pang of conscience and put his liberty at risk, his estranged wife's liberty at risk, and therefore his daughter's future safety at risk?

Hold on - 'estranged wife'? Surely - as you hint at above - he wasn't thinking this was one corker of a chat-up line: How do you like your affidavits in the morning, darlin'?

Ike

[rjpalmer]

[Iconoclast]

But the police could have become interested in him after the affadavit was made public, that would have been dependent of what if anything he told the police in the first instance and whether or not they took a statement from him which later contradicted the affadavit.

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

Trevor,

Are you suggesting - as you seem to be suggesting - that Mike made the affidavit claiming to have created the scrapbook precisely so that the police could become interested in him as a suspect in a crime (which they hadn't done the first time)?

Why? Why was Mike Barrett suddenly on such a downward spiral of self-destruction?

What was his motive?

[caz]

I am reasonably confident that a provenance built around Battlecrease House on March 9, 1992, is able to explain every detail of this case. I'll be publishing my conclusions in my brilliant 2025 edition of my brilliant Society's Pillar so get that one into your diaries, dear readers.

Ike

And the beauty of this one, Ike, is that it would rely on nothing ever claimed by the Barretts about the diary's origins. And there would be a very neat and obvious explanation for that. Neither of them would have wanted it believed that Mike's scrapbook came out of Dodd's house months after Devereux had died. They were not interested in giving Mike's diary a good provenance, but that would make sense if they were in the business of covering up that good provenance.

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

1,300,248 views, RJ, and you think we're all flogging a dead horse?

I trust you aren't implying there has been a 'Great [Fill Your Own Gap] Swindle' perpetrated here?

Ike

[Iconoclast]

And the beauty of this one, Ike, is that it would rely on nothing ever claimed by the Barretts about the diary's origins. And there would be a very neat and obvious explanation for that. Neither of them would have wanted it believed that Mike's scrapbook came out of Dodd's house months after Devereux had died. They were not interested in giving Mike's diary a good provenance, but that would make sense if they were in the business of covering up that good provenance.

Love,

Caz
X

Possibly at different times, Caz?

There is strong evidence (the purchase of the doppelganger diary) that Mike was concerned that he was handling stolen goods in March 1992, and equally strong evidence (the extended provenance she added to Mike's) that Anne had increasingly become concerned by mid-1994 that Mike had handled stolen goods in March 1992.

She is so confident in her extended provenance - it's almost as though she knew that Mike could not possibly prove it was not so?

I think you're on the right track here, Caz.

Ike

[caz]

It's called alcoholism, Keith, which leaves one with mental fog.

Yes, Barrett had the year wrong--hardly earthshattering considering his health at the time-- but your own investigation eventually showed that the event he described (the Barretts attempt to buy a blank Victorian Diary) did indeed happen.

It was just in 1992 and not in 1991/1990.

The advertisement in Bookdealer, issue No. 1044, dated 19th March 1992, exists. It's independent confirmation of Barrett's story.

We are supposed to ignore that because Barrett had the wrong date?

RP

You keep ignoring the fact that you need Mike to have received and rejected the red diary, just a few days before taking his awesome auction find to show Doreen in London.

Just a few days after swearing to Anne purchasing the red diary in early 1990, Mike was very far indeed from being in a 'mental fog'. He recalled the exact date when he took the diary to London: Monday 13th April 1992 - over two years after he had so recently 'remembered' buying all the raw materials and going through the entire creation process.

How are you reconciling these two very different feats of memory by the same alcoholic?

And why the need for any feat of memory concerning the awesome auction if, as you and Orsam believe, Mike still had the ticket for it four years later, in 1999?