One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[caz]

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?

She would have been more than red-faced had Mike simply produced that ruddy auction ticket!

I think if I had faked that diary with Mike, and knew he could prove it one way or another, the last thing I'd have done was to claim "I seen it in the 60s". I'd have gone back to Australia and stayed there.

Again, probably just me.

RJ evidently knows more than I do about wives who write diaries and poison their husband's meat juice.

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

RJ evidently knows more than I do about wives who write diaries and poison their husband's meat juice.

And there it is!

[Trevor Marriott]

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)?

I am not suggesting that, those are you words and suggestions

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

Was he ? whose words are those, I think you have been taking too much notice of Caz and her own personal beliefs

What was his motive?

Clearly to attempt to pass the diary of as the real deal and attempt to obtain money by fraud. Who in their right mind would go to all the trouble of writing a diary in the way described without having a motive. its not the sort of thing you do on a sunday afternoon when you are bored

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[erobitha]

Clearly to attempt to pass the diary of as the real deal and attempt to obtain money by fraud. Who in their right mind would go to all the trouble of writing a diary in the way described without having a motive. its not the sort of thing you do on a sunday afternoon when you are bored

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

I would say that is good motive.

If Mike had actually provided any hard evidence (aside from switching stories across numerous affidavits) that he had done it - this debate would be long dead.

I say I look like Brad Pitt. I would be willing to put that in an affidavit and sign it. Does that mean I actually look like Brad Pitt? Maybe on some psychological level I believe I do. Maybe I am just lying. Maybe I am doing it for **** and giggles. Maybe I have other reasons.

No-one has to believe it is true and why should they? I have provided zero evidence.

Mike was no Brad Pitt.

[Trevor Marriott]

Clearly to attempt to pass the diary of as the real deal and attempt to obtain money by fraud. Who in their right mind would go to all the trouble of writing a diary in the way described without having a motive. its not the sort of thing you do on a sunday afternoon when you are bored

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

Following on from my previous post I have to ask that if the diary was an old hoax as some suggest the same questions apply, why would someone go to all that trouble to forge a diary if they didnt have a motive for doing so? I would have thought that the hoaxer would have had much more chance in convincing people that it was the real deal back then, than in the 90`s when more technology was available to disprove it, after all the crimes of JTR were still as well known then as they are today

Furthermore if it is an old hoax why would the hoaxer go to all that trouble and then hide it away under floorboards where it may never have been found? I think some need to take a step back and re evlauate what they believe about who penned the diary and when it was penned.

Of course geting back to Barrett being the hoaxer given that it has been suggested that he was not the brightest spark in the fire, if he did pen the diary perhaps he would not have been aware of what technology was out there to prove it to be a hoax as I would bet many other people would have been in the same boat.

So many questions but very few conclusive answers to work with.

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[Trevor Marriott]

I would say that is good motive.

If Mike had actually provided any hard evidence (aside from switching stories across numerous affidavits) that he had done it - this debate would be long dead.

I say I look like Brad Pitt. I would be willing to put that in an affidavit and sign it. Does that mean I actually look like Brad Pitt? Maybe on some psychological level I believe I do. Maybe I am just lying. Maybe I am doing it for **** and giggles. Maybe I have other reasons.

No-one has to believe it is true and why should they? I have provided zero evidence.

Mike was no Brad Pitt.

Surely the hard evidence is contained in the affadavit where he described in great detail how he set about forging the diary.

There were no numerous affadavits, the first one is the all important one, destroy that story and you might have a case, but until then it is prime evidence along with the corroboration to show it is a modern day forgery.

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[Iconoclast]

Let me try this again, Trevor, as my previous response was rather more tongue-in-cheek than it perhaps came across.

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 perpetrated and who was involved.

Any discomfort with the affidavit lies in its broadly inaccurate tenor, Trevor. For example, Mike claims he soaked the front cover in linseed oil (to which RJ has redefined 'soaked' as a form of 'dipped' when he realised how awkward 'soaked' would actually be) but any amount of linseed oil would stain and smell. In all of the scientific analyses (and, of course, the simple 'sniff test' of those who handled it), no-one had ever mentioned linseed oil until Barrett did. He said he dried it out over two days in the oven and yet there is no evidence whatsoever of the severe warping that this would induce. So that's the linseed oil. Then there's the ticketing system which he described at O&L which O&L themselves said had never been used by them. So (off the top of my head) just a couple of reasons why the fact that the affidavit stripped of all obvious Barrett lies might still be true does not excite me. What you're saying is "If you strip Barrett's confession of the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth" and I for one think that is bollocks (and always have thought it was bollocks and so deeply regret the fact that it is used so casually by the indolent in the same way 'business' people love to trot out "We work hard and play hard" without stopping to think about how the cliché immediately compromises their point).

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.

I think that is the point that Keith was making about the Jan 5, 1995, affidavit, Trevor: we must always factor in motive to understand why people might have done or said what they claim to have done or said.

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.

This is where we erred initially. I just didn't follow your logic. Reading it again, are you saying that the reason he wasn't investigated after his Jan 5, 1995, affidavit was because the police recognised that what he was claiming was consistent with what he had told them when they first spoke to him? If that is the case, why on earth did the police not simply come out then and say that he had admitted to a hoax, he hadn't actually broken any laws, and that was the end of it?

Ike

[Iconoclast]

Originally posted by Iconoclast View Post
Trevor,

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

Was he ? whose words are those, I think you have been taking too much notice of Caz and her own personal beliefs

Those words were mine, Trevor, and they are most certainly not based upon Caz's 'personal beliefs' - and yet I suspect that they are based upon the same reasons that Caz may have come to a similar understanding about Barrett's situation in 1994 and 1995 which was the evidence and for that I had to read Harrison, Feldman, Linder, Morris and Skinner, Jones, Smith, inter alia, and also sit through the purgatory of some of the recordings made of Mike at his 'best' and Mike at his 'worst' during this particularly sad time in his life (though - if Anne is to be believed - he deserves no sympathy as he was a wife-beater). I certainly haven't seen or heard all of the evidence - nothing like it - but I've seen and heard enough snippets to understand that understanding Barrett's motive (his drivers) once his wife and daughter had left him in January 1994 is absolutely critical in forming a well-rounded view of his affidavits and his statements.

But you actually have to read stuff to be able to do that, Trevor.

What was his motive?

This was my question not yours (despite the quotation format) but it is as important for you to ask yourself as it is for me.

Specifically, Trevor, having created a hoaxed diary of Jack the Ripper (requiring research into countless books, not simply three), and being as he was at the very start of a very profitable period of his life (his share of Harrison I would bring in many thousands of pounds to Barrett), and having clearly tricked sufficient people to get the 'hoax' published to set the gravy train in motion, why the sudden and dramatic volte face? Harrison I was published in October 1993 to a fanfare of publicity and by December 1993 it was in - how ironic - The Sunday Times top-selling list (how that must have sickened Chittenden) and the royalty cheques were looking like they were going to be very significant indeed, but suddenly (if Barrett's 05/01/1995 affidavit is to be believed and we aren't simply to ignore the bits we don't like) Mike decides to turn Queen's Evidence, dob himself and his whole criminal empire in, and make his bid for sainthood by seeking to show the world that the scrapbook was in fact a hoax.

Why, Trevor? Why would he do that?

Well, in reality there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Mike Barrett attempted to reveal the 'hoax' from December 1993, but we do know that his wife and daughter left him in January 1994 and the evidence clearly shows he was not going to take this lying down. For whatever reasons he had (and he must have had some), he decided to announce the 'hoax' in the middle of 1994 (to Harold Brough) and, of course, this was quickly retracted by Mike's solicitor. By January 1995, the only 'friends' Mike had left in the world were the money-driven (not a criticism, by the way) Alan Gray and the agenda-driven (massive criticism, by the way) Melvin Harris. The evidence strongly indicates that Mike was being led very firmly by these two into signing the 05/01/1995 affidavit which Alan Gray certainly typed-up for Mike (and who knows who actually wrote it for him?).

So the evidence isn't strong that Mike's 05/01/1995 affidavit had any value whatsoever in terms of the truth of the matter, and this is why people are rightly very hostile towards it. The evidence tells them to be hostile (or at very least wary).

Clearly to attempt to pass the diary of as the real deal and attempt to obtain money by fraud. Who in their right mind would go to all the trouble of writing a diary in the way described without having a motive. its not the sort of thing you do on a sunday afternoon when you are bored

I think you'll find that the accepted expression is 'one wet weekend', Trevor.

Ike

[Iconoclast]

Furthermore if it is an old hoax why would the hoaxer go to all that trouble and then hide it away under floorboards where it may never have been found? I think some need to take a step back and re evlauate what they believe about who penned the diary and when it was penned.

To be clear, whoever those people are only need to do so if the scrapbook is a hoax. If you start with this as your premise, you are already set firm on the path of a potentially incorrect conclusion, Trevor.

So many questions but very few conclusive answers to work with.

The number of questions does tend to expand depending upon how vast your universe of ignorance is. As you consider the evidence, your universe of ignorance inevitably contracts and so do the questions which require answering.

[Iconoclast]

Surely the hard evidence is contained in the affadavit where he described in great detail how he set about forging the diary.

There were no numerous affadavits, the first one is the all important one, destroy that story and you might have a case, but until then it is prime evidence along with the corroboration to show it is a modern day forgery.

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

And there it is, Trevor!

Your universe of ignorance is just too vast for anyone to properly hope to constrict it again.

You throw around terms like 'hard evidence' as if this were never so well proven - Mike's affidavit of 05/01/1995 (his second, by the way, not his first) is full of holes (two of which I posted this morning). When you say 'hard evidence', you are actually referring to Orsam's desperate attempt to ignore everything that is so deeply wrong with this second affidavit and focus solely on those few bits which actually aren't open to debate and which can just about be shoe-horned into a working theory which would support the notion that Barrett had hoaxed the scrapbook. That's not hard evidence, Trevor, so please stop calling it that. What Orsam did is called cherry-picking.

You really are making a fool of yourself with your enumeration of affidavits - but in fairness there has been much confusion about terminology - so let me clarify:

26/04/1993 - Affidavit (witnessed by a solicitor) backing-up the Tony Devereux provenance
05/01/1995 - Affidavit (witnessed by a solicitor) claiming Barrett had created the Maybrick scrapbook
23/01/1995 - Statement (witnessed by Alan Gray) regarding being pressurised in an interview on 18/01/1995
26/01/1995 - Statement (witnessed by Alan Gray) regarding being pressurised in an interview on 18/01/1995

Ike

[Kattrup]

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.

It's not clear where there are any dates in the material you quote that would preclude Maybrick from being JtR, perhaps you could point them out? It seems perfectly reasonable that the hoaxers used Ryan's book and my point was that there is no reason to think he/she/they got "lucky" with the dates mentioned in MacDougall since it would be no great matter to actually consult the book and check.

And as usual you insinuate that if the hoaxers could not be absolutely certain of never being uncovered, they would not have attempted the hoax, which is just nonsense.

The fact that you claim you personally would not have attempted a hoax is no reason to think that hoaxers would not attempt it.

[caz]

Cheers Caz!

I've just received your book, and I'm looking forward to reading it again.
I read it years ago and can't remember many of the points raised, so I'm really looking forward to diving into it over the festive period.

I'm not as au fait with the whole Maybrick diary issue as you Ike and others, but I might post my thoughts on your book when I've finished it.

Bloody hell, Barny! You're a glutton for punishment.

I'm looking forward to forgetting all about the diary for the duration, once Mr Brown knocks off from work next week and the festivities can begin in earnest.

But I'd be very interested in your thoughts - good, bad or indifferent - if you get through to the end before next Christmas.

Cheers back at you!

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Just a thought regarding the handwriting, what am I getting wrong? If I understand you properly, you think the diary was penned by Mike or Ann, but the handwriting doesn't match, which is an obvious problem for you. Similarly, if Ike believes the diary is genuine, the handwriting not matching Maybrick's is a problem for him. However, if Caz has not identified an author, the handwriting doesn't present a problem for her at all, does it? If she refuses to throw in her with the Mike and Ann wrote the diary school of thought, isn't she quite right to say that the handwriting still needs to be correctly identified?

Sounds about right to me, Paul.

If RJ is accusing named individuals - one still alive - of fraudulently creating a written document together, it's a massive cop-out to argue that he doesn't need to identify the writing because nobody else can do so, even if they have accused nobody and have no idea who was responsible.

As I've said since I first arrived here over 20 years ago, it's hardly anyone else's fault if the debate rumbles on to the crack of doom because the accusers see no need to buckle the accused. Without a penman or woman, there is no certainty that the diary was created by any of the usual suspects, or that fraud was the original intention.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Or, when asked for a sample of your handwriting for comparison, disguise your handwriting in the sample.

And presumably you would also need to disguise your handwriting whenever writing anything in future, especially to a vengeful ex husband, or to the same person who had asked you for the sample?

Did you know that after Anne left Mike, and he learned where she was living, he bombarded her with a constant stream of angry, abusive and desperate letters, which she told Keith Skinner she ended up just throwing away, sometimes putting them in the dustbin unread. So Keith asked if she would keep them for him instead and she had no objection. If she knew Mike could have mentioned their joint hoax enterprise in any of these communications, she saddled herself with the extra task of going through each and every word of these obsessive rants to check for anything incriminating, before handing the envelopes over to Keith.

If Mike did deliver a copy of his January 5th 1995 affidavit to Anne by hand, as he led his solicitor to believe, this would have been before Keith asked her to keep all the missives, so in theory it could have gone in the bin unopened - particularly if the envelope was covered in abusive or threatening language.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

I suppose you could argue that because the writing in the diary is not comparable to that of Maybrick then that is conclusive proof that the diary is a fake, which is what all of this is about whether the diary is the real deal or a fake, as to who wrote it is somewhat academic.

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

Where have you been, Trev?

I've been saying for the last two decades that no attempt was made to make the handwriting look like the real James Maybrick's, which is what makes it such an enduring mystery for me. It leaves open the possibility that it was never meant to be published in that form, or was not written to be taken seriously by the unfortunate finder.

In the great tradition of hoaxes, it would seem to me to be more about the prank and the prankster's intended 'victim' than any expectation that it might be believed genuine. As with all those ripper letters - or at least the vast majority - the authors were jokers, who did not seriously expect people to believe they were all from the real killer, confessing to his crimes. The police and the press were generally the 'victims' of such pranks.

Love,

Caz
X