One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[caz]

I have not praised or dammed the book I have simply asked Caz to show conclusive proof from the book that the affadavit Barrett swore out on oath is totally false, the whole diary issue stands or falls on that affadavit and so far with the exception of a date issue she nor anyone else has been able to do that. In fact there has been corroboration to show the content of the affadvit is correct.

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

Dear Trev, dear dear Trev,

I have never claimed that our book contained 'conclusive proof' that any of Mike's known affidavits, whether sworn on oath or not, was totally false.

We gave the information and left the reader to make up their own mind what was likely to be true and what wasn't.

As the affidavits from April 1993 and January 1995 are mutually exclusive, one or both must have been false.

To date, none of them has proved to be factual in every detail that would need to be, before we could be anything like confident that Mike did indeed order the 1891 diary, with the intention of turning it into Maybrick's confession, which ended up in a scrapbook he finally obtained in an auction sale on 31st March 1992. Mike himself made no such claim about the auction date, while knowing full well that the scrapbook was seen in London just 13 days later, on 13th April 1992. He claimed the auction took place in early 1990, and there is still no satisfactory explanation for why he did so. He did tell Alan Gray, who typed up the statement for him, that he got dates wrong on purpose. Make of that what you will.

If the 1891 diary had been sufficient proof of anyone's guilt, Orsam would not have bothered looking for the only possible auction that Mike could have attended, between the 1891 diary arriving in the post and the Maybrick diary making its debut in London. It was a tight corner to squeeze himself into, but that was Orsam's Hobson's choice. I expect it's all the cosier now, with RJ hanging his stocking in one corner and you leaving mince pies and sherry for Santa in the other.

Love,

Caz
X

[PaulB]

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

Trevor,
There were three affidavits. When you talk about "the first one", which one are you talking about? I'm far from up to speed with any of this, but is "the first one" the one dated 5 January 1995? Ta.

Ah, sorry, I hadn't read Caz's post (7891). So, "the first one" is the one from April 1993. What is in that affidavit that makes it so important? Or do you mean the affidavit dated 5 January 1995 and meant to write "the second one". Or didn't you know there were three affidavits. I'd forgotten too.

[Trevor Marriott]

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.

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.

So what was the motive for the diary creator, as I stated previous its not the thing you would set out to do one sunday afternoon when you were bored it took a lot of time to write and a lot of research. I question just how much information would have been available to the writer if as you suggest the diary is an historic fraud?

Now let me turn to the confessional affadavit which if that was all made up and if as you say Barrett was an gibbering alcholic who by your decsription of him could not string two sentences together, then how did the contents of the affadvit come to be in so much detail?, and how do you know so much about him as a person to make that judgement.

After all why did he need to go into such detail in the affadavit, he could have simply made an affadavit just making a brief admission to faking it with no need to say what he said, and no need to involve anyone else.

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[Iconoclast]

Now let me turn to the confessional affadavit which if that was all made up and if as you say Barrett was an gibbering alcholic who by your decsription of him could not string two sentences together, then how did the contents of the affadvit come to be in so much detail?, and how do you know so much about him as a person to make that judgement.

Alan Gray and Melvin Harris. Please read the posts, Trevor.

After all why did he need to go into such detail in the affadavit, he could have simply made an affadavit just making a brief admission to faking it with no need to say what he said, and no need to involve anyone else.

Or, rather, why go into so much detail that was totally unsubstantiated and even evident hogwash (the linseed oil is the very best example of this, I'd suggest)?

Between Barrett, Gray, and Harris we got what we got on January 5, 1995. Quite how much was by whom is obviously now rather difficult to ascertain.

[caz]

But it is for those writers involved in the book to prove that the affadvit is false, from what i have ascertained from other sources they have not been able to do so and when asked on here that proof is conspicious by its absence. The writers are clearly trying to defend their position as set out in the book which I can fully understand, there can be noithing worse for a writer/s to set their stall out in a book and then have it shot down in flames therefater, you of all persons should know that.

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the wee donkey!

We didn't claim in the book that any of the affidavits had been conclusively proved false, Trev. That's not what the book was about, so there was no 'position' set out in it for us to defend. The main beef people have with the book is that we didn't condemn the diary outright as an obvious Barrett hoax! The late Jeremy Beadle, on the other hand, found our attempts to give a voice to all sides frustrating. We did try to get Melvin Harris to agree to an interview, but he declined, even when Keith said we would only include anything with Melvin's prior approval.

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

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.

Kattnip,

I can't tell if you're joking.

You think Ryan's primary source, MacDougall (an obscure text published in 1891) was 'no great matter to actually consult and check' in 1992 or a few years beforehand?

Do you know that for a fact or just for an opinion?

Ike

[caz]

I disagree I have set my stall out by saying that the affadavit is proof the the diary is a fake, In addittion experts who have examined the diary also state it is a modern day forgery, But it seems Caz who was involved in the book does not agree, So I have challenged her to produce evidence from the book to show that the diary is not a fake, and that the indpendent experts are also wrong. There is no need for me to challenge any of the book contents at this stage, that has been done by others so I would only be duplicatiing what others have previoulsy stated.

www.trevormarriott,co.uk

For feck's sake, Trev, the book does not offer any conclusion about the diary's origins, and I only don't agree that it has been proven to be a Barrett creation.

I have said over and over and over again that the handwriting is not a match for Maybrick's, yet here you are expecting me to 'show that the diary is not a fake', as if I have ever claimed that! If you can't even read and understand what I have been posting here for years, there is no point in thinking you would grasp what the book is about if you did read it.

Love,

Caz
X

[rjpalmer]

Kattnip,

I can't tell if you're joking.

You think Ryan's primary source, MacDougall (an obscure text published in 1891) was 'no great matter to actually consult and check' in 1992 or a few years beforehand?

Do you know that for a fact or just for an opinion?

Ike

Irrelevant. The dates in MacDougall don't conflict with the diary. The forger need not have known about them. And if he did know about them, they don't conflict so it doesn't matter one iota.

Further, despite Martin's statement, the forger didn't get 'lucky,' because the odds were actually in the hoaxer's favor that the dates wouldn't conflict.

As for Ryan, Caz's point is incomprehensible. The forger doesn't give a rat's about matching Maybrick's handwriting, but they care about some obscure point that no one can understand?

Do take a basic logic course, Ike, and get back to us in 2025. You're wasting everyone's time.

[rjpalmer]

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.

(emphasis added)

Folks, please notice the calculated use of the word IF in the above statement. Caz is a sly one; she knows what she's about.

As I have already pointed out my reasoning to Paul, I don't feel the need to repeat myself.

Let me just mention something.

Mike Barrett swore a signed statement that he hoaxed the diary along with his then-wife.

Please tell us, Caz. Has Eddie Lyons signed a similar statement, admitting to theft and the sale of stolen goods? Can you produce this document for our viewing pleasure and assessment?

This must really get your goat, Caz, because I don’t need to accuse Mike of anything--he already accused himself. I am merely exploring whether Mike's signed confession was true, and I think there is evidence that it was true, at least in part if not in its entirety.

By contrast, my understanding is that Eddie Lyons has denied the accusations that you have leveled against him. He denies being a thief. He denies being a fence. He denies finding the diary in Dodd's house. He denies having sold anything to Barrett.

Can you show otherwise?

In brief, Barrett admitted to his hoax, and thus we have the greenlight to explore whether he was being truthful.

By contrast, you are accusing a 'still living' man of stealing the document from Paul Dodd's house--Eddie Lyons, to be specific--so is it not a massive "cop-out" that you don't need to offer evidence for this outlandish suggestion beyond speculation piled upon speculation?

The projection machine is working overtime, today.

[rjpalmer]

As far as I can gather, only four reasons have been given for believing the diary is an old document.

1. William Graham claimed to have seen the diary in the 1940s.

2. Rod McNeil’s ion migration test determined that ink went on paper between 1909 and 1933, inclusive.

3. The chemist Alec Voller noticed the ink was ‘bronzed’ during a visual examination in October 1995, which suggested to him antiquity.

4. [by implication] a miniscule piece of metal, ‘darkened with age,' was found in a scratch on the back inside cover of the ‘Maybrick’ watch. I say by implication because this refers to the watch, of course, and not the diary.

Are there any others?

Bump.

I'll be back when --or if--someone addresses this.

[Kattrup]

Kattnip,

I can't tell if you're joking.

You think Ryan's primary source, MacDougall (an obscure text published in 1891) was 'no great matter to actually consult and check' in 1992 or a few years beforehand?

Do you know that for a fact or just for an opinion?

I know it for a fact. As do you, I believe.

Let's skip the back and forth and just point out that Keith Skinner seemed surprised that MB, if he faked the diary, hadn't simply checked out Maybrick's will for an example of his (Maybrick's) handwriting. That is: finding and examining the single (I presume) copy in existence of Maybrick's will was in 1999 considered so mundane a task that one could be surprised it hadn't been done.

Relatively, finding and examining a copy of a book, which you choose to term "obscure", but which was of course published in great number and widely circulated, quite unlike a will, and which would be known about to even cursory students of the Maybrick case, must have been so easy that I have no problem classifying it as "no great matter to actually consult".

We can add that MB stated that he had, in fact, been to the Liverpool library to check out the will - and that Skinner believed that he had - and, lo and behold, the same library possesses at least one copy of MacDougall's book.

Let's end this discussion by mentioning that MB stated knowing such things was easy if doing documentary research and that he was a researcher and before he started anything he researched - and that Skinner acknowledged that MB had actually studied the Maybrick case for some time.

Perhaps you have such a low opinion of Keith Skinner that you're willing to ignore his evaluation of the difficulty involved.


At any rate: the discussion was about the argument that the hoaxers were extremely lucky that there were no dates mentioned among the many dated prescription bottles that clashed with Ripper-murders. The simple counter-argument I made is that it need not have been that lucky, since there were actually very few dates for autumn 1888 (thus it was not necessarily extremely or very or extraordinarily lucky) and that there's no reason the hoaxers could not have researched it beforehand - because the information was certainly available, whether you then mistakenly consider it a "great" matter or not.

[PaulB]

Bump.

I'll be back when --or if--someone addresses this.

As far as I am concerned R.J., although the most likely forger(s) were Mike and/or Anne, neither appeared to have done it, and neither's handwriting matched that on the diary. Neither did Tony D's, and there was no evidence of a Mr Big the Forger. There was also the question of why no effort seemed to have been made to copy Maybrick's handwriting, and there was some question surrounding the ink (Mike said it was Diamine and said where he'd bought it from, but there was doubt that it was Diamine) and how long it had been on the paper. It was therefore suggested (by me, I think) that the diary could be an old fake, perhaps produced using the ordinary ink used at the time, no attention paid to matching the handwriting to Maybricks but none of Maybrick's was readily available, and that it was produced for a purpose to which it was never put - with Leonard Matters' supposed Argentinian journal article containing "Dr Stanley's" confession in mind, I suggested that someone may have produced the diary as the basis for a hack newspaper feature running for several weeks. It was just an idea.

[rjpalmer]

Let's end this discussion by mentioning that MB stated knowing such things was easy if doing documentary research and that he was a researcher and before he started anything he researched - and that Skinner acknowledged that MB had actually studied the Maybrick case for some time.

If you were so unfortunate to have followed this debate for twenty years, as I have been, you would recall a series of arguments made in the "early years" that the diary is so bad and so outlandish that it HAS to be real. A forger would have tried to copy JM's handwriting...and didn't...so it must really be JM's real handwriting. I am not joking. This was the line of reasoning.

Now we are treated to the idea that the diary has so many blatant errors that there is NO WAY that one of the alleged hoaxers would have been comfortable bringing it to market. A variation on the same old theme.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the Piltdown Hoax consisted of a medieval human skull, the jawbone of an orangutan, and some teeth from a chimpanzee. Who would dream of pulling such a stunt, let alone submitting it to scientific examination?

Personally (and although I don't think Piltdown is a good example), I am of the opinion that part of the psychology of a successful hoax is to allow it to be fairly flimsy. The hoaxer need not worry that he's using an orangutan's jawbone. Some people like a good wind-up, and the wind-up artist is all the more inclined to support a hoax if it flies in the face of reason and popular opinion. A few howlers? So much the better! He can then use the full force of his art to explain them away.

Hence this thread.

[caz]

Hi Paul,

Unfortunately, you seem to have misread my post and are thus misrepresenting my position. Nowhere did I state that Mike or Anne ‘penned’ the diary. I stated there is compelling evidence—and I would suggest overwhelming evidence--that the diary is a modern hoax, and that Mike Barrett has demonstrated inside knowledge. I never suggested the penman’s (or pen woman’s) identity, and indeed I see no reason that I need to.

The issue I have is that Caz has implied, or has attempted to imply several times, that the failure to name the penman leaves the age of the diary an open question and an inscrutable mystery. This is a non sequitur; one can reasonably know the age of the diary without identifying the penman. It is also a rather transparent attempt to set the burden of proof unreasonably high.

As far as I can tell, what Caz is doing is entirely similar to Harry over on the “Petticoat” thread suggesting that you have failed to prove that any of the victims ever engaged in prostitution because you have failed to provide CCTV footage showing that they did.

It’s an unreasonable burden of evidence and a form of denialism; it rejects any evidence that isn’t an all-out slum drunk.

As Trevor states, the hoaxer could have successfully disguised their handwriting or obtained the services of an unknown penman--or as Kattrup suggests---disguised their handwriting when asked to supply a sample.

Thus, the identity of the penman, the age of the diary, and the Barrett’s involvement are three separate questions, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

That is what I am saying.


Cheers, RP

I have not 'implied' that your failure to name the penman 'leaves the age of the diary an open question'. You have chosen to infer that, in your endless attempts to spin and misrepresent positions that have already been made clear to you.

Only the other day you said I believed the diary to be an 'old' hoax [whatever you mean by that], and I had to explain - for the umpteenth time - that I hold no firm belief about its age and don't feel the need to do so.

If you had conclusively proved your theory that the Barretts had inside knowledge of its creation, it would have narrowed down the window of opportunity accordingly, and there would be no need for anyone to rely on subjective opinions, confirmation bias and a bunch of experts in various fields, who couldn't agree with one another or have since been shown to be less than expert, to give the most likely timeframe.

Imagine if this was a missing person case, and you had convinced yourself that someone had inside knowledge of the disappearance and that foul play was indicated. Would that be enough, without actually identifying what the foul play consisted of and who was directly responsible for it?

Where the diary is concerned, as you can't identify anyone directly responsible for the handwriting, you can't know if the penman gained financially from its publication, or ever intended to do so. For all you know, without that person's identity, the foul play could have amounted to no more than a prank that went awry when the old book got into the hands of an over excited Mike Barrett.

[Iconoclast]

Relatively, finding and examining a copy of a book, which you choose to term "obscure", but which was of course published in great number and widely circulated, quite unlike a will, and which would be known about to even cursory students of the Maybrick case, must have been so easy that I have no problem classifying it as "no great matter to actually consult".

Wow, what was all that about Keith Skinner and Wills?

And what was all that about the dates not matching, et cetera?

All I asked was:

You think Ryan's primary source, MacDougall (an obscure text published in 1891) was 'no great matter to actually consult and check' in 1992 or a few years beforehand?

Do you know that for a fact or just for an opinion?

And you claimed that MacDougall is to be found at Liverpool library so - in fact - Barrett could have read Ryan, realised that MacDougall was worth a review, and therefore read through - what was it Caz said? - six hundred pages to ensure that the hoax he was about to write did not fall at the first hurdle. That's fine. It was clearly no 'shabby' hoax, at least.

Just for the record, then, that's:

1) Ryan, The Poisoned Life of Mrs Maybrick, 1977
2) MacDougall, The Maybrick Case, 1891
3) Whittington-Egan, Tales of Liverpool: Murder, Mayhem & Mystery, 1985*
4) Wilson & Odell, Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict, 1987*
5) Harrison, Jack the Ripper: The Mystery Solved, 1991*

* Claimed by Mike Barrett himself

Although he only needed three books to write the diary (according to Melvin Harris, Man of Integrity), it would be interesting to see how many actually get claimed for him. So far, I can think of the above five but I'm going to keep a separate record of them so - if you (dear readers) can think of any others which have been cited to explain how he fooled the world - do remind me and I'll add them to my list.

Ike
Thinking I May Need a Bigger Hard Drive at Some Point