One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[rjpalmer]

While I doubt any answer would be 'helpful' in this case, RJ, you can only embarrass yourself by waffling on, while wishing Mike's claim about the watch scratches would go away.

How tiresome.

What better way for Mike to convince the Diary Faithful that he had nothing to do with the hoax and that his confession was false? Just make up silly stories about bloody kidneys, multiple personality disorder, MI5, and scratching the watch.

After all, Mike's own solicitor wrote him a concerned letter, telling him to stop "strangling the golden goose" with his confessions.

And it worked like a charm. After 25 years later these obviously ridiculous stories told for the benefit of Keith and Shirley are still being repeated as 'evidence' that Mike had nothing to do with any of it.

Just like Mike wanted.

Meanwhile, the unbonded ink, the diary with 'at least 20 blank pages,' the chloroacetamide, the false date for the word processor, the notes that disguised Mike's source, Anne's shifting stories, the utter ridiculousness of the Eddie Lyons provenance, etc. etc.

By all means carry on with these theatrics, Caz, but it doesn't look like your attempts at psychoanalyzing Mike and Anne have convinced many.





Now I'll take a break and this thread will go silent, as it always does.

[rjpalmer]

Just in the interests of balance, RJ, April 1999 may have been when Keith finally got around to recording the fact that Anne had told him (in 1995?) that she had typed-up Mike's research notes for him, so Keith's 'Apparently not' may have referred to the bit where he had originally written 'They have, however, been updated by Mike, on his word processor ...' [which they had not] and not been a reference to whether or not they contained any of Shirley's input [which they may well have done].

Ike

I don't think so, Ike. Let's wait for Keith to clarify this contradiction. The subject bores you and Caz ...but it obviously didn't bore Keith, who was clearly asking questions and looking for clarification about the various stories being told about these notes.

Why couldn't it have been Shirley who told Keith this was 'not' the case? After all, she was working on the 'American Connection' at the time, and states in that book that Mike's notes were made before he went to London.

Personally, I don't think Caz has the foggiest idea when or why these notes were made, nor when they were handed over, nor when Shirley mentioned Bernard Ryan to Mike.

[caz]

Gents,

Let’s get one thing straight, I’m no more ‘diary defending than I am following a Lechmerian ‘party line’. The diary itself doesn’t interest me one bit. What I do find fascinating is the psychology of Orsamism.

When was the last time either of you criticised or even questioned anything the Spandex Bully uttered? I don’t see you holding back when you have issues with others.

Is that because you think he never makes mistakes and you approve of his personal attacks on anyone who dares voice an opinion that is contrary to his?

Tell us what you really think about the significance of MB’s use of ‘off Tithebarn Street’. And of how his Lordship sneers and snarls at anyone who has the temerity not to doff their cap to him.

I won’t hold my breath.

Gary

Hi Gary,

It's that footballification thing. Anyone wearing the Orsam scarf needs to watch it doesn't get wound so tightly round their neck that it will eventually cut off the oxygen to their brain.

Mike Barrett was not so dumb after all. He named The Liverpool Echo as the source of his Maybrick info [no dates or page numbers], to make it look like he had spent hours sifting through microfilm newspaper reports in the library, before he made contact with Doreen on March 9th 1992. That's what he had told Shirley, so it stands to reason that he had to reflect this work in his research notes when he finally handed them over.

Orsam has now done all the 'sifting' that Mike didn't bother with, in his obsessive quest to prove something, and all he has managed to show for his labours is that Mike took the easy way out, by taking his Maybrick notes from a single book - Bernard Ryan's - but pretending he had to trawl through a load of old newspapers for the info.

What kind of sad git would ever check? And what would it prove if they did, apart from the fact that Mike was not above lying whenever it suited his purpose? The real trick is working out what that purpose was each time, and Orsam has missed this one by a mile.

Once again, for RJ's benefit, if Mike had wanted to avoid naming Ryan's book in those notes, because he had used it for faking the diary, he had no need to take the notes from that book in the first place.

But perhaps the Orsam scarf is already too tight for clear thinking.

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

I don't think so, Ike. Let's wait for Keith to clarify this contradiction. The subject bores you and Caz ...but it obviously didn't bore Keith, who was clearly asking questions and looking for clarification about the various stories being told about these notes.

Again in the interests of balance, I can't speak on behalf of Caz but what I am bored with is the entire discussion about Mike Barrett being the author of the Maybrick scrapbook not simply any one specific element of it. There is nothing about Mike's contribution to this case which provides us with one incontrovertible, unequivocal, undeniable fact which refutes the scrapbook, and most certainly not Bongo's drink-fuelled, deranged and thoroughly uncorroborated 'confessions'.

Why couldn't it have been Shirley who told Keith this was 'not' the case?

This possibility is subsumed in my (anything but humble) opinion by my second scenario ('and not been a reference to whether or not they contained any of Shirley's input [which they may well have done]') though admittedly I hadn't actually thought of that specific example at the time I typed it.

Personally, I don't think Caz has the foggiest idea when or why these notes were made, nor when they were handed over, nor when Shirley mentioned Bernard Ryan to Mike.

She's a big girl with a big scary knife and I'm a big girl's blouse where big scary knives are concerned so I'm not endorsing your views when I say that no-one really knows the answers to these issues - it sounds to me as though she has Shirley on record as asking for Mike's notes in July or August of 1992 and Shirley did claim (as I recall) that Mike was excited to be part of the research project, but I suppose you would just say that that doesn't prove that Shirley actually requested Mike's notes?

Any chance we could talk about James Maybrick for a wee while?

Ike

[rjpalmer]

Any chance we could talk about James Maybrick for a wee while?

Ike

Absolutely, Ike.

By all means, discuss James Maybrick.

I won't say a peep about a modern hoax unless Keith responds.

All the best and good luck!

[rjpalmer]

and most certainly not Bongo's drink-fuelled, deranged and thoroughly uncorroborated 'confessions'.

As I leave, Ike, let me just say that I would hope that in the future you might demonstrate more humanity and a more measured viewpoint than what we see in this above ill-considered comment.

According to a physician, Barrett's later behavior was consistent with Korsokov's Syndrome which is a biproduct of alcoholism, so it is hardly a joke, even though some recently made light of it. The Mike we see in 1995-1996 might not represent the Mike of pre-1992 or even 1993.

Further, someone who knew Barrett personally also said that Mike really did have a stroke--which obviously may have contributed to his behavior, and the alleged lack of abilities that you and Caz are so fond of writing about as a sort of mantra.

There is also this, which you won't be familiar with--a poignant message that Peter Birchwood sent me over twenty years ago.

Hi Roger

I just got back from Ireland and have finished scrolling through about 300 JtR messages most of which have gone into delete. Your last one is typically well conceived and researched. There is one point that I must make which needs to be understood when considering MB’s part in all of this.

There are references in Feldman and Harrison books to stories told by Mike which are obviously meant to take with a pinch of salt. One of these is that Mike had been seriously ill with kidney disease and had nearly died and had been on dialysis.

I have seen a report by a doctor confirming that by the mid-1980s Mike had indeed suffered serious kidney failure and that later he underwent dialysis treatment. For those unfamiliar it involves sitting for several hours at a time connected by tubes to a machine which filters and cleans the blood. It is a necessary but painful treatment.

If we are concerned that MB’s stories of the diary and how he forged it are often inconsistent and his character changeable then we must consider that this disease and its treatment means that fatigue poisons accumulate in the body, the mind is affected in various ways, it is difficult to concentrate, and memory lapses are common. Incredibly enough, even such mundane things as handwriting can change!

I’m familiar with all these effects because they happened to me during my three years of dialysis before I got the kidney transplant that saved my life. I even had to give the Bank a new signature!

Incidentally, although it was said during the Wallace trial that William Herbert Wallace’s kidney disease had altered the moral center of his brain to make him a criminal mastermind, I think it is a fallacy.

--------------

That's all from me, Ike.

I don't believe that Mike was the incompetent idiot you think he was. I think he suffered medical issues that could explain his decline. His handwriting on the receipt for the word processor is fluid and competent--in stark contrast to the blocked lettered examples from the late 1990s that Caz likes to reproduce.

But now the floor is yours.

[caz]

Here is a riddle, Ike: What is the foundation of Diary Belief?

Answer: the belief that Barrett (or the Barretts) was/were too stupid or incompetent or unsophisticated to have created the diary. That we smart literary Londoners or suave New Yorkers or sophisticated Californians of Glib Glaswegians are too intelligent to have been fooled by a couple of nobodies from the anonymous backstreets of working-class Liverpool.

We've heard it a thousand time in a thousand different ways from two dozen different people. Mike was ToO dUmb.

And yet Orsam can only rustle up 22 votes in 2022 for a Barrett hoax, from all those with posting privileges who read this thread? And even that number is a combination of: Mike did it; Anne did it; or both did it.

All Mike did in his research notes was to name The Echo, to support his lie to Shirley that he had spent hours in the library, between August 1991 and March 1992, sifting through microfilm newspaper reports. I don't see that as particularly clever, just because nobody until now thought it would be a good use of their time to check if he could actually have done this, or used a single library book on Maybrick to save himself all the time and effort. As long as the library had the appropriate resources - they did - it was bingo for Bongo and the charm was wound up.

If Mike's reason for not naming Ryan's book in his notes [while using it anyway, when he had absolutely no need ] had been because he had used the same book to fake the diary, he could at least have had the decency to say so in his affidavit of January 5th 1995, and save Orsam the thankless task all these years later, of sifting through all those Echo reports and then having to speculate that this was the case, without any actual evidence.

Auction ticket from 1992, anyone? I have one for sale, along with a bridge on the Thames.

[Iconoclast]

Auction ticket from 1992, anyone? I have one for sale, along with a bridge on the Thames.

Hi Caz,

I've got Mike's medical records describing in graphic detail his terrible, debilitating, personality-changing stroke. I've had to handwrite them in myself in pencil but nevertheless I've got them.

Would you consider a swap?

Cheers,

Ike

[Iconoclast]

As I leave, Ike, let me just say that I would hope that in the future you might demonstrate more humanity and a more measured viewpoint than what we see in this above ill-considered comment.

I think you can only be disputing my use of the word 'deranged', RJ, given that we all know that he was drink-fuelled throughout this period and we all know that he never once corroborated any of his numerous confessions, even when he had the fabled auction ticket right there 'in his pocket' (well, wouldn't that just cork you?).

On reflection, my choice of word ('deranged') was a bit weird and I don't really know why I used it so I'm happy to retract it. Let's rephrase it thus: Mike's mental health was definitely on a relative downturn during that specific period of his life (i.e., after the high-spot of his hoaxing a diary of James the Ripper and convincing someone to publish it) which not unreasonably - once coupled with the drink and the lack of evidence - would surely cause most reasonable people to think twice before hitching a ride from what was essentially an Eddie Stobart lorry careering down the M6 with nae brakes?

Cheers,

Ike

[caz]

Yes, Ike, please give Bongo a bit more respect. Instead of calling his confessions 'deranged', you should have recognised them, as RJ does, as the product of a hoaxer, conman and fraudster, doing his best to imitate an honest man for once.

As I wrote that, I nearly put Boris instead of Bongo. Can't think why.

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

Yes, Ike, please give Bongo a bit more respect. Instead of calling his confessions 'deranged', you should have recognised them, as RJ does, as the product of a hoaxer, conman and fraudster, doing his best to imitate an honest man for once.

As I wrote that, I nearly put Boris instead of Bongo. Can't think why.

Love,

Caz
X

I now have images of an eighteen-wheeler tearing down the M6 with Boris 'It was a big boy and he ran away' Johnson, Mike 'Bongo Schmongo' Barrett, RJ 'Roger and Out' Palmer, and O. Lord 'It's him again' Orsam all crammed together sitting up front with Stetsons and bolo ties shouting 'Yee-hah!' and chewing on beef jerky, intermittently interrupted by Bongo on his word prosser asking "How do you spell 'Abberline' again, y'all?

And none of them at the wheel!

Ike

[caz]

One final bit.



Hi Caz,

The way I look at it, it is a shame that they weren't gone over with a fine-toothed comb back in the day, because then maybe Anne Graham's provenance tale wouldn't have been so readily repeated and slow-walked as a plausible story in a number of prominent Ripper books, much to the confusion of the reading public.

Because--let's face it--don't these bogus notes finally put an inglorious end to Anne's claims?

Anne stated that she had given the diary to Mike through Tony Devereux sometime before August 1991 (the same date given on the notes), so this would mean that her husband had a minimum of 11 months to compile research, provided we accept the July/August date for these notes. During these many months Mike supposedly lived and breathed the Ripper, read every book in sight, spent hours down at the Liverpool Library, etc. etc. Digging through probate records, even.

Yet Anne Graham also admitted to "tidying up" and typing these notes from Mike's rough drafts and scraps. In some measure, they represent her work. And that work has now been shown to be deceptive and bogus.

Are we supposed to believe that Anne Graham wouldn't have been aware that notes quickly cobbled together from only four sources --and NO work down at the library--represented nine months of obsessive labor? Or didn't notice that Mike was studiously avoiding his major source?

Let's state the obvious. Stick with Fat Eddie Lyons if you want, this is the death knell of Anne's "in the family" provenance.

I have no problem believing that when Anne got her hands on Mike's research notes, and tidied and typed them up, she went along with the August 1991 date at the top, because she knew that Mike had told everyone he got the diary from Tony Devereux and had been researching it ever since.

Clearly, Anne knows if Mike didn't bring the thing home until March 1992, and would know if whatever research he had put in, presumably while she was out at work, and between the school runs, was not done until the Spring/summer of 1992.

I have no idea if Anne took any interest at all in how Mike went about his research, or what he may have told Shirley about it, but how would Anne know, unless Mike told her? And how would she know if he was being truthful about his sources?

Your belief that Anne was heavily involved in putting the hoax together would make her rather careless, if she didn't even check that Mike wasn't giving anything away in those notes. If you expected Shirley to have read Ryan's book and absorbed every line before mentioning it to Mike [why would that be a given, if she was only just embarking on the Maybrick research herself, and reasonably asked Mike if he had come across Ryan yet in his?], and if you expected Shirley to have recognised Ryan's hand in Mike's notes, wouldn't that apply to Anne with knobs on, as his partner in crime? Was she not supervising Mike's bogus Maybrick 'research'? Did she just let him take everything from Ryan and then lie about the source, when there would have been no need to do either? It's even less credible if you think those notes in any material sense represent her work. If she was the brains behind it all, and thought it would be too suspicious to source any notes to Ryan, she could have left him on the shelf next to Fido, and Mike's notes could have been taken from Trevor Christie, or Morland, or The Echo, and sourced accordingly.

As usual, the rush of excitement at the thought of Orsam getting one over on the Barrett sceptics, has led to lazy and shallow thinking.

[caz]

I now have images of an eighteen-wheeler tearing down the M6 with Boris 'It was a big boy and he ran away' Johnson, Mike 'Bongo Schmongo' Barrett, RJ 'Roger and Out' Palmer, and O. Lord 'It's him again' Orsam all crammed together sitting up front with Stetsons and bolo ties shouting 'Yee-hah!' and chewing on beef jerky, intermittently interrupted by Bongo on his word prosser asking "How do you spell 'Abberline' again, y'all?

And none of them at the wheel!

Ike

Ha ha, Ike.

How could you leave out the haunted pencil, Jacob Rees-Moggy, who taught himself to sound posher than the Queen, so he could be sent by the Bumbling Buffoon to lie to her?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Originally posted by caz View Post
I'll keep this really simple. Shirley asks Mike if he's read Bernard Ryan's book on Maybrick. Mike tells her he's never heard of it, so he gets himself a copy to get more acquainted with the Maybrick story - probably borrows it from the library to save dipping into the housekeeping or his beer tokens.

One final thing.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

I'll keep it equally simple.

This is the 4th or 5th time you've made this unsubstantiated claim. You've been asked to provide your source and you have failed to do so. Why is that?

Are you disputing the fact that Shirley asked Mike this question? Or that he replied that he'd never heard of it? Or that he got himself a copy from somewhere at some point?

Or is it just the order of these three events that sticks in your craw?

Even if Mike claimed he had never heard of Ryan, you obviously have no way of knowing if he wasn't merely playing dumb to hide his source. Thus, you are speculating—indeed, you couldn't be doing anything other than speculating.

So why in that case would you expect me to provide a source for him being genuinely unaware of Ryan's existence before, say, March 1992?

And you still haven't answered why Mike didn't similarly fake his notes when it came to Odell and Wilson, or Paul Harrison, or Richard Whittington-Egan, if his aim was nothing more than to impress Shirley, why the selective deception?

I think I have answered this now, RJ. We know he told Shirley that after finding Maybrick in ToL, he had spent hours trawling through the newspapers to put flesh on the bones. The trawling was the deception. We know that now. Take a bow, Lord O. So Mike sourced his Maybrick research accordingly, to hide that deception. He could name his ripper sources if he hadn't already lied about them to Shirley. You do see the difference?

[caz]

Are you suggesting that Shirley's investigation was so muddled that Mike's original notes were garbled together with her request for Liverpool research between April and July 1992???

If such was the case, how could they represent proof of anything? And why would Mike disguise the source that Shirley, herself, suggested that he consult?

Why would I suggest that?

For all we know, Mike's notes could well have been a combination of his own unaided work and tasks suggested by Shirley. How would anyone know for certain, since they were not handed over until Shirley had been commissioned to write her book? Why would that suggest anything 'muddled' about Shirley's investigation? She was gathering information on Maybrick and JtR, just as she assumed Mike had been doing since Tony's death, while the physical diary was being subjected to its first examinations. Mike had said that Tony died without telling him anything about the diary or where it came from, which is why Shirley quickly got in touch with the Devereux family to investigate this unsatisfactory provenance. But where could she go from there, when the family had no knowledge of it and nothing to add but their scepticism? Mike was contracted with Shirley to work on the research for the book and to share the costs, and she had to crack on with it and hope Mike would be a help rather than a hindrance.

I don't think the notes represent proof of anything in particular, except that it now appears that Mike sourced Maybrick notes to the Echo, which he had actually taken from Ryan's book. I don't know how much of a crime that was, apart from saving himself a lot of time and effort making good his claim to have spent hours trawling through old newspaper reports in the library.

Orsam wants the notes to represent proof of something very specific - that Mike had used Ryan to fake the diary, so he couldn't risk drawing attention to his use of the same source for his bogus notes.

And that's what makes no sense, because all Mike had to do was avoid Ryan entirely when faking the notes. Instead, he even made a big deal of the 'Britannic' detail he got from Ryan, by ending it with three exclamation marks [!!!].

Orsam needs Mike to have faked his notes, carefully leaving Ryan's name out of it because otherwise Shirley would suspect he wrote the diary himself using the same book. If that doesn't stretch credulity far enough, Orsam needs Shirley to peruse those notes, and then at some later point, when her research for the book is well under way, she just happens to ask Mike if he knows about a book on the Maybrick case by Bernard Ryan. "Sugar lumps!", says Mike under his breath. "That's the very book Anne and I used to fake the diary and the notes." But in a flash he replies that he has never heard of it, and Shirley believes him. "Phew!!", thinks Mike. "That was a close one!!!"

But can Orsam prove any of this? If so, I'll buy the bridge myself.