One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[caz]

Oh my, is someone becoming obsessed? When a person has to deliberately change what has been written, you have a pretty good idea they are rattled.

I don't know, but it certainly sounds like it, if you had to deliberately change what Anne actually wrote and then claim that what you wrote was 'in her own words'.

Or have I missed where you provided a direct quote from Anne to prove your point?

This is decidedly not my 'theory,' and, as always, you have constructed some bizarre meaning of your own in order to critique it. You're making a dog's breakfast of it--deliberately, no doubt--but if it wiles away your time, I'm glad to have helped.

Everyone here who can actually read will have noticed by now that you haven't yet given us any meaningful insight into your theory and how it is supposed to have worked in practice, and I can hardly be blamed for not being able to read your mind. I can only work with the crumbs you have provided, if you won't expand on your own reasoning, and I've said more than once that I will happily be corrected if I am reconstructing the wrong biscuit from those crumbs. If you haven't yet got a clear picture in your own head of all the right ingredients and the recipe for a perfect bake, that would be perfectly natural, but why not just admit it, if that's the reason for your reticence? I'm in no hurry. But you might have given yourself an easier life by not airing your beliefs about Anne's life in 1992 and what she knew, until you had tied off enough loose evidential ends to present it as a credible explanation for the diary's existence. Isn't that why Ike and ero get such stick, concerning their beliefs about Maybrick's life in 1888? And yet they don't whinge like snowflakes at all the scorn and ridicule they receive, so why would you expect preferential treatment regarding your own unproven theory, which you can't even show to be compatible with all the existing documentary evidence?

I never said this was Anne's 'idea,' nor did I ever suggest that 'she did all the researching herself.' These are your own inventions.

Well you did suggest that 85-95% of the work was done by Anne, on a story she had initially wanted Mike to write, and that she wasn't aware until later in the process that she had been creating a monster of a hoax.

I'm not sure how it helps you if it was someone else's idea to write about Maybrick being Jack the Ripper, and someone else's research that made him seem like a good bet. Would Anne not have needed to check everything Mike brought to the Goldie Street table, before committing a single word to his word processor, for the fatal blunders he was bound to make if let loose on turning his own idea into reality? Or did you have Tony Devereux in mind, with no evidence that Anne knew this man better than she knew Mike, and could therefore have trusted him instead with such an idea? Or perhaps it was Billy Graham who is meant to have put the idea in his daughter's head, forgetting what a total liability his son-in-law was?

It exposes yet again your muddled thinking. First, you have me gullibly lapping up the Barrett/Gray affidavit as gospel (which has Tony and Mike and Anne coming up with the concept together, and the general plotting) and then--in practically the same breath-- you have me supposedly believing that Anne did everything herself from start to finish and that it was "her novella."

Nothing like consistency when attacking someone's alleged "theory"!

A muddled theory can only beget muddled thinking on the part of anyone trying to make sense of it without help from the theorist.

It might help if you had taken us line by line through the affidavit, saying what you believed to be true and what you accepted as false, and how each and every false detail, including the troublesome dates, could have been the result of a memory shot to pieces by booze, and not a deliberate lie by a man whose memory for dates and all manner of other details was sound enough before he swore the affidavit, and went through a miraculous recovery immediately afterwards - every bit as miraculous as the auction ticket, but at least in evidence so there can be no disputing it.

What I actually suspect is that Graham was the primary author--I think I once threw out a rough estimate of her writing 90% of the text--but I do hope you can appreciate the difference between an initial concept, the necessary research and the actual writing?

Do you think these are invariably all the same act and done by the same person?

Have you never heard of researchers, and co-authors, and ghost-writers, and consultants, and writing assistants, etc? Or even just a kibitzer standing over someone's shoulder in Goldie Street?

Blimey, so you really do have a 'nest' of forgers in mind after all this? Another conspiracy theorist comes out of the closet, who is unwilling or unable to name the names of all he believes were involved? How many close friends and associates do you imagine Mike and Anne ever had in common, and would have been in constant touch with in 1992? From what I've gathered, the Barretts had less and less in common by then, in the way of either friends or shared interests. The idea of Anne and her father spending cosy evenings in the company of Mike and Tony, discussing plans for a future of fame and shared fortune, doesn't really ring true, does it?

Why do you think I believe Anne did all the leg work when Barrett stated that Tony Devereux helped him greatly with the concept? Wasn't Mike's copy of Tales of Liverpool known to have been in Tony's possession, and haven't I mentioned this on many occasions?

Depends what you mean by 'leg work'. Anne was holding down a full time job, which paid the mortgage and all the other household bills. Do you think she knew Mike was asking Tony for help with the concept of this 'story' and was happy about it? If it was just a story at that point, Tony could have told his daughters all about it for all Anne knew, and then where would it have ended, when she finally gave way to the pressure Mike was putting on her and let him take her hoax to market?

It is not 'fraud' to create the Diary of Jack the Ripper on one's home word processor. It is not illegal to write-up a Ripper theory in the guise of a confessional diary as a marketing ploy-especially if one's husband has convinced you that it will be sold as nothing more than a work of fiction and the publishers will be alerted to this fact when he duly arrives in London.

What? You have to be kidding me. Anne didn't know her husband had adapted an old photo album to house her work? Or did she think this was standard practice when presenting a literary agent with a work of fiction? When and why do you think the fight took place between them, if Anne was in such a state of ignorance over what was happening? When did it finally dawn on her that she had been an unwitting accessory to fraud? And when did she turn into a willing one, even helping Mike with his research notes after finding out that he had taken her for such a complete fool? And where does this leave your belief that Anne lied to Keith Skinner in 1995 about her knowledge of the red 1891 diary, including why Mike ordered it and when? If she knew he was trying to obtain a Victorian diary weeks before he took her innocent work of fiction to London, what did she think was going on?

So no, Caz, you're wrong, I'm afraid. It only becomes fraud if one sells it as the real deal. I think the details of the purchase of the red diary--with Barrett being put down as a late payer--suggest he bought it behind Anne's back. It suggests to me that she hadn't been initially involved in the scheme, other than helping him write a work of fiction. No hoaxer is going to draw further attention to themselves by being a late payer when they are trying to obtain their raw materials. I take it to be more evidence of Barrett's conniving ways.

Ah, changing the goal posts then. Anne didn't know that Mike was trying to obtain a Victorian diary. I'm not sure how the rest of your argument works, because if Mike was the fraudster, trying to obtain his raw materials, he did draw further attention by allowing himself to be put down as a late payer for the 1891 diary. The payment had to be chased, upon which Anne settled the bill. If anything it's evidence that he was no hoaxer, if he did what you claim 'no hoaxer' is going to do!

And I'm afraid it becomes fraud from the moment Anne learns what Mike is trying to claim for her work of fiction and she not only does nothing to stop him, but gets actively involved in preparing a bogus set of research notes for him to again pass off as genuine.

Anne Graham was upset that Barrett was peddling a hoax and they would both be arrested for fraud--(even though I personally think she had been coerced).

She was upset that Mike was using a literary agent to fence what she suspected had very recently been nicked. "Did you nick it, Mike?" That's clear enough to me.

Anne said she had tried to 'burn the diary.' The last time I checked, most stoves are kept on top of the kitchen floor--which refers back to Caroline's account. The wrestling match was when Anne tried to burn the diary in the stove--that's what I think. She may have even tried to burn the diary in the stove when Barrett was attempting to slow dry the ink or dry the spot where he had removed the maker's stamp of 1908/1909 after daubing or soaking the inside cover with linseed oil or some similar solvent. The idea that he plopped the whole diary in a bedpan of linseed oil is more tomfoolery, a ridiculous interpretation in order to dismiss a reasonable one, since it has never been disputed that the inside cover does have suspicious damage which would be consistent with someone removing a tell-tale date from a guardbook of World War I photos, a 20–30-pound expenditure as estimated by the contemporary manager at Outhwaite and Litherland.

Jesus wept. What an imagination you have.

Nobody has given me any rational reason why Anne couldn't have helped Barrett create the typescript, or why she couldn't have been coerced and bullied and manipulating into helping him.

But that's very different from providing evidence that she did any such thing, or ever would.

There's no reason why Lechmere couldn't have been the ripper and lied his way out of trouble in Buck's Row, but you wouldn't let Christer get away with that kind of argument for a second.

[Yabs]

In principle, Yabs, this is very clever but I can't find any copy of this photograph where that level of detail can be discerned. Can you tell us where you sourced your photograph and - ideally - post the whole photograph, please?

Cheers,

Ike

It was posted up a few months back by Addalime, and I commented on it back then.
post #29

https://forum.casebook.org/forum/rip...z-stride/page2

[rjpalmer]

I think the average reader and above will have recognised that I was NOT relying on Barrett's dates but - as per the Palmer Strategy - purely focusing on hard dates.

In hard dates terms, he clearly articulates that the text in the scrapbook was placed there before Tony Devereux passed away (August 8, 1991) which means that Orsam's Magical Auction at O&L on March 31, 1992, did not see Brother Barrett in the pews.

No Ike, as always, you exhibit well-crafted confusion.

Perhaps the "average reader" will be fooled by your clumsy argument, but the above-average reader will quickly discern that y'all are peddling a product, and that product is deliberate mypoia.

This has all been gone over dozens of times.

You make the same mistake Caz has made by failing to differentiate between the concept, the creation of the typescript, and the actual creation of the physical diary.

Do you think the average would-be novelist is Mary Shelley, who comes up with the idea for Frankenstein during a late-night conversation with her hubby and Lord Byron, and then over the next 48 hours pounds it all out in her own handwriting in one long narrative?

Is that how these things usually work?

You pretend it must have been one continuous act of creation to undermine Barrett's affidavit, instead of honestly trying to see how Barrett's account really does conform to the evidence we have.

Of course, your confusion is partly down to Bongo's own vernacular. When Barret refers to "writing the diary" he almost always fails to distinguish between composing the typescript and the physical writing of the typescript into the guard book.

This is why we see him make ridiculous comments to Skinner and Feldman along the lines of "Anne wrote it, but didn't write it. I wrote it."

In Mike's mind, this gibberish actually makes sense.

Do you see? He means one person 'composed the text' and another person 'wrote it in the guard book.'

Don't be so dense, Old Boy---life will be easier if you try.

In brief, Bongo uses 'write' to signify the concept, the plotting, the creation of the typescript, and the actual physical act of writing in the guard book. It doesn't mean it always happened in the same breath or involved the same people.

Thus, there is no discrepancy between Tony helping Mike 'write the diary' (come up with ideas for the plotting, etc) and Barrett seeking the raw materials for the physical hoax long after Devereux's death.



Of course, Tony Devereux having had Barrett's copy of Tales of Liverpool in his possession before August 1992 (the same book Mike references in his bogus research notes) supports the claim that Barrett did indeed discus the Maybrick-as-Ripper idea with Devereux, but utterly flies in the face of your belief in Eddie Lyons finding the typescript under Dodd's bathroom rug in March 1992. We can't know, of course, the extent of Devereux's input, but we know he couldn't have been involved in turning the typescript into a hoax. He has the perfect alibi. He was dead long before Barrett went shopping for the material for the physical hoax with the unwitting help of Martin Earl in suspiciously far-off Oxford.

I'm not holding out hope, but maybe if you and Ero put your heads together and genuinely gave it the Old College try, you can really work out how it might have all 'gone down' using the Gray/Barrett affidavit as a roadmap, supplemented by the forensic evidence and hard data.

I think it would be more beneficial to your recovery if you did so without any more of my in-put.

I don't expect to happen, though. You'll keep placing hurdles in your own path, won't you, Old Boy?

[Iconoclast]

It was posted up a few months back by Addalime, and I commented on it back then.
post #29

https://forum.casebook.org/forum/rip...z-stride/page2

Oh, okay. Not quite the same quality as Kelly's wall which retains its 'FM' even when enlarged. The whole-picture of Eddowes, I could not tell where your 'F' and 'M' were, but once reduced in scale those shapes began to have a more familiar look.

I'll take a pass on to what extent they appear to be deliberately put there. I have a feeling this one might go down partisan lines. As if!

Ike

[caz]

A key point is Barrett's attempt to purchase the raw material for his hoax.

But isn't that the only point in favour of Mike's 'chronology', that has become a mantra in the absence of anything more solid looking?

As much as you and Caz and Hartley are in a constant state of frenzy to say the affidavit is all a load of bollocks, we know for a FACT that Barrett was describing a real event because the advertisement published on this behalf by Martin Earl in Bookfinder was traced...

...by Keith Skinner first, with Anne's help and full co-operation. A single real event, but inaccurately described and backdated two years by Mike, to fit his creative timeline and order of events. Within days of this affidavit he was able to date his trip to London to 13th April 1992, so you tell me how he could possibly have thought his enquiry for the 1891 diary was made two years before his initial calls to Doreen, when we know they happened at the same time? Or that the photo album was similarly obtained two years before he took it to London, if in reality the two events were less than two weeks apart?

Assuming Mike knew when he made the enquiry, around 9th March 1992, that Anne's fictional story covered the final year in the life of a real man who died in May 1889, it still baffles me why anyone finds it appropriate that he wanted a Victorian diary dating from 1880-90, much less that he would order one for the year 1891, after Martin Earl had described the useless article to check if it would suit his requirements, before going to the trouble and expense of getting it sent to him. Both parties had a tongue in their head, so if Martin didn't have the diary's dimensions to hand, or details about how and where the date was printed, Mike could have asked before ordering, saving himself the trouble, and Anne the expense, of finding out just how useless it was - and how useless her husband was - when it arrived with an invoice for 25 quid.

What is inadvertently humorous about your desire to stick to known chronologies is that you didn't have sod all to say about what Caz Brown posted yesterday--a transparent attempt to pawn-off a sample of Mike Barrett's writing skills from August 1994 -- fresh from when he was in and out of the drunk tank and in a context when he's trying to prove to Shirley Harrison that he can't write-- as evidence of his skills and abilities back pre-March 1992!

But that would be quite a feat in itself, given every other example we have of the man's appalling written work and typing skills, regardless of who was the unfortunate recipient over the years. If he was in and out of the drunk tank when he wrote that particular example, how do you think he managed to reproduce the effect so consistently, time after time after time, when he had nobody willing to help him? Did he ever show an ability to write, even when he was trying desperately to prove he had written the diary? I think the answer you should be looking for is no.

Is Caz really trying to post a sample of Mike's writing to disprove that Anne Graham couldn't have written the diary, or helped Mike to write it?

Is this a double negative I see before me?

The answer to your question is no.

I don't need to disprove anything. If you honestly believe that Anne wrote the diary for Mike, composing up to 95% of the text, what do you think could have possessed her to imagine her husband of fifteen years being capable of contributing more than the remaining 5%, when even you now acknowledge that he never was?

[caz]

Now, we can skip the whole 'getting the date right or wrong' thing because under your rules, the dates don't matter if they are simply remembered. You like hard dates. The harder the better, probably, I'm guessing. So hard they might constitute a Code Red. You follow hard dates or else men die, etc.. So we can ignore the fact that Tony Devereux sadly died on August 8, 1991, because Mike's allowed to get dates as wrong as he likes under your rules. He was pissed-up so the dates don't matter. Only the hard dates become facts.

Anyone else spotted the problem here for Lord Orsam and The Acolytes, RJ Palmer on lead guitar? Mike provides us with a hard date. The diary was completed no later than August 8, 1991. Remember what Mike means by 'completed the Diary', dear readers:


See how Mike is making it clear that the actual physical writing of the scrapbook was done before Tony died? He doesn't say that Tony died in May early June 1990 and then he and Anne waited another two years (or even one year if he'd got the date of Tony's death right). The actual physical writing of the scrapbook, mistakes and all, occurred before Tony died.

Orsam (therefore his lapdog, Nipper) have to reinvent Mike's story so that 'writing the diary' means typing the diary into Mike's PC ready for transferring into an appropriate vehicle when such a vehicle was found and when they decided to go for it. But that is self-evidently not what Mike (the supposed author of the affidavit) means. By 'writing the diary' he means - surprise, surprise - writing the scrapbook, mistakes and all. And then Tony dies in August 1991, thereby buggering-up Orsam's hard-date theory of a hoax.

Shame. Come on, RJ, you must feel like a complete arse, do you not?

Morning Ike,

I think we can go one better than this. While RJ might want to argue that Mike's 'chronology' is ambiguous, regarding whether Tony died after the text was composed, but before the offending artefact was created from it, I don't see how it can be remotely ambiguous regarding when the raw materials, including the red diary and the photo album, were obtained in relation to Tony's unexpected demise. Mike's timeline unequivocally dates the former to January 1990, and the latter - incorrectly - to late May, early June 1990. If he had got his mate's date of death the following year roughly right, he'd have put the cart containing both diaries even further before the horse and hearse. It's the basic order of events that RJ needs Mike to have got so spectacularly wrong - no word of a lie.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Just to remind everyone...

Mike's story, by 13th April 1992 [which ran through him like a stick of rock whenever he wasn't making silly forgery claims, and which he reverted to afterwards] was that he was given the diary by his mate Tony, who had died the previous summer without telling anyone a sausage about it.

The mind boggles how anyone could think Mike totally forgot this, but only for the duration of swearing his affidavit of January 1995, when he stated that Tony was still alive throughout the process of obtaining a suitably old book in time to create the diary and take it to London.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

He also very obviously states that the purchase of the red diary preceded the trip to the auction house.

Well he would say that, wouldn't he? He was trying to claim the red diary was purchased to house Maybrick's, and never dreamed it would be too small and for the wrong year.

Of course, like a member of the Harrison/Feldman coalition, you ignore all that and rely instead on the dates supplied by a man in a near alcoholic coma.

Not wise, my friend, not wise, but I'm wasting my time here.

So how was it wise of Alan Gray to type it up for him and send a copy to Melvin Harris, to distribute to a select group of like-minded people? Did Gray not realise the man was in a near alcoholic coma at the time? Did Harris and the rest not realise it when they read it?

Or is it only you who recognises it for the booze-fuelled pile of rags you have wasted so much time trying to sober up and make respectable?

It is at this point that it becomes evident that the problem you face is not an intellectual one, but a psychological one. You can't bring yourself to look dispassionately and fairly at the evidence pointing toward Barrett and Graham. The reason is not hard to discern and involves the ego. Not being a psychiatrist, I'm afraid I can't help you overcome this hurdle, but I do look forward to your eventual recovery.

This was not addressed to me, but I could equally write:

'It is at this point that it becomes evident that the problem RJ faces is not an intellectual one, but a psychological one. He can't bring himself to look dispassionately and fairly at the evidence pointing against Barrett and Graham as the diary's creators. The reason is not hard to discern and involves the ego.'

[caz]

When Barret refers to "writing the diary" he almost always fails to distinguish between composing the typescript and the physical writing of the typescript into the guard book.

This is why we see him make ridiculous comments to Skinner and Feldman along the lines of "Anne wrote it, but didn't write it. I wrote it."

In Mike's mind, this gibberish actually makes sense.

Do you see? He means one person 'composed the text' and another person 'wrote it in the guard book.'

All I see is a man who got totally confused when trying and failing to give a coherent and credible account of the diary's creation - because he and Anne had nothing to do with it, and he was a rotten liar, saying whatever came into his head depending on his audience and whether it was nearly beer o'clock or well past Scotch o'clock.

If Mike means one person 'composed the text' - and you have Anne doing up to 95% of it - and another person 'wrote it in the guard book', do you think he was telling the truth about this? If so, wouldn't that rule out the diary being in Anne's handwriting and make that claim a lie?

If Anne didn't write it in the guard book, what was Caroline witnessing when, according to Mike, the diary was being transferred by hand into the guard book from the typescript? Who was Mike protecting and why?

You recently suggested that the 'wrestling match' Caroline witnessed was over the typescript of Anne's fictional story, when she learned of Mike's plans for it. I assume you had to rethink this, presumably because he could simply have printed off another copy if she had managed to burn it on the stove. This was the result of your rethink:

Anne said she had tried to 'burn the diary.' The last time I checked, most stoves are kept on top of the kitchen floor--which refers back to Caroline's account. The wrestling match was when Anne tried to burn the diary in the stove--that's what I think. She may have even tried to burn the diary in the stove when Barrett was attempting to slow dry the ink or dry the spot where he had removed the maker's stamp of 1908/1909 after daubing or soaking the inside cover with linseed oil or some similar solvent.

So forgive me for being as confused about your chronology of events as Mike was confused about his own. What we don't need is another artful dodger like Bongo. He can no longer be asked to clarify anything he once claimed, and Anne may never confirm or correct your interpretation of her words, but you are here, so you can at least answer questions related to your own thinking, if you wish to avoid being misunderstood.

If Anne tried to fight Mike physically over the completed diary, what does this tell you about who could have put pen to paper? Devereux was dead, so he is eliminated. Mike is a non-starter.

If Anne was bullied into doing it for Mike [so she composed most of the text and wrote it in the guard book, despite what you think Mike meant], how could she not have known she was helping to create a fake artefact out of her fictional story? And how could she have been bullied into doing the handwriting if she was prepared to fight Mike physically once she had done so and it was all too late?

Finally for now, do you believe the diary represents a fictional story, composed by Anne Barrett with no intention of making it look like anything else?

If so, you must think Chris Jones will be wasting more of his time analysing the equivalent of a novel for its factual content, in order to prove that the novelist's central character was not actually a killer. Perhaps you'd better warn him before he turns his analytical skills to The Day of the Jackal.

[rjpalmer]

This was not addressed to me, but I could equally write:

'It is at this point that it becomes evident that the problem RJ faces is not an intellectual one, but a psychological one. He can't bring himself to look dispassionately and fairly at the evidence pointing against Barrett and Graham as the diary's creators. The reason is not hard to discern and involves the ego.'

What evidence might that be?

As far as I know, you have never presented your case.

I've asked twice in recent memory for you and/or Ike to present "One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, and Undeniable Fact" proving that Anne and Mike could not have created the diary.

The room went silent.

I even tried to help you out by naming the only four arguments I could think of why some people might consider the diary an old document and asked for more reasons.

Again, the room went silent.

By all means, present your case why Anne and Mike could not have created this hoax.

[rjpalmer]

*bump*

From this same thread, back in December:

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.

And the bonus suggestion, although not really the diary, per se:

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?

Maybe if the diary friendly can give a coherent explanation how they know this is an old document, we can eliminate Mike and Anne from our inquiries.

[Iconoclast]

It has just occurred to me, back now as Mrs I and I are after a beautiful drive from Edinburgh to Lower Whottlington on the Whottle yesterday afternoon and evening, arriving home in the standard 5.5 hours (which was considerably better than the 11.5 hours it took us to go north last Friday thanks to an overturned lorry on the M6), what might Mike have been thinking when he got the chronology and dates in his affy David so spectacularly wrong on January 5, 1995?

He was clearly being driven there (probably literally) by ace detective Alan Gray who was rather obviously being driven there (probably not literally) by that green-eyed Monster of Disingenuity (the viperous Melvin Harris, if you aren't keeping up) - we have the transcript of Alan Gray telling Mike Barrett that Harris is behind the push for an affy - but what if Mike (being Mike) went along with it to keep spinning those two plates but decided to bugger up the chronology to signal that it was all bollocks?

It's an interesting thought on this The Hottest Day of the Year on this The greatest Thread of All. I'm cooking!

Ike
Sizzle

[caz]

Morning Mister I,

For me, there are only three realistic possibilities, when we consider Mike's multiple chronological cockups.

1) He was being plied with Scotch at the time until, in a near alcoholic coma, he couldn't have got his story straight if his life depended on it.

2) He injected provable deliberate mistakes into his invented account, such as the year of the red diary purchase and Tony's death, so that if he was "nicked", it would soon become clear that he had failed to incriminate anyone, including himself.

Back on 12th December 1994, Mighty Mel has been pushing Alan Gray to get a "concise statement" which "all the newspapers" will take. Gray tells Mike that they will go together and swear it as an affidavit and "that will be it nailed down, right. It will take a few hours."

Mike replies: "I'll get nicked then." [That shows he was worried about the possibility.]

And Gray says: "No, you won't, because this statement will safeguard you is what Melvin tells me."

[How Melvin could possibly have known this, before Mike knew what he would be putting in this statement, is anyone's guess. If the plan was for Gray to coerce Mike into sticking to a pre-planned script it went spectacularly wrong because Mike couldn't stick to his own script, never mind anyone else's.]

Gray: "You know what, when we get to write this affidavit, we'll need a lot of detail you know."


3) Mike was too drunk to do it himself, and Gray was being chased by Melvin to get the goods, so Gray composed the narrative for him, or 85-95% of it [see what I did there?], based loosely on all the contradictory crumbs he had been fed over the previous two or three months. We know Gray had to type it up for him because Mike had cut his hand rather badly, so he was excused making an even bigger pig's ear of it if he had typed up the tripe himself.

I think RJ forgets that some of us have already eliminated the Barretts from our own enquiries, beyond any reasonable doubt, and it's hardly our fault that he is lagging so badly behind.

For me, this only means the diary was in existence by 9th March 1992, when Mike phoned Doreen to claim he had Jack the Ripper's diary in his possession.

Our enquiries strongly indicate that the old book was in Battlecrease House that morning, but that by itself would prove nothing about its whereabouts up until that date, nor how long it had been waiting to be found.

Off now to clean the windows and listen to the test match at Headingley - fingers crossed for good cricket weather.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

By all means, present your case why Anne and Mike could not have created this hoax.

I'll think about it, when you have presented your own case [not someone else's] why the diary could only have been a hoax created by Anne and Mike - including a comprehensive chronology of the creative process, from conception to birth. For instance, if you don't believe it was conceived or composed as a hoax, but as a fictional story, you will need to explain the process by which the contents evolved into a deliberate attempt to hoodwink the public.

I'm happy to wait until hell freezes over.

In the meantime, back to the cricket...

[caz]

Another unanswered question is why Anne felt reasonably safe, in telling her 'in the family' story, shortly after Mike's retracted forgery claim, if they both knew very well how and when the diary was written, and Mike was in a position to prove it.

If RJ believes it was Mike who sourced all the raw materials, either without Anne's knowledge or her blessing, how could she have known he hadn't kept any dated receipts hidden in Goldie Street when she left the marital home in January 1994? One for Diamine, perhaps? The pen and nibs? The legendary linseed oil? The awesome auction ticket? When Scotland Yard paid the Barretts a call in October 1993, I don't recall that they searched the premises, and Anne was well aware of Mike's penchant for porkies, so she couldn't have trusted him to have destroyed all the evidence he had, and she wouldn't have known what that evidence consisted of in any case.

The only answer I can come up with is that Feldman was ready to believe Anne's story, having long since concluded that no electricians were involved. Scotland Yard were no longer interested either, and if Mike was hell-bent on his own mission impossible, to show he was capable of having written the diary and fooled all his perceived enemies, he was unlikely to change course completely and rob himself of centre stage along with his baby, by admitting he had fenced stolen property in March 1992. In the worst case scenario, if he ever decided to come clean, Anne would not be expecting any proof to emerge, or reliable confession to be forthcoming. That bird had flown - thanks to Feldy and the boys in blue. And who would believe Mike next time round, if he came out with yet another unproven version of events?

Anne knew what she was doing when she told her story. She would not have given Mike the green light to go ahead and spill all the hoaxing beans, if he'd had any of those beans to spill.

Love,

Caz
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