One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[Tom Mitchell]

In which case Flying Spaghetti Monsterism is also intrinsically flawless. Show me the one incontrovertible flaw in that theory which proves that the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't exist. You can't. Therefore, by your own logic, it is a flawless theory, and we should all hail his noodly appendages.

The diary has many flaws. Almost countless ones. Therefore it is not "flawless". The fact that one can explain those flaws away by using bizarre tortured logic does not make them any less flaws.

None of it matters - the diary is dead in the water. Mr. Omlor has nailed it with his triumverate of adjacent objects in the Eddowes list.

Eventually, even the most fanatical have to listen to such reason ...

Tom

[Stewart P Evans]

I'm struggling with this critical 'three items in a row' thing - this is a big deal-breaker!
In the diary text itself, the tin match box entry is followed by the cigarette case, then 'make haste' and 'my shiny knife' and 'the whore's knife' (Stride's, of course).
Next mention of the tin box, it comes after 'no light', and before 'tea and sugar'.
He then repeats this later.
I'm sure I must be misreading this (we feeble-minded types have just such a tendency), but I can't even find TWO adjacent items never mind the three.
Maybe the official police report (published c1987?) has the items in a different order?
Please help - I feel we are finally close to busting the forgery wide apart.
Tom

From The Crimes, Detection & Death of Jack the Ripper by Martin Fido, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987, page 70 -



The match box, cigarette case and knife references listed together.

[Tom Mitchell]

Nope, Tom, that's just the thing. I didn't have to do any better than that, and nor did the forger.

And he does.

Actually, Ben, you do.

You've totally missed the point about the reference to 'May' in the diary being backed up by Florie referring to 'May' to Brierley.

Maybrick - sorry, the forger - introduces 'May' into the diary because he sees it in the Punch cartoon. The fact that it is in the Punch cartoon is irrelevant to whether Maybrick was the killer or not.

Where this becomes interesting is that Maybrick/the forger clearly has an affinity with the 'May' term and uses a few times. THEN, Florie uses this very expression to refer to Maybrick in a letter to Brierley.

THAT is the point. It then becomes circumstantial evidence.

Or, at least, it would have done had John not just nailed the diary stone dead in the water with his three items for the price of two evidence.

Game over. Maybrick is innocent. Shame, really - I had high hopes for that boy.

Cheers,

Tom

[Tom Mitchell]

From The Crimes, Detection & Death of Jack the Ripper by Martin Fido, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987, page 70 -

[ATTACH]3100[/ATTACH]

The match box, cigarette case and knife references listed together.

Ouch - no need to shout, Stewart (even by proxy)!

Hey, I'm done here. I have accepted that three-in-a-row is a fatal mistake. The duck is dead in the water. Long live some other duck.

Incidentally, grand work on the Letters from Hell book - just finished it.

Cheers,

Tom
Defeated, crestfallen, unlikely to fight another day ...

[Ben]

You've totally missed the point about the reference to 'May' in the diary being backed up by Florie referring to 'May' to Brierley.

No, Tom.

You've missed the point.

The point is that the diarist didn't need to know that the real Maybrick was known as "May" on occasions. He only needed to have access to the Punch cartoon, which was readily available on the dust-cover of Fido's book. Any references to "May" within the diary thereafter could easily have stemmed from that cartoon and nowhere else, and we ought to note immediately that those other "May" references came directly after the diarist first mentioned the Punch cartoon.

Interesting that both the cartoon AND the list of Eddowes' accessories were easily obtainable from that one book, published in 1987.

Best regards,
Ben

[Tom Mitchell]

No, Tom.

You've missed the point.

The point is that the diarist didn't need to know that the real Maybrick was known as "May" on occasions. He only needed to have access to the Punch cartoon, which was readily available on the dust-cover of Fido's book. Any references to "May" within the diary thereafter could easily have stemmed from that cartoon and nowhere else, and we ought to note immediately that those other "May" references came directly after the diarist first mentioned the Punch cartoon.

Interesting that both the cartoon AND the list of Eddowes' accessories were easily obtainable from that one book, published in 1987.

Best regards,
Ben

Ben,

We aren't debating whether or not the term 'May' is used in the diary. We know it is because it's in the diary. Whether it was written by Maybrick or someone purporting to be him is not the point. It's in the diary, and either Maybrick or our forger was clearly influnced by the Punch cartoon. There's no debate about that.

The forger, then, mentions 'May' for the first time because he is prompted by the Punch cartoon. We are agreed on that.

The reference to 'May' would never henceforth have had any interest to us had the Florie letter not explicitly referred to Maybrick as 'May'. Without the Florie letter, the reference to 'May' in the diary could quite easily have been written by a forger inspired by the Punch cartoon.

The point was simply that Florie's letter lends credance to 'Maybrick' homing in on the reference to 'May' in the Punch cartoon. It is a small (not much more than that) amount of circumstantial evidence supporting Maybrick's authorship of the diary.

It doesn't matter to what extent you or I feel it supports his authorship of the diary. The point (that you DID miss) was that that was what Florie's letter did. No more, no less.

Please go back through the postings and check.

Cheers,

Tom

[Ben]

Hi Tom,

The point was simply that Florie's letter lends credance to 'Maybrick' homing in on the reference to 'May' in the Punch cartoon.

Yes, but he didn't need any letter from Florrie to home in on a readily available cartoon explicitly mentioning the word "May" in the context of Jack the Ripper not being caught. He had an obvious incentive to home in on it without any knowledge of that letter; it was there, easily accessible, and said "May".

Take the easily available cartoon out of the picture, and then - and only then - would it constitute the "circumstantial evidence" you're angling for. Otherwise, any letter from Florrie is completely coincidental.

Regards,
Ben

[Tom Mitchell]

Hi Tom,



Yes, but he didn't need any letter from Florrie to home in on a readily available cartoon explicitly mentioning the word "May" in the context of Jack the Ripper not being caught. He had an obvious incentive to home in on it without any knowledge of that letter; it was there, easily accessible, and said "May".

Take the easily available cartoon out of the picture, and then - and only then - would it constitute the "circumstantial evidence" you're angling for. Otherwise, any letter from Florrie is completely coincidental.

Regards,
Ben

Obviously, if the Punch cartoon did not exist, and the diary did not mention Maybrick as 'May', then Florie's letter is irrelevant.

You are arguing a different point to the one I originally made, which is fair enough.

For the record, the point I was making was that the diary does refer to Maybrick as 'May' (inspired by Punch, the month of, his grandmother, it matters not - the diary definitely has the author referring to himself as 'May'). If nothing Maybrick-linked then supported this, it would not be a discussion point. The fact is, Florie wrote a letter which referred to her husband as 'May'. This then becomes a small amount of circumstantial evidence linking the diary to Maybrick.

As it happens, I accept 100% that the entry was a direct reference to the Punch cartoon (whether by Maybrick for real, or a forger 100 years after the crimes) but that was not the point I was making.

Your point is perfectly valid - it just isn't the point I was making.

Cheers,

Tom

[Ben]

Thanks for the clarification, Tom.

The question begged though; would the diarist have homed in on the whole May reference if there was no letter from Florrie? I'd say yes; the punch cartoon provides more than enough "ammunition" in that regard, thus rendering the letter wholly incidental to the "May" references that appear in the diary.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

Regards,
Ben

[Brenda]

The duck is dead in the water. Long live some other duck.

Welcome to the Ripper equivalent of the Renaissance, Mr. M! One suspect down, 2500 other suspects to go......

Well - only 2499 if you've eliminated Lewis Carroll.

[Dan Norder]

I use the term 'flawless' in the context of having no one incontrovertible flaw which renders it a fake.

And then you set the bar for what is incontrovertible so that nothing can reach it, which means by your wacky definition every theory in the world about the Ripper (or anything else for that matter, including things like "airplanes fly because angels lift them into the air" and "Elvis is still alive and playing a poker game with Bigfoot and Jimmy Hoffa at this very moment") is "flawless".

(Looks like a couple of people beat me to that one... that'll teach me to responbd to a particularly ridiculous claim without have read the rest of the thread first.)

[Ron Beckett]

Tempus Omnia Revelat.

No Tom you are not the only one left. At the risk of being called wacky and other nice adjectives I will tell everyone what you really are doing. Tom is a statistics student who wanted to see how many people could answer his question without starting to get personal. We'll start counting again from here. I always thought that there may be a lot more to the forged will of JM by his brother Michael, who even if he didn't consider himself a poet,was supposedly the most prolific sogwriter of the day,hymns mostly but apparently quite famous. He was also the Lord Mayor of the island where Queen Victoria had a summer house, I forget which one. He certainly had good reason to cover up the truth as he was in society and he seems like a real nasty one for his actions toward Florence. What was the info that tipped Sir James Stephen over the edge the night after he condemned Florence. What were the diaries or journals that the Baroness(Florences mother) was trying to hawk around to help acquit Florence? If these and other questions can be answered by FACT and not opinion we might know more about the diary's provenance. I think it has a great bearing on the case, I think it was written by a Maybrick, and was certainly written by a disturbed though highly intelligent if addicted person. The Isreali writing specialist thought it was a masterpiece as do other literary people who have knowledge of arsenic and strychnine addiction. So you are not alone and I suspect you will never get a fact. Allthe ink tests were like the forensics in the Chamberlain case -proved wrong over time. I thought your diatribe was excellent and knew it would bring out the naysayers. I am still a fence-sitter but I feel there is a nexus of probable facts that revolve around the many Liverpool- London dichotomies that you mention. Someday they will all fit together. Michael Maybrick was a high level mason too. That should be top bait. Regards to you all, let the festivities commence.

[Sam Flynn]

"Elvis is still alive and playing a poker game with Bigfoot and Jimmy Hoffa at this very moment

...or, "Elv is still alive and playing pkr with Bgft and Hof at this very moment" - to adopt the rather common practice of abbreviating wrds and personal Ns in corres. If "Flo" wrt to "Alfd" about "May" we shouldn't be particularly surprised, and it doesn't definitively prove that the latter was familiarly known as "May".

[Tom Mitchell]

And then you set the bar for what is incontrovertible so that nothing can reach it, which means by your wacky definition ...

Hi Dan,

Honestly, I don't think it's my definition. If it's wacky, you need to blame the english language. Incontrovertible is not something which occurs by degrees. In the same way as you can't be partially pregnant, I don't think something can be partially incontrovertible (can it?) - so neither I nor the english language needs a bar set to aid its understanding.

My use of 'flawless' in the context of incontrovertible may itself be flawed, or may have invoked a wee bit too much poetic licence, but I'm sure you take my point.

Certainly, it achieved its end - we had a cacophony of agreement from the Casebookers that I was right (there is no one incontrovertible piece of evidence which utterly kills the diary, and that has to be encouraging after sixteen long years of analysis).

Mr Omlor threw in the three-line whip about the three blind mice, though, and that whole forgery thing reared its head again, and I had to agree that it was a stupendously unlikely coincidence of entries in both Mr Fido's work of 1987 and Mr Forger's of a few months later. That one goes to the top - straight in to No. 1 - on the hmm-that's-not-so-easy-to-explain charts.

There remain, of course, the unanswered questions about the small print - about how our forger knew the small details. They say 'Don't sweat the small stuff'. But then they also say 'The devil's in the detail', and in the case of our diary, that seems particularly true.

And then there's those pesky letters - 'F' and 'M' - that so many people can see on Mark Kelly's wall. No forger could ever hope to be that fortunate, could they? That bothers me, and it ought to bother anyone else if they are looking at it with unbiased eyes.

And then there was ...

And then there was ...

Incontrovertible most definitely is possible, Dan (you set your own bar of expectations unexpectedly low): as I said earlier, a reference to the IRA, to Liverpool FC, to the Tyne Bridge, to a magazine cartoon which was published post-1889, to the miner's strike, would all be incontrovertible evidence of fraud. As with the Hitler diaries, the use of paper unavailabvle in 1888 would have nailed the diary. A manufacturer's stamp dated 1890 would have done the job. These things are truly incontrovertible. Everything else is simply the (hopefully balanced) accumulation of circumstance.

For me, the jury is actually firmly still out on that one ...

Cheers,

Tom

[Tom Mitchell]

No Tom you are not the only one left. At the risk of being called wacky and other nice adjectives I will tell everyone what you really are doing. Tom is a statistics student who wanted to see how many people could answer his question without starting to get personal.

Hi Ron,

You missed the salt and pepper hair, but other than that, you got me!

Thanks for putting your head above the parapet. I hope you remembered your tin hat (you're gonna need it).

At the last count, this thread had achieved a cool 1,269 views in just over 24 hours. And yet only a handful of people have actually responded.

It makes me wonder how many other heads sit just below the parapet but are quite rightly nervous about popping up for air.

There is a poll on this very Casebook asking who you think was the Ripster, and old Jamesy polls about 99% of the popular vote. In fairness, I've voted for him about 2,000 times, but you get my point (I got confused - meaning to vote for Darnell to be evicted from the Big Brother house). And yet these people never speak about the love that dare not speak its name, etc.! Why not? Who are these people who vote for old May, and view the postings, but do not post their views?



Come on everyone, if you believe that the debate is not yet over, don't be afraid to say so!

Is it possible that the diary actually could be the authentic work of Rippy himself?

You decide!

Cheers,

Tom