One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[Iconoclast]

RE: J. M. Jack. May I propose...

For the record, it was an excellent spot and I for one am happy to accept that there's a very good chance that is the once-golden key to the Jack netty ...

[caz]

i didnt even mention the barretts or trolls caz.lol.but you cant help it. your stance is a joke and an embarrassment to ripperolgy. sugden said it best ...you and your ilk are stranded in amber forever for all the world to see. id have more respect for you if you just admitted you have too much time money and effort invested over half your life to admit youve been fooled by a two bit con man.

Not sure I understand your argument, Abby.

Assuming this 'two bit con man' was Mike Barrett, I have said too many times for you to have missed it [unless you really haven't been paying attention] that I don't believe a single claim this con man and liar ever made about how the scrapbook came into his life.

How that translates as being 'fooled' by this man is not immediately clear. Perhaps you could explain the contradiction.

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

Not sure I understand your argument, Abby.
Assuming this 'two bit con man' was Mike Barrett, I have said too many times for you to have missed it [unless you really haven't been paying attention] that I don't believe a single claim this con man and liar ever made about how the scrapbook came into his life.
How that translates as being 'fooled' by this man is not immediately clear. Perhaps you could explain the contradiction.
Love, Caz X

Take a deep breath, everyone - this one's a real old labyrinth of claims ...

I think Abby's position, Caz, is unknowingly self-contradictory in that it appears to consist of the claim that Mike Barrett did indeed create the Maybrick scrapbook and that you have pretty much always known this and therefore that you are fooling yourself (or attempting to fool others) in claiming that he didn't and that he has therefore also fooled you into thinking he didn't (which doesn't make sense because according to Abby's theory, you know deep down that Barrett created the hoax so he - Barrett - clearly hasn't fooled you at all).

I can't square that circle for Abby, but then I don't need to because you have made it patently clear that you don't know whether the scrapbook is authentic or not but that the one thing you are certain of - which we can all be certain of, dear readers - is that Michael Barrett had no hand in it other than taking it to London on April 13, 1992.

I may have misrepresented your views regarding authenticity and - rather than suffer the slicing madness of the Switchblade in full fury - I am willing to beg for mercy now.

Ike

[caz]

Afternoon Ike,

Anyone who begs as prettily as you do will always get mercy from the Switchblade.

I don't see the diary in its only known form as the original work of James Maybrick or Jack the Ripper.

I've often said that if someone had written a spoof diary supposedly by Jimmy Savile, in which he boasted about committing several unsolved murders, nobody in their right mind would argue that this made the swine any less of a despicable human being in reality. The real James Maybrick may have been no Jimmy Savile, but he was certainly very far from being a saint, and someone decided he was a bad enough lad to be portrayed as the very devil. At least this person wasn't trying to fit up a family man like Lechmere, who was not known to have had a secret life of drugs or debauchery, or to have done anything more sinful than to find a murder victim on his way to work and report it to a policeman.

Returning to Abby's 'two bit con man', I don't think I've yet seen a convincing motive put forward for Mike Barrett to have made a true confession to faking the Maybrick diary. There is no evidence to suggest he suddenly grew a conscience, or no longer wanted to make money from the diary. How many 'two bit' con men does Abby know who try to come clean and confess all their sins, but have to ask a private investigator to help, and then only succeed in cutting off the ill-gotten gains that have been feeding a worsening alcohol habit?

We know all the reasons Mike could have had for making false claims about the diary: revenge against his estranged wife and the hated Paul Feldman for starters. Mike's self-esteem by the beginning of 1994 was at rock bottom, with a diary that had been described as a shabby modern hoax, leading to a visit from Scotland Yard, followed by his wife and daughter walking out on him. From Mike's point of view, if the diary was to be branded a fake, it was arguably less painful for him to claim to be the faker, than the man who was conned by whoever did fake it.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

The conclusions of Alan Gray are not exactly top of my list for perspicacity, I have to say.

Trusting the limited knowledge of the world's biggest mug seems like a fragile platform to build an argument on.

Afternoon Ike,

Slowly catching up with your thread...

The argument is usually made that Alan Gray was at a distinct disadvantage because he knew next to nothing about the subject matter when Mike asked for his help in proving that the diary was a Barrett fake. The significance of the Crashaw quote, for instance, might never have really sunk in with Gray, without advice from Melvin Harris on why it was so important to get sight of the Sphere volume 2, which Mike claimed had been in his possession since 1989. Did Gray never wonder why it took so long for Mike to hand over that used copy, if it was such good evidence? Gray didn't even think that basic facts, like when Tony Devereux died, would be important to establish, even when it became obvious to him that other dates, such as the awesome auction, were likely to change more often than Mike's undercrackers.

It was tough enough for those who were involved with the diary from the start, in 1992, to engage with Mike personally and try to work out what was true and what wasn't. By the time Gray entered the fray in the second half of 1994 he could only have had an uphill struggle to get any sense at all out of Mike at his worst, and then apply it to his own limited knowledge of the story. Without considerable prompting by Harris, Gray would essentially have been relying for his intelligence on what Abby's 'two bit con man' was willing or able to tell him, which was by then a complete ragbag of lies and contradictions, with perhaps the odd truth in there somewhere, told more by accident than design.

Frankly, I'm only surprised that Gray was ever able to reach any kind of rational conclusion about the diary's creation, apart from the one many of us have reached, which is that trusting Mike's word on the subject, without impeccable supporting evidence, is foolish in the extreme.

Along with Keith Skinner and others, I don't regard Mike's order in March 1992, for a tiny 1891 diary with 365 printed dates in it, as impeccable supporting evidence that he was planning to fake Maybrick's 1888/9 diary with it. If that makes my stance 'a joke and an embarrassment to ripperolgy' [sic], as Abby tells me, at least I know I am in excellent company.

Love,

Caz
X

[rjpalmer]

Along with Keith Skinner and others, I don't regard Mike's order in March 1992, for a tiny 1891 diary with 365 printed dates in it, as impeccable supporting evidence that he was planning to fake Maybrick's 1888/9 diary with it.

There's little point in arguing about this yet again, but that's not what Mike 'ordered.' It's what he received or accepted.

To use a legal phrase, the red diary is not the 'mens rea'-- the evidence of criminal intent-- that would be the advertisement placed on Barrett's behalf by Martin Earl.

[Iconoclast]

There's little point in arguing about this yet again, but that's not what Mike 'ordered.' It's what he received or accepted.
To use a legal phrase, the red diary is not the 'mens rea'-- the evidence of criminal intent-- that would be the advertisement placed on Barrett's behalf by Martin Earl.

The one where he requested something similar to the Maybrick scrapbook so that he could produce that instead of the priceless scrapbook if he was asked in the following month or so before he took it to London?

To be honest, I think everyone knows that was what he was seeking a similar item for.

[caz]

There's little point in arguing about this yet again, but that's not what Mike 'ordered.' It's what he received or accepted.

To use a legal phrase, the red diary is not the 'mens rea'-- the evidence of criminal intent-- that would be the advertisement placed on Barrett's behalf by Martin Earl.

Mike literally did order a tiny 1891 diary with 365 dates in it, unless Palmer wants to argue that Martin Earl is an unreliable witness and Mike an honest one.

Full descriptions of any item located were given to the customer before taking an order, to prevent the unnecessary time and expense involved if an item had to be returned to the supplier because it didn't meet with their specific requirements. The year alone - 1891 - would have meant a potential rejection as it was outside of Mike's specified years.

It's just too silly for words to believe that Mike had to wait for the red diary to arrive in the post before he realised just how small it was, and even sillier that he gave its size as the only reason why it could not be used to create what is in the scrapbook.

Even the advert, as it was worded, was never going to produce something that a hoaxer could have used, as no page size was specified for this "diary", nor the need for the unused pages to run consecutively, and asking for it to date from 1880-90 would have been asking for trouble.

Mike had seen the scrapbook, but he didn't know who JtR was meant to be at that early stage, so he didn't know the period covered by the entries. May 1889 gave him the decade but very little else. The wording of the advert reflects that ignorance, which doesn't make sense if the Maybrick diary typescript had been sitting on his word processor, just waiting for him to find a suitable old book to put it in.

Has Palmer given up on trying to contact Anne, I wonder? Or has he not even tried yet? An update would be nice.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Oh excuse me ''F'' out of me , Is that what they call it these days when someone strongly objects to an opinion regarding a perticular topic on a public forum ? ill keep that in mind next time i see one of your post doing the same thing . [ you know, one troll to another kinda thing]

Has some kind soul been able to translate the above into plain English? Particularly this bit: 'Oh excuse me ''F'' out of me ,', which I simply can't make sense of, and doesn't even appear to relate to anything in the post to which FISHY was responding?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

For the record, I don't think Dodd denied that floorboards had come up on March 9, 1992...

Afternoon Ike,

It wasn't a denial as such by Dodd, but rather an unfortunate misstatement concerning which year the electrical work was done, which had required one or more floorboards on the first floor to be raised. Colin Rhodes and his weekly worksheets were finally able to pinpoint this for Keith Skinner to one occasion only: the morning of 9th March 1992. Feldman died without appreciating this date, or what made it potentially significant.

It was either incredibly lucky - or unlucky - for Mike Barrett [depending on one's thought processes] that he had his first known conversation about Jack the Ripper's diary that very afternoon, but failed to name Maybrick as the supposed author, whose thoughts happen to range from the early Spring of 1888 to May 1889, which is the exact period, no more, no less, in which the Maybricks had lived in Dodd's house. I doubt Mike knew any of this on 9th March, including that the Maybrick family moved into the house in February 1888 and that it was named Battlecrease from that day until shortly after they all left again - Jim in a box.

The circumstantial evidence fits like a glove with our impetuous Mike seeing the diary for the first time on that Monday in March, after ordering his usual late lunchtime pint, and wasting no time in making a phone call to claim it was in his possession, but before he knew where it had been or who could have written it, or whether it was serious or someone's idea of a sick joke. I doubt Mike would have acted so hastily had he suspected for one moment that it had been taken that same morning from the house of the individual who would be identifiable from internal clues as a real historical figure, who was claiming to have been the Whitechapel Murderer.

In fact, I believe Mike also died without knowing the precise details of the 9th March double event, although he must have had his suspicions about where the diary had come from, if not when it had emerged blinking into the Aigburth daylight.

Love,

Caz
X

[Scott Nelson]

Hey Caroline, remember all those years ago when you encouraged me to post more on the diary threads?

I'll bet you're sorry about that now.

[caz]

Not at all, Scotty! Your posts always lighten the mood around here, preventing Ike's thread from looking like a magnet for every ripperological misery guts.

Keep 'em coming.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

The problem we have here is that the first on-the-record mention of a Diary of Jack the Ripper being found in Liverpool is March 9th 1992. I simply do not believe that if the scrapbook was in someone else's hands (or was being/had been forged) prior to that date, that nobody said anything about it to anybody else.

edit: Obviously Mike and Ann have both offered up stories which have the Diary in Goldie Street (and elsewhere) prior to that date, but as yet there's nothing to back up either of those claims.

It's a good point, Owly.

Mike was not exactly good at keeping his mouth shut - the one exception being his failure to give a truthful, credible or supportable explanation for how and when it really, really came into his possession.

I find it all too plausible that Mike would waste no time in contacting someone about the old book, even before knowing anything about it beyond the fact that the last page of writing was dated 1889 and claimed to be by Jack the Ripper. If it was a joke, so be it, but Mike would be itching to find out. It seems far less plausible that he could have kept its existence a closely guarded secret from everyone who knew him for any length of time prior to March 1992, whether it already contained the diary when he first obtained it, or whether he was in the planning stages of trying to create a hoax. If he had ever discussed the matter with Tony Devereux, there was a distinct possibility that he would have mentioned it to his daughters or another family member or friend. But no, not a whisper about it came out of anyone's mouth before that first phone call to Doreen Montgomery, and the Devereux family didn't believe a word of it when Shirley contacted them to ask what they knew. Tony either took a diary secret to the grave with him or he genuinely knew nothing about it.

I often think it must have played on Anne's conscience that Mike had named a friend who couldn't defend himself, and she had only gone along with the story for personal reasons connected with her marriage. The innocent Devereux family had been suffering unwelcome intrusions and questions ever since as a direct result. So when Anne told Paul Feldman in July 1994 that she had seen the diary back in the late 1960s, and had asked Tony to give it to Mike in 1991 as a personal favour to her, she must have had her reasons for putting herself right in the middle of the controversy for the first time, while effectively exonerating Tony from any involvement with a diary that was by then strongly believed to have been faked, or rumoured to have been stolen - or both. To me, that seems an extraordinary step for Anne to take if she had 'humoured' her abusive husband back in 1992 by helping him to write the diary, without appreciating that he might try to pass off her work of fiction as an old document, or thinking that Doreen and Shirley might actually take the thing seriously. When the penny dropped, that was supposedly when Anne had tried to burn the diary - at the risk of having her lights punched out - but that would appear to have been her first and last attempt to nip it in the bud.

With no knowledge of how to fake an old handwritten document, assuming Anne had no awareness that she had been helping Mike to create one, what realistic expectations could she have had in April 1992 that her own handiwork could possibly survive for long under the scrutiny of scientists and historians before being exposed for what it was? And yet, we are invited to believe that this timid mouse simply kept her head down and prayed for the best, while anticipating the worst, until she finally left the marital home two years later. By July 1994, she had somehow gained the confidence to stick two fingers up at the combined might of a vengeful husband; a 'once bitten, twice shy' Sunday Times; a deeply suspicious detective from Scotland Yard; the hoax busting skills of Melvin Harris and full-on scepticism of Martin Fido, to establish with forensic certainty that she hadn't seen the diary in the 1960s for the simple reason that it didn't exist much before the 1990s. This lie would have assured her new suspect status as Mike's co-conspirator in a modern hoax at the very least - if she had created the diary with him in 1992.

Palmer has often observed that Anne was free of Mike by then, so she had no need to dig herself in deeper, but could have carried on maintaining that she knew nothing apart from what Mike had told her about getting the diary from Tony Devereux. Tony would have made the perfect scapegoat: the man from the Echo, who had played a tasteless trick on a susceptible "Bongo", with a recently faked Jack the Ripper diary, but had popped his clogs before he got the chance to say sorry or stop his chum making a massive clown of himself over it. But Anne's 'in the family' story dragged Tony out from under the Barrett bus and she risked throwing herself under it instead - which only really makes any sense if she was making amends to his family for the distress caused since 1992, and to right a wrong that was done to him personally in death. It also only makes sense if Anne's instincts, from the day Mike brought the diary into their lives, told her that whatever it was, it had not been written in recent years and there was a rightful owner out there somewhere who might want it back. That worry would have diminished over time, especially following the Battlecrease rumours when Paul Dodd made it clear that he had no knowledge of the diary ever being in his house. The opposite would have been the case had Anne's handwriting been in the scrapbook, and had she also composed much of the text. Her worries could only have increased with time, as researchers made fresh discoveries and advancements were made in detecting modern fakes and identifying handwriting. And that doesn't even address the fear of what Mike could have proven if he had really put his mind to it.

As for the red diary argument, it would have looked more suspicious if Mike had rejected it immediately on hearing it described over the phone, leaving him with no obligation, no red diary and no transaction in his real name. But then the advert might never have come to light unless Mike had been able to recall sufficient details when swearing his January 1995 affidavit. If he had been in the process of deceiving Anne over his plans, it would have been rather foolish to order this diary and keep it in the house without paying for it, resulting in her finding out and having to settle the bill herself in May. This was long after she learned that Doreen was serious about publishing what was in the scrapbook, and that Mike had lied about where it came from.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

And once again--when someone DID come knocking (Robert Smith)--and met Barrett in the pub with Eddie Lyons, did Barrett produce this 'doppelganger' and wave it in the air?

Did he $%&@. It suddenly slipped his mind!

It's the bottom of the garbage pail, Ike, but if you want to believe it, by all means do so.

Yes, the argument that Mike would have made sure to whip out his little red 1891 diary, on 26th June 1993, three months after handing over the Maybrick diary to Robert in Liverpool for the suspiciously large sum of £1, has to be pretty near the bottom of the garbage pail - or the skip that never was.

Whatever reason Mike may have thought he had for trying to obtain an 1880s 'diary' of unspecified size, within a day or so of Maybrick's floorboards being raised and his call alerting Doreen to the existence of JtR's diary [and I challenge Palmer to provide some evidence of Mike thinking in ways that all rational folk would], that reason had long since expired and gone to meet its Maker etc etc, and to be reunited with Tony Devereux, before the Maybrick diary had even boarded the train to London on the one date Mike never forgot: Monday 13th April 1992.

Why is it that Palmer cannot seem to understand that motivation will inevitably change over time as the circumstances change? This would apply to Mike too, even though he was never a man to let a logical thought take precedence over an illogical one.

[Scott Nelson]

Not at all, Scotty! Your posts always lighten the mood around here, preventing Ike's thread from looking like a magnet for every ripperological misery guts.

Keep 'em coming.

But I really believe in everything I write about origins of the Maybrick diaries.