One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[DVV]

That's a wee bit harsh! Everyone's entitled to make a living, surely? And if anyone could polish up Patricia Cornwell's act, she seems to have appreciated it would be Keith.

Caz
X

I've been told she likes whisky, so I'm ready to polish up whetever she needs (with a chainsaw).

Cheers

[caz]

I'm kind of getting the impression that not all posters to this thread have actually read much with regard to the 'Diary' and its appearance 20 years ago....

Read Paul Feldman's and Caz's books, and you will understand why it is highly unlikely that Mike Barratt could have written the 'Diary' or anything like it. He wasn't the type. Neither IMHO was Anne Barratt, although she was far better qualified than Mike. Also bear in mind that there was a police investigation into the question of whether the 'Diary' was a deliberate hoax to make money fraudulently (per the Hitler Diaries), and it concluded that it wasn't. OK, not the world's most thorough investigation perhaps, but nevertheless the officers involved backed off presumably through lack of evidence. Caz knows far more about the 'Diary' and the characters involved than I ever will, and she should be listened to and given due credit for her knowledge.

G

Very kind, Graham, but due credit should also go to the late great Mighty Melvin Harris, who knew better than most that neither Mike nor Anne had the 'capacity' (I seem to recall that was the word he used) to write the diary, even though Mike managed to con Melvin rotten with all sorts of contradictory tall tales, claiming to know a lot more about its origins and creation than he could know in reality - which is pretty much nothing at all, aside from when and how he became its temporary owner.

And that's a story Mike has never told the truth about, which is why one needs to look elsewhere for the answers. There are at least two good reasons why he would have considered a false forgery confession preferable to the alternative options in 1994 - one reason being Feldy's fanatical mission (as perceived by Mike) to prove to the world that his precious only daughter was directly descended from Jack the Ripper.

Love,

Caz
X

[Digalittledeeperwatson]

Hullo Graham and others.

Yes, as I said I am not well versed on the specifics on this. Hence the interest. So, Barrett lacked the capacity to create it. Does this mean he also could not have known it was a fake? No. If he had nothing to do with fakery, if it is a fake, why ever claim it to be such? Does it not sound any alarms? I am slightly aware of some troubles the guy was having but why not stick to your guns? Ample reason enough for questioning. Not drawing conclusions.

[caz]

Yes, as I said I am not well versed on the specifics on this. Hence the interest. So, Barrett lacked the capacity to create it. Does this mean he also could not have known it was a fake? No. If he had nothing to do with fakery, if it is a fake, why ever claim it to be such? Does it not sound any alarms? I am slightly aware of some troubles the guy was having but why not stick to your guns? Ample reason enough for questioning. Not drawing conclusions.

Am I invisible? Did you actually read what I posted?

Mike pretended he wrote the diary all by himself/Anne wrote it with his help/the cat wrote it (choose one or add your own version, the more the merrier) because the alternative at the time was even worse for him.

He could not tell the truth as he knew it, and has never told the truth, nor has he ever accepted either Anne's story of the diary being in the family or Feldy's earlier belief that it came out of Battlecrease. Understand why that might be, and why he opted instead for his forgery claims (risking prosecution and possibly prison, even though he couldn't have forged a sick note from his mum), and you might begin to get a feel for where Mike was coming from.

Love,

Caz
X

[Kaz]

Never ending circles...

[Digalittledeeperwatson]

Apologies Caz.

Am I invisible? Did you actually read what I posted?

Mike pretended he wrote the diary all by himself/Anne wrote it with his help/the cat wrote it (choose one or add your own version, the more the merrier) because the alternative at the time was even worse for him.

He could not tell the truth as he knew it, and has never told the truth, nor has he ever accepted either Anne's story of the diary being in the family or Feldy's earlier belief that it came out of Battlecrease. Understand why that might be, and why he opted instead for his forgery claims (risking prosecution and possibly prison, even though he couldn't have forged a sick note from his mum), and you might begin to get a feel for where Mike was coming from.

Love,

Caz
X

No you are not invisible. I did read it but apparently retained nothing. Blaming sickness and fatigue. If you would be so kind.

He pretended he wrote the diary because the alternative was worse? What alternative? Why could he not tell the truth? I have no idea about this. Thank you ahead of time for the crash course.

[Jonathan H]

To Diagalittledeeperwatson

You're asking the right questions. The 'Dairy' has no reliable provenance and the person involved who first put their hand up has no credibility.

That's that.

You can read big, long meticulously argued books on how 'Anna Anderson' must be the Grand Duchess Anastasia until, posthumously, DNA exposed her as an imposter. She nearly fooled a German court in the 60's.

Yet as with all hoaxes it is obvious that it was one all along. 'Anna' could not speak Russian, and did not exhibit the manners of a Russian Royal.

Some people want to believe and, furthermore, they have a need to believe. They invest years in stuff that is not real, and that is hard to admit.

The Shroud of Turin is a weird hoax. In it's own day it was a flop, and they even knew who had painted it. But the technology of photography in 1900 inadvertently turned it back into a 'mystery' that Carbon-14 dating, showing it was a Medieval creation, should have quashed.

Yet it did not for 'Shroudie' believers because of the need to believe.

As with the 'Diary' excuses are put forward: the wrong bits were tested, the test is the wrong test, the test was faked, etc.

An ever more bizarre variation of this need to believe was cattle 'mutilations' of the 1970's being attributed to extra-terrestrials. Vets knew it was normal predation but some ranchers and UFO believers refused to accept the obvious, and counter-accused the former of being part of the conspiracy, and so on.

Bin Laden said, yes, my group planned and execucted 9/11 and yet you still have conspiracy believers rejecting this ownership and asserting, often aggressively, it was definitely an inside job by the Cheney(Bush) junta.

[Gladiator]

To Diagalittledeeperwatson

Yet it did not for 'Shroudie' believers because of the need to believe.

One of the genuinely unusual features of the Maybrick diary is the fact that believers may very well have a 'need to believe' (not so surprising, of course), but that non-believers seem to have a deep-rooted need to not believe. It is this reluctance to engage in the debate which potentially prolongs it.

Fortunately (for historians especially) not every event was a hoax or a fraud, and picking those that were does not in itself confirm that any other event - however strange it may seem in itself, in particular at its most surface-level - is necessarily a hoax.

The Maybrick diary may well prove to be a hoax, but that hoax has definitely not yet been demonstrated - merely believed by some to have been demonstrated. When it has been scrutinised, it has time and again been suggested that the diary is not a modern creation, and that it could not have been faked (Anna Koran). Doesn't make it the real thing, but definitely and clearly doesn't yet make it the hoax so many appear to need to believe it is.

Gladiator

[Stewart P Evans]

Fact

It is a fact that I say the 'diary' is a fake.

[Damaso Marte]

I remember the day I learned about the Maybrick diary. I was around 11 years old, on a trip with my family to Florida. I had just toured the NASA facility at Cape Kennedy that day, which had been a life-long dream of mine, and when we went back to the hotel room, I turned on the Discovery channel and there it was: a special about how the Jack the Ripper case had been solved.

I thought "wow, this is the coolest thing ever!" - I assumed it had to be true, after all the Discovery Channel would never put something on TV that was dubious. And since "Kosminsky" is a name that occurs in my family, and was the surname of my favorite cousin at the time, I personally felt exonerated by the fact that James Maybrick, of whom I had never heard before, was the killer, and not a possible distant relative.

So I definitely started off with a strong desire to believe in the diary; "need" is probably too strong of a word. But as I got older and learned more about the case, I became pretty convinced that the diary is a hoax and that Maybrick has nothing to do with the case. The main issue for me is that the diary presents a very 1980's view of the killings and that the information about the murders strangely parallels available sources from a few years before the diary's release. The author may have well had a super-encyclopedic knowledge of James Maybrick, but his knowledge of the Whitechapel murders (not to mention how actual human beings write about things) seems elementary.

Can I disprove the diary entirely? Of course not, but we all hold beliefs that we cannot undeniably prove. None of us here can disprove the Koran, for example, yet I see few Muslims among us. When faced with things we might possibly believe but cannot prove/disprove, we apply a plausibility test, and the diary fails my plausibility test as it does for most people. I submit that methodological hyper-orthodoxy, in Ripperology, is the refuge of people who either subscribe to one of the less-plausible theories or who are misanthropes.

[Gladiator]

The main issue for me is that the diary presents a very 1980's view of the killings and that the information about the murders strangely parallels available sources from a few years before the diary's release. The author may have well had a super-encyclopedic knowledge of James Maybrick, but his knowledge of the Whitechapel murders (not to mention how actual human beings write about things) seems elementary.

Hi Damaso,

Interestingly, if James Maybrick was Jack the Ripper, you've just described him rather well. He would have had a very 1980s view of the murders as that view is still held to be the most accurate one (in terms of number of murders, etc.), and he certainly would have had a very detailed knowledge of James Maybrick, and he may well have had only an elementary understanding of creative writing as he was a cotton broker not an author. In terms of how much detail he did or did not go into regarding the murders, there is no rule which says someone's written record of events needs to be based upon the details. If Maybrick wrote about his feelings because that was the purpose of his writing, he was of course entitled to do so.

I am drawn back time and time again to the sheer implausibility of choosing Maybrick as a candidate for Jack, and yet still being able to spin a plausible case for him despite the long intervening years. And to have the Diego Laurenz letter to the Liverpool Echo. The case cries out not to be underestimated.

Despite the tone of your email, I (as a firm believer in James Maybrick as JtR) found it quite uplifting so thank you for that.

Gladiator

[Gladiator]

It is a fact that I say the 'diary' is a fake.

It is a fact that this time last year I would have said that Wigan would never win the FA Cup.

Strange, but true ...

[Jonathan H]

No, it's not a 'deep-rooted' need to not believe.

It's right there on the surface.

Unlike the Swanson Marginalia or the Littlechild Letter or the 'Aberconway' version, the 'Diary' does not have a reliable provenance.

Instead it has a person closely connected to it who has admitted its a forgery--his forgery--then retracted his confession, as people often do when they are admitting to fraud. His wife provided a new tale of how the artifact came into their possession, one which conveniently cut out her unstable/unreliable spouse from the equation altogether.

To argue that those who reject this 'source' as nothing more than a modern forgery--eg. just about everybody--are people who are just as needy as those who want to believe in it as real, or at least bloody old, won't wash.

It does not have a reliable provenance, so that's that.

One last thing. I have seen it written several times that Mike Barrett did not have the smarts to make the 'Diary'.

Really? How so? Because he didn't go to Oxford, or forgery school?

This strikes me as cliche snobbery.

There are arguably three stages as to how the hoodwinked react to, and ferociously resist, the unraveling of a hoax:

1) Hey, they would not be morally capable of doing such a thing as hustling a fake! I've met them! Have you met them? They've looked me in the eye, and assured me it's real and could not be lying!

This is usually followed by stage 2) ok, they're liars but they did not have the brains and/or skills to actually make the damn thing!

Followed by 3) those low-lives, forget them, they are nothing because provenance lies elsewhere and we will divulge the big story, soon, but not just yet ...

[Gladiator]

...

Hmmm.

If you don't understand the man (and you clearly don't) then it's pointless discussing it.

Suffice it to say that even the harshest critics of the diary (Martin Fido, Keith Skinner) and agnostics (such as Caroline Morris) have no time for the Mike Barrett aspect of the diary. They could see through the simplicity of the man in 1993, and then through his tortured, drink-induced confessions of the mid-1990s. His account of how he forged the diary was littered with fundamental errors (and I mean, critical errors) such as a detailed description of how he bought the diary at an auction house following a methodology which the auction house stated they had never used in their long history.

Don't get bogged down with Mike Barrett unless you're really desperate to denounce the diary.

Let's just refresh on the timeline so that your misinformation does not cause prejudice:

• Mike acquires the diary from Tony Devereaux without an explanation.
• Eighteen months later - post-launch of books - wife Anne admits that she gave Tony the diary to give to Mike to give him something to focus his attempts at writing on.
• Years go by, then Mike 'confesses' but can't get a single detail of the forgery right. Caroline Morris argues that his confession was designed to prevent his beloved daughter (also Caroline) from being associated with Jack the Ripper.

Mike failed to achieve his objective - Caroline is linked (though not blood-linked) by her great-grandmother who received the diary from one of the servants in Battlecrease House. None of this has been categorically proven, of course - that's now impossible, but it is a provenance, and it does provide a link right back to the scene of the crimes. What provenance could you conceive in 2013 as being more categorical, and therefore more believable? What evidence would you expect someone to realistically find to support this provenance given the passing of 125 years?

The provenance which you deny has been shown to go right back to the Maybrick household of 1888, so which bit of it do you find fault in?

Or did you not know that such a provenance had been proposed?

Gladiator

[Stewart P Evans]

Strange

It is a fact that this time last year I would have said that Wigan would never win the FA Cup.
Strange, but true ...

What a strange comparison to make.

I was there in 1992/93 looking at the whole 'diary' story as it emerged and knowing most of the key players in advancing the 'product'. I spent a lot of time in Feldman's office discussing the thing. I met Shirley Harrison before her book was published (she referred to me as 'the opposition' at the time) and, I believe, I know much more about it than all those who post here. Where were any of you in 1993 in relation to the 'diary' and when did you come onto the 'diary' scene?