One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[Iconoclast]

What was Mike doing in the Spring of 1993, fishing for information from Colin Rhodes about his crew and the work done in Battlecrease, if he'd overheard the salient details back in March 1992? What was he fishing for anyway, if he already knew there was no possible connection between anyone at Portus & Rhodes and his diary because he and Anne had created it together, weeks after the Battlecrease floorboards were raised and lowered again?

Personally, I can't take the Barrett Hoax Theory seriously on any level whatsoever, but if I were forced to at pain of watching Sunderland I would point our dear readers in the direction of Mike Barrett's Irrelevant Behaviours If He Were a Hoaxer as evidence directly pointing away from the possibility of a hoax; and chief amongst these would be:

• His willingness on April 3, 1992, to arrange to meet Darren Montgomery on April 13, 1992, despite the ink very obviously still either drying or not yet even on the scrapbook he had apparently purchased at O&L on March 31, 1992
• His glaring failure to produce any evidence whatsoever of his involvement in a hoax (including the fabled missing auction receipt)
• His attempting to get Colin Rhodes to give him the names and addresses of the electricians
• His willingness to introduce Eddie Lyons to Robert Smith in The Saddle

I have no doubt that there are more but these are the ones I either stole from your post above, Caz, or which I could think of off the top of my head.

If one looks at the Victorian scrapbook in the cold, objective light of day, it rather patently was not created by either or both of the Barretts of Goldie Street. That does not in itself point us particularly in the direction of who did write it, though it seems reasonable to argue that it was written by the bloke it claims to have been written by and whose house it rather obviously came out of on the morning of March 9, 1992. There is no obvious reason why anyone else would have composed it, and a great deal of reason why James Maybrick would have. That all seems pretty compelling to me.

Ike

[caz]

Oh Dear Lord, grant me patience.

Barrett and Lyons drank at the same pub. That is the alleged connective tissue between them. Full stop. That is it. We do not care where the pub is.

Further, Lyons, being an employee for Portus and Rhodes, was called to a job site involving James Maybrick's old house. (Supposedly)

Again, the location of this job site does not concern us whatsoever, provided it involves James Maybrick. We can mentally move the house around our imaginary Liverpool and Birkenhead chessboard, and it wouldn't change anything.

Moving this job site closer or further from Mike Barrett's house changes nothing, either. We already know that Barrett and Lyons drank at the same pub, and that is the connective tissue.

It doesn't change the 'odds' if we moved Maybrick's house 3 miles up the road, or 3 miles closer to Barrett, the 'coincidence' is the same.

In a nutshell:

Barrett drank in the same pub as a man who was (supposedly) at Maybrick's house that day. That is the full equation.

We then merely need to analyze how big of a coincidence this is or isn't.

We cannot proceed further, Ike, until you grasp this simple fact and admit to it.

The analogy I would use is that you've been handed a relatively simple math problem by your teacher, and you have somehow convinced yourself that the color of the ink in which it is written is somehow extremely important and relevant to solving the problem. Or the size and color of the paper.

You seem to struggle, and struggle mightily, when it comes to removing the superfluous elements from an analysis.

If, for the sake of argument, we were to conclude that Lyons DID steal Maybrick's diary that day (we don't actually know this, and thus can't allow it to infringe on our analysis) then the logistics of Lyons delivering the scrapbook to Barrett would now become an issue.

But we don't know that, so it isn't an issue.

This simple concept eludes you every time.

You always start from the position that it DID happen, and because of this, bring in superfluous elements that don't actually concern us.

But guess what? If the event--the transaction between Barrett and Lyons did happen, that would mean that your reasoning is 180 degrees backwards.

The further that Lyons and Barrett's mutual pub was from the job site, the less time and chance Eddie would have to deliver it into Barrett's hands before closing time, or before Barrett was scheduled to go home and cook his wife's dinner.

Think about it.

If Barrett and Lyon's mutual pub was on Riversdale Road itself, just over the fence from Dodd's house, we wouldn't need to worry one iota that Eddie could have passed along the diary to Barrett in time for him to call Doreen.

If, on the other hand, their mutual pub was across the Mersey and up a gravel road some thirty miles from the job site, suddenly we would worry very much indeed, wouldn't we, because the time allotted for Barrett and Lyons to have met up that day and still allow enough time for Mike to call Doreen in London would be severely curtailed.

The odds would become increasingly worse that these events happened, the further the pub was from the job site.

But none of this factors-in because we DON'T KNOW that Eddie found anything!! We don't know that the transaction took place.

You have a very queer way of going about things, Old Man. In a way it's charming, I suppose. We Yanks do love the UK eccentric. He or she is almost an archetypal figure for us.

I recommend taking a long walk in the countryside, clearing your mind, and trying again in 48 hours or so.

What RJ consistently fails to appreciate, from his own argument, is just how unlikely it should have been - to the point of it being a physical impossibility - for all the circumstances we now know about to have even allowed for anyone to have found an old book in Maybrick's former home and taken it back with them to a pub where a chap having his usual late lunchtime pint would soon be heading off to phone London about a "diary" supposedly belonging to Maybrick.

As RJ has helpfully pointed out, but not apparently appreciated himself, there must have been a million and one ways in which the stars would not have aligned and there would have been no possible way for a Battlecrease Floorboards Man to have bumped into a Battlecrease Diary Man, let alone set off the chain of events which stemmed from the latter's phone call that day. So let's take out the speculation and see what we have left:

Lyons has insisted he helped out that morning in Maybrick's former home, long after Colin Rhodes explained how and why he'd have been sent there that day. Lyons was living at the time with his partner, close to his own and Mike Barrett's local, where the latter was a familiar face on school days.

On this particular afternoon, Mike decided to phone London about the diary he claimed to have in his possession.

Someone once said, when faced with what RJ argues was no more than coincidence: "I'm not having that."

And it was someone I suspect knew rather more than RJ about when a coincidence is not a coincidence.

[caz]

This is why I choose to no longer engage with you, Caroline.

If one simply punches the words "Rawes" and "rjpalmer" into the Search Engine, it will become abundantly obvious that I have mentioned Rawes a total of 9 times in the history of these message boards.

In none of those 9 posts did I ever say anything even remotely similar to what you are now claiming. You have a very bad habit of putting words in the mouths of others.

Either your reading comprehension skills are truly in tatters, or you are confusing me with someone else (highly unlikely considering your obsession), or you're deliberately deceiving this forum.

All I ever pointed out is that the event described by Rawes took place in the Summer of 1992--after the Diary had already been brought to London.

That's it. I have never denied this conversation took place, or that Rawes recalled Eddie saying that he "found something important" in July. I simply voiced my skepticism that this vague statement could have been a reference to finding THE DIARY OF JACK THE RIPPER four months earlier.

Apologies then, RJ.

If you believe that Rawes did hear Lyons say he had found something important, and he was grinning as he said it, that's the event Rawes was describing [not the find or when it happened], and that's fine by me. What you don't have is any evidence of an important find - or indeed any find - made by Lyons in July, which doesn't really elevate your position above mine. So I think you might be better off - seriously - arguing that Lyons was probably just pulling Rawes's leg and never actually found anything, rather than allowing him to have found something important, just as long as it was anything in the known universe but the "old book" housing Mike's Battlecrease diary.

[rjpalmer]

What the Diary Crowd doesn't seem to appreciate is that their own lack of judgment about what constitutes a 'coincidence' is what is leading them into self-deception.

As Jeff Hamm pointed out over a year ago, when two or three lost souls were momentarily bedazzled by Iconoclast's eccentric and bizarre use of statistics, once Feldman began quizzing the electricians there was nearly a 100% chance that stories about Jack the Ripper's Diary would have circulated among the employees as they tried to grasp what in the heck this strange Londoner (Paul Feldman) was yammering on about over the telephone. At that point, the rumor mill was off and running. Skinner, Linder, and Johnston are thereafter stuck with the unenviable task of trying to analyze rumors instead of real events. There is little point in trying to analyze the statistical probability of a rumor.

So, with that in mind, what does the coincidence really amount to? That a couple of the electricians drank in one of the pubs that Mike drank in. In Liverpool, no less, a city not particularly known for sobriety.

Some here make this sound like a near mathematical impossibility.

Is it?

How many pubs did these electricians collectively drink in? Dozens? Several dozen? We don't know. They were specifically asked about The Saddle, and attention then focused on the two men who answered in the affirmative.

This is a concept genuinely known as "confirmation bias." Study the concept; it might help.

Meanwhile, how many pubs did Mike Barrett drink in? Barrett was known to have hoisted a pint in the Saddle (that was the pub he used for his bogus Tony Devereux provenance), but what if Tony hadn't died and Barrett claimed a drinking buddy from the Poste House or the Veteran's Hall had given the diary to him? Or some other place that wasn't a pub? Would one of the electricians have frequented one of those pubs or public spaces and thus we ended up with a different 'story'?

I already uploaded a map to this site demonstrating that when Barrett lived at an entirely different part of Liverpool (Lincoln Street, Garston) at least one of the electricians (Alan Davies) lived very near by him (as close or closer than between Mike's house and Eddie's) and very well might have patronized Barrett's local pub. This was long before 1992. Mike lived only .4 mile from Portus & Rhodes itself. He could have brushed shoulders with many of these men in a pub without knowing it.

Post #6798

One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary - Casebook: Jack the Ripper Forums

How could it have been anything other than a coincidence? Or does Team Diary find that a mathematical impossibility as well?

Caroline, in particularly, seems to be increasingly annoyed that the 'court of history' doesn't find these coincidences as mind-blowing as she believes they are, but I've yet to see any fault in those who aren't as impressed as she is.

I think Feldman quizzed the electricians, planted an idea, and the rumor mill did the rest. The closest we come to anyone claiming to have actually seen the diary was a pillowcase or a brown bag or some other type of bag under a car seat. This has all the appearance of someone straining their memory to find an event--any event--that could explain what Feldman was yammering on about.

That's how I see it.

[Iconoclast]

As Jeff Hamm pointed out over a year ago, when two or three lost souls were momentarily bedazzled by Iconoclast's eccentric and bizarre use of statistics, once Feldman began quizzing the electricians there was nearly a 100% chance that stories about Jack the Ripper's Diary would have circulated among the employees as they tried to grasp what in the heck this strange Londoner (Paul Feldman) was yammering on about over the telephone. At that point, the rumor mill was off and running. Skinner, Linder, and Johnston are thereafter stuck with the unenviable task of trying to analyze rumors instead of real events. There is little point in trying to analyze the statistical probability of a rumor.

This is so disingenuous, RJ!

The debate was not even vaguely about the likelihood of two men in Liverpool drinking in the same pub on any given day, and you know it.

The point I was making, and the point Caroline was referring to, and the point you went out of your way to conveniently ignore, is that not on any given day but on a very very given day (March 9, 1992) James Maybrick's floorboards were raised for the first time on record in the morning and by the afternoon eight miles away a man who drank in the same pub as one of the P&R team in that house on that morning was ringing Rupert Crew to see if they were interested in a scrapbook purportedly written by Jack the Ripper and James Maybrick. You'll recall the statistic - some 36,000 days had to pass after Maybrick's death for one of these events to have occurred and when one did, the other did too - on the same day.

That's what a ******* coincidence is, RJ.

Ike

[rjpalmer]

This is so disingenuous, RJ!

The debate was not even vaguely about the likelihood of two men in Liverpool drinking in the same pub on any given day, and you know it.

I would encourage you to go back and review Hamm's points, since you clearly don't understand them.

Your use of statistics was totally debunked.

Some work was done on Dodd's house on 9 March 1992. You then foolishly counted backwards from that date to the date of Maybrick's death and said it was 36,000 to 1 that Barrett had contacted a literary agent on the same date that the work on Dodd's house was done. This is a total misuse of statistics. Among other things, the diary itself does not reference floorboards so you egged the pudding badly in that regard alone.

In reality, the exact odds would entirely depend on how much work Dodd tended to have done on his house. If Dodd had people in 37 times in two years, the odds would be roughly 20 to 1 that the events would coincide, but actually far less than that because, as your good friend Lord Orsam has pointed out, work (and people calling literary agents) is generally conducted Monday thru Friday.

The rest is just your overwrought imagination, Old Bean.

But Hamm's point was that when someone starts asking questions about a mysterious diary or object, then it is nearly a 100% probability that stories and rumors will surface around them. We see this in reference to the Whitechapel Murders all the time--family folklore, etc.--and the rumors circulating about the diary among the electricians is the same thing in a microcosm.

As late as 2000, one of the electricians (whose name I think I know) was still telling stories about the discovery of Jack the Ripper's diary, only now it had been found, not under floorboards, but under a pile of rubbish in Dodd's loft or attic. Why had his story changed? Because it was based on nothing. It has all the recognizable elements of urban folklore.


In other matters, have you ever used a fountain pen or manuscript ink? Have you actually conducted any experiments with iron gall ink?

How long does it take the ink to dry? A few seconds or a few minutes?

Why are you and Jay Hartley under the impression that a manuscript written the previous week or over the previous days would "drip" (Hartley's word) from the pages 12 or 24 or 48 hours later?

Do you imagine that the Victorians penned a letter and then had to let it dry for several days or hours before inserting it inside an envelope for fear of smudging?

On what is this belief based?

Thanks in advance for your time.

[Yabs]

Speaking of coincidences.
There’s a Maybrick Road next to a Brierley Close in Essex.
If that isn’t some kind of strange homage to Maybrick and his relatively unknown love rival, I wonder what the odds would be of those two particular uncommon names being given to adjacent roads.

But if it is just a coincidence then I guess these things happen.

[Iconoclast]

I would encourage you to go back and review Hamm's points, since you clearly don't understand them.
Your use of statistics was totally debunked.
Some work was done on Dodd's house on 9 March 1992. You then foolishly counted backwards from that date to the date of Maybrick's death and said it was 36,000 to 1 that Barrett had contacted a literary agent on the same date that the work on Dodd's house was done. This is a total misuse of statistics. Among other things, the diary itself does not reference floorboards so you egged the pudding badly in that regard alone.
In reality, the exact odds would entirely depend on how much work Dodd tended to have done on his house. If Dodd had people in 37 times in two years, the odds would be roughly 20 to 1 that the events would coincide, but actually far less than that because, as your good friend Lord Orsam has pointed out, work (and people calling literary agents) is generally conducted Monday thru Friday.

If me auntie had bo..oks, she'd be me ******* uncle. We can all do the 'But hold on what if ...' thing. Care to demonstrate a single instance where your 37 'ifs' actually occurred other than the one that occurred on March 9, 1992.

And Jeff's point was, primarily, around my failing to factor in the increasing likelihood of floorboards being raised in an old house over time, and my counter to that - you've evidently forgotten - was two-fold, that I was talking about simple probability theory, and also that any reduction in the odds induced by anyone factoring-in the time that had past was going to be moot (i.e., that a reduction even to as little as 10,000-to-1 would still have been massively significant given that statisticians infer significance at as little as 20-to-1 odds).

Oh, and I am NOT NOT NOT saying the odds were as little was 10,000-to-1 before you start! My argument is that there was more than sufficient time having passed for any probabilistic floor-raising to have already occurred and that, therefore, one should not be factoring-in an event which could and should have happened much earlier, so my 36,000-to-1 odds very much still holds.

Everything else you wrote was ... and I really was trying to stop saying this ... just muddying the waters ...

[Iconoclast]

Speaking of coincidences.
There’s a Maybrick Road next to a Brierley Close in Essex.
If that isn’t some kind of strange homage to Maybrick and his relatively unknown love rival, I wonder what the odds would be of those two particular uncommon names being given to adjacent roads.

But if it is just a coincidence then I guess these things happen.

And that's the joy of statistics. Coincidences sometimes genuinely do happen. All the time, in fact. It's just that we don't always know they've happened. I was born on the same day as a colleague whose only child was born on the same day that my only child was born. That's not a coincidence (it happens al the time given that some 200,000 people are born every day). The element of chance lay in the unlikeliness of our discovering this fact about ourselves.

But when the odds of two things co-inciding are as low as 36,000-to-1, you have to stop scratching away looking for coincidences underneath it all.

[caz]

What the Diary Crowd doesn't seem to appreciate is that their own lack of judgment about what constitutes a 'coincidence' is what is leading them into self-deception.

So is RJ actually arguing that Lyons couldn't have found or taken anything from the house he was working in on the day that Mike phoned Doreen [but he could have done so later in the year?], because it had to be a coincidence that the house was called Battlecrease between February 1888 and May 1889, and the diary Mike phoned Doreen about covered that exact period when the Maybricks were in residence there?

As Jeff Hamm pointed out over a year ago, when two or three lost souls were momentarily bedazzled by Iconoclast's eccentric and bizarre use of statistics, once Feldman began quizzing the electricians there was nearly a 100% chance that stories about Jack the Ripper's Diary would have circulated among the employees as they tried to grasp what in the heck this strange Londoner (Paul Feldman) was yammering on about over the telephone. At that point, the rumor mill was off and running. Skinner, Linder, and Johnston are thereafter stuck with the unenviable task of trying to analyze rumors instead of real events. There is little point in trying to analyze the statistical probability of a rumor.

Of course, how silly of us not to have analyzed everything that was going on around and beyond the rumours, and then put those rumours in context to see whether or not there could be any truth in them. There would indeed have been little point - I would think no point whatsoever - in trying to analyze the statistical probability of any rumor being true or false in splendid isolation of any actual evidence.

But RJ knows all about unenviable tasks. His is to find any actual evidence that could lend support to Mike Barrett's auction claims, which in splendid isolation do not even amount to a rumour, which at least relies on more than just one bitter and vengeful individual to spread it abroad, and some kind of circumstantial basis for it being possibly true.

I notice how quickly RJ drops Rawes like a hot brick when arguing for 'nearly a 100% chance' that stories would circulate among the former P&R crew from April 1993, thanks to Feldy 'yammering on about' Jack the Ripper's diary over the phone. Unfortunately for RJ, the same 'stories' had been doing the rounds months before Feldy came on the scene, and long before anything had reached the papers about Jack the Ripper supposedly being a Scouser called Maybrick, whose diary may have been found under Dodd's floorboards. Rawes could have known nothing about this back in July 1992 when Lyons told him he'd found something important, and Rawes wasn't one of the crew who could have been 'got at' by Feldman. Rawes never worked in the house and there is no evidence of any contact between him and Feldman at any time. In any case, by the time Rawes gave his police statement, in October 1993, Feldman was on to bigger and better theories [!], and Rawes had nothing to gain from over-egging his Lyons pudding unless he fancied being beaten to a soggy pulp for fingering an innocent former workmate.

The other little problem is that very little was in the public domain by April 1993 about the diary, so RJ is right in one sense: the former P&R crew members contacted by Feldman would have wondered what the heck he was on about, and would have had no information - useful or otherwise - to offer in exchange for hard cash, if they knew nothing except for what they could have read in the local papers. The rumours would have had no substance and would have crumbled under the most rudimentary questioning about the physical book and its condition, let alone the circumstances in which it had first come to anyone's attention. What Feldman missed was the fact that the brown paper detail would not be in the public domain until October 1993, when Shirley first mentioned it in her book. He wrongly assumed it would have been common knowledge when one of the crew mentioned it, and put it down to a false rumour based on this knowledge.

Meanwhile, how many pubs did Mike Barrett drink in? Barrett was known to have hoisted a pint in the Saddle (that was the pub he used for his bogus Tony Devereux provenance), but what if Tony hadn't died and Barrett claimed a drinking buddy from the Poste House or the Veteran's Hall had given the diary to him? Or some other place that wasn't a pub? Would one of the electricians have frequented one of those pubs or public spaces and thus we ended up with a different 'story'?

What? RJ is truly entering the realms of fantasy now. 'What if Tony hadn't died'?? Mike would have needed to think up another explanation for where he got the diary. So what? The point is, if he faked the diary in early April 1992, to show Doreen on 13th, he could not in a million years have expected that on 9th March, when he first phoned her, there had been an electrician who used the same pub, who had actually been working that morning in Maybrick's old home.

I already uploaded a map to this site demonstrating that when Barrett lived at an entirely different part of Liverpool (Lincoln Street, Garston) at least one of the electricians (Alan Davies) lived very near by him (as close or closer than between Mike's house and Eddie's) and very well might have patronized Barrett's local pub. This was long before 1992. Mike lived only .4 mile from Portus & Rhodes itself. He could have brushed shoulders with many of these men in a pub without knowing it.

But it's just the one day in March 1992 that is under the spotlight here: The day Maybrick's floorboards came up. The day Mike Barrett chose to phone someone about Maybrick's diary. Everything else is irrelevant. Mike could have drunk in pubs all over Liverpool at various times over the years, and had one or more of the P&R crew of '92 for company by chance. It would mean nothing - unless RJ wants to suggest they were all old pals, and in on Mike's cunning plan to fake a diary that will definitely not be coming from the Maybrick house, but will be 'given' to him by whichever poor sod snuffs it first - as long as he's not on Colin Rhodes's books. That might look a trifle weird.

I think Feldman quizzed the electricians, planted an idea, and the rumor mill did the rest. The closest we come to anyone claiming to have actually seen the diary was a pillowcase or a brown bag or some other type of bag under a car seat. This has all the appearance of someone straining their memory to find an event--any event--that could explain what Feldman was yammering on about.

That's how I see it.

Close but no cigar. It was a package wrapped in brown paper - which could not have been the result of anyone in the Spring of 1993 'straining their memory' unless they had seen it for themselves the previous Spring. I hate to think how much 'straining' would have been involved in trying to produce a brown package, not knowing it had already landed.

[rjpalmer]

But when the odds of two things co-inciding are as low as 36,000-to-1, you have to stop scratching away looking for coincidences underneath it all.

Here's what Jeff Hamm actually wrote to you, Ike, almost exactly two years ago today. The emphasis (in bold) has been added by me.

He referred to your attempted calculation (correctly) as a "red herring" and as "irrelevant to the question we are interested in."

Sadly, I don't think you can quite grasp why this is, and it is probable (I lay the odds at 36,000 to 1) that you never will grasp it. But at least I can tell my great great grandchild that I tried to reason with the author of Society's Pillar.

It's will-o-the-wisps, and meaningless calculations that have nothing at all to do with whether or not there is a connection between the two events in question.

The more specific you look at any set of events that happen in life, the more these kinds of calculations will demonstrate that even normal everyday life is just a sequence of incredibly unlikely events. That doesn't make them connected. Things happen. Look, the other day I was outside on my doorstep, and a single car drove past, and the licence plate had for the 3 letter portion my initials. That 3 letter combination only has a 1 in 17,576 probability of occurring by chance, so was it a sign? Did I somehow "cause" that combination?

When I walk into work, I pass people, buses, and so forth, in a particular order, and the chance probability of me passing those people, in that order, is infinitesimally small. It doesn't mean there's a connection, or meaning, involved.

So while we could quibble about what the probability of the floorboards coming up are, such as it increases over time, and so forth, none of that matters one whit. This sort of probability calculation is of the type that misleads us, because it is irrelevant to the question we are interested in.

Given we know those two events happened, we then have to determine if there are consequences of them being "linked" events. Does the diary show any evidence of having been under the floorboards? Was there dust, or dirt, or whatever, found on the diary that can be traced to that storage area? Was that area damp, had it ever flooded, etc, and if so, does the diary show corresponding water damage? Were there insects under the floorboards? Does the diary show signs of similar insects? Does the electrician have a known history for stealing items from job sites? If not, what's the probability he would suddenly engage in theft this time? How long do people who do come across artifacts normally take to decide on what to do with it (i.e. publish it, auction it, TV rights, movie rights? etc), allowing us to estimate the probability of Mike deciding to contact a book publisher on the first day (so within hours)? Is that probable? I doubt it, but I don't know because that would require doing research into similar things.

What I'm trying to make clear is that having two known events and a bit of creativity makes it entirely probable that a false story could be created to connect them. What we want to know is if the story we have is just one of those false stories, or instead, a true one. And that cannot be determined by post-hoc evaluation of the probabilities of the known events - because those are always improbable - all life events are, when you calculate them, improbable, but events in life happen. These ones happened.

In other words, the entire starting premise of the calculations is wrong. Worrying about the "chance probability co-occurrence" of these two events that are know to have happened will lead to nothing other than the realization of how improbable life is. Deciding if the diary really did come from under the floorboards, and was handed to Mike in the pub, can only be assessed by demonstrating that story leads us to information that cannot, or should not, occur if that story is false. If it does that (leads us to evidence that should not otherwise occur I mean), then we have evidence that our story, which is only one of an infinite number of possible stories we could invent from those two known events, might be the one true one.

But all the focus on calculating the probabilities of the floorboards coming up on that day, whether we spread the probability out equally over all 37000+ days or if we go with a more complicated model where the daily probabilities increase over time, is a complete red herring with regards to whether or not there is a connection between the diary, the floorboards, and Mike.

[Iconoclast]

When two things happen simultaneously (as they do constantly), we generally do not call them coincidence because they are simply co-incidence - they simply innocently occurred in the same timeframe quite by chance alone, utterly unconnected from one another.

But when two things happen simultaneously and they appear to be connected, we are left with two possible conclusions:

1) They occurred purely by random chance, or
2) Something caused them to happen in the same timeframe

To conclude which is correct we can assess the odds of them occurring by chance and decide if we are willing to accept those odds as reasonably likely to occur by chance alone. If however we have some information which links those two events, we are extremely unlikely to favour chance especially as the odds of chance along being the cause decreases.

So we have a 36,000-1 probability which is staggeringly unlikely to be caused by chance alone (but could have been) coupled with a public house which directly links our two events together.

With that information, the seasoned detective and statistician agree that chance almost certainly played no part in this particular co-incidence of two events. It’s the only reasonable conclusion to draw (until evidence points to the contrary).

But to draw it, you have to be reasonable …

And there’s the rub, dear readers.

[Iconoclast]

Jeff Hamm’s comments do not survive the logical extremes of what RJ is inferring he is implying. To clarify this, just take the argument to its extremes. Let’s say the March 9 event happened in 5992 rather than 1992. Are we still happy to argue that the time passed since Maybrick’s death is irrelevant? Well over four thousand years, but that doesn’t matter because - as Jeff argued - you still have to demonstrate some other, concrete evidence of a link?

Two things to that:

1) What is the point of probability theory if you ignore its p values in favour of waiting for concrete evidence? You may as well just await the concrete evidence. And
2) We have the good fortune to have concrete evidence of a link which would cause Mike Barrett to have rung Rupert Crew on March 9, 1992.

So whether you want it Jeff’s way or my way, Fate has served you up the answer you crave.

The Victorian scrapbook has an unerring knack of doing that, it seems.

[Iconoclast]

Deciding if the diary really did come from under the floorboards, and was handed to Mike in the pub, can only be assessed by demonstrating that story leads us to information that cannot, or should not, occur if that story is false. If it does that (leads us to evidence that should not otherwise occur I mean), then we have evidence that our story, which is only one of an infinite number of possible stories we could invent from those two known events, might be the one true one.

And this, of course, we have. We have the testimony of the electricians that something was found in Battlecrease House and we have the testimony of a well-respected businessman who was offered the diary of Jack the Ripper.

This alone still has potential holes, but would we have these testimonies if nothing had come out of Battlecrease House on March 9, 1992? The businessman dated the offer of the diary to 1991 or 1992. He couldn’t be certain, but he knew it wasn’t after 1992. But enquiries into the electricians only started in the spring of 1993. So he should not have that memory. How could he have that memory if nothing was removed that fateful morning?

As I say, it’s still got holes, but this is the sort of stuff Jeff wants us to demonstrate and I’d say it’s pretty compelling as it stands.

Obviously RJ will now tell us how bereft this example is of resonance. [Sigh] Bring it on Roger …

[caz]

I'm totally okay with the idea that we don't know who wrote the diary, so I've got no horse in that race and thus don't need to jam Mike and Anne in everywhere to fit in with my theories. I simply believe that it's a modern hoax, and probably has something to do with Mike and Anne, and I've got my reasons, as you have yours.

That's refreshing to know, Mike. I'm also totally okay with us not knowing who wrote the diary, but many others do see a need to 'jam' Mike and Anne in everywhere to fit in with theories that would be seen as extreme if they concerned any other subject matter.

You feel it's an older hoax, which is fine, I've no issues with that, although you're not always clear on your views as you seem to be placing some big significance on a single letter matching Maybrick's, as though that means something, when virtually none of the other hundreds of letters, or writing style in general, found in the scrapbook or on the watch, matches Jim's at all.

I do feel the diary had to be older than just a couple of days when Mike took it to London on 13th April 1992 - on the practical level certainly. The need to 'jam' in an auction sale on 31st March, which supposedly included the scrapbook used to create the diary, is particularly problematic, since a typed transcript was made by the Barretts from the finished product, adding to the time constraints which would not have been needed at all if Mike had only waited a while longer before resuming contact with the literary agent to set the ball rolling for the diary's debut. But conceding that the diary was almost certainly done and dusted before the last day of March is to concede that the whole Barrett theory must be discarded or reworked. I can't see why they don't just bite this bullet and have the Barretts create it at an earlier date and at their own pace. When it's done, Mike calls Doreen, who says something that makes him worry that the physical scrapbook does not look terribly realistic. He tries to obtain something more authentic looking, but fails miserably and so decides to run with the one they made earlier, hoping for the best. It worked out rather well financially - and would have continued to do so, if Mike hadn't suddenly decided, for no logical reason, to piss on his own chips and confess to committing fraud. Anyway, that might have been my older hoax theory if I had thought for one second that the diary could have been the Barretts' handiwork.

My observation about the signature in the watch remains that, regardless of whether you think it's nothing like Maybrick's, whoever did it appears to have wanted to give that impression, and to make the attempt they would first have needed to know the basic form his signature took, before even considering how he typically formed the individual letters.

Love,

Caz
X