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Imagine that it happened like this. Imagine this was the moment he gave up his secret. Imagine we’d been talking about the Victorian scrapbook and he’d been adamant that it could not be authentic. Imagine how much I wished I had a tape recorder, but I didn’t. Imagine how much I now wish I had a perfect memory, but I don’t.
Imagine how I felt the moment he confessed.
Ann Truth: “You seem very confident that it’s a forgery.”
John Smith: “And with good reason.”
AT: “What reason is that.”
JS: “The fact that I wrote it.”
Imagine we were in a relationship, and John had suddenly opened up, right out of the blue. Imagine that I had had an interest in Jack the Ripper for many years, and had read the diary. Imagine that he and I had got on the subject of the diary over a bottle of wine one evening and that he had said those words.
AT: “You wrote the diary of Jack the Ripper?”
JS: “I did.”
AT: “You’re joking with me?”
JS: “I’m not. I was joking with someone else, and it backfired.”
AT: “How do you mean?”
JS: “I mean I wrote it for someone I knew, and it spiralled out of control.”
AT: “Why? Why did you write it?”
JS: “Because I wanted to prove someone to be a fantasist, and this seemed like a way to do it.”
AT: “Who?”
JS: “Mike Barrett.”
AT: “You know Mike Barrett?”
JS: “I knew of Mike Barrett more than I knew him. In the early 1990s, I was drinking in The Saddle, and Mike was there most days. Everyone knew he told a tall tale, and everyone got the tales over and over again. He was ex-MI5. He’d infiltrated the IRA. He’d sailed the oceans single-handedly. He’d won the lottery. He’d won a fortune, then he lost a fortune. One day, he’d have a terminal illness. The next day, he’d be cured. There was no end to his literally fantastic life.”
AT: “So why the diary?”
JS: “Well, one day I saw my chance to show him up for the fantasist he was.”
AT: “How?”
JS: “One day he claimed that he knew who Jack the Ripper was. It was a family secret, apparently. Jack was an ancestor who had left evidence of his crimes. According to Mike, he and his family could name names all the way back to Jack. According to Mike, he actually had in his home the farthings taken from Annie Chapman’s feet. According to Mike, he had Mary Kelly’s room key. Of course, whenever he was later asked to produce them, he would ‘forget’ to bring them in, or he’d say they were locked away. So I saw an opportunity to prove he was a fraud. It occurred to me that if Mike Barrett came across a diary of Jack the Ripper and he believed it was the real thing, he would talk about it. That was guaranteed. Now he’d said Jack was a family member. He could trace him back by name. So the diary he found had to be written by someone who was in no way related to him. I reckoned that he’d be so excited that he’d forget his tales about Jack being an ancestor and - when he did - I would nail him. It was as simple as that. In retrospect, it was rather sad that I bothered, but that was why I wrote it.”
AT: “So you wrote the diary of Jack the Ripper to show that Mike Barrett was a fantasist?”
JS: “That’s exactly it. And – for the record – it did exactly that.”
AT: “So how did you write the diary?”
JS: “Well, I obviously needed a plausible Jack.”
AT: “You wouldn’t describe James Maybrick as a plausible Jack”.
JS: “That’s true. But he was convenient, and he ended up fitting the bill. The Liverpool connection was convenient, but irrelevant. First of all, I wanted something on the record that I could link to my Jack – just to really excite Mike. I bought a couple of books and I looked for something on the record that I could make that link with. To cut a long story short, I came across the photo of Kelly’s room, and I used a magnifying glass to highlight any details at all I could use. I quickly saw the blood marks or whatever they were which looked like a letter ‘M’ and knew that I could use it for the diary. I also felt that you could make a case for a letter ‘P’ right next to it, so I figured I needed a Jack with whom I could link the letters ‘P’ and ‘M’, in that order. My first idea was to link the murders with the prime minister Gladstone because he was known to wander the streets trying to save prostitutes, and I very nearly did – I even wrote some notes for a Gladstone Jack.
AT: “So how did you decide upon James Maybrick?”
JS: “Well, initially I didn’t think of him at all because a less obvious candidate you could hardly think of. But then – just out of personal interest - I bought a book on Liverpool crimes and it was when I read about Florence Maybrick and the affair with Alfred Brierley and started to think that that would provide a good storyline. You know, the wronged husband rages away but can’t prove anything and takes his vengeance out on Whitechapel prostitutes. Probably the first thing was the Whitechapel connection between London and Liverpool, I guess – that set me thinking. but when I read more on James Maybrick’s life in a couple of other books I bought, especially the addiction to arsenic and the occasional bouts of violent rage against Florence, I started to build the story that became the diary. the ‘P’ on Kelly’s wall became an ‘F’, and I had the concrete link between James Maybrick and Jack which I could use to fool Mike Barrett. After that, the writing of the diary was effortless. I wrote it over about four evenings in the spring of 1991. I used the five books that I’d bought. Anything I didn’t know, I just made up. At the end of the day, I only needed the diary to be convincing enough long enough to fool Mike Barrett into walking into The Saddle with it under his arm and telling everyone that he’d found the diary of Jack the Ripper and that it was written by anyone other than a member of his family.”
AT: “Okay, so you wrote the diary. Where did you get an authentic Victorian scrapbook and authentic Victorian ink?”
JS: “Very easy. I’d been in Stoke on business around that time and I came across an antique shop. I went in, and there on a small table was a pile of old scrapbooks from around that time. The one I chose had half its pages ripped out. This made it significantly cheaper than the others, and saved me from having to remove pages myself. The ink was on a table next to the scrapbooks. The whole purchase took me less than five minutes from walking in the shop. Overall, they cost me about £25, which was frankly well worth it to catch Mike out.”
AT: “So you just sat down and wrote it?”
JS: “Far from it. I read each of the books I had. Made notes about the canonical five victims and the investigation, and about the Maybricks. Then I sat down and wrote the diary.
AT: “But you had seven victims?”
JS: “Two anonymous victims in Manchester were artistic licence. It was all just throwaway stuff designed to sucker in Mike. There were loads of other lines which sound as though they are loaded with meaning – and plenty of meaning has since been ascribed to them – but they were no more than that; throwaway lines designed to fool Mike Barrett.”
AT: “So how did you get it to Mike?”
JS: “That was always going to be a problem – but ultimately it was the time of year which gave me the idea. It was March 1991. It occurred to me that the most appropriate timing of the diary would be April the first – one because it would make an even bigger fool of Mike, and two because I could use the date as a reason to convince someone to give it to Mike. The obvious choice was Tony Devereux. He drank in The Saddle, and he was very friendly with Mike. He was a really decent bloke and everyone liked him. I knew that if Tony gave Mike the diary, this would give it huge credibility. So I approached Tony at the end of March and explained to him that I was playing an April Fool joke on Mike and that I needed him to give a parcel to Mike and say ‘Do something with it’. I told him that Mike would want to know where he’d got it from, and that he should refuse to answer the question otherwise the April Fool would be ruined. True to his word, just as I knew he would, Tony gave Mike the diary, delivered the line exactly as I’d asked him to, and then refused to answer any of his questions even when Mike pestered him as I now believe that he did.”
AT: “So what happened after that? Did Mike walk into The Saddle with it under his arm?”
JS: “For all I know, he did. Just after I gave Tony the diary, I left Liverpool for a new job. I quickly lost touch with the guys in The Saddle, and I was too busy in my new job to give any thought to Mike Barrett and the fake diary of Jack the Ripper.”
AT: “So what happened next?”
JS: “What happened next was that I opened a newspaper about two years later to see Mike Barrett’s face next to the diary I wrote for him, and realised that he’d believed in the thing hook, line, and sinker and had had it published. I was completely cold – I couldn’t believe my eyes: my first reaction was to panic, thinking that I’d committed some kind of crime. Then I figured I hadn’t – genuinely hadn’t – and that the joke would soon be exposed for what it was when it was published. And sure enough, The Times did expose it as a fake, but the book still went ahead. It was a joke which just ran and ran. Now it’s 2009, and it’s still out there, generating thousands of lines of debate. What started out as a joke became big money for Mike Barrett, although I believe he frittered it all away. Others soon jumped on the bandwagon with their books and films. Even now, this year, there’s apparently another book due out claiming Michael Maybrick wrote the diary! It’s ridiculous.”
AT: “So you gave the diary to Tony Devereux. Why did Mike’s wife later claim that she had given it to Tony?”
JS: “I’ve no idea. It’s of little consequence to me whether she did or she didn’t. I can only assume that she understood the weakness of the provenance provided by Mike – despite believing him (after all, he was telling the truth) – and did what many loyal wives would have done and provided what she thought was a better provenance, and got her father to support it. I don’t suppose she gave it a lot of thought. If she believed Mike, as I’m sure she did, it would have seemed right that she helped him out. I found it quite touching, to be honest”
AT: “There are a lot of coincidences attached to the diary. People have said the forger had incredible luck.”
JS: “There were some coincidences along the way. It was a coincidence that the first and last two letters of ‘James Maybrick’ spell ‘Jack’. Personally, I didn’t notice it when I was writing it, but looking back I could have made good use of it as the reason for the name. The blind man’s bluff drawing was incredible good luck – I couldn’t have hoped for that kind of luck had I needed it, but I didn’t actually need it. These things were just coincidences, though. I didn’t give James Maybrick his name, and I didn’t draw the blind man’s bluff cartoon”
AT: “What about the ‘M’s at the various crime scenes?”
JS: “Well, what was there? An ‘M’ on an envelope? If you write ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’, then every envelope will have an ‘M’. A reference to ‘left my mark’ on Catherine Eddowes? That was another throwaway line which researchers then found something to link to Maybrick. The letters on Kelly’s wall were no coincidence – they were just blood stains which inspired me to build a story which led to James Maybrick.”
AT: “What about the ‘Juwes’ looking like ‘James’ and the reference to ‘then a Jew I shall be’?”
JS: “Again, it was a throwaway line which researchers who were desperate to find meaningful links could use to link to Maybrick. It could have meant anything, and it could have meant nothing. I don’t even think it looks much like ‘James’ anyway – unless you really want it to. There are lots of other throwaway lines in the diary which have simply been ignored because no-one has been able to link them to anything.”
AT: “What about Florence’s letter to Brierley where she said ‘The tale he told me was pure fabrication and only meant to scare the truth out of me’?”
JS: “Well, that was a genuine coincidence, and one that I happily wrote into the diary. I knew that if Maybrick in the diary claimed to have confessed to Florence near the end of his life then it would tally with her letter to Brierley. It was hugely unlikely that she would have written those words, but the fact that she did made it easy for me to build them into the joke.”
AT: “What about the watch?”
JS: “Nothing to do with me.”
AT: “Nothing at all?”
JS: “Nothing. I didn’t create the watch – I didn’t need to.”
AT: “You wrote about the little girl Gladys being ill again. Then it was proven in a letter that she was often ill. Where did you get that from?”
JS: “It was another throwaway line. All of these little ‘slice of life’ lines were designed to fool Mike into thinking the diary was for real. This was the 1880s – every child was ill, for goodness sake. Infant mortality was through the roof. I could have referred to the boy, but I didn’t. If I had, someone would eventually have found a letter which showed the boy was often ill - guaranteed.”
AT: “Why didn’t you copy James Maybrick’s handwriting?”
JS: “The handwriting wasn’t a mistake, as people keep saying. I didn’t know what it looked like and nor did I care. I assumed that Mike Barrett wouldn’t know either, and that’s all that mattered. What I did do was to mimic the style of the blood stains on Kelly’s wall which looked like an ‘M’. That way, you’d be more likely to think – ‘this is the real deal’.”
AT: “There were other errors as well.”
JS: “Of course there were – that was inevitable. I wrote the thing in four evenings after work, using only the notes I had made and my memory of events to base it on. But none of the other errors gave the game away to Mike Barrett, and that was the only point. I referred to the ‘Post House’ when it hadn’t existed in 1888. I hadn’t realised that, but for all the same reasons, neither would Mike Barrett. If he had, if he’d known about local pub history, all my efforts may have been in vain. Fortunately – or unfortunately, I suppose – they weren’t. I made reference to Jack placing Kelly’s breasts on the side table, and that one could well have blown the diary because it was easily researched by Mike. The strange thing is, I believe he did do a lot of research of his own before he attempted to get it published, but he didn’t notice that mistake, or if he did he chose to ignore it. I misunderstood Michael Maybrick’s role in writing lyrics for his songs. I assumed he did both lyrics and music, and I made a big play of this in the diary. Obviously, I now realise that he only wrote the music. Again, it wasn’t enough to stop Mike so in that sense it served its purpose. Looking back, I’m amazed I didn’t make more mistakes than I did.”
AT: “What about the line ‘Oh costly intercourse of death’? Where did you get that from?”
JS: “I got that from Mike Barrett! He came into The Saddle one day with some books he’d been given, and we were all looking through them. I picked up the poetry one and it literally opened on that page. I saw the line, and thought I’d put it into the diary. Simple as that.”
AT: “Can you prove you wrote the diary?”
JS: “I could write a paragraph now and you’d see that it was my handwriting.”
AT: “You could just be copying the style of the diary.”
JS: “I could, I suppose. However, there is one very big clue that I left in the diary. ‘Left it in front for all to see’. In fact, I deliberately wrote two things into the diary designed to prove it was a fake – just in case I needed to prove it to Mike in the pub. The first one, everyone spotted very quickly. The second one, no-one has ever spotted – it’s never been noticed after all this time. And yet it’s the most blatant entry in the diary, and it totally nails the joke. The first one was the line straight out of the list of Catherine Eddowes’ possessions. ‘Tin match box empty’. It was word for word from the original list! I figured Mike wouldn’t spot it, but when I pointed it out to him he would realise he’d been conned.”
AT: “So that was deliberate?”
JS: “Totally. It was put there to prove the diary was a joke. Simple as that.”
AT: “And the second thing?”
JS: “The second thing occurred to me late on in the writing of the diary. It was at the time of the Kelly murder. I crossed out most of the entries around it and left just it alone. Three words. ‘Left them in front for all to see’! Thing is, when the publishers typed the diary text up for the first book, they crossed out everything in that section and they’ve remained crossed out ever since, even though three words were very clearly not crossed out in the text itself.”
AT: “What were the three words?”
JS: “They were ‘Damn Michael Barrett’.”
Imagine my frustration at not being able to find my copy to check this unbelievable claim. Imagine that the next day I went out and bought a copy of the original book and read through looking for this clue left by a man whose name was not John Smith and who is no longer my partner. Imagine how I felt when I read those three words and realised that an entire industry had grown up out of one small joke which backfired.
Just imagine if my name was really Ann Truth, which it sort of is, and that this story was true, which it may well be.
Just imagine!
Imagine how I felt the moment he confessed.
Ann Truth: “You seem very confident that it’s a forgery.”
John Smith: “And with good reason.”
AT: “What reason is that.”
JS: “The fact that I wrote it.”
Imagine we were in a relationship, and John had suddenly opened up, right out of the blue. Imagine that I had had an interest in Jack the Ripper for many years, and had read the diary. Imagine that he and I had got on the subject of the diary over a bottle of wine one evening and that he had said those words.
AT: “You wrote the diary of Jack the Ripper?”
JS: “I did.”
AT: “You’re joking with me?”
JS: “I’m not. I was joking with someone else, and it backfired.”
AT: “How do you mean?”
JS: “I mean I wrote it for someone I knew, and it spiralled out of control.”
AT: “Why? Why did you write it?”
JS: “Because I wanted to prove someone to be a fantasist, and this seemed like a way to do it.”
AT: “Who?”
JS: “Mike Barrett.”
AT: “You know Mike Barrett?”
JS: “I knew of Mike Barrett more than I knew him. In the early 1990s, I was drinking in The Saddle, and Mike was there most days. Everyone knew he told a tall tale, and everyone got the tales over and over again. He was ex-MI5. He’d infiltrated the IRA. He’d sailed the oceans single-handedly. He’d won the lottery. He’d won a fortune, then he lost a fortune. One day, he’d have a terminal illness. The next day, he’d be cured. There was no end to his literally fantastic life.”
AT: “So why the diary?”
JS: “Well, one day I saw my chance to show him up for the fantasist he was.”
AT: “How?”
JS: “One day he claimed that he knew who Jack the Ripper was. It was a family secret, apparently. Jack was an ancestor who had left evidence of his crimes. According to Mike, he and his family could name names all the way back to Jack. According to Mike, he actually had in his home the farthings taken from Annie Chapman’s feet. According to Mike, he had Mary Kelly’s room key. Of course, whenever he was later asked to produce them, he would ‘forget’ to bring them in, or he’d say they were locked away. So I saw an opportunity to prove he was a fraud. It occurred to me that if Mike Barrett came across a diary of Jack the Ripper and he believed it was the real thing, he would talk about it. That was guaranteed. Now he’d said Jack was a family member. He could trace him back by name. So the diary he found had to be written by someone who was in no way related to him. I reckoned that he’d be so excited that he’d forget his tales about Jack being an ancestor and - when he did - I would nail him. It was as simple as that. In retrospect, it was rather sad that I bothered, but that was why I wrote it.”
AT: “So you wrote the diary of Jack the Ripper to show that Mike Barrett was a fantasist?”
JS: “That’s exactly it. And – for the record – it did exactly that.”
AT: “So how did you write the diary?”
JS: “Well, I obviously needed a plausible Jack.”
AT: “You wouldn’t describe James Maybrick as a plausible Jack”.
JS: “That’s true. But he was convenient, and he ended up fitting the bill. The Liverpool connection was convenient, but irrelevant. First of all, I wanted something on the record that I could link to my Jack – just to really excite Mike. I bought a couple of books and I looked for something on the record that I could make that link with. To cut a long story short, I came across the photo of Kelly’s room, and I used a magnifying glass to highlight any details at all I could use. I quickly saw the blood marks or whatever they were which looked like a letter ‘M’ and knew that I could use it for the diary. I also felt that you could make a case for a letter ‘P’ right next to it, so I figured I needed a Jack with whom I could link the letters ‘P’ and ‘M’, in that order. My first idea was to link the murders with the prime minister Gladstone because he was known to wander the streets trying to save prostitutes, and I very nearly did – I even wrote some notes for a Gladstone Jack.
AT: “So how did you decide upon James Maybrick?”
JS: “Well, initially I didn’t think of him at all because a less obvious candidate you could hardly think of. But then – just out of personal interest - I bought a book on Liverpool crimes and it was when I read about Florence Maybrick and the affair with Alfred Brierley and started to think that that would provide a good storyline. You know, the wronged husband rages away but can’t prove anything and takes his vengeance out on Whitechapel prostitutes. Probably the first thing was the Whitechapel connection between London and Liverpool, I guess – that set me thinking. but when I read more on James Maybrick’s life in a couple of other books I bought, especially the addiction to arsenic and the occasional bouts of violent rage against Florence, I started to build the story that became the diary. the ‘P’ on Kelly’s wall became an ‘F’, and I had the concrete link between James Maybrick and Jack which I could use to fool Mike Barrett. After that, the writing of the diary was effortless. I wrote it over about four evenings in the spring of 1991. I used the five books that I’d bought. Anything I didn’t know, I just made up. At the end of the day, I only needed the diary to be convincing enough long enough to fool Mike Barrett into walking into The Saddle with it under his arm and telling everyone that he’d found the diary of Jack the Ripper and that it was written by anyone other than a member of his family.”
AT: “Okay, so you wrote the diary. Where did you get an authentic Victorian scrapbook and authentic Victorian ink?”
JS: “Very easy. I’d been in Stoke on business around that time and I came across an antique shop. I went in, and there on a small table was a pile of old scrapbooks from around that time. The one I chose had half its pages ripped out. This made it significantly cheaper than the others, and saved me from having to remove pages myself. The ink was on a table next to the scrapbooks. The whole purchase took me less than five minutes from walking in the shop. Overall, they cost me about £25, which was frankly well worth it to catch Mike out.”
AT: “So you just sat down and wrote it?”
JS: “Far from it. I read each of the books I had. Made notes about the canonical five victims and the investigation, and about the Maybricks. Then I sat down and wrote the diary.
AT: “But you had seven victims?”
JS: “Two anonymous victims in Manchester were artistic licence. It was all just throwaway stuff designed to sucker in Mike. There were loads of other lines which sound as though they are loaded with meaning – and plenty of meaning has since been ascribed to them – but they were no more than that; throwaway lines designed to fool Mike Barrett.”
AT: “So how did you get it to Mike?”
JS: “That was always going to be a problem – but ultimately it was the time of year which gave me the idea. It was March 1991. It occurred to me that the most appropriate timing of the diary would be April the first – one because it would make an even bigger fool of Mike, and two because I could use the date as a reason to convince someone to give it to Mike. The obvious choice was Tony Devereux. He drank in The Saddle, and he was very friendly with Mike. He was a really decent bloke and everyone liked him. I knew that if Tony gave Mike the diary, this would give it huge credibility. So I approached Tony at the end of March and explained to him that I was playing an April Fool joke on Mike and that I needed him to give a parcel to Mike and say ‘Do something with it’. I told him that Mike would want to know where he’d got it from, and that he should refuse to answer the question otherwise the April Fool would be ruined. True to his word, just as I knew he would, Tony gave Mike the diary, delivered the line exactly as I’d asked him to, and then refused to answer any of his questions even when Mike pestered him as I now believe that he did.”
AT: “So what happened after that? Did Mike walk into The Saddle with it under his arm?”
JS: “For all I know, he did. Just after I gave Tony the diary, I left Liverpool for a new job. I quickly lost touch with the guys in The Saddle, and I was too busy in my new job to give any thought to Mike Barrett and the fake diary of Jack the Ripper.”
AT: “So what happened next?”
JS: “What happened next was that I opened a newspaper about two years later to see Mike Barrett’s face next to the diary I wrote for him, and realised that he’d believed in the thing hook, line, and sinker and had had it published. I was completely cold – I couldn’t believe my eyes: my first reaction was to panic, thinking that I’d committed some kind of crime. Then I figured I hadn’t – genuinely hadn’t – and that the joke would soon be exposed for what it was when it was published. And sure enough, The Times did expose it as a fake, but the book still went ahead. It was a joke which just ran and ran. Now it’s 2009, and it’s still out there, generating thousands of lines of debate. What started out as a joke became big money for Mike Barrett, although I believe he frittered it all away. Others soon jumped on the bandwagon with their books and films. Even now, this year, there’s apparently another book due out claiming Michael Maybrick wrote the diary! It’s ridiculous.”
AT: “So you gave the diary to Tony Devereux. Why did Mike’s wife later claim that she had given it to Tony?”
JS: “I’ve no idea. It’s of little consequence to me whether she did or she didn’t. I can only assume that she understood the weakness of the provenance provided by Mike – despite believing him (after all, he was telling the truth) – and did what many loyal wives would have done and provided what she thought was a better provenance, and got her father to support it. I don’t suppose she gave it a lot of thought. If she believed Mike, as I’m sure she did, it would have seemed right that she helped him out. I found it quite touching, to be honest”
AT: “There are a lot of coincidences attached to the diary. People have said the forger had incredible luck.”
JS: “There were some coincidences along the way. It was a coincidence that the first and last two letters of ‘James Maybrick’ spell ‘Jack’. Personally, I didn’t notice it when I was writing it, but looking back I could have made good use of it as the reason for the name. The blind man’s bluff drawing was incredible good luck – I couldn’t have hoped for that kind of luck had I needed it, but I didn’t actually need it. These things were just coincidences, though. I didn’t give James Maybrick his name, and I didn’t draw the blind man’s bluff cartoon”
AT: “What about the ‘M’s at the various crime scenes?”
JS: “Well, what was there? An ‘M’ on an envelope? If you write ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’, then every envelope will have an ‘M’. A reference to ‘left my mark’ on Catherine Eddowes? That was another throwaway line which researchers then found something to link to Maybrick. The letters on Kelly’s wall were no coincidence – they were just blood stains which inspired me to build a story which led to James Maybrick.”
AT: “What about the ‘Juwes’ looking like ‘James’ and the reference to ‘then a Jew I shall be’?”
JS: “Again, it was a throwaway line which researchers who were desperate to find meaningful links could use to link to Maybrick. It could have meant anything, and it could have meant nothing. I don’t even think it looks much like ‘James’ anyway – unless you really want it to. There are lots of other throwaway lines in the diary which have simply been ignored because no-one has been able to link them to anything.”
AT: “What about Florence’s letter to Brierley where she said ‘The tale he told me was pure fabrication and only meant to scare the truth out of me’?”
JS: “Well, that was a genuine coincidence, and one that I happily wrote into the diary. I knew that if Maybrick in the diary claimed to have confessed to Florence near the end of his life then it would tally with her letter to Brierley. It was hugely unlikely that she would have written those words, but the fact that she did made it easy for me to build them into the joke.”
AT: “What about the watch?”
JS: “Nothing to do with me.”
AT: “Nothing at all?”
JS: “Nothing. I didn’t create the watch – I didn’t need to.”
AT: “You wrote about the little girl Gladys being ill again. Then it was proven in a letter that she was often ill. Where did you get that from?”
JS: “It was another throwaway line. All of these little ‘slice of life’ lines were designed to fool Mike into thinking the diary was for real. This was the 1880s – every child was ill, for goodness sake. Infant mortality was through the roof. I could have referred to the boy, but I didn’t. If I had, someone would eventually have found a letter which showed the boy was often ill - guaranteed.”
AT: “Why didn’t you copy James Maybrick’s handwriting?”
JS: “The handwriting wasn’t a mistake, as people keep saying. I didn’t know what it looked like and nor did I care. I assumed that Mike Barrett wouldn’t know either, and that’s all that mattered. What I did do was to mimic the style of the blood stains on Kelly’s wall which looked like an ‘M’. That way, you’d be more likely to think – ‘this is the real deal’.”
AT: “There were other errors as well.”
JS: “Of course there were – that was inevitable. I wrote the thing in four evenings after work, using only the notes I had made and my memory of events to base it on. But none of the other errors gave the game away to Mike Barrett, and that was the only point. I referred to the ‘Post House’ when it hadn’t existed in 1888. I hadn’t realised that, but for all the same reasons, neither would Mike Barrett. If he had, if he’d known about local pub history, all my efforts may have been in vain. Fortunately – or unfortunately, I suppose – they weren’t. I made reference to Jack placing Kelly’s breasts on the side table, and that one could well have blown the diary because it was easily researched by Mike. The strange thing is, I believe he did do a lot of research of his own before he attempted to get it published, but he didn’t notice that mistake, or if he did he chose to ignore it. I misunderstood Michael Maybrick’s role in writing lyrics for his songs. I assumed he did both lyrics and music, and I made a big play of this in the diary. Obviously, I now realise that he only wrote the music. Again, it wasn’t enough to stop Mike so in that sense it served its purpose. Looking back, I’m amazed I didn’t make more mistakes than I did.”
AT: “What about the line ‘Oh costly intercourse of death’? Where did you get that from?”
JS: “I got that from Mike Barrett! He came into The Saddle one day with some books he’d been given, and we were all looking through them. I picked up the poetry one and it literally opened on that page. I saw the line, and thought I’d put it into the diary. Simple as that.”
AT: “Can you prove you wrote the diary?”
JS: “I could write a paragraph now and you’d see that it was my handwriting.”
AT: “You could just be copying the style of the diary.”
JS: “I could, I suppose. However, there is one very big clue that I left in the diary. ‘Left it in front for all to see’. In fact, I deliberately wrote two things into the diary designed to prove it was a fake – just in case I needed to prove it to Mike in the pub. The first one, everyone spotted very quickly. The second one, no-one has ever spotted – it’s never been noticed after all this time. And yet it’s the most blatant entry in the diary, and it totally nails the joke. The first one was the line straight out of the list of Catherine Eddowes’ possessions. ‘Tin match box empty’. It was word for word from the original list! I figured Mike wouldn’t spot it, but when I pointed it out to him he would realise he’d been conned.”
AT: “So that was deliberate?”
JS: “Totally. It was put there to prove the diary was a joke. Simple as that.”
AT: “And the second thing?”
JS: “The second thing occurred to me late on in the writing of the diary. It was at the time of the Kelly murder. I crossed out most of the entries around it and left just it alone. Three words. ‘Left them in front for all to see’! Thing is, when the publishers typed the diary text up for the first book, they crossed out everything in that section and they’ve remained crossed out ever since, even though three words were very clearly not crossed out in the text itself.”
AT: “What were the three words?”
JS: “They were ‘Damn Michael Barrett’.”
Imagine my frustration at not being able to find my copy to check this unbelievable claim. Imagine that the next day I went out and bought a copy of the original book and read through looking for this clue left by a man whose name was not John Smith and who is no longer my partner. Imagine how I felt when I read those three words and realised that an entire industry had grown up out of one small joke which backfired.
Just imagine if my name was really Ann Truth, which it sort of is, and that this story was true, which it may well be.
Just imagine!
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