Fake!

[Casebook Wiki Editor]

Assuming for a brief moment that the "Diary" wasn't a late 20th Century concoction, imagine this "1889" drivel having accidentally landed on a pre-1894 desk at the CID.

What might Messrs Anderson and Macnaghten have made of it?

They'd have done the correct thing of course - evaluate it on its literary merits and then seeing the atrocious rhymes and puns they would realize it couldn't be from a real killer and totally disregard it!

Then they would obsessively write letters to the editor denouncing it as a shoddy hoax. Perhaps several a day......

[Simon Wood]

Hi Sir Robert,

Whilst not disagreeing with you for an itsy-bitsy moment, going on past form with the Dear Boss and Saucy Jacky correspondence, might not Scotland Yard have serialized the "Diary" in, say, the Police Gazette?

Merely a passing fancy.

Regards,

Simon

[caz]

Hi Caz,

And yes, you do take it correctly: no one who signed themselves "Jack the Ripper" was the real McCoy—for very good reasons.

Naughty Simon. I only pointed out that Jack the Ripper was nobody's actual name. If a hundred hoaxers adopted it for themselves, why would it have been impossible for the murderer (or one of them, if you believe there were half a dozen) to have done the same? It was a name on everyone's lips, after all. Where's the logic in your argument, dear boy? Stick to the problematic handwriting - I would.

Assuming for a brief moment that the "Diary" wasn't a late 20th Century concoction, imagine this "1889" drivel having accidentally landed on a pre-1894 desk at the CID.

What might Messrs Anderson and Macnaghten have made of it?

I've already said what I think many times. I don't think it would have been seen as a serious murder confession by the real James Maybrick at all, or even someone's serious attempt to frame him. At that time it would have so resembled the kind of burlesque pieces and spoofs appearing in the pages of Punch, designed to send up the class system, the police, the politicians, the semi-literate, the famous and the infamous (anyone considered fair game), that my guess is it would have been taken for someone's pre-published spoof at best, or someone's idea of a practical joke at Anderson or Macnaghten's expense at worst.

In fact, I wouldn't put it past one of Mac's cronies to have come up with the idea, based on inside ripper information (or misinformation) given to him by Mac himself.

Now who wrote another spoof diary for Punch in 1888, which mentions a "double event"; spent his honeymoon in Aigburth of all places on God's green earth; and had a brother (who was as fond of practical jokes as he was) who counted Macnaghten and George Sims among his personal friends, referred to Mac as the "boss" of the CID, and whose portrait, as notorious criminal Jack Sheppard (which he played at the Pavilion Theatre, close to Buck's Row, in 1898) hung on Mac's wall, next to a print of the real Sheppard?

Chew on that one.

Love,

Caz
X

[Simon Wood]

Hi Caz,

Duly chewed.

Should I swallow or do you want me to spit it out?

Regards,

Simon

[caz]

Don't be filthy.

If you've never considered the possibility that the diary was meant to come across as 'drivel', you haven't lived.

The suckers may yet be those who think it was actually designed to deceive them.

Love,

Caz
X

[Simon Wood]

Hi Caz,

I obviously need to get out more. That's a bit too elliptical for me.

Regards,

Simon

[RavenDarkendale]

@ Sir Robert

Well I did say when I posted the "mock trial" that neither opening statement by the lawyers was completely truthful but "Lawyer Speak!"

Cheers!

Darkendale