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[caz]

I should qualify this statement.

Anne claimed that she helped Barrett (with the notes, the typescript, etc.) because she thought it should be a professional job---despite saying elsewhere that she didn't want the diary published and also stating their marriage was such that she & Mike couldn't collaborate. One of many contradictions.

Her statement that she thought "Doreen would just send Mike packing" was her mindset when Barrett took the diary to London in April 1992.

I think Anne's statements could make sense and be reconciled if she first saw the diary in March 1992 and simply didn't think it was likely to be genuine, and suspected Mike had nicked it from somewhere. Double trouble ahead when Mike insisted on taking it to London. He did say - for what that's worth - that he asked "Tony" what he was playing at, as if he initially assumed this was all some sort of joke, and it is after all what most people would have asked on seeing such a book signed Jack the Ripper down their local, so I can see why Anne would have been equally sceptical at first sight. Hoping Mike would try to write a ripping yarn based on it would make sense in that context, because it certainly doesn't follow that she'd have believed it to be genuinely written by the killer nicknamed 'Jack the Ripper', and that would explain why she assumed nobody else would take it seriously either. Doreen's interest in seeing it might have been good news to Mike's ears, but an unwelcome surprise to Anne if she had her own doubts about its origins. Her hope could have been that Doreen would share her scepticism and send Mike packing without investigating the diary or its origins.

Most people might only have known about JtR as a Victorian murderer who was known by that name because he was never caught. The Yorkshire Ripper hoaxer of the 1970s reminded people that a letter had been sent in 1888 signed 'Yours truly Jack the Ripper', which was widely considered to be a hoax, along with a host of similar letters.

In this context, I can see Mike bringing the diary home in March 1992 and thinking: is it a joke or could it be real? Anne's first thought would have been where the hell did Mike get it? It couldn't have been authenticated by anyone, or the whole world would have known about it, so was it just another ripper hoax, which could have been in someone's private collection, and had possibly been stolen along with other similar curiosities? It would explain Mike's inability to tell her where it came from and also Anne's own reservations about him contacting Doreen. Anne would have no reason to believe it was written by the killer himself, but the story Mike told Doreen put a different slant on it. If a friend had given him the diary without appreciating what he had and had never tried to find out, then it could in theory turn out to be an important new discovery and worth investigating.

I can't see Anne thinking along similar lines if she suspected it had been nicked and its rightful owner would soon miss it and report the theft.

[caz]

It's been some time since the little red diary has been discussed. What's your latest theory as to the reason why Mike ordered it?

I'll get back to you, if I may!

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

It's been some time since the little red diary has been discussed. What's your latest theory as to the reason why Mike ordered it?

Hi Observer,

I am assuming here that you are familiar with all the published facts and message board speculation, or I may be wasting my time, but the first thing to say is that Mike is the only person who could have said what was on his mind and what he hoped to achieve when he called Bookfinders with his request, and then ordered the item that was found, despite it being for the year 1891, and asked for it to be sent to him on approval.

But Mike is dead and nothing he ever said can be relied upon without impeccable independent supporting evidence. So while it's anyone's guess why he did what he did when he did it, there is not much point in guessing without having a good grasp of the context and everything that is known about the circumstances. Even with all that information at one's fingertips, guessing at Mike's motivation will inevitably be subjective and it's all too depressingly normal for us to tailor our guesses according to our preconceptions of how he ended up with the diary he took to London, just a couple of weeks after the arrival in the post of the tiny 1891 diary.

I have to rule out guesses that depend on Mike trying to find a suitable book for hoaxing Maybrick's diary, not just on the grounds that he went about it in the most inept fashion possible, but because the diary handwriting can in no way be attributed to Mike, and can only be attributed to Anne by arguing that she had the necessary skill and dedication to disguise her normal handwriting over the 63 pages - for which there is no evidence whatsoever - which would then imply that she knew exactly what she was doing and playing a major part in creating a fraudulent document, and nobody with a reasonable grasp of the facts seems currently willing to go that far.

We have been offered one working theory that changes with the weather, which allows for Anne to have been ignorant to the extent that Mike led her to believe she was creating, between 1st and 12th April 1992, a harmless sales gimmick to house the fictional story she had written with him. In this scenario, she would be trusting Mike to present it as such to Doreen on 13th, and if she imagined he'd be "sent packing" it would be on account of the story not being good enough, with or without the 'sales gimmick' - and all that effort would be for nought. But no lasting damage, except to the creators' egos.

I'll be corrected if I'm wrong, but I think the idea is that Anne had a light bulb moment between completing her innocently crafted sales gimmick and Mike taking it to London, when she realised that he might betray her trust and try to deceive Doreen with the diary? Did she hope Doreen would send Mike packing in disbelief? If Anne had just filled a photo album that could be Edwardian with her own handwriting, using ink bought yesterday, had she really not grasped by April Fools' Day that Doreen had been waiting patiently since 9th March to see the diary of Jack the Ripper, which Mike had claimed was in his possession? Did he hide Doreen's letters from Anne, so she had no idea what had been discussed and put in writing before she got stuck in with the Diamine?

There is also a strange inconsistency in this theory concerning which Barrett was supposedly deceiving the other at different stages of the creative process: if Anne was feeding Mike the ideas for this fictional story, making him believe they were his own, the roles were apparently reversed for the creation of the 'sales gimmick' itself, when Mike fed Anne the idea, making her believe that she was doing nothing wrong and there would be no attempt to deceive anyone.

Frankly, I am at a complete loss to see how the theory is meant to play out in practice, but maybe I'm complicating something that would have been seen as really simple by the Barretts themselves, to work through and collaborate on, and Anne would have done it in the spirit of "anything for a quiet life", as has been suggested. Me, I'd sooner have collaborated with Mike over completing a ten thousand piece jigsaw puzzle of a Jackson Pollock painting. It would have been boring as hell but a lot less stressful, unlikely to provoke blazing rows and fewer lasting regrets. But then I don't claim to know how Anne's mind worked. Perhaps she thought life would become a doddle working closely with Mike on such a project, compared with what their relationship had been like before it all kicked off.

Sorry, Observer, I don't know why Mike wanted that wretched 1891 diary, but then nobody else does either, so I'm not alone. My best guess would be that if he had seen the diary down the pub, with the name Jack the Ripper and the year 1889 at the end, he might naturally have considered the real possibility that it was an elaborate leg-pull - the latest in a history of hoaxes, very possibly inspired by the Hitler Diaries from the 1980s. As such, it might have occurred to him to test his suspicions with a simple experiment that would end up costing him no more than a phone call. How would a leg puller have found a genuine 1880s diary in 1992, which still had a decent number of unused pages for the purpose? If they were growing on trees [not literally, that would just be weird] he'd soon find out and be able to compare one with what he'd seen. If they were rare as hens' teeth, he would not expect to get a result, but neither would a leg puller, so it would be a more positive sign. As it happened, the only one that came anywhere close to what he'd asked for was for the year 1891 - two years after 'Jack' had signed off - and was as unfit for leg pulling purposes in just about every possible way.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

I don't know if you have lived a sheltered life, Ike (for your sake I hope you have), but your use of the word "tricked" reveals that you have a very superficial understanding of both what I suggested, and how convoluted the emotional dynamics can be between an alcoholic and a codependent---which, from my reading, is how I perceive the relationship of the two individuals who marketed the Maybrick Diary.

But Palmer's reading, and his perception of the Barretts' relationship, leading up to 9th March 1992, is solely based on what these two individuals have claimed about it, and they are both self-confessed liars - so I'm not sure how confident he feels that his perception has any relevance to the diary's true origins.

I've seen this 'dynamic' up close and personal with family members, so I think I'm qualified to speak of it without being labeled a fantasist.

Of course Palmer is qualified to speak of a 'dynamic' he has seen up close and personal with family members, but how does this extend to what the Barretts have claimed about themselves and allow for any useful comparison to be made? Has the 'dynamic' observed up close by Palmer produced anything remotely comparable to the collaborative project Palmer believes the Barretts involved themselves with? If not, what is the point he is seeking to make?

My suggestion--and that's all it is---but it's a damn good one--is that Barrett could have told his missus that the physical photo album confessional was just a marketing gimmick for their joint novella (and I hate to tell you this, old boy, but back in the 1980s there was a mystery novel marketed along similar lines in the United States)--which allowed her to suspend just enough belief to go along with Barrett's mad scheme.

Of course, the real reason was to humor him and thus keep peace in the house.

Yes, it would have been very peaceful in that house if Scotland Yard had extended their fraud investigation and found that the Barretts had knowingly made loads of money off the back of this joint novella-cum-marketing gimmick, which Mike had sought to pass off as genuine. Anne might have got away with it on the grounds of her husband's cruel and unusual punishment in making her create the thing and keep her trap shut, but it would have been a big risk to take that she would find peace behind bars.

As I've told Caz about a zillion times, look no further than Anne Graham's own words.

I think Anne helped Barrett for the very reason she said she did--she assumed that when Barrett got to London with the ridiculous Diary, the literary agent Doreen Montgomery would "just send Mike packing."

Her own words!

In other words, that once the diary was seen by a sensible person---the melodramatic confession of Jack the Ripper in a quite possibly Edwardian photo album with newish ink and missing pages and a silly text, no less--- the gig would be up.

No one was more shocked than Anne that it wasn't. Which is why she later admitted that the book launch was a "nightmare."

But none of this would have been necessary, because when Anne was shocked to find that Doreen was actually buying into it, all she had to do was to explain everything when they first spoke on the phone if the bloody thing was her own handiwork and Mike had had no business letting Doreen believe otherwise. Doreen would be so relieved to be spared the time, expense and embarrassment of looking for a publisher that she'd have let Mike down professionally without him ever knowing what Anne had told her. Deflated, Mike would have had to get on with it, but he couldn't take it out on Anne if he had acted against her advice, so she would be free to get on with her life much sooner, and without the nightmares she could have anticipated by letting Mike dig even bigger holes for them both with his lies.

This, I suspect, was Anne's guiding assumption in the first three months of 1992--Mike's scheme wouldn't work, so there was "no harm, no foul" in helping him.

I can't begin to imagine what would have possessed Anne to spare the time and effort to help Mike with a project she believed would inevitably end in his humiliation. Bad enough if she was right; potentially ten times worse if she was wrong and it did work, at least initially, contrary to her expectations.

But if Palmer finds it not the least bit implausible, perhaps he has seen similar situations evolving in other troubled relationships and doesn't differentiate between them and the Barretts.

[rjpalmer]

If I had been so thoroughly bamboozled by Anne Graham between 1994 and 2002, convinced she was telling the truth, etc., I wonder if I'd have the audacity to come here now and pretend that I have great insight into her mind and what she would and would not be willing to do.

I would certainly hope I would have more humility and introspection than that, but there's nought so queer as folk.