New Book: The Maybrick Murder and the Diary of Jack the Ripper

[Iconoclast]

Personally, I can't see how the diary handwriting can be Maybrick's own, and I'm only surprised that Chris has spent ten years coming up with infinitely weaker ...

Personally, I can, Cazzykins.



Imagine the above (apologies for the poor magnification) was an example of the handwriting in the scrapbook - where James Maybrick has frantically scribbled for his own eyes the details he wants to capture about his crimes.

And then imagine that it's 1889 and you receive a letter (apologies for the poor magnification) from that fine cotton fellow James Maybrick and it reads somewhat as follows:



If you had access to both, back in 1889, would you say that they were by the same hand or by two different people's hands?

Obviously (otherwise I wouldn't be posting them), they are from the same hand. Mine. Back in 1989 and 1990 (as I recall). The former was frantically scribbled into a notebook for my eyes only and the latter was written in a letter for someone else's eyes.

Honestly, now, how many of you think those two examples above were self-evidently not written by the same hand?

Ike

[caz]

Even Dodd must be wrong about his own house. Even though he tells us he gutted the place and lifted all the floorboards, he could have missed it...

The problem is that if Chris Jones put this in his book, Paul Dodd himself has said more recently that there were some 'virgin' floorboards [meaning original boards that had never been lifted] when the electricians did their work. He pointed out - rather needlessly - that these boards could not have had anything hidden beneath them.

This not only completely contradicts any previous claim that Dodd had personally lifted every board in the place at some point, but it also allows for other boards which Dodd had never lifted, but which could have been raised and nailed down again at any previous point, by a workman or occupant.

Dodd also said, after mentioning the virgin boards, that he wouldn't be "surprised" if it turned out that the old book had been found and taken away, despite having thought it unlikely.

After all, Dodd had no idea about the Victorian newspaper which was found by one of the Portus & Rhodes electricians. Colin Rhodes asked Dodd if the employee concerned could keep it, and Dodd said yes. I don't know where it was in the house, but it demonstrates that Dodd's 'gutting' hadn't managed to disturb its rest.

Let's face it: we can't even prove the handwriting is not Maybrick's, for Maybrick may have developed a special handwriting that he only used for confessional journals written in photo albums.

Can you prove otherwise?

Personally, I can't see how the diary handwriting can be Maybrick's own, and I'm only surprised that Chris has spent ten years coming up with infinitely weaker arguments against JM as the author. One such example, already posted by Ike, is Chris's funny little three-line whip, where he sells his readers the tripe that the real JtR would never have stopped at three lines to describe the murder of Polly Nichols in his private diary. If only Chris had been around in 1867 to advise the man who murdered and horrifically mutilated Sweet Fanny Adams, and recorded the event in just four words, before devoting his next five to the late summer weather.

As King Charles said when he had to face Liz Truss at their first weekly meeting: "Dear, oh dear."

It's also a great pity that Chris has been unable to pin the handwriting on one of his merry band of Liverpudlian forgers - or to even suggest whose handwriting is least unlike the diary's.

Mind you, RJ is in a similar boat, unable to commit to anyone as the likely pen person. But at least he hasn't written a book claiming to have put the matter to bed - which identifying that person would surely have done, if by no other means.

Limiting ourselves to two individuals - whether it be James Maybrick or Anne Graham - whose handwriting is not obviously [or should that be obviously not?] in the diary, is like expecting to get the right PM with only Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Truss to choose from. There are many millions who were alive between 1889 and 1992, whose handwriting would have better resembled the diary's than JM's or AG's, and only one that would be a forensic match.

However painful it might be for some of the diehards, the handwriting issue does leave open the possibility of some original document, since destroyed or hidden away who knows where, which was found at some point - with or without the watch - by someone who then had the idea to transfer, adapt or embellish its contents by hand into the scrapbook.

Isn't this roughly what RJ has been suggesting for the Barretts of Goldie Street in 1992? The original document in his scenario would be the diary draft, wholly typed up by Anne Graham, and up to 95% her own work, apart from allowing Mike to come up with a bon mot here and a bon mot there [here a mot, there a mot, everywhere a mot mot] to complete her fictional retelling of two murder mysteries for the price of one. If Mike misunderstood and thought she was telling him to "Bog off!" it wouldn't have improved the mood when he revealed his plan to have her novella transferred by hand into a genuine Victorian diary. He wouldn't fancy being sworn at again, so best to keep quiet about using his real name to try and obtain any sort of diary from the 1880s, as long as it had at least twenty usable pages.

I'm not quite sure whether RJ favours some unknown third party for Mike's chosen pen person, who was drafted in for the purpose and never identified, even when Mike wanted so badly to confess to fraud, and implicated three others - four if we include young Caroline as his alleged witness to it - all of whom had provably played large parts in his life in happier times. Mike could have thrown the Invisible Man under the bus and been done with it - if there had been one. 1995 must have started badly for Melvin Harris when he didn't get the barest sniff of Citizen Kane from the promised Barrett/Gray affidavit.

Even Mike's Invisible Man must seem a better bet to RJ than having to fall back on Anne Graham, being coerced into transferring her story by hand into a doctored old book reeking of linseed oil, while Caroline was learning how to spell 'hoax' and use it in a [prison] sentence. Anne could not have done this, in a heavily disguised hand, without knowing she was engaged in something seriously seedy, utterly unethical and, frankly, fracking fraudulent.

This is RJ's dilemma, because he has tried to paint a picture of Anne as an unwilling accomplice, more sinned against than sinning. He knows it's a fake picture, but it's that or the Invisible Man.

I don't envy his options.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Sorry to disappoint you, Old Man, but those of us who believe the diary is a modern fake were not fooled by Mike Barrett. We have always acknowledged that Barrett was a liar. Lying and tall tales are par for the course when dealing with hoaxers and scam artists.

In reality, had Barrett never confessed, and had the 5 January 1995 affidavit never surfaced, we would still believe that the diary is a modern fake and that the Barretts were up to their arm pits in it. Our beliefs are not and have never been dependent on Mike's confessions.

Sadly, many of the old players such as Nick Warren and Melvin Harris and Martin Fido are no longer with us, but if you asked some of the other skeptics who were around at the time, I am confident that they all suspected Barrett's involvement at some level long before he got drunk and started spilling the beans.


RP

Unfortunately, RJ's claim as it relates to himself cannot now be tested, because he came late to the party, after Mike had already spilled the beans [not even the right beans, never mind in the right order ]. I recall one of RJ's very early posts implying that this 'confession' was a reliable enough indication that Barrett dunnit. He said so himself, didn't he?

So when is a liar not a liar? Only, it seems, when he is voluntarily claiming to have been the brain box behind the diary, who thought up the brilliant idea of turning James Maybrick into Jack the Ripper. When this wasn't universally received as credible, the liar learned from it and spent the next few months polishing up his act. By January 1995 he was giving bit parts to his ex wife, recently deceased father-in-law and late 'friend', and fleshing out his initial claim with details he thought would deal with some of the queries and anomalies Shirley had identified in the wake of his drunken outpourings the previous June.

The only 'evidence' that Mike had any hand at all in the diary's creation is his desperate personal need to make that claim. Everything else depends on the subjective arguments for its modernity, which, even if all could be proved correct would not mean that a Barrett had to be involved, because no bugger alive or dead can tell us where the scrapbook was on 8th March 1992. Mike could have seen that writing for the first time on 9th March, when he called Doreen, and it wouldn't tell us how long it had been in the old book up until that point. A day, a week, a month, a year or five years, should still be music to the ears of modern hoax believers.

So what is it about the very concept of a non-Barrett hoax, that seems to strike fear into people? Why is it out of the question to take Mike and his lies out of the equation, and still be left with all the arguments for the diary being a post-1970s fake? Do they fear that the modern hoax theory is like a glove puppet, which can only survive with a Barrett hand up its jacksie?

If anyone had seen Mike Barrett in 1992, hurrying down the street carrying what appeared to be a valuable early television set, they might reasonably suppose him to have just nicked it from somewhere, planning to sell it on. Nobody would have suspected him of making the set himself - unless it later transpired that he was a tv engineer by trade, with a workshop out the back, where he had repaired old sets and made reproductions to order. A belated reluctant or remorseful admission to faking the set he had sold as genuine would then have come with the undeniable evidence of his capabilities, and nobody would doubt that he did it, and did it alone. Fingering the missus [oo-er] or any dead friends or relatives, to try and make his confession credible, would be superfluous to requirements. It would be a fair cop.

Final question for the day, for those who still believe Mike's 'confession' had its basis in truth:

What would he have stood to gain from volunteering a true confession to inside knowledge, when there was no pressure on him to come clean, the police were no longer interested and the diary money was coming in?

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

Oh my! 'Come 2024', Ike? Did you mean 24 minutes past 8? You wrote this on 5th September, and now Truss has proved that a lettuce has the better shelf life.

If I believed in conspiracy theories, I might suspect that some obscenely rich people, considerably brighter than Truss [isn't everyone?], decided to speculate to accumulate, and made a killing by correctly predicting that Long Liz would be Short Liz in almost no time at all.

24 hours has become a long time in British politics, while Barrettology remains stuck in 1994, with Mike's less than trusty truss.

Time to revisit 'How to Have Fun with a Hernia', anyone?

Love,

Switchypoo
X

Yes, indeed, Caz, whilst consciously seeking to avoid being off-post here, I am struck by how my post of Sept 5 both did not age well and was simultaneously rather prescient.

I have sight now of Jones and Dulgin's new tome (I mention this in order to bring me back on-post) and shall look forward to working my way through some new and some very old tropes about this most mysterious of cases.

Ike

[caz]

And - for the record - asking people what their views are on a candidate they've almost all read almost nothing about is never going to produce anything other than a sense of what the mood music is around here. Indeed, I think that was what ero b was seeking to achieve, perhaps not realising that people would read the results as some sort of testimony in favour or against. It's very much like those Tories who today voted personality-explant Liz Truss in as party leader and therefore as prime minister. Come 2024, she and her government will face the British electorate and they like Rishi more than they like Truss so - if they had one eye on getting re-elected - today's vote may not have been as utilitarian as it could have been for them. Big mistake, big mistake (thank you, Julia Roberts' character).

Don't make the big mistakes, dear readers. The Good News today is that I am here to keep you all honest.

Honestly.

Ike

Oh my! 'Come 2024', Ike? Did you mean 24 minutes past 8? You wrote this on 5th September, and now Truss has proved that a lettuce has the better shelf life.

If I believed in conspiracy theories, I might suspect that some obscenely rich people, considerably brighter than Truss [isn't everyone?], decided to speculate to accumulate, and made a killing by correctly predicting that Long Liz would be Short Liz in almost no time at all.

24 hours has become a long time in British politics, while Barrettology remains stuck in 1994, with Mike's less than trusty truss.

Time to revisit 'How to Have Fun with a Hernia', anyone?

Love,

Switchypoo
X

[caz]

You might be better off forgetting about courts of law, or 'the court of history' as Keith Skinner calls it, or the court of public opinion, and instead concentrate on being a modern-day Galileo, battling for an unpopular truth among a rabble of ignorant and prejudiced minds.

This was directed to another poster, but I can certainly identify with the sentiment expressed, in the context of the Barrett hoax faithful.

It reminds me of the minority who battled back in 2016 for the unpopular truth about Brexit. 52% of voters were persuaded to reject the truth as 'project fear'.

There's nothing new or strange about the truth being rejected by a majority due to ignorance and prejudice. If people still live in a fantasy world where Mike and Anne Barrett hoaxed the Maybrick diary, and the two Johnson brothers hoaxed the watch, without having bothered to educate themselves about all the issues involved or, worse, ignoring those issues, there they will stay - and at least it's not like they are watching the wolf at their door and blaming the minority for crying wolf.

[John Wheat]

That's right. He had the receipt as well to prove it. Oh, wait, no, he didn't.

Then he had the auction ticket from where he did buy the scrapbook, then? Oh, wait, no, he didn't.

Of course it was written by James Maybrick. Get real.

[erobitha]

Hold on, ero b, he said he did have those things. What were you expecting? He said he hoaxed the scrapbook and everyone seems perfectly happy to believe his confession is the true version without a single scrap of evidence, so why would he actually need any concrete evidence at all for any of his remarkable claims? Surely he gets a free go where the scrapbook is concerned? We have on record countless examples of where he quotes from the scrapbook or offers some utterly illogical claim and then says, "There's your proof!". With standards of scientific analysis like Barrett's, we could all own the Mona Lisa and who could possibly argue with us:

"It's in a protective frame in the Louvre in Paris, France.. There's your proof, now give me it back!".

Ike

Imagine if Mike said he forged the Mona Lisa and when asked to produce some evidence that he showed people this drawing.


It is the equivalent of what he demonstrated with his 'creative writing'.

[Iconoclast]

That's right. He had the receipt as well to prove it. Oh, wait, no, he didn't.

Then he had the auction ticket from where he did buy the scrapbook, then? Oh, wait, no, he didn't.

Hold on, ero b, he said he did have those things. What were you expecting? He said he hoaxed the scrapbook and everyone seems perfectly happy to believe his confession is the true version without a single scrap of evidence, so why would he actually need any concrete evidence at all for any of his remarkable claims? Surely he gets a free go where the scrapbook is concerned? We have on record countless examples of where he quotes from the scrapbook or offers some utterly illogical claim and then says, "There's your proof!". With standards of scientific analysis like Barrett's, we could all own the Mona Lisa and who could possibly argue with us:

"It's in a protective frame in the Louvre in Paris, France.. There's your proof, now give me it back!".

Ike

[erobitha]

Brought in a shop by Mike Barrett.

That's right. He had the receipt as well to prove it. Oh, wait, no, he didn't.

Then he had the auction ticket from where he did buy the scrapbook, then? Oh, wait, no, he didn't.

[John Wheat]

Or it could have been found behind a cupboard in a wall cavity.

Brought in a shop by Mike Barrett.

[Scott Nelson]

Or it could have been found behind a cupboard in a wall cavity.

[Iconoclast]

Shall we discuss the location of Maybrick's study since you spent months on this site telling us it was on the first floor outside his bedroom?

This is crucial since you argued that these were the floorboards lifted on 9 March 1992.

I thought you had read Nigel Morland?

Integrity at all times.

I don't recall saying it was on the first floor outside his bedroom? If I did, then I was quite wrong to do so. My understanding was that it was an adjunct to his bedroom that he kept locked at all times. I now think that it was a dressing-room not a study.

It turns out that he had a 'den' on the ground floor and it was this he kept locked at all times. This, from Florence Aunspaugh's long letter to Trevor Christie in (IIRC) 1941.

So the question is this, over the 103 years to 1992, which rooms in the house had their floorboards raised? How many rooms had all of their floorboards raised (so that nothing could possibly have been missed in that room at that time)?

I assume we don't know, but I don't yet have Chris' book so I'm not in a position to say. Until we know for certain, we should not be generalising from a limited amount of information to "It was therefore impossible for the scrapbook to have been missed when the work was carried out".

Ike

[Iconoclast]

I've got another one to discuss but I have somewhere to be today so it may have to wait.
Ike

More haste, less speed would have been sound advice for Ol' Ike there. The rain and darkness of the M42 and the outskirts of Birmingham awaited me and thus I was rather evidently distracted.

Ike

[rjpalmer]

Jones's mantra only makes sense logically, as you believe it does, if the diary is undeniably proven to be a hoax written by the Barretts, who in turn somehow liaised with the Johnson brothers in creating a watch. That is not an established fact, so the logic falls down.

You haven't really thought this through, have you? You acknowledge in your first sentence that his logic makes sense. You then immediately say that it doesn't make sense.

The logic of his premise is independent of the evidence.

From your perspective, you think Jones is sidestepping the watch. But he explains why he is doing that--because logic and commonsense dictates that if the diary falls, the watch also falls.

You still haven't show why this isn't true, and indeed, you just acknowledge that it does, indeed, "make sense."

I think it is time to move on. But no one said anything about the Johnsons having "liaised" with Barrett. The diary had been in the newspapers.