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

[Scott Nelson]

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

[John Wheat]

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

Brought in a shop by Mike Barrett.

[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.

[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]

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'.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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]

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

[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

[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]

Hi Ikeypoo,

I take your point, sort of, but the fly paper in Florie's face wash is that we are all amateurs around here, so you would really need at least two reputable handwriting experts to examine your examples and conclude:

'These are self-evidently not written by the same hand - as any fool can see.' [But then you'd need some way to prove them wrong! Catch 22?]

My handwriting at school was only legible to myself when I was scribbling in my rough book, but neat as a pin in my exercise book, when I wanted the teacher to be able to read it and give me an A. I had to explain the difference to my French teacher, when she walked round the classroom, leaned over my desk and, seeing an indecipherable page of my rough book, announced to the whole class that "Caroline is going to be a doctor, as her handwriting is impossible to read".

The same problem applies, because an experienced document examiner should be able to detect the same hand at work in any different situation - and, of course, detect different hands at work when comparing the diary with anyone who didn't write it.

Anne Graham, your time is up. You are free to go.

Not because I'm a handwriting expert, but because for all Anne knew on 13th April 1992, England's finest could shortly be queuing round the block to try and detect hers in the scrapbook.

I wonder what Chris Jones thought of the possibility, when he met Anne recently?

Love,

Cazzykins
X

[caz]

Do you think it is possible that Barrett or the Barretts came up with the idea of Maybrick-as-Jack, hoaxed the diary in 1992, and then by a sheer bit of good luck they stumbled onto the fact that Maybrick really was the Ripper? And that Maybrick really had made a confession--only on a watch?

Does RJ believe Mike Barrett when he said he created the diary because he knew Maybrick was Jack?

No, of course not.

And yet RJ believes Mike Barrett when he made other similarly unsupported and unsupportable claims related to his part in the diary's creation.

No; I agree with Jones. If the diary is a modern hoax, it strikes me...

Oh my goodness. I never thought I'd see RJ using the IF word. Is his resolve slipping, or is he getting sloppy? Did he mean to write:

'I agree with Jones that the diary IS a modern hoax, and therefore it strikes me...' ?

An old hoax would be a different matter, but that's a different argument. I think he means a modern hoax.

Yes, I think RJ is right here, because Chris would not otherwise have leant so heavily on Bernard Ryan having provided pretty much all anyone needed to know about the Maybricks in order to fashion a fictional retelling... sorry, that's RJ's theory about Anne Graham. I have no idea what Chris would make of it. He appears to believe the diary text is a 'clever', but deliberate hoax, composed to deceive the reader, rather than an innocently conceived work of fiction, usurped by whoever turned it into a cynical hoax by tucking it snugly between the covers of the old scrapbook.

Chris has met Anne, so I presume he didn't tell her to her face that her 'in the family' story is nonsense on stilts [I don't blame him, I wouldn't either, although I have different reasons for thinking the same!], but even that would be mild compared with telling her that she had relied on Ryan's book to write the diary. Ouch, now that would smart.

What a very unsmart woman that would make her, not to have thought of doing all that in-depth Maybrick research - which she really got a taste for in the mid-1990s - before agreeing to weave her husband's tangled web for him, and practising to deceive with a Maybrick lite tale, based on a single source.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

It's a shame you haven't really digested any of the points above other than those which reinforce a prejudice - in this case, against James Maybrick.

The trick is to step back and just ponder: of all of the numerous issues which you are willing to believe call out the scrapbook for the hoax you assume it is (and really want it to be), how many individually actually are concrete and meaningful and fully-supported by the facts? And how many are tunnel-visioned assumptions, unsupported in the literature, and based fundamentally on a determined eye which will not consider the possible?

It's all - I hope without exception - going to be covered in my brilliant Society's Pillar 2025, but even in the last few posts you have been shown how killers really do record their terrible crimes in terse language if it suits them (and yet Maybrick's lack of detail over Nicholls' murder - we were told - proved the scrapbook to be a hoax!).

There are so many more of these old (and new) canards which sound compelling and yet have absolutely no basis in fact. One of the truly most compelling reasons to look seriously at James Maybrick is the watch which bears his known signature. That's pretty good going for a bunch of Liverpool scallies in the pre-internet age, isn't it? But you just let it go 'Whoosh!' - right over your head - because it doesn't fit your narrative. Think about it: a James Maybrick confession appears long before his signature is out there on Google and it matches his known signature. This is not compelling, it is damning! Erobitha showed us the letter 'K' because it is so idiosyncratic and yet so consistent, but the whole signature in the watch is a true facsimile of Maybrick's. Of course, one can rationalise this critical piece of evidence against Maybrick away, but the human brain is very good at finding ways out of cul-de-sacs when it feels trapped.

If you get excited every time someone posts 'the thing that nails the scrapbook as a hoax' but don't then get deflated when it is immediately shown to be a facile argument, you are a victim of your deep conviction.

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

Ike

Hi Ike,

Channelling one of Harry Hill's famous fights, in a mash up with "will you the pork or the lamb?", here's one just for those who have seen and thoroughly digested both the below examples. I trust Chris Jones will have done so too...

Will you the K in Citizen Kane's signature, compared with the K in the diary's Kelly?

Or will you the k in Maybrick's signature on his marriage licence, compared with the k in the 'Maybrick' signature in the watch?

FIGHT!!

By the way, I will need to read RJ's long post again after dismissing it too hurriedly as the 'same old same old'.

Ringing endorsements from The Baron and FISHY - who know where they are with special K - should not be taken too lightly.

Love and KYBO [as my lovely late ma-in-law used to sign off cards and letters],

Caz
X