The Diary — Old Hoax or New or Not a Hoax at All?​

[erobitha]

But that's not what he actually asked for, or went on to order and receive, was it?

Love,

Caz
X

Bingo! Not for Bongo, obviously.

[caz]

Hi Ike,

Have you considered the possibility that what Mike was attempting to get hold of was authentic paper which would be scientifically indistinguishable from paper from the time of the Ripper murders?

But that's not what he actually asked for, or went on to order and receive, was it?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

If it does not concern you that Barrett’s request included 1890, you really should ask yourself why you might be ignoring it.

Indeed, Ike.

I suppose the answer might be that Anne did all the donkey work, including the rudimentary Maybrick and ripper research, and the fun bit of composing the diary prose and piss-poor poetry on the family word processor - until it came to the trivial last-minute tasks, like finding something to put it in, which she left entirely to Mike's discretion, without bothering to tell him when Maybrick shuffled off, or that a diary with actual dates in, or the size of a half-empty matchbox, would be no good to man nor beastly woman.

There - simple. Like adding sugar to stir up the ink molecules and one's audience.

Love,

Caz
X

[Herlock Sholmes]

I'm waiting for someone to knock down the walls of the Battlecrease double event of 9th March 1992, with proof that it was all a coincidence.

Aside from it being a hellishly awkward one for anyone to swallow, it is not made any easier to digest when both Mike's affidavits, each telling a completely different story, are considered together in the context of documented events. The little 1891 diary gets spewed out, but it's the only visible means of support for the eleven-day Creation Theory, and doesn't amount to the hill of beans a truly contrite hoaxer would have been able to spill in a heartbeat.

Love,

Caz
X

Hi Caz,

Does someone really need to prove it was a coincidence that there were workmen in an old house on a day someone else made a telephone call?

Goodness, surely that kind of thing happens every day of the week. What is there to prove?

I also think, as RJ Palmer has mentioned, that no one is spewing out the little 1891 diary, as you put it. What is relied upon is the wording of the advertisement which clearly reveals what Barrett was actually seeking.

[caz]

It's so seamless than one can barely drive a Mack truck through it without scraping sides. Anne Graham's own behavior disproves it, and the key witness was recently revealed to be wholly unreliable.

I think it's useful to remember that for Eddie Lyons to have taken an active role in the diary's discovery, there is only the one working hypothesis to consider, and this demands that the physical diary has to have been found by Eddie between 8am and 3pm on 9th March 1992.

Anyone with any reason to doubt this very specific scenario or would allow for the diary to have been created after 9th March 1992, when Mike made his first known contact with the publishing world over the phone, may as well forget Eddie Lyons as the man who found the diary, and look elsewhere.

Anne's own behaviour disproves - what, exactly?

I'm missing something here, but then I'm an idiot, so it's probably for the best if Palmer has finally put me on 'ignore'. For years I was bringing him down to my level and beating him with my experience.

If the 'key' witness is Eddie, and it involves him 'twocking' an old book from Battlecrease - which he pretty much admitted to another key witness back in July 1992, and again in June 1993 when he lied about putting it in a skip, but has understandably denied everything since - maybe it's just me being an idiot again, but we knew he wasn't exactly Mr Reliable in the first place. What's he done now, to reveal himself as 'wholly' unreliable?

If Palmer is thinking of one of the other 'key' witnesses - and there are several who can be described as such - let's hope they all reveal themselves to be as wholly unreliable as each other, so Palmer can then wholly rely on nobody knowing anything while everyone pretended to know something.

There is no comparison here with Auction Theory, if that is where Palmer was hoping to lead his dwindling troops. The only witness to what he desperately needs to have happened on 31st March 1992, and the days leading up to 13th April, was someone who is no longer with us and would have needed a dictionary to look up the meaning of the word 'reliability' and even then would have spelled it 'ReLIARbilly'.

[caz]

The purpose of the forum is to cover all theories and possibilities and present them without having to face a gauntlet of debunkers. Bad theories should die their own natural death. If they're good theories, they should live on without people propping them up like Bernie Lomax.

Good theories don't need help. They help you by continually giving researchers gifts that make them look good. Barrett theory hasn't provided any "library miracle" since 1992.

I'm waiting for someone to knock down the walls of the Battlecrease double event of 9th March 1992, with proof that it was all a coincidence.

Aside from it being a hellishly awkward one for anyone to swallow, it is not made any easier to digest when both Mike's affidavits, each telling a completely different story, are considered together in the context of documented events. The little 1891 diary gets spewed out, but it's the only visible means of support for the eleven-day Creation Theory, and doesn't amount to the hill of beans a truly contrite hoaxer would have been able to spill in a heartbeat.

Love,

Caz
X

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Herlock -

In reference to Alice in Wonderland, Harold Brough of the Liverpool Post deserves credit for the mind-numbing observation that the diary's bogus handwriting is strong evidence that Maybrick was the author!!

Brough came up with this brainstorm back on 29 September 1993.





Using this same logic, if the handwriting in the diary did look like Maybrick's, it would be a strong indication that it was a fake!

Given such complexities, what were poor Mike & Anne to do??

I doubt that even the March Hare ever went this far down the rabbit hole...

Ciao.

Thanks Roger. That kind of thinking also appears to have influenced someone posting under the name "Tom Mitchell" for, when recently reviewing the thread he started entitled 'One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary', I saw that he wrote in the very first post in the thread dated 30th August 2008:

"I suspect that it is the fact that the handwriting looks so little like the known examples of Maybrick's writing that many people have assumed the diary to be an 'amateurish fake'. Personally, if I were to write a forged diary, the very first thing I'd do before I gave up my weekend writing it would be to check what the target's handwriting looked like (otherwise, the effort would be patently wasteful). The lack of correlation makes me think either an utter idiot wrote it (an argument not then backed up by the detail contained within it) or else it was written by Maybrick in a hand not historically on record elsewhere."

It's a shame he wasn't around to own up to this when Caz wondered who was making such an Alice in Wonderland type argument

[Herlock Sholmes]

Here's another 'typo' or three by Mike Barrett which is also presumably irrelevant to whether his affidavit was even vaguely trustworthy.

Mike made the request through HP Bookfinders.
It was made in March 1992.
HP Bookfinders are not listed in the 1985, 1989, nor 1993 Writers' & Artists' Yearbook (so, presumably, not in the 1986 one).
Technically, Anne did pay for the diary but it is moot whether one can say that that is the same as 'Anne purchased a Diary'.

This all seems to suggest that Mike was lying through his teeth when that affidavit was created. None of these things matter, of course, because affidavits are just like private notebooks that you can throw ideas around in without any recourse to accuracy, it would appear.

It is a curious fact that when asked for the small red diary, rather than make any attempt to hide the fact it had been purchased, Anne produced it and even produced the cheque stub to show when she paid for it and how much she paid. Really seriously curious behaviour from a hoaxer's wife who had apparently got her fingerprints all over the hoax itself. She evidently had some balls that woman.

Does it really suggest that Barrett was "lying through his teeth with the affidavit was created" though, Ike, or does it suggest that the person who wrote the affidavit for him (Alan Gray?) didn't fully understand the sequence of events?

Clearly, Barrett had told Gray that Anne had paid for the diary using a cheque from her Lloyds bank account so, in Gray's mind, when he drafted the affidavit, she obviously purchased it. Even you've accepted that she did technically purchase it, because she paid for it.

I think we already know that Barrett confused his years and should have said 1992 instead of 1990 but, as I've previously said, dating errors and failures of recollection are not evidence of someone lying.

What does it matter if it wasn't the Writers Year Book? What possible significance can that have? Surely that would only be important if the story about the 1891 diary was a complete fiction, which we know it wasn't.

This mission you are embarked on, Ike, of finding mistakes in the affidavit is a complete waste of time. None of the errors you have mentioned assist towards disproving the forgery. If anything, they support the idea of the forgery because, when the erroneous date of Jan or Feb 1990 is corrected to March 1992, it means that the timeline of the forgery suddenly makes sense.

As for Anne's behaviour, she must have seen her husband's affidavit in January 1995, so had plenty of time to prepare for any questions about her payment for the diary. What if she had denied it and then information had been obtained from Lloyds Bank that she had paid for it? What would she have done then? So surely the only sensible thing for her to have done was to admit it. And isn't it the case that when she was asked to explain the purchase, she said that Mike simply wanted to know what a Victorian diary looked like? We know that isn't true, due to the wording of the advertisement, and even you don't claim that this is what Mike was up to. So why did she lie?

[caz]

Oh, I get it, it’s Wescott not Westcott. How very droll of you.

An initial there but not here.

Neither here nor there, but since Palmer has promoted himself to the 'spelling police' long after the former Commissioner retired to concentrate on sympathising with Spurs supporters, we had all better watch our step. I'm sure the new boy will be strictly fair and not only stop and search minority theorists for the most minor offences while leaving the popular majority to mistreat the King's English unmolested.

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

You forget, dear Ike, that it was supposedly created for Anne's eyes only, to give her a bit of a fright and hopefully persuade her to talk to him and let him see Caroline. He didn't need to include any incriminating details if she knew them all like the back of her hand, did he? All she needed to believe was that next time, if she didn't give in to his emotionally-charged demands, he might actually swear a truthful affidavit, with bells and whistles, and all the right notes in the right order [thank you, Eric] and then send it straight to Harold Brough, cutting out the middle woman.

Worryingly, I can't think of a counterpoint at this moment. Must have been distracted by the footy ...

[Iconoclast]

Hope you enjoyed the game... sure you did.

It was magnificent!

So, it's now 7 finals in my football-following lifetime (5 Newcastle, 2 England) and I've yet to taste victory. Will this 6th for Newcastle finally bring home a trophy? My dad was 25 when he attended the last domestic trophy win (1955). It's got to be a little overdue?

[Iconoclast]

... so the website owner or the email recipient can't trace the sender's location or identity.

And can this VPN thingy you've got reveal which planet you're posting from, RJ?

Ike

[Geddy2112]

Obviously, it didn't end 0-4 ...

Hope you enjoyed the game... sure you did.

[caz]

It’s understandable when Ripper authors get viperish when discussing aspects of the case. They have invested a lot of time and effort in their theory and book. So I can understand it when they go spewing venom. I just brush it off or suck it up and spit it out unobtrusively.

Even Feldy told me I was “sick”. So what! I just told him I thought he was cool too.

So Caz, any time you want to be a viper, it’s okay.

Only one problem with that, Lombro2: I'm not a Ripper author.

I do have a trusty switchblade, however, to cut a hypothetical scenario to ribbons if nobody else beats me to it and the evidence disproving is being ignored.

One example is the scenario where Mike's affidavit could be largely true, and only marred by a 'typo' over a date.

But I was too busy laughing to take it seriously and sharpen my blade for that one. It falls on its own sword.

Love,

Caz
X

[rjpalmer]

Hi Herlock -

In reference to Alice in Wonderland, Harold Brough of the Liverpool Post deserves credit for the mind-numbing observation that the diary's bogus handwriting is strong evidence that Maybrick was the author!!

Brough came up with this brainstorm back on 29 September 1993.





Using this same logic, if the handwriting in the diary did look like Maybrick's, it would be a strong indication that it was a fake!

Given such complexities, what were poor Mike & Anne to do??

I doubt that even the March Hare ever went this far down the rabbit hole...

Ciao.