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

[caz]

I never said there was any evidence--none of us were there--I asked if you had considered the possibility.

I have, and I think it is highly plausible.

Considering possibilities with no evidence may be fun, but is ultimately futile.

The oddness of this suspicious purchase being a late payment, the oddness in how the cheque was filled out (as if Anne wanted no part of it), along with Keith still believing four years later that the diary had been ordered in May 1992 all adds up to make one wonder, and all we have against this is the word of Anne Graham--whom, by your own admission, told a whole string of lies to Keith and Feldman and Shirley.

It's odd that this odd purchase would have been left to become a late payment, if it had represented an attempt, albeit a spectacularly inept one, to source the raw materials needed to fake James Maybrick's diary. Surely it would have been wiser to have asked for more details before ordering it, or to have returned it within the 30 days if the description had been so woefully inadequate that Mike could not have been expecting what he had been sent.

Not so odd that Anne wanted no part of it, since it was undoubtedly connected with another diary that had arrived in Goldie Street in somewhat mysterious circumstances. The trick is knowing which came first.

Keith had no evidence four years later that the diary had been ordered 'pre-Doreen', just because that is what Anne thought she recalled. It is surely to his credit that he didn't assume anything further than the evidence allowed at that time, which was when the 1891 diary was actually paid for by Anne. Mike would have had every opportunity in April 1999 to tell Keith and everyone present that while Anne had paid for it in May 1992, he had begun the search for a suitable diary weeks earlier, when he had just "conned" Doreen into believing he already had Jack the Ripper's. He could have described what he had asked for, and explained why he had received something entirely different, which was uniquely unsuitable for the purpose.

We also only have Anne's word that Mike had told her that he had 'just wanted to see what a diary looked like'---which makes no sense once we see Earl's advertisement. Again, there is no evidence that Mike didn't say this, but I'm not inclined to believe it because it doesn't make any sense.

Again, the possibility is not even being considered that Mike's request was bound up with the mysterious circumstances in which he brought the scrapbook home, and may have come about as a direct result of those circumstances, rather than preceding them.

It would be entirely different if you believed that Anne was truthful with Keith about seeing the diary in the 1960s, or that there was an oral tradition linking Formby to Yapp, etc.

If that was the case, I could understand why you would believe that Anne was giving her level best cooperation.

But since you don't, I find it odd that you're bending over backwards to portray Anne as cooperative on this single, solitary occasion. She was over a barrel.

There remains no evidence that Anne felt she was 'over a barrel' in the way Palmer wants her to have been. She saw nothing to lose by helping Keith and nothing to gain by holding back what little she knew. The only danger in helping him would have been if she had helped Mike to create the diary in April 1992 and didn't know what incriminating evidence he may have stupidly left in his wake when sourcing the raw materials. Mike was never going to admit it, if he had requested the diary in connection with the one he had taken off an electrician's hands. He had already given at least two different accounts of how and when he got it, so you could say she had him over a barrel if he had tried to tell the God's honest truth about the diary for once.

Feldman had bizarre theories, but I trust his account over Anne's. I see no reason why he would tell such an odd lie to his own researcher. And then we have the MI-5 mumbo jumbo.

I don't see it as a deliberate lie on Feldman's part. He told Keith that Anne had confirmed his belief that she wasn't Anne Graham, but we don't know her actual words, so it could have been more a symptom of his own obsessive belief that he was right and was coaxing the truth out of her. Anything she said, or just the way that she said it, could have convinced Feldman that she was admitting to something that she really wasn't. Why could he not have been doing a 'Palmer' and reading too much into her words because he had already decided what she must know? Palmer can't be the only one who sees his own version of the truth in everything that woman said or left unsaid. I trust Feldman to have done much the same, in which case he'd have had no need for lies. He honestly thought he was seeing in Anne what he had been expecting to see.

[caz]

Possibly, but didn't Martin Fido remark that Anne frequently let out 'peels of girlish laughter' whenever she was nervous and wanted to quickly change the subject?

And?

Does that mean she only ever laughed in those circumstances? Might she not have found some of the arguments for a Barrett hoax to be genuinely hilarious?

[Iconoclast]

The reality is that there is no provenance for the Maybrick scrapbook, but that there are three current candidates for it:

1) The Barretts hoaxed it;
2) The Graham family had it in their possession from at least 1950; and
3) The scrapbook was taken from Battlecrease House on March 9, 1992, and found its way to Michael Barrett soon thereafter.

There have been other proposed potential back stories but none have any substance and certainly no evidence to support them.

As I see it, the evidence for each of the three canonical possibilities is as follows:

1) Michael Barrett - at the worst possible time for his credibility - gave an unsupported account of creating the hoax with Anne;
2) Anne and Billy Graham 'testified' that they had owned the scrapbook at various times since at least 1950 and Florence Maybrick used the name 'Florence Graham' on her release from confinement in 1904; and
3) Work was carried out on Battlecrease House on the same day Michael Barrett first notified anyone that he thought he had the 'diary' of Jack the Ripper, Eddie Lyons and Michael Barrett had a common locus in The Saddle pub, and Brian Rawes gave a statement to New Scotland Yard detectives that Eddie Lyons had told him on July 17, 1992, that he had found something important (Rawes even claimed Lyons had called it a diary in his statement though I don't think he ever again said this).

So, what does the evidence tell us? Well, it tells us that none of the canonical three potential provenances can be conclusively ruled in nor ruled out.

Meanwhile, proposed provenance 1 relies fundamentally on Michael Barrett's attempted purchase of a diary from 1880 to 1890 with at least twenty blank pages (and his eventual accepting of a tiny 1891 diary plastered with '1891' on every page and the inside cover). This - to most people - is good enough: the scrapbook looks shoddy and reads 'incorrectly' in places, so Michael Barrett's claims must be true.

And - yet - the 1891 diary is an ambiguous piece of evidence. What it almost certainly does do is rule out potential provenance 2 because there is no good reason to have made the purchase if Tony Devereux had given Michael the scrapbook before the former died on August 8, 1991. This isn't entirely true as it could be claimed that Barrett had the scrapbook but did not want to take the original to London in April so he was seeking a document he (or Anne) could scribble some or more of the actual scrapbook into to test the water at that first meeting. It's a possibility so it can't be ruled out but - for me - it's not a strong possibility (but that's just my opinion).

The other ambiguity lies in Michael potentially holding in his hands a priceless document which might finally reveal the name of the Whitechapel fiend but knowing that it was almost certainly liberated without the legal owner's knowledge. This fear would have presumably preyed on the ex-scrap metal dealer's mind - after all, short of winning the lottery (which would not start for another two and a half years), he had few hopes of ever improving his limited lot - so what could he do? Well, we don't know what options he considered (if any) but the purchase of the 1891 tiny diary is at least strong evidence that one of his options was to secure a Victorian diary he could pass off as the one he had if anyone ever came looking for it. It doesn't matter how much it did or it did not look like the scrapbook. It didn't matter that we might struggle today to think of who might actually come knocking at his door. We aren't holding the winning lottery ticket. He was. All he had to think was that having a genuine Victorian diary with a similar number of blank pages to that of the scrapbook would give him some possibility of keeping hold of the latter if asked about it: "Have you recently come into possession of an old book?", "Yes, I have, and here it is" (handing over 1891 diary).

It doesn't need to make sense to us here in 2025. It didn't need to make sense to anyone else in 1992. It only had to make some sort of sense to Michael Barrett in March 1992 as he held on to an old scrapbook with what appeared to be Jack the Ripper's record of events in. Can we - in all seriousness - say that the same thought would not have occurred to us in the same circumstances?

For me, then, potential provenance 3 is the one which explains most of that which we know for certain (which is very little indeed) about this baffling case.

[caz]

Morning Ike,

Mike could have been prompted by something Anne or Doreen had said at the time, to try and obtain a genuine Victorian "diary", and not just any book with blank pages that was old enough.

If he wasn't giving Anne a straight story of how he got the scrapbook, which was very likely if he lied to Doreen about getting it from Devereux in 1991 because the truth was a whole lot worse, Anne's worry would have been that if he had already blabbed about his "find" down the pub, for instance, he could bring its rightful owner straight back to Goldie Street on the heels of the diary itself - or the police, if it had recently been stolen and Mike had rashly associated himself with it. Mike would have been the one in possession if Anne thought someone was using him in this way. But if she didn't know, because Mike wasn't being straight with her, she might have realised it was better for her personally not to know.

Her question to Mike in February 1993: "Did you nick it, Mike?", asked in front of a group of strangers who had come to Liverpool to investigate the diary's origins, would have come in the 'nick' of time [ha ha], if she had suspected something of the sort back in March 1992, but had wisely kept her trap shut until that moment. Mike's comment about not splitting "on a mate", when Martin Howells was sceptical of the Devereux story and they had just learned about the electrical work done in Dodd's house, gave Anne the ideal opportunity and excuse to get in quick, in case her suspicions were about to be proved correct. She could then claim that the thought had never occurred to her when Mike was showing off the diary in London. She would be protecting herself from accusations of guilty knowledge, knowing there was nowt she could do to protect Mike, if they uncovered evidence to show the diary had indeed been "nicked".

If Anne knew it hadn't been nicked, either because she had given it to him via Devereux or they had faked it together, using a photo album bought legitimately from an awesome auction, what purpose was achieved by her question, apart from annoying Mike and putting him on the defensive, quite unnecessarily?

Love,

Caz
X

[Observer]

But you’re right.

The Ripper was Bury(ied).

So he was. I believe the first hymn sang at the funeral was "The Old Rugged Cross", better known in the East End as "The Old Rugged Lechmere"

[John Wheat]

So he was. I believe the first hymn sang at the funeral was "The Old Rugged Cross", better known in the East End as "The Old Rugged Lechmere"

This is nonsense. Bury may well have been the Ripper. Lechmere and Maybrick no chance whatsoever.

[caz]

And another thing, Ike...

Do you understand Palmer's obsession with the date on Anne's cheque for that 1891 diary? Would he have considered her actions to be any less suspicious if she had signed and dated it on receipt of the diary and a bill for £25? How about when she first learned of its arrival, if this was not on the actual day but later - which for all Palmer knows was the same as the date on the cheque?

I could understand the argument more if Anne had agreed to purchase the red diary before seeing it, or if it had been in any way fit for forgery purposes and could have been beaten into a close second place by the scrapbook. Mike stated in his affidavit that Anne had purchased the red diary, by cheque, for the purpose of creating Maybrick's, but when it arrived it was very small. The implication is that she had paid for this small diary to be sent to Goldie Street, without knowing if it would be fit for its intended purpose. But this could hardly have been further from the truth. Anne did not 'purchase' or pay for it with that purpose in mind, because one look at the bloody thing in all its 1891 splendour, never mind the quality or the width, would tell anyone paying the slightest attention that it was about as unfit for faking Maybrick's diary as a new set of cotton bed sheets would have been. What possible difference would it have made if Anne had been able and willing to sign the cheque promptly at the tail end of March 1992, instead of failing to do so until the middle of May, when the thing she knew she was paying for after delivery was of no possible use for what Mike claimed in 1995 that she had 'purchased' it for?

Anne's only purpose in paying for the red diary at any time was to stop any action being taken against Mike for not having done so himself. She knew what she had been asked to pay for, and Keith knew it too when she handed it over in 1995, and it was nothing that could in anyone's wildest imagination have been used for Maybrick's diary, regardless of how or when it was obtained. From Anne's point of view, deliberately delaying the payment until after the scrapbook had been seen in London could not have made the red diary any less physically suited to a Maybrick hoax than it patently was in any case, so giving a false impression of it being too late to have been obtained for that purpose would smack of overkill, unlike Mike's claim that its diminutive size made it unsuitable, while totally ignoring the 1891 elephant in the room, as if it had slipped his memory if not the elephant's.

Love,

Caz
X

[John Wheat]

And?

Does that mean she only ever laughed in those circumstances? Might she not have found some of the arguments for a Barrett hoax to be genuinely hilarious?

I think it highly unlikely as I've said before the smart money is on the conman, published writer, who was looking for Victorian diaries and his wife to have written the diary. Or has all logic gone out the window?

[Iconoclast]

I could understand the argument more if Anne had agreed to purchase the red diary before seeing it, or if it had been in any way fit for forgery purposes and could have been beaten into a close second place by the scrapbook.

Here's the obvious problem with the affidavit of January 5, 1995 (as if there were only the one!): does anyone seriously think that Anne Barrett would have accepted the 1891 diary without first establishing exactly what she was getting?

The implication is that she had paid for this small diary to be sent to Goldie Street, without knowing if it would be fit for its intended purpose.

And that's my point, it is inconceivable that an intelligent woman with any grip at all on the household's finances would have coughed-up £66 in today's money for something so blatantly inappropriate, regardless of whether or not desperate posters in 2025 feel they can yet spin it so.

I would say that that was simply another of Michael Barrett's lies, but I don't know why I'm saying it because it literally falls on very deaf ears in certain parts around here.

What I would say is that - if Anne Barrett had ordered that diary or if Mike had and she knew about it and either way it was for the creation of a hoaxed Jack the Ripper document - there is no way that she would have allowed it to go unpaid for because an intelligent person in either scenario would realise that that would poke the bear in terms of recall one day. It is far less likely that Martin Earl would have recalled the sale had it gone through smoothly (however 'unusual' he said the request was), and Anne was an intelligent person who would have figured this all out in advance even if her husband might not have.

So, I suggest her anger come May 1992 when she had to write out that cheque was genuinely all about the waste of money that it patently was (by then). Had Mike said to her, "I didn't tell you about it because I didn't think I needed it any longer and I didn't want you to know I didn't get it from Tony Devereux" then she might have relented a little, but that would have required Mike Barrett to avoid lying and it seems he was incapable of doing so before the full stop of any given sentence he ever uttered.

Anne's only purpose in paying for the red diary at any time was to stop any action being taken against Mike for not having done so himself.

Absolutely. She was still his wife in - at very least - name if no longer spirit and she would know the thing had to be paid for or else hubby might pay for it in some other way. But any suspicions on Anne Barrett because of her actions in May 1992? Of course not. None whatsoever.

[Iconoclast]

I think it highly unlikely as I've said before the smart money is on the conman, published writer, who was looking for Victorian diaries and his wife to have written the diary.

Back in 2023, the 'smart money' was on Walter Renwick having cut down the beautiful Sycamore Gap oak tree. He had tree-felling equipment and experience. He lived just eight miles from the scene of the crime (that distance again!). He was very angry at being in the process of being evicted from his property which he had recently described as "like a tree with roots", and he had rented out his land (illegally) to camping visitors to Hadrian's Wall and that very tree.

Yesterday, Adam Carruthers and Daniel Graham from Carlisle (a great deal more than eight miles from the Sycamore Gap tree - some 17 miles further yet, in fact) were sentenced to four years and three months 'prison' (they will serve no more than 40% of this in gaol which is a disgrace, but it is what it is, our gaols are full).

Just a warning from history - the people with the 'smart money' are smarting today ...

Or has all logic gone out the window?

Well, logic said that it had to be Walter Renwick. He was nailed-on for the crime in the press. A bit like Colin Stagg (who was on the common that day) in the Rachel Nickell murder which - it turned out - he didn't do. She died two days before Eddie Lyons famously told Brian Rawes he had found something 'important' as he stood outside Battlecrease House.

Maybe it wasn't logic that 'went out the window' on March 9, 1992?

[John Wheat]

Back in 2023, the 'smart money' was on Walter Renwick having cut down the beautiful Sycamore Gap oak tree. He had tree-felling equipment and experience. He lived just eight miles from the scene of the crime (that distance again!). He was very angry at being in the process of being evicted from his property which he had recently described as "like a tree with roots", and he had rented out his land (illegally) to camping visitors to Hadrian's Wall and that very tree.

Yesterday, Adam Carruthers and Daniel Graham from Carlisle (a great deal more than eight miles from the Sycamore Gap tree - some 17 miles further yet, in fact) were sentenced to four years and three months 'prison' (they will serve no more than 40% of this in gaol which is a disgrace, but it is what it is, our gaols are full).

Just a warning from history - the people with the 'smart money' are smarting today ...



Well, logic said that it had to be Walter Renwick. He was nailed-on for the crime in the press. A bit like Colin Stagg (who was on the common that day) in the Rachel Nickell murder which - it turned out - he didn't do. She died two days before Eddie Lyons famously told Brian Rawes he had found something 'important' as he stood outside Battlecrease House.

Maybe it wasn't logic that 'went out the window' on March 9, 1992?

More guff. I'm not sure what the Sycamore Gap Tree or Colin Stagg have to do with the Diary.

[Iconoclast]

By the way, logic only works when you have one or more premises from which the conclusion must follow.

Premise 1: X is greater than Y
Premise 2: Y is greater than Z
Conclusion: Therefore X is greater than Z

There can be no doubt or ambiguity involved if you wish to invoke logic as your method of research.

Have you ever tried programming in Prolog? It's a declarative programming language where you first define what is possible (that is, what is allowed) and then use code to work out any given problem which is possible to be answered from within those declarations. For me, it is the very epitome of logic - its beauty lies in the fact that ambiguity (at least back in 1987) wasn't permitted. (With AI as advanced as it is now, it's probably now an imperative.)

Premise 1: Every post Wheato doesn't agree with is ridiculous
Premise 2: Wheato never agrees with my posts
Conclusion: This is a ridiculous post.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Considering possibilities with no evidence may be fun, but is ultimately futile.



It's odd that this odd purchase would have been left to become a late payment, if it had represented an attempt, albeit a spectacularly inept one, to source the raw materials needed to fake James Maybrick's diary. Surely it would have been wiser to have asked for more details before ordering it, or to have returned it within the 30 days if the description had been so woefully inadequate that Mike could not have been expecting what he had been sent.

Not so odd that Anne wanted no part of it, since it was undoubtedly connected with another diary that had arrived in Goldie Street in somewhat mysterious circumstances. The trick is knowing which came first.

Keith had no evidence four years later that the diary had been ordered 'pre-Doreen', just because that is what Anne thought she recalled. It is surely to his credit that he didn't assume anything further than the evidence allowed at that time, which was when the 1891 diary was actually paid for by Anne. Mike would have had every opportunity in April 1999 to tell Keith and everyone present that while Anne had paid for it in May 1992, he had begun the search for a suitable diary weeks earlier, when he had just "conned" Doreen into believing he already had Jack the Ripper's. He could have described what he had asked for, and explained why he had received something entirely different, which was uniquely unsuitable for the purpose.



Again, the possibility is not even being considered that Mike's request was bound up with the mysterious circumstances in which he brought the scrapbook home, and may have come about as a direct result of those circumstances, rather than preceding them.



There remains no evidence that Anne felt she was 'over a barrel' in the way Palmer wants her to have been. She saw nothing to lose by helping Keith and nothing to gain by holding back what little she knew. The only danger in helping him would have been if she had helped Mike to create the diary in April 1992 and didn't know what incriminating evidence he may have stupidly left in his wake when sourcing the raw materials. Mike was never going to admit it, if he had requested the diary in connection with the one he had taken off an electrician's hands. He had already given at least two different accounts of how and when he got it, so you could say she had him over a barrel if he had tried to tell the God's honest truth about the diary for once.



I don't see it as a deliberate lie on Feldman's part. He told Keith that Anne had confirmed his belief that she wasn't Anne Graham, but we don't know her actual words, so it could have been more a symptom of his own obsessive belief that he was right and was coaxing the truth out of her. Anything she said, or just the way that she said it, could have convinced Feldman that she was admitting to something that she really wasn't. Why could he not have been doing a 'Palmer' and reading too much into her words because he had already decided what she must know? Palmer can't be the only one who sees his own version of the truth in everything that woman said or left unsaid. I trust Feldman to have done much the same, in which case he'd have had no need for lies. He honestly thought he was seeing in Anne what he had been expecting to see.

Why do you regard it as "odd" that Mike gave himself an extra month to pay for the diary which he was legally obligated to pay for?

Had Mike asked Earl for "more details" before purchasing the diary, Earl would have told him that he couldn't answer any questions about it and would need to go back to the supplier, thus delaying the process. Not helpful if Mike wanted to get cracking on the forgery a.s.a.p.

As I've explained to you more than once, Mike could not have returned the diary within 30 days if it been accurately described. He wasn't given it on approval.

It doesn't matter how many angles you approach this from Caz, Mike's acquisition of the 1891 diary is never going to relieve you of the burden of explaining why he was secretly seeking a Victorian diary with blank pages during March 1992.

As for the "pre-Doreen" comment, Keith's notes of his August 1995 conversation with Anne are ambiguous. Those notes simply say: "Thinks it was pre Doreen....thinks Mike got it by phoning up Yellow Pages...wanted to see what a Victorian diary looked like...". It's not clear what "it" relates to but if Mike had simply wanted to see what a Victorian diary looked like (which we know was not the case) it would have provided an entire explanation for his actions, meaning that the date of purchase was irrelevant.

[John Wheat]

By the way, logic only works when you have one or more premises from which the conclusion must follow.

Premise 1: X is greater than Y
Premise 2: Y is greater than Z
Conclusion: Therefore X is greater than Z

There can be no doubt or ambiguity involved if you wish to invoke logic as your method of research.

Have you ever tried programming in Prolog? It's a declarative programming language where you first define what is possible (that is, what is allowed) and then use code to work out any given problem which is possible to be answered from within those declarations. For me, it is the very epitome of logic - its beauty lies in the fact that ambiguity (at least back in 1987) wasn't permitted. (With AI as advanced as it is now, it's probably now an imperative.)

Premise 1: Every post Wheato doesn't agree with is ridiculous
Premise 2: Wheato never agrees with my posts
Conclusion: This is a ridiculous post.

Whatever. The Diary was not written by Maybrick and was probably written by the Barretts.

[Herlock Sholmes]

The reality is that there is no provenance for the Maybrick scrapbook, but that there are three current candidates for it:

1) The Barretts hoaxed it;
2) The Graham family had it in their possession from at least 1950; and
3) The scrapbook was taken from Battlecrease House on March 9, 1992, and found its way to Michael Barrett soon thereafter.

There have been other proposed potential back stories but none have any substance and certainly no evidence to support them.

As I see it, the evidence for each of the three canonical possibilities is as follows:

1) Michael Barrett - at the worst possible time for his credibility - gave an unsupported account of creating the hoax with Anne;
2) Anne and Billy Graham 'testified' that they had owned the scrapbook at various times since at least 1950 and Florence Maybrick used the name 'Florence Graham' on her release from confinement in 1904; and
3) Work was carried out on Battlecrease House on the same day Michael Barrett first notified anyone that he thought he had the 'diary' of Jack the Ripper, Eddie Lyons and Michael Barrett had a common locus in The Saddle pub, and Brian Rawes gave a statement to New Scotland Yard detectives that Eddie Lyons had told him on July 17, 1992, that he had found something important (Rawes even claimed Lyons had called it a diary in his statement though I don't think he ever again said this).

So, what does the evidence tell us? Well, it tells us that none of the canonical three potential provenances can be conclusively ruled in nor ruled out.

Meanwhile, proposed provenance 1 relies fundamentally on Michael Barrett's attempted purchase of a diary from 1880 to 1890 with at least twenty blank pages (and his eventual accepting of a tiny 1891 diary plastered with '1891' on every page and the inside cover). This - to most people - is good enough: the scrapbook looks shoddy and reads 'incorrectly' in places, so Michael Barrett's claims must be true.

And - yet - the 1891 diary is an ambiguous piece of evidence. What it almost certainly does do is rule out potential provenance 2 because there is no good reason to have made the purchase if Tony Devereux had given Michael the scrapbook before the former died on August 8, 1991. This isn't entirely true as it could be claimed that Barrett had the scrapbook but did not want to take the original to London in April so he was seeking a document he (or Anne) could scribble some or more of the actual scrapbook into to test the water at that first meeting. It's a possibility so it can't be ruled out but - for me - it's not a strong possibility (but that's just my opinion).

The other ambiguity lies in Michael potentially holding in his hands a priceless document which might finally reveal the name of the Whitechapel fiend but knowing that it was almost certainly liberated without the legal owner's knowledge. This fear would have presumably preyed on the ex-scrap metal dealer's mind - after all, short of winning the lottery (which would not start for another two and a half years), he had few hopes of ever improving his limited lot - so what could he do? Well, we don't know what options he considered (if any) but the purchase of the 1891 tiny diary is at least strong evidence that one of his options was to secure a Victorian diary he could pass off as the one he had if anyone ever came looking for it. It doesn't matter how much it did or it did not look like the scrapbook. It didn't matter that we might struggle today to think of who might actually come knocking at his door. We aren't holding the winning lottery ticket. He was. All he had to think was that having a genuine Victorian diary with a similar number of blank pages to that of the scrapbook would give him some possibility of keeping hold of the latter if asked about it: "Have you recently come into possession of an old book?", "Yes, I have, and here it is" (handing over 1891 diary).

It doesn't need to make sense to us here in 2025. It didn't need to make sense to anyone else in 1992. It only had to make some sort of sense to Michael Barrett in March 1992 as he held on to an old scrapbook with what appeared to be Jack the Ripper's record of events in. Can we - in all seriousness - say that the same thought would not have occurred to us in the same circumstances?

For me, then, potential provenance 3 is the one which explains most of that which we know for certain (which is very little indeed) about this baffling case.

If this is supposed to be your explanation of why Mike was seeking a Victorian diary with blank pages, the first thing to note is that it has nothing to do with plausible deniability. Because in this scenario Mike is denying nothing. He is admitting to being in possession of a stolen diary and is handing it back to its rightful owner, or, rather, in your bizarre scenario, to "anyone" who came asking for it, whether they could prove it was theirs or not.

The second thing to note about it is that it entirely fails to explain why Mike was seeking a Victorian diary with a minimum of 20 blank pages. You say that he was intending to hand over a diary with "a similar number of blank pages." I'm going to leave aside that Mike's request wasn't for a diary with a similar number of pages as the Ripper diary because, I suppose, he could have ripped out any additional blank pages. And I'm going to ignore the fact that Mike's request expressly excluded any diary with the same number of pages as the Ripper diary because I know you will tell me, without shame, that he couldn't count from 1 to 17. The real problem is that you don't explain why he could possibly have thought that the only thing that "anyone" who asked him about the diary would know about it was that it had about 20 blank pages but would not have known that it was in a large black leather photograph album or scrapbook which contained 63 pages of writing signed Jack the Ripper. The idea of the blank pages being, in Mike's mind, the only identifying feature of the diary, so that he could pass any other Victorian diary off as the stolen Jack the Ripper diary, regardless of size, colour and contents, as long as it contained 20 blank pages, is so absurd and ridiculous that it can't be given any credence whatsoever.

Your question: "Can we - in all seriousness - say that the same thought would not have occurred to us in the same circumstances?" has to be a joke.

I mean, let's just consider what you are saying Mike was planning to do. He was planning to admit to being in posession of a stolen diary for no apparent reason (when he could simply have denied knowing anything about it) and thought he could fob off any enquirer - who could only realistically be the police - with another diary which looked absolutely nothing like the stolen diary. I mean, seriously?

Not only is the police officer, or other person asking about the diary, going to immediately say "That's not the stolen diary, it looks nothing like it, I don't care how many blank pages it has", but, by handing over an obvious substitute, Mike has now put himself bang in the frame by admitting that he is in posession of a stolen diary. It will then immediately be apparent that he is hiding the real stolen diary. There could be no other explanation for his behaviour.

So, no, Ike, none if us would have had the same thought in the same circumstances. What you are saying is incomprehensible madness.

Not many people put forward a theory while, at the same time, saying, "It doesn't need to make sense". Sorry, Ike, but yes it does need to make sense. You only remind me more of South Park's Johnnie Cochran who, in putting forward the Chewbacca Defence, said: "Ladies and gentlemen! I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense....No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor you must acquit! The defence rests". That's you that is, Ike. A complete joke.