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

[Lombro2]

Caz asked for examples of people who created a hoax and then peddled it themselves. How about Rick Dyer?

Have you seen Bigfoot? - Gainesville Times Bigfoot Hunter-Hoaxer Takes Corpse-Bear Rug On Tour - ABC News

I would never do that publicly unless it was encased in ice. I usually just throw my hoaxes out the car window as I'm driving by, hit the gas, and let someone else deal with them.

There's a seamless narrative with those guys and with me. If Michael spoke of UFOs and Mindspeak and implants, I would find it more believable than what we have so far. That's one mention of James visiting his doctor in London in 1889 in Tales of Liverpool. What a Eureka moment!

[rjpalmer]

If Michael spoke of UFOs and Mindspeak and implants, I would find it more believable than what we have so far.

I have no doubt you would, Markus. Of course, there's always Anne Graham telling Feldman she was a member of MI-5, so that's a start...

Hoax hunting in Liverpool is a lot like tracking Sasquatch...just follow the scat...

[Lombro2]

Now we just have to differentiate if the spoor leads to a Rick Dyer forger or a Fritz Stiefel fence.

Michael Barrett can't really be compared to Mark Hoffman. He can be compared to Rick Dyer if he was a Hoaxer but Dyer's story makes sense in the context of his Hoax and so does his motive. He wanted to make people happy. That's one possible motive here. It doesn't work for the Diary. Is forging a Ripper Diary the best way to make money?

But some forgers make hoaxes to try to "prove" a theory they believe in. The Piltdown guy believe in missing links and Pierre Plantard believed he was the King of France. Maybe a serial killer diary IS the best thing to fake since it's virtually unknown territory.

It's the start of a seamless narrative. To compete with Caz's Patsy Theory which is very seamless, so seamless that the only arguments, thrown at her, work for a fence as much as a forger, if not more so. That's when the scat hits the fan.

PS That's Patsy not Patty.

[Iconoclast]

In his January 5, 1995 affidavit, Michael Barrett swore on oath the following was true:

Since December 1993 I have been trying, through the press, the Publishers, the Author of the Book, Mrs Harrison, and my Agent Doreen Montgomery to expose the fraud of ' The Diary of Jack the Ripper ' ("the diary").

Critical question: Does anyone know what these suddenly repentant efforts were between December 1993 and June 1994?

I can't understand why we have no record of Barrett's confessions to the press, the publishers, Shirley Harrison, and Doreen Montgomery prior to June 1994. I would have to more thoroughly check my 800+ folders of information on the Maybrick case to see if my memory is lacking here, but I'm feeling reasonably confident that the first we all heard of it was in June 1994 - around six months after his beloved wife Anne had left him taking his precious daughter Caroline with her.

So, I guess I'm asking people to dig deep and try to remember the numerous articles he had published from December 1993 - after all, that was the method he finally chose in June 1994, the method with the widest reach, and one for which his contacts (as an ex-professional journalist, remember) should have made this the easiest and most obvious way to purge his soul of his terrible sense of guilt.

Ike

[Iconoclast]

In his January 5, 1995 affidavit, Michael Barrett swore on oath the following was true:

Since December 1993 I have been trying, through the press, the Publishers, the Author of the Book, Mrs Harrison, and my Agent Doreen Montgomery to expose the fraud of ' The Diary of Jack the Ripper ' ("the diary").

Critical question: If Barrett had suddenly become so repentant, why did he spend the proceeds of the book sale from December 1993 onwards?

I will need to check my records to see how much - if anything - he was paid during and after December 1993. Maybe it was nothing. But if it was something, anything, why did he spend it? In his many communications with the press, the publishers, Shirley Harrison, and Doreen Montgomery prior to June 1994 as he desperately - and heroically - strove to stop in its tracks the fraud he had started, why did he not include his payment cheques - uncashed - as a measure of just how serious he was about making good the crime he had allowed to be committed when his scribblings were published in October 1993?

Ike

[Iconoclast]

In his January 5, 1995 affidavit, Michael Barrett swore on oath the following was true:

The idea of the Diary came from discussion between Tony Devereux, Anne Barrett my wife and myself, there came a time when I believed such a hoax was a distinct possbility. We looked closely at the background of James Maybrick and I read everything to do with the Jack the Ripper matter. I felt Maybrick was an ideal candidate for Jack the Ripper. Most important of all, he could not defend himself. He was not 'Jack the Ripper' of that I am certain, but, times, places, visits to London and all that fitted. It was to [sic] easey [sic].

I told my wife Anne Barrett, I said, "Anne I'll write a best seller here, we can't fail".

Critical question: When Mike Barrett made that astonishingly bold claim to his wife Ann, he didn’t have a scrap of the scrapbook started so what made him so confident of such success?

He had read everything he could find on the Ripper, but he didn’t have the scrapbook, the ink, nor a story to transcribe - he had nothing of what would become the end product - so what exactly made him think that what he planned to write would be a best-seller? He had no history of forging and only the most trifling ‘career’ as a ‘professional journalist’. How could he have - even just 'optimistically' - thought he and Ann and Tony had what it takes to create a document which would cause such argument and debate over thirty years and counting?

Did he - indeed - ever say to Ann, "Anne I'll write a best seller here, we can't fail” and - if he did - is it possible that he had simply incorporated into his affidavit a little reality - twisted, of course, severely twisted - where in truth he had genuinely said these words to Ann but only once he had what we all now know as the final product in his excited hands?

Ike

[Iconoclast]

You do not need to believe that the Maybrick scrapbook is genuine in the process of agreeing that there is not one scintilla of categorical evidence that Mike Barrett (and therefore Ann Graham) had anything whatsoever to do with the creation of it.

I understand fully that Barrett is the easey [sic] answer to the quandary of who - in your opinion - created this clever hoax which has bedevilled us for over thirty years now, and I understand that you will not have any idea whatsoever who could have done so, when, and why if you accept that there is no categorical evidence against Barrett. I understand, therefore, that the Barrett option is actually highly attractive even without categorical evidence because it permits you to declare the scrapbook a hoax without the need to do any more thinking about it than that.

The Maybrick scrapbook could be a hoax. I - and I seem to stand alone in this but that doesn't bother me - believe it is almost certainly authentic (see my remarkable Society's Pillar update when it is posted here). But what I can say with categorical certainty is that there is not a single piece of categorical evidence which proves that Barrett created a hoax. For your hoaxer, you need to look elsewhere, but I understand that that requires a massive amount of effort and commitment and I don't think anyone who posts here or reads here has that motivation.

For what I trust are obvious reasons, I won't be doing so either ...

Ike

[Iconoclast]

In his January 5, 1995 affidavit, Mike Barrett had the perfect opportunity to enumerate a long list of where he got his references from which he used in his hoaxed scrapbook but - instead - he seemed to deliberately focus on aspects of his 'creation' which were patently untrue. I wonder why that was?

If you or I had done what Barrett claimed to do, there is a good chance that our January 5, 1995 affidavits would have included:

"I got the reference to 'Punch' from the back of Fido (1987)".
"I got the reference to 'left my mark' from Fido (1987)".
"I spotted that 'Juwes' looked a bit like 'James' when I saw the GSG in [wherever]".
Et cetera.

There must have been many other references which he could have included which would have given us some degree of confidence that he had indeed been aware of a number of Ripper-related books but he chose to focus on things which he 'did' or which 'happened' which were simply untrue. It's almost as though he was - deep down - trying to show the world how little he knew and how little he had actually wanted to create that affidavit.

No?

Ike

[erobitha]

I can see a fairly clear "M" on the wall in the first photo (Farson) but the "letter" on its left looks like a stylized "P" or even a Mordic rune. It mostly looks like a blotch of grimy blood splatter.

In the second photo, much the same, except smaller. The supposed "F" looks even more like a blotch.

Just a quick question: How can your arteries create spray if you have no pulse?

[Iconoclast]

One of the criticisms levelled against the case for James Maybrick - and, of course, many have been thought-up to try to disprove its potential authenticity - is that it is 'preposterous' to suggest that the 'Juwes' in the GSG were actually a simple cypher for 'James' and that James Maybrick therefore could have written the GSG as a 'funny Jewish joke' which he then mentioned in his scrapbook.

Many people on here iterate Martin Fido's original criticism (in Paul Feldman's video) but one person who noticeably did not (to my knowledge - I'm open to being corrected here as it won't make one iota to my underlying point) was that doyen of anti-scrapbookism, Melvin 'The Viper' Harris. I wonder why he would be so unexpectedly lenient over an opportunity to pile in ahead of the pile-in.

Hmmm ...

In his 1994 book which apparently sold very badly, almost certainly because of the attention being paid to Shirley Harrison's original text on Maybrick which Harris had invested so much effort in dismissing (because - as we know - he had loads of integrity just before he published a competing book about Jack the Ripper), Harris quoted his candidate Robert Donston Stephenson as claiming the following regarding the word 'Juwes' in the GSG:

[p112, The True Face of Jack the Ripper] "Now place a dot over The Third Upstroke (which dot was naturally overlooked by lantern light) and we get, plainly The Juives which, I need not tell you, is the French word for Jews".

Goodness, could it be any more obscure? But Harris is more than happy to keep quoting Stephenson's claims:

[p114] "Inspection at once shows us, then, that a dot has been overlooked by the constable who copied it, as might easily occur, especially if it were placed at some distance, after the manner of foreigners ... Therefore we place a dot above the third upstroke in the word Juwes, and we find it to be Juives, which is the French word for Jews. Strictly Juives and grammatically speaking, of course, it is the feminine form of Juifs and means 'Jewesses'."

Harris does not challenge Stephenson's self-fulfilling logic. Stephenson states, "Inspection at once shows us, then, that a dot has been overlooked by the constable who copied it, as might easily occur, especially if it were placed at some distance, after the manner of foreigners". If the dot was overlooked, how can it be said to have ever been there? This is simply a means for Stephenson to attempt to shoehorn in a dot which was not written down therefore could not be said to have been 'overlooked'. It was only overlooked if was there in the first place and if - therefore - it was meant to read 'Juives' which is what Stephenson wants us to believe.

Harris is happy to publish this errant nonsense and use it as part of his case against Stephenson. How many of us can recall the torrent of abuse which came his way at making such an unsustainable argument in order to pursue a point? Harris felt it was in line with his excessive integrity to do so therefore Harris - the original antiscrapbookist - must have found it equally acceptable to interpret 'Juwes' as a clever little cypher for 'James'.

Ike

[Pcdunn]

Just a quick question: How can your arteries create spray if you have no pulse?

Logically, they were created from the neck, when she *did* have a pulse. The medico's report does say the blood on the wall were "in a line with the neck", as quoted by another poster.