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

[caz]

The Maybrick Will -- The Crucial Key to a Shabby Hoax
Melvin Harris

I first saw the 'Maybrick Diary' long after 'the experts and advisors' had had their say. But before seeing it I made three predictions; it would be written in a simple iron-gall ink, which could not be dated; it would be written in an old journal with its front pages torn out; the handwriting would not match the known handwriting of James Maybrick. With time all three forecasts proved correct, but when first shown this document I was assured by Paul Feldman that no significant examples of Maybrick's handwriting existed. There was just one signature on his marriage lines, but nothing else:--"We have checked."

Harris also claimed that the Barretts were the handlers and placers of a document forged by others, and that the forger was most probably schooled in the 1930s.

How about his predictions that it would be written in an old 'journal' and the ink could not be dated?

I've always seen it as a bizarre and desperate argument. Pointing out the handwriting doesn't even match is like saying, "the forgery is so bad it must not be a forgery! No one would risk it."

I tend to agree with this - don't faint! I have always said that the handwriting sticks out to me as the only factor anyone should ever have needed to argue against it being an original document by James Maybrick - and yet here we are, drowning in a sea of weaker arguments made in support of the same conclusion.

It's like a forensic scientist, who had DNA evidence ruling out a murder suspect back in 1992, spending the next 30 plus years looking for more and more reasons to defend his original, unassailable 'not guilty' conclusion.

Puts me in mind of Baxendale again, making nigrosine his killer blow, that made the diary 'likely' to have originated since 1945, and not his famous solubility test, if that ought to have date stamped it conclusively to not a day before 1992.

Midsomer Murders: Dr Fleur Perkins is called to a male found dead one morning in his arm chair. She finds an empty pork chop wrapper in the kitchen bin, with a use-by date of two months ago, and reports to Barnaby that she considers it 'likely' that the victim's wife has poisoned him with out-of-date meat. But the wife has already told him that she froze the chops after purchase and had eaten her chop with no adverse effects after thawing and cooking them both.

D'oh! Poor old Fleur. Perhaps she should have made more in her report of the cup of tea, half empty and still warm, which she found bedside the corpse's arm chair, smelling strongly of bitter almonds. If only she had not poured it down the sink.

P.S. Oh, and I'm still waiting to hear about Mike "immediately" submitting the diary to forensic tests. I've been following the diary debacle for 20 years and this is the first I've heard of such tests. It will be fascinating to learn about them.

Palmer will be waiting a long while, since I have seen nobody claiming that Mike immediately submitted the diary to 'forensic tests'.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Herlock thought Mike would be expecting the diary to be 'authenticated',

Sorry Caz, but this is a complete misrepresentation of what I said.

All I said (see my #165), was that, " I would have thought that any forger worth his or her salt would have wanted it looked at and authenticated as soon as possible."

As you can see, I used the word "wanted" not "expected".

It was you who introduced the word "expected" into the discussion, in your #265, when you said, "even someone like Mike Barrett could not have expected his wife's 'blind' forgery to be authenticated as Maybrick's handiwork from 1888/9."

In response (#259), I simply asked you why someone like Mike Barrett could not have expected it to be authenticated. When you replied in #364, you said that if I couldn't work it out myself "then I really can't help you".

At no time, therefore, have I ever said that I thought Mike Barrett would be expecting the diary to be authenticated. All I've suggested, hypothetically, is that if he was the forger (and one worth his salt), he would surely have wanted it to be authenticated. As I said in my #187, for a forger, that is "the dream scenario".

It’s simpler if we stick to what was actually said Caz

[caz]

Hi Herlock,

I don't want to drag you into my longstanding argument with Caroline Brown, and I've put her on 'ignore' to keep the peace moving forward (and I hope she has reciprocated) but since you quoted her, I was able to see her post, and I really do feel the need to respond to her remarkable attempt at rewriting history:

"The very fact that Mike brought the diary 'into the light', and immediately invited the experts to examine it, makes me highly sceptical that he'd have done this knowing he was 'perpetuating a hoax', especially if his wife had only just finished dotting the i's and crossing the t's - which appears to be the only working Barrett theory these days."

Hold the phone, here. Who are these experts Mike invited to examine the diary? What are their names and qualifications? Doreen Montgomery, a literary agent, was a forensic document examiner?

Does the above description bear any resemblance to what actually took place?

We currently have two examples of men who, in all probability, acquired hoaxes created by someone else. No one believes they are the hoaxers.

Tim Atkinson bought the 'Tilly' letter on eBay. What did he do with it? Mr. Atkinson invited experts (or at least people he believed to be experts) to examine the letter, including a scientist at Liverpool John Moore University who made an analysis.

Barrett, by contrast, did nothing of the kind.

Similarly, some years ago Russell Edwards obtained the dubious 'Eddowes' shawl and consulted various experts, including an expert on silk dying and Dr. Jari Louhelainen, a scientist at the same Liverpool university. Only then did Edwards publish his book.

Again, Barrett didn't do anything even remotely similar.

Rather than 'immediately inviting the experts to examine' the diary, Barrett called up a literary agent in London with the obvious intention of getting the diary published as well as to tell his story of how it has affected his life. According to Maurice Chittenden, Barrett had previously contacted various publishers. Not forensic experts--publishers.

There is not a jot of evidence that Barrett ever submitted the diary to any forensic examinations at all. It was Robert Smith and Shirley Harrison who consulted Dr. David Baxendale after they decided to move forward with publication.

Indeed, Barrett later complained that he was a greenhorn about such things and also pissed and moaned bitterly that he was charged for his share for various forensic tests. Unlike Atkinson or Edwards, Barrett hadn't even taken the diary to an auction house to get a non-expert opinion.

My apology for the interruption, but one really ought to stick to the facts. I guess I'll just have to stop reading altogether.

Ciao.

P.S. I also think the insinuation that Barrett wasn't a risk taker is a deeply misguided one--if that is indeed what is being insinuated. Isn't this the same Mike Barrett who mugged an old lady in broad daylight and was almost immediately captured? And the mastermind behind the 'Loot' magazine scam. If I didn't know it was John, I'd think Barrett's middle-name was Audacious.

A bit of housekeeping is required here:

I was referring to what happened on 13th April 1992, because Mike did invite two relevant experts to give their professional opinions on the diary that very day. I didn't claim these were forensic examinations, and it would be nitpicking to point out that it was Shirley's idea. Mike went along with it, not knowing who might be shown the diary, what qualifications and experience they would have, what tests they might be able to carry out on the spot and what they would make of it. If his wife had only just put the finishing touches to the handwriting, what expectations could Mike have had, realistically, of coming away with one, let alone two initially positive reactions? Herlock thought Mike would be expecting the diary to be 'authenticated', so who did Mike think would be doing the authenticating? Doreen's cat?

As I wrote previously, Mike was a 'chancer' [I don't know how Palmer translated this as not a risk taker], so while he could have bluffed his way out of letting Shirley take the diary anywhere else on 13th April, if he thought the 'freshness' of the ink might have been a dead giveaway - he could hardly have Googled it - and insisted on total confidentiality until he knew her and Doreen better and could fully entrust them with it, he couldn't have expected it not to be subjected to testing when he was relying on someone else to invest in it financially. Mike didn't have a pot to piss in, did he?

According to Palmer, Maurice Chittenden claimed that Mike had 'contacted various publishers' before finally phoning a literary agent on 9th March 1992. That might have suited Palmer's argument regarding Mike's approach, but what Chittenden actually wrote was this: "For months he haunted the publishing houses of London, clutching a dusty black ledger in his hand". Had Mike named any of them, Chittenden could have checked easily enough. Pan Books had no record of Mike's telephone call, making it more likely that Chittenden would have pressed him for the names of who else he had contacted, although I suspect the answer would have been: "I don't remember."

Palmer would doubtless have been a very happy bunny if he'd had confirmation of any other telephone calls about the diary prior to 9th March 1992, but if one of these London publishing houses had a record of a visit by Mike in person, clutching the diary, and leaving again two minutes later with a "thanks but no thanks" ringing in his ears - which is what Chittenden was implying - then it would be going, going, gone for the Awesome Auction Activists along with the Battlecrease Buglers, and we'd all be left scratching around for a new theory.

[Iconoclast]

My apologies. I've done it again. I'm going to have to start posting directly rather than typing into Pages and then cutting and pasting because I've just re-posted something I'd already posted after I'd had to change it. I was thrown a little by Ike's reference to Barretts father until I realised that I'd given the wrong time stamp.

A lesson to me to not post whilst doing other things

I see you have now spotted what actually occurred. Skip the Pages, mate - just type into the editor like the rest of us ...

[Iconoclast]

Can we just stick with the handwriting point please, Ike? What's Barrett's father got to do with that?

So desperate to make my posts seem irrational or meaningless! Such an Orsam/RJ trick. At 11.14am TODAY, you quoted me from my post at 10.47pm YESTERDAY (#472) in which I was simply saying that at 23:58 in the tape you were quoting from, Barrett appears to be telling Gray that his (Barrett's) father had died. You then realised your error because you replied at 11.24pm YESTERDAY (#475) to say:

Apologies, Ike, I mis-typed. That should have been from 24:58 on the tape.

So, yesterday, you directed us all to 23:58 in the tape and I pointed out at 10.47pm that that told us nothing to which you replied half an hour later acknowledging that you had made a mistake and that you should have typed 24:58. But this morning, you asked 'What's Barrett's father got to do with that?' as if I was some sort of imbecile!

I don't have a crystal ball so I couldn't know at 10.47pm last evening that you had made a mistake.

Seriously, you need to get your arguments (euphemism for what I first typed) together, man - you're all over the place.

[Herlock Sholmes]

My apologies. I've done it again. I'm going to have to start posting directly rather than typing into Pages and then cutting and pasting because I've just re-posted something I'd already posted after I'd had to change it. I was thrown a little by Ike's reference to Barretts father until I realised that I'd given the wrong time stamp.

A lesson to me to not post whilst doing other things

[Herlock Sholmes]

This is no wind-up, but it is too late in the evening to resolve it. Linder dated it as November 5 but I had recalled it as November 4. On the latter tape at 23:58, I can only hear Barrett telling Gray that his (Barrett's) father had passed away the night before?

Can we just stick with the handwriting point please, Ike? What's Barrett's father got to do with that?

I've persevered with the inaudible recording of 5th November. At 50 minutes, Gray appears to be typing out a statement on Barrett's behalf. You can hear the banging of the typewriter keys. He reads out one line which can, miraculously, just about be heard. It says: "My wife, Anne, wrote the Jack the Ripper diary, the actual manuscript".

How is that in any way consistent with Barrett saying, on the very same day according to Linder, that the handwriting was fifty-fifty? It makes no sense, Ike. He couldn't have been saying that he wrote half of the manuscript in view of what is in the statement. It must be a misunderstanding of the words "fifty fifty" by Seth Linder.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I'm about to try to unravel where the error is here and it's probably going to take me some time but - before I start - can I just remind my dear readers that what I actually said was:



I'm not denying for a moment that I thought (and still think it may have been) the recording on November 4, but - by the same token - I did not 'identify' it as the correct one; I simply stated that I recalled it being the November 4 tape.

This is not a huge point but points like this can later be used against you here on the Casebook if they are not clarified immediately.

Yes, but Ike, when I asked you if the recording was available, all you did was give me a link to 15 audio recordings without further comment and without identifying the one I should be listening to, let alone the time stamp. The only information I had to go on was your belief that it was November 4th. So that's the one I listened to. What else was I supposed to do?

I had to listen to the entire 47 minute recording to discover it wasn't there. But I've now also listened to the entire inaudible one-and-a-half-hour recording on November 5th and I can't hear it in there either. So where is it? If Seth Linder thought he did hear this being said, it makes me wonder if he misheard because I can't see how it's possible to get an accurate transcript from that recording.

You do also rely quite a lot on your memory for quotes which often seem to turn out to be wrong. Might it not be a good idea to check your facts before posting? Over the years I’ve made this mistakes numerous times when I’ve assumed that I’m remembering correctly leading me to not bother checking.

Nothing really makes sense of the Gray/Barrett exchange, especially because I can't see how a letter "Y" written by Barrett could have been confused by Gray with a letter in the diary. Barrett's child-like handwriting that I've seen doesn't look anything like the diary handwriting. Do you see the problem?

And have you actually ever heard this exchange yourself or have you always been relying on Seth Linder's summary transcription of it?

[Iconoclast]

I've just listened to all 47 minutes of the recording of November 4, 1994 which is the one you identified in #466 as being the correct one. The exchange in question is definitely not on there.

I'm about to try to unravel where the error is here and it's probably going to take me some time but - before I start - can I just remind my dear readers that what I actually said was:

This was from Seth Linder's transcription which was a mix of transcription and summary from him; however, I have heard the tape (Linder lists it as Barrett-Gray, November 5, 1994, but I seem to recall it was the day before) ...

I'm not denying for a moment that I thought (and still think it may have been) the recording on November 4, but - by the same token - I did not 'identify' it as the correct one; I simply stated that I recalled it being the November 4 tape.

This is not a huge point but points like this can later be used against you here on the Casebook if they are not clarified immediately.

[Lombro2]

I've done a lot of debunking in the course of doing research but I never went into things in order to debunk. Boy, have I been missing out! It's actually quite enjoyable and much easier. You hardly have to do any research at all. Just peruse what's already there and pick the choicest cherries of nonsense.

Now I can enjoy hoaxes and hoaxers like a real debunker.... MB--the gift that keeps on giving.

Wow! This winter is just going to fly!

[Lombro2]

So was she disguising her hand or was she schizoid like a serial killer with multiple handwriting like a serial killer?

Well, I think the latter makes more sense. I think Anna Koren was right about the "multiple" and she plucked it out of the air without prior knowledge. Feldman would have to be an idiot to tell the Israeli graphologist that this was the diary of a businessman (Gentile or Jew?) who was Jack the Ripper if he didn't want to get a false positive for forgery.

[Herlock Sholmes]

This is no wind-up, but it is too late in the evening to resolve it. Linder dated it as November 5 but I had recalled it as November 4. On the latter tape at 23:58, I can only hear Barrett telling Gray that his (Barrett's) father had passed away the night before?

Apologies, Ike, I mis-typed. That should have been from 24:58 on the tape.

I've persevered with the inaudible recording of 5th November. At 50 minutes, Gray appears to be typing out a statement on Barrett's behalf. You can hear the banging of the typewriter keys. He reads out one line which can, miraculously, just about be heard. It says: "My wife, Anne, wrote the Jack the Ripper diary, the actual manuscript".

How is that in any way consistent with Barrett saying, on the very same day according to Linder, that the handwriting was fifty-fifty? It makes no sense, Ike. He couldn't have been saying that he wrote half of the manuscript in view of what is in the statement. It must be a misunderstanding of the words "fifty fifty" by Seth Linder.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Herlock -

Go to the 4 November tape

Is it just me, or do we hear the following exchange starting at 24:58?

Alan G: So, who's handwriting is it?

Mike B: That's the whole point.

AG: Who's handwriting is it?

MB: Anne's.

Alan G: Exactly...

Cheers, RP

Yes, you are absolutely right Roger. I meant to type 24:58 earlier, not 23:58. And then a minute or two later, Gray asks how she did the handwriting and Barrett says, "Easy. She just wrote slow on some occasions".

All entirely consistent with Barrett saying his wife wrote the diary on her own

[Iconoclast]

I've just listened to all 47 minutes of the recording of November 4, 1994 which is the one you identified in #466 as being the correct one. The exchange in question is definitely not on there.
However, at 23:58, Gray asks Barrett whose handwriting was in the diary and Mike says it's Anne's. Gray then asks him "How did she do the handwriting?" to which Barrett replies: "Easy. She just wrote very slow on some occasions".

This is no wind-up, but it is too late in the evening to resolve it. Linder dated it as November 5 but I had recalled it as November 4. On the latter tape at 23:58, I can only hear Barrett telling Gray that his (Barrett's) father had passed away the night before?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Granted, it reads a lot less revealingly now that you've skipped the crucial line: ' ‘You said Anne did it. You're still saying it’s all her handwriting?'

Check it out, Maybrick sticky:

https://forum.casebook.org/forum/ripper-discussions/suspects/maybrick-james/828407-alan-gray-michael-barrett-cassette-recordings-1994-1996

It's very clear that Barrett has replied to Gray without thinking, Gray thus asks Barrett an awkward question, and Barrett realises he's cocked-up so he changes the story's tack (as ever he did), making the handwriting an equal effort between the two. Remember, he's got Alan Gray telling himself that Barrett is the author of the scrapbook text and Barrett jumps too quickly on what he thinks is an open goal when - in reality - he's facing a very uncomfortable own goal. Gray states that Barrett wrote the manuscript and Barrett happily concurs before realising his mistake and immediately retracting and in the process showing himself to be the liar that he unquestionably was.

Is this a wind-up Ike?

I've just listened to all 47 minutes of the recording of November 4, 1994 which is the one you identified in #466 as being the correct one. The exchange in question is definitely not on there.

However, at 23:58, Gray asks Barrett whose handwriting was in the diary and Mike says it's Anne's. Gray then asks him "How did she do the handwriting?" to which Barrett replies: "Easy. She just wrote very slow on some occasions".

I then tried to listen to the recording of November 5, 1994, which is the one you tell me Seth Linder identified, but it's totally inaudible. It sounds like it’s recorded at the wrong speed so I'm wondering how you managed to listen to this yourself. Are you absolutely sure you've heard it? Is there another version or maybe you're misrememberiing?

I know that in the written extract you provided, Gray is recorded by Seth Linder as having said "You're still saying it's all her handwriting". But, in the recording I heard, Barrett doesn't always listen properly to what Gray is saying. If Gray was overspeaking, Barrett could easily have been continuing with his original answer, not responding to what Gray was saying. That's the problem. That's why I need to hear the original recording but, it seems, I can't. If you insist it's on one of those tapes at the link you've provided, could you please identify it for me?