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

[caz]

Hi Caz,

I don't know any forgers personally so your question is impossible to answer but surely loads of art forgeries get wrongly authenticated. For the forger, that's the dream scenario, isn't it?

Are you saying that forgers don't want their forgeries looked at as soon as possible? And that they don't want someone to pronounce that their forgery is genuine?

If so, what do you think forgers do with their forgeries after completing them? And what do they want to happen to them?

I was being a tease, Herlock, because even someone like Mike Barrett could not have expected his wife's 'blind' forgery to be authenticated as Maybrick's handiwork from 1888/9. According to the Barrett theory, it wasn't even an attempt by Anne to deceive anyone, but a piece of creative fiction which Mike evidently thought he could pinch and pass off as a genuine confession by JM/JtR. How on earth he could have been remotely confident, let alone 'entirely satisfied' that what she had put into the diary's creation would not immediately be seen for what it was, is a question that no doubt Palmer feels most qualified to answer, but 'mental vegetable' sounds quite an apt description for anyone who would seriously present their wife's intentionally fictional story, hoping it would be mistaken for anything else. I mean, who does that in the real world? Has anyone heard of a comparable example?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

One notes that Diary Defenders usually portray the risk to Barrett’s as immense, like some personal calamity would befall them and they would be imprisoned and lose their home and child and everything, were the forgery exposed early.

In truth, nothing would have happened. They would have been out what - 25-50 pounds and some personal embarrassment - since no one knew about the scam.
But it’s always presented like oh so risky, Diary Defenders using their own comfort zone to argue how difficult the scam would have seemed to them.

When in fact it was easy and the people involved personally profited from not questioning the diary closely.
As some of them still do.

Well, I guess the Barretts had their trusty crystal ball to tell them that they couldn't fail, as seasoned forger Konrad Kujau had failed ten years previously and been imprisoned.

As for 'some of them' still personally profiting from not questioning the diary closely, it would be odd if anyone wanted that to be the case, just so they could complain about it, so it would make a nice change to have names, because I don't know of anyone who has personally made a net profit in recent years from anything connected with the diary - which ought to be a comfort if true.

Love,

Caz
X

[Herlock Sholmes]

Love it. I'm not sure if Herlock meant to provide an argument for his hoaxer not wanting the handwriting to look like Maybrick's, but it's a new one on me and this is Diary World after all.

Love,

Caz
X

I think you misunderstood me Caz, I was confronting Lombro with the possibility, which didn't seem to have occurred to him, that if it made sense to him it could equally have made sense to the forger.

I didn't think it made sense. See my later #214 in which I wrote: "I would like to make clear for the avoidance of doubt that I don't think your statement makes any sense at all."

[Herlock Sholmes]

I was being a tease, Herlock, because even someone like Mike Barrett could not have expected his wife's 'blind' forgery to be authenticated as Maybrick's handiwork from 1888/9. According to the Barrett theory, it wasn't even an attempt by Anne to deceive anyone, but a piece of creative fiction which Mike evidently thought he could pinch and pass off as a genuine confession by JM/JtR. How on earth he could have been remotely confident, let alone 'entirely satisfied' that what she had put into the diary's creation would not immediately be seen for what it was, is a question that no doubt Palmer feels most qualified to answer, but 'mental vegetable' sounds quite an apt description for anyone who would seriously present their wife's intentionally fictional story, hoping it would be mistaken for anything else. I mean, who does that in the real world? Has anyone heard of a comparable example?

Love,

Caz
X

When you refer to "the Barrett theory" what exactly are you referring to Caz?

Why could someone like Mike Barrett not have expected his wife's blind forgery to be authenticated as Maybrick's handiwork from 1888/9? I don't understand why not. You don't explain it.

Haven't Robert Smith, Paul Feldman, Shirley Harrison, Doreen Montgomery and others (including our very own Ike) all held the belief that it was Maybrick's handiwork?

[caz]

Hi Kattrup,

I entirely agree. Furthermore, if we assume he was the forger, Mike had fully covered himself by saying that he'd been given the diary by his dead pal. He never once vouched for its authenticity.

So all the risks that are mentioned about the diary being proven to be a fake due to the handwriting not matching, or a problem with the ink, or some other mistake, didn't exist in reality. If it was shown to have been fake in the early days, Mike would have just said "what a shame" and got on with his life.

He would surely have expected the diary to go through some form of authentication before he could make any money from it. If it failed to be authenticated, it would be game over (or, at least, that's what one would think in a sane world) but if it was authenticated then perfect. All the possible mistakes had been avoided so let the money roll in.

Creating a fake Victorian diary signed "Jack the Ripper" isn't a crime in itself and there was no peril for the forger until there was a victim who had been defrauded (and who would complain to the police). Even if the police got involved, how were they going to prove that Mike forged it? The risks were therefore minimal and, certainly, I would have thought, when it comes to risk versus reward, that the potential reward outweighed the risk

This all relies on 'if we assume he was the forger', which kind of makes any further argument redundant and circular, because you can make it fit the assumed narrative.

Now apply all the above reasoning to a document created by someone who is not among the named suspects, and who never had any intention of identifying themselves with it, and therefore didn't need to think about the handwriting, or any other aspect letting them down or catching them out, from the ink and paper, to the language and psycopathy, or the history and geography. That could only ever be a problem for anyone who ended up with it through happenstance, if they decided to do anything with it other than to set it alight.

Would the money motive not have gone up in flames with the diary, when Anne tried to burn it?

Love,

Caz
X

[Lombro2]

Caz, this is why you are vindshield viper!

[Herlock Sholmes]

This all relies on 'if we assume he was the forger', which kind of makes any further argument redundant and circular, because you can make it fit the assumed narrative.

Now apply all the above reasoning to a document created by someone who is not among the named suspects, and who never had any intention of identifying themselves with it, and therefore didn't need to think about the handwriting, or any other aspect letting them down or catching them out, from the ink and paper, to the language and psycopathy, or the history and geography. That could only ever be a problem for anyone who ended up with it through happenstance, if they decided to do anything with it other than to set it alight.

Would the money motive not have gone up in flames with the diary, when Anne tried to burn it?

Love,

Caz
X

I don't think you're understanding me correctly Caz. I wasn't making any form a circular argument because I wasn't arguing that Michael Barrett was the forger. The point I was making was straightforward one - If Mike was the forger, as some people have suggested, and if the diary was exposed as a forgery, he wasn't in any serious legal peril because he never vouched for the diary's authenticity.

You must agree with that statement, surely. And it has to be predicated on the basis that Mike was the forger because there's no other way of expressing it. The only danger for Mike (as the forger) would have been if it was proven that he didn't receive the diary from Tony Devereux but was responsible for creating it. Something which would have been difficult to do. Only then would he have been in the you-know-what.

Now, the only reason I wrote what I did was because Kattrup had said in the post to which I was responding, "Diary Defenders usually portray the risk to Barrett's as immense". So the only purpose of my post was to say, in agreement with Kattrup, that, really, there was very little risk to the Barretts.

For that reason, the rest of your post about another unnamed forger makes no sense to me. You seem to be trying to make an entirely different point which bears no relation to mine or Kattrup's. This is that an unidentified forger would not have bothered recreating Maybrick's handwriting in the diary (even though they presumably could have done) because there was no risk to them if the diary was shown not to have been by James Maybrick. Leaving aside that I can't fathom why they would have wanted to create such a diary in the first place nor how it ended up with Michael Barrett, I could just as easily say that because there was no risk to them of ever being arrested for fraud, because they were unknown, they might as well have attempted to recreate Maybrick's handwriting to make the diary appear far more convincing. But when talking about unknown people with unknown motives it just seems to pointless to discuss it.

You then made another separate and disconnected point about whether the money would have gone up in flames "when Anne tried to burn it". The simple answer is that if the diary had been burnt there would have been no money to have been made from it. But what independent evidence is there that Anne really did try to burn it? She certainly didn't do a very good job of it! I may be misremembering Caz but didn’t I read something about her insisting on the diary being kept at the bank because of her fear of it going up in a house fire?