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

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Herlock,

I think we can breathe easily.

The public is not as easily misdirected as Ike thinks they are. Both he and C.A.B. have written multiple posts over the years trying to shift attention away from what is DOCUMENTED--Martin Earl's original advertisement in Bookdealer, issue No. 1044, 19th March 1992---to what is shadowy and uncertain---an unrecorded and undocumented phone call between Earl and Barrett. Ike goes as far as to invent dialogue for this call!!

This is the three-shell game, and the public will know it. They won't ignore the documented evidence in favour of a walk down the garden path with Ike and Caz.

Even if a few easily led souls scratch their heads and wonder why Barrett accepted the 1891 diary, they are still going to harken back to the original advertisement and ask themselves why this ex-con and future inventor of the Loot Magazine scam was seeking a blank diary almost immediately after hanging up the phone with Doreen---ie., at a time when there is no compelling reason to believe that the Maybrick Hoax even physically existed.

They will also wonder why Anne was so disgusted with this purchase---and so eager to distance herself from it---that she only signed her name and the amount of the purchase, forcing Barrett to fill in the other details--leaving the paper trail in his name and not (truly) in hers.

This suggests (to me) that Anne wanted no part of it, realizing it was crooked. And as is so often the case, C.A.B. has misstated my views in a previous post through sins of omission. I suggested--and it was only a suggestion--that Mike could have later tried to mollify a reluctant Anne by falsely claiming the diary would be a marketing gimmick. In other words, that it was a fictional story that blurred the lines between fiction and reality. Such books exist.

That said, I never claimed that Anne would have BELIEVED Barrett's explanation. Rather, as I have stated many times, I think she cooperated with Barrett to humor a violent alcoholic on the mistaken but reasonable belief that Londoners like Doreen Montgomery and Robert Smith would have mustered enough commonsense to see through such an obvious scam--that they would "just send Mike packing."

Unlike Ike's invented dialogue, these are not my words--they are Anne's own! "Doreen would have just sent Mike packing.'

No one who truly believed the diary was genuine or even a competent scam would have said such a thing, but Anne did. If we take her at her word, she was literally gobsmacked that Mike's project actually worked. If the wrestling match on the kitchen floor, as described by young Caroline was real (and I realize that you are skeptical of it) it might have occurred when Mike returned from London, beaming that he had "fish on the line." According to Shirley, who was there at the time, Anne could barely be dragged to the book launch and it was a relatively short time later that she left Barrett for good.

If I'm wrong about this, all it means is that Anne was a willing participant in the hoax. Only Anne can tell us. I doubt she ever will.

RP

Misdirection is a good word to describe what's going on here, Roger. I post about one thing and the response is invariably about something entirely different.

As you say, the advertisement shows clear as day what Mike wanted. But they don't want to talk about that. They just want to talk about the thing that even he said, once he saw it, wasn't suitable!

[Herlock Sholmes]

Caz, you need to understand that Sherlock is cleverer than you so he 'explains' things - he doesn't postulate theories, he explains things to us because he's right and the rest of us are wrong. Hey - exactly like Orsam used to do!

In the particular case you are speaking of, Ike, I do think I needed to explain to Caz what Mike said at the 1999 meeting because, although she was there, she doesn't give any impression that she's read the transcript from that meeting in order to refresh her memory of what Mike said that day.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Has anyone else noticed how Herlock is the only one who appears to have understood what's going on? The number of times he says the equivalent of, "You've been told ..." and the likes is truly astonishing for some who is only recently here at the party. It's the tone of a Lord Orsam preaching down at us all from his self-built pulpit not from the low-ground of someone who prior to 2025 didn't seem to have any skin in this game whatsoever. Astonishing.

No, I hadn't misunderstood the discussion - primarily because I don't read Sholmes 'discussions' (they land so hard on the head). Nope, I was merely passing through and saw this wonderful line and couldn't resist a response:



And that gem was followed by this gem:



It is literally like reading Orsam of five years ago or whatever. I imagine that I am about to be assailed by endless screeds of why the date of a diary doesn't matter but I doubt I'll read it. I read it all when he said it before he was 'resigned' from the Casebook back in the day.



No ****, Sherlock. We all know that the guy knowingly bought an 1891 diary. The last sentence, you just took from Orsam's playbook because you haven't got one of your own (that's my polite version) and can't stop saying even though there is absolutely no evidence for it bar your interpretation of what we all know doesn't then make sense.



But I don't. It's the very sequence of events I assume occurred. He knew it was an 1891 diary. I'm not sure what difficulty you have in understanding this very simple event. And he was willing to 'pay' (loosely speaking) £66 in today's money for it ($90, RJ). Sometimes I think as the years pass the £25 is ever diminished by inflation that we cease to think that it was very much at all - but it wasn't at all not very much at all; why would he continue with the purchase of such an expensive item which he clearly could do nothing with if you and your dad are to be believed? Make it make sense, man. He clearly still had a use for the diary which was created two years after his 'innocent' target died. Think it through. Don't just cut and paste the ideas of the most pompous poster ever to grace these boards.

Look, I know you think you have a smartarse excuse and apology for why Michael Barrett wanted an 1890 diary but settled for an 1891 diary even though both of these shatter Orsam's theories into quarks, but I for one do not think that anyone would have wanted an 1891 diary with at least twenty blank pages because I - unlike you perhaps - know exactly what an 1891 blank diary would look like. It would be an 1891 diary and its entries would not yet have been made.

But maybe that's too simple for you?

Or just too awkward?

Ike, your posts aren't making any sense at all, it's like they're written by two different people.

Earlier, in your #950 you wrote (in response to my statement: "If Martin Earl had correctly described the 1891 diary to Mike based on the full description provided by Earl's supplier, which I'm sure he did ...").

"Either Martin Earl was not told by his supplier the tiny red diary was for 1891 or he was and he failed to tell Michael Barrett or Michael Barrett wanted that tiny red diary for some other reason than creating a hoaxed diary from the period 1888-1889."

Please tell me how that sentence follows on from what I posted? Neither of the two alternatives you posited are even vaguely credible. It's obvious that Earl knew it was an 1891 diary and told Barrett it was an 1891 diary. So I just don't understand your response.

Now you say "No ****, Sherlock. We all know that the guy knowingly bought an 1891 diary". Great, but if that's the case why do you write the sentence "He knew it was an 1891 diary." in bold. Surely we are all agreed MIke knew it was an 1891 diary.

I don't get it.

Yes, he was willing to pay £25 because he needed a Victorian diary with blank pages in order to create a fake Victorian diary of Jack the Ripper for which he expected to make considerably more than £25, having received interest from a literary agent. It was investment.

Tell me, because I'm confused, why do you think he was willing to spend "very much" money on a Victorian diary with blank pages?

You may well know, or think you know, with hindsight, what an 1891 diary would look like but there are plenty of diaries from the Victorian era (including 1891 presumably) in which dates are not printed and which could be from any year were it not from the handwritten dated entries. Are you prepared to agree that much? Or are you in still in denial about it?

Btw I see you are still suffering from Orsam Derangement Syndrome. Hope you manage to get some professional help for that some day.

[Herlock Sholmes]

How have you been led so far down the Barrett rabbit hole, Herlock? The 'fact' that Anne 'didn't manage to remove every trace of her own handwriting from the diary' doesn't seem all that surprising to you?

Do you wish to reconsider your definition of a fact? Or is there no hope for you?

Well, Caz,I repeat and draw your attention to my #948 to which you haven't yet responded.

You yourself said that a forger would give away their identity by looping their letters in a certain way. So I'm agreeing with you here. Despite an attempt disguise her handwriting, I'm suggesting that she couldn't disguise all the loops etc.

That seems simple stuff. If Anne was the forger, which is what I’m assuming, even if I don't repeat this every single time, then it is an obvious fact that she didn't manage to remove all traces of her handwriting. So, no, I do not wish to reconsider my definition of what a fact is, thanks.

[caz]

Hi Roger,

I was assuming that Caz was talking about the evidence in Rupert Crew's file which at least records what Mike said at the time. But is interesting is that she evidently discards the note typed by Anne of her husband's supposed research notes which is headed "Transferring all my notes since August 1991". Those notes, if accurately titled, would provide evidence of the existence of the diary prior to 9th March 1992 but, if they don't, and Caz doesn't seem to think they do, it means they are fake, which means that Anne was complicit in creating a fake document on Mike's behalf in support of the historic nature of the diary.

I don't think we've ever been provided with a satisfactory explanation as to why, absent her having been involved in forging the diary, she would do this, have we?

The clue is in the words: 'if accurately titled'. How would we know, since these notes were not produced until the summer of 1992, many months after the magic date of 9th March? Now you and RJ Palmer should finally have worked out between you what I was counting as 'evidence' in this saga and what I wasn't. Nothing diary related provably originates from before that date.

I love the reference to supporting 'the historic nature of the diary'. Hardly, since neither Barrett in 1992 was going back any further than the previous summer, when Tony Devereux had given the diary to Mike without explanation and promptly snuffed it. That was the story Mike had given Doreen and he was sticking to it. For whatever reason, Anne chose to go along with it, and I don't consider it to be a 'satisfactory' explanation that she would only have done this if she had helped Mike to create the diary. She knew her husband was a liar from long experience, and not a very good one. I dare say she'd have been able to learn from his mistakes when the time came, but in April 1992, when she was supposedly up to her elbows in Diamine? How could she have trusted Mike not to have told a dozen fatal lies already about the diary she was busy writing for him, and not to tell a dozen more before the month was out?

If Mike lied to Doreen and Shirley about how long he'd had the diary and how it came into his possession, and had involved Anne in this deception from the outset, it would point to a dodgy source, but it doesn't follow that it came from the pen of a Barrett - certainly not, when the suggestion of it originated with a Barrett, the one who told lies like other people breathe.

The alternative suggestion, that Mike had no legitimate claim to the diary and Anne was worried that it would all go tits up when his lies caught up with him, has a lot more going for it in terms of circumstantial evidence and independent accounts in support of it being found during electrical work at Battlecrease. Anne would have had a reason for letting it go, if it was Mike who came up with the title for his notes to keep the Devereux story reasonably straight. The wording does sound contrived, but I had Anne down as a bit brighter and more subtle than that, which is why I suspect it was Mike's idea and she went along with it, because by then it was all a bit late to change the record. Anne didn't change the record in July 1994 either, but came up with a prequel. It must have suited her at the time and there was no going back, so I can only assume she had no fear of Mike ever being able to implicate her in anything potentially criminal.

[caz]

It so happens that very recently a correspondent has sent me a rare gem: a genuine example of Anne Graham's handwriting dating to well before 1992. It is a rather small sample, but even so, it is of considerable interest for one idiosyncratic element. It struck me immediately.

There was nothing nefarious about how this sample was obtained--it's a matter of public record--so I don't think there would be anything illegal or unethical about posting it here.

I'll have to give it some thought, though.

I wonder if it's worth the bother, as any observations would be dismissed as 'amateur opinion.' But then, when it comes to Anne's handwriting or Kane's etc, that's all we've ever had.

If Palmer strongly suspects Anne of penning the diary and is interested in testing his suspicions, rather than leaving them hanging round indefinitely, like a lingering fart after eating boiled eggs, the onus is on him to make the effort. Could he not ask a professional document examiner to compare this genuine pre-1992 sample with the diary handwriting - at the very least using the facsimile in Robert's book, if not the original document?

If the excuse is that Robert is bound to refuse access to the physical diary, and a negative or inconclusive result using the facsimile would prove nothing, I wouldn't be remotely surprised. But a positive result, or even a vaguely promising one, would be the evidence against Anne that is currently lacking, which would then put pressure on Robert to allow the direct comparison.

But are Palmer's suspicions sufficiently strong for him to test them in this way? Or is his sample just a copy, which he is seeking to compare with a copy of the diary handwriting, which would make this latest public stab at nailing Anne a bit like a blunt pencil - pointless?

[rjpalmer]

Hi Herlock,

I think we can breathe easily.

The public is not as easily misdirected as Ike thinks they are. Both he and C.A.B. have written multiple posts over the years trying to shift attention away from what is DOCUMENTED--Martin Earl's original advertisement in Bookdealer, issue No. 1044, 19th March 1992---to what is shadowy and uncertain---an unrecorded and undocumented phone call between Earl and Barrett. Ike goes as far as to invent dialogue for this call!!

This is the three-shell game, and the public will know it. They won't ignore the documented evidence in favour of a walk down the garden path with Ike and Caz.

Even if a few easily led souls scratch their heads and wonder why Barrett accepted the 1891 diary, they are still going to harken back to the original advertisement and ask themselves why this ex-con and future inventor of the Loot Magazine scam was seeking a blank diary almost immediately after hanging up the phone with Doreen---ie., at a time when there is no compelling reason to believe that the Maybrick Hoax even physically existed.

They will also wonder why Anne was so disgusted with this purchase---and so eager to distance herself from it---that she only signed her name and the amount of the purchase, forcing Barrett to fill in the other details--leaving the paper trail in his name and not (truly) in hers.

This suggests (to me) that Anne wanted no part of it, realizing it was crooked. And as is so often the case, C.A.B. has misstated my views in a previous post through sins of omission. I suggested--and it was only a suggestion--that Mike could have later tried to mollify a reluctant Anne by falsely claiming the diary would be a marketing gimmick. In other words, that it was a fictional story that blurred the lines between fiction and reality. Such books exist.

That said, I never claimed that Anne would have BELIEVED Barrett's explanation. Rather, as I have stated many times, I think she cooperated with Barrett to humor a violent alcoholic on the mistaken but reasonable belief that Londoners like Doreen Montgomery and Robert Smith would have mustered enough commonsense to see through such an obvious scam--that they would "just send Mike packing."

Unlike Ike's invented dialogue, these are not my words--they are Anne's own! "Doreen would have just sent Mike packing.'

No one who truly believed the diary was genuine or even a competent scam would have said such a thing, but Anne did. If we take her at her word, she was literally gobsmacked that Mike's project actually worked. If the wrestling match on the kitchen floor, as described by young Caroline was real (and I realize that you are skeptical of it) it might have occurred when Mike returned from London, beaming that he had "fish on the line." According to Shirley, who was there at the time, Anne could barely be dragged to the book launch and it was a relatively short time later that she left Barrett for good.

If I'm wrong about this, all it means is that Anne was a willing participant in the hoax. Only Anne can tell us. I doubt she ever will.

RP

[Iconoclast]

I tried to explain this to you last time, Caz.

Caz, you need to understand that Sherlock is cleverer than you so he 'explains' things - he doesn't postulate theories, he explains things to us because he's right and the rest of us are wrong. Hey - exactly like Orsam used to do!

[Herlock Sholmes]

I don't. As I said, I was merely stating the fact that all the diary evidence that exists on the record begins with Mike's phone call on 9th March 1992. I wasn't reading anything in to that regarding the suspicions that the diary is Anne's handiwork. My only point was that I have seen nothing on that record which l would describe as evidence that the diary only exists today because Anne was an active participant in its creation.



I see where you start from - a presumption of Anne's guilt, regardless of the lack of evidence, unless or until someone provides you with proof of her innocence. Not expecting any evidence to have survived if she was guilty is such a lazy cop out, because it's precisely the same if she wasn't. A lack of evidence against someone is not evidence, in any sense of the word, that they got rid of it all. If you think it is, you could have had a career in the police in the 1970s.

Is this because it's a modern story, as opposed to a historical one? How many times have you argued with Lechmere theorists, who have already hanged him in their imagination, despite the fact that "there's no evidence" that he was remotely capable of such crimes, but they expect others to come up with good reasons to rule him out? Is that the weakest possible argument anyone can make against Lechmere's guilt, because there is no good reason to think that if any evidence had existed it would have been known about? He wasn't likely to have left bloody body parts around the house for the wife and kiddies to find, was he? So by your own reckoning, you can't presume Lechmere to have been innocent on the basis of no evidence, because naturally the murdering swine got rid of everything that would have incriminated him. Guilty!

When it comes to evidence of Anne's participation in the diary's creation, things may become clearer when you deal with the question of why the handwriting sample she provided to Keith Skinner in 1995 seems to be so different to her normal handwriting Caz.

Do you also accept that a number of sensible members of this forum have commented that they can see similarities between the way Anne loops and curls some of her letters and the way the diarist loops and curls those same letters?

You incorrectly attribute to me a belief that I wouldn't expect any evidence of Anne's evidence to have survived. Read what I wrote again more carefully Caz. What I said was directed to whether, if that evidence has survived, we would know about it. By which I mean has her potential role as a forger been properly investigated? I don't think so. She was asked to provide a handwriting sample in 1995 but, if there had been a proper investigation, examples of her pre-1992 handwriting would have been examined. As it stands, we don't seem to have any (although Roger recently mentioned seeing some).

Other than that, though, if you are prepared to assume for the sake of argument that Anne was the forger who wrote out the text of the diary at her husband's dictation in 12 Goldie Street, please tell me what type of evidence could possibly exist to prove her involvement? The testimony of her husband? Well he repeatedly and consistently said that the diary was written by Anne but you discard that entirely. The testimony of her daughter? Well she refused to speak to you for your book, didn't she? And she apparently continues to refuse to speak.

So what else could there be? If you can't answer this there really is no merit in an argument which relies on the absence of evidence to rule out Anne's involvement.

[Iconoclast]

I don't think you're understanding this discussion, Ike.

Has anyone else noticed how Herlock is the only one who appears to have understood what's going on? The number of times he says the equivalent of, "You've been told ..." and the likes is truly astonishing for some who is only recently here at the party. It's the tone of a Lord Orsam preaching down at us all from his self-built pulpit not from the low-ground of someone who prior to 2025 didn't seem to have any skin in this game whatsoever. Astonishing.

No, I hadn't misunderstood the discussion - primarily because I don't read Sholmes 'discussions' (they land so hard on the head). Nope, I was merely passing through and saw this wonderful line and couldn't resist a response:

If Martin Earl had correctly described the 1891 diary to Mike based on the full description provided by Earl's supplier, which I'm sure he did ...

And that gem was followed by this gem:

Of course Mike was told it was an 1891 diary. There's no doubt about that.

It is literally like reading Orsam of five years ago or whatever. I imagine that I am about to be assailed by endless screeds of why the date of a diary doesn't matter but I doubt I'll read it. I read it all when he said it before he was 'resigned' from the Casebook back in the day.

So he was told that an 1891 diary with blank pages was available. He agreed to buy it. There were no other options available at that time. On receiving it, he realized it was useless for the purpose of forging a Ripper diary.

No ****, Sherlock. We all know that the guy knowingly bought an 1891 diary. The last sentence, you just took from Orsam's playbook because you haven't got one of your own (that's my polite version) and can't stop saying even though there is absolutely no evidence for it bar your interpretation of what we all know doesn't then make sense.

I'm not sure what difficulty you have in understanding this very simple sequence of events.

But I don't. It's the very sequence of events I assume occurred. He knew it was an 1891 diary. I'm not sure what difficulty you have in understanding this very simple event. And he was willing to 'pay' (loosely speaking) £66 in today's money for it ($90, RJ). Sometimes I think as the years pass the £25 is ever diminished by inflation that we cease to think that it was very much at all - but it wasn't at all not very much at all; why would he continue with the purchase of such an expensive item which he clearly could do nothing with if you and your dad are to be believed? Make it make sense, man. He clearly still had a use for the diary which was created two years after his 'innocent' target died. Think it through. Don't just cut and paste the ideas of the most pompous poster ever to grace these boards.

Look, I know you think you have a smartarse excuse and apology for why Michael Barrett wanted an 1890 diary but settled for an 1891 diary even though both of these shatter Orsam's theories into quarks, but I for one do not think that anyone would have wanted an 1891 diary with at least twenty blank pages because I - unlike you perhaps - know exactly what an 1891 blank diary would look like. It would be an 1891 diary and its entries would not yet have been made.

But maybe that's too simple for you?

Or just too awkward?

[caz]

Hi Mike.

Shouldn't C.A.B.'s statement more correctly be 'no evidence prior to 13 April 1992 and not a day before'--the first date that an independent set of eyes confirmed the diary's existence?

Or does she consider claims made over the telephone by the serial liar Mike Barrett to be 'evidence'?

That phone call is the earliest 'evidence' we have on record that Jack the Ripper's diary was in anyone's mind. There is nothing on record prior to 9th March 1992 that anyone on the planet was aware of its existence in any form.

I wasn't counting any claims made retrospectively, in written or spoken form, because no proof has yet emerged of an earlier origin for any of them.

If we deny all unsupported claims made by the various 'witnesses' then surely there is no unambiguous evidence that the diary existed in its entirety before 13 April 1992.

Quite so, but I didn't claim otherwise.

[caz]

As for the fact that Anne didn't manage to remove every trace of her own handwriting from the diary, that doesn't seem to be at all surprising.

How have you been led so far down the Barrett rabbit hole, Herlock? The 'fact' that Anne 'didn't manage to remove every trace of her own handwriting from the diary' doesn't seem all that surprising to you?

Do you wish to reconsider your definition of a fact? Or is there no hope for you?

[caz]

Well the argument is that Anne's handiwork (i.e. the manual writing of the diary) was done after 9th March 1992 so there wouldn't be any evidence of her handiwork before 9th March 1992, would there? In fact, the argument is that the photograph album wasn't even purchased until late March 1992. So I'm not sure what "evidence" you think could possibly exist prior to 9th March 1992.

I don't. As I said, I was merely stating the fact that all the diary evidence that exists on the record begins with Mike's phone call on 9th March 1992. I wasn't reading anything in to that regarding the suspicions that the diary is Anne's handiwork. My only point was that I have seen nothing on that record which l would describe as evidence that the diary only exists today because Anne was an active participant in its creation.

To say "there's no evidence" for something is the weakest possible argument anyone can make unless there is good reason to say that if evidence existed we should know about it.

I see where you start from - a presumption of Anne's guilt, regardless of the lack of evidence, unless or until someone provides you with proof of her innocence. Not expecting any evidence to have survived if she was guilty is such a lazy cop out, because it's precisely the same if she wasn't. A lack of evidence against someone is not evidence, in any sense of the word, that they got rid of it all. If you think it is, you could have had a career in the police in the 1970s.

Is this because it's a modern story, as opposed to a historical one? How many times have you argued with Lechmere theorists, who have already hanged him in their imagination, despite the fact that "there's no evidence" that he was remotely capable of such crimes, but they expect others to come up with good reasons to rule him out? Is that the weakest possible argument anyone can make against Lechmere's guilt, because there is no good reason to think that if any evidence had existed it would have been known about? He wasn't likely to have left bloody body parts around the house for the wife and kiddies to find, was he? So by your own reckoning, you can't presume Lechmere to have been innocent on the basis of no evidence, because naturally the murdering swine got rid of everything that would have incriminated him. Guilty!

[Herlock Sholmes]

Continued from yesterday...



What do you mean, 'four years in the future'? That takes us from 1988 to 1992. If Mike's motive for allegedly faking Jack the Ripper's diary in the first place had been so they [or more accurately, Anne, as the breadwinner] could afford the monthly mortgage repayments, when do you suppose their financial struggles began, and how quickly after that did this unusual remedy first present itself? Are you having trouble with the diary's alleged chronology, from sperm to worm? It has been suggested that the Barretts drew inspiration for their money-making scheme from watching the Michael Caine mini series, which would put a speculative date on when the idea may have originally been planted if they saw it on tv when first broadcast. So what time period would you put on the whole process, from first thoughts to fruition, when the diary was finished and fit to be seen in London, on 13th April 1992? Or have you not really thought about it?



See above. The diary didn't just get 'created' out of nowhere in April 1992, by a husband and wife in urgent need of a second income, in spite of Mike's 11-day claim - which his affidavit dated back to early 1990. Did Mike really have so little idea of whether this financial struggle to keep the roof over their heads had gone on for two years or more, or just for a few belt-tightening months until he had something to take to the bank?



Not in October 1993. Anne was still paying the mortgage then. I meant when she left Mike, in early January 1994, I can well understand how paying the mortgage after that would no longer have been a priority for him, if it ever had been.



So how much of that money do you suppose Mike gave to Anne before she left him, to help her meet the monthly repayments? And how much of it did he use to pay the mortgage at any time afterwards? It might have been an effective way, had Mike been the least bit financially aware and prudent, and if he'd made even a single repayment in 1994, but the evidence shows that thousands of pounds left his bank account in the May shortly after arriving there, which got spent on God knows what or whom, leaving him in the red and with less than nothing to put towards the mortgage on 12 Goldie Street.

So I repeat: the idea that Mike would have been itching to help pay the mortgage prior to April 1992 is not one I'd be banking on.

I tried to explain this to you last time, Caz. Mike didn't say he was in financial difficulty in 1988 nor did he say he started to plan the diary in 1988. He simply placed the origins of the diary in the death of Anne's stepmother which led to the move to Goldie Street which meant he needed to keep up payments on the mortgage. I don't know precisely when the idea popped into Mike's head to start to write the diary, assuming, of course, that he and his wife were responsible. How can I possibly know this? All that can be said is that it was definitely by March 1992. But if it was in 1991, the point is the same. The Barretts couldn't have known when they took out the mortgage what their financial position would be three years in the future, or, indeed, at any time in the future.

As for the Michael Caine miniseries, you must have missed Roger's post that it re-aired in Liverpool in January 1992.

It should be clear to you now that the 1990 date in Mike's affidavit was an error. Just like Paul Dodd thought he'd had the night heater installed in 1989 when it was 1992.

As for who paid the mortgage, I'm not aware of any documentary evidence that assists on this issue, or about the Barretts' internal finances, and I can't see the point in speculating. All I can do is note that Mike said in 1999 that the mortgage payments were "half and half" but that still means that it was 100% paid by the Barretts who, I would remind you, are both suspected of being involved in the diary forgery and who, as I understand it, both received money from the diary.

[caz]

Continued from yesterday...

You ask a silly question when you say "Would Anne have taken out a mortgage in 1988 for their move to Goldie Street, if it meant having to come up with a new and improved writing project for Mike to take on, in the hope of making some serious money this time?". How could Anne possibly have known in 1988 what the global financial situation, as well as her own family's financial situation, would be like four years in the future?

What do you mean, 'four years in the future'? That takes us from 1988 to 1992. If Mike's motive for allegedly faking Jack the Ripper's diary in the first place had been so they [or more accurately, Anne, as the breadwinner] could afford the monthly mortgage repayments, when do you suppose their financial struggles began, and how quickly after that did this unusual remedy first present itself? Are you having trouble with the diary's alleged chronology, from sperm to worm? It has been suggested that the Barretts drew inspiration for their money-making scheme from watching the Michael Caine mini series, which would put a speculative date on when the idea may have originally been planted if they saw it on tv when first broadcast. So what time period would you put on the whole process, from first thoughts to fruition, when the diary was finished and fit to be seen in London, on 13th April 1992? Or have you not really thought about it?

Thousands of people take on mortgages which it later transpires they can't afford, often because of rising interest rates or a change in their personal financial situation. So, yes, absolutely, Anne and Mike might easily have taken on a mortgage in 1988 which they found it difficult to keep up the payments on. Unless you can provide some evidence of the Barretts' healthy financial position between 1988 and 1992, how can you possibly say that a need to keep up the mortgage payments wasn't Mike's motive for creating a forged diary in 1992?

See above. The diary didn't just get 'created' out of nowhere in April 1992, by a husband and wife in urgent need of a second income, in spite of Mike's 11-day claim - which his affidavit dated back to early 1990. Did Mike really have so little idea of whether this financial struggle to keep the roof over their heads had gone on for two years or more, or just for a few belt-tightening months until he had something to take to the bank?

If, in October 1993, Mike "asked himself what was the point of paying the mortgage on a house that was no longer a home, and which he never wanted to move to in the first place",so what? How could he possibly have predicted what the future held for his marriage in March 1992?

Not in October 1993. Anne was still paying the mortgage then. I meant when she left Mike, in early January 1994, I can well understand how paying the mortgage after that would no longer have been a priority for him, if it ever had been.

Given that Mike received thousands of pounds from the diary during 1993 and 1994, it seems to me like it was an effective way to meet monthly mortgage payments.

So how much of that money do you suppose Mike gave to Anne before she left him, to help her meet the monthly repayments? And how much of it did he use to pay the mortgage at any time afterwards? It might have been an effective way, had Mike been the least bit financially aware and prudent, and if he'd made even a single repayment in 1994, but the evidence shows that thousands of pounds left his bank account in the May shortly after arriving there, which got spent on God knows what or whom, leaving him in the red and with less than nothing to put towards the mortgage on 12 Goldie Street.

So I repeat: the idea that Mike would have been itching to help pay the mortgage prior to April 1992 is not one I'd be banking on.