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

[caz]

We all have our own ideas, but my belief is that if someone as volatile as Barrett believed for one second that the diary was something other than the modern fake he knew it to be, he never would have transferred its ownership to Robert Smith for a one-pound note. No way.

This is the same bloke who couldn't help brag about the diary on his train ride home from London (which is what allowed Brough to trace him) and who is said to have waved his first royalty check in the air down the boozer. It is well-known that he blew his profits like a drunken sailor. If Barrett didn't know the diary was a fake, and didn't fear getting sent to the slammer, he would have tried to sell it at Sotheby's for a lot more than Johnson tried to sell the watch to Robert E. Davis. Albert Johnson might have been an innocent dupe--I can't say---but Barret surely wasn't. That Barrett sought to have the diary published--which is far more of a gray area legally--instead of selling it outright is significant in itself.

Palmer forgets that if he could only bring himself to imagine for that same single second that Mike didn't know what he had - recent hoax, older document of unknown origins or something potentially worth squillions - because he had acquired it in distinctly dodgy circumstances and knew it wasn't legitimately his own property to sell, all this head-scratching over its nominal one pound transfer to Robert, instead of taking it to Sotheby's and telling them the lies about where he got it, would instantly be relieved, down to the legally grey area of getting the contents published, and a book written about the diary, which divides the responsibility between the literary agent, publisher and author.

If the effect is exactly the same, whether the cause was that Mike knew the diary was penned very recently, or had been 'twocked'- taken without the owner's consent - then such arguments get us no further forward.

[Herlock Sholmes]

This is my point. You attempt to present an argument but we can’t get past the derivative issues which have been addressed a million times because someone will then post (having almost no knowledge of the case and no knowledge that the issues have been addressed over and over again - maybe not satisfactorily in their opinion but addressed nevertheless) and we go around again making no progress.

You know you’re onto a loser when the responses you get assure you that you’ve got literally every detail of every idea you’ve ever presented stonewall wrong. So you’re either stupid and can’t make a cogent argument without erring or else it’s not worth responding because you know there will be no real discussion or concessions of any form.

You really know it’s a forlorn journey you’re on when you present an argument which gets roundly mocked by various quarters whilst the doyens of the argument you are countering get away with exactly the same process without a word of criticism.

All anyone can ask for is that arguments are heard and given fair airtime not crushed with frequently really dreadful logic.

Finally, if you have to ask for answers to the old canards, you should know you’re in serious danger of being a Johnny-Come-Lately to this (or any other) particular debate.

Hi Ike,

In #199 you asked for an answer to the question as to why Michael Barrett's affidavit included the wrong date for when Barrett started to expose the fraud. Could that question not reasonably be described as an old canard?

I have to ask though, in regard to your last question, surely you aren’t suggesting that those of us who don’t have years of experience of all things diary should bother contributing?

[Herlock Sholmes]

If it does not concern you that Barrett’s request included 1890, you really should ask yourself why you might be ignoring it.

Hi Ike,

Have you considered the possibility that what Mike was attempting to get hold of was authentic paper which would be scientifically indistinguishable from paper from the time of the Ripper murders?

[caz]

As far as I know, it doesn't matter if an expert looks at a forged document one day after it's been forged or one year afterwards, or at least it didn't in 1992. There obviously weren't any reliable tools to enable them to differentiate between the two, other than perhaps a solubility test but not everyone seems to accept the result of the one that Baxendale did. So I'm not terribly impressed by the fact that the forger might only have just finished writing it before producing it. I suspect that's true of all or most forgers. They want to make their money as fast as they can.

Morning Herlock,

I just wanted to remind you that in this case, Mike Barrett would have wanted his wife's 'blind forgery' - if you believe RJ Palmer's theory has merit - to be mistaken for a document dating back to 1888, so there'd have been no benefit to him whatsoever if the experts in 1992 could not tell the difference between one penned yesterday and one penned a year ago. He'd have been hoping, on 13th April 1992, on the train to London, that nobody who might be invited to examine the diary that day, or in the days, weeks and months to come, would be able to distinguish between ink applied to paper in early April 1992, and ink applied when Maybrick was alive.

I still wonder what knowledge Mike would have had about such matters before you could Google it, and how confident he'd have been on a scale of one to ten, that it wouldn't go very quickly pear-shaped if he and Anne had created a document such as this one.

Surely, you have to take into account what the people who actually met or knew the Barretts would think of all this, and not just dismiss them as no more qualified, or even less qualified to comment, than those of you who don't know the real Mike or Anne from the mythical Adam and Eve - or the fictionalised Macbeth and Lady Macbeth if you prefer.

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

The Barrett accusers do not consider the 1891 maroon diary to be evidence. What--or who-- has left you have that false impression?

Someone has misdirected your attention with that little red diary, has decoyed you down the garden path.

Don't let them do that.

If it does not concern you that Barrett’s request included 1890, you really should ask yourself why you might be ignoring it.

[Iconoclast]

… throwing out the same questions over and over that have already been explained doesn't help.

This is my point. You attempt to present an argument but we can’t get past the derivative issues which have been addressed a million times because someone will then post (having almost no knowledge of the case and no knowledge that the issues have been addressed over and over again - maybe not satisfactorily in their opinion but addressed nevertheless) and we go around again making no progress.

You know you’re onto a loser when the responses you get assure you that you’ve got literally every detail of every idea you’ve ever presented stonewall wrong. So you’re either stupid and can’t make a cogent argument without erring or else it’s not worth responding because you know there will be no real discussion or concessions of any form.

You really know it’s a forlorn journey you’re on when you present an argument which gets roundly mocked by various quarters whilst the doyens of the argument you are countering get away with exactly the same process without a word of criticism.

All anyone can ask for is that arguments are heard and given fair airtime not crushed with frequently really dreadful logic.

Finally, if you have to ask for answers to the old canards, you should know you’re in serious danger of being a Johnny-Come-Lately to this (or any other) particular debate.

[rjpalmer]

So I wouldn't use that as an argument. Neither would I use the red diary from 1891.

The Barrett accusers do not consider the 1891 maroon diary to be evidence. What--or who-- has left you have that false impression?

Someone has misdirected your attention with that little red diary, has decoyed you down the garden path.

Don't let them do that.

[Lombro2]

With a seamless narrative that explains everything if you only just think about it, throwing out the same questions over and over that have already been explained doesn't help.

The diary was kept in a cookie tin for freshness. It obviously didn't come out fresh enough to help Barrett accusers. So I wouldn't use that as an argument. Neither would I use the red diary from 1891. That one was past the expiry date.

[Lombro2]

A linear approach to language lumps everyone and everything together in one lump all following the leader whoever he is. If a linear approach to everything was real, Jack the Ripper would have arrived in the 1990s.

[Herlock Sholmes]

How did a diary created at some point between 1945 and 1992 inclusive end up beneath the nailed down floorboards of Battlecrease? Who put it there and why did they do so?

What evidence is there that a bloke called Eddy found it? Why did he give it to Michael?

When you say that Michael and Anne "acted suspiciously", does that involve keeping secret from everyone the fact that Michael was a former journalist? And does it involve secretly attempting to buy a diary from the period of the Ripper murders with blank pages?

That should have read “…to buy a diary from the decade of the ripper murders…” btw.

[Herlock Sholmes]

The Diary came out of the floorboards in Battlecrease. Eddy found it and gave it to Michael who took it to London. Michael and Anne were fencing a stolen item and so acted suspiciously.
Similarly, the watch came out of Battlecrease the same time and was fenced at that end. Simple.

No phantom auctions and golden sock drawers where jewellers keep their broken golden Dali watches.

How did a diary created at some point between 1945 and 1992 inclusive end up beneath the nailed down floorboards of Battlecrease? Who put it there and why did they do so?

What evidence is there that a bloke called Eddy found it? Why did he give it to Michael?

When you say that Michael and Anne "acted suspiciously", does that involve keeping secret from everyone the fact that Michael was a former journalist? And does it involve secretly attempting to buy a diary from the period of the Ripper murders with blank pages?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Everyone knows what a debunk is and they don't usually require a long blog explanation. Debunking, as a default, shows the shallowness of the research.

What one person thinks is as debunk, to me, actually supports authenticity, as it's more likely James coined and/or heard the creative terms than Michael, but either one could have coined it which you deny. But I don't go on an on about "one off" or "trip over" as a fatal flaw for Maybrick defenders.

If you think the case is unsolved, why wouldn't you go solve it? Why would you spend valuable time debunking Santa Claus as the Ripper?

As I've informed you many times, it's literally impossible for Michael Barrett to have coinedthe expression "one off instance" because it's on record as having been used many times before that, going back to the 1970s. Expressions involving "one off" to mean a unique or not-to-be-repeated event go back to the 1950s.

On the other hand, there's no way for James Maybrick to have coined or used the expression "one off instance" in the 1880s because "one off" didn't mean anything unique or unrepeatable at that time.

So the very simple answer to the question posed in the thread title is that the diary is a new hoax, created after the Second World War.

Glad we've finally got that sorted.

[Lombro2]

The Diary came out of the floorboards in Battlecrease. Eddy found it and gave it to Michael who took it to London. Michael and Anne were fencing a stolen item and so acted suspiciously.
Similarly, the watch came out of Battlecrease the same time and was fenced at that end. Simple.

No phantom auctions and golden sock drawers where jewellers keep their broken golden Dali watches.

[rjpalmer]

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.

It's so seamless than one can barely drive a Mack truck through it without scraping sides. Anne Graham's own behavior disproves it, and the key witness was recently revealed to be wholly unreliable.

I think it's useful to remember that for Eddie Lyons to have taken an active role in the diary's discovery, there is only the one working hypothesis to consider, and this demands that the physical diary has to have been found by Eddie between 8am and 3pm on 9th March 1992.

Anyone with any reason to doubt this very specific scenario or would allow for the diary to have been created after 9th March 1992, when Mike made his first known contact with the publishing world over the phone, may as well forget Eddie Lyons as the man who found the diary, and look elsewhere.

[Herlock Sholmes]

The purpose of the forum is to cover all theories and possibilities and present them without having to face a gauntlet of debunkers. Bad theories should die their own natural death. If they're good theories, they should live on without people propping them up like Bernie Lomax.

Good theories don't need help. They help you by continually giving researchers gifts that make them look good. Barrett theory hasn't provided any "library miracle" since 1992.

Hi Lombro,

When you say "The purpose of the forum is to cover all theories and possibilities and present them without having to face a gauntlet of debunkers", do you mean to say that theories and possibilities which are presented on this forum should not be challenged or questioned?

"Debunk" means to expose the falseness or hollowness of an idea. How can something which is correct or true be debunked? I don't think it's possible.

If I ever present a theory, I welcome any challenges to test that theory and would happily answer any questions about it.

I've asked a string of questions in this thread recently, none of which have been answered. It's really quite strange that some people want to make posts about the diary without defending those posts from challenge or answering questions about their contents.

But, I suppose, if there is no defence and no answers, it may not be so strange after all.