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

[Herlock Sholmes]

Carrie Brown was a New York prostitute known as Old Shakespeare, murdered in a room of the East River Hotel in 1891.

[Herlock Sholmes]

It wasn't MJD (sorry Keith).


PS It was Maybrick.

Is it good logic to outright dismiss one suspect because of your confidence in another?

[Herlock Sholmes]

It is only inference that James Maybrick actively disguised his handwriting. I have shown here on the Casebook - in a brilliant randomised, placebo-controlled study of one - that my own formal handwriting way back in 1989 or so (when people actually wrote to one another with all vowels preserved, no numbers substituting for letters, and no emojis) looked absolutely nothing whatsoever (to me) like my informal handwriting for my own eyes. Maybe Audrey Giles or Sue Iremonger or Anna Koren or whoever could tell me the similarities but I can't see any.

As Lao Tzu so famously nearly said, every journey starts with a single study of one ...

PS Wasn't Anna Koren that speccy lass from 'On the Buses'?

I’d prefer the explanation that everyone else in the world (apart from those in the Maybrick Club) would accept as by a huge distance the most likely. That the diary is clearly a fake. In fact Ike, much as it annoys you, it’s a categorically, unequivocally proven modern fake.

[Iconoclast]

In fact Ike, much as it annoys you, it’s a categorically, unequivocally proven modern fake.

This is where I can't engage with you because it hasn't been proven to be a fake. You've just 100% bought into Orsam's argument, but that's all it is - an argument.

PS No-one - absolutely no-one - has been searching for 10 years to discount Orsam's theory so please stop saying it. I give it almost no thought whatsoever as - although it hasn't yet been contradicted by a word-specific example - it simply isn't categorical (it's also ambiguous). You can't take Orsam's opining and make of it an unquestionable truth. This is where you absolutely get on my tits, mate.

PPS Let this be the last of it - feel free to state it again and again but I won't be engaging in it.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I don’t care about that Ike. What gets badly on mine is this absolutely deliberate act of ignoring. You have a rebuttal and the only response is “well surely there must be a chance that he could have used it…” That’s all that you have. There is no rebuttal to the point. And it has been around 10 years whether you like it or not. Absolutely barking mad, desperate and embarrassing attempts at dismissing this have been made and they have failed miserably.

If ‘one off instance’ can’t be disproven after 10 years (and it can’t) then we’re on safe ground to say it’s the proof that was asked for. The diary has been categorically proven a forgery. It doesn’t deserve to be discussed as a ripper-related item.

[Lombro2]

Quietly confident on the safe and higher ground…

Just to highlight the “ignoring” and/or the ignorance, we have “one off standpoint” and “one off basis” at the turn of the century in print (1903 and 1919).

How these same people used “one off” in their personal diaries and correspondence going back to when they were born in the middle of the 1800s is beyond me at least, to know or to prove.

I think I’ve heard this type of argument before:

”But they never found a body!”

[Herlock Sholmes]

You’ve had this explained to you so many times but it either doesn’t sink in or you deliberately ignore it. Apart from this you clearly have no judgment when it comes to assessing suspects if you can keep trying to brush aside the very clear pointers shouting at us and telling us that this is a fake. The fact that it’s not in his handwriting immediately zooms it up from 0-80 on the percentages - and from a man who makes absolutely no effort to hide his identity. That Barratt tried to but a Victorian diary is yelling to you from the top of his voice FAKE but you and The Club turn a deaf ear. That he imitates the unusual grammar of the list nudges us even further into fake territory. That this well-to-do guy for some reason can’t afford a notebook or a diary sets half a dozen alarms blazing. That he claims to be a man who a witness says that he looks absolutely nothing like is duh…kind of a clue don’t you think? Then as Roger also pointed out..he locates the breasts in the wrong place…he calls his wife’s godmother her aunt! He names a neighbour that no one has managed to find. He allegedly committed a murder that no one can find. Oh…and a guy admitted to forging it - not to mention the journey into Grimm’s Fairy Tales when it comes to explanations for the diary’s origins.

The thing is a modern forgery. 100%.

[Lombro2]

I’m the guy who first put up examples of Peter Kurten’s multiple handwriting in 2002. It’s still in the archives.

That was a day’s trip to the city. You’d probably call they a Reference Library Miracle and a Hoax.

[rjpalmer]

The late, great Melvin Harris came up with an excellent reason for concluding that the diary is neither Victorian nor Edwardian, but it's X-rated so I'll have to give it some thought before discussing it.

[C. F. Leon]

The late, great Melvin Harris came up with an excellent reason for concluding that the diary is neither Victorian nor Edwardian, but it's X-rated so I'll have to give it some thought before discussing it.

It doesn't involve semen analysis, does it?

[Iconoclast]

I’m the guy who first put up examples of Peter Kurten’s multiple handwriting in 2002. It’s still in the archives.

That was a day’s trip to the city. You’d probably call they a Reference Library Miracle and a Hoax.

Have you still got them, Lombro? I could do with them for SocPill.

If so, you know how to email me!

Cheers,

Ike

PS If anyone has any ideas or material I could use for SocPill, please email me at historyvsmaybrick@gmail.com.

[rjpalmer]

Hello Ike,

Not to steal Lombro's thunder, but I sometimes forget that you're a "newbie" to the Diary debate. That Peter Kurten's wife claimed that she didn't recognize his handwriting in letters written at the time of his murders was an argument raised several times on these forums over twenty years ago by, among others, Peter Wood and Caroline Ann Brown (when she was, I believe, less emphatic about the handwriting being the ultimate coffin nail--but you'd have to ask her).

Wood got the idea from something Donald Rumbelow had said, but I also remember seeing examples of Kurten's multiple scripts alongside something written by Anna Koren. Too much water under the bridge, but I'm sure it is still out there somewhere. Maybe it was Lombro.




However, what you should bear in mind is that Kurten was writing anonymous letters to the police & press, so it is hardly surprising he would disguise his handwriting.

But what Mr. Wood and perhaps others were attempting to suggest is that Kurten's handwriting changed because he was in the throes of psychosis, etc.--an argument that struck me as misleading and overblown. I believe Kurten was deliberately trying to disguise his handwriting and his wife, of course, would have wished to distance herself from knowledge of his crimes.

RP

[rjpalmer]

It doesn't involve semen analysis, does it?

No; we can safely leave that to Russell Edwards, fortunately.

I once asked the Diary's supporters why we can't find any genuine Victorian (or even Edwardian) slang in the diary but received no response. The Victorians loved their slang, as did the writer of the 'Dear Boss' letter, and 'Sir Jim' plays word games yet the only slang expressions we find in the text were still in circulation when the diary emerged in 1992, and at least two of them--one off instance and bumbling buffoon--cannot be found in print until around World War II.

Personally, I think this stinks to high heaven. I would expect to find genuine Victorian slang in a sixty plus page personal diary, specially from someone who allegedly liked word games and is hanging out in East London....and yet there is none.

With that in mind, there's an utterly absurd passage in the diary where Maybrick dubs himself "Sir Jim" and states that he did the murders "all for a whim." He then throws a hissy fit, writing:

"I cannot think of another word to accompany Jim. I like my words to rhyme, dammit."

Melvin thought this was absurd and rightfully so, because any genuine Victorian male--and particularly one who was a known frequenter of brothels who allegedly sexually mutated women and on one occasion mused about shoving a cane up a woman's passage---would know the obvious rhyme: quim.

He's literally congratulating himself for murders where the victims' private parts were grotesquely mutilated.

The word is now more or less antiquated and has fallen out of use, but it was vulgar slang for a woman's genitals well-known to the Victorians and Edwardians.

One can see how widely used it was by looking into the pages of what was the most famous of all Victorian pornographic works, My Secret Life by "Walter, "published in 1888. Walter uses the word dozens of times. Even more frequently than he used the 'c word.'

Melvin's comment was this:

"As for the Diarist having problems finding a rhyme for Jim, this is crass. No authentic ripper-up of women would coyly shy away from using the familiar Victorian slang term : QUIM."

I think Melvin has a point. The passage shows the writer's ignorance of a well-known Victorian slang word--something that doesn't ring true unless the work was written in the late 20th Century.

Maybrick would have known the word. Mike and Anne Barrett, not so much.

If one is easily offended, don't read on, but for the sake of completeness here are some examples of its use in 'My Secret Life' (1888).




I could go on, but I'll leave it at that.

By the way, there is a rather strange book where the two authors argue that 'Walter' was Jack the Ripper.

[Herlock Sholmes]

No; we can safely leave that to Russell Edwards, fortunately.

I once asked the Diary's supporters why we can't find any genuine Victorian (or even Edwardian) slang in the diary but received no response. The Victorians loved their slang, as did the writer of the 'Dear Boss' letter, and 'Sir Jim' plays word games yet the only slang expressions we find in the text were still in circulation when the diary emerged in 1992, and at least two of them--one off instance and bumbling buffoon--cannot be found in print until around World War II.

Personally, I think this stinks to high heaven. I would expect to find genuine Victorian slang in a sixty plus page personal diary, specially from someone who allegedly liked word games and is hanging out in East London....and yet there is none.

With that in mind, there's an utterly absurd passage in the diary where Maybrick dubs himself "Sir Jim" and states that he did the murders "all for a whim." He then throws a hissy fit, writing:

"I cannot think of another word to accompany Jim. I like my words to rhyme, dammit."

Melvin thought this was absurd and rightfully so, because any genuine Victorian male--and particularly one who was a known frequenter of brothels who allegedly sexually mutated women and on one occasion mused about shoving a cane up a woman's passage---would know the obvious rhyme: quim.

He's literally congratulating himself for murders where the victims' private parts were grotesquely mutilated.

The word is now more or less antiquated and has fallen out of use, but it was vulgar slang for a woman's genitals well-known to the Victorians and Edwardians.

One can see how widely used it was by looking into the pages of what was the most famous of all Victorian pornographic works, My Secret Life by "Walter, "published in 1888. Walter uses the word dozens of times. Even more frequently than he used the 'c word.'

Melvin's comment was this:

"As for the Diarist having problems finding a rhyme for Jim, this is crass. No authentic ripper-up of women would coyly shy away from using the familiar Victorian slang term : QUIM."

I think Melvin has a point. The passage shows the writer's ignorance of a well-known Victorian slang word--something that doesn't ring true unless the work was written in the late 20th Century.

Maybrick would have known the word. Mike and Anne Barrett, not so much.

If one is easily offended, don't read on, but for the sake of completeness here are some examples of its use in 'My Secret Life' (1888).




I could go on, but I'll leave it at that.

By the way, there is a rather strange book where the two authors argue that 'Walter' was Jack the Ripper.

Good points Roger, although our ‘wordsmith’ must have been having a ‘off’ day as also missed:

Him
Limb
Dim
Swim
Slim
Prim
Vim
Grim
Brim

And as it’s been suggested that the description “Jewish looking” was a reasonable one for Maybrick, perhaps I should add…

Kibbutzim

[Iconoclast]

By the way, there is a rather strange book where the two authors argue that 'Walter' was Jack the Ripper.

I wonder if it would be easier if we all agreed that EVERYONE aged 20-60 in 1888 was Jack the Ripper. It might be more interesting (and easier) to discount candidates than add them.

Would you be able to help out a newbie, RJ, by clarifying which Ripper letter Peter Wood was referring to when he said it matched James Maybrick's handwriting, please? I'm assuming it was the September 17 'Dear Boss' letter, but worth asking nevertheless ...

Ta.

Ike