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

[Lombro2]

I’ll admit I got the Provenance wrong. It didn’t come from Anne’s family. It came from Battlecrease.

[Lombro2]

We can add “bumbling buffoon” to the long and growing list (that they refuse to make or admit to) of shots that missed the mark.

These guys think they never came up short, never hit the post or shot wide, never hit one foul or off the rim. They never shot an air ball.

Perfect record. Bat 1000.

[caz]

When you talk about "the bloody thing" being "in her own handwriting" I think you're confusing two different things.

While it's true that Mike Barrett, but only Mike Barrett, repeatedly said that the diary was in Anne's handwriting, what he surely must have meant what that she wrote it in a disguised hand. Even he must have appreciated that the handwriting of the diary was not the same as Anne's handwriting, which, to my mind, makes it all the more powerful that he insisted that she wrote it.

So you seem to be trying to decipher the wrong puzzle if you are wondering why Anne would have told people that she used the diary to help and encourage Mike with his writing ambitions if the diary was in her handwriting. Because it clearly wasn't in her handwriting. That doesn't, however, mean she didn't write it in a disguised hand. If she did, it would then provide a simple explanation for the thing you say you can't begin to explain.

Or yet more powerful evidence of Mike's capacity for telling porkies - and the capacity of others to make excuses for him.

Have you ever considered that the reason the diary is 'clearly' not in Anne's handwriting may be because she didn't write it?

Mike knew he had no chance of being believed if he said the handwriting was his, so who else was he going to try and throw under the bus, if not the woman who had betrayed him for a second time, by ripping his precious diary from his grasp and claiming it had belonged to her father?

There is no 'simple' explanation if Anne had disguised her normal hand to write the diary, because she'd have known it didn't remotely resemble Maybrick's and would therefore have needed to be confident that if a document examiner had then been asked to compare the diary with Mike's handwriting or her own, they would have found no evidence or any obvious points of similarity. In short, without being a document examiner herself, what are the chances that Anne knew what signs would be looked for, and how to avoid leaving any that would have identified her as the likely culprit, if not the culprit?

What would complicate matters further is if Anne had been persuaded by Mike that she was merely creating a marketing 'gimmick' for a fictional story - not one of RJ Palmer's brighter ideas, if she didn't need the diary to look like it 'clearly wasn't in her handwriting', but achieved that remarkable feat anyway, with no special effort or skill.

And then we have Mike, quietly confident when he brings the photo album home from the auction sale, that Anne will have the will and the skill to disguise her hand well enough, and whose confidence is rewarded a few days later when he sees that she has done so over 63 pages.

How would he have known an effective disguise from one that an expert could see through?

[rjpalmer]

Barrett and Graham dodged bullets about as effectively as Bonnie and Clyde.

[caz]

When you say that the skip "was never there" could you tell me the evidence for this please?

Also, when you say that there is "no evidence" that Eddie Lyons was at the house in June 1992 what about the old daily memo book (an old book!) mentioned by Shirley Harrison at page 292 of her 2003 book, The American Connection? By way of reminder, she tells us in that book that Brian Rawes spoke to Eddie Lyons at Battlecrease "in June 1992" and that Rawes had confirmed this "by reference to an old daily memo book". What does that old daily memo book say? Was Harrison wrong?

Many thanks in advance.

Would you like the skip to have been there, Herlock?

By the time Shirley spoke to Brian Rawes, he had to use the memo book to help him remember when he would have seen Eddie at Dodd's house, but he was mistaken. Back in 1993 he had given the exact date - Friday 17th July 1992 - and this later checked out with Keith Skinner's timesheet information, and was also confirmed by Colin Rhodes, who recalled the circumstances of that particular Friday. Brian only ever went to the house on the one occasion, not to work but to collect the van that was at the premises, which was needed for a different job that afternoon.