New Ideas and New Research on the Diary

[rjpalmer]

there wasn't a peep about Anne being anything other than an honest British secretary until she needed to not be ...

I think we must travel in different circles.

Who are you referring to Ike?

The skeptics I know always thought of Anne Graham and her "in the family" nonsense as total malarky so you must be referring to Shirley Harrison, Keith Skinner, etc.

Maybe Shirley still thinks of Anne as an honest British secretary. I haven't heard otherwise. Does anyone know if she endorses the great Battlecrease caper?

It was the diary folk who needed to throw Suzanne and Ron under the bus, and, of course, they did the same with Anne.

[Iconoclast]

Why do I need to disprove your imagination?

The watch did not 'mysteriously appear' at the same time as the diary, as you claimed.

Suzanne and Ron Murphy informed Shirley Harrison that the watch had belonged to Suzanne's father, as part of the bits & bobs left over when he retired. It had been in the family's possession for years.



There wasn't a peep about Ron and Suzanne being anything other than honest British shopkeepers until the Battlecrease caper was invented, and then it was necessary to retroactively paint them as dishonest members of a gang of thieves and fencers.

Not very nice, Lombro.

How I laughed!

This, my dear dear readers, is why Anne Barrett is occasionally described as having been tricked by her conman husband into writing the Maybrick scrapbook. What's good for the Murphys has to therefore be good for the Anne Barretts because, of course, there wasn't a peep about Anne being anything other than an honest British secretary until she needed to not be ...

[rjpalmer]

Oh so you proved it saw the light of day in the previous 103 years! Wow.

Why do I need to disprove your imagination?

The watch did not 'mysteriously appear' at the same time as the diary, as you claimed.

Suzanne and Ron Murphy informed Shirley Harrison that the watch had belonged to Suzanne's father, as part of the bits & bobs left over when he retired. It had been in the family's possession for years.



There wasn't a peep about Ron and Suzanne being anything other than honest British shopkeepers until the Battlecrease caper was invented, and then it was necessary to retroactively paint them as dishonest members of a gang of thieves and fencers.

Not very nice, Lombro.

[Lombro2]

.................................................. .................................................. .................................................. Nothing new! Nothing real!

[Lombro2]

Oh so you proved it saw the light of day in the previous 103 years! Wow.

Something new! Something real!............................................. .................................................. .................................................. ......................

[rjpalmer]

there is the matter of the gold watch that mysteriously appeared at the same time

Imagination...it's one hell of a drug.

[Losmandris]

And so it begins..............

Have fun!

[Lombro2]

In conjunction with the Battlecrease Provenance, there is the matter of the gold watch that mysteriously appeared at the same time without a proven Provenance for the actual watch itself. It was alternately in a cubby hole in Battlecrease or it was in a jeweler's sock drawer until 1992.

Coincidentally, it has a watch repair mark in the middle which is an H or a K with the numbers 9/3.

I think that was the mark made by the jeweler and/or repairman who got the watch back up and running on March 9 of 1992. I think it's a K for Kruger of Kruger Jeweler. Their store is now in the same unit where Stewarts used to be but, in 1992, it was in the same neighborhood. They did not reply to two requests for comment.

The Inconvenient Truth of The Maybrick Watch - Jack The Ripper Forums - Ripperology For The 21st Century

[Lombro2]

I agree you don't need a Provenance for a serial killer diary. It's not a work of art. But the Diary says, at the end when he's dying in his bed in Battlecrease, "I place this now in a place where it shall be found". That means Battlecrease (more likely than the Knowsley Building).

It could have come out of Battlecrease at any time between 1889 and 1992. So your theory must be that it came out of Battlecrease before and then came to him. And then Eddy by coincidence also came to him with a story of working at Battlecrease.

If Michael Barrett had the diary previously written by someone else, as you're now saying, then he'd have read that and known it meant Battlecrease. Or Mike first learned from Eddy what Battlecrease was, and he just happened to have a Diary that came from there.

So he had the written word and the words of Eddy to cement a Provenance given to him by Providence. And yet, again, he didn't receive it with open arms.

He's not thinking like a Forger. He's thinking like a Dealer who found out he's dealing a stolen artifact.

[John Wheat]

This is a completely pointless thread.

[Scott Nelson]

The Battlecrease provenance isn't clearly written in the diary. Mike probably couldn't figure where it came from until Eddie suggested it based on discussions Lyons had with colleagues who worked in the house years before. The way subsequent events unfolded, Mike didn't have to worry about using a "Battlecrease Provenance."

[Lombro2]

Then of course, the electricians, and the rumours they apparently started, provided Michael with his “air-tight” cookie tin alibi to take care of the INKonsistecies. But he didn’t think to use that either even though he invented or incorporated a Battlecrease Provenance.

[Lombro2]

This is the problem I posed in post 1.

The Battlecrease Provenance is clearly written in the Diary. If Barrett used it and was given confidence to use it by Eddy’s information, why didn’t he embrace it when the rumors started trickling out?

[Scott Nelson]

How about Mike already possessing the diary when he meets Eddie in the pub (without the actual diary in hand)? Eddie only gives Mike the idea that it could have come from Dodd's house, so Mike is comfortable with that provenance, should he need to use it in the near future.

[Iconoclast]

Caz came up with a new idea about the "alleged" Saddle pub transaction:

The idea of Mike being a regular fence of stolen goods is an interesting one, Lombro2, though there is zero evidence for it - but, for clarity, Caz's idea about why Mike received the scrapbook is not new, she and others have proposed this many times over the long years of this debate.