New Ideas and New Research on the Diary

[Herlock Sholmes]

Indeed. That's why I mentioned caveat emptor.

Herlock appeared to be suggesting that when he bought Robert Smith's diary book, he actually expected it to contain the definitive solution to the Whitechapel Murders, and felt like he'd been conned. I never thought of him as a 'vulnerable' victim of a scam in the usual sense, where a person may be tricked into handing over their life savings.

I once bought a bible, but didn't find God. Should I have asked for my money back?

Hi Caz,

That's not what I was saying. My point was that I expected a book entitled "The True Facts" to contain true facts. But when it came to the section about "one off" at least, the facts were not true That's what was so disappointing to me.

[Lombro2]

Why would anyone expect an author or an academic to be able to Rubiks Cube something anyway? We have forums for a reason. And for reason.

[caz]

Hi Caz,

I suppose that if Mike had been told or had heard or read that putting sugar into ink would assist when forging an old document he might have speculated in his mind as to why this might be. There is some literature online which suggests that adding sugar to ink will change the appearance of that ink. So, really, it doesn't matter what he believed, only whether he did or did not put sugar in the ink, as he insisted he did in 1999, assuming he was one of the forgers, of course. The fact that his reasoning might have been wonky can hardly be used as evidence that he didn't do it, or that he wasn't the forger.

Fair enough, Herlock, except that Mike had no access in 1992 to anything online. And nobody needs evidence that Mike didn't do what he claimed, or that he wasn't a forger. The onus is on those who are trying to make the case against him - using his own words to do it.

If he'd claimed in June 1994, that he had bought a bottle of Diamine ink and added sugar to it, explaining his reasons, things would have been rather different. But he did none of that. Mike just claimed at the time that he bought the diary ink from Bluecoat Chambers. He was not willing - or able - to name it, but it was established that Diamine was the only ink on sale there which could mimic a Victorian ink [despite its formula being thoroughly modern]. Naturally, this was the gift that kept on giving: Mike now had "Diamine" tripping off his tongue, so he could later claim it had been dripping off his wife's pen. Nobody believed he could have been the penman, so he needed a Plan B if he was going to settle any scores.

Mike later claimed he had only named Bluecoat Chambers because they happened to pass it as Harold Brough drove him round the one-way system to see if he could identify where he had obtained the raw materials for his forgery. Had they popped into Outhwaite & Litherland, might Brough have found the necessary confirmation from another source? If only.

As usual, a miss is as good as a mile, where Mike's forgery claims are concerned. Was he deliberately stopping short of providing definitive proof at each and every turn, because he wanted to avoid any serious consequences to himself? Or did he have no proof because every single claim was yet another tall tale told by this serial liar? Is there another realistic option?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

I wasn't aware that there was any secrecy in what Mike told Scotland Yard in 1993, especially as you mentioned it in your post, and find it rather strange that the evidence to support your claim isn't publicly available. It's just that you phrased it in an unusual way referring to Mike's "creative writing ambitions and achievements", and it's not quite clear to me what that involved. But are you saying that Mike told the truth to Scotland Yard on this occasion? If so, does that demonstrate he was capable of telling the truth at times?

I'll let you work it out, Herlock.

But, as RJ Palmer would agree, nobody tells lies all the time.

Mike is on record for having mixed provable lies with provable truths, half-truths and sheer unadulterated fantasy, sometimes during the course of a single interview or conversation.

The claim here for a long time was that Mike had deliberately concealed this aspect of his life in the 1980s, and this was considered suspicious to the point of damning. But he didn't conceal - or try to conceal - this from the boys in blue, and this was way back in October 1993, many months before he went to Brough with his first forgery claims. There's no need to shift any goalposts. It is what it is.

If you wish to question Keith Skinner's research, or what I have posted with his knowledge, there's nothing I can do. I was trying to help, as you seemed unaware of this fact, but I appreciate why you might prefer help from alternative sources.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

I haven't asked him that question, Caz, but I know he posted other extracts from the same letter on his old website which can still be viewed on the Wayback archive. It's the one in which Anne accuses Mike, mysteriously, of blackmailing her.

I don't actually need to see any of those extracts, Herlock. I merely wondered if you had asked if the whole letter was available.

It's pretty obvious that none of us would still be here if Anne had written anything to the effect that she had written the diary with or without Mike's input.

It's far from obvious to me, however, in the absence of all Anne's correspondence with Mike being made available, that she didn't write anything to the effect that his 'confessions' were all total bollocks and he knew it as well as she did. Perhaps I'm just too suspicious.

It would change nothing in any case because I doubt that Anne would have put anything incriminating in writing to Mike, knowing her letters were unlikely to be safe in his hands. In that respect, the blackmail accusation is pretty self-explanatory. He delivered his affidavit through her door, hoping it would 'terrify' her into agreeing to make contact. She was not going to be blackmailed, however, by a faux legal document that was a pack of lies. He could publish and be damned as far as she was concerned. If people chose to believe his drunken fantasies, that was their problem, not hers. She had other problems on her plate, all very much connected to life on earth.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Caroline-- I don't read your nonsensical screed anymore, but I was alerted by email to the above statement.

Will you stop telling lies about me?

I challenge you--right here, right now--to produce a single instance where I have ever suggested or implied that the Murphys---honest shopkeepers--were dishonest.

Quit projecting your own unfounded suspicions onto me.

The casual readers of this thread should be made aware that it is YOU (along with Markus and Jay Hartley) who have accused the Murphys of lying about the watch.

I believe the exact opposite.

Apologies. I must have missed the post where Palmer acknowledged that the Murphys remembered treating the scratches in the watch with jeweller's rouge because it was true. He had previously insisted there were no scratches to treat in 1992 and therefore this never happened, and one of the Johnson brothers must have put them there the following year.

The implication was pretty obvious, to me at least: that the Murphys were protecting their customer by claiming to have used jeweller's rouge on scratches that had not existed when the watch was in their possession.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Why would anyone expect an author or an academic to be able to Rubiks Cube something anyway? We have forums for a reason. And for reason.

If that's directed at me, Lombro, I wasn't expecting Smith to Rubiks Cube anything away. I merely expected his book to contain accurate facts about to a critical subject relating to the diary's authenticity. Sadly, it did not. Perhaps my hopes were too high?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Fair enough, Herlock, except that Mike had no access in 1992 to anything online. And nobody needs evidence that Mike didn't do what he claimed, or that he wasn't a forger. The onus is on those who are trying to make the case against him - using his own words to do it.

If he'd claimed in June 1994, that he had bought a bottle of Diamine ink and added sugar to it, explaining his reasons, things would have been rather different. But he did none of that. Mike just claimed at the time that he bought the diary ink from Bluecoat Chambers. He was not willing - or able - to name it, but it was established that Diamine was the only ink on sale there which could mimic a Victorian ink [despite its formula being thoroughly modern]. Naturally, this was the gift that kept on giving: Mike now had "Diamine" tripping off his tongue, so he could later claim it had been dripping off his wife's pen. Nobody believed he could have been the penman, so he needed a Plan B if he was going to settle any scores.

Mike later claimed he had only named Bluecoat Chambers because they happened to pass it as Harold Brough drove him round the one-way system to see if he could identify where he had obtained the raw materials for his forgery. Had they popped into Outhwaite & Litherland, might Brough have found the necessary confirmation from another source? If only.

As usual, a miss is as good as a mile, where Mike's forgery claims are concerned. Was he deliberately stopping short of providing definitive proof at each and every turn, because he wanted to avoid any serious consequences to himself? Or did he have no proof because every single claim was yet another tall tale told by this serial liar? Is there another realistic option?

Love,

Caz
X

Yes, I know Mike Barrett didn't have online access in 1992, Caz. It was me that did the online searching. But I don't have access to the books in the Liverpool Library. I also said that someone might have told Mike that adding sugar to ink could change its appearance. The only point I was making was that Mike's explanation for why he put sugar in the ink doesn't help us as to whether he did or did not do it.

You've moved on in your post to other issues about the ink, asking various questions for which there isn't enough available evidence to answer, but I was only interested in the sugar point.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I'll let you work it out, Herlock.

But, as RJ Palmer would agree, nobody tells lies all the time.

Mike is on record for having mixed provable lies with provable truths, half-truths and sheer unadulterated fantasy, sometimes during the course of a single interview or conversation.

The claim here for a long time was that Mike had deliberately concealed this aspect of his life in the 1980s, and this was considered suspicious to the point of damning. But he didn't conceal - or try to conceal - this from the boys in blue, and this was way back in October 1993, many months before he went to Brough with his first forgery claims. There's no need to shift any goalposts. It is what it is.

If you wish to question Keith Skinner's research, or what I have posted with his knowledge, there's nothing I can do. I was trying to help, as you seemed unaware of this fact, but I appreciate why you might prefer help from alternative sources.

Love,

Caz
X

Just be clear, Caz. I wasn't making any claims. I was putting forward as one theory for Mike confessing in June 1994 the possibility that he felt under pressure because he had deliberately concealed his journalistic career (which was about to be publicly revealed) from Shirley, Doreen, Smith, Feldman, Martin and Keith and other researchers. I didn't say anything about the police.

If you're saying that he freely told Scotland Yard of his work for Celebrity and Chat, it does raise the question of why he volunteered that information to them yet had never mentioned it to Shirley or any of the researchers. I mean, if it wasn't important enough to tell Shirley, why did he tell Scotland Yard? Doesn't that strike you as strange?

But was it voluntary? Nick Warren said he learnt of Mike's journalist career from Devereux's family. Could the police have learnt the same thing from them during their investigations? If so, did Mike only come clean with the police because the interviewing officers made it clear that they already knew?

I also don't see how Mike privately telling Scotland Yard detectives in 1993 about his writing ambitions and achievements meets the point I raised which was that, in June 1994, Mike was expecting to be publicly exposed as a former journalist and would thus have had to answer very difficult questions from Shirley, Doreen et al about why he had never told them this. The fact that he might have privately told Scotland Yard about it under questioning after the completion of Shirley's book, wouldn't have got him anywhere near to being absolved from having concealed that information from Shirley and the others.

So I think we're back to where we started which is that Mike's imminent exposure of having once been a journalist seems to be a plausible reason for why he suddenly, and out of the blue, confessed to forging the diary in June 1994. Unless you can provide any reason why not.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I don't actually need to see any of those extracts, Herlock. I merely wondered if you had asked if the whole letter was available.

It's pretty obvious that none of us would still be here if Anne had written anything to the effect that she had written the diary with or without Mike's input.

It's far from obvious to me, however, in the absence of all Anne's correspondence with Mike being made available, that she didn't write anything to the effect that his 'confessions' were all total bollocks and he knew it as well as she did. Perhaps I'm just too suspicious.

It would change nothing in any case because I doubt that Anne would have put anything incriminating in writing to Mike, knowing her letters were unlikely to be safe in his hands. In that respect, the blackmail accusation is pretty self-explanatory. He delivered his affidavit through her door, hoping it would 'terrify' her into agreeing to make contact. She was not going to be blackmailed, however, by a faux legal document that was a pack of lies. He could publish and be damned as far as she was concerned. If people chose to believe his drunken fantasies, that was their problem, not hers. She had other problems on her plate, all very much connected to life on earth.

Love,

Caz
X

No, I'm aware you haven't asked to see any other extracts, Caz. My point was that it would seem that Orsam does have the whole letter because he's reproduced a number of extracts. But, as I said, I haven't asked him. I's not something that's ever occurred to me to ask.

There's no evidence as far as I'm aware that Anne ever privately told Mike that his confessions were all total bollocks. I suppose that's something which remains at issue on the basis that the Barretts could have forged the diary together.

As for your theory that Anne said she was not going to be blackmailed by an affidavit which was full of lies, the problem is that this isn't what she said in her letter, at least not in the extracts which have been reproduced (and it would seem that all the relevant extracts have been made available). On the contrary, what she wrote to Mike was, "If you want to destroy the diary get on with it! Because nothing I can say or nothing I can do will stop you doing what you want to do. And writing to me saying "speak to me or I'll.....will not work.". She then added, "if you want to make a public exhibition of yourself that is your decision not mine. But don't expect me to sit quietly back and take it because I won't." So, you see, she didn't actually say that his document was a pack of lies. On the face of it, she would appear to be saying that she was refusing to be blackmailed into speaking to Mike by his threat of destroying the diary (i.e. by circulating his affidavit) and was challenging him to go ahead and do it, but that, if he did, he should expect some strong retaliation from her. Which makes it surprising that she didn't say that it was an empty threat because the affidavit was all untrue. I do agree with you, though, that she would have been too clever to admit in the letter that they did jointly forge the diary, if that's what had happened. She would have surely left that part unsaid.