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.

[Lombro2]

I know how it is. It would be like clicking on a thread about "New Research" and seeing the same "Old Research" being covered again and again. But maybe "The Liar Pushing Her Own Lie Didn't Actually Say the Liar Was Lying in his Daffidavit" is a new one.

Since Robert Smith owns the Diary, that might influence what he has to say. That's like reviewing your own book.

"What Stephen Knight could have been and should have been!"

Even I wouldn’t bother with it. That would be like a Barrett Hoax theorist listening to a cotton merchant’s opinion on the Diary or a Kosminski or Lechmere proponent's. But I guess if they agree, you’d be all ears.

[caz]

The above shows the juvenile mentality of the Maybrick Diary crowd.

The Murphys inherited the watch from Suzanne's father, Mr. Stewart. He had never gotten around to repairing the watch before his retirement, but it stayed in the family's possession for years. There is no reason to doubt this, and Shirley Harrison and Paul Feldman reported it without a whisper of skepticism, and even Albert Johnson's relatives went around to question Murphy and found him nothing other an honest, candid shopkeeper.

Even so, the Diary Crowd has now decided that the Murphys are liars who received stolen goods from Battlecrease in April 1992 and kept the true origins of the watch secret from a string of subsequent researchers, lying repeatedly.

There is not a jot of evidence that this happened, but instead of having the integrity or the spines to admit that they are the ones falsely accusing the Murphys, they hypocritically and falsely turn the tables and suggest that others are questioning their honesty--which I have never done.

And Caroline Brown does this knowingly. Is it any wonder that a long string of people has simply stopped communicating with the Maybrick crowd?

One grows weary of these gaslighting ghouls.

I wonder if Palmer had to reach for the smelling salts after that little display of histrionics.

This is all very simple. Shirley and Feldman never knew about the 9th March 1992 double event, so we will never know what they would have done with that new information had they known it from the outset. I like to hope they would have reassessed everything accordingly, but maybe they would have stuck obstinately with what they thought they knew, and treated new information like something to be scraped off their boots.

Palmer knows - but naturally forgets - that I am not personally wedded to the watch coming out of Battlecrease with the diary, but the circumstantial evidence does lend itself strongly to the possibility that the timing is not coincidental.

I'm not sure how Palmer can argue with a straight face that he never implied that the Murphys had falsely claimed to have used jeweller's rouge to treat visible scratches in the watch in 1992 - scratches which he insists, with no supporting evidence - were not there until the middle of 1993.

Perhaps Palmer would treat the man on the stair who isn't there to a beer, but I'd advise him to have a mop handy.

I don't personally believe the Murphys were that mad, or even that bad.

Palmer is the one who absolutely needs these two otherwise normal individuals to have seen no scratches and therefore nothing to treat - because it would destroy his precious belief in the Barretts as the creators of the diary. It has nothing to do with what's actually true or false.

[caz]

Now that we've established that the Barretts appear to have divorced in the spring of 1995, I don't think one can really talk about the odds being that Mike "lied" about Anne "just after she got her divorce from him" or that he was "attempting to throw Anne under the bus for having left him".

Anne left Mike in January 1994, taking their young daughter with her, and Mike spent the rest of his life demonstrating how bitter and twisted he was about it.

Anne was going to leave getting a divorce until they had been separated for two years, but changed her mind due to Mike's increasingly erratic behaviour during 1994.

Assuming the decree nisi came through on 7th December 1994, that is when the writing was truly on the wall for their marriage, and within the next five days Mike showed his anger and distress by going round to where Anne was living and only succeeding in cutting his hand badly on the glass entrance, which required hospital treatment. That's just a small snapshot of a man in the throes of misery and resentment.

It's not only the decree absolute point It's that none of the dates work. Anne left Mike in January 1994, I believe, yet Mike didn't mention Anne in his confession of June 1994. Ike has pointed out to me in the "Hoax" thread that the reason behind the January 1995 affidavit was that Melvin Harris had suggested to Alan Gray in December 1994 that Mike put his story down in a written statement. I'm pretty sure that suggestion by Harris could have had nothing to do with the Barretts' divorce proceedings. As I've previously discussed with Ike, Mike had already told Gray multiple times in November 1994, long before the decree nisi, that Anne had written the manuscript. This was merely repeated in the January 1995 affidavit. Furthermore, Mike repeated this claim in 1999, five years after his divorce.

This is the problem of dipping into the lives of these individuals without really knowing or caring about the causes and ongoing effects of a long relationship irretrievably broken. Harris and Gray evidently had rather different motives from Mike during the period between June and December 1994. Harris was pushing Gray to get a detailed statement out of Mike about how the diary was created. Harris's immediate aim was to get his nest of hoaxers exposed. Maybe he was not fully aware of the state of Mike's physical and mental health at the time, but Gray must have been, and presumably the idea wasn't for the resulting statement to be put in cold storage for two years. But that's what happened, because Mike only put it through Anne's door, when he could have taken a copy straight to Harold Brough if he'd wanted to reinforce his initial 'confession' and be believed this time.

What is it that makes you say the known dates don't work - apart from the gap of two years between Harris getting his statement and its arrival on the internet?

And I hope this post explains why I thought it was important earlier to mention that the November 1994 and April 1999 instances of Mike stating that his wife assisted him in the forgery weren't included in your brief chronology.

But all this has been known, written and posted about for years, Herlock. My brief chronology was to highlight just a small handful of claims Mike made over the years which seemingly came out of left field, such as the real kidney Anne slapped on the diary, the scratches Mike made in Albert's watch and the sugar he added to the ink.

I still haven't been given anything like a believable motive for Mike to have volunteered a true confession to forgery at any time from January 1994. When did he ever express any credible remorse for his behaviour? When would he have been in 'the right place' to do 'the right thing' and apologise for his own role in the events? A true confession doesn't typically involve the guilty party blaming everyone but himself for his own misdeeds and misfortunes, and trying new ways to make that confession believable. It's usually a one off instance of coming to terms with one's own guilt and accepting it. But multiple false confessions could represent Mike's failed attempts to take his own misery out on others.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

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?

Strange? Coming from Mike? Nope.

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?

By all means carry on speculating about what Mike was asked, and why he said whatever he said. I've already explained why I won't be providing additional information to what has already been posted on these boards. And while we're at it, I won't be providing answers to questions that have already been asked and addressed a thousand times. I just don't have the time.

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.

And I don't understand the logic of the point being made here. Okay, I realise that Mike wasn't exactly Mr Logic, but if he was expecting to be publicly 'exposed' as a former 'journalist' [a bit of a euphemism, but at least he didn't have a column in the Daily Mail], leading to 'very difficult questions' being asked by Shirley, Doreen et al, about why he hadn't told them, why in the name of sanity would that have compelled him to expose himself [oo-er, missus] as an active forger? Why would he not have fobbed them off instead with one of his stock answers or smart remarks? What on earth could they have done that was worse than what he did to himself by cutting off his own Scotch tokens so effectively? Isn't it a bit like asking for more offences to be taken into account, when he hasn't yet been charged with one? "All right, so I got some children's word puzzles and celebrity interviews published after Anne tidied them up and corrected all my mistakes, and I didn't tell you. It's a fair cop. I will now hold my hands up to forging Maybrick's diary and framing him as Jack the Ripper."

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.

If you say so. I'm just struggling with the concept of Mike ever being 'absolved' if he had also concealed from Shirley and the others that he had forged the diary. How did he think it would help matters when he claimed to have done so?

Absolution is not a concept I had ever previously associated with Mike Barrett. But every day is a school day.

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.

You say 'we' and claim this is a 'plausible' reason for Mike to confess to forgery, so nothing I could say is likely to alter that view. And it is only a view. I have explained why the logic escapes me, and I doubt that any amount of Herlocksplaining will help me to understand why you find it logical.

Love,

Caz
X

[Herlock Sholmes]

Anne left Mike in January 1994, taking their young daughter with her, and Mike spent the rest of his life demonstrating how bitter and twisted he was about it.

Anne was going to leave getting a divorce until they had been separated for two years, but changed her mind due to Mike's increasingly erratic behaviour during 1994.

Assuming the decree nisi came through on 7th December 1994, that is when the writing was truly on the wall for their marriage, and within the next five days Mike showed his anger and distress by going round to where Anne was living and only succeeding in cutting his hand badly on the glass entrance, which required hospital treatment. That's just a small snapshot of a man in the throes of misery and resentment.



This is the problem of dipping into the lives of these individuals without really knowing or caring about the causes and ongoing effects of a long relationship irretrievably broken. Harris and Gray evidently had rather different motives from Mike during the period between June and December 1994. Harris was pushing Gray to get a detailed statement out of Mike about how the diary was created. Harris's immediate aim was to get his nest of hoaxers exposed. Maybe he was not fully aware of the state of Mike's physical and mental health at the time, but Gray must have been, and presumably the idea wasn't for the resulting statement to be put in cold storage for two years. But that's what happened, because Mike only put it through Anne's door, when he could have taken a copy straight to Harold Brough if he'd wanted to reinforce his initial 'confession' and be believed this time.

What is it that makes you say the known dates don't work - apart from the gap of two years between Harris getting his statement and its arrival on the internet?



But all this has been known, written and posted about for years, Herlock. My brief chronology was to highlight just a small handful of claims Mike made over the years which seemingly came out of left field, such as the real kidney Anne slapped on the diary, the scratches Mike made in Albert's watch and the sugar he added to the ink.

I still haven't been given anything like a believable motive for Mike to have volunteered a true confession to forgery at any time from January 1994. When did he ever express any credible remorse for his behaviour? When would he have been in 'the right place' to do 'the right thing' and apologise for his own role in the events? A true confession doesn't typically involve the guilty party blaming everyone but himself for his own misdeeds and misfortunes, and trying new ways to make that confession believable. It's usually a one off instance of coming to terms with one's own guilt and accepting it. But multiple false confessions could represent Mike's failed attempts to take his own misery out on others.

Love,

Caz
X

I think I already explained why the dates don't work, Caz. Firstly, you said that the swearing of the affidavit in January 1995 occurred "just after she got a divorce from him." In fact, as at January 1995 the Barretts were still married. Secondly, you said that Mike was "attempting to throw Anne under that bus for having left him". But Anne left Mike a whole year before he swore his affidavit (which itself wasn't made public) and within that period, six months after she left him, Mike didn't mention Anne's name in his initial public confession. But then thirdly, and most importantly, the idea behind the affidavit appears to have come from Harris and thus had nothing to do with the state of the Barretts' marriage.

I also think I put forward believable motives for Mike's confessions.

In June 1994, he was expecting to be exposed by Nick Warren as having been a former journalist. I don't think there's any doubt about that fact. So I'm suggesting as a possibility that he figured that the game was up and that he might as well finally tell the truth, albeit that he wanted to keep Anne's name out of it as a courtesy to her because he still hoped they might get back together.

By December 1994, he was hoping to sell his story and had already told Alan Gray about his wife's involvement. He accepted the advice from Harris to put his story into writing (although no newspapers were sufficiently interested) and, instead, weaponised the affidavit by using it to "blackmaiil" Anne into speaking to him.

But he didn't go public with his claim that his wife wrote the manuscript until some years later. It may be that the first time he said so publicly was in 1999, more than five years after Anne walked out. That's a long time to wait to attempt to throw someone under the bus for having left him.

I can't, of course, say this is definitely what happened but it seems believable to me, and has the advantage of being very simple and straightforward.

I have to repeat that no-one has given me any reason to think that the Barretts weren't capable of forging the diary and no alternative candidate outside the Barretts or their immediate circle has ever been put forward who could have done it in the post WW2 period.