New Ideas and New Research on the Diary

[rjpalmer]

It is typical of the diary crowd that, while they have utterly no real respect for Melvin Harris's 'viperous' theories about the diary, they nonetheless cite his opinions (or alleged opinions) about the worth of Barrett's affidavit! It's weird. It's a bit like someone who has constantly rubbished the Lechmere theory putting great stock in Christer Holmgren's opinions about M.J. Druitt's guilt or lack thereof.

Is C.A.B. now plumping for Melvin's Kane/Devereux theory? If not, why should we care if Melvin didn't accept (or fully accept) the account given in the Gray's affidavit?

And it's a simplistic statement anyway. Harris also believed Barrett demonstrated inside knowledge of the diary's creation, hence his interest in testing the ink for chloroacetamide and his attempt to get at the truth of the Sphere book.

If Melvin had thought all of Mike's statements were 'rubbish,' he would have hardly done so.

Q.E.D.

[caz]

Hi Roger,

In the past few months that I've been posting about the diary, it's remarkable how many times I've been categorically told things are facts which turn out not to be true. When I ask for supporting evidence I'm denied it and have to search out the truth myself. Truly, this subject is like none other I've ever encountered.

I don't even know why Gray's own enquiries, or lack of them, as the case may be, are of any significance. All I was asking was what the auctioneer actually said about the account in Barrett's affidavit of O&L's auction process. What do Gray's supposed lack of enquiries have to do with this? And what I find really extraordinary is that no-one seems to know how O&L conducted their auctions on 1992 and how that differed from the account in Barrett's affidavit. Did no-one ever ask them this simple and obvious question?

Why we're even discussing the O&L auction process is another mystery. Abby said something amusing to me about details of "the old book" being revealed in "a new book" and, for reasons I still don't understand, this led to us being told that we either believe Mike or the auctioneer. So the obvious question is: what did the auctioneer say? But I still haven't had a straight answer to this simple question. Instead, I'm being told that Alan Gray didn't bother to check something, and I can"t understand why I'm being told that. Even worse if, as you suggest might be the case, it's not even true.

In early 1997, Shirley Harrison finally had sight of Mike's January 1995 affidavit and immediately sent O & L a copy of his auction 'experience' to ask how this compared with the way they conducted their sales. The response she got made it clear that they did not accept what Mike had claimed - no ifs, no buts. I'm not particularly impressed with the argument that it might have made a world of difference if only someone had thought to change Mike's word 'ticket' to 'receipt', as if there would then have been instant recognition of O & L's typical sales practice. On balance, I'd stick to Mike - or Alan Gray - having 'garbled' the details to such an extent that nobody at O & L could have been expected to reconcile his claimed experience as a bidder with their own experience of the business in general.

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

As much as I try to avoid spending 30 minutes of my day replying to Casebook posts, it seems that my role here is simply never done ...

All that happened on 9th March 1992 was that some workmen did some electrical work in an old house in Liverpool. I've no idea why you say that by rights that "should never have happened".

I hope no-one is falling for this statistical mince? There were (and still are) thousands of old houses in Liverpool. All that actually happened on March 9, 1992, was that some workmen appeared to have done some work involving floorboards in James Maybrick's last residence (103 years earlier). Now, James Maybrick's name had no association with the authorship of the crimes of Jack the Ripper (except highly tangentially via the 'Maybrick Case') up until that day. All that then happened on March 9, 1992, after James Maybrick's last residence had workmen in was that a man called Michael Barrett rang a London literary agency saying he thought he might have the diary of Jack the Ripper and would they be interested in seeing it. All that actually happened after that included the discovery that one of the workmen drank in the same pub that Michael Barrett drank in. That's all that actually happened (which is significantly more significant than the 'all that happened' which you chose to describe).

If there is anyone on Casebook who genuinely thinks the March 9, 1992, 'double event' is just 'one of those things', please take a course in statistics because I promise you, if it were a coincidence, it is one of the greatest in the history of the human race. If, however, you think it is just 'one of those things' because that helps your argument along hugely, then please get yourself a good mirror, look in it, and ask yourself, "Why is it so important to me that I feel the need to do that?".

That said, the idea that he bought it at an auction sale on 31st March 1992 has never been disproved, to my knowledge. You can keep saying that there's "no credible evidence" for this and "no credible evidence" for that - and of course credible evidence is in very short supply regarding the diary - but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Credible evidence is very much in short supply regarding the Maybrick scrapbook. Fortunately for me, absolutely none of it whatsoever was wasted on supporting Mike Barrett's claims, ever. Nor none wasted on the quality of Alan Gray's hearing, it would appear.

I did explain why Mike might not have mentioned Anne's role in his June 1994 confession. He might have wanted to keep her name out of it at that stage, perhaps hoping for a reconciliation.

If he was hoping for a reconciliation, why did he 'confess' in the first place?

If Anne assisted Mike with the diary by providing "the brains", that is highly relevant to Mike's journalistic career because she helped him with his articles. They were a writing team. It's why I keep asking why they couldn't have jointly written the diary, to which answer comes there none. So if you don’t think Mike was capable of faking a diary why wasn’t he capable of faking a diary with help from someone who had helped previously and on numerous occasions?

I personally would not equate the claim that Anne helped Mike to 'tidy up' his celebrity interviews during his very short-lived attempts at a writing career with anything even vaguely as creative as the format of the Maybrick scrapbook text, nor do I see Mike's 1980s literary efforts as anything other than what he implied when he admitted that he had been part of a 'writing circle'. As I recall, 'The Writing Circle' was a fee-paying process by which you 'learned your craft', part of which may very well have consisted of recommending that one's career could start with simple short stories and perhaps even celebrity interviews to the gossip rags. By the early 1990s, there is no evidence whatsoever that Barrett was part of a writing 'team' with his wife, nor that he ever actually had been. There is actually no evidence that he was still striving to be a writer which makes his wife's claim that she gave Tony D the scrapbook to give to Mike a particularly questionable one altogether. To me, the only evidence that is relevant here is that Barrett's attempts at a writing career in the 1980s would have been the reason why he ended up with a hookey scrapbook from a meeting in the pub in the early 1990s - Barrett's literary braggadocio presumably as evident then as it certainly was during his patronising 'confession' on stage in April 1999 (the event you harp on about so much, note).

Your question "Why would confession have been good for the soul in Mike's case, as you suggested yourself, if he'd had very little input?" is a non sequitur. The point is that Mike had been lying for two years non-stop about where the diary came from. That was the pressure he was under and that's why confession might have been good for the soul. But if he, at a minimum, obtained the photograph album and dictated the text to Anne, that is not "very little input" by anyone's definition.

I am drawn back to RJ Palmer's insightful comments on Barrett of just a few short days ago:

"Calling him a pathological liar, while true, only grazes the surface. He was not a liar in the sense of someone who wants to deceive you. That sounds bizarre, but that's the mistake people make. In reality, Mike doesn't care if you believe him. At times, he is overjoyed that you know he's lying. His aim is less than that, and it's more than that. He's not clever, but he is a mental terrorist. His aim is to exasperate and to sow doubt. If you walk away convinced that he knows nothing at all (which is what many have concluded, wrongly), he's fine with that, too. Indeed, he loves that conclusion. If he was the hoaxer, why wouldn't he be?"

I'm thinking of sticking this into SocPill25 because it's one of the finest things RJ has ever written. Call it as you see it, say I - it was well-crafted. Barrett was a mental terrorist and a spectacular one at that as his actions have derailed the truth for over thirty years now.

There is good reason to think that all three of them were liars ...

To adopt your own stance on these things, can you please provide your evidence that Caroline Barrett - aged around ten years - was a liar? If you cannot, can you - to adopt your own stance on these things - retract the claim, please?

I can't seem to get away from this place because whenever I put my head back in over a leisurely cup of Tesco's Rooibos decaffeinated tea, my sense of fair-play is assailed by a thousand claims regarding Mike and Anne Barrett for which no-one appears to have much more than a fancy and a whisper and a rumour and a mishearing here and there to back up some seriously trenchant views on what actually happened.

Ike

[rjpalmer]

I am drawn back to RJ Palmer's insightful comments on Barrett of just a few short days ago:

"Calling him a pathological liar, while true, only grazes the surface. He was not a liar in the sense of someone who wants to deceive you. That sounds bizarre, but that's the mistake people make. In reality, Mike doesn't care if you believe him. At times, he is overjoyed that you know he's lying. His aim is less than that, and it's more than that. He's not clever, but he is a mental terrorist. His aim is to exasperate and to sow doubt. If you walk away convinced that he knows nothing at all (which is what many have concluded, wrongly), he's fine with that, too. Indeed, he loves that conclusion. If he was the hoaxer, why wouldn't he be?"

I'm thinking of sticking this into SocPill25 because it's one of the finest things RJ has ever written. Call it as you see it, say I - it was well-crafted. Barrett was a mental terrorist and a spectacular one at that as his actions have derailed the truth for over thirty years now.

If you do quote me, Ike, please edit the last sentence. I was going to write "If he was the hoaxer, why wouldn't he?" That last 'be' somehow got in and is grammatically incorrect. I think I was going to write that Barrett would have been 'delighted,' and somehow this got lost in the editing process.

As a totally irrelevant aside, let me draw your attention to the word hoaxster.

Our embattled Secretary of Defense, the incompetent Pete Hegseth, blamed his current troubles on "hoaxsters" in the media.

I thought I misheard him, so I ran back the tape. Yup, he called them "hoaxsters." As I type this word, it is underlined in red--indication that the word is misspelled.

He claims to be a Harvard grad, though it certainly doesn't show.

Anyway, apparently 'hoaxter' is a rare and acceptable variant of 'hoaxer,' but almost no one uses it, and I'm convinced Hegseth stumbled on it by accident.

But for now on I'm call Bongo Barrett a hoaxster, so be warned.

[Iconoclast]

I've already discussed the "December 1993" date from Barrett's affidavit with Ike. It's patently obvious that this is a simple dating error and that Gray should have typed "June 1994".

Seriously, does anyone consider this to be a plausible 'dating error'? Get a month wrong, yes. Get a year wrong, okay. But get them both so badly wrong? Did Gray mishear or misremember? Or just randomly chuck in a month and a year because he knew it would be irrelevant to readers of it if Mike Barrett wasn't actually typing it?

The fact of the matter is that as at June 1994 Barrett was about to be publicly exposed as a former journalist. All I'm saying is that this seems to be the best motive available for understanding his confession at that time.

Hardly the 'best motive' at all! If you're about to be 'exposed as a former journalist' what does it matter whether you 'confess' your nefarious hoax before you are 'exposed as a former journalist' or after you are 'exposed as a former journalist'? Surely you ride the odds and wait to see if you are indeed going to be unmasked and 'exposed as a former journalist'?

I stress the 'exposed as a former journalist' bit in the hope it might just sink into people's brains how contrived this interpretation is of one of The Writing Circle's most inept alumni.

If you're asking me why Mike delivered the affidavit to Anne's door, assuming his affidavit to be broadly true, then I would suggest the answer is that he was attempting to blackmail Anne, effectively saying to her that if she didn't let him see Caroline he'd circulate the affidavit, either to the newspapers or to Keith, Shirley, Doreen, Feldman etc. I had thought that was obvious. I don't know if Anne did let Mike see Caroline but, if not, she must have held her nerve, confident that Mike couldn't prove anything about her own role in the forgery.

Or she ignored the ramblings of her desperate, alcoholic ex- (or soon-to-be-ex-) husband whose motivations she could well see through after so many years of marriage, whilst she was utterly free of any concerns regarding her liberty (knowing - as she did - that she had no hand in the creation of the scrapbook). It is clear that she did know about the affidavit - the January 18, 1995, meeting with Shirley, Keith and Sally shows that she tentatively touched on it but moved on quickly when it was evident that they were either unaware of his affidavit or that they were not excited enough about it to talk with her about its contents.

[rjpalmer]

one of The Writing Circle's most inept alumni.

The Writing Circle should have been quizzed about Barrett. I've seen no evidence they ever were. Hindsight is 20/20 but they would have been my first port of call.

I realize most of the diary's researchers were based in London, and had limited time in Liverpool, but for the life of me I don't know why Harold Brough or Carol Emmas or Alan Gray didn't chase these people down, buy them a cup of tea, and pick their brains about Barrett's interests and literary efforts.

Brough in particular must have had many contacts--he should have been able to locate former members.

[Iconoclast]

If you do quote me, Ike, please edit the last sentence. I was going to write "If he was the hoaxer, why wouldn't he?" That last 'be' somehow got in and is grammatically incorrect. I think I was going to write that Barrett would have been 'delighted,' and somehow this got lost in the editing process.

I was going to remove that whole line as it was an argument I didn't want to iterate. If I include it, could we agree to "If he was the hoaxer, why wouldn't he be delighted?"?

[Iconoclast]

The Writing Circle should have been quizzed about Barrett. I've seen no evidence they ever were. Hindsight is 20/20 but they would have been my first port of call.

I realize most of the diary's researchers were based in London, and had limited time in Liverpool, but for the life of me I don't know why Harold Brough or Carol Emmas or Alan Gray didn't chase these people down, buy them a cup of tea, and pick their brains about Barrett's interests and literary efforts.

Brough in particular must have had many contacts--he should have been able to locate former members.

The Writing Circle
Outhwaite & Litherland (to include 1992 had it entered anyone's head that Gray's affidavit might be wrong on the dates)
The Bluecoat Chambers (did they recall him and his wife buying the brushes and the ink? - a long shot but one to cover nevertheless)
Barrett's solicitor (re the Sphere book inter alia)
Lynn Barrett (re what she knew - if anything - about the scrapbook)
The Devereux girls (to confirm the Tales of Liverpool tale inter alia)
The staff of The Saddle (not just the owner)
Goodness only knows who and what else ...

But - as I'm sure that Keith Skinner has pointed-out before - when Rendell's report crushed the potential sales of the book and Robert Smith drastically reduced his upfront investment, the monies available for researching everything went pretty much out of the window (especially as half of it was already spent on Mike Barrett's tab in The Saddle, no doubt).

I may have got some of my facts wrong there, but I think the gist is correct - there just wasn't the funding to dig any deeper than was dug.

Frustrating, I know.

[rjpalmer]

The Devereux girls (to confirm the Tales of Liverpool tale inter alia)

They already confirmed it. I've seen others trying to cast doubt on this and it's lame.

The booklet was obtained from their father Tony Devereux in 1990/1991 who informed one sister that it was Mike Barrett's. That settles the matter.

As I read it, Barrett was very uncharacteristically rattled when Martin Howells brought this up with Mike.

In brief, Mike's reaction was strange. All I can figure is either he had previously told Harrison & Co. that Tony didn't know the identity of the diarist, or he had previously told them that he (Mike) had only discovered Maybrick's identity after Tony's death. Somehow, Mike feared he was 'caught out,' but we aren't given any explanation for his reaction.

[rjpalmer]

I may have got some of my facts wrong there, but I think the gist is correct - there just wasn't the funding to dig any deeper than was dug.

"Lift not the painted veil."

Too busy chasing after Feldman and Graham's malarky.

[caz]

If you really want to be depressed, Herlock, go look in the archives for May 2001.

Peter Birchwood asked the same question nearly a quarter of a century ago. He was trying to find out what the actual procedure was at O & L from Shirley Harrison. Whether he ever found out or reached out to O & L himself, I have no idea. The conversation turned in another direction and not long afterwards both Peter and Shirley quit contributing.

Peter wrote something that resonated with me. He got the feeling that Mr. Whay and Ms. Harrison were a little too eager to dismiss Barrett's account--to debunk it rather than to 'get at the truth of the matter.'

I got the same feeling. I'm not suggesting that Mr. Whay was being evasive--not at all. He no doubt said what he believed--but businessmen can be very protective of their businesses, and he might not have relished the idea that the good name of his company would forever be associated with something as distasteful as Jack the Ripper or a fake document that had gained local notoriety. It would hardly have been the fault of the auction if they had unwittingly sold the photo album to a scammer, but people can be irrational. Whay's impulse might have been to quickly dismiss any such association. "He didn't get that damned thing from us!"

Barrett's less-than-competent description of the auction might have made for a convenient 'off ramp'--- enough for Whay to throw his hands in the air and to put the matter to bed quickly.

Ah yes, let's imagine that Whay was as precious as he was irrational, and would have cared what a buyer might choose to do with any item included in one of his auction sales. How would any mud have rubbed off on his business, by association with a liar's claims to have turned an innocent photo album after purchase into Jack the Ripper's diary? Some would no doubt have welcomed the free publicity, in the event that Mike's claims had been confirmable. It's not as if anyone was likely to make a habit of treating O & L like an Aladdin's cave, where items could be picked up for a song by petty criminals and sold on as serial killer trophies.

Personally, I'm not convinced Barrett made it up. There is a logic to his chronology. The red diary Barrett had secretly received from the bookseller in Oxford WAS too small and useless, so he would have needed to seek something else. The 11/12 day span between the auction and Barrett showing up in London jives with the facts.

Well, I've seen nothing yet to convince me that Mike didn't make it up. The wording of the advert placed on his behalf by Martin Earl did not produce what would have been essential for anyone planning to fake Maybrick's diary, and was highly unlikely ever to have done so. Had the red diary proved in any way suitable for that purpose, and had Anne been moronic enough to have used it, the paper trail from advert to order to dispatch to invoice and finally to payment would have led straight back to Mike Barrett [not Williams] of 12 Goldie Street when the first diary book became a bestseller in 1993. Someone involved with supplying and sending Mr Barrett the raw material only had to recognise it and remember his 'unusual' request and that would have been that. It was lucky for Anne that the red diary was so hopelessly unsuited to the task Mike was about to set her, or that she was about to set herself.

Anne's luck must also have been in when it came to the auction find, as nobody ever came forward with inside knowledge of the photo album and compass having been in an auction sale at O & L before the diary story first emerged. When the book was published, revealing what the diary itself looked like, it wouldn't have been hard for a previous owner to work out that this was suspiciously like the one they had put up for auction the previous year, the only difference being that all the pages had originally been intact and there was no writing, just photographs, which had been mounted on the same pages which were coincidentally missing from the start of Jack the Ripper's diary.

Mr Whay's irrational reaction must have been another stroke of luck for Anne, who could hardly have expected him to be in denial about Mike's purchase if the evidence was there, even if she could rely on Mike to get the year wrong on two or more occasions.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Only 'maybe', Herlock? If Mike didn't attend an auction, and made up those details from whole cloth, where does that leave the Great Barrett Hoax Conspiracy Theory?

Neither Mike nor Alan Gray could be bothered to check with anyone at O&L that the experience as described in the January 1995 affidavit had anything in common with their day-to-day reality, whether the year in question was 1990 or some earlier or later year. Don't forget, Mike told Gray at one point that it had been Anne alone who had bought the job lot which included the journal and compass.

That's not garbling the details 'slightly' when recalling them in November 1994 - that's a total change of story, which reverted just two months later to Mike attending the auction; Mike giving his name as Williams; Mike bidding for the album and compass; and Mike coming home with the goods plus his proof of purchase.

Love,

Caz
X

I already answered your question about the auction in my #342 Caz. For some reason you seem determined to insist that Mike must have bought the photograph album at an O&L auction on 31st March 1992 and nothing else is possible. While this would seem to be quite likely what did happen, if we assume the diary is a Barrett forgery, the only reason to identify O&L as the source is because of Barrett but we know that Barrett was capable of telling lies. You always caution us not to rely on what Mike said. As far as I'm concerned, he could have obtained the photograph album somewhere else, or someone else could have bought the album at the auction on his behalf.

You already made the claim that Gray didn't "bother" to check with O&L but then Roger countered that he did, in fact, try to check but was turned away. Either way, whether Gray (or Barrett) did or did not try to carry out checks it doesn't change the underlying truth of whether the album was or was not bought at the auction so why even bring it up? Is this an examination into Gray's competence as an investigator?

Yes, I do remember hearing Mike saying to Gray that Anne bought the diary at the auction on one of the tapes I listened to (and for all I know that's what happened or perhaps they both went to the auction together) but you always tell us that Mike was a compulsive liar so I put that down to him telling a lie. For me, the best account of Barrett's story is found at the April 1999 Cloak & Dagger meeting. It could, of course, all be a lie but that then brings us back to his secret attempt to purchase a Victorian diary with blank pages in March 1992 and the only reason for him to have done that, surely, is because he wanted to forge a Victorian diary. It's so obvious it's truly hard for me to understand why you don't see what a giveaway it is.

[Herlock Sholmes]

In early 1997, Shirley Harrison finally had sight of Mike's January 1995 affidavit and immediately sent O & L a copy of his auction 'experience' to ask how this compared with the way they conducted their sales. The response she got made it clear that they did not accept what Mike had claimed - no ifs, no buts. I'm not particularly impressed with the argument that it might have made a world of difference if only someone had thought to change Mike's word 'ticket' to 'receipt', as if there would then have been instant recognition of O & L's typical sales practice. On balance, I'd stick to Mike - or Alan Gray - having 'garbled' the details to such an extent that nobody at O & L could have been expected to reconcile his claimed experience as a bidder with their own experience of the business in general.

Love,

Caz
X

I asked a very long time ago for you to produce O&L's response. This was after you claimed that they said that "everything" about Mike's account was wrong. You still haven't produced their response but now you are saying that it "made clear" that they didn't accept what Mike had claimed. But what part of what Mike had claimed were they challenging? That's what I've been trying to get at. I quoted one line from your book where they said that they didn't conduct their auctions in the way Barrett had described in his affidavit. Is that the entire response that you're relying on? To me, it's not good enough. There's no detail of what they were challenging and they haven't explained how they DID conduct their auctions. It doesn't matter whether you're impressed or not with the argument about "ticket" versus "receipt" because the point is that we still don't know, all these years later, if that was the issue or not.

[Herlock Sholmes]

As much as I try to avoid spending 30 minutes of my day replying to Casebook posts, it seems that my role here is simply never done ...



I hope no-one is falling for this statistical mince? There were (and still are) thousands of old houses in Liverpool. All that actually happened on March 9, 1992, was that some workmen appeared to have done some work involving floorboards in James Maybrick's last residence (103 years earlier). Now, James Maybrick's name had no association with the authorship of the crimes of Jack the Ripper (except highly tangentially via the 'Maybrick Case') up until that day. All that then happened on March 9, 1992, after James Maybrick's last residence had workmen in was that a man called Michael Barrett rang a London literary agency saying he thought he might have the diary of Jack the Ripper and would they be interested in seeing it. All that actually happened after that included the discovery that one of the workmen drank in the same pub that Michael Barrett drank in. That's all that actually happened (which is significantly more significant than the 'all that happened' which you chose to describe).

If there is anyone on Casebook who genuinely thinks the March 9, 1992, 'double event' is just 'one of those things', please take a course in statistics because I promise you, if it were a coincidence, it is one of the greatest in the history of the human race. If, however, you think it is just 'one of those things' because that helps your argument along hugely, then please get yourself a good mirror, look in it, and ask yourself, "Why is it so important to me that I feel the need to do that?".



Credible evidence is very much in short supply regarding the Maybrick scrapbook. Fortunately for me, absolutely none of it whatsoever was wasted on supporting Mike Barrett's claims, ever. Nor none wasted on the quality of Alan Gray's hearing, it would appear.



If he was hoping for a reconciliation, why did he 'confess' in the first place?



I personally would not equate the claim that Anne helped Mike to 'tidy up' his celebrity interviews during his very short-lived attempts at a writing career with anything even vaguely as creative as the format of the Maybrick scrapbook text, nor do I see Mike's 1980s literary efforts as anything other than what he implied when he admitted that he had been part of a 'writing circle'. As I recall, 'The Writing Circle' was a fee-paying process by which you 'learned your craft', part of which may very well have consisted of recommending that one's career could start with simple short stories and perhaps even celebrity interviews to the gossip rags. By the early 1990s, there is no evidence whatsoever that Barrett was part of a writing 'team' with his wife, nor that he ever actually had been. There is actually no evidence that he was still striving to be a writer which makes his wife's claim that she gave Tony D the scrapbook to give to Mike a particularly questionable one altogether. To me, the only evidence that is relevant here is that Barrett's attempts at a writing career in the 1980s would have been the reason why he ended up with a hookey scrapbook from a meeting in the pub in the early 1990s - Barrett's literary braggadocio presumably as evident then as it certainly was during his patronising 'confession' on stage in April 1999 (the event you harp on about so much, note).



I am drawn back to RJ Palmer's insightful comments on Barrett of just a few short days ago:

"Calling him a pathological liar, while true, only grazes the surface. He was not a liar in the sense of someone who wants to deceive you. That sounds bizarre, but that's the mistake people make. In reality, Mike doesn't care if you believe him. At times, he is overjoyed that you know he's lying. His aim is less than that, and it's more than that. He's not clever, but he is a mental terrorist. His aim is to exasperate and to sow doubt. If you walk away convinced that he knows nothing at all (which is what many have concluded, wrongly), he's fine with that, too. Indeed, he loves that conclusion. If he was the hoaxer, why wouldn't he be?"

I'm thinking of sticking this into SocPill25 because it's one of the finest things RJ has ever written. Call it as you see it, say I - it was well-crafted. Barrett was a mental terrorist and a spectacular one at that as his actions have derailed the truth for over thirty years now.



To adopt your own stance on these things, can you please provide your evidence that Caroline Barrett - aged around ten years - was a liar? If you cannot, can you - to adopt your own stance on these things - retract the claim, please?

I can't seem to get away from this place because whenever I put my head back in over a leisurely cup of Tesco's Rooibos decaffeinated tea, my sense of fair-play is assailed by a thousand claims regarding Mike and Anne Barrett for which no-one appears to have much more than a fancy and a whisper and a rumour and a mishearing here and there to back up some seriously trenchant views on what actually happened.

Ike

If you seriously think that workmen doing work in an old house on the day that Michael Barrett called Doreen Montgomery is the greatest coincidence in the history of the human race, it really is about time for you to call it a day, Ike old friend.

And don't think I didn't notice the old switcheroo you pulled. One minute we were talking about what happened on 9th March 1992, next minute you're saying "one of the workmen drank in the same pub that Michael Barrett drank in". What's that got to do with 9th March 1992?

Maybe you forgot, or just blanked it out of your mind, but an actual expert in statistics, Jeff Hamm, did comment on your statistical theory and told us that there was nothing amazing or extraordinary going on,

Do I really have to explain things that are really very simple? I've already explained why Mike might have felt the need to confess due to his imminent exposure as a journalist. But, hoping for a reconciliation with Anne, he kept her name out of it. It seems reasonable to think that this would have kept her happy but, as we know, she regarded his confession as an attack on her, personally. I don't think he could reasonably have anticipated this reaction.

As for your views on Mike's writing career, you contradict yourself. On the one hand, you seem to accept that Anne helped Mike tidy up his articles, as she claimed, on the other hand you say there's "no evidence" that Mike was part of a writing team with his wife. But you already cited the evidence! If she helped him with his articles she was obviously part of a writing team with him. Talk about trying to deny the obvious!

The good reason to think that Caroline Brown wasn't telling the truth has already been discussed. She said that she remembered her father getting the diary from Tony Devereux and then asking Tony Devereux questions about the diary at a time when we all accept Tony Devereux was dead. Or do you think she was telling the truth about this? If so, where does that leave the Battlecrease discovery theory?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Seriously, does anyone consider this to be a plausible 'dating error'? Get a month wrong, yes. Get a year wrong, okay. But get them both so badly wrong? Did Gray mishear or misremember? Or just randomly chuck in a month and a year because he knew it would be irrelevant to readers of it if Mike Barrett wasn't actually typing it?



Hardly the 'best motive' at all! If you're about to be 'exposed as a former journalist' what does it matter whether you 'confess' your nefarious hoax before you are 'exposed as a former journalist' or after you are 'exposed as a former journalist'? Surely you ride the odds and wait to see if you are indeed going to be unmasked and 'exposed as a former journalist'?

I stress the 'exposed as a former journalist' bit in the hope it might just sink into people's brains how contrived this interpretation is of one of The Writing Circle's most inept alumni.



Or she ignored the ramblings of her desperate, alcoholic ex- (or soon-to-be-ex-) husband whose motivations she could well see through after so many years of marriage, whilst she was utterly free of any concerns regarding her liberty (knowing - as she did - that she had no hand in the creation of the scrapbook). It is clear that she did know about the affidavit - the January 18, 1995, meeting with Shirley, Keith and Sally shows that she tentatively touched on it but moved on quickly when it was evident that they were either unaware of his affidavit or that they were not excited enough about it to talk with her about its contents.

If you don't think that someone in January of any year couldn't mis-date something which had happened in June of the previous year to December of the year before, you really must have been living in a cave all your life, Ike. People make dating errors of this nature all the time, every single day of every single week. It's called human memory. It's very fallible, especially when it comes to trying to date an event. Then, to add to the mix, we have a situation where Alan Gray was probably trying to piece various notes together to try and form a coherent narrative when typing up the affidavit. He could easily have muddled up his notes to confuse June 1994 with December 1993. Like I've said to you before, the date of Barrett's confession is a matter of record. There was no point him trying to lie about it. So the obvious conclusion is that it was a mistake in the affidavit, whether made by Barrett or Gray. The time spent obsessing over it is out of proportion to any significance it can possibly have.

And, oh dear, do I really have to explain the possible motive for the June 1994 confession all over again? Clearly I do. Mike had been lying for two years flat about how he obtained the diary, quite possibly to people he liked and who he felt trusted him. He had deliberately kept secret from them all that he'd been a former journalist. He'd allowed Shirley to publish a book, of which he was supposed to be the co-author, where this information was omitted. Now he knows his secret is about to be exposed. He's not looking forward to all the people asking him why he hadn't told them about being a journalist. More than this, he probably felt that the game was up. Once they discovered he was a journalist, they'd know he had authored the diary. It was blooming obvious! The pressure was too much for him. He thought he'd get ahead of the story and own it, doing the exposure on his own terms in the newspaper. He then got blind drunk so he didn't have to speak to anyone. Oddly enough, it seemed to work! With a few months all was forgotten, there were no consequences and he was allowed to continue to say that Tony had given him the diary.

You can put forward any other alternative explanations for this or for why Mike delivered the affidavit to Anne but Caz asked me the questions and I answered them.

There's no doubt that Anne knew of the affidavit because Mike posted it through her letterbox immediately after swearing it. Where there is a great deal of doubt is that she mentioned the affidavit, even obliquely, when she spoke to Keith and Shirley on January 18 1995. I've looked back at what you posted in September last year about this meeting. All you're relying on is that Anne said to them, "Did anything else come up? I, I, I was expecting you – to be honest – to come back and go on about the forgery thing". According to you, that was a reference to the affidavit but I've no idea why you think that. Mike had publicly confessed in June 1994, and by January 1995 had never retracted, so why shouldn't Anne have told Keith and Shirley that expected Mike to "go on" about having forged the diary, especially if, as she knew, Mike did forge the diary, with her assistance. Why does that need to be a mention of the affidavit? And surely if it was a mention of the affidavit she would have first ask Keith and Shirley if they'd seen the affidavit, wouldn't she? In fact, as far as I'm concerned this just shows Anne being worried about what Mike was going to say about the forgery, especially bearing in mind what she knew he'd said in his affidavit. So she was probably reassured by the fact that Mike hadn't said anything on that day about forging the diary. You need to do a lot better Ike, you really do.