The Maybrick Thread (For All Things Maybrick)

[Iconoclast]

Mrs. Steele (I thought her name was Nancy, by the way) was Tony Devereux's daughter, and she voiced surprise that Barrett was being described as a salt-of-the-earth ex-scrap metal scalesman, when she was told by her father that he was a journalist who had published in national magazines.

I think you'll find that the 'journalist' comment - assuming it ever happened - came from Nancy Steele in whatever 'interview' she had with Nick Warren ahead of his July 9, 1994, edition of Ripperana.

What Mrs. Steele revealed to Feldman during the filming is unknowable, because it was left on the cutting room floor, but the timing is interesting.

I think if any revealing was done, it was to Martin Howells who was writing the script for Feldman's documentary as well as interviewing the key participants. I don't think Feldman was present. Small point but one worth noting all the same.

Also, Martin evidently created a typescript from the whole of his interview with Nancy Steele (including the unused stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor) and - in that - he reveals that Nancy in September 1993 was less forthright regarding Barrett's literary past:

Did Feldman discover from Mrs. Steele the bit about Barrett being a journalist, and this is what triggered his suggestion to Barrett that he not mention his word processor if the police came calling?

To be clear here: at no point in that transcript did Nancy Steele refer to Michael Barrett - either directly or indirectly - as a journalist. That comment was reported by Nick Warren almost a year later. I guess it is possible that this (the September 1993) comment was heard by Feldman once Howells returned to London and this triggered a concern in his mind which prompted him to suggest that Barrett deny - if asked - that he owned a word processor. It all seems pretty irrelevant to me thirty-plus years later but (as I have argued many times before) it is not for us to tell other people what they should have been thinking nor to suggest that they were being irrational regarding certain actions that they took.

Curious.

I would probably use the word 'unnecessary' or 'unhelpful' but maybe Feldman - rather than Barrett - was seeking to hide Barrett's past from Bonesy because Feldman's brain was capable of more leaps and bounds than even your average Bobby from the Yard.

[Iconoclast]

According to Martin Howells, the filming for the video took place in September 1993---the police interview with Barrett was in October.
Mrs. Steele (I thought her name was Nancy, by the way) was Tony Devereux's daughter, and she voiced surprise that Barrett was being described as a salt-of-the-earth ex-scrap metal scalesman, when she was told by her father that he was a journalist who had published in national magazines.
What Mrs. Steele revealed to Feldman during the filming is unknowable, because it was left on the cutting room floor, but the timing is interesting.

I would have to check my facts but I'm fairly confident that Nancy (you are right) was shown in later versions of the Feldman video - sporting her bright orangey-yellow cardigan. Not all of her interview would have been broadcast, of course, as would be true of all participants.

[rjpalmer]

What new hobby would you take up if she already has?

The same---gardening. I don't find it easier on the musculature, though. My back is still a bit 'off' from planting an Italian plum tree last week.

I've long been under the impression that only about ten people in the world follow this thread, but I received an email from a correspondent who is following and wanted to pass along the following interesting observation.

The Ripperana issue under discussion states that "Mrs. Anne Steele was interviewed by video producer Paul Feldman, but the relevant footage was cut."

According to Martin Howells, the filming for the video took place in September 1993---the police interview with Barrett was in October.

Mrs. Steele (I thought her name was Nancy, by the way) was Tony Devereux's daughter, and she voiced surprise that Barrett was being described as a salt-of-the-earth ex-scrap metal scalesman, when she was told by her father that he was a journalist who had published in national magazines.

What Mrs. Steele revealed to Feldman during the filming is unknowable, because it was left on the cutting room floor, but the timing is interesting.

Did Feldman discover from Mrs. Steele the bit about Barrett being a journalist, and this is what triggered his suggestion to Barrett that he not mention his word processor if the police came calling?

The timing certainly fits, and something must have caused Barrett and Feldman to have this most interesting exchange.





Curious.

[Iconoclast]

Obviously, it couldn't have been modified before it was created, but you know what I mean.

I have long since given up the dream of never erring when I type, RJ. I find that living with my erring is simpler for my wa, mate.

[Iconoclast]

If, for the sake of argument, the disk shows that the typescript was created prior to 9 March 1992, and modified several times before and after that date, what new hobby would you take up?

Gardening, probably. A lot less hard on the musculature than typing out one hour telephone interviews and what have you (taking about a fortnight to complete it due to utter boredom at doing so and too easy to click on YouTube videos of Newcastle's Wembley glory).

Things sometimes turn up. Perhaps Barrett's disks are also still out there somewhere, like an unexploded time bomb.

Well, I think I know where they probably are if they do still exist, but there's always a risk they were consigned to the bin a long time ago.

If, as they say, Tempus omnia revelat. Of course, Anne Graham could always cut to the chase and tell us what she really knows.

What new hobby would you take up if she already has?

[rjpalmer]

If, for the sake of argument, the disk shows that the typescript was created prior to 9 March 1992, and modified several times before and after that date, what new hobby would you take up?

Obviously, it couldn't have been modified before it was created, but you know what I mean.

[rjpalmer]

Yes, RJ. There will also be a Creation date which would tell us when that particular version of any give document was initiated. What, of course, it could never tell you is what is on discs which we don't know about, but it would at least be very insightful to know when the contents of the discs we do know about were created. Unfortunately, we don't have any discs at all (to my knowledge) which is not to say that we don't know where they are.

If, for the sake of argument, the disk shows that the typescript was created prior to 9 March 1992, and modified several times before and after that date, what new hobby would you take up?

When my uncle Dick died many years ago, his antiquated word processor with floppy disks were inherited by a relative who stored them in an attic. Knowing the hoarders in my family, they're probably still there.

Things sometimes turn up. Perhaps Barrett's disks are also still out there somewhere, like an unexploded time bomb.

If, as they say, Tempus omnia revelat. Of course, Anne Graham could always cut to the chase and tell us what she really knows.

[Iconoclast]

This is a reasonable assumption. We know that Harrison had visited the Barretts in Liverpool.

I'm trying to imagine a scenario where Barrett and Feldman could have innocently discussed the word processor in advance of Mike's police interview, and Feldman could have innocently suggested that Barrett hide or deny its existence, but I confess that I'm coming up blank.

As for Barrett's worries, I believe a document stored on an Amstrad floppy disk could be checked for modifications, using the appropriate software. "Floppy disks are a magnetic storage medium, any change to the data will be physically recorded on the disk, making it possible to detect if alterations have occurred."

Yes, RJ. There will also be a Creation date which would tell us when that particular version of any give document was initiated. What, of course, it could never tell you is what is on discs which we don't know about, but it would at least be very insightful to know when the contents of the discs we do know about were created. Unfortunately, we don't have any discs at all (to my knowledge) which is not to say that we don't know where they are.

[rjpalmer]

Harrison's claim that that it was on the table in the dining room might have been no more than her own experience of where it usually was and where she expected it to be when the police were there. Perhaps Mike had hidden away in advance of Bonesy's arrival.

This is a reasonable assumption. We know that Harrison had visited the Barretts in Liverpool.

I'm trying to imagine a scenario where Barrett and Feldman could have innocently discussed the word processor in advance of Mike's police interview, and Feldman could have innocently suggested that Barrett hide or deny its existence, but I confess that I'm coming up blank.

As for Barrett's worries, I believe a document stored on an Amstrad floppy disk could be checked for modifications, using the appropriate software. "Floppy disks are a magnetic storage medium, any change to the data will be physically recorded on the disk, making it possible to detect if alterations have occurred."

[rjpalmer]

with DS Thomson's noisy question should it arise?

My apologies. DS Thomas.

[rjpalmer]

What I would ask is, why would DS Thomas (or his colleague if he was also there) ask Mike Barrett if he had a word processor? What would be the point? The Maybrick scrapbook was handwritten into a very old book. What would it matter whether Mike had a word processor or not? DS Thomas might equally well have asked Mike whether he owned any notebooks or scraps of paper (if he was looking for evidence of a premeditated text from which the scrapbook text was copied-out). Perhaps DS Thomas was seeking clues as to whether Mike was deliberately suppressing an unmentioned previous career as a journalist whilst he was on invalidity benefit? It feels like a stretch, but perhaps his detective radar was blaring out that here was a skilful man of letters and therefore perhaps he had a word processor hidden away somewhere on which he might have composed a hoaxed text before he or someone else hand wrote it into the scrapbook. It's possible, I guess. But - still - what would be especially telling about a word processor that a notebook or scraps of paper could not have equally told?

There's a far more interesting companion question that you've failed to ask.

If it was no big deal that Barrett owned a word processor, then why did Barrett anticipate that the police would ask him about it?

Because--from what Keith has told us--anticipate it he did.

Why did the word processor concern Barrett to that point that---long before Scotland Yard even knocked on his door in Goldie Street---Barrett brought the matter up with Paul Feldman (of all people!)---or Feldman brought the matter up with him---and the two men hatched a strategy for dealing with DS Thomson's noisy question should it arise?


It's a pity that Keith, taking pity on Feldman's contrition, didn't probe the matter further. My own mental wheels would have been spinning at Feldman's 'crass' admission, wondering if there was anything else he had failed to mention to his research team.

RP

[Herlock Sholmes]

Well, that was quick - my July 1994 copy of Ripperana arrived this afternoon. We know that Mike had freely admitted in his Scotland Yard interview way back in October 1993 that he wrote pieces for Look-In back in the day, but apparently he was suffering the absolute horrors of hell to such an intense degree at the thought of being exposed by Nick Warren as a journalist (therefore potential hoaxer) in June 1994 - ahead of the July 1994 quarterly edition of Warren's Ripperana - that he simply caved-in under the seismic pressure he was enduring and confessed all to Harold Brough of the Liverpool Post.

The following is the sum of the devastating expose of Barrett's professional career as a journalist which Warren wrote (bear in mind that Warren had sent this to Barrett in advance of publication to give him the opportunity to respond):

Mr. Devereux understood that Barrett was a journalist (he had certainly contributed features to magazines) ...

I've got to be honest, I was expecting slightly more than this for my £9.99 (including first-class post), especially given the rabid build-up it had been given in terms of it being the motivation Barrett needed to 'fess up and face the music. I don't know about anyone else, but I was certainly trembling as I read what I expected to be Warren's relentless and eviserating condemnation of what was so clearly a very guilty person, though in the end I had to conclude that it had not been particularly damning at all. What do you think, dear readers?

Are you thinking, 'Lord, how Mike Barrett must have lost his mind in panic and terror at the thought that such a claim was going to be revealed to the world which he had so far fooled so brilliantly: 'he had certainly contributed features to magazines''.

Or are you thinking, 'Talk about overplaying your hand to try to draw a conclusion which would rather conveniently work for your far-fetched and over-stretched fantasy regarding Mike Barrett's hoaxing powers"?

Ike

You were expecting more than I'd already quoted to you from that article yesterday in my post #49? More than was already reproduced on Orsam's site as far back as November 2023?

You have, of course, missed out the part where the Devereux family said that, as a result of their understanding that he was a journalist who had contributed features to magazines, they were "surprised to find his publishers describing him as an ordinary 'Liverpool bloke', scalesman at a firm of scrap-metal merchants".

I'm not responsible for you paying £9.99, but you are, as usual, missing the importance of what was happening in May 1994 when Mike read the draft of the article.

The first thing is that he would known for sure that he was going to face questioning from Shirley, Doreen and others following publication. Is it true that you're a journalist who has contributed features to magazines? That is question number one. A bit tricky already, isn't it?

Either he lies, which is going to be immediately found out, or he tells the truth.

Even if he just tells a part of the truth, as he did to Scotland Yard, the next question is going to be: why have you never told us this before?

If he doesn't mention Celebrity and Chat, he must know that one of the many investigators is going to find out about it. At the very least it would be a huge risk to lie.

He's caught in a trap. As of late June, the clock is ticking towards the inevitable, imminent publication and exposure of his secret past.

If you can't see this, Ike, you've really hit a flat earth type of denial of reality.

[Iconoclast]

Mike Barrett freely admitted that he submitted pieces to magazines, encouraged to do so by writing circles he had signed up to. If you want to call that professional journalism, career journalism, or just plain journalism, that's your call. It is clear that it is necessarily so in your mind in order to provide a balwark to support your key argument - that his sleepless terrors and worst fears were all coalescing in the form of Nick Warren making the same exaggerated claim that you are making in July 1994 thereby making it imperative that Mike got in there first, which basically means he simply brought forward the inevitable by a month (in your world) and denying himself any possibility of a reprieve by speaking out. I've ordered the July 9, 1994 Ripperana to see exactly what was said (which I assume Warren must have told him was coming), but it must have sent the horrors of hell down Mike's spine daily: "Oh God, they've found out that I submitted some very average interviews to some very average gossip rags some many years ago as part of a writing course I'd paid for so it's absolutely game up on my extraordinary shift to world's greatest forger and I may as well confess all now".

Well, that was quick - my July 1994 copy of Ripperana arrived this afternoon. We know that Mike had freely admitted in his Scotland Yard interview way back in October 1993 that he wrote pieces for Look-In back in the day, but apparently he was suffering the absolute horrors of hell to such an intense degree at the thought of being exposed by Nick Warren as a journalist (therefore potential hoaxer) in June 1994 - ahead of the July 1994 quarterly edition of Warren's Ripperana - that he simply caved-in under the seismic pressure he was enduring and confessed all to Harold Brough of the Liverpool Post.

The following is the sum of the devastating expose of Barrett's professional career as a journalist which Warren wrote (bear in mind that Warren had sent this to Barrett in advance of publication to give him the opportunity to respond):

Mr. Devereux understood that Barrett was a journalist (he had certainly contributed features to magazines) ...

I've got to be honest, I was expecting slightly more than this for my £9.99 (including first-class post), especially given the rabid build-up it had been given in terms of it being the motivation Barrett needed to 'fess up and face the music. I don't know about anyone else, but I was certainly trembling as I read what I expected to be Warren's relentless and eviserating condemnation of what was so clearly a very guilty person, though in the end I had to conclude that it had not been particularly damning at all. What do you think, dear readers?

Are you thinking, 'Lord, how Mike Barrett must have lost his mind in panic and terror at the thought that such a claim was going to be revealed to the world which he had so far fooled so brilliantly: 'he had certainly contributed features to magazines''.

Or are you thinking, 'Talk about overplaying your hand to try to draw a conclusion which would rather conveniently work for your far-fetched and over-stretched fantasy regarding Mike Barrett's hoaxing powers"?

Ike

[Herlock Sholmes]

I don't really make anything of them. We know so very little about the truth of the matter that it is impossible to comment. My own 1989 Amstrad PCW9512 came with a cover for the main unit and one for the printer but both of these were fairly translucent depending upon how the light fell. Barrett had an earlier Amstrad model for which I have no idea if there was a cover. Can we exclude the possibility that the WP was indeed on the table with its cover on (if it had one) and DS Thomas had one of those dancing gorilla moments? I don't know. My gut instinct would say that Anne was telling the truth and Mike was asked the question about whether he had a WP and that therefore Mike must have said to someone that his WP was there on the table all along when in fact it wasn't. How can we possibly know, though, what really happened?

What I would ask is, why would DS Thomas (or his colleague if he was also there) ask Mike Barrett if he had a word processor? What would be the point? The Maybrick scrapbook was handwritten into a very old book. What would it matter whether Mike had a word processor or not? DS Thomas might equally well have asked Mike whether he owned any notebooks or scraps of paper (if he was looking for evidence of a premeditated text from which the scrapbook text was copied-out). Perhaps DS Thomas was seeking clues as to whether Mike was deliberately suppressing an unmentioned previous career as a journalist whilst he was on invalidity benefit? It feels like a stretch, but perhaps his detective radar was blaring out that here was a skilful man of letters and therefore perhaps he had a word processor hidden away somewhere on which he might have composed a hoaxed text before he or someone else hand wrote it into the scrapbook. It's possible, I guess. But - still - what would be especially telling about a word processor that a notebook or scraps of paper could not have equally told?

I'm fascinated to know why it matters. I appreciate that Kenneth Rendell made a huge drama out of it live on a US radio station but that was just to utterly and quite dishonourably muddy the waters for Shirley Harrison - the cheapest possible shot anyone could have made given that a man in 1992 in the UK having an Amstrad word processor was truly no great breaking news event. The fact that this particular guy also had an old Victorian scrapbook seems utterly irrelevant to me other than to explain why a typescript of the scrapbook's contents had apparently been found on one of the discs which was still no great shakes given how freely Barrett had provided a print-out of that typescript (or some version of it) to Doreen Montgomery well over a year earlier. If the big deal is that it shows Mike to be a liar then we have wasted a great deal more quality SocPill time these past few days. Imagine Bonesy was trying to get to the bottom of whether a local thug had written a threatening letter to an elderly neighbour. Would it have occurred to anyone at all to ask the thug whether he had a word processor? Why would the question ever come up for Barrett to deny it? I don't know, but it evidently must have done.



I'm not sure what magic you feel Feldman was working but the news that Shirley was being deceived by Mike Barrett has not shaken any earth around me and I can't imagine why it would shake the earth around anyone else. He was a liar. That's what liars do. As a mental terrorist, he positively revelled in it, it would appear (unless he was just very keen to practice it in order to perfect his skills).



Still the earth around me remains apparently very solid indeed.



I've read it but I can't see anything 'funny' or odd about it, no. Perhaps you would enlighten me?

Ike

Hi Ike,

Might I suggest that it would have been quite rare in 1992 for an unemployed working class man in Liverpool to own a word processor. Why would he have needed it?

If Bonesy had heard that Mike owned one, might that not have piqued his interest, leading him to ask the question?

Harrison's claim that that it was on the table in the dining room might have been no more than her own experience of where it usually was and where she expected it to be when the police were there. Perhaps Mike had hidden away in advance of Bonesy's arrival.

[Herlock Sholmes]

[QUOTE=John Wheat;n853171]

Can I suggest that the problem here, Ike, is your tendency to deny the obvious. Michael Barrett was undoubtedly working as a journalist between 1986 and 1988 but you don't like this because it offends your image of Barrett as a gibbering idiot who could not have written the diary so you literally attempt deny reality.

It also doesn't help when you say things are "evident" which are not supported by evidence. I'm thinking of your disastrous and now disproven claim that "Evidently, Barrett didn't think of himself as a journalist" for which there is no evidence at all and for which the actual evidence flatly contradicts your claim.
[/QUOTE

Hi Herlock

The points are that Mike Barrett was a journalist at one point. That he was certainly not a gibbering idiot and that there is nothing to suggest that between them Mike and Anne could not have written the diary. It's just that some don't like this. Because it might suggest something they don't like.

Cheers John

Hi John,

Those are indeed the points. Ike's full gymnastic routine has been on display in this thread, with contortions that have never been seen before.

Q. When is a journalist not a journalist? A. When he's a journalist by the name of Michael Barrett, apparently.