One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[rjpalmer]

I'm not sure why you can't grasp this.

I grasp it perfectly...as does Jeff Hamm, as does Lord Orsam, as does my bookkeeper friend, as does Scott Nelson.

The date of Maybrick's death, and the date given in a bogus diary (and thus the intervening span of 37,585 days) are IRRELEVANT to any statistical analysis based on the known facts. This is what you cannot grasp. As I say, maybe your brother can guide you. I can't. And Ike will never, ever get there....not in another 37,585 days.

[erobitha]

I think I'm definitely going round the bend here.

Ike draws no conclusions or assumptions about the diary being James Maybrick's or Harry Houdini or anyone else's.

Known fact 1) Mike called Doreen on 9th March 1992 with the the 'Diary of Jack The Ripper' which we soon establish was purported to be written by James Maybrick

Known Fact 2) Many years later we learn that the floorboards were lifted in the house where James Maybrick lived and died on the very EXACT same day as known fact 1.

BONUS BALL: A man who worked on that job on that day also drank with Mike in the same pub.

Well readers, is that not very strange? What would the odds of something like that be Ike?

The irony is, and later RJ twigged, this actually supports a new theory by the pro-Barrett hoax theory with "opportunity". Now they can use the exact same scenario to support a hypothesis whereby Mike and Eddie conspired to correlate the two things themselves to give added weight to its authenticity if found out. That is another possible outcome of the above.

I also noticed how quickly that theory was dropped. Perhaps to embrace it would mean some serious u-turning by one or two people.

[Iconoclast]

JtR and Maybrick both go back to 1888, regardless of whether the diary which materialised on 13th April was old, recent or did not even exist on 9th March.

Hi Caz,

Maybe my statistics would have been less 'junk' if I'd skipped all the other 102 possible years and just focused on 1992?

Apparently the odds are just 1-in-18 if you get rid of pesky time that gets in the way and makes your odds longer and longer. Why on earth did Maybrick have to be so awkward and go and die in 1889, for goodness sake!!! If he could have just held on until December 31, 1991, that would have made things so much easier for everyone.

Vibes man sting a trash can
Listen to your junkman
Ah, listen to your junkman
Listen to your junkman
Oh, listen to your junkman
He's singing (singing) ...

Pretty much my favouritist everist song, by the way, with the possible exception of Oasis' amazing Whatever. Up vote me if you agree, everyone!

Junky Ike

[Iconoclast]

Well readers, is that not very strange? What would the odds of something like that be Ike?

Ooh, ooh - I think I know this one! Pick me, sir! Pick me!

Oh, you already did ...

Wannabee toff dies (May 11, 1889)

Floorboards come up in Battlecrease, and conveniently go down again to permit gratuitous smiley which would otherwise have been meaningless (March 9, 1992)

Mike Barrett rings Rupert Crew (March 9, 1992)

Mike does everything in his power to keep a professional profile (pretty much every day thereafter)

Ike spots statistical miracle in the air (don't recall when)

RJ and Lord Orsam react badly to inconvenient miracle

Ike does his sums

RJ and Lord Orsam ring the Samaritans

Unfortunately, Ike shares same cyberspace with those whose grasp of statistics is not quite as brilliant as his

ero b (and many others) experience terrible sense of deja vu everytime they check out Casebook: Jack the Spratt McVitie


PS In answer to ero b's question, the odds are incredibly very big ...

Ike

[Iconoclast]

I grasp it perfectly...as does Jeff Hamm, as does Lord Orsam, as does my bookkeeper friend, as does Scott Nelson.

The date of Maybrick's death, and the date given in a bogus diary (and thus the intervening span of 37,585 days) are IRRELEVANT to any statistical analysis based on the known facts. This is what you cannot grasp. As I say, maybe your brother can guide you. I can't. And Ike will never, ever get there....not in another 37,585 days.

Oh - I get it now!

I've been counting all the days before 1992 that the two events could have happened on the same day. What an idiot I am! I should have just counted the days in 1992 that conveniently made the statistical miracle seem as unremarkable as just another episode of Coronation Street coming on the TV. How on earth could I have missed this one?

Doh!

[rjpalmer]

All you need to know is when the real Maybrick died, because anyone at any time between then and 9th March 1992 could have phoned someone about the concept of a diary, such as the one Mike spoke to Doreen about and then produced on 13th April. The diary may not have existed until that day, but Maybrick and Jack the Ripper most certainly existed and were both diary worthy back in 1889.

I'm not sure why you can't grasp this.

To which Mr. Hamm has already replied, while pointing out that statistics can be 'shockingly counter-intuitive':

And again, to infer a causal link between those events, we have to consider all possible causal links of stories that would create a link between Battlecrease¹ and those involved with the Diary, and that creates a near infinite number of possible stories, each of which might appear extremely improbable, but if we get to pick and choose what we use to build those stories, we can inevitably come up with something, making it unsurprising that a story of connection can be produced.

^1. And not just Battlecrease. Any vaguely 'Maybrickian' event would have sufficed, even outside of Battlecrease. Feldy once checked the new site of the Knowsley Buildings to see if any old furniture had survived the rebuild. If one of the workers there had been fast on his toes, he could have started a similar rumor to get on film.

Without knowing if anything was found under the floorboards at Battlecrease, and without knowing who wrote the Diary, nor knowing how old it is, our would-be statisticians keep plugging in the same irrelevant numbers into what is still an unproven 'story,' without ever having the sudden epiphany of logic to realize what they are doing wrong.

Maybe our resident statistician will grace us by calculating the odds that a random electrician, finding a diary purporting to have been finished by Maybrick on his last day spent at the Knowsley Buildings--3 May 1889--would randomly sell that very diary to a complete stranger in a pub whose wife just happened to work at the very same site as the old Knowsley Buildings, and even would be savvy enough to 'push' this provenance story in his research notes dating to 'August 1991'.

Lordy, gov', whatter the odds?

To me it seems so damn unlikely one might assume it was done by the unseen hand of design!

[Iconoclast]

Without knowing if anything was found under the floorboards at Battlecrease, and without knowing who wrote the Diary, nor knowing how old it is, our would-be statisticians keep plugging in the same irrelevant numbers into what is still an unproven 'story,' without ever having the sudden epiphany of logic to realize what they are doing wrong.

Hey RJ - I can save you so much time! If you knew how old the diary was, you'd probably not need to do the statistics as you'd surely know whether it was a hoax or not at that point? If you knew the diary was 73 years old in 1992, you could strike that dagger now into my cold heart and be done with me.

It is precisely our lack of such information which encourages us to stick with what we do know until we know more.

That said, I have generously offered you 37 different days in which the Barrett 'phone call could have aligned with a known Maybrick event. I'll still pledge you that odds of 1-in-1,000 (which our odds would immediately shrink to) is staggeringly implausible. It would be helpful if you actually named the 36 days (I assume you'll include March 9, 1992 for the 37th?) and explain why those days are being included, of course.

Ike

[caz]

To which Mr. Hamm has already replied, while pointing out that statistics can be 'shockingly counter-intuitive':




^1. And not just Battlecrease. Any vaguely 'Maybrickian' event would have sufficed, even outside of Battlecrease. Feldy once checked the new site of the Knowsley Buildings to see if any old furniture had survived the rebuild. If one of the workers there had been fast on his toes, he could have started a similar rumor to get on film.

Without knowing if anything was found under the floorboards at Battlecrease, and without knowing who wrote the Diary, nor knowing how old it is, our would-be statisticians keep plugging in the same irrelevant numbers into what is still an unproven 'story,' without ever having the sudden epiphany of logic to realize what they are doing wrong.

Maybe our resident statistician will grace us by calculating the odds that a random electrician, finding a diary purporting to have been finished by Maybrick on his last day spent at the Knowsley Buildings--3 May 1889--would randomly sell that very diary to a complete stranger in a pub whose wife just happened to work at the very same site as the old Knowsley Buildings, and even would be savvy enough to 'push' this provenance story in his research notes dating to 'August 1991'.

Lordy, gov', whatter the odds?

To me it seems so damn unlikely one might assume it was done by the unseen hand of design!

Strange to say, Mike himself was always very keen on the possibility of a Knowsley Buildings provenance, and utterly resistant to the Battlecrease one he was being handed on a plate in 1993. He eschewed this ideal and usable provenance with every fibre of his being, right to the end of his life. 1) Tony had given him the diary in 1991; 2) the diary was a fake, either by Mike himself, or with the involvement or support of Tony, Anne and Anne's father; 3) Tony had given him the diary in 1991.

The perfect opportunity to grab a Battlecrease provenance and run with it arose when Feldy began investigating. Mike could have gone along with Feldy's initial belief that Tony D must have got the diary at some point from someone who had worked at the house, prior to August 1991. That would have removed any suspicion that Mike knew it was stolen property, and clearly Paul Dodd must not have missed it in all that time, and indeed admitted he knew nothing about it, so any claim for its return would be seen in that light. With a potential provenance going back before Tony, to Maybrick's house, which couldn't be disproved, Mike would escape accusations of theft and forgery, and there would be no need for Anne to claim the following year that the diary came from her family, because the possibility would already be in place that it came from Battlecrease via Tony, and was found by anyone who had worked there in any capacity, and at any time before the early summer of 1991.

And it would still have proved nothing about the diary's author or when it was written.

[caz]

But wasn't Arthur R in the car, going to Liverpool Uni? A trip you automatically date to the 9th. Events moved kinda fast that day, huh?

I wonder what your precious timeline looks like for the 9th. House work was not complete, yet the crew had time to find the diary, go to the uni and then back to selling it at the pub at lunchtime.

I wonder where you got the idea that I 'automatically' date the alleged Uni trip to the 9th March? Why would I do that?

If it happened, and if it was the old book making the trip, wrapped in its brown paper, it only had to happen at some point between 9th March and when Mike managed to part it from Eddie in time to take it to London on 13th April.

Something that you, Roger Irrelevant and Lord Awful just can't - or won't - get your heads round, while having no trouble at all with automatically dating an alleged auction find, for which there is zero evidence, to 31st March, a date which was never even hinted at by Mike or anyone else. Events moved kinda fast after that, huh?

I wonder what the Awful timeline looks like for All Fools' Day. Work on the physical diary barely started, let alone completed, yet Mike and Anne, watched like a hawk by Caroline, had time to strip the album of its impressive collection of WWI photos; transfer the diary text to 63 of the blank pages; expose each page to a sun lamp to try and age the ink artificially; and confirm Mike's upcoming trip to London with their freshly written fake - all between the twice-daily school runs, the end of term jollities and Easter egg buying, Anne's full-time job as a secretary and popping in to check on her elderly father.

[caz]

I asked Kattrup:

How long do you think it will take to link Eddie with the theft of the old book from the old house, if he makes that call on 9th March 1992 instead of Mike?

A very, very long time. How much time did anyone spend probing MB's provenance before they started cashing in?
Eddie wasn't officially allocated to Battlecrease, was he - he wasn't on the timesheets...

A very, very long time - or never?

Eddie linked himself on 17th July 1992, by mentioning his find to Brian Rawes, and Arthur Rigby linked Eddie a year later, when he went to see Paul Dodd. But Eddie hadn't made that call to Doreen on 9th March 1992, and none of them knew that Mike had.

From Eddie's perspective, had he made that call, he would obviously have kept his trap shut and not blabbed to Brian, when a publishing deal was about to be secured. But he couldn't have relied on others to say nothing, especially when news of Maybrick's diary reached them the following year and they were all questioned by their former boss, Colin Rhodes. We know Arthur went to see Paul Dodd, and for all Eddie knew, Colin Rhodes could have confirmed all the dates he had worked at the house independently of the timesheets used to invoice the house owner. On 9th March 1992, Eddie had no reason to think the boss would not be keeping some record of his work that day, even if he could predict his name would not appear on that week's timesheet as he was only helping out. Colin may well have kept separate records in those circumstances for his own use, which have not survived. Eddie would have known nothing about it, and indeed, when he recalled and freely admitted to working there on floorboards day, he was unaware that this had not already been established from the firm's records.

...and you've already explained that the crew was perfectly willing to lie about him stealing. You must know them quite well in order to sling such accusations around.

Was that a Freudian slip? I never suggested Arthur lied to Paul Dodd when naming Eddie. Quite the reverse. There is no doubt he did name Eddie as one of two electricians who knew about the theft. I don't need to know them all individually to know this much, so I'm not the one slinging baseless accusations around. Kattrup is accusing the electricians of lying, collectively and singly, and accusing Arthur in particular of having lied when he threw Eddie under the bus. Kattrup must have known Arthur quite well in order to suggest that he would have grassed up two former colleagues for stealing, if he knew it never happened.

[caz]

Dishonest people frequently accuse others of being dishonest because they assume everyone else is the way they are.

Let me know if you fall into that category, Erobitha.

Let us all know if you fall into that category, RJ.

You have written goodness knows how many thousands of posts, accusing others - from Mike and Anne, to Robert Smith and every so-called 'diary defender' - of dishonesty, whether it involves the alleged creation, promotion, publication and investigation of the diary itself, or the diary story. More recently you have adopted the moral high ground to condemn people for what you think you see as running 'interference for frauds', which you say is the 'only' reason you keep debating. So you keep on hurling those accusations in all directions, and with the same alarming frequency, making you a veritable master debater, but that's apparently not because you are one of those dishonest people you refer to, who assume everyone is like them.

I wonder if we could calculate the probability of person A being dishonest, based on how frequently they have accused persons B to Z of dishonesty, over the last twenty years. Perhaps Jeff could work with Ike on that one, in the interests of tact and diplomacy going forward.

[caz]

I think we're back to our old friend pareidolia as an excuse for why Jack-related things just keep happening around James Maybrick. This is not the pareidolia which allows us to see human expressions in inanimate objects (the actual meaning of the word, sadly frequently confused with 'wishful thinking') but the 'pareidolia' which causes us to see associations between events which are not actually linked.

It's interesting that no such 'pareidolia' was employed by the original research teams prior to Keith Skinner's uncovering of the Portus & Rhodes timesheets. I don't recall anyone saying that the wallpaper in Michael Maybrick's old house on the Isle of Mann was refreshed four months before Mike Barrett contacted Rupert Crew, or that John Over's outhouse had new shelves put in thirty-three years before the call to Rupert Crew.

As I recall it, it was only the knowledge that James Maybrick's study floorboards had been raised for the very first time on the record on the morning of the day that Mike Barrett contacted Rupert Crew that alerted the waiting world that there was this elephant in the room (the elephant being statistical improbability).

Personally, I would not be looking for such tenuous links as houses hundreds of miles away being renovated, etc.. Personally, I'd be looking for events which were located as closely as possible to the very epicentre of James Maybrick's life. So, Battlecrease House definitely, and his office in Knowsley Buildings undoubtedly. And I'd be interested in events there which implied in any way that something hidden could be uncovered. This would allow us to do a different probability analysis. We don't have any definite evidence to work with so we are going to have to include in our hypothesis some guessed events. If I was guessing, I'd say that there would be maybe 37 separate days maximum since May 12, 1889 where something hidden could be uncovered in one of the two epicentres of Maybrick's life. You'll have worked out that I have chosen 37 because my maths is iffy and I know this produces odds of around 1/1,000. Still incredibly unlikely to have happened by chance, dear readers.

Personally, I wouldn't be casting my net further and further and further to try to find other guessed events which I could include so that the odds would keep on tumbling. But you might. RJ's post shows that he most certainly would and indeed has (without the slightest shred of evidence to support it, obviously). If that serves a purpose for you, then psychologically you will be motivated to argue for it. Doesn't make it robust, and it certainly doesn't change the 1/37,557 odds. The only thing - in my scenario - which would change those odds would be one or more other days coming to light (and on the record) when Maybrick's floorboards were raised (initially, I was referring to Battlecrease House only but I would be prepared to accept the day Knowsley Buildings came down so that would half the odds to a still eye-watering 1/18,500 or so).

Remember, we are not talking about the likelihood of someone contacting a literary agent with Maybrick's confession before or after one of these two events (described above) although very close proximity after the floorboards came up would obviously be intriguing - we are talking about the odds of that happening on the same day as one (or even both) of those events.

Ike

Hi Ike,

It might be worth revisiting the event which caused Feldy to investigate Portus & Rhodes to begin with, around February 1993. He, along with Mike, Paul Begg and Martin Howells went to Battlecrease, because the diary was after all supposedly Maybrick's, who had lived there in 1888 and died there in May 1889. So far, so predictable.

The owner, Paul Dodd, revealed that electrical work had been done on the house by a firm of Electrical Contractors called Portus & Rhodes. No dates in 1992 were given by Dodd for any of this work, which with hindsight is curious, because all the work P&R did at the house was in 1992, beginning on 9th March, apart from a small immersion heater job back in 1989. Nothing at all in 1990 or 1991.

Nobody at that point knew if there was any chance of making a connection between any of the work Dodd described, and the diary which Mike insisted [indeed he swore an affidavit to the effect in April 1993 - for what that was worth ] he had been given by Tony Devereux in the early summer of 1991. Feldy decided to find out. He very, very badly wanted to make that connection. But to his eternal credit he admitted defeat when the dates for the work, as supplied by P&R [and conflicting with Dodd's own recollections] simply didn't tally with his theory that an electrician from P&R had taken the diary while working at the house and later passed it on to Tony D. Even when he identified one of the electricians as a chap who drank in the Saddle and lived round the corner, he still could not make the dates work in his favour, and accused the electricians of just trying to make a fast buck out of him - very possibly because he assumed everyone was just like him, always seeing opportunities to make a fast buck. [See what I did there?]

Hindsight is a beautiful thing. What Feldy never knew, and would not have predicted in a million years, was that his Saddle electrician had been asked by his boss to help out at Battlecrease, for the first time, on the only job done by P&R which involved raising floorboards in Maybrick's old bedroom. Not in 1989 or 1990 or 1991, but on 9th March 1992. What Feldy may never have asked, and had no reason to know in April 1993, months before Shirley's book was published [he wasn't sent the manuscript when Shirley delivered it to Robert Smith] was that Mike had made that first call to the literary agent on 9th March 1992.

If only he had kept on pushing a little longer, he might have found his connection - the big one.

So there is every chance, if RJ keeps on pushing, that he may yet find what he seeks even more desperately than Feldy ever did - in this case another 36 specific Maybrick-related single events, which would be considered by his peers to be comparable to when Eddie and the floorboards were introduced, for the first and only time.

In fact, RJ will probably be able to find millions of actual single events like that, avoiding the need to divide the 9th March double bed into two singles using a hacksaw. As we are assured this happens whenever people start looking for potential connections to a known event, and the chances are near to 100% of finding one that sounds plausible on the surface, RJ is bound to find just as many plausible opportunities for a close encounter of the Maybrick kind, other than beneath the floor of Maybrick's death bed.

RJ has made his bed, so now he can lie in it.

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

RJ has made his bed, so now he can lie in it.

Love,

Caz
X

Crikey Caz - you're on fire today (see what I did with that?). Seems to me that that old and shiny switchblade is never far away from someone's neck when the opportunity arises for a quick slashing of a jugular here and a jugular there. Splendid work, young lady.

By the way, I hope no-one missed your glorious 'master debater' line!

Melting Ike
Half the man I was this morning

[caz]

Hi all,

Ok, first, just to be clear, I have no dog in this race with regards to Diary debates. Moreover, even if we were to throw out the entire line of argument based upon probabilities, that's not going to change anything Diary wise, other than to illustrate why this approach doesn't work the way it may feel like it does.

The idea of the chance combination of two events is just the product of their individual probabilities. Let's keep the "calling the publisher" at whatever low rare probability one feels appropriate. The other event is the lifting of the floorboards at Battlecrease. If that event is truly rare, the chance probability for the combination of two extremely rare events would be very low. That gives the impression that the two events must be somehow related (this is why it's an inferential test; we're trying to infer a causal link between the two events).

Ike has suggested the chance probability for of the floor boards being uplifted has a 1 in 3000+ chance (forgive me if I don't go back and get the exact number, it doesn't matter for our purposes here) based upon the number of days between two events. That, however, is not correct for the following reason. That presumes the probability of repairs to Battlecrease are equally spread over those days. But, as a building gets older the probability of it requiring repairs increases, so the probability of requiring a repair increases with time, making the days at the end of the series more probable to require floorlifting than the days early in the timeline.

Second, repairs are something pre-planned, you don't just call a tradie and they show up that day. So the probability that the floorboards were going to be raised that day become very high, approaching 100% because no doubt that day was arranged in advance.

If the floorboards had a near 100% chance of being raised on that day, though, which they did because the repairs had to be pre-arranged, and the probability of repairs required is much larger after such a long time, then the combination of the two pretty much leaves the combined probability at the same level as the probability of just calling the publisher by itself.

Hi Jeff,

I don't expect you to have known this, but your presumption that the work involving floorboards being lifted, in the room where Maybrick spent the last week of his life, were necessary repairs to an old building, was not in fact correct. There were no repairs being done. The owner, Paul Dodd, simply decided to have storage heaters installed, which required a wiring job, which in turn required floorboards to be lifted. There was no immediate hurry for the wiring to be done on 9th and 10th March 1992, because the storage heaters would not actually be installed until the June. The preparatory wiring work was slotted in between 7th and 13th March, while a long-term contract over in Skelmersdale was on hold - IIRC for more materials to become available. While it's clear that Dodd must have contacted Portus & Rhodes in advance, to arrange for the storage heaters to be installed, it's very far from clear how long before 9th March the preparations were booked in for that day. In any case, that work did not have to be done on a specific day from Dodd's point of view, even if he desperately wanted the storage heaters in by June. He was dependent on the availability of the crew and went to work leaving them to it. Anything could have delayed or postponed the wiring work on 9th March, or Dodd could have changed his mind and cancelled the job entirely, due to personal or financial reasons for deciding against having storage heaters at all.

We cannot distribute the probability equally over time for repairs to Battlecrease, because repairs are not a random event. They are events that increase in probability over time, and given the floors hadn't been worked on in such a long time, the liklihood they needed repairs would be high, which, in fact, is why they were worked on.

No, Jeff. If you were told this by anyone, they were giving you duff information. The floors and the boards were not being repaired. Nothing was being repaired.

And if the probability of the repairs is high, then the combination of the two events is not the combination of two improbable events, they are the combination of an improbable event with one of high probability. Moreover, the fact that both Mike and the repair fellow were regulars at the same pub means there would be a high probability on any random day they would both be there, making that another high probability chance event that requires no causal explanation.

Again, there is no evidence that Mike drank in the Saddle other than weekday lunchtimes when his daughter was at school, in the time frame under scrutiny, while Eddie had been working full-time hours over at Skelmersdale, every day including Saturdays, from when he was first taken on by Portus & Rhodes in late November 1991, right up to and including Saturday 7th March 1992. His first opportunity to bump into Mike on a weekday lunchtime, after November 1991, was on Monday 9th March 1992, while the Skem job was on hold and he was free to help out that morning in Dodd's house, when the floorboards were raised.

Anyway, I see what people are trying to do, and it's a good idea in principle to try and apply some objective approaches. However, this one does not work the way it feels like it should. Statistics are shockingly counter-intuitive sometimes.

That's really all I feel I can contribute, though.

- Jeff

Thanks Jeff, but I hope you would agree that it's pointless to factor in the much higher probability of repairs being needed to the floors of a property the older it gets, if floor repairs were never part of the equation.

Love,

Caz
X

[StevenOwl]

Crikey Caz - you're on fire today (see what I did with that?). Seems to me that that old and shiny switchblade is never far away from someone's neck when the opportunity arises for a quick slashing of a jugular here and a jugular there. Splendid work, young lady.

By the way, I hope no-one missed your glorious 'master debater' line!

Melting Ike
Half the man I was this morning

I just assumed Caz was too polite to call him a massive wanker!