Rampant Misinformation

In a sign of how desperate the Chief Diary Defender is becoming, and in a futile attempt to deflect from the ruthless diary defender suppression of documents condemned by every right thinking person, she posted her last stand on Wednesday in which she claimed:

'all we ever get from an auction theorist are weak attempts to make the pesky Battlecrease evidence vanish in a puff of smoke. The mirrors are optional.'

This is unintentionally hilarious because one of thing key things I've been calling for the diary defenders to do over the past six years is to actually release the Battlecrease evidence that they keep talking about but are deliberately withholding. But they won't do it. Every single transcript of every single interview with every single electrician is being suppressed (ruthlessly).

More than this, they are being suppressed with the full blessing of the Chief Diary Defender, Caroline Morris-Brown, herself. When I asked James Johnston in December 2017 to publish all the transcripts. he point blank refused and, in doing so, was supported and given encouragement by the Chief Diary Defender who now claims to favour transparency and would love all the evidence to be released, it's just out of her hands (i.e. "Personally, I would be happy for more information to be released" - Chief DD to Ally Ryder, 13.12.23). That's not what she said back on 18 January 2018, after I had been repeatedly pressing Johnston to release those transcripts which he was refusing to do for no good reason. After I stated that Johnston had an obligation to release the full transcripts of every diary or watch related interview ever quoted from, and that it was disgraceful that they hadn't already been made public, she didn't agree with a single word of mine but posted this by way of justifiying Johnston's refusal:

'Because, as with the research notes, you want them put in the public domain, and you want them yesterday?'

The implication was that Johnston was right to withhold the transcripts because I was being too impatient in wanting them 'yesterday' but that they would be released in due course (and if you can explain the second sentence of her above post to me I'd be very grateful). Well, nearly six years later, we seem to be not one jot closer to seeing even a single transcript!

And then on the same day in January 2018, she also posted this:

Another pitiful defence of James Johnston's indefensible decision to withhold the 'Battlecrease evidence', misrepresenting my argument which she'd taken out of context, showing exactly where her priorities lay.

In my reply to her later the same day, after repeating two of my earlier posts which made clear that I had been saying the transcripts should made available to anyone with an interest in the diary, which would thus allow any independent person or researcher to check them, not just to a single person, was:

'It must be obvious to anyone with any standards that you just cannot quote selectively from a document or transcript and not make available the entire document or transcript, especially in circumstances where other parts of the document or transcript contradict the impression given by the quote used. For that is to put a misleading impression or misleading information into the public domain. That is why there is an obligation to make the entire document available. As an author you can do it or not do it (you cannot be legally compelled to) but to say that there is no obligation to do it is simply wrong.'

Response to this from the Chief Diary Defender came there none. Transcripts released: none.

For people who tell us with such certainty that the Battlecrease evidence proves that the diary wasn't created by Mike Barrett, it's rather odd, isnt it, that they don't seem to have any intention of sharing that evidence with us to allow us to test it? Yet they expect us all to take their word that it's sufficiently compelling evidence for us to conclude that the diary was found under the floorboards of Battlecrease which realistically means that James Maybrick must have written it which, realistically, can only mean that James Maybrick was Jack the Ripper.

So they've solved the crime of the century, the crime of all the centuries, but they won't allow us to see the actual underlying evidence which proves that Jack the Ripper was James Maybrick. How incredible is that?

From her claim in her 13th December 2023 post, that all 'auction theorists' do is attempt to make the pesky but non-existent 'Battlecrease evidence' vanish in a puff of smoke, she then went on to tell us what that 'Battlecrease evidence' that we're not allowed to see is supposed to say:

'I'm never quite sure if there is a consensus on how multiple, independent witnesses came up with their broadly consistent accounts of how Jack the Ripper's diary was found in Dodd's house during a rewire and sold in an Anfield pub, which continue to be supported by fully documented circumstantial evidence, and not broken by any of it. If these people were/are suffering from 'false memory syndrome'; or lying in the vain hope of gaining something - beyond a reputation for telling lies; or even simply mistaken, we should not have expected their accounts to have had the ghost of a chance against the known facts. So what is going on here?'

Ladies and gentlemen, even without seeing the Battlecrease evidence, I'm confident in stating that what the Chief Diary Defender has said there is FALSE.

She claims that there are:

'multiple, independent witnesses [who] came up with their broadly consistent accounts of how Jack the Ripper's diary was found in Dodd's house during a rewire and sold in an Anfield pub'

That, I suggest, is completely untrue.

There are no multiple witnesses - certainly not those we've been told about - who have provided an account of how Jack the Ripper's diary was found in Dodd's house during a rewire. In fact, I will go further and say that there is not a single person who can properly be described as a witness who has provided an account of how Jack the Ripper's diary was found in Dodd's house during a rewire.

It really shows how desperate the Chief Diary Defender is these days that she has to invent evidence which simply doesn't exist to support her theory.

There are only two electrician witnesses who claim to have any relevant knowledge.

The first is Brian Rawes. While he gave an account of Eddie Lyons mentioning a discovery of something under the floorboards (for an inexplicable reason at an inexplicable time in the summer of 1992), he never once said that he was told it was a diary, let alone Jack the Ripper's diary.

In one of the murkier episodes that we know very little about, we've been told that an old newspaper was found by an electricican somewhere in Battlecrease. Perhaps when Eddie was telling Brian that he'd found something under the floorboards he was talking about this old newspaper. Who knows? We've never been told which electrician found the newspaper. If it turns out to have been Eddie but they've kept this from us it, will be the cover-up of the century.

But Rawes might have been telling the truth about his conversation with Eddie as best he remembers it; it's just that Eddie was talking about finding an old newspaper not a diiary. Why does any discovery in Battlecrease have to have been of the diary?

Equally, Brian might have been misremembering. Everyone should know (although the Chief Diary Defender does not seem to) that witnesses attempting to recall events of many months earlier can inject false memories into their mind, especially if they've been discussing those memories with other people. After his conversation with Eddie during the summer of 1992, Brian Rawes would have had no reason to think of it ever again. Why would he? It would only have been in the spring of 1993, when Feldman was probably poisoning the minds of the electricians with his theory that Eddie Lyons had found the diary in Battlecrease, that Rawes, learning of this surprising twist, might have vaguely recalled Eddie saying something about some kind of discovery and, after speaking to his colleagues who suddenly suspected that Lyons was the guilty man, he's now convinced himself that Eddie must have been confiding in him the fact that he'd found the diary (although, to repeat, he never claims to have been told anything about a diary).

The other relevant electrician witness is Alan Davies but no record has ever been produced of him claiming to have been aware of a discovery of Jack the Ripper's diary. The evidence suggests that he said nothing about a Jack the Ripper diary because when Keith Skinner spoke to Alan's wife, Margaret, in 2004, she only mentioned an 'old book' with 'old handwriting', having been told by her husband about the discovery of 'an old book in Doddy's house' during underfloor rewiring. Had she been told it was Jack the Ripper's diary, it is surely something she would have remembered, especially as she told Keith that she was considering buying the old book because of her interest in history. The only other person Davies is known to have spoken to about this supposed discovery at the time is Alan Dodgson but, according to Robert Smith, Dodgson recalled that Davies only mentioned 'a leather-bound diary' during their conversation. He seems to have said nothing to Smith about a diary of Jack the Ripper, which is utterly astonishing if that's what he had been told by Davies was up for sale. The only person who has said that he thought he was being offered 'Jack the Ripper's diary' is Tim Martin-Wright but his information could only have come from Dodgson who doesn't seem to have been aware of such a thing. I don't necessarily say that Martin-Wright is wrong about this - I really don't know because I haven't seen the full accounts of any of the individuals involved - but Martin-Wright apparently contacted Feldman in 1994 after having read Shirley Harrison's book about Jack the Ripper's diary (although why he contacted Feldman rather than Shirley is unclear) so he might simply have assumed at that time, when looking back, that the 'leather bound diary' that Dodgson (presumably) mentioned to him must have been that very same Jack the Ripper diary.

No one is doubting that Davies mentioned something about a diary or old book to Alan Dodgson (he may, for all I know, even have mentioned Jack the Ripper's diary) and that Dodgson passed this on to Tim Martin-Wright. The critical issue is WHEN did these two conversations occur? For, if they occurred in early 1993, they have no validity bearing in mind that this was Paul Feldman's exact theory which he probably spread around the electricians who believed it had happened.

I've said this time and time again. There is simply no reliable evidence that has ever been presented to us that the conversation between Rawes and Dodgson happened in late 1992.

Just look at the deceptive way that the chief diary defender frames the challenge to her case. It's either 'false memory syndrome' or mistaken. But she doesn't even mention a possible confusion over dates. As far as I know - but we've not been allowed to see any of the transcripts - Alan Davies has never supplied a date either for when he was told about the supposed disovery of a diary nor when he mentioned this discovery to Dodgson. It's only Tim Martin-Wright (apparently) who thinks that it occurred 'close to Christmas 1992' (per Robert Smith in his 2019 book, p.26). But there doesn't seem to be any documentary evidence to support this claim and, it seems, he once changed his mind and said it happened close to Christmas 1991, although the circumstances surrounding this erroneous dating have not been disclosed. It only needs for it to have actually happened in early 1993 - there is no reason why it could not have been then - for it to be of no value whatseover because, if that's when it did happen, Davies would just have been repeating gossip that he'd heard from other electricians influenced by the excitable Paul Feldman.

When the Chief Diary Defender asks 'what is going on here?', therefore, she needs to ask that of her own unlikely theory? After all, Alan Davies telling Dodgson in around Christmas 1993 that the diary of Jack the Ripper was available for sale from one of his mates makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

As to that, incidentally, you can see that the Chief Diary Defender edits this inconvenient fact about the availability of the diary from her summary of the evidence which, as we've seen, she represents as merely being that 'the diary was found in Dodd's house during a rewire and sold in an Anfield pub'. She leaves out that Davies was supposedly trying to convince Dodgson to tell his boss to buy the diary because it was still available. She does this because she knows it can't possibly have been true. It was only later, at a totally unspecified date, that enquiries were supposedly made - about which we literally know nothing because all the evidence is being ruthlessly suppressed - which established that the diary was sold in an Anfield pub. To me, this was just Davies learning of Feldman's theory that Eddie sold it to Mike in the Saddle, but who knows? I can't really analysis it because all I know about it is from Robert Smith's book in which he tells us that, when Davies tried to locate the diary, 'he was informed that "the book had been sold in a pub in Anfield"' but, bafflingly, Smith doesn't reveal if Davies told him who informed of this and when. Surely he must have asked these obvious questions of Davies when he spoke to him. If he did, we haven't been told the answer. This is yet another reason why the suppressed transcripts need to be made available.

Having happily spread her misinformation about those unidentified 'multiple independent witnesses' accounts of a discovery of Jack the Ripper's diary in Battlecrease, the Chief Diary Defender then moved on in her post to the idea that Mike Barrett might have been involved in forging it without, naturellment, mentioning the troublesome advertisement placed in Bookdealer requesting a genuine Victorian diary with blank pages. This is what she said:

'By stark contrast, not a single soul to my knowledge, alive or dead - aside from our very own liar and fantasist, Mike Barrett - ever claimed to have had the least inside knowledge of the diary's less than immaculate conception by Tony, Mike and Anne, right up to and including its final journey with donkey and compass to its birth in a lowly Goldie Street stable. It was a silent night - as were all the nights and days leading up to this miracle of creation. How Mike managed to keep his trap shut about it before 9th March 1992 is just another minor miracle for others to explain.'

Here's the funny thing. It was less than a month ago that the chief diary defender was telling us that Mike Barrett had hardly any friends. Hence:

'In short, Mike's friends, in the main, were more likely to be imaginary than made of flesh and blood, and could probably be counted on the fingers of someone who had an unfortunate accident with a threshing machine.'

So who does she think Mike would or even could have told about his plan to foirge Jack the Ripper's diary? All his non-existent friends?

She doesn't even tell us the names of the one or two friends that she thinks he might have had. Did anyone even speak to them to ask? Because if they didn't, all she can say is that there is no evidence that Mike spoke to anyone about his plan prior to 9th March. She can't say for a fact that he did 'keep his trap shut'. Although she does it anyway.

But it doesn't even really matter. I mean, is that the best she can do? Her big argument against the Barrett forgery theory is that Mike Barrett didn't tell anyone of his secret criminal plan to forge Jack the Ripper's diary and illegally defraud a publisher into publishing it as if it had been something given to him by a dead friend? What a big surprise! Criminals don't usually blab to non-criminals about what crimes they are planning to commit.

But her argument is even more fundamentally flawed than that. The idea that Mike couldn't keep a secret is absolutely disproved by the many secrets which we know he did keep very successfully. He kept secret for years from everyone involved with the investigation of the diary's provenance that he had recently been a professional freelance journalist. He kept secret his reason for purchasing his word processor. He kept secret his search for a Victorian diary with blank pages. He kept secret his purchase of the little red 1891 diary. He was a man who could keep secrets very well. So the fact that this man with hardly any friends to even tell his secret to about his diary forgery plan managed to keep it a secret doesn't even put a minor dent in the theory.

I repeat, is that reallly the best she can do?

Then all we had next was the type of ridiculous speculative ramblings about what she would have done if she had been in Anne's situation:

'If I'd got wind of it, I'd have wanted to strangle it at birth. We are asked to consider the theory that Anne would have done it if left to her own devices, but was bullied by Mike against her will to go through all the labour pains and then feed the bloody thing on mother's ink while their firstborn watched the telly. Belatedly screwing her courage to the sticking place, Lady Mac - er - Anne did try to burn it to death, in a last-minute "Screw you, Mike" gesture, but then she meekly gave up and let him take her demon brainchild to London, thinking that if anyone there did smell a large, barely weaned rodent, it wasn't her problem and they would merely send its father packing.;

But she wasn't in Anne's situation. She isn't Anne.

Honestly, does the Chief Diary Defender think that every single person acts the same way about everything? Dees she really expect us to swallow the line that if she, the Chief Diary Defender, (using hindsight!), wouldn't have gone along with Mike's scheme, it follows that Anne Barrett wouldn't have done so? It's just so ridiculous.

I would also add that my own theory doesn't involve Anne being 'bullied against her will' to do anything. I'm not even sure that RJ Palmer has said that. I thought his theory was that she just went along with it thinking that it wouldn't come to anything. We really don't know what motivated Anne and I'm personally not interested in speculating about it but it's so typical of the Chief Diary Defender to pretend that a certain unknowable part of the Barrett theory which someone one day might have speculated about is fundamental to it and then claim that this part of the theory doesn't work (even though, in this case, she doesn't have a clue about what Anne would have done in any given situation) so that the whole theory is wrong.

Presumably having deluded herself into thinking that what she's written is unanswerable, she then says:

'By the way, I'm not actually expecting to see answers or explanations posted on these boards.'

No, of course she doesn't want people answering her back! She doesn't want anyone actually challenging her misinformation and nonsense. Of course she doesn't. And what chances are there that she will take into account the answers and explanations I'm providing here on this website? Clue: big fat zero.

In a similar vein of not wanting anyone to show her where she is going wrong, stressing that people shouldn't respond but consider 'quietly', she writes:

'Other questions the readers might like to consider quietly, away from the boards, include why Mike is so worried in the very early days, and needs reassurances from Doreen and Shirley that his identity will not be revealed in the course of local enquiries being made in relation to the diary he claims Tony Devereux gave him.'

I already dealt with this deceptive point (in 'Lord Orsam Says...Part 14' way back in March 2021) the last time she made it. For there is no evidence that Mike ever said he was worried about his identity being revealed, just that he wanted to keep a low profile, said to be for health reasons.

This is what the evidence shows.

Firstly, we have Doreen writing to Mike in May 1992 to assure him that she hadn't mentioned his name when writing to potential publishers because he had told her that he wanted to 'keep a low profile'.  All this shows is that Mike wanted to keep a low profile in the face of a possible media storm about Jack the Ripper's diary, and thousands of questions from reporters, which strikes me as entirely sensible, especially for someone who had forged the diary and didn't really want to talk about it to the press.  Then, in July 1992, Shirley wrote to Mike saying that she had mentioned 'possible publicity' in a letter to Tony Devereux's daughter, but said that she would do her 'level best' to keep Mike's name out of things.  However, she told Mike that she did need the press to help her and had asked the Liverpool Echo to publish a story appealing for information, to which there is no record of Mike objecting.   At the same time, she reassured Mike that he didn't need to worry and that he should say that he didn't want to give interviews due to his health.  There is no reason to think that Shirley was telling Mike to give a false reason or that Mike wasn't truly concerned about his health.

Caroline Morris-Brown also relies on Shirley saying to Tony's daughter:

'The Liverpool Echo is aware of the existence of the diary and there will, inevitably, be some publicity surrounding its discovery.  Mike is extremely anxious, because of his health, not to be involved in this, so we shall do our level best to keep it low key.'

Again, we can see that Shirley explained that the reason for Mike's desire to avoid publicity was that he was concerned about the effect on his health.  One assumes that Shirley genuinely believed this at the time and was not lying to Tony's daughter. Ir may even be true.  Certainly, if Mike had been involved in creating the forgery, he might well have been worried about the effects on his health of having to tell a false story to journalists and face intense questioning from them about it.

Any other reasons for Mike to be worried about publicity?   Well, yes.  Perhaps he wouldn't have wanted a certain Martin Earl to know about his discovery of a sensational Victorian diary shortly after he had attempted to acquire through him a Victorian diary with blank pages.

He also might have wanted his photograph to be kept out of the papers in case someone at a certain auction house recognized him as the purchaser of an old photograph album under the name of 'Williams'. 

He might also not have wanted anyone who knew him as a professional freelance journalist to mention this fact to Shirley, bearing in mind this it was one of his big secrets.

But Caroline Morris doesn't even seem to consider these possibilities, so obsessed is she with Eddie Lyons.

Anything else? Oh yes, another tired old point:

'Equally, why is Mike fishing so hard for information from Colin Rhodes in 1993 about his electricians and the work done in Battlecrease, if he used a guard book he found in an O&L auction sale in 1992 to fake the diary?'

The thing I don't understand about this is that when Caroline Morris-Brown and her two co-authors went into print in 2003, they evidently weren't sure that Mike had even spoken to Colin Rhodes because they wrote:

'On 21 April [1993] Rhodes had received a call from a man claiming to own the Diary but as this man would not divulge his address or telephone number, Rhodes refused to give him any information on his employees who had worked at Battlecrease'.

As Morris-Brown and her co-authors were obviously aware in 2003, because they didn't name the man who made the call, anyone could have telephoned Colin Rhodes claiming to own the diary, including a journalist or diary researcher illicitly seeking information, and one has to wonder what has happened in the intervening 20 years to now make her so sure that the man in question was Mike Barrett.

But, okay, let's assume it was Mike Barrett who made the call. Might there have been a good reason for it?

I can think of at least two.

The first is that Mike's co-author, Shirley Harrison, with whom Mike had formally signed a legally binding collaboration agreement, being frustrated by the fact that Paul Feldman seemed to know where the diary had come from via an electrician but wasn't giving her any information, tasked Mike, as the diary's owner, with the job of getting hold of the contact information of the electricians so that she could speak to them and pursue that line of enquiry.

The second relates to the legal proceedings that Paul Dodd was contemplating in 1993 for the diary to be handed over to him as the true legal owner. I have no idea when the possibility of litigation was first mentioned but if it had been floated as at 21 April 1993 it might easily explain why Mike was attempting, perhaps at the behest of solicitors, to establish if Eddie Lyons, who we know at some point in 1993 was claiming to have found the diary in Battlecrease, had actually ever worked in that property.

Those are just two possible reasons. But Caroline Morris-Brown doesn't even consider them.

We also don't know precisely what information Mike had been seeking. If it was merely contact details of the electricians, this wouldn't be consistent with her theory because he was already supposed to have been able to contact Eddie Lyons. It may be that her argument is that Mike wanted to establish if Eddie had worked at Battlecrease (because it would explain for him where the diary came from) but if that's the case why hasn't she said so? Why has she left her readers to 'consider quietly' the significance of Mike fishing for information when she doesn't ever bother to explain for those readers what she believes he was doing, under her own theory?

When she asks, 'Supposing that Mike, Tony and Anne really were behind the diary's creation, and that nobody else knew about it before 13th April 1992, how do you, dear reader, reconcile all this with Mike's early fears of losing his anonymity, and his later repeated attempts to get information out of Rhodesy?' the fact is that I've already explained it, not for the first time. I've said all these things before. But is she actually interested in engaging in a debate and actually dealing with my responses? Absolutely not. She gives the impression of loving the sound of her own voice, convinced that what she is saying must be correct, totally uninterested in any challenges.

And that was it!

That was her big defence of the Battlecrease provenance against the Barrett forgery theory.

What a disaster.

How utterly desperate.

But there was one consolation for her. The Assistant to the Chief Diary Defender liked her post, calling it 'outstanding', but then quite sensibly stopped there rather than attempt to explain what was so outstanding about it. Instead, the following day, he wrote his own long pointless post, asserting without any explanation, and without discussing the facts, least of all Mike's attempt to acquire a Victorian diary with blank pages, that the argument that Mike forged the diary has: 'zero explanatory power when defined by the degree of evidence to support it' unless you are 'willing to suspend all of the normal rules of scientific enquiry'. He continued:

'Let me ask you, dear readers, does that include YOU? Are you willing to believe something because it suits an argument you have either formed yourself (e.g., the scrapbook is not what I would have expected so it must be dodgy) or have adopted from others (e.g., Lord Orsam's magical mystery tour into events in Liverpool for which the sole piece of supporting evidence other than an utterly discredited affidavit is that apparently there was an auction held at Outhwaite & Litherland between March 9 and Aprii 12, 1992)?'

Nope. I'm not seeing a mention of MIke's advertisement in any of that. It's called denial.

It's also false to say that the only two pieces of evidence to support the forgery theory are 'an utterly discredted affidavit' and an auction held between 'March 9 and April 12, 1992'. Him saying this, entirely proves my point that every single diary defender is in denial about Mike's long and detailed account of the forgery which he gave at the Cloak & Dagger meeting on 9 April 1999. For that is also evidence which has certainly not been discredited (nor for that matter has his affidavit, although it certainly contains some unfortunate dating errors which were no doubt the fault of Alan Gray). As for the auction, Mitchell is confused if he thinks that I've ever adduced it as evidence in support of the Orsam Theory. The most I've said is that it is consistent with Mike's account for there to have been a suitable auction at the correct time, especially on a date which gave him eleven days to create the diary, which is the amount time he said it took for it to be created, in the face of people like Morris-Brown who were saying it wasn't possible. Mitchell is also terribly confused in saying that the relevant date range is between 9 March and 12 April. Absolutely not. For it to fit with Mike's story, that auction had to have occurred after 28 March when Mike would have received the little red diary, and it couldn't in any way have happened as late as 12 April because that wouldn't have left sufficient time for the Barretts to write out the diary into the photograph album. No, for the story to make any sense, and to allow for the eleven days which Mike consistently said it took for the diary to be written, the auction had to be around 31st March which, as it happens, is the exact day that there was an auction in Liverpool of Victorian and Edwardian effects. But, as usual, the misinformation specialist that is Tom Mitchell totally misrepresents the argument so that he can avoid dealing with its compelling nature.

Then we had this nonsense from Mitchell:

'If you have been honest enough to put your hand in the air at this point, are you willing to go further and answer the question, What drives you to fall back on a convenient - but unsupported - theory when there is a wealth of evidence out there screaming 'Possibly Not Fake!' louder than The Sunday Times could ever shout 'Fake!'. '

What is he talking about? Where is the 'wealth of evidence' which screams that the diary is possibly not a fake? There isn't any. Nothing at all. He certainly doesn't tell us what it is. If he means the Battlecrease provenance evidence, we've not even been allowed to see that.

On the other hand, the evidence we have proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the diary is fake. The expression 'one off instance' did not exist in 1888. It was a mistake by the forger. Not the only one because 'bumbling buffoon' could also not have been written by anyone in 1888. This is proof positive that the diary is not only a fake but a modern fake because those two expressions didn't come into play until the second half of the twentieth century.

That's not even to mention the multiple factual errors in the diary, which neither James Maybrick nor the real Jack the Ripper would have made, all sourced to the secondary literature.

It's because we know for a fact that the diary is a fake that we have to look at who could have forged it. Currently the only realistic candiates are Mike and Anne Barrett, whether on their own or with assistance from friends and family. In fact, Mike Barrett is more than a realistic candidate because nothing else can possibly explain his urgent and secret desire to get his hands on a Victorian diary with blank pages in March 1992.

Then we just have a lot of babbling blather from Mitchell.

'I've always been fascinated by the human mind - how it projects what it wants to believe onto canvasses blank or otherwise, regardless of what might justify the picture thus emerging. Why do we do that?'

I think he needs to become more fascinated by his own thought processes and why he allowed himself to be convinced by Feldman's mumbo jumbo that Maybrick wrote the diary.

'We know that the argument for Barrett-as-Hoaxer only has explanatory power if you are willing to suspend all of the normal rules of scientific enquiry.'

Do we know this? No, we don't, is the answer. Further, Mitchell doesn't even bother to deal with the actual argument in support of Barrett-as-hoaxer, even though I have set it out in detail on this very website.

I'm not going to bother quoting the rest of Tom's jibber jabber in its entirety, which is just more of the same, but it's worth mentioning that his claim,'that there is not a scrap of proper evidence to support the notion that oh-thank-God-for-that-it-was-Barrett-and-Barrett-all-along', is not only wrong but it's quite astonishing that he seems to think that anyone will have the view of 'thank god it was Barrett'. It's not a question of thanking a deity, it's a question of following the evidence which Mitchell likes to pretend doesn't exist.

What is so incredibly ironic is that it was only a few days ago that Mitchell was asking people to 'look at the holistic sum of the parts' of the Barretts-as-hoaxers scenario. So when is he going to do it? When is he going to consider all the parts of the argument which are so compelling in pointing to the Barretts. In addition to his search for a Victorian diary with blank pages, which, in itself, is a smoking gun, for which there is simply no explanation for it other than a desire to forge a Victorian diary, these include Mike's deliberate cover-up of his journalistic career, his ownership of a book containing chapters about the Maybrick case, expressly mentioning Battlecrease, which he liked sufficiently to lend to a friend while claiming ignorance of 'Battlecrease' to Doreen and Shirley, his astonishing ability to reveal the source of the Crashaw quote in the diary, his research notes which covered up his use of Ryan's book which was clearly the forger's main source of Maybrick information, the fact that he uses similar quirky expressions to those in the diary in his speech and writings, the fact that he was clearly capable of writing additional diary pages in the same style as the diary's author, the fact that he told a story about the diary's origins in 1999 which no one believed and no one could be expected to have believed which was, on its face, inconsistent with the story in his 1995 affidavit but, in fact, was consistent with it when analysed very closely using the knowledge of the Bookdealer advertisement allied with knowledge that he requested the red diary from Martin Earl on 26 March 1992, which no one possessed in 1999, the fact that document experts thought that the diary he presented looked fresh on the page, the fact that Anne is known to have formed similar characters in her handwriting in a distinctive way similar to the diarist and made similar spelling and grammatical errors in her correspodence, Anne's strange behaviour after Mike's June 1994 confession which she seemed to think was an attack on her plus Anne's even stranger invention of what Mitchell himself now believes to be a totally false story that the diary had been in her family since at least the 1950s and that she gave it to Tony Devereux to give to her husband.

You never find a diary defender making a holistic argument against Barrett's authorship which deals with all of the above. It's because their game is to isolate individual parts of the argument which they can then say, in themselves, don't prove anything while entirely ignoring the holistic whole. They do the same thing with all the mistakes in the diary, coming up with imaginative but unrealistic excuses as to how Maybrick, or someone who knew Maybrick intimately, could have made any one of those mistakes without considering the sheer and utter implausibility of that person making all of those mistakes in one document.

LORD ORSAM

15 December 2023