The Brown Paper Scam

So we've all now seen the Battlecrease scam, and we've seen that the exposure of this scam in my Battlecrease Scam blog post upset the scammers so much that one of them, full of anger and rage, rushed onto this website a-moaning and a-groaning, making of a lot of noise in the Comments section but failing to add a single particle of substance to the implausible Battlecrease discovery story.

Let's now move on to a sub-scam of the Battlecrease Scam, being the Brown Paper Scam.

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According to Paul Feldman in his 1997 book, Arthur Rigby told him on some unspecified date in 1993 that:

"He had been in a car with...colleagues [Eddie Lyons and Jim Bowling]. He said he had noticed a parcel wrapped in brown paper under the front passenger seat".

No actual quote from Rigby was provided and no contemporaneous note of his words taken by Feldman has ever been produced. One assumes, therefore, that Feldman was going from memory of what Rigby had told him some years earlier.

Feldman commented that:

"Mike Barrett had always said that Tony Devereux had given him the diary wrapped in brown paper with string tied around it".

The scam had begun.

Rigby had seen a parcel wrapped in brown paper. Mike Barrett had been given the diary wrapped in brown paper.

It must have been the same brown paper!!

But hold on a minute there.

Houston, we have a problem.

When Arthur Rigby's brother gave a more detailed account of Arthur's story he said (bold added):

"My brother never actually witnessed the finding of anything whilst he was working there. It was only the odd behaviour of the other two who went quiet in his presence and he saw them quickly put something that was in a pillow case or shopping bag under the seat in the van as he approached".

No brown paper in sight!!

If one is being generous, Arthur might have said it was a brown paper bag and Feldman, many years later, translated this into brown paper, forgetting that it was supposed to be a bag. But, from what Rigby's brother said, it could have been a pillow case or a (plastic) shopping bag.

Suddenly the coincidence is not so miraculous.

The scam might have been laid to rest in 1997 but Caroline Morris-Brown - desperate as usual - decided to resurrect it in 2023.

On 17 April 2023, in the 'Maybrick diary' thread on JTR Forums, she posted:

We can see in her first sentence the finest misdirection known to magic:

"As you know, one of Feldman's electricians spoke to him in April 1993 about a brown paper parcel".

Well, of course, we don't know this. It's just what Feldman claimed in 1997 had occurred in 1993. Furthermore, nowhere does Feldman say this happened in April 1993.

Having set out with this clearly flawed premise - one which, if Rigby's brother is to be believed - is a false premise - the Great Magician continued:

"The brown paper used to wrap the diary was a detail that nobody would have known about before Shirley's book was published in October 1993 without inside information".

You've got to love that "without inside information" bit which followed the word "nobody".

The fact of the matter is that anyone to whom Mike told his story about receiving the diary from Paul Feldman would have known that he'd been given a brown paper parcel. Then anyone who heard that story could have told anyone else.

Feldman, who appears to have spoken to Mike Barrett in February 1993, would surely have extracted from Mike his story of receiving from Tony Devereux the diary wrapped in brown paper. He certainly tells us in his book that, in February 1993, "Mike told us his story about how he obtained the diary from Tony Devereux". He must have known from very early on, therefore, that Mike claimed to have received the diary wrapped in brown paper.

After all, when Feldman filmed his documentary in September 1993, before publication of Shirley's book, the brown paper was a central feature of the reconstruction of Mike returning home with the diary. Hence we see Mike filmed in Goldie Street carrying something wrapped in brown paper:

He is then shown entering his home, number 12 Goldie Street:

We next see him at the table of his living room unwrapping the parcel:

Still at it:

Nearly there...

Can you guess what he finds inside? The tension is unbearable.

Lordy lord, it's the diary of Jack the Ripper!

It's perfectly clear, therefore, that Paul Feldman was independently aware prior to October 1993 that Mike claimed to have received the diary wrapped in brown paper. When he spoke to Rigby, he might even have asked him about brown paper and thus planted the idea in his head. We don't need to go that far, however, because the only real evidence we have is that whatever it was Rigby saw was contained in either a pillow case or a shopping bag.

This didn't stop the Chief Diary Defender from returning to the subject in September 1993 in the 'Lord Orsam Blog' thread on JTR Forums:

"The scrapbook was indeed wrapped in brown paper when it arrived with Mike Barrett in London on Monday 13th April 1992. This detail was not 'revealed in print' in the spring of 1993 to my knowledge, and it appears that the first reference to it was in Shirley's book, not published until October 1993. Palmer seems to be assuming that Feldman would have known all about the brown paper before he began contacting the electricians, so a source to that effect would be helpful. I haven't come across one myself, and I'm not sure why anyone would have thought to mention this insignificant detail to him when he first involved himself with the diary.

As Palmer would be the first to agree, Feldman is not the most reliable source, and four years later in 1997 he was justifying in print his conclusion that the electricians had all lied to him. He could only see the brown paper in that context, so he assumed - wrongly - that his informant had picked up on this detail because, as he writes: 'Mike Barrett had always said that Tony Devereux had given him the diary wrapped in brown paper with string tied round it'. He's not seeking to endorse what the electrician told him here; he's implying that the brown paper was already common knowledge - except that it wasn't. Note that the wording reflects Feldman's continuing belief in this part of Mike's story, and not the fact that the brown paper was actually seen in Doreen's office in April 1992. There is no suggestion here that it was Feldman who told his informant what Mike 'had always said', if he even knew it himself at the time. It's the wrong way round. He's surmising in hindsight that his informant would have picked this up independently from what he'd been reading, but he was misremembering in 1997 what little had been in the public domain about the scrapbook back in the spring of 1993."

As usual, we have to take this apart piece by piece. Firstly:

"The scrapbook was indeed wrapped in brown paper when it arrived with Mike Barrett in London on Monday 13th April 1992. This detail was not 'revealed in print' in the spring of 1993 to my knowledge, and it appears that the first reference to it was in Shirley's book, not published until October 1993."

What does it matter how Mike wrapped the diary when he took it to London in April 1992? Surely it matters not. All that matters is how he claimed to have received it. As to that, we know he claimed to have received it (from Tony Devereux) wrapped in brown paper. The diary defenders ignore the lie that Mike told about receiving the diary from Devereux but are perfectly happy to believe that he was telling the truth about the brown paper. Caroline Morris-Brown realizes that there is no corroboration that Mike received the diary wrapped in brown paper in March 1992 so she has to focus on what the diary was wrapped in when Mike brought the diary to London in April 1992 because that can be corroborated, but is totally irrelevant. Mike could have wrapped the diary in any material he wanted in April 1992. The fact that it was brown paper means nothing.

In his affidavit sworn on 26 April 1993, Mike mentioned that the diary, when received from Tony Devereux, had been wrapped in brown paper, meaning that his story was "in print", so her wording isn't accurate. Her most disingenuous comment, however, is the next one:

"Palmer seems to be assuming that Feldman would have known all about the brown paper before he began contacting the electricians, so a source to that effect would be helpful. I haven't come across one myself, and I'm not sure why anyone would have thought to mention this insignificant detail to him when he first involved himself with the diary."

She knows perfectly well that Feldman would have heard Mike's story first hand in February 1993 and would have learnt about the brown paper at that time. Why does she need a source to that effect? She knows there is no such source, so saying that one would be "helpful" is, of course, unhelpful. Her claim that she's not sure why "anyone" would have thought to mention this "insignificant detail" is barking. Not only did Mike include this fact in his April 1993 affidavit but we've seen it was a key feature in Feldman's documentary filmed in September 1993.

The next (long) paragraph in her post seems to show Morris-Brown getting the wrong end of the stick and I won't spend too much time with it.

"As Palmer would be the first to agree, Feldman is not the most reliable source, and four years later in 1997 he was justifying in print his conclusion that the electricians had all lied to him. He could only see the brown paper in that context, so he assumed - wrongly - that his informant had picked up on this detail because, as he writes: 'Mike Barrett had always said that Tony Devereux had given him the diary wrapped in brown paper with string tied round it'. He's not seeking to endorse what the electrician told him here; he's implying that the brown paper was already common knowledge - except that it wasn't. Note that the wording reflects Feldman's continuing belief in this part of Mike's story, and not the fact that the brown paper was actually seen in Doreen's office in April 1992. There is no suggestion here that it was Feldman who told his informant what Mike 'had always said', if he even knew it himself at the time. It's the wrong way round. He's surmising in hindsight that his informant would have picked this up independently from what he'd been reading, but he was misremembering in 1997 what little had been in the public domain about the scrapbook back in the spring of 1993."

I would suggest this is all entirely wrong and misunderstands what Feldman was saying.

In my opinion, Feldman was clearly saying that Rigby did NOT know Mike's story that the diary had been wrapped in brown paper, so the fact that he (Rigby) said that Eddie Lyons and Jim Bowling were hiding a parcel wrapped in brown paper suggested to Feldman that Rigby must have seen the diary. It's the very same point, in other words, that Morris-Brown is making today.

The key point for our purposes is that there is zero contemporary evidence that Arthur Rigby ever said he saw anything wrapped in brown paper and, once we realize that Paul Feldman's recollections of events cannot be trusted - even Morris-Brown, as we have seen, accepts that "Feldman is not the most reliable source" - there is zero reason to believe that Rigby saw any brown paper.

Yet, for some reason, the brown paper is held up as an important part of the diary defender argument that the diary was discovered under the floorboards of Battlecrease.

But no longer.

This brown paper scam has now been exposed!

LORD ORSAM

8 August 2024