The Diary of Jack the Ripper - The Chilling Confessions of James Maybrick

by Harrison, Shirley

  First, Kenneth Rendell’s own summary of his report:

  The basis of the book and the text of the purported Jack the Ripper Diary is that James T [sic] Maybrick was Jack the Ripper and wrote the Diary. Handwriting comparisons by a number of leading experts, including the one selected by the English publisher, definitely show that Maybrick did not write this Diary.

  A major factor cited in this book linking the Diary to Jack the Ripper is the fact that highly unusual phrases and expressions that first appeared in 1888 in a letter signed ‘Jack the Ripper’, sent to a London newspaper, widely publicised since, are used throughout the Diary. The Diary is thus inexorably linked to that letter. All comparisons of the two handwritings conclude they are written by different people.

  The style of handwriting is not Victorian. The type of handwriting is indicative of the early to mid-twentieth century at the earliest — not late 19th century. The layout, pen pressure and ink distribution all indicate that many entries were written at one time, they are completely inconsistent with the Diary but consistent with a forgery of a Diary.

  The ion migration test conducted by its developer, Rod McNeil, to determine how long the ink has been on the paper concluded a median date of 1921 plus or minus 12 years…

  The Diary is not written in a Victorian Diary book but in a scrap book — highly unusual. The first twenty pages are torn out, which is illogical, unless one assumes a forger bought a Victorian or Edwardian era scrap book, tore out the used pages and then filled in the Diary.

  There is no credible evidence whatsoever that this Diary is genuine. Every area of analysis proves, or indicates the Jack the Ripper Diary is a hoax.

  Robert Smith’s reply, in part, said:

  Kenneth Rendell’s report on the Diary of Jack the Ripper is fundamentally flawed, inaccurate and unreliable. The tests and report on the Diary were rushed through in two weeks and largely ignore 16 months of research and testing by our writer, researchers and experts … Furthermore, his opinions are more subjective than scientific; he makes many false assumptions and conclusions; and, crucially, all of his points of disagreement are dealt with fully in the book.

  I spoke with Bill Waddell, the former curator of Scotland Yard’s Black Museum, some time afterwards. He is now an international lecturer and a man with a lifetime’s experience of crime and particularly of fraud and forgery. ‘You could have driven a coach and horses through that American evidence,’ he told me.

  The Sunday Times had already decided in July that the Diary had been forged after three of their own experts had been called in to examine it before the clinching of any serialisation deal. They were: Dr Audrey Giles, a forensic document examiner who looked at the Diary for only a few minutes in Robert Smith’s office on June 22nd and performed no tests on it; Dr Kate Flint, a lecturer at Oxford University specialising in Victorian literature rather than language; Ripperologist Tom Cullen whose vague report started unpromisingly by mistaking the year of the Whitechapel murders!

  However, the standard confidentiality agreement which had been signed prevented them from publishing these results. Meanwhile, to their frustration the competition was already also on the trail of the Diary. ‘Is this man Jack the Ripper?’ asked the Independent on Sunday on August 29th.

  So it was that the newspaper took the publishers, Smith Gryphon Ltd, to Court, to overturn the confidentiality agreement and persuade a High Court judge that it was ‘in the public interest’ for the Sunday Times to print their article before the agreed date. The upshot of two court appearances and astronomical legal costs was that the Sunday Times was finally given permission to go to press just one week before the confidentiality agreement allowed anyway!

  On September 19th 1993, a banner headline was splashed over a double page spread: ‘FAKE!’ The article, under the by-line of the associate news editor, Maurice Chittenden, fell well short of the biting indictment that the headline promised.

  No forger was named. No evidence was presented to suggest when or how the Diary had been forged. Much of the evidence produced to support the accusations was entirely subjective. We were even accused of suppressing damaging expert evidence when Maurice Chittenden discovered that we had adhered to Dr Baxendale’s request, at the time, that his report should not be used in any way.

  Yet in the ‘small print’ tucked away towards the bottom of the page Mr Chittenden made, in the circumstances, an astonishing suggestion which did not support the headline. He said:

  The Diary of Jack the Ripper has to be one of four things:

  1. A genuine document

  2. A modern hoax

  3. A fantasy written by James Maybrick

  4. A Victorian forgery, perhaps invented to secure the release of Florence Maybrick but never used.

  Options 3 and 4 can be quickly discounted… the Diary must therefore be genuine or a modern hoax…’

  Their conclusion was that the Diary was a modern fake and so began a determined effort to find the forgers. But no forgers could be found…

  My book was published on October 3rd. Anne Barrett, who had kept a very low profile throughout, was extremely unwilling to attend the launch in London. Not for another year would we learn the true reason why. But eventually she was persuaded by Doreen Montgomery, and so Michael and she travelled down with their daughter, Caroline, to stay at Doreen’s home.

  The event was attended by large numbers of press and one disruptive but uninvited guest who stood up, waving his arms and shouting accusations at us all. His name was Melvin Harris. I learned that he was a well-respected historical writer, with a book about his own Ripper theory due to be published shortly. He became a self-appointed guardian of the ‘public interest’ and founder of the Committee for Integrity which has taken a great deal of interest in our work on the Diary. He seems to believe that my book was being published as part of a cynical commercial plot based entirely on greed and that all of us involved knew we were promoting a fraud.

  The facts were less exciting. Besides, any potential golden goose’s egg was swiftly being gobbled up by legal fees and research expenses. On October 21st 1993 there was yet another blow. We learned from the Daily Express that there was to be a ‘Ripper Diary Probe by Yard’ into what they suggested could be the ‘biggest publishing hoax since the Hitler diaries’. Knowing the London team involved with the Diary as I did, such dark insinuations were amusing and hard to take seriously. They bore no relation to the honest people with whom I was working but of course they looked alarming in print.

  We had known that the Sunday Times had deposited all its papers with New Scotland Yard’s International and Organised Crimes Branch. If such a move is taken, the Yard is obliged to act. Their brief, we understood, was to discover if Robert Smith, or anyone else, had knowingly passed off a fake document as genuine. Their intention was not to prove whether the Diary was genuine or a forgery, but in order to unravel the facts they would, incidentally, have to examine its provenance.

  In charge of the case was Detective Sergeant Thomas, known to his colleagues as ‘Bonesy’ — famous in the force for his superb home-made pickled onions. I heard on the grapevine that Detective Sergeant Thomas had travelled to Liverpool and was interviewing everyone involved in the story. Among them were Mr Devereux’s daughters, the landlord of the Saddle Public House, a witness of Tony’s will, the local press and of course the Barretts.

  Anne has since described that day as the worst in her life. She prepared refreshments and hardly said a word while Detective Sergeant Thomas grilled Michael who kept asking for beer. In the middle of it all Anne’s father, Billy Graham, turned up and Michael asked Detective Sergeant Thomas to pretend he was the insurance man rather than admit his true identity. Among other things Michael denied that he had a word processor. He was terrified that Scotland Yard would know of a confrontation with the police over 20 years before and that he would be condemned before they arrived. He was right. When asked to sign a statement Michael refused unless a solicitor was present.
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  We all knew that, in many ways understandably, Michael Barrett was suspected of being the forger. The rumour and innuendo was getting out of hand and the pressure on the Barrett family was intolerable.

  * * *

  In November 1993, I was invited to the USA to take part in an exciting red-carpet, coast-to-coast promotional tour for the book and to appear with Kenneth Rendell himself, first on the Larry King show and later to participate in a radio phone-in from Pasadena. Ken Rendell told me on air that there had been a ‘sinister development’ and that he had heard that a word processor had been found with the Diary on disc.

  The facts are these. Michael Barrett invited the police into his house. There was no word processor in sight. No notes. Detective Sergeant Thomas left empty handed. The explanation about Michael Barrett’s original research and his use of a word processor was, in any case, in the first edition of my book for all to see. Interestingly, by the time I met Kenneth Rendell he had shifted his stance. He still had absolutely no doubt the Diary was a modern forgery. But he now felt it was a modern forgery of within the last few years. Rod McNeil had re-examined his own report and issued a statement admitting that the storage conditions of a document could affect the tests he conducted and that a controlled study to test the Diary scientifically could take 20 years. I was astonished during our discussion to find that so much reliance could be placed by Mr Rendell on matters of personal opinion. For instance, he condemned the Diary because, he said, it is written in a scrap book with pages torn out, whereas Maybrick, an affluent man, he claimed, would have bought a purpose-made Diary. But we are not talking of the actions of a rational man; these are very extraordinary circumstances.

  I have myself seen a Victorian album which is almost identical to the Maybrick Diary — it was used as a scrap book for photographs, visiting cards and letters by the prosperous Doubleday family in Essex. Its contents have been glued in casually and show that even Victorians varied in their artistic competence and design skills!

  By the time I went to the USA, I had also received a letter, dated November 11th, from the curator of 19th century manuscripts at the British Museum. It said,’By the late 19th century the term “Victorian handwriting” becomes dificult to define. From that time onwards a wide variety of hands, some quite modern in appearance can be found. Examples of the many different handwriting styles of the period can be seen in the large collections of late Victorian letters held by the British Library.’

  I have corresponded amicably with Kenneth Rendell since those tumultuous times. Rod McNeil, working as part of the Rendell team, originally placed the Diary somewhere in the 1920s — give or take 12 years. As Martin Fido commented, remembering that the existence of the empty tin box was publicly unknown in the 1920s: ‘science places the document in an historically impossible period’. Rendell himself had said to me and written several times that he now believed it to be a modern forgery with the clear implication that it was the work of Michael Barrett. On March 14th 1996, I wrote and asked him to explain that since the rest of his team had roundly condemned the Diary as a forgery, exactly when they thought it had been forged.

  I had a reply by return. ‘I did not state a definite opinion as to when I thought the forgery was done because my job was only to determine whether it was forged or not … It did however appear to be quite recent… I think everybody had the opinion that it was done fairly recently but nobody really thought very much about it because that was not a question we needed to deal with. It would be a mistake, therefore, to conclude that was our opinion — it was only an impression …’

  An ‘impression’ that did a great deal of damage. This was the report that seemed to me to destroy 16 months’ work! It was not, of course, the end of the story. The police investigations rumbled expensively on, although once again no one ever came to interview me. We waited anxiously for their findings but such findings never came our way.

  On November 26th, the Daily Express followed up its original story with ‘Ripper Diaries are Fake’. The report said ‘a Scotland yard investigation into the alleged diaries of Jack the Ripper concludes they are fake… detectives… are convinced the 65 page document was penned within the last decade.’ Here was yet another date!

  I rang the Daily Express to know the source for this statement and they claimed the information came from New Scotland Yard itself. I rang the Yard and was put through to Detective Sergeant Thomas’ office who denied having made any statement to the Daily Express. They transferred me to the press office who, they alleged, would have issued any statement. The Press Office refused to speak to me because they said I was not a journalist. As a former member of the NUJ for some 30 years and currently with the British Institute of Journalists, this seemed unreasonable.

  I asked when we would receive a statement. ‘There is no statement,’ I was told.

  Finally, on January 15th 1994, we learned the truth from Harold Brough of the Liverpool Post: ‘Yard Clears Diary Publisher of Fraud’. This was the subject of the investigation — not, as already mentioned, the authenticity of the Diary, which was an internal matter and not, one on which they were entitled to comment in the press.

  The Yard had sent their findings to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) who had made a statement when deciding to go no further with the matter. The CPS told Harold: ‘We have decided against a prosecution because there is not enough evidence to have a realistic prospect of getting a conviction.’ It was a totally unsatisfactory conclusion. We, who had suffered such headline damage as ‘The Great Ripper Rip-Off’, were to be given no official written response to the harm that had been done.

  16

  MY CAMPAIGN IS FAR FROM OVER YET…

  James Maybrick’s legacy to his family was sombre enough, but in the years that followed, his shadow was to darken so many lives — and it still does.

  Florie Maybrick was a survivor. She endured her existence as prisoner ‘L.P.29’ including solitary confinement, hard labour and illness, without hope of early release despite the efforts of so many. Her mother came from France to visit her every two months, travelling ‘a hundred miles for thirty minutes’ and spent a fortune campaigning for mercy.

  Florie later recalled, ‘At these visits she would tell me as best she could of the noble, unwearied efforts of my countrymen and countrywomen in my cause; of the sympathy and support of my own Government; of the earnest efforts of the different American ambassadors in my behalf… The knowledge of their belief in my innocence, and of their sympathy comforted, cheered, and strengthened me to tread bravely the thorny path of my daily life.’

  These visits took their toll on the Baroness. ‘Almost before we had time to compose ourselves there would come a silent sign from the mute matron in the chair — the thirty minutes had passed. “Goodbye” we would say, with a lingering look and then turn our backs upon each other … no one will ever know what my mother suffered.’

  Florie’s Counsel, Sir Charles, later Lord, Russell, continued to express his support for his infamous client and never lost confidence that she would be freed. He died in 1900 before Florie was to see his belief vindicated.

  For the entire fifteen years of her incarceration Florie remained the focus of an international campaign to clear her name. Three American Presidents registered pleas for mercy. Cardinal Gibbons, Secretary of State James G. Blaine and the Ambassador to Britain, Robert Lincoln, added appeals on her behalf. Not until 1904 after the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 was Florie finally a free woman. On January 25th aged 41 she was taken into the kindly care of nuns at the Community of the Epiphany, a convent in Truro, Cornwall. Six months later, according to the local press, she left the convent using the name ‘Graham’ — a truncated form of her family name ‘Ingraham’. She then rejoined her mother in France before sailing home to a new world in America, lit by electricity, over-populated and noisy with the march to industrialisation. The change was hard. Never pardoned, she was free from prison but not from her past.

  ‘A t
ime will come when the world will acknowledge that the verdict which was passed on me is absolutely untenable,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘But what then? Who shall give back the years I have spent within prison walls; the friends by whom I am forgotten; the children to whom I am dead; the sunshine; the winds of heaven; my woman’s life, and all I have lost by this terrible injustice?’

  Florie’s repeated attempts at appeal may have been in vain as far as her early release was concerned but her prison sentence produced an ultimate irony: Britain’s Court of Criminal Appeal was set up in 1907 as a direct result of her case. In future, prisoners would face a more equitable system of justice. Indirectly the change could be said to have been brought about by James Maybrick, whose other life as Jack the Ripper led to her downfall.

  Florie wanted privacy. But the public wanted her story. In need of money and with the encouragement of her American supporters she wrote about her experiences in prison and toured the country lecturing on the need for penal reform. She never once discussed the events of 1889 that had taken her to the shadow of the gallows. This public life, however, made it impossible for her to escape the curiosity of her audience, and she abandoned the lecture circuit after two years.

  In 1910, the Baroness returned to France after an extended visit to see Florie and she died there a few months later. She was buried beside her son in the cemetery at Passy.

  When attempts to reclaim family land failed, Florie was in dire need of money. She worked briefly for a publishing company, then her health broke down and in 1910 she moved to Moraine, near Chicago. There she stayed for five years in the care of Frederick W. Cushing, proprietor of the elegant Moraine Hotel. But she became ill, she ran up debts and eventually was taken in to the protection of the Salvation Army, homeless. In 1918 she contacted a friend, Cora Griffin, asking about employment opportunities. Miss Griffin had a friend in Gaylordsville, Connecticut, Genevieve Austin, who was looking for a housekeeper on her poultry farm. Florie was hired. The following year, she bought a tract of land in Gaylordsville and had a small three-roomed cottage built. Before moving there she had decided to revert to her maiden name and thereafter was known as Florence Elizabeth Chandler. Mrs Maybrick ceased to exist.