It's All On Murphy

Five weeks after my Let's Talk About the Receipt post, not a single diary or watch defender wants to talk about Albert Johnson's receipt for the watch. Just fancy that. A blanket wall of silence. Don't they want to discuss the watch, then?

Well, the day after my post, Hartley posted his own poorly researched blog post in which he claimed to "investigate" whether the watchmaker was Verity of Lancaster but, in typical Hartley style, for which he is famous, failed to comprehend what I had clearly shown, namely that the name engraved on the movement of a Victorian watch is not going to be that of the watchmaker but that of the watch finisher or retailer.

Critically, we've not had an image of the watch receipt from July 1992 provided. One has to wonder why not.

In the meantime, Caroline Morris-Brown thinks she's proved that the Maybrick scratches were added onto the watch before July 1992 but she doesn't seem to realize how heavily dependent she is on the honesty and accuracy of one man: Ron Murphy.

She wrote on JTR Forums on 18th June 2024:

"no further research into the watch could help to support the case for the diary being a 1992 Barrett fake. It would certainly refute that nonsense if all the scratches were indeed in the watch by then, as the evidence provided by the Murphys and Drs Wild and Turgoose indicates."

Sure, the Turgoose report says that "the vast majority of superficial surface scratches" (not all of them!) were applied to the watch after the Maybrick markings. But what Turgoose couldn't do was tell us how much longer after the Maybrick markings were added to the watch those scratches were applied. If the forger put the Maybrick markings on the watch, then immediately overlaid those markings with scratches, that knocks out the evidence of Turgoose (and Wild who adds little) on this issue.

So we are left with Ron Murphy, the only person who (vaguely) claims to have seen scratches on the inside back cover of the watch prior to selling it to Albert Johnson on an uncertain date.

If his recollection is faulty or he is downright lying, the only thing left which supposedly tells us the Maybrick markings are old is the obviously flawed evidence about the brass particles found by Turgoose. Even Turgoose said that, "there are no features observed which conclusively prove the age of the engravings".

Ron Murphy's own recollections are inconsistent. In 1993, he was "almost certain" that there were scratches on the watch, which means he wasn't entirely certain, yet in 1997 he told Shirley Harrison for the first time that he had attempted to buff out those scratches which, four years earlier, he hadn't even been 100% certain were even there.

Furthermore, and this is the incredible part, according to Caroline Morris-Brown herself, Ron Murphy was a thoroughly dishonest jeweller who bought the watch at some point after 9 March 1992 (presumably from Eddie Lyons) believing it was a stolen watch and then lied about the provenance of this watch when signing a statement in 1993 and lied again when speaking to Shirley Harrison in 1997, claiming the watch had been in his family's possession since the 1980s. Yet, she trusts him entirely when he claims that he could recall scratches being on the watch!

She doesn't care about the fact that Ron was visited by Albert and his criminal brother Robbie in private and in secret in 1993 when his memory of the scratches could have been "influenced" in some way by those two. For all we know, his immediate reaction was that he couldn't remember any scratches but was persuaded in that secret meeting that he could do so.

We've never seen the receipt that Albert possessed for the watch, we've never seen any of Ron Murphy's documentation relating to the watch and we don't seem to know for sure on what date it was sold to Albert. The man to whom the watch was sent for repair, who can have no reason to lie, thinks it was a different watch entirely.

Given that all the diary defenders have gone into hiding and can't seem to bring themselves to assist with this problem I guess we'll never know.

LORD ORSAM 25 July 2024