Nelson's Column

Scott Nelson is a curious fellow, for sure.  A Simon Wood fanboy who once said his favourite Ripper book is Deconstructing Jack (a massive red flag as to a person's judgement) - yet, contrary to Wood's belief that Jack the Ripper never existed, has repeatedly expressed an inexplicable belief that Jack the Ripper was someone called Henry Defries (see Defries with that?) - he is probably best known for publicly begging authors to send him free "complimentary" copies of their books ("I always make it a point to ask authors of new books for a complimentary copy"  he brazenly told us in 2022). When it comes to the Maybrick diary, he has a theory which is so bizarre, convoluted and stupid that I doubt anyone fully understands it, including himself.   He admits that his theory involves the self-confessed diary forger, Michael Barrett, behaving irrationally even though there is a far more obvious explanation for Barrett's actions which involves him behaving rationally.  When he was recently asked on JTR Forums (by Michael Banks) to explain why he preferred an irrational solution over a rational one, he failed to answer the question, and now says: "I no longer debate the diary".

The purpose of this post is to discuss Nelson's theory for which his confidence in it seems be inversely related to any actual supporting evidence or basis.

Before doing so we need to get one thing out of the way.

LORD ORSAM AND NELSON

During the summer of 2025, Scott Nelson seemed to think he was talking to me on the Casebook Forum when responding to posts by Michael Banks about the Maybrick Diary. His "evidence" for this was that Banks had used a hyphen when writing the word "no-one". Bizarrely, according to Nelson, Lord Orsam is "[t]he only other person" he's ever come across who hyphenates "no-one", even though it's really very common, and Banks immediately produced multiple examples of other Casebook posters doing the same thing including Nelson himself (!), not to mention historic examples by Banks from many years earlier. So that was a bit strange. It was also ironic because, while I did indeed hyphenate "no-one" when posting on the Casebook Forum, as Nelson had evidently noticed, I stopped doing so a few years after my resignation from the Forum, in around 2021 (deciding it didn't need one), since which time I've consistently written "no one" without the hyphen. Had Nelson considered any of the blog posts on this website, or read my 2023 book, Temperature of Death, he would have spotted this. But, as Sherlock Holmes, or even Herlock Sholmes, might have said, he sees but does not observe.

Before starting to write this post, I couldn't remember engaging with Nelson about the Maybrick Diary while I was posting on the subject on Casebook between 2016-2018 although I've now refreshed my memory and find that I did so on a few very brief occasions. I certainly did remember him popping up randomly, repeating the name "Harry Dam" somewhat madly, over and over again, without any real explanation of this but never understood what he was banging on about and ignored him. For the first time, I've now sat down and had a look through his historic posts and find it all quite interesting and worth writing about.

Before doing so, in respect of my own engagements with him, of which I've now refreshed my memory, I see that he has an interesting way of what he might term as lighting the gas. A classic example occurred in January 2018.

I posted on 26th January 2018 in the "Acquiring a Victorian Diary" thread (#678) an accurate statement that: "No evidence has ever been produced that [James Maybrick] ever referred to himself as either Sir Jim or Sir James nor that he liked to be called this when at home."

Later the same day, Scott Nelson, thinking he had caught me in an error, posted (#679): "What about the Trevor Christie Collection of letters housed at the University of Wyoming used for research on Christie's book? Didn't one written by Florence Aunspaugh allegedly state that Maybrick referred to himself as "Sir Jim"?"

My response (#680) was very simple:

"No, it didn't".

Scott had got confused. Florence Aunspaugh had noted that someone else (Mrs Yapp) had called Maybrick "Sir James". But it wasn't Maybrick who ever used this appellation. Nor was he referred to as "Sir Jim," as in the diary, but "Sir James".

Nelson, however, hadn't yet worked it out and doubled down on his mistake, posting (#684):

"So the entry for Florence Aunspaugh on page 69 of the Maybrick A to Z book by Christopher Jones is wrong?"

My response, if I say so myself, was quite beautiful (#685):

"Are you referring to the entry which doesn't say that James Maybrick referred to himself as Sir James and doesn't say that he liked to be called Sir James when at home? In which case, no, I think that entry is correct."

But still it hadn't penetrated the Nelsonian brain because he replied (#686):

"The entry says: "Another real point of interest in the papers is that she [Florence Aunspaugh] referred to James Maybrick at one point as "Sir James."

This is based on a letter from Florence to Christie that wasn't included in the latter's book.

I'm not trying to be difficult here. I'm hoping for clarification if "Sir Jim" or "Sir James" was used outside of mainstream publications."

We can see from his final sentence that he had obviously spotted that the Jones book only mentioned "Sir James", not "Sir Jim", and he was now attempting to style it out by saying it was the same thing, even though it's different. But what about his claim that Maybrick "referred to himself" as Sir Jim? He seemed to have now forgotten he'd even said that.

I explained it all to him in my next post (#687) and commented: "I assume you can read and understand plain English perfectly well so your posts are baffling."

As I subsequently mentioned to another poster (#690): "there is nothing known in any archives which supports the idea that Maybrick called himself "Sir Jim" or liked to be called that or was aware that anyone ever referred to him in this way."

Following a helpful intervention from Keith Skinner, I clarified (#695), for Nelson's sake, that Keith had confirmed that, "no evidence has ever been produced that JM ever referred to himself as Sir Jim or Sir James nor that he liked to be called this when at home".

To my surprise, Nelson returned to the board to make a post that was stunningly opposed to the facts. He wrote (#700):

"I said it was Florence Aunspaugh who called that Maybrick "Sir James", not Maybrick himself."

We can see, clear as day, that this was untrue in two respects. He had said that a letter written by Aunspaugh had stated that "Maybrick referred to himself as "Sir Jim"?""

His new reformulating of this as Aunspaugh referring to Maybrick as "Sir James" was breathtaking in its inaccuracy as a summary of what he had originally told me.

I notice that Nelson likes to casually (and inappropriately) throw out the word "gaslighting" when writing to Banks but doesn't seem to realize that gaslighting only works with unrecorded speech, not with permanent posts which can be quoted.

As I told him in no uncertain terms (#701):

"That's simply not true Scott.

In #679 you said:

"Didn't one written by Florence Aunspaugh allegedly state that Maybrick referred to himself as "Sir Jim"?"

All you subsequently did in #686 (after I told you the answer to the above question was no and then you asked me if the Maybrick A-Z entry was wrong, which I told you it wasn't) was to quote from the entry in the Maybrick A-Z. You never made clear that you personally understood that it was not saying what your earlier question was premised on. So you did not say what you are now claiming you said, as the record of this thread clearly shows."

We then moved on from Stage 1, the Nelson Denial stage, to Stage 2, the inevitable Nelson Abuse stage, as he replied angrily, and falsely (#703):

"I was simply questioning the allegation that Maybrick was known as "Sir Jim" or "Sir James". Nothing more, nothing less.

Leave it you to twist around the wording in other people's posts to fit your warped preconceptions.

What an insecure ******* you are."

Nothing more, nothing less! Totally untrue. He seems to be one of those people for whom every accusation is a confession.

As I told him (#706):

"Once again, Scott, that is not a truthful post. The insecurity can only be yours for failing to admit to an obvious error."

There was no reply from Nelson to this post. How could there be? He was bang to rights. His own words, which I had quoted repeatedly without any twisting, betrayed him.

Another good example of Nelson's behaviour can be found in my "Diary Handwriting" thread on Casebook from May 2018. I had, on 21st May 2018 (in #34), posted hitherto unseen examples of Anne Graham's handwriting and, noting that it was slanted differently from the writing in the diary, quoted from a scientific paper which said: "Disguise can be accomplished by writing with the hand opposite to that which is habitually used". I commented: "So if we are comparing the Diary handwriting with the handwriting of any individual we need to consider whether they might have attempted to disguise their handwriting by using their "other" hand. This could account for a different direction in the slope of such handwriting." Nelson had evidently missed this for in a post the very next day (#59) he said:

"Is it safe to suggest that Anne Graham is a left-handed writer?

The Diary writing appears to be written by a right-handed person."

I then drew Scott's attention to my #34, asking him if he'd read it. His reply was:

"Yes, I read it, thank you. But I asked if anybody knew if Anne Graham was a left-handed writer, not ambidextrous."

Once again, Nelson's attempt to convince me he'd said something which he had not was breathtaking. He hadn't, in fact, asked if anybody knew whether Anne Graham was a left-handed writer. He had asked if it was safe to suggest that Anne Graham was left handed (on the basis of the slant of her handwriting).

Naturally I pointed this out to him and his response was as childish as one would expect. I won't bother quoting it as it was gibberish referring to a toilet.

Two years before these incidents, in September 2016, I find I had a similar exchange with Nelson on the subject of Kosminski. I won't go through it in painful detail – it's all in the thread "Lawende was silenced" between #688 and #731 for anyone interested - but the short point is that in support of his belief in the possibility that the police had learnt of Kosminski as a suspect from a family member during their house-to-house search in October 1888, Nelson had claimed that Stewart Evans had supported him in this belief. The fact, however, was that Evans had said no such thing, as I demonstrated. Once again it took me a number of posts to knock into Nelson's head that I was challenging his claim about what Evans had written on the subject, not the issue of whether Kosminski had or had not been identified as a suspect in 1888 (which itself is a dubious claim), before he flounced off without a word of apology for having misrepresented to me what Evans had said.

THE THREE MAYBRICK DIARIES

That now brings us to the central subject of this post: Nelson's strange theory about the origins of the Maybrick diary or, in Nelson's world, diaries plural.

It's a topic of particular interest because, as noted by Michael Banks in a recent JTR Forums discussion, Nelson once seemed to have been open to the possibility of the Barretts having been involved in creating the diary. He now denies this but there really isn't any other way of reading his post from 30th March 2025 in the "One off" thread on JTR Forums. In this post, responding to detective work by R.J. Palmer, who had noted two remarkable similarities between language used in the 1988 Michael Caine TV miniseries and language in the diary, Nelson said:

"Very low that it was coincidence, RJ. One gets the impression the Diary was written during the miniseries or very shortly afterwards. I suspect the Barretts (or Devereux?) had a VCR and there was quite a bit of start/stop action so they could pick out the bits of dialogue they could work with."

In saying that he suspected that the Barretts had a VCR so that they could watch the Michael Caine TV drama and "pick out bits of dialogue they could work with", he must have been accepting that the Barretts were, or might have been, responsible for writing the diary text. There is no other possible interpretation of those two sentences. He could only have been talking about the Barretts having written the diary as we know it because only the diary as we know it contains the two phrases from the 1988 TV miniseries.

We'll see later that Nelson gave some bullshit reason to Michael Banks as as to why he wasn't saying what he clearly was saying but one of the reasons he put forward to show that he couldn't have been saying this, after Banks suggested he'd come up with a new theory after his post in March 2025, was:

"…it's not a brand new theory, I've said this from the beginning. The original diary was a late nineteenth century creation by Harry Dam that was found and lodged with the newspaper and found years later by Devereux".

Has Nelson said this from the beginning? Spoiler alert: He has not. I can't help wondering if this is what Nelson calls gaslighting. A bit ironic, if so, because in the same post he directly accused Banks of gaslighting. His theory has changed and evolved over the years to become rather different to how it started out.

The earliest we find Nelson discussing the origins of the diary is on 30th May 1999.

On that date, he made a somewhat incoherent post, noting that at the time of the Whitechapel murders, Inspector Fred Abberline, "was relatively unknown to the public at large" so that if the diary was an old fake, the hoaxer would have had to have had certain knowledge, "that was generally unknown outside the confines of Scotland Yard". For this reason, at one point in his post, he seemed comfortable with the idea of the diary being a modern fake written after publication of McCormick's 1959 book in which Abberline featured prominently, so that, "the hoaxer probably read post-1959 books on the case describing FA's contributions and decided to incorporate him as an object of derision." Strangely, he quickly pivoted from this notion saying he thought that the diary may, in fact, be an older fake. His final sentence was: "One is almost tempted to postulate a rival detective or detective's family having some involvement in the diary's provenance, say 15 to 30 years after the murders." So, for Nelson at this time, he was looking at a fake written in the early twentieth century by someone, possibly a detective, familiar with Abberline's role in the investigation.

Two years later we still find him obsessing about this strange detective-author theory. Hence, on 6th October 2001, he posted:

"The Diary written about 1920? The author having seen a police inventory list ("tin matchbox empty")? Hey! maybe the author was an ex-MET policeman! What's that theory of Andy Aliffe's? That some of the Ripper files returned to Scotland Yard anonymously in 1987 quite possibly came from the descendents of Walter Dew (?). Was Dew jealous of Abberline? Food for thought."

So for Nelson in 2001, the diary was potentially written in 1920 by a police detective who was jealous of Abberline. Madness! And totally different to what he is saying today despite his claim that he's been saying the same thing "from the beginning".

Let's now fast forward 10 years to 31st October 2011. Nelson has come up with a new idea as to the authorship of the diary. The jealous detective has been unceremoniously abandoned.

What he's now telling us (#910 of the Incontrovertible thread) is:

"The theory entitled to the most respect, because it is based on the best available circumstantial evidence, is that it was written by George Grossmith in 1889 just after a visit to Battlecrease while on his honeymoon. George, who was extremely jealous of Maybrick's brother, Michael, then had it planted in James' house where it was found years later."

Where the hell has this come from?

The sad answer is.... Caroline Morris, for whom the Grossmith brothers had long been of interest due mainly to their authorship of Diary of a Nobody (it has the word "Diary" in the title, you see) and the fact that they were mild practical jokers.

For a few years after this, George Grossmith was the sole, obsessive focus of Nelson's diary posts and he admitted his debt to Caroline Morris after someone posted on Casebook in November 2012 that, "Caz is the resident authority around here on all things Maybrick and diary related" to which he replied, "I know she is. Why do you think I keep banging on about George Grossmith?".

By way of example of Nelson "banging on about George Grossmith", on 17 May 2012, in answer to the question "Who wrote the Diary?" on Casebook, he posted:

"Well..let's try George Grossmith."

Then on 11 October 2012, in "The Diary" thread on Casebook during a discussion of the possible authorship of the Maybrick Diary, he posted:

"Well, you do have George Grossmith."

Pausing there, what about Nelson's "best available circumstantial evidence", as stated in his post of 31st October 2011, that the diary was written in 1889 by George Grossmith "just after a visit to Battlecrease while on his honeymoon"? What exactly is that circumstantial evidence? Here Nelson seems to have been confused by a post of Caroline Morris from the previous year when, in response to a pathetically hopeful question from Nelson as to whether Grossmith was ever a guest at Battlecrease, Morris posted on 22 July 2010 (#815 of Incontrovertible):

"I don't know, but he did spend his honeymoon in Aigburth (doesn't everyone?)"

The problem is that Grossmith married Emmeline Rosa Noyce in 1873, long before Maybrick lived in Aigburth, with Florence. In fact, in 1873 Maybrick was a single man living in the United States, so a honeymoon taken by Grossmith in Aigburth in 1873 is of no significance whatsoever in respect of James Maybrick. There is not a jot of evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, that Grossmith was in Liverpool, let alone Aigburth, let alone Battlecrease, in 1889. He is never known to have visited Battlecrease in his entire life and there is zero reason to think he ever did.

We may also note that George Grossmith actually went to Leamington in Warwickshire for his honeymoon. He chose that location for the practical reason that he'd been booked to give a recital there. He couldn't afford a proper honeymoon abroad (or anywhere else really) and thus combined pleasure with business in the West Midlands. Grossmith married Emmeline Rosa on 14th May 1873 and resided, on honeymoon, in Leamington until at least the 26th May when he performed at the Royal Music Hall in that town (and quite possibly stayed there until 30th May). After spending his honeymoon in Leamington, he and his new wife visited one of his wife's relatives who happened to live in Aigburth, Liverpool. This involved more business for Grossmith because he was booked to play at the Queen's Hall in Bold Street, Liverpool, for seven nights starting on 31st May 1873. So Grossmith had no particular personal attachment to Aigburth, or desire to spend time there, and it's only partly true that he spent his honeymoon there. He just happened to go to Aigburth later in the same month of May 1873 that he married Emmeline Rosa. If the honeymoon is the period immediately after one gets married (which is what I've always understood), his honeymoon was spent in Leamington, not Aigburth.

Caroline Morris rather burst Nelson's bubble in April 2017 when, asked by him if Grossmith was perhaps the hoaxer, she replied:

"I don't know, Scotty. I'm not sure the handwriting would be right for either of the Grossmith brothers, but it's the kind of mischievous literary prank that I could see the authors of Diary of a Nobody secretly relishing."

Don't worry readers, Nelson ignored that post and ploughed on regardless. In July 2017 he was still obsessed with the man, posting (#174 of "The Curious Case of History v. James Maybrick"):

"George Grossmith... need there be any other explanation".

But hold on. It seems that there was another explanation! A collaboration between George Grossmith and the Star journalist Harry Dam. Hence, on 6th October 2017 Nelson posted on JTR Forums (Michael Maybrick As The Diarist" thread #33):

"How about a collaborative effort between the journalist Harry Dam and the actor, George Grossmith?"

It also explains why on 13th December 2017 he told JTR Forums members in a thread entitled "George Grossmith":

“The prose in Diary of a Nobody is classic Harry Dam. He probably ghost-wrote the thing. The handwriting in the so-called Maybrick Diary is likely George's or that of a contemporary”

Heaven only knows what is "classic Harry Dam" about the prose of Diary of A Nobody or why it could be considered even half-sane to suggest that the Grossmith brothers needed a ghost writer (or why it wouldn't have been credited to Harry Dam if he had, in fact, written the bloody thing). Nelson certainly doesn't bother to explain any of it. It's utterly barmy, although it's unclear if Nelson actually knows what a ghost writer does because for the next few months he kept referring to Dam as the "originator" or the "inspiration" for the diary rather than its author.

It's bizarre that Nelson stated that the handwriting in the Maybrick Diary is "likely George's". He doesn't seem to have any understanding of likelihood. He'd already been told by Caroline Morris that the handwriting of the diary isn't known to match the handwriting of either of the Grossmith brothers so it would seem to be unlikely that it was in Grossmith's normal handwriting. It's okay, though, he's covered because he wrote that it could be "that of a contemporary" which makes a mockery of his entire new theory which is that Grossmith and Dam created the diary together. Why would this pair of writers have needed a third person to write it out?

That a Grossmith/Dam collaboration was his theory at this time was confirmed on 22nd December 2017 ("Acquiring a Victorian Diary" thread #284), giving us an approximate date of the diary's creation:

“Yes it's a forgery. Written between 1890 and 1895 by the actor George Grossmith with help from the Playwrite and Journalist Harry Jackson Wells Dam.”

Then on 28 December 2017 in JTR Forums we were told ("George Grossmith" thread, #22):

"I think Harry Dam (playwright and Journalist who worked with George) was the inspiration for the Diary."

As we will see, the claim that Dam "worked with" Grossmith is based on a mistaken identity.

But where did the idea of Harry Dam having been involved in creating the diary come from?

Well Harry Dam had been on Nelson's radar since 2003 due to some research by Chris Scott, albeit not in the context of the diary.

On 13th August 2003, Chris Scott started a thread about Harry Dam on the old Casebook Forum in which he posted an 1890 press cutting from an American newspaper which suggested that Harry Dam, believed to be responsible for the Leather Apron story in September 1888, might also have been responsible for the Jack the Ripper letters while he worked at the Star, although the Star's editor, T.P. O'Connor, said he'd never heard of this before and didn't believe it.

Nelson posted in the thread on 25th August 2003 to say that he was going to see if he could locate samples of Harry Dam's handwriting. Perhaps he did and realized it looked nothing like the handwriting in the diary hence he later decided that someone else such George Grossmith might have been the diary scribe (although he's never identified any similarity between Grossmith's handwriting and the diary handwriting, while Caroline Morris seems to tell us there isn't any).

It appears to have taken another 14 years for Nelson to put Harry Dam in the frame for the diary, although it may be that he started to think in this direction in 2009 because on 17th July of that year he posted mysteriously that "maybe the person who wrote the Dear Boss letter also penned the diary..."

Grossmith still had to have some role though. He could not be totally abandoned. On 17th January 2018, Nelson wrote ("Sam Flynn's Annotated Diary Thread", #21):

"George Grossmith? Was he the penman?"

There doesn't seem to be any sane or sensible reason to ask if Grossmith was the penman. Caroline Morris had already confirmed that there was no similarity with his handwriting and the diary handwriting. He doesn't seem to have been known for any penmanship skills.

On 3rd February 2018 in the Casebook thread, "Who was the author of the Maybrick diary?", Nelson posted (#5):

“I'll opt for an old forgery. George Grossmith as penman with help from Harry Jackson Wells Dam.”

At this point, it will be noted that he's still only saying that Harry Dam assisted Grossmith with the diary. He's not being very clear about what that entailed. Although he's thrown up the idea of Grossmith being the penman, he's not yet explicitly divided the roles to state that Dam was the author and Grossmith was the penman but that seems to be what he was getting at.

Then in April 2018, quite possibly influenced by Bruce Robinson's nonsensical and factually inaccurate 2015 book, They All Love Jack, Nelson added a twist of an unspecified role in the plot for Michael Maybrick (#10 of "Acquiring a Life" thread):

"We probably have a plot involving Harry Dam, George Grossmith and Michael Maybrick."

On 15th July 2019, on JTR Forums ("Sam Flynn's Annotated Maybrick Diary" thread, #47), Nelson elaborated on Michael Maybrick's suspected involvement:

"Harry Dam as the originator, George Grossmith as the penman and Michael Maybrick as the placer. All three worked with each other at various times"

I'm not quite sure what an "originator" is. Did Dam just have an idea? Or did he write the thing himself. Who knows? Who cares? It's all a fantasy.

If you're wondering why Michael Maybrick became "the placer" for a fake diary in which his late brother was said to have murdered and mutilated a number of women, you will have to keep wondering, I'm afraid, because Nelson never manages to explain why the famous singer would have been involved in such a dreadful, silly and pointless scheme.

A few days later, on 23rd July 2019, over on the Casebook Forum ("The Diary- Old Hoax or New?" thread, #33), Nelson was a bit more specific about what he meant when he referred to Maybrick as "the placer". Thus, he posted:

“Old hoax, originated by the playwright and newsman, Harry Dam. Penned by the stage actor, George Grossmith and placed in Battlecrease by Michael Maybrick.”

Remember that one. Michael Maybrick placed the diary in Battlecrease.   Again, no reason for him doing such a strange thing was offered up by Nelson but so convinced was he by this new formulation of his theory that he added a comment addressed to Tom Mitchell: "You may need to amend Society's Pillar again."  As if anyone, even the mad Major, was going to take these ravings seriously.

Furthermore, he'd ignored the caution of Caroline Morris who had posted in response to one of his posts in December 2017 (#293 of "Acquiring a Victorian Diary):

"I can't think of anything less likely than Michael Maybrick willingly taking such a diary from GG and planting it in Battlecrease."

Oh the humiliation!

Nelson explained his thinking (such as it involved any thought) for identifying Dam, Grossmith and Maybrick as being behind the diary in July 2019 as follows:

"Harry Dam wrote the long running musical, "The Shop Girl" (1894-5). George Grossmith was in the cast, among other plays. Dam, charged with perjury, went to court facing Lord Chief Justice Charles Russell, who acted as counsel for Florence Maybrick in 1889.

Michael Maybrick and George Grossmith performed at the Savage Lodge (a bohemian club) in London according to Bruce Robinson)."

On their own, these three connections are absurdly tenuous but it's even worse when we take into account that two of them are false. George Grossmith was not in the cast of "The Shop Girl", while Dam did not face the Lord Chief Justice, Charles Russell charged with perjury. He was a party in a contract dispute in the High Court heard by Lord Chief Justice Russell in December 1897 and again in December 1898. This was long after Dam is supposed to have created the diary by Nelson's reckoning so, to the extent there could possibly be any significance in one of Dam's civil cases being heard by a former defence barrister in the Florence Maybrick criminal prosecution, which, let's be frank, there can't be, this totally vanishes once we know that it happened long after the fake diary is supposed to have been created. Yet, on this ludicrously tenuous foundation, Nelson thought that Dam and Grossmith had combined to create a fake diary in which James Maybrick was Jack the Ripper. Why he thought they did so was not explained by him (and never has been as far as I'm aware, other than him saying it was "a lark").

But we need to be clear about one thing. At this time, and for many years thereafter, Nelson's claim was that Dam and Grossmith created the diary that we know today; the one in the former photograph album. He wasn't talking then, as he would later, about a spoof story of some sort which is now missing. He was talking about Dam and Grossmith literally creating the Maybrick Diary as we have it. There was only one diary and they were the men responsible for producing it.

In August 2019, Nelson put forward another reason for thinking that Harry Dam was the author of the diary. He told Tom Mitchell:

"Look at some of the Harry Dam writings."

Sadly, we have no idea what he meant by this. He has never identified the Harry Dam writings that Tom should have been looking at nor what one would find if one did so. He's certainly never identified any similarities between the writing style of Harry Dam and the writing style of the diary author. Furthermore, as he now thinks that Tony Devereux wrote the diary, it would have been a pointless and futile exercise to compare the diary with Harry Dam's writings in 2019.

In August 2020, Nelson narrowed down the date of the diary's creation from 1890 to 1895 to circa 1895, finally confirming that Harry Dam was, in his view, the author, as he posted:

"Harry Dam creation, circa 1895"

How odd considering he'd previously told us, as we've seen, that the theory entitled to the most respect was that it was written by George Grossmith in 1889. Why was he disrespecting his own theory?

Then in September 2020, we had a totally new theory emerge out of the blue. In a post addressed to Simon Wood, Nelson told us:

"I read Shirley's hardback book when it first hit the U.S. in November 1994 (even before it was published in the UK, if I understand). One of the first things that struck me was the numerous mentions of (Frederick) Abberline throughout the text. And this was just a few years after the Michael Caine Miniseries was shown in 1988. Abberline's name was rarely mentioned in press reports and books prior to this time. I therefore concluded that the Diary had been produced sometime after the miniseries and the numerous centennial books that followed.

But as I read more and more about Mike Barrett, I thought there's no way he could have written something like that out of the blue. He must have acquired the forged scrapbook from an earlier version (an old hoax) that was taken out of Battlecrease house -- maybe sometime in the early 1980s according to the electrician "Darren" who worked in the Dodd house. This earlier hoax then likely found its way to Gerard Kane/Tony Deveraux, who produced the current scrapbook with quite a few modern embellishments that is currently in the possession of Robert Smith."

We can see a certain revisionism occurring here. Nelson's posts from 1999-2001 did not state any conclusion that, "the Diary had been produced sometime after the miniseries and the numerous centennial books that followed". Not at all. As we've seen, Nelson originally believed that the diary was written in about 1920 by a jealous detective before changing his mind in 2017 and reverting to 1895 by Harry Dam and George Grossmith. But that was all now quietly forgotten and we had this bizarre new hybrid theory that Barrett, "must have acquired the forged scrapbook from an earlier version (an old hoax) that was taken out of Battlecrease house". Even more bizarre is that Nelson rejected the idea that the diary was found by Eddie Lyons on 9 March 1992 but instead thought it might have been found by a different electrician in the 1980s! This diary somehow ended up with either Gerard Kane or Tony Devereux who then, for some unexplained and irrational reason, decided to create a new fake diary, "with quite a few modern embellishments". The original old hoax, which must have had some financial value, had, apparently, vanished.

The most interesting thing about Nelson's post is his statement that as he read more and more about Mike Barrett, "I thought there's no way he could have written something like that out of the blue". This seems to be the heart of the Nelson issue. What reading could he be talking about? Who had written about Mike Barrett?

The obvious answer is that he was influenced by the unremitting 25 year propaganda campaign of Caroline Morris who, in her postings, likes to paint Barrett as a gibbering idiot incapable of even tying his shoelace, let alone writing a 63 page diary. Why else would, or could, Nelson have concluded that there is "no way" that Barrett could have written the diary?

It reminds me very much of Alec Voller who revealed in February 1996 that, prior to his examination of the diary, he had been led to believe that Mike Barrett was, in his words, "a complete idiot", and was thus shocked to discover that the man had formerly been a professional freelance writer. In similar fashion, Nelson has clearly been brainwashed into believing that Barrett couldn't have written the diary despite his previous journalistic work. From his more recent posts in the Forum, we also know that Nelson is under the false impression that Barrett was suffering from Korsokoff Syndrome (having supposedly been diagnosed as such) which was another reason why, in his mind, he was incapable. But the reality is that there has never been such a diagnosis and, to the extent that Barrett might ever have suffered from a syndrome which is known to be caused by excessive alcohol intake, this would only have been at some point in or after 1994 and would have had no effect on whether he could have created the diary in 1992.

One of Caroline Morris' favourite propaganda stories about Mike Barrett is that at some point after 2001 he got confused by the American dating system and thought that 9/11 occurred on 9th November rather than 11th September. Oh how she laughed at Mike's stupidity. Thing is, though, the American dating system can be very confusing to British people and I doubt that Mike Barrett is the only Brit who has made that mistake.

And what about Scott Nelson himself? In a discussion about John McCarthy, he famously got confused by the British use of "Esq." after a surname, thinking it meant that such a person was a solicitor. For someone who is supposed to be a Ripperologist, with a detailed knowledge of 19th century England, that's kinda daft. But Mike's mistake about 9/11, just like any other stupid things he might have said, has no bearing on his ability or otherwise to be creative and write a story about James Maybrick as Jack the Ripper. Just like Nelson's stupidity about "Esq." doesn't affect his creative ability to come up with a fantastic story about the origins of the Maybrick diary. Caroline Morris has clearly confused herself in any case because she can barely contain her excitement when it comes to Mike's poor spelling and bad penmanship, neither of which are relevant if his wife physically wrote the diary. But the cumulative effect of the campaign is that impressionable people like Scott Nelson tend to think that Mike Barrett couldn't possibly have produced the diary. Precisely what Ms Morris intended.

So I think we've identified, early on, a key flaw in Nelson's thinking here. His belief that Barrett wasn't capable has led him down some strange paths.

It would seem that, for Nelson, in 2020, pondering once again on the inclusion of Abberline in the diary, he has finally had to abandon his belief that the diary, as we have it, was written by Harry Dam and George Grossmith in about 1895 during the run of "The Shop Girl" (although it's the use of the expression "one off instance" which is conclusive that they did not). But he doesn't want to ditch that beautiful theory about Dam and Grossmith's involvement entirely, so he now has to theorize that there was an earlier version of the diary written by Harry Dam (and/or George Grossmith) - one which presumably didn't mention Abberline - which was discovered in the 1980s and somehow made its way to Gerard Kane or Tony Devereux - he hasn't yet decided which - who created their own fake diary based on the earlier one, although why they did so isn't clear.

The absence of any evidence at all that Harry Dam and/or George Grossmith had created a fake Ripper diary in 1895 (or any other time) which Gerard Kane or Tony Devereux then embellished didn’t trouble Nelson at all. Only a few days later (10 September 2020) he was pathetically asking Caroline Morris what she thought of his crazy idea, apparently seeking validation:

"But what about my theory that the Diary is a modern forgery based on an old hoax?"

Two days later he wrote:

"Well, modern forgery maybe -- but based on an old hoax. Modern forgers? Maybe Devereux and Kane working together or separately. Problem is, there's no trace of an older document."

Oh dear, there's a "Problem". No trace of an older document. Well that problem didn’t trouble Nelson for too long, or at all. In early 2021 he was back with his fantastic nonsense:

"Devereux obtained an unknown document from a workman, Darren, who found it in Battlecrease sometime in the late 1970s or early to mid 1980s. Devereux then watched the Michael Caine mini-series in 1988 and decided to write a Maybrick Diary based on this old document with modern trimmings, such as the Abberline emphasis. He then gave it to Mike Barrett before he died. The older document may be with the Devereux family or may have been destroyed."

Nelson doesn't seem too clear as to when the diary was found by the mysterious "Darren". It's moved from the early 1980s to possibly the late 1970s or even the mid 1980s. Any time really!

In late May 2021 we had this:

"Once Tony Devereux passed his rewrite to Mike Barrett, Mike floundered with it for a couple of years, trying his various attempts at rewriting it himself. Finally, he gave up and brought Tony's version to the Rupert Agency."

From the mention of the "couple of years" it would seem that Devereux must have given the diary to Mike in 1990 (i.e. two years after 1988). Indeed, this had been explicitly confirmed in a post from a few weeks earlier, on 28th April 2021, when Nelson had said:

"Tony Devereux probably rewrote a diary found in Battlecrease House and gave it to Mike Barrett in 1990. The original (now lost) was a spoof originated by eccentric playwrite Harry Dam, ham actor George Grossmith and musician Michael Maybrick."

However, in a much later (2024) post Nelson would say:

"When Tony knew he was dying, he gave the diary to Billy."

We see that in this version Tony didn't give the diary to Mike, he gave it to Billy Graham (and Billy gave it to Anne who gave it to Mike) but the important point is that Tony didn't give the diary to anyone until he knew he was dying which can only have been in 1991. This becomes important later.

In June 2021, Nelson wrote:

"My theory is that Tony Devereux hoaxed the Maybrick Diary from a genuine document that has not yet (or may never) see the light of day."

In the same month he confirmed his view that the original was authored by Harry Dam.

"Yes Erobitha, I think the original was a Harry Dam creation."

In a post from September 2021, Nelson was again claiming that he always thought that the diary was based on an earlier short story written by one of Maybrick's near-contemporaries avoiding any mention of his original belief that it had been written in 1920 by a jealous detective. He wrote:

"Mike's first (and probably true) provenance is that he got it from Tony and I'm suggesting Tony rewrote it from an older Diary. Even when I read Shirley's book back in 1994, I thought this melodrama was likely based on an earlier story written by one of Maybrick's near-contemporaries. So I settled on the sneaky Harry Dam, who knew Michael Maybrick and the actor, George Grossmith and they probably wrote it together as a lark. This is just the sort of thing Harry Dam would have done, if you recall the Leather Apron stories. Another candidate could have been the playwright George Sims, but he had too much integrity."

A "lark", it seems, is the best explanation we are ever going to get for Harry Dam and George Grossmith writing some sort of diary of Jack the Ripper in 1895, all apparently based on Dam being the author of "the Leather Apron stories". What the Leather Apron stories in the Star have to do with the diary of Jack the Ripper I have no idea.

But Nelson's resolve was not always very strong. On 15th October 2021, in response to Caroline Morris saying that she had never understood why it has to be a case of either James Maybrick or Michael Barrett as the author of the diary, he posted:

"I don't either Caz, when we've got the flamboyant playwright, Harry Dam to consider."

Not for the first time, Nelson had lost track of his own theory. Surely he should have been talking about Tony Devereux as an alternative to Maybrick or Barrett considering that only the previous month he said he was suggesting that "Tony rewrote it from an older Diary". As Caroline Morris was speaking of the authorship of the Maybrick Diary, not any older Diary, or, as Nelson seems to prefer "spoof", the only person Nelson should have been speaking of was Tony Devereux. But old habits die hard and he was evidently back to Harry Dam having written it (with George Grossmith having inexplicably been dropped like a stone).

Nelson's resolve weakened even further a few weeks later when, on 2 December 2021, he seemed open to the idea of none other than Mike Barrett being an author of the diary:

"What if Mike had help from Devereux, who I think, at least had a hand in writing it?"

The very next day, however, he was back to the nonsense:

"The theory is that a near contemporary of Maybrick's, a mischievous sort, like Harry Dam, conceived of a story linking JM to JtR, and used Michael Maybrick to hide the document in Maybrick's house. Dam was a playwright, Maybrick was a composer and both worked together. Years later, this document fell into the hands of Tony Devereux, who rewrote it with unintended modern touches, such as the importance of Abberline, after viewing the 1988 Michael Caine series on T.V."

The idea that Dam and Maybrick "both worked together" seems to me to be entirely unsupported by any evidence and almost certainly false. Nelson had apparently forgotten about Grossmith but in a later post from 2023 he wrote this:

"The Dam knock-off, written with George Grossmith (actor) and Michael Maybrick (organist) -- the two guys Dam worked with on his long-running play, The Shop Girl".

The claim that Harry Dam "worked with" Grossmith and Maybrick on the play "The Shop Girl" is totally untrue. Dam wrote the libretto for this musical but it was George Grossmith's son, George Grossmith Junior (born 1874) who was in the cast of "The Shop Girl". George Grossmith (born 1847), the author of the Diary of a Nobody, had nothing whatsoever to do with Harry Dam's musical play.

Nelson appears to have got confused between the Grossmiths, father and son. So Nelson's entire basis for his theory is exploded. Even worse is that Nelson was told this on 29th August 2020 by Joshua Rogan but ignored it.

Michael Maybrick also had no connection to the play "The Shop Girl". When asked for a source for his claim in August 2020, Nelson said: "I saw it on one of the Gilbert & Sullivan web pages, but I can't find it now. Michael was described as a baritone singer and was with the play for over a year with Grossmith." Despite being unable to confirm what he thought he'd seen (or likely imagined), he repeated the falsehood in 2023 and again in 2025 when he told Michael Banks: "the original spoof, yes. Michael Maybrick, the organist in Harry Dam's play, The Shop Girl, with Dam possibly being the originator of the spoof, if not the chief writer". The truth is that there is no reason to think Harry Dam and Michael Maybrick even knew each other. They certainly never worked together.

During 2022, Nelson first posited the idea that Mike Barrett pointlessly decided to re-write Devereux's fake diary (itself said to be based on Dam's spoof) after receiving interest from Rupert Crew before abandoning that plan but, on 1 February 2023, in the "Maybrick Diary" thread on JTR Forums (#222) we find a key Nelson post relating to the Michael Caine TV miniseries. This is what he wrote:

"I didn't realize the Barretts told Keith Skinner about watching the miniseries. That original 1988 series was a big red flag for me because of the diary's reliance on Abberline. If it was written sometime post-January 1992, it nullifies the Devereux theory."

So here we have Nelson being open to the diary being written in 1992 which must have been by the Barretts because Devereux was dead at that time.

In March 2023, Nelson appears to have had a lightbulb moment. Tony Devereux clearly found the diary at the Liverpool Echo where he worked as a compositor! As he wrote in a JTR Forums post to R.J. Palmer on 31 March 2023:

"Maybe a Victorian or Edwardian hoaxer did do just that [buy a blank notebook], but then it got lost until a finder turned it into the offices of the Liverpool Echo."

Now the diary of Jack the Ripper "got lost". It wasn't hidden by Michael Maybrick in Battlecrease as he had previously said, it got lost. Then a finder turned it into the offices of the Liverpool Echo. Why would they have done that? Is that where lost property is handed in by the people of Liverpool?

He then said:

"The recipient then keeps it and decides to rewrite it in his spare time using a photo album he had at hand, just for amusement at first."

So Devereux, in this telling, was the recipient of the diary at the Liverpool Echo even though no one would hand something in to a compositor at the Liverpool Echo. And he then rewrote it in a photo album "just for amusement".

But, despite the implausibility, the Echo part of the story now gets repeated on Casebook on 8th May 2023 (#9593 of Incontrovertible):

"It just seems to me that the logical place for a lay person who found what they thought to be an old diary would be the local newspaper office, like the Liverpool Echo."

Surely the Liverpool Echo would have been the least logical place to take an old diary. Why would you just take it to the offices of a newspaper and leave it there? It makes no sense. Either the diary was newsworthy or it wasn't. If it wasn't, you wouldn't take it to a journalist. If it was you wouldn't just give it to a journalist. You might sell it but, if the journalist bizarrely just took it, the reason for doing so would be to write a story about it. So where is the story? The fact that there is no such story means we can entirely rule out the idea that it was taken to the Liverpool Echo.

We saw that in February 2023 Nelson was open to the idea of the Barretts having written the diary in 1992. Nevertheless, later in the year he was back with his Devereux theory as follows (#10217 of the 'Incontrovertible' thread dated 10th October 2023):

"In the roughly 15 years since I think the old diary was pulled out of a skip and taken to Rupert Crew, it probably sat on a shelf somewhere until Devereux found it. I think his rewrite probably occurred post-1988 when the Michael Caine/Abberline program was broadcast. Then he passes it on to Barrett, telling him it's a real story, but not who it's about. Mike eventually figures out the story is about Maybrick and when Eddie, who was aware Mike had the diary, tells him a story he just heard from a colleague working at Dodd's house about a book being thrown into (and recovered from) a skip years earlier, Mike knows it's the 'real thing".

A few things to note.

1. The diary was pulled out a skip. Where this has come from I know not. Previously we were told it came out of Battlecrease. Does he mean a skip at Battlecrease? Who can say? And what does he mean by "pulled out of a skip and taken to Rupert Crew"? How does that fit with his theory? It's a documented fact that it was Mike Barrett who took the diary to Rupert Crew. Yet, Mike Barrett is never supposed to have seen the diary which came from Battlecrease. Only Devereux is supposed to have had that (and then, presumably, destroyed it). I can only think he confused himself with his own convoluted theory.
   

2. The diary "sat on a shelf somewhere".  He doesn’t yet seem to have worked out what shelf it could have sat on, unseen by a living soul, nor where Devereux would have found it.
   

3. If Nelson is saying that the Harry Dam/George Grossmith version of the diary was pulled out of a skip "years" before 1992, how could Eddie Lyons have known about this?

On 4th September 2024, Nelson presented us with a new, revised version of his theory (#10943 of 'Incontrovertible'). He first said he believed that, "contemporaries of the organist Michael Maybrick, such as actor George Grossmith and playwright Harry Dam, were involved in producing the original". This itself is a somewhat watered down version of the theory because, before, it was definitely Harry Dam and maybe George Grossmith after having been definitely George Grossmith on his own.

We were then told that: "The original 'text' was found somewhere (possibly associated with Maybrick) and ended up being taken to the Liverpool Echo offices where it was eventually 'discovered' by Devereux." There are two modifications from his earlier theory here. Previously the text was found in Battlecrease but now it's just found in "possibly" a location associated with Maybrick. The second modification is that the diary "ended up" being taken to the offices of the Liverpool Echo where it was discovered by Devereux as opposed to being immediately taken there as the most logical place to take it. Why it was taken to the offices of the Liverpool Echo Nelson doesn't say.

Then we have a brand new player: Billy Graham! Gerard Kane is forgotten but instead the diary was now a collaboration between Tony Devereux and Billy Graham. Hence:

" Tony had the original and he and Billy discussed it at length, and got Billy interested enough to help with it."

There's more:

"The handwriting was either Tony's, Billy's or an unknown third person. The original diary was rewritten to make it more modern, especially with spate of television programs and centennial books that appeared at that time."

Curiously, despite introducing the concept of an unknown third person who might have handwritten the diary, Nelson can't bring himself to suggest that this third person might have been Billy Graham's daughter, Anne. Wonder why not.

As to that, here's another wonderful piece of trickery associated with the handwriting. On 8th August 2025 (#1876 of Old Hoax thread), having been asked by Michael Banks if he truly couldn't see the similarities between the unusual way Anne forms certain characters and the way the diarist forms those characters, Nelson responded:

"I just can't see them. And if some people were being honest, they would admit they can't see them either."

Similarly two days later, when Banks mentioned that Nelson hadn't taken the opportunity to challenge the supposed similarities in my 2018 "Diary Handwriting" thread, Nelson said:

"As I recall, I did comment on the overall appearance of her writing, not the little "similarities" other people had brought up, because I couldn't see any."

Here's the thing though. Two years earlier, Nelson had admitted to R.J. Palmer that he COULD see a resemblance in the "odd letter formation or two" hence in a post on 12th May 2023 (#9609 of 'Incontrovertible') he wrote:

"I don't think her handwriting resembles that in the diary, except for an odd letter formation, or two."

So how honest was he being when he told Michael Banks that he "just can't see" any similarities in the way Anne forms her characters compared with the diarist? Why didn't he admit to seeing some similarities? If one was Nelson, one might say that the gas was being well and truly lit. And of course there are similarities. It's plain obvious and good to know that even Scott Nelson cannot and does not deny that they are there. The one thing he doesn't seem to have grasped is the concept of disguised handwriting. That seems to be too much for his brain to take in.

Observant readers might also have spotted what they might think to be a double attempt at a lighting of the gas in Nelson's post of 10th August when he wrote: "As I recall, I did comment on the overall appearance of her writing". I've already reproduced Nelson's only post about the handwriting he made in my "Diary Handwriting" thread which was solely about the slant and in which he claimed he was only asking if Anne was left handed. That was post #59. He made no other comment about the handwriting in that entire thread. His claim that he did "comment on the overall appearance of her writing" is as wonky as his claim that George Grossmith and Michael Maybrick were both involved in Harry Dam's play.

Furthermore, it's odd that Nelson requires a comparison between Anne's handwriting and the diary handwriting before he can say that Anne was the scribe. Hadn’t he previously pinned that role on George Grossmith without a single handwriting comparison?

Anyway, writing in September 2024, Nelson's view was that Tony gave the diary to Billy and Billy gave it to Anne who gave it to Mike, thus contradicting what he'd said in 2021 which is that Tony gave the diary directly to Mike.

Now we come to Nelson's final position as outlined to Michael Banks in August 2025 over a sequence of five posts between 7th and 11th August (#1861, #1876, #1866, #1891, #1916) when Banks pressed him to state clearly what he thought the origins of the diary were. There's lots of lovely new additions to the theory. The essence is found in his final post of 11 August 2025 which was actually addressed to me, not Michael Banks because, as Nelson said:

"The only reason I've argued this far is because I'm likely dealing with David Barrat directly, not his parrot, Michael Banks."

As he took the time to write a post addressed to me, while I live in his muddled head without paying any rent, I really should do him the honour of reading and considering it.

Despite having previously referred to the Harry Dam or Harry Dam/George Grossmith creation as an "old diary", what was originally created, we are now told, was "a spoof story, not necessarily a journal" . So, not a diary, not even a journal! Later he calls it "likely a humorous story". For some reason, in his 2025 theory, Nelson did not once mention George Grossmith. One might think this is because there's no point talking about a "scribe" now that Nelson has abandoned the idea that the Maybrick Diary as we know it today was created by Dam and Grossmith and has introduced the concept of the missing "spoof" journal in circumstances where, as far as Nelson knows, never having seen the thing, the spoof could have been in Harry Dam's handwriting or even typewritten or printed. But, if you think this, you'd be wrong because, bizarrely, as recently as February 2025, while promoting some form of "committee" of his own invention, Nelson was still banging on about Grossmith's involvement, saying (#12 of thread "New Ideas and New Research on the Diary"):

"Have you heard of the Harry Dam Committee - Dam, George Grossmith and Michael Maybrick? They may have created a spoof which led to the creation of the modern Maybrick diary."

One wonders why Dam needed Grossmith at all to write the spoof if, as Nelson has madly claimed, Dam was the ghost writer of Grossmith's Diary of Nobody. We can also see Nelson's story changing again. Now Maybrick isn't just the "placer", he was somehow involved with creating the mythical missing spoof journal for no reason that has ever been provided.

As I say, though, in the theory outlined to Banks over a series of posts in August 2025, Grossmith wasn't mentioned at all, while Harry Dam only got a brief mention in his final post as "possibly being the originator of the spoof". He's still using that strange word, "originator". For reasons unexplained (which Nelson says "was already explained in numerous posts" but, in fact, from having read them all, I can confirm it has not been) the spoof story was passed to Michael Maybrick. Why would Harry Dam, George Grossmith or anyone, having created, for "a lark", a "spoof story" in which James Maybrick was Jack the Ripper have then given it to James Maybrick's brother? For what conceivable purpose would they have done this. Were they trying to upset or offend him?

Nelson then told Banks:

"you don't know for sure, the document could have been hidden shortly after Maybrick's death. I prefer some place other than under floorboards".

This is really puzzling because Nelson, as we've seen, had previously insisted that the diary had been created in 1895. Only a few days earlier he'd said that it "was originally written near the turn of the twentieth century" . Why was he now saying that it could have been hidden "shortly after Maybrick's death"? 1895 was six years after Maybrick's death. The turn of the century was 12 years after Maybrick's death. What's he talking about? Once again he seems to have been confused by his own convoluted theory.

And why was it hidden? Nelson doesn't seem to have a clue. Banks asked him directly: "who would have hidden it in Dodd's house around the turn of the century, and for what purpose?" This was Nelson's non-answer to the "for what purpose" part of the question:

"Michael Maybrick may have been tasked with hiding the spoof story/diary. It could have been found in Dodd's house or in Maybrick's office building."

Not a single word there about why Harry Dam, George Grossmith or anyone else would have "tasked" Michael Maybrick with hiding it. The idea is just ridiculous and absurd. Why create a spoof story or diary and then ask someone else to hide it?

You may also remember that Nelson had once insisted that Maybrick had placed the diary in Battlecrease but now it could have been in Maybrick's office building. I would love Nelson to explain how, in about 1895, long after his brother's death, Michael Maybrick, who lived on the Isle of Wight, would have had access to either Battlecrease or Maybrick's old office building in Liverpool order to pointlessly hide a stupid spoof story about his late brother having been Jack the Ripper. If he had wanted to get rid of it, why not just throw it on the fire?

Nelson's August 2025 theory involves the diary being discovered in around the 1970s, "likely found by construction workers in the house, some of whom later worked at the house in 1992, or they passed on the story of a document having been found there". But who are the construction workers who worked at Battlecrease in both the 1970s and 1992? Highly unlikely that any such people exist. And what construction work from 1992 is he referring to? Does he mean the electricians from Portus & Rhodes, or actual construction workers? If the latter, who were they?

The next part of his story says:

"I've previously explained that the document may have been passed from one place to another before being dropped off at the newspaper office. I think nobody there thought much of it and it remained on a shelf or in storage until found by Devereux"

However, he hasn't explained any such thing in any of his posts. On the contrary, far from saying it may have been "passed from one place to another", he had previously said that the newspaper office was the most logical place for the person who found it to have taken it to. If "nobody" at the Liverpool Echo "thought much of it" why was it even accepted in the first place? The Liverpool Echo is not a storage facility nor a museum. Why the hell would it have been stored there?

After admitting that Devereux must have stolen it because "nobody there was interested in doing anything with it" he says that Devereux never believed it was James Maybrick's diary, just a spoof of some sort although what type of spoof, and for what actual purpose it was created, is never explained.

He is vague on when Devereux took the "spoof" story/diary from the Liverpool Echo and created his own fake diary but he presumably thinks it was after 1988 due to the inclusion of Abberline in the diary taken from the TV miniseries. According to Nelson, Devereux then used an old photograph album belonging to Billy Graham to create his new (non-spoof?) diary of James Maybrick as Jack the Ripper.

Then we are told that Nelson thinks Anne Graham was involved in the plot and, "I think he gave it first to Billy Graham (because it was originally his photo album), then Billy gave it to his daughter." Anne gives it to Mike without explanation and, I kid you not, it's Eddie Lyons who tells Mike "where it came from".

This is clearly Nelson confusing himself with the complexity of his own story. How can Eddie Lyons possibly have told Mike Barrett where a diary created by Tony Devereux, about which he couldn't have known anything, came from? No, Nelson must mean (but does not say) that Eddie told Mike about the Harry Dam created spoof from 1895, although how Eddie could have known about a spoof document discovered at Battlecrease by construction workers in the 1970s and then forgotten about is not made clear. Nor is it explained how Eddie could possibly have known that Mike had been given Devereux's fake diary by his wife. I mean, why would Eddie have been speaking to Mike in 1992 about any form of diary? Eddie wouldn't even have known that Devereux's diary existed. Yet, according to Nelson, this was the only diary Mike possessed.

But Nelson says:

"I think he did know Eddie from before and Eddie knew he had the diary. When Eddie learned on March 9, 1992 about a Maybrick document having been previously discovered in the house in the 1970s, Eddie told Mike and he put two and two together."

Again, it doesn't make any sense. How would Eddie have known on 9 March 1992 that Mike had a diary? There is zero evidence that the men were friends or even knew each other. Why would Mike have told a random electrician about the diary of Jack the Ripper that Anne had given him? Even if Eddie had been told by other electricians while working at Battlecrease about "a Maybrick document" having been discovered in Battlecrease in the 1970s, why would he have for one second thought it was the diary which Mike possessed, even if he knew about that diary?

Then we have Mike Barrett having received the photograph album containing the 63 page diary of Jack the Ripper deciding that, rather than take this diary to show Doreen Montgomery, who'd already expressed an interest in seeing it, he would spend money on a buying a Victorian diary with blank pages so that he could write another version of the diary. Why does Nelson say he would do this? Apparently because his ego wanted him to be the diary author even though the whole point of the exercise was that Barrett would never be identified as the author of the diary, only as the person who had been given it by someone else. So that makes no sense for starters. But then if Barrett had wanted to be believed to be the diary author/forger, given that Devereux was dead, he could always have taken the credit, as he did in fact do in June 1994.

Why doesn't Nelson adopt the more simple and non-barmy theory that Mike's attempt to acquire a genuine Victorian diary with blank pages was for him to write the diary that we now have? Well, all we get from Nelson about that is this:

"the idea of the Barretts creating the thing from scratch and pushing it out into a publishing world is a somewhat too far-fetched for me, but not impossible."

It's a strange formulation because we know for a fact that the Barretts did push the diary into a publishing world. I guess he means that he can't accept that the Barretts created a diary from scratch which was sufficiently good to be accepted by the publishing world. But why not? He never said. What does he know about the capabilities of the Barretts? What can he possibly know? The answer is very little, if anything. Just like everyone else.

NELSON'S LATEST THEORY

Having digested Nelson's convoluted, complicated and ever-changing theory, let's now consider it in the context of his March 2025 post whereby he said:

"One gets the impression the Diary was written during the miniseries or very shortly afterwards. I suspect the Barretts (or Devereux?) had a VCR and there was quite a bit of start/stop action so they could pick out the bits of dialogue they could work with."

We've seen that, with Kane discarded, his theory is that Devereux wrote the diary. So, if the diary was written during the miniseries or very shortly afterwards, it must have been by Devereux. Only Devereux could possibly have watched the TV miniseries to pick out bits of dialogue which were used in the diary. That being so, why has he even mentioned the Barretts? According to Nelson's theory, the Barretts had nothing to do with what is in the diary. They couldn't ever have been influenced by the TV miniseries because they never put pen to paper and wrote anything. So why would they have been picking out bits of dialogue they could work with? And why would they have been doing it in 1988, bearing in mind that, according to Nelson, Devereux didn't pass on the diary he created to Mike via Anne until shortly before his death (because he knew he was dying and was unable to do anything with it himself) which couldn't have been any earlier than 1991.

Furthermore, if Devereux is the only candidate for plucking dialogue from the TV miniseries and including it in the diary, why is his name only in brackets with a question mark? Michael Banks did ask Nelson this and his only response was that he included the question mark because he didn't know if Devereux had a video recorder. But that didn't make sense because, as Banks pointed out, that uncertainty must apply to the Barretts as well. How does Nelson know that they had a VCR at any relevant time? So that can't have been the reason for Devereux's name being in brackets with a question mark. What he must have been doing was saying that the Barretts were the most likely people to have created the diary after the miniseries but perhaps Devereux was also, or alternatively, involved.

By introducing the concept of a video rental, as opposed to a direct TV watch at time of broadcast, Nelson cunningly tries to pretend that what he was saying there was that some considerable time after the broadcast of the miniseries (not during or shortly afterwards as he actually wrote), which could have been no sooner than the summer of 1991 when Tony Devereux knew he was drying (at which point, as we have seen, Nelson thinks he passed the diary on to Billy Graham for onward transmission to Mike) but possibly as late as March 1992, when Nelson claims that Mike decided to write a new version of the diary, Mike Barrett acquired a rental video tape of the TV miniseries. He did this, according to Nelson's new version of events, so that he could pick out bits of the dialogue he could work with to write his own re-drafted version of the diary even though he never did use any of it because he never wrote a word of it and even though, in the absence of any form of draft text, there was no reason for Nelson to connect his planned unwritten diary to the TV miniseries.

Aside from being bizarre, the entire explanation makes no sense for two obvious reasons.

The first is that Nelson referred to "the Barretts" picking out the dialogue, yet, according to Nelson, Anne had no part in Mike's aborted scheme to re-draft Devereux's diary of Jack the Ripper. So why did he mention the Barretts as opposed to just Mike Barrett?

The second is that the only reason to think that anyone watched the TV miniseries on a VCR (aside from its focus on Abberline) is because the diary contains similar language to that used in the TV miniseries. If Nelson was referring to another planned diary which never in the end existed, conceived in 1991 or 1992, what could that possibly have had to do with the TV miniseries, which is what Roger's detective work related to? The fact that some of the language of the TV miniseries ended up in a diary created by Devereux cannot have any bearing on the Barretts, so why did Nelson respond to Roger's detective work with a random observation that the Barretts might have watched the TV miniseries on a VCR to pick out bits of dialogue to use? It just doesn't follow from Roger's own post nor does it make any sense bearing in mind that we have no idea what type of diary Mike would have written, assuming he'd been contemplating a new version based on what Nelson thinks is Tony Devereux's original, so that it's impossible to say what Mike would or would not have watched in order to create it.

No, the whole notion of the video rental has clearly been invented by Nelson post facto to try and explain his March 2025 post because he knows it makes no sense for the Barretts to have been picking out parts of the TV miniseries dialogue in 1988, during or shortly after the broadcast, when they couldn't possibly have been considering the creation of any kind of Jack the Ripper diary bearing in mind that, at that time, according to Nelson, it was Devereux's secret.

The truth of the matter is that Nelson changes his mind about the diary like the wind. Different people pop in and out of his theory as having involvement depending on which way the wind is blowing. He also veers between the polar opposites of being confident his theory is correct and discarding it because it's rubbish. We've seen that in December 2021 he suggested that Devererux might have helped Mike write the diary, while in February 2023 he was saying that he hadn't realized that the Barretts watched the TV miniseries so that perhaps his "Devereux theory" was wrong. As a result, I would suggest that in March 2025, he was impressed with R.J. Palmer's detective work and was open to the idea of the Barretts having written the diary as we have it, based on their watching of the TV miniseries. But in August 2025, because he thought he was talking to me on the Casebook Forum through Michael Banks (and I'm one of his enemies, having caught him out a number of times in the past, as we've seen), he decided to go back to insisting that his tired old triple diary theory had any value so that he could avoid having to admit that the only sensible reason why Mike Barrett could have been seeking a Victorian diary with blank pages in March 1992 was to write the diary itself.

SUMMARY

Scott Nelson's theory, as it currently stands, to explain the origins of the Maybrick Diary is fundamentally flawed for the following reasons:

1. There is no known connection between Harry Dam and George Grossmith or between Harry Dam and Michael Maybrick. There is no known connection between George Grossmith and Michael Maybrick other than that the two men once performed on the same night at the Savage Club (and were both members of that club). Nelson's belief that there is such a connection between all three men is founded on basic factual error.
   

2. There is no known similarity between the writings of Harry Dam and the content of the diary.
   

3. There is no known similarity between the handwriting of George Grossmith and the handwriting in the diary.
   

4. There is no sensible reason for Harry Dam, George Grossmith or anyone else to have been creating some kind of spoof journal during the 1890s or early 1900s in which James Maybrick was identified as Jack the Ripper. A "lark" is not a sensible reason for these professional men to have been wasting their time.
   

5. There is no sensible reason for anyone, after having created a "spoof" journal in which James Maybrick was identified as Jack the Ripper, to have then given that journal to James Maybrick's brother of all people, least of all for him to then pointlessly hide it.
   

6. There is no sensible reason for Michael Maybrick, who lived on the Isle of Wight, to have hidden the fake journal in Battlecrease or Maybrick's former office (to which he would not have had access in the 1890s) or anywhere else for that matter.
   

7. There is no sensible reason to think that this fake journal was discovered by anyone in the 1970s or the 1980s.
   

8. There is no sensible reason why anyone who had discovered such a journal in the 1970s or 1980s would have taken it to the offices of the Liverpool Echo and left it there.
   

9. There is no sensible reason to think that Tony Devereux would have stolen any such fake diary from the offices of the Liverpool Echo.
   

10. There is no sensible reason to think that, having acquired (or stolen) some kind of spoof journal or diary in which James Maybrick murdered women in Whitechapel in 1888, Tony Devereux would have written a second fake journal in which James Maybrick murdered women in Whitechapel in 1888.
    

11. If Devereux wrote the diary of Jack the Ripper which ended up with Michael Barrett, and which, as has been proven, was in a sufficiently good state to be accepted by a publisher as a genuine Victorian diary, there is no sensible reason why Michael Barrett would have decided to write another diary of Jack the Ripper.
    

12. There is no sensible reason to think that Eddie Lyons would have had any involvement whatsoever with the events outlined by Nelson and, in any event, even if he had been told by some as yet unidentified person that a diary of Jack the Ripper (or some kind of unspecified spoof variation thereof) had been discovered at Battlecrease many years earlier, there's no sensible reason to think he would have mentioned this fact to Michael Barrett.

There are, no doubt, more reasons why this is all a nonsense – and feel free to add them in the comments section - but those are sufficient for now.

The funniest thing of all is that Scott Nelson seems to think that his theory is quite simple and straightforward whereas, in reality, it is so convoluted that he can't tell the same flipping story twice. It changes on virtually every single telling and, on many occasions, Nelson himself can't keep up with it and seems confused by it, saying things which aren't possible within its confines.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

What I was most interested in getting to the bottom of when starting work on this blog post was why Nelson was so obsessively focused on Harry Dam as the author of the Maybrick Diary. It never seemed to make any sense to me.

What I didn't even know was that Dam was his third suspect. I had no idea that Nelson had earlier fingered George Grossmith. I had even less idea that he'd originally suggested that an unknown detective jealous of Abberline had written the diary in the 1920s.

His choice of Grossmith was irrational bearing in mind his initial belief that the author of the diary must have had some insider knowledge of Abberline's role in the investigation or else it must have been written after 1959. Why would Grossmith have had any such knowledge?

If he'd given the matter any thought at all he should have worked out that it wasn't only knowledge of Abberline that the author had, but also a fair amount of knowledge about the Whitechapel murders, including fairly obscure knowledge, such as that Stride had been seen wearing a red rose. This isn't something terribly difficult for a modern forger to have known, due to the influx of late-twentieth century books about the Ripper murders, but rather less easy for someone writing at any time in the 50 years after 1889 to have discovered.

Nelson's initial focus on George Grossmith was, of course, all down to Caroline Morris who had been obsessed by the Grossmith brothers since 1998. Nelson seems to adore Morris and accepts without question anything she says. But the reasoning behind her belief that one or both of the Grossmiths was involved in writing the diary was always somewhat daft. Sure, their Diary of a Nobody was first published in Punch in 1888 but its style and content bears absolutely no resemblance to the style and content of the Maybrick diary which isn't even written like a normal diary with daily dated entries as is the fictional diary of Charles Pooter (see How Did We Get Here? for more on this).

As recently as 2020, Morris was posting on JTR Forums to say ridiculous things like: "I've only found two instances of the expression [double event] - one from the Saucy Jacky postcard, and one the same year, from Diary of a Nobody, first serialised in Punch." She obviously hadn't looked very hard because multiple examples of the very common expression "double event" can be found in print prior to 1888. Did she think Grossmith was the author of the Saucy Jacky postcard? Perhaps she thought he might be Jack the Ripper himself!

Aside from a harmless desire to engage in a few pranks, there is absolutely no reason to connect Grossmith to the Maybrick diary. He isn't known to have had any interest in either the Maybrick case or the Whitechapel murders or to have had any reason to have created such a diary. He can be found to be a member of the same club (Savage) as Michael Maybrick but so were many other influential and artistic people. It means nothing.

One of Caroline Morris' worst attempts to connect Grossmith with James Maybrick was her much repeated claim that Grossmith "spent his honeymoon in Aigburth". As we've seen, this is hardly accurate. She doesn't even seem to have got to the bottom of why he went there (i.e. to perform at the local entertainment venue and stay with his wife's relatives) because in a 2008 post on JTR Forums she asked: "What the hell was George doing, spending his honeymoon in Aigburth? That's what I want to know." It's noticeable that whenever she made the claim about Grossmith having honeymooned in Aigburth she never once made clear that this occurred in 1873 and thus had no relevance whatsoever to James Maybrick. But it certainly confused the hapless Nelson who seems to have thought it had occurred in 1889 and, in his poorly functioning mind, if someone like Grossmith went to Aigburth in 1889 they couldn't possibly have missed the opportunity of visiting Battlecrease, as if spending an evening with an obscure cotton merchant was the highlight of any visit to Liverpool at the time.

Nelson's Morris-influenced identification of George Grossmith as the diary author was doomed from the start but, ironically, it was because of his focus on Grossmith that he landed upon Harry Dam. As we've seen, Dam was already of interest to Nelson as a possible writer of the Ripper correspondence, so when he learnt (or thought he learnt) that George Grossmith had been a cast member of Harry Dam's 1894 play, all sorts of bells and whistles went off inside his head about a possible collaboration on the diary.

Alas, Nelson had failed to spot that it was George Grossmith Junior who was in "The Shop Girl" cast, not his more famous father.

Worse followed when Nelson somehow got it into his head that he'd read online that Michael Maybrick was the organist for "The Shop Girl". Even if he had read such a thing (which he almost certainly never did), it's the type of information that needs to be checked and confirmed. But Nelson was too excited to bother to do boring, sensible stuff like that.

In his mind, he now had a Grossmith/Dam/Maybrick connection.

He didn't bother to give any thought as to why Grossmith and Dam - both professional writers - would have needed to team up to write that silly Maybrick diary. The best he could do was suggest that Dam was the "originator" while Grossmith was the "penman" even though he'd been told by Caroline Morris that Grossmith's handwriting was not similar to the diary handwriting (a rare occasion when he ignored his mistress). Nor could he ever offer a sensible reason why they would have bothered to have done such a strange thing in the first place. Nor could he come up with a sensible reason why they would have then given the diary to Michael Maybrick for him to hide in either Battlecrease or Maybrick's old office.

But there was an even bigger problem. Nelson's own doubts about the diary having been written in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century due to its focus on Abberline must always have been floating around in his head even though he tried to suppress them because of his beautiful Grossmith/Dam theory, but, from 2016, onwards I had conclusively demonstrated that the expression "one off instance" could not have been included in any diary written before 1945.

The idea that either Grossmith or Dam or both could have written the Maybrick diary was no longer tenable. Harry Dam died in 1908 while Grossmith died a few years later in 1912. But Nelson had managed to convince himself that Dam at least must have been involved somehow.

So in 2020 he came up with a way of keeping Dam in the frame by devising a ludicrous fantasy of a "spoof" story having been created by Dam in the 1890s which was hidden somewhere by Michael Maybrick and then found its way to Tony Devereux who created his own diary of Jack the Ripper which he then passed on to Michael Barrett.

There was now no rational reason to think that Harry Dam had anything to do with the diary which, according to Nelson, was written by Tony Devereux, but, for Nelson, it had the advantage of not entirely abandoning his silly Harry Dam theory while also explaining how someone like Tony Devereux could have had the idea of the diary because, in Nelson's mind, such an idea was impossible for someone other than Harry Dam to have had.

Nelson's theory also had the advantage of not having Mike Barrett being the author of the diary. Having been manipulated by Caroline Morris's relentless anti-Barrett propaganda, and holding a false memory in his head of having read that Barrett had been diagnosed with Korsakoff Syndrome, he didn't think Barrett was capable.

The only sensible thought in Nelson's head throughout the entire process has been that he understands that Mike Barrett's desire to obtain a genuine Victorian diary with blank pages in March 1992 means that Barrett must have wanted to write a fake Victorian diary into that diary. He was so close to working out the whole thing but a supposed desire by Barrett to reproduce a perfectly old looking and usable diary which had supposedly been created by Devereux makes no sense.

LORD ORSAM

19 March 2026