We need to talk about Roger...

I don't think any of us were expecting 2026 to be the year Roger Palmer turned into a mini-Morris, a Morris Minor if you will, arguing that Michael Barrett was incapable of creating the Maybrick diary. If anyone was going to be resistant to the 25 year + online propaganda campaign of Caroline Morris to present Barrett as a near moron you'd have thought it would be Roger, but no, sadly, he too has succumbed.

The difference between Roger and Caroline Morris is that Roger thinks Anne was responsible for creating the diary, or some of it, or most of it or.... who knows what of it? So be it, but why he felt the need to make aggressive posts arguing that it couldn't possibly have been Mike Barrett is beyond me.

It started out of the blue with two hugely embarrassing posts by Roger on 18th April 2026 addressed to Michael Banks in response to a very straightforward statement by Banks that the "additional" diary pages written by Mike Barrett show that Barrett was "clearly capable" of writing the diary text.

This was the first one:

Although, the post Roger was quoting from had been posted by Banks as far back as 13th December 2025, Roger had, mysteriously, only been "thinking this over lately". Hmmmn.

Roger's point was that Banks couldn't be certain that Barrett wrote those samples.

"How can you be certain that Barrett even wrote those samples?....how do you know that Anne didn't write them and that you're giving Barrett credit for her work?"

But he was basing this on a massive misunderstanding of Tom "Major Misunderstanding" Mitchell proportions for, as he revealed in his next post (of which the relevant part is produced below), he evidently thought that Barrett had produced beautifully worded, correctly spelled and grammatically adequate pages:

What Roger was doing there, amazingly, was reproducing the improved version of Mike's pages which I had created and posted on this website in 2023 in The Secret Ripper Diary Extracts. I did this on the basis that if Mike and Anne Barrett jointly created the diary, with Mike writing the first draft, Anne would have made similar improvements when physically writing it out. That Roger was unfamiliar with the three original pages written by Mike Barrett as posted by Tom Mitchell on the Casebook Forum is staggering. That he was prepared to make a post suggesting that Mike might have copied out those pages which had been created by someone else, on the basis that he couldn't find any spelling errors or poor grammar in them, is astounding.

It fell to none other than Tom Mitchell to point out to Roger that the spelling in the three original pages he had posted was "obviously Mike's terrible spelling".

While he was correct about this, he wrongly added: "The only obvious difference - to me - between Mike's awful 11 pages and Mike's known scribbles is the absence of random capital letters within words".

Tom was, as usual, talking nonsense. We certainly do find random capital letters in the three additional pages. For example:

So, on that page alone, we can see "CRicket", "MAy", "MAYBRick", "NAMe", "dAY", "wiLL Tell". It's classic Barrett.

Showing just how daft Tom Mitchell is, when Caroline Morris had asked him to post that particular page back in July 2020, she had literally flagged the capitalization issue in her post:

I've featured the word "CRicket" but she also identified "MAy", "Good", "Myself", "Miss" and "Month". I give Mike a pass on the last four because I think the "G" and "M" are at best ambiguous as to whether they are lower or upper case (and, in fact, the last three look like "my self", "miss" and "month" to me). How Tom missed this capitalization issue when it was flagged to him at the time by Caroline Morris I have no idea but it's another reason why Mike obviously wasn't copying out someone else's work.

In his second post of 18th April, Roger said:

"I'd be more persuaded, perhaps, if I could see the originals side by side with examples of Barrett's known writing."

But that was quickly forgotten. When Roger was directed to the originals, so that he could, as he had wanted, view them side by side with examples of Barrett's known writing, he had nothing to say. The entire argument that Barrett might have copied the pages from someone else was quietly abandoned, for it was patently obvious from the spelling and capitalization that Barrett hadn't done this.

All Roger was able to say now was that Barrett could have imitated the writing style of the diary. But that itself shows that he was capable of writing the diary which is all that Banks was saying. After all, many authors imitate other authors and Barrett could have imitated someone else's writing style (perhaps another diary he'd read) when writing out the first draft of the Ripper diary. The possibility of imitation isn't the issue. The issue is that Barrett had applied himself and actually created diary style pages. He was capable of doing it!

The worst thing about it is that in his second post of 18th April, Roger also said this:

"I'm only interested in the limited question of whether we know with certainty that Barrett did indeed write these additional pages."

That statement didn't age very well did it? As soon as it became clear that we do know with certainty that Barrett wrote those additional pages, Roger suddenly lost interest in that "limited question" and became interested in other questions.

By 8th May 2026, on the basis of the three additional pages, Roger had now developed a completely different, convoluted and nonsensical argument which, he said, demonstrated "Mike's complete lack of judgement, focus and effort" although, if it showed anything, it was only Mike's lack of judgement which, by itself, doesn't even begin to rule him out of creating the diary in any way. Roger's argument is too convoluted for me to summarize here but had something to do with Barrett claiming, when he gave the ten additional diary pages to Keith Skinner in March 2002, that they had been "transcribed from some of the missing pages of the Diary". Roger's point was that it should have been obvious to Barrett that the spelling and grammar of the diary was far better than anything he was capable of achieving, so that his story couldn't possibly be true, but the explanation he gave Keith is totally separate from the simple and indisputable fact that he created the pages in the first place.

So Roger was back on 11th May with another attempt to rescue the fiasco which he had started in April with his now disproven claim that Barrett might have copied out the diary pages written by someone else, with another weak argument that (a) because Mike had crossed some words out and (b) he'd included a date on one of the pages, he couldn't be the forger. In a childish and petulant way, the post was addressed not to Michael Banks but to John Henry who hadn't said anything about the additional diary pages. Roger was obviously directing his post at Michael Banks while using poor John Henry as cover.

The problem with Roger's argument is that it assumes that Barrett was attempting to reproduce actual diary pages rather than showing Keith draft pages in the same form as they would have been in 1992 prior to being typed up on a word processor and/or written out by Anne. For the original draft diary pages written by Barrett might well have contained crossings out. Roger assumes that in crossing words out Barrett wasn't correcting mistakes he'd made, or changing his mind, but trying to imitate the way some words are crossed out in the diary not realizing that this only applies to the poetry. That however, is pure assumption on Roger's part.

In any case, as a factual matter, Roger is wrong to say that Barrett, "should have been crossing out poetry not prose" and equally wrong to say:

"If you closely study the diary transcript in Shirley Harrison's book, the only time "Maybrick" crosses out a line is when he is writing poetry."

On page 31 of the diary, in a prose paragraph, the words "I will go [something illegible]" are crossed out and replaced with "I will go to sleep". It seems to me that an effort was made here to hide what the final word of the original sentence was. But it's prose not poetry which has been crossed out.

As for the date issue, it seems implausible that Barrett didn't know in around 2002, ten years after the production of the diary, that the diary entries weren't dated. In any event, the part which refers to 27th May says (or looks like) "May the 27th is" and is found at the very end of the page. It presumably continues onto the next page which hasn't been produced so we don't know the significance of 27th May. It certainly doesn't look like Barrett was attempting to date the diary entry due to the inclusion of the word "is" which appears to be an attempt to start a sentence which was completed on the next (missing) page.

Here's what I mean:

I don't really know what the circled word is if not "is". It could be "in", I suppose, but the point is that if Mike had been dating the above diary entry, there shouldn't be anything there. Once again, the fact that all the pages haven't been produced limits our understanding.

In a later post, Roger would claim that Mike changed from the first person to the third person in the additional diary pages, which the diary author did not do, but when asked by Michael Banks to identify this in the additional pages, Roger failed to do so. I've tried to work out what Roger was seeing but am unable to. No such switch from the first person to the third person seems to be present in the three additional pages. Michael Banks asked him to identify what he was talking about but he dodged the question. I don't think that what Roger claimed to see is there.

One further thing to add is that Roger explains why the diarist didn't include dates. It's because, he says, "The more detail you give, the more like you are to trip up.". The motive, he says, is "obvious".

This perfectly demonstrates Roger's muddy thinking. He's obviously confused himself and lost track of his own theory which involves Anne creating a literary novel. If Anne had been creating a literary novel, a work of fiction - never designed to be taken seriously as a genuine diary - why would it have mattered to her about how much detail was given in respect of dates? There was never a possibility of her tripping up. She could have included as many dates as she wanted to. It didn't matter if some of them could be shown to be wrong because it was a work of fiction. How much faith does Roger have in his own theory when he makes statements as to the motives of the diarist which stand in total contradiction of that theory?

From my point of view, I do believe that the diarist took care to avoid dates but in one of Barrett's additional pages the diarist has already said that June is "four days away". So the date of the entry had already been revealed. It's only if you start with the assumption that Mike was attempting to copy the diary that you end up with a conclusion that he failed. If he wasn't attempting to copy the diary but simply showing Keith that he was capable of writing in the style of the diary, and not caring about those pages being exposed as fake, the things that Roger has identified don't matter.

But the real irony of all this is that this was Roger's third attempt to use Mike's three handwritten pages to make a point about the diary authorship even though he had perversely said that he couldn't see the need for all of them to be produced. This was in his post on 22nd April when he said something so dumb that it's hard to be believe it came from Roger:

"David Barrat and now Mike Banks have repeatedly called for these additional pages to be made public, but I don't particular care if I ever see them.

If, in Mike's mind, the pages already produced prove that Barrett was capable of hoaxing the diary, I'm not sure what could be gleaned from seeing the rest of them. Does one have to prove something twice?"

That really is dumb. I mean, the equivalent would be for me to say that I'm not sure what could be gleaned from Anne being interviewed about the diary because Roger's already decided that she created it so why does he need her to confirm it?

I shouldn't have to explain why it's important for all the documents in the case to be produced so that we have a full picture but it's the fact that Roger HAS clearly analysed the three pages to try and produce an argument that Mike didn't write the diary which demonstrates more eloquently than I could write it why we need to have all the pages.

Let's see. Tom referred to the lack of muddled capitalization by Mike. He's wrong about that but if he was right we'd need to see all 10 pages to know if that was a consistent issue. The same with the crossings out. Are they on all 10 pages? And the dating issue. What is the next page which follows "May 27th is..." ? Without seeing that next page we don't really know if that is the start of a sentence or if Mike was attempting to date the entry above it.

I say Roger made three uses of the handwriting pages because, in addition to the two uses described above, he also posted this on 4th May 2026:

"Although I personally find it hard to believe that Barrett was the penman, strange to say, after Mike kindly pointed us in the direction of where to find Barrett's "additional" pages of the diary, I studied them and I do think I see some vague similarities between his incompetent penmanship with certain passages in the diary! It must be a coincidence, though, mustn't it?"

Weird isn't it that he said he doesn't particularly care if he sees the additional pages while going on to say that he "studied" the three pages after his attention was drawn to them. And wow, he actually claims to see "vague similarities between his incompetent penmanship with certain passages in the diary!" If that's true, is it not important to say what they are? Is he talking about the crossings out, in which case he presumably doesn't mean "similarities" but "dissimilarities". If not the crossings out, what similarities is he talking about?

The type of argument made by Roger that one doesn't need to see the remaining seven pages because the three pages we have tell us that Mike was capable of producing the diary is one I would expect to be made by Tom Mitchell and, indeed, he did make just such an argument (saying in August 2022: "Mike's eleven pages to which RJ makes reference are all of a similar theme so three pages will have to suffice as far as I'm concerned for the other eight."). I wouldn't expect someone sensible like Roger to be saying "no, please don't provide any more evidence which shows us what Mike was capable of because I don't particularly care". It's madness.

My own suspicion is that the three pages posted by Tom were the worst of the batch but the fact that they still show that Mike was capable of writing the diary doesn't mean that we don't need to see the rest of them. Just having all the evidence available is an important fact in itself. Who knows what one will find? Like I say, the fact that Roger decided to study the three known pages for clues (and thought he'd found some!) demonstrates exactly why we need to see everything. Perhaps there will be something in those pages which supports an argument that Mike was NOT capable of writing the diary. I would still want to see that. I don't want to be making arguments which are or, may be, false because I haven't seen everything that's available.

Whether he realizes it or not, Roger is making the exact same argument that Caroline Morris makes whenever HE posts something new about the diary. For example, earlier this year he posted the fact that James Maybrick and his family had spent some time in Scarborough during August 1888 which isn't mentioned in the diary. As usual, Caroline Morris leapt in to wonder why Roger was posting this information if he was already sure the diary was a fake. Why does he, she asked, need MORE evidence for this?

The truth is that it's a terrible question whether posed by Morris or Palmer. It's ALWAYS better to have more evidence than less. It's never good for information to be withheld or unknown. It's just fundamental. Boy, I remember when Keith Skinner used to justify withholding the Gray/Barrett tapes because there wasn't going to be any bombshell evidence in them to prove Barrett wrote the diary. But they are still important tapes in their own right, as shown by the amount of times they've been referenced in debate since their release. The same for Mike's research notes and the diary transcript. They are all important documents which everyone needed to see regardless of whether they have solved the case or not. Every piece of information is precious and it is purely anti-intellectual to say that it's not a problem for documents to be kept hidden. Roger is an intellectual and thoughtful person so there would appear to be a hidden agenda behind his sudden announcement that he's not particularly interested in the remaining pages.

That all said it's even worse because Roger's position today somewhat contradicts what he posted on JTR Forums in August 2022.

As we can see, in #160 of the 'Maybrick Diary' thread, he posted, with some highlighting from me:

"Tom Mitchell once posted 3 of 10 existing examples of Mike's attempts to recreate the missing pages of the diary unaided. Barrat noted, with considerable validity, that these samples were not noticeably inferior to the diary's own text. The skeptically inclined might even wonder if Tom chose what he felt to be the most unflattering of the 10 samples, since he didn't post all of them, but only three, and Tom was attempting to argue that Barrett's writing wasn't good enough to cut the mustard. I am not accusing Tom of dishonesty, but merely unconscious partisanship, and he can feel free to divest me of my worries by posting the other 7".

So Roger was, back then, not only agreeing with me that the three additional pages posted by Tom were similar to the diary's own text but was literally inviting Tom to post the remaining seven pages.

How is that in August 2022 Roger could understand that Tom might have posted the least flattering examples of Mike's handiwork so that it would useful to see them all but, today, four years later, he's decided that he doesn't know what can be gleaned from seeing them?

We can also see lower down the post that Roger had a message "for those who think Barrett was incapable of producing the diary on his own".

The message in August 2022 was that Mike was living with a capable woman. But that is precisely what Michael Banks had been saying. As we can see (and highlighted from the same post below), in August 2022 Roger had no problem describing the three additional pages, which "seems to have captured the cadence [of the diary] quite nicely", as being "from the pen of Mike Barrett".

All of a sudden in 2026 he wants to challenge this notion. Odd.

And it's not just on JTR Forums that he was saying such things:

On Casebook, on 10 December 2023, Roger said

"I think the Diary is a modern fake by Barrett..."

Clearly he's talking about Mike Barrett because in the next sentence he refers to "Barrett's confessional tapes".

So he had no problem in saying that the diary was a fake "by Barrett" in December 2023. Today, he fights the idea like a tiger.

IN THE DICTIONARY

Having started nickpicking the posts of Michael Banks, Roger now couldn't seem to stop himself.

On 30th April, interfering in Michael Banks' discussion with Caroline Morris about the forger's use or otherwise of a dictionary, Roger responded to Michael Banks' statement that: "Some of the mistakes made by both Anne and the diarist, such as confusing "off" and "of" weren't going to be resolved by a dictionary. Nor the difference between "where" and "were" because they are not spelling mistakes as such." Michael's point was that someone confusing "where" and "were" wasn't going to be assisted by using a dictionary because it was really a grammatical mistake rather than a spelling error. Roger said he was "surprised" by this, and Tom followed, both of them claiming it wasn't a matter of grammar before Banks posted examples from online sites dealing with the English language which proved that the "where/were" confusion is widely considered to be an issue of grammar. So another entirely unnecessary (and dumb) intervention by Roger.

Even worse; responding to Michael's question addressed to Caroline Morris as to why it mattered if Anne made a spelling mistake in the diary, Roger said, bizarrely, that it was "self evident" why it mattered - even though it is far from self evident - and he went on to make some kind of ridiculous argument that Anne would have needed to spell "rendezvous" correctly otherwise, had she not done so, it might have identified her as the author of the diary . What??? Why would anyone in the world have connected a wrong spelling of 'rendezvous" with Anne Barrett? It doesn't even make sense. But worse, he suggested, hinted or implied that she deliberately made a few spelling errors (of difficult words to spell!) in order to sabotage Mike's plan to publish the diary (i.e. "She didn't expect Mike's fake to succeed in London and it's possible, even probable, that she didn't want it to succeed...Halfhearted co-conspirators do shoddy work.") even though, as we shall see later, according to Roger, Anne didn't even know of her husband's plan to present the diary in London as the real diary of 'Jack the Ripper' at the time she was physically writing it out! She supposedly thought the plan was to get her novella published as a work of fiction, so would have been highly motivated to get it right. Once again, therefore, Roger was getting confused by his own theory. It was all a lot of complete rubbish being posted by Roger for no apparent reason over a stupid question raised by Caroline Morris about why the forger did what millions upon millions of people do every single day of the week, many of whom own dictionaries, i.e. make some basic spelling mistakes when writing out a text.

ROGER THE DODGER

Michael Banks asked Roger a number of direct questions on 30th April:

"But, Roger, can you help me with something about your posts that I have trouble understanding? You told me a few days ago that you suspect that Anne (the person with the real interest in True Crime) was "the brains" behind the diary and that Mike's input has been overstated. Yet, you then went on to call the diary "Mike's fake" and you now refer to it as "Barrett's project" with which Anne was never fully onboard. Do you see my difficulty?

When you said that Anne was the brains behind it, you seemed to be challenging my notion that Mike (with or without help from others) drafted the text. So I figured you were saying Anne was responsible for both the text and the physical writing of it. Was I wrong? But if she did this, and was the brains behind the diary, for what purpose did she do all this? She would, of course, have been using a fountain pen and ink to write in a specially purchased old book the diary of Jack the Ripper, as if it was being written in the 19th century. It would have taken her some considerable time to research and write it and then more time (perhaps eleven days!) to physically write it out. What did she think the purpose of her doing all this was? Why would she have been terrified if Mike had then found a publisher? For what other purpose could it have been created? To sell it to someone as Jack the Ripper's diary, perhaps? Is that what you think she expected was going to happen? But then couldn't the new owner have wanted to publish it?"

Roger chose not to answer. Roger dodged it.

The questions were repeated on 4th May 2026:

"What I still don't understand is how you think Anne could have been the brains behind the operation, drafting the text and writing it out, yet still have been reluctant to have it published. What did she think the purpose of writing it out in an old photograph album with a fountain pen was if not to fool someone that it was a genuine Victorian diary? And if she was the brains behind it, drafting the text and writing it out, why do you still call it "Mike's project"? Surely, in that case, it was Anne's project."

Again Roger chose not to answer. Roger dodged it.

Banks re-stated the problem for a third time on 9th May 2026:

"The upshot of all our discussions is that I remain baffled by your own theory of events regarding Anne being the brains behind "Mike's project" and her sudden horrified realization, after all the hard work of it being written out in an old photograph album with a fountain pen and ink, that it was going to be presented as a genuine diary of Jack the Ripper and wanting to burn it before doing a reverse ferret and becoming protective of it (from fire!). I have to say that none of it makes sense to me Roger. I did ask you to explain it to me some days ago but you chose not to, which is fine."

After Mike accused him of ducking these questions, following which Roger queried when he'd ducked anything (seriously!), Mike asked him the following six numbered questions on 23rd May 2026:

1. If Anne wrote a work of fiction, how could Mike have been confident that it was sufficiently accurate as to the facts to be presented to Doreen Montgomery as a genuine diary?

2. You said in an earlier post (1008) that the reason the diary didn't include dates was "obvious". It was, you said, because "The more detail you give, the more like you are to trip up.". Why would the writer of a work of fiction have been concerned about tripping up over dates?

3. If Anne wrote a work of fiction, why did she only write 70, 80 or 90% of it? Why didn't she write all of it?

4. Did she want to manipulate Mike to write something so that she could be proud of him (and he restore his self-confidence) or not?

5. Do you think that Tony Devereux had any role in contributing to the diary? If so, what was it? If not, what's the deal with "Tales of Liverpool" that you've mentioned so many times?

6. On the basis (as I assume you agree) that Anne wrote the text of her fictional diary out by hand into the old photograph album with a fountain pen, what did she think she was doing that for?

What do you think Roger's response was to those six questions?

Yes, that's right, he dodged them! How clever of you.

It was Roger's obvious avoiding of these questions which got me curious. What IS Roger's theory about the creation of the diary? To be honest, it's not something I've paid much attention to in the past although I had the impression that Roger got hammered by Caroline Morris on Casebook every time he raised some kind of theory involving Anne, as she exposed its obvious contradictions. But at the time I didn't follow those long exchanges very closely. I just thought it was Roger harmlessly theorizing aloud in the way he likes to do on a subject (in this case the precise details of the diary creation) that I care nothing about. Anyway, I've now done some research into it and here's what I found:

ROGER'S BIG THEORY

Roger's theory changes in almost every telling but, in a nutshell, it is that Anne either herself wrote a fictional diary of James Maybrick as Jack the Ripper or she helped Mike to write such a diary (Roger can't seem to decide) but was then tricked into writing the diary out by hand on the basis that it was going to be published in her husband's name as a work of fiction, with the handwritten diary to be used as some form of marketing gimmick to show Doreen Montgomery but always on the basis that it was a novella.

For me, the major problem with Roger's theory is that it's based around, and founded upon, Anne's claim that she wanted to encourage Mike to write a fictional story about the already existing diary of Jack the Ripper.

It seems to me that Anne created this tale from her imagination in order to explain why she gave the diary to Tony Devereux for him to give to Mike, a tale which Roger, of course, thinks is a barefaced lie.

Giving the diary of Jack the Ripper to Mike, whether via a third party or directly, seems like such a strange thing for Anne to have done that it required an explanation. The only explanation that she could come up with, it seems to me, was that she wanted Mike to write something about, related to or inspired by the diary.

Here's what Anne told Bob Azurdia in October 1995:

"I was going through a bad time and I decided to hand the diary to my husband via a third person in order for it to be used as a basis of a novel. Now this reasoning sounded pretty good to me at the time, I really can’t explain it. Anyway this is what I did."

It's hardly surprising that she couldn't explain it. It makes no real sense.

But she also told Azurdia:

AG: I wrapped it up in brown paper and string, old brown paper I found in a drawer, and I give it to him and I asked him to pass it on to Michael and told him to tell him to do something with it, which he did.

BA: And no more than that?

AG: Very little more that, there was very quick conversation.

How Mike was supposed to work out that he was meant to be writing a novel on the basis of being told to "do something" with what purported to be the actual diary of Jack the Ripper from 1888 is baffling. A more sensible reason for giving it to him would have been for him to research it to try and work out who had written it. But Anne didn't go down that route, presumably because Mike was interested at that time in creative writing so she needed a creative writing excuse for passing it over to him. Giving it to him to research would have been an odd justification because he wasn't a researcher.

I have no idea how Mike could have written a novel based on the diary. There has never been any indication by Anne that she was aware that it was supposed to have been written by James Maybrick. So her story must have been either that she had in her mind that he write a novel about Jack the Ripper (of which there were already multiple books easily available to buy or borrow from a library so he hardly needed the diary) or a perhaps a novel about someone suddenly being given a diary of Jack the Ripper! I can't really think what else she could have had in mind.

If it's all a lie, though, it doesn't really matter.

But Roger seems to think that there was a grain of truth in the lie although what that grain of truth was is difficult to establish. In Roger's account, the truth is fundamentally different to Anne's story because no such diary existed for Mike to write about and the diary had to be created from scratch. But Roger can't seem to decide whether Anne wanted to write the diary herself (and did so) or whether she wanted to assist or encourage Mike to write it. If she wrote it herself, though, what would have been the point of her doing that?

After all, a key part of Anne's story was that she wanted Mike to be busy and to do something that he could be proud of and that she could be proud of him.

Here is what she told Feldman:

"Mike was keen on writing...I thought he would try to write a novel around it...I wanted Mike to make a success of himself. Perhaps my respect for the man I loved and married would return".

Indeed, she said her plan "did work for a while" because Mike "threw himself into research".

In Inside Story her account was that:

"she gave Barrett the diary to encourage his writing, hoping he would use it as the basis of a fictional book...she wanted Barrett to achieve something by himself".

Indeed, she goes further and says that the diary project "could lead to her regaining a sense of pride in him".

In similar fashion, to Shirley Harrison she said:

"Michael had always had an idea he wanted to write. Dad had lent him some money to buy a word processor in 1995 (sic) and he had started sending puzzles and short star interviews to the magazine Look-In. I wanted so much to be proud of him".

Roger seems to discard all of this. He throws it all out. Despite the stated purpose of Anne's plan having been to regain her pride in her husband, Roger thinks that she basically created the diary by herself thus negating the purpose of what she said she was trying to do in allowing Mike to grow his self-confidence. It also made her claim that "Mike was keen on writing" somewhat irrelevant. Presumably Roger doesn't believe that Mike was even keen on writing in the first place although that is unclear and it would have been somewhat odd for Anne to have entirely invented that part of the story. In one post, Roger says that the diary was 85-95% the work of Anne but in another he seems to say that it was almost entirely her own work with little or no involvement by Mike. His story changes constantly though, as do the assigned percentages. In another post he says it was a combined effort by both Mike and Anne with the help of Tony Devereux. Sometimes, though, he uses a formulation of Melvin Harris (who knew nothing about how the diary was created) whereby all Mike had was "inside knowledge" of the diary without, apparently, having played any part in creating it.

Roger does seem to place a lot of weight on the views of Melvin Harris and Martin Fido. To Scott Nelson he wrote on 12 May 2023:

"I'd be curious about why you put so little stock in Martin Fido's judgment about Anne Graham's writing abilities. Fido would know, wouldn't' he? When he posted here in the early 2000s he was literally teaching a writing/research course at Boston College. He was impressed by the paper Anne Graham wrote on Liverpool laundries."

Why the hell would Fido know? Simply because he taught a writing course? That's crazy.

While one can't say it's impossible that the entire idea of making James Maybrick the Whitechapel Murderer was Anne's or that she drafted and wrote the entire thing, simply making Mike the front man who would go and market the completed diary to Doreen Montgomery - but as a work of fiction, pretending that he had written it - there doesn't seem to be much going for it bearing in mind that the concept of the fictional story of Jack the Ripper was itself part of a fictional story told by Anne to support her fictional story that the diary had been in her family for over thirty years.

I should say at this point that whichever way I summarize Roger's theory he's going to object and say I'm not doing it accurately. This will definitely be true because, as we shall see, his theory changes every time he posts about it and I'm not sure he really has a fixed idea of what he's saying in his mind. But we'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

BOOK BURNING

A second limb to Roger's theory is that little Caroline Barrett supposedly told Paul Begg and Martin Howells that she remembered her mother wanting to burn the diary following a row. For Roger, this supports the idea that Anne only ever wanted the diary to be presented to the world as a work of fiction and never expected to participate in a fraud whereby the diary was presented as the real diary of Jack the Ripper. He thinks this story must be true because he can't conceive of any reason why little Caroline would have said it if it wasn't true.

When Roger tells this story he often gets befuddled into thinking that Caroline was the first person to tell the story of the "fight" between her parents which story was subsequently corroborated by her parents. But that's not what Feldman says in his book. He says that the researchers already knew of a row between the Barretts. Caroline merely confirmed, in response to a leading question, that she remembered this, supposedly adding an extra detail that her mother had wanted to burn the diary. It was the burning which was subsequently confirmed (at least by Anne, we've never been told what Mike said about it).

The story as told in Feldman's book is entirely unsatisfactory. We are given zero information about what the Barretts (or one of them) had said about their row and what caused it. Nor do we have a single quote from little Caroline about the burning. All we have is Feldman saying in 1997 (from memory?) that Caroline said to him, Begg and Howells:

"her mum had wanted to burn it after one horrible row when her dad said he was going to get the diary published".

But what appears to have been the case, as Feldman recalls it in his book, js that Mike was the source of the story about the row. Feldman says that immediately before Caroline's interrogation, she and her mother had sat in the same room with Feldman, Begg and Howells while Mike had told them the story "of how he obtained the diary from Tony Devereux". So Caroline (and Anne) had listened to Mike telling the story of the diary and this presumably included the story about a row between him and his wife.

Immediately after this, little Caroline was questioned in a car by Begg and Howells, almost certainly in respect of what they had all just been told by Mike. Surprise, surprise, she managed to confirm that her father had obtained the diary from Tony Devereux. She also managed to confirm that there had been a row.

Now it's important to bear in mind that we only have it from Feldman that Caroline was the first person to mention her mother's attempt to burn the diary and that this wasn't in Barrett's original story. Can we be sure that Barrett hadn't spoken of an attempt by Anne to burn the diary but that it had been missed or forgotten by Feldman when Caroline was being interrogated? I don't think we can.

But even if Mike had said nothing about the attempted burning, might this not simply have been an invention by little Caroline off the top of her head to support her father's story around which Anne later had to weave an unconvincing (and changing) story to explain it?

Either way, what is important to bear in mind is that the story of the row must have emanated from Mike, not Anne, and formed part of his story that he received the diary from Tony Devereux.

Feldman doesn't tell us what Mike said this row was about - although, in light of what young Caroline is supposed to have said, it would be reasonable to assume that it concerned a disagreement over getting the diary published but, as it came from Mike, while he was telling a huge lie, it needs to be treated with extreme caution. The fact that Caroline confirmed that it occurred cannot be given much weight bearing in mind she had been in the room, listening to her father's lies and confirmed that Tony Devereux gave Mike the diary.

Anne was also listening to Mike telling his story, according to Feldman, so the fact that she too would later incorporate the concept of a row into her own story is unsurprising.

But when did the supposed row occur and what exactly was it meant to be about? Without evidence from one of the participants it's impossible to say. But here's one possibility: in a letter written by Doreen Montgomery to Mike on 10th March 1992 she said:

"I can well understand how this diary and its import has affected your lives. Finds of this kind do not grow on trees! And the very nature of its content must assuredly be compelling and at the same time, revolting. It is hard for "normal" people to understand the mind of the psychopath."

Those who have read my A Man in a Pub article will no doubt recall that Keith Skinner was obsessed with this passage in Doreen's letter, asking Mike over and over what she meant by it. What, he wondered, did Doreen mean by the diary has "affected your lives"? Was that obsession of his, I wonder, because he had been told by Feldman (or Begg or Howells) that Mike claimed to have had a row about the diary with his wife? What if the false story told by Mike, in order to try and give the lie a bit of colour, was that Anne was revolted by the subject matter of the diary, hated her husband researching the subject of "Jack the Ripper" and didn't want him to be associated with the Ripper at all so that her objection to publication was one of principle due to the horrific nature of the crimes with their ghastly mutilations of women? Might that have been why Anne was said (by Mike) to have tried to burn it?

Another possibility - if we assume that the story of the row was true - is that Anne thought the plan was that Mike was going to sell the diary for perhaps a few hundred or even thousand pounds. They could then take the money and continue living their lives. But, against her wishes, Mike decided to interest a literary agent and get the diary published. Perhaps, as she would later say, she was initially confident there would be no interest from Doreen once Mike went to London but did panic (or was "terrified") when Mike wanted to move forward with publication fearing that the forgery plot, in which she was deeply involved, would inevitably be exposed.

This is, of course, only speculation but there still remains one massive problem with any story which places the attempted burning after Mike returned from London with news that Doreen wanted to publish. This is that on 21st April 1992 Anne told Doreen Montgomery that she wanted the diary placed in a safe for protection from theft and fire.

How could such a dramatic conversion have come about? For it seems totally inconsistent with Anne having desperately wanted to burn the diary on or about 13th April when Mike returned from London?

But let's say for a moment that Anne was, indeed, horrified to learn that Mike had succeeded in convincing Doreen to publish the diary, had a row with Mike and attempted to burn the diary but, nevertheless, calmed down and decided that publication was a good idea after all and the diary needed to be protected not burnt. Can we, from this, deduce that Anne had wanted the diary to be presented as a work of fiction? No, I don't think we can. It doesn't seem to follow at all. I've already suggested that Anne might have thought that the purpose of creating the diary was to sell it but there is another plausible explanation. This is that she simply went along with Mike's project to create a fake Victorian diary of Jack the Ripper being certain that there was never going to be any interest in it. In her mind, it was just another one of Mike's daft plans which had absolutely no chance of succeeding. In this scenario she would have known perfectly well that Mike was going to show the diary to Doreen but thought Doreen would reject it out of hand. This is almost identical to what she told "Inside Story" and it matches what Roger believes was happening but it is equally consistent with Anne being a reluctant or neutral accomplice to Mike's project to create a fake diary. So we can fit the story about her wanting to burn the diary in a narrative which doesn't in any way necessarily mean that she, not Mike, created the first draft of the diary.

This, in a nutshell, is where I disagree with Roger. I'm not saying that his theory is impossible, only that Anne's untruthful story about why she gave the diary to Mike via Tony Devereux should not be used as supporting evidence for a theory that Anne was the brains behind the diary and that the diary started life as a work of fiction. The one doesn't follow the other. The whole novel or novella thing was a fabrication to shore up a lie. But if you believe the novella story you can't just discard that Anne said that the entire reason for it was that she wanted to restore her pride in Mike by encouraging him to write a novel. If that truly was the case, she might have suggested to Mike that he should write a diary of James Maybrick as Jack the Ripper but would then presumably have let Mike get on with it until she was needed to edit it, type it up or write it out.

We may also note that on the same day as Doreen was writing to Mike about how the diary had affected his "lives" (sic) she was also writing to Shirley Harrison to say:

"Our Ripper friend has phoned again today, having had further discourse with his wife (who apparently rules the roost!) and they have decided that we must be entrusted with the diary to check it out for ourselves!"

While Mike was the source of this information, it does mean that Mike must have claimed on his very first call to Doreen to have discussed the diary with his wife and to have then discussed it again before the second call. She was said to rule the roost! While Mike could have been making all this up, it is nevertheless the fact that Doreen spoke to Anne on 21st April 1992 and what she said did seem to be consistent with how Mike had described her. Thus her note read:

"I spoke with Mrs Barrett last evening, and she sounded a very chirpy, friendly woman. I think they are genuine people and her only anxiety in asking her husband to place the Diary with the bank was because of the fact that they have had a couple of burglaries and she is also frightened of fire. Understandable."

Perhaps Anne was acting but she wasn't sounding like a person utterly depressed about the diary being published. On the contrary she was "chirpy". She was keen to protect the diary. Indeed, the only thing she was anxious about was that something might happen to the diary. I just don't see this as consistent with Roger's story about an abused woman who was being forced to agree to the publication of the diary against her will.

I'm not saying here that she wasn't abused only that the abuse appears to have been separate from the diary. This is an important point because in Inside Story we are told by Anne that her issue with Mike prior to April 1992 was that "he was spending the shopping money with little to show for it." It was, it would seem, money which was at the heart of the problems in the Barrett family, something which is entirely consistent with Mike's claim that the mortgage they were having to pay through living in 12 Goldie Street in order to be close to Anne's father was crippling them financially, leading to the plan to write the diary in the first place. Also don't forget that Anne, albeit lying, told Bob Azurdia that she was "going through a bad time" before she said she gave the diary to Tony to give to Mike which "bad time" (if real) had nothing to do with the diary.

A PUBLISHED WRITER

A third limb of Roger's argument that Anne was the brains behind the diary is the fact that she once wrote a well researched paper on Victorian laundries and, after having assisted Keith Skinner with cataloguing the Maybrick file at the National Archives, developed an interest in the Maybrick case which led her to co-author a book about it with writer and researcher, Carol Emmas.

The problem with the book is that we don't know how the writing was divided between Anne and Carol while the research paper (and the non-fiction book) can't possibly show whether Anne was a creative writer.

Because really the key thing about the diary author is that he or she was a creative person. They were clearly not the world's greatest author or writer.

That Anne could write a decent research paper is more a testament to her research and organisational skills. It doesn't tell us anything about her creative writing ability. Yes, she seems to have been able to tell lies but then so could Mike.

A LOVE OF CRIME

Another limb of Roger's argument that Anne was the brains behind the diary is her supposed love of crime. In support of this he tells us of four favourite television programmes listed by Anne on her Facebook page. It's rather a shame that Roger hasn't provided a screenshot because I've searched her Facebook page and am unable to find any such "likes" on her profile.

Nevertheless I'm going to assume that Roger has not got confused with someone else's profile and that they are there, somewhere. This is what Roger says:

Her profile includes a sub-listing of “likes”—her favorite, books, music, t.v. shows, etc., which is intended to give a general idea about her tastes. Very little of it has been filled out, however. Yet, under “Television Shows” she has five “likes.” I list them here for your benefit.

The first is a general category

Detective Fiction

The next four are specific shows:

Wire in the Blood

Dexter (on Showtime)

Waking the Dead

NUMB3RS

That’s the grand total. Only the above four shows

In case you don't know, Dexter is a series about a forensic blood-spatter expert who is also a serial killer. According to Common Sense Media, it is “highly graphic” and features “significant, intense content, particularly in its depiction of violence and gore.”

Waking the Dead (a BBC crime drama in the ‘mature viewers’ time slot) is “frequently dark, graphic, and disturbing” and is known for depicting “gruesome, detailed, or mutilated remains during forensic investigations.”

NUMB3RS is another crime drama and is characterized as “somewhat gory” but suitable for teens, 15+.

I hadn’t heard of Wire in the Blood, another UK crime drama, but it is considered “quite gory” and “frequently focuses on sadistic serial killers including depictions of torture, rape, and mutilated bodies.”

This is the preferred viewing of someone who once claimed she had no interest in “Jack the Ripper” and found the interest of others to be morbid and offensive.

I located an episode of Wire in the Blood on YouTube and had a look. It featured a serial killer who murdered gay men, crucified them, and then cut off their genitalia. One scene showed naked dead men laid out on slabs, with only bloody towels covering their “privates.” It wasn’t my “cup of tea” and I didn’t watch the whole episode.

Now, bear with me. Millions of people watch crime shows and read detective fiction. Standing alone, it is not evidence that Anne Graham wrote or co-wrote the diary. However, that’s not the point.

Instead, it raises the interesting question of whether Anne Graham was truthful and sincere when she claimed all those years ago that she not only had no interest in Jack the Ripper but found the topic disgusting and depraved.

A person’s tastes can change, but Anne was in her 40’s when she made those earlier remarks—an age when people’s tastes and attitudes are well established.

Judging from her own list, it is difficult not to conclude that she is fascinated by gruesome murders, forensic science, and detective fiction.

What reason might she have had to leave the impression that she had no such interest?

Was it to ridicule and dismiss any stray notion that---heaven forbid---she may have written the Diary of Jack the Ripper?

What does it tell us about Anne?

I don't happen to think that the fact that Anne might enjoy some television dramas about fictional crimes crime, as millions do, conflicts in any way with her claim that "she had no interest in “Jack the Ripper” and found the interest of others to be morbid and offensive." The Whitechapel murders were real murders and involved real mutilations of real women and one can easily see how someone might find the obsession about the identity of the murderer, and indeed the entire subject of Ripperology, to be distasteful. Indeed, it's pretty much the same as what Hallie Rubenhold says about it but she nevertheless wrote a book on the subject.

Anne, of course, also admitted to watching the 1988 Michael Caine TV miniseries so it's not like she had any fundamental objection to a fictional account of the Ripper murders.

Roger thinks that Anne, not Mike, had an interest in True Crime but has no evidence to support this. It's mere supposition.

AUDREY

A final limb of Roger's theory relates to what Anne's friend, Audrey Johnson, told researchers. As Roger describes it:

"Her friend Audrey recalled a time when Anne showed up for work deeply upset, but couldn't talk about. It had something to do with her husband 'writing a book' (ie., creating a fraud).

There is no reason on earth why Audrey would have lied about it. This is what was actually going on behind the scenes, Anne was terrified, and it had bugger all to do with Eddie Lyons."

I don't think Roger has accurately stated the position here. First of all, Audrey didn't say that Anne was "deeply upset". She said that Anne was "obviously upset". More importantly, Audrey never said that Anne being upset had "something to do with" Mike writing a book. It is true that Audrey said that Anne seemed upset. It is also true that she said that Anne's husband was writing a book. But she never said that the reason Anne was upset was because her husband was writing a book. That is an inference by Roger which may or may not be correct. One would have thought that if Anne had said such a thing it would have led to the obvious question from Audrey as to why she could possibly have been upset that her husband was writing a book.

This is what we find Audrey Johnson told Keith Skinner and Shirley Harrison in February 1997 as quoted by Shirley Harrison:

"Anne never talked to anyone at work, she was such a private person. But we started chatting about books; I knew she was unhappy but she never said a word. One day she was obviously upset and she did say that her husband was writing a book...but she couldn't talk about it. I remember calling into Goldie Street one day; Anne had had to give up work for a while with a bad back and Caroline was at school. But things were frenetic, Michael was in the front room and you could hear him pacing around the phone kept going and the beer cans kept going but I had the strong feeling Anne just wanted to keep her head down."

Anne might simply have been upset due to rows with Mike who was spending the family's shopping money. How can we be sure that it was the fact of Mike writing a book which is what upset her?

Above all, the fact that Anne was telling Audrey that her husband was writing a book - if by this she meant the diary of Jack the Ripper - is inconsistent with Roger's theory that Anne was writing the book. Why would she have told Audrey that Mike was writing a book which she was, in fact, writing?

BONGO THE CLOWN

It would be one thing if Roger's theory stopped at identifying Anne as the forger for the above reasons but he decided to adopt diary defender style arguments to suggest that Mike wasn't capable of writing the diary. If you're wondering why he felt the need to do this, join the club. In doing so, he even suggested,à la Mitchell, that Mike wasn't a journalist, putting the word "journalism" in inverted commas.

Thus, on 8th May, Roger referred to Mike's "journalism" which was just "going around with a tape deck interviewing people". He added: "I don't think Mike could have submitted anything to Burness without her substantial help".

This is pure guesswork in Roger's part which is strikingly familiar to Robert Smith's claim that Barrett hardly had anything to do with the articles published in his own name.

It's funny, though, because in September 2022 on JTR Forums Roger was scathing about Smith's claims while at the same time posting an example of what he referred to as "Barrett's journalistic efforts":

This is the full paragraph:

"Meanwhile, he's [sic] another example of Barrett's journalistic efforts, this time from 30 April 1987, though--depending on whom you ask--we'll be told that Mike had nothing to do with it and it was actually a joint effort by Anne Graham, Rob Green, and an unnamed copy editor at Celebrity (according to Robert Smith's version) because as everyone knows, that's how magazines work--a drunk mails in a cassette and a few illegible notes, and the editor has a hack write it all up in a nice finished package, having nothing better to do with his or her time."

Roger now seems to be telling us that, indeed, "Mike had nothing to do with it". The very thing he was arguing against in 2022.

In the same month on Casebook, Roger was stating that Barrett "had actually been a freelance journalist in the 1980s":

A year prior to this he was saying that, "Mike bought the word processor on April 3 1986 and used it in his career as a freelance journalist."

On 22 November 2023, Roger was saying that Devereux sisters were "not wrong" when they thought of Barrett as a journalist who had contributed features to a magazine.

On 24th November 2023, Roger told us once again that "Barrett was a freelance writer in the 1980s" and pooh poohed Robert Smith's claim that his interviews "weren't interviews as such".

As recently as May 2025, Roger was referring to Mike's journalism without feeling the need to put inverted commas around the word "journalism":

As we can see, Roger then said:

"Mike's journalism was not the common knowledge that you pretend it to be."

Why has he changed his approach in 2026?

Why does he now think that Mike was capable of writing neither short articles or the diary?

According to Roger in a post on 21st May 2026:

"Anne Graham didn't "lightly edit" Mike's gibberish. She wrote it while he was passed out drunk on the sofa. That's how I see it."

The problem is that there is no evidence to support this statement. It comes entirely from Roger's imagination.

One thing Roger mentions is Mike's claim, which he made on one occasion, that Anne did most of the work with the articles, in contradiction to Anne's statement that she only tidied up Mikes' work.

We need to examine the context in which Mike said this.

We know that in May 1994, Mike Barrett was aware that Nick Warren was about to publish an article alleging that Mike was known as journalist. Barrett threatened to sue Warren for libel. In a signed statement dated 24th June 1994 (and published in the Liverpool Daily Post three days later), Mike Barrett "confessed" to forging the diary. He had warned Feldman "a month or two beforehand" that he would be making this confession, so it didn't quite come out of the blue. A few days after publication of the story, Mike was then admitted to an alcoholic unit of a hospital. His solicitor, no doubt mindful of not killing the goose that had laid the golden egg, unilaterally retracted Mike's confession, apparently without instructions from Mike. On 31 July 1994, Anne then revealed that the diary had supposedly been in her family's possession since the 1960s. In the meantime, Warren's article in which Tony Devereux's daughter said that she understood Mike was a journalist had been published in Ripperana.

So we now come to early August 1994. Anne has rescued the diary with her story of it having been in her family since the 1960s. The story that Mike received it from Tony Devereux is now back on the table. Mike's confession has been discarded by Shirley Harrison et al as the ramblings of a drunken man So Mike is readmitted to the fold. He can continue to make money from the diary. But there is still the thorny issue of Mike's journalism which he'd never previously mentioned to Shirley Harrison. An explanation is required. And this is what Mike said to Shirley in a letter dated 2 August 1994 (in which his poor grammar and spelling is largely corrected):

"It was always Anne who ended up writing articles that had my name on (and there were very few).  Anne was the one who always had the ideas (she did not however write the Diary). Tony really gave me it”.  

The obvious thing to note here is that Mike is back to saying that the diary came from Tony Devereux. He's lying, obviously. Equally, I would suggest, he is lying about not writing his own articles. He's trying to downplay his abilities (and the number of articles) for Shirley's benefit. At this time, Anne wasn't suspected by anyone of having any involvement in creating the diary so he can safely say that she was responsible for the articles published under the name "Michael Barrett" in Celebrity and Chat (although he did, at the same time, feel the need to deny that she wrote the diary). It's hardly something that can be taken seriously in assisting us as to what actually happened or what Mike Barrett was capable of. Roger, however, seems to rely on it while ignoring the fact that at the very same time he was saying that Anne wrote his articles, Mike was also saying that Anne didn't write the diary...which was given to him by Tony Devereux. You can't cherry pick which of Mike's statements were lies and which were true.

We really do need to ask ourselves what we know about Mike Barrett's capabilities.

We've been able to listen to a few recordings of Mike Barrett during which for the most part he appears to have been drunk. But you can listen to as many recordings as you like. It doesn't tell you anything about Mike's creative writing ability which is the key requirement for writing a fictional diary. We can hear that Mike was able to speak and form sentences which is all that is required to "write" because, while he undoubtedly had poor penmanship skills, and a very poor grasp of written English, if he could speak the diary someone else could have written it down in a presentable form. But Mike could also have had some writing ability if he sat down and gave it some effort. If he'd joined a creative writing course he would surely have been told how to use a thesaurus. He would surely also have been given instructions on how to write well constructed sentences, even if that didn't come naturally to him.

FIDO, HARRIS AND GRAY

Roger prays in aid the opinions of others who met Mike Barrett during the 1990s but that is merely to substitute his own speculative opinions with the speculative opinions of others who also can't possibly have known what Mike was capable of.

FIDO

We've seen that Roger mentions Martin Fido as an authority but, while we know that Fido was present, along with Caroline Morris, at the April 1999 Cloak & Dagger meeting in London, there is no known evidence that Fido ever met Barrett prior to this (and Tom Mitchell, who gets his information direct from Keith Skinner, once wrongly stated that Fido had never met Barrett). If he did meet him prior to 1999, he couldn't have spent very long with him.

Further, Fido's theory was that while Anne created the text, Mike wrote the diary out by hand. Fido must have been speaking from ignorance without having seen Mike's handwriting because it is obvious that Mike was incapable of physically writing the diary. He just did not have the penmanship skills. Yet, Roger is happy to discard Fido's stupid claim that Mike physically wrote the diary while accepting his claim that Anne drafted the text.

We may note that the reason Fido believed that Mike imperfectly wrote out the diary text is because the diary "is full of spelling mistakes". For THAT reason he thought Anne couldn't have done it. Hence he told Mike:

"Well I’ve had a lot of letters from Anne and I’ve seen a certain amount of her writing. And it doesn’t contain spelling mistakes."

But Mike told him the answer was simple. Anne wrote her letters using a word processor with a spell checker.

One also has to question whether Fido was even correct to say that the diary is "full" of spelling mistakes. I don't think that's correct. There are some spelling mistakes for sure but not that many.

We now know from seeing Anne's personal handwritten correspondence that she was perfectly capable of making spelling mistakes. This corroborates what Mike said about her in April 1999: "Anne’s not the world’s greatest speller."

Yet it was due to the spelling mistakes in the diary that Fido believed Mike had written out the diary by hand.

Mike also asked Fido directly during the April 1999 meeting if he'd ever seen Anne's handwriting and Fido admitted he never had.

So Roger is relying heavily on someone who not only got half of the equation completely wrong but developed a theory on the basis of very poor reasons.

Fido's conclusion that Anne wrote the diary seems to have been based on nothing more than that she was more intelligent than her husband and could write well enough. But he didn't know from any first hand knowledge whether Mike could write or not.

HARRIS

Roger also mentions Melvin Harris without telling us what Harris said other than that Harris believed that Mike had "inside information". The problem is that Harris appears to have misled himself into thinking that there was a nest of forgers involving Gerard Kane due to Kane's handwriting supposedly being similar to the diary handwriting (although I don't see it myself). I also don't think that Harris even met Mike Barrett. So I can't see how Harris assists us in any way.

GRAY

Roger has also cited Alan Gray, once again without telling us what Gray said on the matter. According to an affidavit sworn by Gray on 22 January 1998, he told Barrett: "Michael you can't write, you can't even lie properly these days, you're pathetic. You made an attempt with a story - 'Daniel the Dolphin Boy' - what a load of rubbish." He also said: "I realise now that you couldn't possibley [sic] have had anything to do with the ‘Jack the Ripper’ diary fraud, your to thick, to drunk and really quite unable to come up with such a creation". However, by this time, he had an outstanding £3000 bill which Mike was showing no signs of paying. Back in January 1995, after having spent many hours if not days with him, Gray drafted Mike's affidavit in which Mike was said to be the diary author so he must have believed he'd done it at that time. If he changed his mind three years later this might have been because Mike didn't pay him for his services.

That Gray was very hostile towards Barrett in 1998 can be seen by the fact that Gray called Barrett, "Rat, scum and the biggest liar I have ever met" and threatened to "kick the shit" out of him.

Gray's belief at the time was that the diary was a joint project created by Anne and Tony Devereux. Hence he said to Mike:

"Now Devereux, that’s another kettle of fish, he wrote the diary or should I say he wrote the story lines and Anne Barrett wrote the diary, your Anne or should I say Devereux’s Anne, when you realised Anne and Devereux had something on the go, it turned you around, you were stupid, Anne made some very clever moves and you thought you had control, Anne sold you out all the way down the line, before you had finished your early morning drink."

According to "Inside Story", Gray's actual belief was that the diary was created by:

"a conspiracy of hoaxers involving Paul Feldman as well as Anne and Devereux"

This seems to come from Gray having said this:

"Never-the-less you had the Diary alleged in your hand, put there by Feldman, Anne Barrett and Devereux, makes you think. This was one big set up and you Liverpools best con-man was conned, that’s the funny bit. They had the money, you had the promises."

Roger, as usual, ignores bits of someone's theory he doesn't like, as if they never said it. He ignores the part about Feldman being involved in the plot, as well as Devereux, and gives the impression that Gray had somehow brilliantly deduced that Anne was the sole author. Furthermore, he ignores the fact that Gray thought it was Anne (and Feldman) who manipulated Mike into getting the diary published, contrary to Roger's own belief that Anne was the one being manipulated. Surely the fact that he named Devereux as a co-author, with Feldman also being involved in a grand conspiracy, must diminish his credibility in Roger's eyes.

Gray almost certainly never met or spoke to Anne. He also appears to have been near illiterate himself as evidenced by his affidavit claiming "your to thick, to drunk.." His views on the matter cannot be taken seriously.

Furthermore, when Keith Skinner attempted to make the same point in February 2028, i.e. that Gray concluded that "Mike Barrett did not write the diary", Roger wasn't impressed, telling him we should "tread carefully" while noting that Gray had only worked with Barrett for six months, during which time "Barrett was going thru rehab, alcohol treatment, and other personal challenges?". He added: "6 months seems like a fairly brief window to unravel the great mystery compared to the 25 years invested by other investigators, so I don't quite follow what you are attempting to imply with this statement."

So how is it possible for anyone to say that Mike wasn't capable? Even Caroline Morris, the author of the near 30 year propaganda campaign to present Mike as an incapable incompetent, cannot explain why he wasn't capable of writing those 63 diary pages. She relies on her instincts.

In any case, Mike could have been assisted by Tony Devereux (as stated in the January 1995 affidavit). This is another issue on which Roger seems to have flipped a hundred and eighty degrees. In a post on 15th May 2026, Roger said he rejected the idea that Devereux could have assisted with the writing of the diary:

Roger said that Gray, "eventually concluded that the diary was actually written by Graham (and Tony - which I reject)". Yet Roger was once very open to Tony Devereux's involvement

On 14th July 2020, for example, (in a Casebook post about Tales of Liverpool) he wrote:

"My belief is that this places the hoax somehow in Devereux's hands. On some level he was involved, and this is why Barrett lied about it."

We'll come back to Roger's thoughts about Devereux's involvement but it's first worth considering a few other posts that Roger has made in the past which don't sit very well with what he is now saying.

During May 2026, Roger repeatedly referred to other people's opinions that the diary was a "shoddy" hoax, as if he doesn't believe it himself, with it having been written by Anne Graham. Here is just one example:

As we can see, Roger says of his (new) opponents:

"They insist she [Anne Graham] wasn't reckless, dishonest, or desperate enough to knowingly participate in a "shoddy" hoax created by her alcoholic husband."

So you might think from the use of the quotes that Roger doesn't believe that the diary was a shoddy hoax. However, back in October 2020 we find him describing the diary as a "shabby hoax".

But there's more....

MIKE PROBABLY EXECUTED THE FORGERY!

When it comes to Roger's confusing and contradictory statements about the diary, things get much worse.

Look at this post by Roger of 14 July 2020:

"The mistake you are making, Caz, is a common one. You are suggesting that Barrett was creating a forgery. He wasn't; he was creating a hoax, and the standards of a hoax are much lower".

Putting aside the artificial distinction between a "forgery" and a "hoax", what we see here is Roger telling us that Mike Barrett was "creating" the hoax. And further down the post, "Bongo" only needed to fool "a few hundred Iconoclasts". No mention at all of Anne's role.

Now look at this post from August 2021:

We can see that Roger quotes Paul Begg as saying that Mike "might have conceived and executed the forgery, and he probably did". He expressly says that this is his own opinion as well as Begg's. He comments:

"Imagine entertaining the notion that Barrett "probably" wrote it. I've been called as crazy as a loon for believing such a thing".

So in 2021 Roger was clearly saying that he, like Paul Begg, believed that Mike Barrett probably wrote the diary.

On 28th November 2021 he told us that his belief was that Barrett "damn well knew it was a hoax because he was involved in creating it."

On 29th November 2021, Roger seemed to understand that :"The penwoman could have corrected errors and made minor (or major?) adjustments when writing out the pre-existing text into the ledger".

The only possible "penwoman" of the diary is Anne, and he can't there be saying that Anne would have corrected her own errors. He must be saying she would have corrected someone else's errors. The only person that could have been (bearing in mind that he essentially rules out the involvement of people like Tony Devereux and Billy Graham) was her husband.

However, when writing to Paul Begg the following month, Roger suddenly became all vague:

"Unfortunately, you seen to have misread my post and are thus misrepresenting my position. Nowhere did I that that Mike or Anne 'penned' the diary. I stated there is compelling evidence - and I would suggest overwhelming evidence - that the diary is a modern hoax, and that Mike Barrett has demonstrated inside knowledge. I never suggested the penman's (or pen woman's) identity, and indeed I see no reason that I need to."

So we see here the appearance of Melvin Harris' "inside knowledge" formula being applied to Mike but Roger's denial that he had ever stated that Mike or Anne penned the diary seems to be in contradiction to his earlier claims that Mike was involved in creating the diary. Further, it's kind of odd for him to have spoken of a "penwoman" then denied that this was Anne. Who else could he possibly have been talking about when using the word "penwoman"?

It goes without saying that his approach from 2021 is drastically different from his approach today whereby he now insists that Anne penned at least 70% of the diary while Mike (presumably) penned the remaining 30%.

On 16th December 2021, Roger challenged Paul Begg's suggestion "that Mike & Anne couldn't have written the diary", drawing his attention to Mike's journalism and Anne's book. In a subsequent post he added that the idea that Barrett was an "IlLiteRate" stood "in stark contrast" to "His published articles":

So Roger had no problem in accepting that Mike's Barrett's published articles countered the notion that Mike was illiterate.

Then on 17th December 2021 we find this post:

We see that "Barrett" knew that it didn't matter that the diary was "fairly flimsy" (or, as Roger later in the same post says, "a flimsy document") because "The hoaxer" instinctively knows that the world is full of suckers ("Tom Mitchell types") and "the hoaxer" is only out to convince a literary agent and a publisher. Well, who tried to flog the diary to a literary agent and a publisher? Mike Barrett, that's who. So who else is "the hoaxer" in this scenario?

THE HISTORY OF ROGER'S BIG THEORY

I find that the story that Anne Graham was "the brains" behind the diary first emerged in its full form on Casebook in May 2022 although Roger apparently mentioned it in some form to Caroline Morris in an email in the late 1990s or early 2000s and did hint at it on the boards in 2018 yet didn't tell the story consistently over the subsequent years.

Let's start with the 2018 version. This is what Roger wrote on 9th January 2018 in #363 of the thread "Acquiring a Victorian Diary" (with my bold).

"...the picture I see of Anne Graham portrayed by Feldman, Harrison, Skinner, etc., is of a very unwilling woman who, at one point, even wrestles with Mike on the kitchen floor. I believe that wrestling match occurred when she first learned that he was taking the artifact to London."

So how might it have 'worked'?

If the pious Ms. Morris will simply flip her hymnal to pg. 316 of the Diary of Jack the Ripper (Blake editon, 1998) she will find the correct solution to the mystery.

Shirley Harrison gives an amazing insight into Barrett’s modus operandi---a nasty little scheme involving readers of LOOT Magazine. Barrett, inadequate in things literary, fools other people into doing his work for him.

This is the key to the puzzle. Put your thinking cap on and work it out. The word 'novella' might be a helpful clue. Have a good week."

So what we have here is Anne getting involved in a wrestling match with her husband when she first learned that she was taking the artifact to London. This is, of course, in direct contradiction of Anne's claim that she wasn't bothered when she first learned that Mike was taking the artifact to London because she was confident no one would touch it with a barge pole.

Crucially there is no hint here of Anne being the mastermind behind the diary. She appears to have been an unwilling pawn, manipulated by Mike into "doing his work for him".

After Caroline Morris asked him why Anne would have helped Mike create the diary, Roger made a further post the next day (#375) saying:

"I suppose I will have to spell it out. Anne wrote a novella about Maybrick-as-Jack. Nothing either or illegal or strange about her "helping" Mike. In fact, she encouraged "his" literary efforts, and did 99% of the actual work. No mystery whatsoever, and nothing illegal or untoward.

Then one unlucky day around February 1992, while she's at work, Mike takes what is basically her manuscript and decides to turn it into the 'real' McCoy...the Maybrick Diary. Why not? Pan Books didn't want it, so, to use Mike's own phrase, it's "Hell or Bust." So he enlists the help of Citizen X from down the boozer. Anne doesn't find out about it until the unpaid bills start showing up from Martin Earl, who naturally wants his £25. She now figures out what Mike's really been up to and goes ballistic. But she also finds out it's already too late---a 'done deal.' Mike's made an appointment with Doreen Montgomery. She fights him tooth and nail--on the floor even---(see Feldman's account) but in the end she puts her head down and goes along with it, knowing full well that she's in it as deep as he is. As with the readers of LOOT Magazine, she's been hoodwinked. All her subsequent actions can be explained as someone trying to make the best of an impossible situation--including her totally irrational and ill-advised 'gig' with Feldman, who she figures might have the money/clout to make it all go away. The rest is history.

I personally see Anne as a rather tragic figure.

As for Mike "pissing it against the wall," didn't he make some rather unusual £1,000 withdrawals when the royalty cheques starting rolling in?"

So Roger was saying that Anne wrote a novella about James Maybrick being Jack the Ripper in the form of the diary. She did "99% of the work" in creating this novella (but what the remaining one per cent done by Mike was, or why she couldn't do 100% of the work, he doesn't say).

Now, I could just about understand the theory if Anne wrote the diary as a novella but I'm at a loss to know what he meant when he said: "Nothing either or illegal or strange about her "helping" Mike. In fact, she encouraged "his" literary efforts, and did 99% of the actual work." If she wrote a novella which Mike then basically stole to use in his scan how did she "help" Mike and how did she "encourage" his literary efforts if she basically wrote the whole thing?

Leaving those puzzling issues aside, it seems that according to Roger, Mike then decides he wants to use Anne's fictional diary to create a handwritten fake diary and present that fake diary as genuine. He gets "Citizen X" to assist him in writing it out. Anne knows nothing about the plan until May 1992, long after Doreen has agreed to publish the diary, when Mike asks her to pay the unpaid £25 demanded by Martin Earl and the entire plot is revealed. She then goes ballistic at the way Mike has secretly used her novella and tries to burn the diary.

This is, of course, all nonsense. It was disproved very quickly when Keith Skinner (on 21st February 2018) posted correspondence by Doreen Montgomery which showed that Anne knew all about the diary on 21st April 1992, long before Martin Earl's demand for payment arrived in May 1992. This version of the theory was thus quietly abandoned by Roger without him questioning his own ability to form accurate theories.

Another important piece of new evidence emerged during 2018, namely the evidence of Anne's handwriting, which suggested that the idea of her having written the diary by hand was not as unlikely as it previously seemed based on the only known handwriting sample from Anne, so that the involvement of a "Citizen X" for this purpose was no longer necessary

Roger returned to the same theme in the "Incontrovertible" thread (#5031) on 1st October 2019:

"There are other nagging details—Mike and Anne physically fighting over the diary on the kitchen floor, little Caroline tells us—that suggest that Anne might not have been a willing participant, at least not initially. Allegations of abuse complicate our musings."

We can see the shift in Roger's theory because, in the previous version, Anne wasn't a participant at all in Mike's fraudulent scheme. Indeed, she knew nothing about it until it was all over. But now that she was likely the penwoman, Roger has had to revise everything so that she did participate but unwillingly.

We may pause here and ask ourselves what the source is of this physical fight or wrestling match on the kitchen floor of 12 Goldie Street. Roger frequently mentions it in his posts, and attributes it to Paul Begg, but I'm unaware of the source which shows Begg saying this. It's obviously important to know where it came from because the only published account of Little Caroline's recollection of the row between Mike and Anne over the diary is in Feldman's book which makes no mention of any kind of physical fight and provides no location for it, with no mention of the kitchen floor. According to Inside Story (pages 209-10) Anne did refer to a physical fight which occurred "on the floor" but with no mention of a kitchen.

Roger may be correctly remembering what Paul Begg once said or he may not. But Roger certainly likes the idea of a fight of a kitchen floor because he has said on more than one occasion that the kitchen stove would have been the ideal place to burn the diary. I have difficulty in agreeing with him about this. It would surely be foolhardy to say the least to burn a book with a hard cover on a kitchen stove unless, of course, you want to set your house on fire or, at the very least, fill it with smoke. With 12 Goldie Street having electric heating (as can be seen in the Feldman documentary), and thus no fireplace, I would have thought any burning would have been conducted outside, in the garden. So I don't see the same significance of a fight in the kitchen, if this is actually true, as Roger does.

We've already seen that during 2020 and 2021 Roger's posts seemed to suggest that Mike, not Anne, was the forger. But on 5th May 2022 (#8633 of "Incontrovertible"), Roger was back with his novella story and told Caroline Morris:

"Anne is telling you what happened, Caz -- and it even aligns with your own instincts -- but will you listen?

Graham is saying that the diary began as a story...a novella.

But it was never meant for publication as a physical hoax - just as a story

Indeed, when she found out what Mike was planning to do with her typescript, fought him physically on the kitchen floor.

It's all right there in her statement. And Little Caroline had already described the same incident to Paul Begg."

It should be said first of all that there is a factual flaw in what Roger is saying (which he would later repeat in his 2026 posts). It isn't the case that Little Caroline "had already" told the story about the fight which was then confirmed by Anne in "her statement". According to Feldman, the story of this fight (or row) had been told by at least one of the Barretts before Caroline was spoken to about the diary. What Caroline added was the part about her mother wanting to burn the diary.

From the account in Inside Story, nothing is said by anyone about a fight on the kitchen floor.

Anyway, what is Roger's theory as at May 2022?

Well it's not easy to say but he's clearly sticking with the same idea as in 2018 by which Anne had created the diary as a novella. Hence he refers to "her typescript". That being so, I fail to see why it wasn't 100% created by her. Why would she have needed input from anyone else?

Although Roger now knows that Anne had wanted to protect the diary from fire in April 1992, he doesn't mention this and keeps it vague as to precisely when the attempted burning occurred. He certainly doesn't say that she wrote it out by hand before attempting to burn it but he clearly believes this is what occurred (as becomes apparent from subsequent exchanges) and, as we know, he had long been speaking about a "penwoman".

The problem with this version of events is that it doesn't make sense. Sure, if Anne had written a transcript she might have had a plan to have the diary published as a fictional story (although the style of the diary as we have it doesn't strike me as even remotely consistent with this) but then what could Anne have been expecting when she wrote the diary out by hand into a specially purchased Victorian looking photograph album with a fountain pen and nibs? To repeat, we've seen that Roger himself referred to the "penwoman" and it's simply not possible for Mike to have written the diary because he clearly did not have the penmanship skills to do it.

So when she's writing out the diary laboriously by hand - quite possibly over a period of eleven days - what was going through her mind as to why she was doing it? She must have known that the manuscript wasn't going to be used for a novella. A diary was being created to deceive people into thinking it was a genuine Victorian diary.

A similar point was made forcibly to him by Caroline Morris on the same day when she wrote:

"So remind me, RJ, about your order of events. If Anne fought Mike physically over his plans for 'her typescript', how and when did he manage to 'bully' her into transferring this by hand into 63 pages of the photo album? Did he poke her with the soft cushions, or make her stay in the comfy chair until lunch time, with only a cup of coffee at eleven? What a rotten swine! No wonder she capitulated. Any woman would. I can see now why you would have considerably more respect for her than many others do."

Roger's response was that Barrett was a drunk who was emotionally and physically abusive. But while that might answer the question posed by Ms Morris as to how Mike managed to manipulate her into doing the job, it doesn't deal with the issue of what Anne thought the purpose of her transferring the pages by hand was going to be. She must have know what Mike wanted to do so that her later claim to have "panicked" when she discovered he was going to pretend it was a real diary and get it published doesn't make much sense.

Caroline Morris responded on 19th May 2022 as follows:

"During this period, when Mike is no longer contributing to Celebrity Magazine, his wife fancies a little writing for pleasure in her spare time, and settles on the idea of a 'novella', based on one of the sickest series of murders in criminal history, and decides that Jack the Ripper should be James Maybrick of Liverpool, writing his diary and composing flippant doggerel to describe the gruesome deeds.

So Anne sets to work using the word processor, which was bought in 1986 for Mike's abandoned efforts, and when she is finally happy with the result, Mike reads it and then has the brilliant idea of getting her novella transferred by hand into a suitably old book and trying to flog it as the true confessions of Jack.

RJ will no doubt clarify if it is Mike who prints off Anne's draft and causes the fight over it on the kitchen floor when he outlines his plans for it. She never intended it for publication and wants nothing to do with this crazy scheme, but Mike takes over and bullies her into submission, to the extent that she is not only fully aware of his efforts to obtain the raw materials for this fraudulent enterprise, but she actively assists him throughout the process. The last thing she wants is another row.

When Mike swears his affadavit [sic] on 5th January 1995, he gives an account of this process that is basically correct, apart from getting the year wrong because of his terrible memory for dates. He accuses Anne of transferring the fraud by hand into the photo album, while young Caroline looks on. He would hardly forget it if a third party did the handwriting, so he is either lying about his wife's involvement because she left him, or she really did all this, just to keep the peace at home, and he is now punishing her for doing what he coerced her into doing in the first place.

Which is it, RJ?

If you think Mike could have lied about whose handwriting is in the diary, what else was he lying about? Who was the real hoaxer in that case, and why would Mike protect him or her?

PS - I think I can see why RJ can't have the Barretts fighting over the physical diary. If it is only obtained from an auction on 31st March 1992, and Anne's novella is then transferred into it over the next few days, it just doesn't work, does it?"

Here is Roger's full response on 20th May 2022:

"Who said anything about Anne 'fancying a bit of novel writing'?

That is not what she alluded to in her statement. She said--in her own words--that she wanted Mike to write a story....a story about Maybrick being the Ripper.

That was the plan, wasn't it, when her father funded Mike's purchase of a word processor in the mid-1980s? That, since Mike was on disability and had health problems and couldn't work, that he would pursue a writing career--evidently with her support and her help?

But we know how that would have went, don't we?

Anne also admitted that she had to 'tidy up' Mike's various writing projects, and I see no reason why it would have been any different this go-round, and, indeed, I suspect she ended up doing 85-95% of the work.

Your argument has always been that Anne was too smart or too ethical to have assisted Barrett in a scam. But your assumption is that she began with the knowledge that it was going to be a hoax.

I don't think this is true. She said she wanted Mike to write A STORY (ie., she assumed this). She had no intention of having the 'diary' published. It was supposed to be a story.

This is the essence of her own statement.

Thanks to David Barrat, we have now seen several samples of Barrett's published articles and they are entirely competent, but I think it is reasonable to take Anne's word for it that she, on some level, helped Mike in their creation.

It also doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes or a Dr. Freud to realize that Anne had writing aspirations of her own and had encouraged Barrett to seek this line of employment. It was her father who apparently funded the purchase of the word processor. So why on earth wouldn't she have helped him?

I want to make one thing plain.

I don't think Anne is any more morally or ethically guilty of helping Barrett create this fraud, if that is indeed what she did and was alluding to, than the artists that Barrett tricked into submitting their drawings for his non-existent children's book. ("The Loot Magazine" scam). They were coerced and tricked, and I suspect Anne Graham was as well.

Ultimately, she was deeply upset by Barrett's scheme, as confirmed by the accounts given by her friend Audrey and her little daughter Caroline.

Shirley Harrison noted in her book that Irish Roman Catholic women are taught that they must stick with their husbands, and Anne kept her head down, terrified, but also placing hope in the very reasonable assumption that the literary agent would eventually come to her senses and Mike's hoax would implode.

Anne said as much. She believed Doreen would send Mike packing. Why would she not humor her abusive husband's whims, if she believed the whole project would implode? No, Anne wasn't thinking clearly, perhaps, but do emotionally and physically abused women think rationally and clearly? Or do they just try to cope from day to day?

But have it your way. If you want to believe the fantasy that Fat Eddy the electrician found the diary under Maybrick's floorboards and sold it to a man he didn't know in a pub for twenty-five pounds, by all means, do so. It still leaves you with the 'man in the pub' provenance--just a variation on Bongo Barrett's own malarky.

Meanwhile, the laws of chemistry and the use of the police inventory list and the use of modern idioms tell us the diary is a modern fake, so you're merely transferring the suspicion from two known writers (Graham and Barrett) to a man with no known history of writing (Lyons). That doesn't strike me as very rational, nor productive.

Personally, I am confident that Anne (or her daughter) will eventually admit to what happened and it won't be far removed from what she was implying in her original statement to Feldman, except that the diary never existed in her youth, nor did it come down through the family. Whether she first came up with the idea of Maybrick-as-Ripper, who knows? Maybe there was an element of truth to Steve Powell's ever-evolving memory of an Australian nurse who liked to talk about Jack the Ripper. Harrison seems to have given it some credence.

Finally, if Anne thinks I have misunderstood her or are misrepresenting what she implied in her statement, she can, of course, correct me."

Roger didn't deal with a number of questions raised by Caroline Morris and his account is vague and contradictory of earlier versions of his theory. For here we now have Anne wanting Mike to write a story, not her creating a typescript of a novella. So she apparently encourages Mike to write the story but helps him by doing "85-95%" of the work; numbers he appears to have pulled out of thin air. Why is it not 57% of the work? Or 63%? or 77% Where does 85-95% come from? And if Anne did 85-95% of the work, what was the 5-15% that Mike was doing?

And where did the figure of 99% vanish to? Why has Mike's role suddenly been enormously boosted?

Roger doesn't deal with the question of precisely what it was that Little Caroline remembered Anne attempting to burn the diary. Was it the finished diary or the typescript?

It kind of gets worse because even though the whole thing is supposed to be Anne's idea she was nevertheless "coerced and tricked" into helping Mike create what she had encouraged him to create. If you're having trouble understanding this, I suspect you're not alone.

If one can try and make any sense of this at all, he's saying that for some strange reason Anne encouraged Mike to write a fictional story about James Maybrick being Jack the Ripper in the form of a diary but Mike cunningly tricked her into writing his typescript (for which she was about 90% responsible for having created) into an old photograph album before she ended up realizing that she was participating in a forgery at which point, either during the creation period or after it, she panicked and tried to burn it.

Well perhaps not because she later told the authors of Inside Story that she was very confident Mike wouldn't get the diary published so she must have panicked when Mike came back from London to say that Rupert Crew was interested in publishing it. But that's when we know she was wanting to protect the diary from theft and fire. Things aren't making sense.

Roger was challenged by Caroline Morris to expand on his theory in her #8794 of the "Incontrovertible" thread on 8 June 2022 when she posted:

"What I am currently struggling with is RJ's theory that Anne's original idea was for Mike to write a story around James Maybrick being JtR. As far as I can gather - and I know RJ will correct me if I get any of the details wrong - the idea evolved to become a 'novella' Anne ended up writing herself, because she hadn't already appreciated that Mike would not be capable of contributing any more than a bit of Sir Jim's doggerel at most. She didn't intend it for publication, at least not in the form of a fake Victorian diary, and that is what RJ believes their fight was about, when Mike suddenly revealed his cunning plan for her work of fiction, which she had produced in all innocence on the word processor. She was basically duped and, as an abused wife, felt she had no option but to go along with his insane idea for the sake of marital peace.

What is not clear is how RJ thinks Mike managed to coerce Anne [or persuaded a third party] to transfer her novella by hand into the old photo album he had just obtained from an auction sale and doctored for the purpose, in time for him to take it to London on 13th April 1992 and pass it off as a genuine historical document. According to RJ's theory, Anne put herself through this charade, while consoling herself with the hope that Doreen would take one look and send Mike packing. One wonders if he was the type to give up after an initial rejection, and would not have tried every other possible avenue to foist his wife's work of fiction onto the public, in the form of this obvious fake, and complete her humiliation.

I'd like RJ to explain how Mike knew that Anne had not written an intentionally fictional treatment, based loosely on the murders and the Maybricks, but not meant to be factually accurate. What would have made Mike think she had researched both cases as well and as carefully as she could have done in the early 1990s, and had then stuck as closely as possible with the historical records, so that he could hope to pass off the result as the genuine thoughts of JM/JtR? If Anne had really wanted to stop him, without the risk of further abuse, all she had to do was to tell him it was just a work of fiction, which would fool nobody, no matter how it was packaged. How would Mike have known the difference, if he had little to no input with the writing?

And then we have Mike's research notes... How do they fit into RJ's 'novella' theory?

Maybe if RJ could put some flesh on the bones, we could judge the overall plausibility of his theory."

Roger didn't put any flesh on the bones, telling Morris she would have to struggle on her own.

Quoting her saying: "What I am currently struggling with is RJ's theory that Anne's original idea was for Mike to write a story around James Maybrick being JtR" he posted:

"I'm afraid you'll have to struggle on your own, Caz.

Do you notice anything about the statement in bold?

It was Anne herself who said that she wanted Mike to write a story about Maybrick as Jack the Ripper. Or are you forgetting that?

It is not my 'theory'--it was what Anne herself said in her 'confession' to Paul Feldman.

And, if you recall, Anne's account was accepted as true by Paul Felman and Shirley Harrison, and was given the moral support of Keith Skinner in a letter to The Ripperologist. It was explored as possibly true by Paul Begg in "The Facts' and in your own book, Ripper Diary.

The idea was looked on as plausible then, back when people believed her story. Why is it suddenly untenable now?

Anyway, I have no plan to defend what you are calling my 'theory.'

Take it or leave it. As far as I am concerned, the only person's opinion worth hearing about the matter is Anne Graham's.

Was she indirectly telling us what actually happened, or am I misreading her?"

Strictly speaking, what Roger said about Anne wanting to write a story about Maybrick being Jack the Ripper isn't true. She never said anything about Maybrick. She simply said that her plan was to encourage Mike to write some kind of fictional story about the diary, even though, in her account, she doesn't appear to have communicated this to him. But that was by way of explanation for why she gave the diary to Devereux to give to Mike. And, of course, if her plan was for Mike to write the story, why does Roger think Anne ended up writing some or all of it?

Challenged further by Caroline Morris to explain his theory, after she said: "RJ's theory is that this man's wife came up with a fantastic idea that he should write a story about James Maybrick being Jack the Ripper, and the result was the diary, which she inevitably ended up researching and writing herself [for bleedin' obvious reasons], knowingly committing fraud in the process [because anything less would require mental gymnastics that even RJ has been shying away from." Roger, after denying that this was his theory, posted on 15th June 2022:

"What I actually suspect is that Graham was the primary author--I think I once threw out a rough estimate of her writing 90% of the text--but I do hope you can appreciate the difference between an initial concept, the necessary research and the actual writing?

Do you think these are invariably all the same act and done by the same person?

Have you never heard of researchers, and co-authors, and ghost-writers, and consultants, and writing assistants, etc? Or even just a kibitzer standing over someone's shoulder in Goldie Street?

Why do you think I believe Anne did all the leg work when Barrett stated that Tony Devereux helped him greatly with the concept? Wasn't Mike's copy of Tales of Liverpool known to have been in Tony's possession, and haven't I mentioned this on many occasions?

Why play these games? The muddled thinking and inconsistency is all your own---it's not mine.

The writing of the diary is not particularly good and is repetitious. It also contains a malaprop or two---consistent with Anne's own malaprops. The concept itself would have taken time and thought and a certain amount of basic research to formulate, and Barrett was perfectly capable of doing much of it, and I am far from opposed to Devereux coming up with an idea or two during Barrett's drinking sessions down at the Saddle.

You see, Caz, when it comes to the Maybrick Hoax you never, EVER argue or debate in good faith. You're always out to work some silly angle.

We have further instances of Barrett pointing out that he simply made up details in the text--such as James visiting his brother Thomas at Christmas (and, by the way, as has been pointed out, Thomas was commonly referred to as Tom--another false note, perhaps. Kind of curious how Anne always religiously referred to Mike as Michael, but I digress).

Of course, nothing Barrett claimed can be taken without independent support or at least good logic, but lo and behold, Yabs has noted that the testimony of both Michael and Thomas at trial strongly suggests that this detail WAS made up. How could Bongo the Blunderer have known this? There is not a whiff of evidence that Maybrick actually visited Manchester that Christmas, which, if I recall, left you and Ike scrambling to find the sheet music to The Twelve Days of Christmas.

We certainly can't entertain the notion that a Hoaxer--even an Old Hoaxer-- might have simply made something up!

So please, Caz, don't blame me for your own confusion and misinterpretations by trying to tell me what I do or do not believe.

You seem to be further suffering from the delusion that I am accusing Anne Graham of fraud.

I said the exact opposite. I don't think she is morally or legally responsible for the Maybrick Hoax. The diary is undoubtedly a modern concoction, so the alternative is that she IS guilty of fraud--but that would be your accusation, not mine.

It is not 'fraud' to create the Diary of Jack the Ripper on one's home word processor. It is not illegal to write-up a Ripper theory in the guise of a confessional diary as a marketing ploy-especially if one's husband has convinced you that it will be sold as nothing more than a work of fiction and the publishers will be alerted to this fact when he duly arrives in London.

Much like Barrett told the subscribers to Loot Magazine that he had a contract for a children's book, so please send me your artwork--I promise it is legit and it won't end up being peddled in art shops in Southport!

Scam artists generally stick to the same m.o.

So no, Caz, you're wrong, I'm afraid. It only becomes fraud if one sells it as the real deal. I think the details of the purchase of the red diary--with Barrett being put down as a late payer--suggest he bought it behind Anne's back. It suggests to me that she hadn't been initially involved in the scheme, other than helping him write a work of fiction. No hoaxer is going to draw further attention to themselves by being a late payer when they are trying to obtain their raw materials. I take it to be more evidence of Barrett's conniving ways.

Let us return again to Anne's own account, buried in her 'confession' to Feldman, as well as in various statements to Shirley Harrison, but disguised within a transparently bogus tale of having had the diary in her youth.

She wanted Michael to write a story. She admitted helping Michael in his previous writing projects. She claims she was horrified to have learned Michael was taking the diary to London and she physically fought him because of it.

I believe her.

Why? Because it makes sense. Because it has the ring of truth. Because we have two independent witnesses. Her friend Audrey claimed Anne was deeply upset about Michael's book. Interpret it how you will---I know how I interpret it. There's no credible evidence that the diary came out of Battlecrease or that Eddie Lyons sold the Diary of Jack the Ripper to some dude down the boozer for twenty-five quid. Anne Graham was upset that Barrett was peddling a hoax and they would both be arrested for fraud--(even though I personally think she had been coerced).

Further, there is also the account of Caroline Barrett. Lord Orsam is undoubtedly correct that Caroline could have been coached--she probably was--but I don't think there is any logical reason why she would have been coached to say her parents were fighting over the diary on the kitchen floor. I think it happened. There would be no motive to coach a child to say that--it would be counterproductive. No one would even think of such a thing. It was a spontaneous admission.

This means there was conflict over Barrett taking the hoax to London.

Anne said she had tried to 'burn the diary.' The last time I checked, most stoves are kept on top of the kitchen floor--which refers back to Caroline's account. The wrestling match was when Anne tried to burn the diary in the stove--that's what I think. She may have even tried to burn the diary in the stove when Barrett was attempting to slow dry the ink or dry the spot where he had removed the maker's stamp of 1908/1909 after daubing or soaking the inside cover with linseed oil or some similar solvent. The idea that he plopped the whole diary in a bedpan of linseed oil is more tomfoolery, a ridiculous interpretation in order to dismiss a reasonable one, since it has never been disputed that the inside cover does have suspicious damage which would be consistent with someone removing a tell-tale date from a guardbook of World War I photos, a 20–30-pound expenditure as estimated by the contemporary manager at Outhwaite and Litherland.

No, Anne was NOT a willing participant in the hoax. She did help Michael in the end, but I think Anne explained her reasoning in a statement to Shirley Harison, as I have already alluded to several times.

"I thought Doreen would send Mike packing."

Is anyone here going to seriously argue that an emotionally and physically abused woman might not humor her husband, hoping the whole thing would eventually implode?

That was her rationale, and it has the ring of truth.

What about Anne's further statement: "I know nothing about contracts. I just signed what Mike told me to sign."

Does that sound like the statement of a woman who is in control of the situation?

Nobody has given me any rational reason why Anne couldn't have helped Barrett create the typescript, or why she couldn't have been coerced and bullied and manipulating into helping him.

I think she was admitting as much--in an indirect way as she pushed her b.s. story about having owned the diary since young adulthood---but, as I say, she can correct me if I have misunderstood.

I am afraid that I have limited time at the moment, so if Caz Brown continues to misinterpret and misreport my suggestion, I will simply refer readers back to this post."

I find this very confusing, especially the part where Roger says:

"She did help Michael in the end,"

In the end? So it was all her husband's idea and work until "the end"? The end was writing out the diary, wasn't it?

And we are told that: "Nobody has given me any rational reason why Anne couldn't have helped Barrett create the typescript". But surely, if the diary was originally a novella written by Anne, that would be the rational reason why Anne couldn't possibly have helped Barrett create the transcript. Because in that case, Anne wouldn't have been helping Barrett do anything. She would have been doing it herself. If, however, Anne did help Barrett create the transcript what did she think they were creating? A fictional story? Or a supposedly true story which needed to be properly researched to avoid being exposed a fake?

We also have here the suggested involvement of Tony Devereux who helped Mike with "the concept" and possibly came up with "an idea or two". The concept of Anne quietly and happily writing a novella on her own, or almost entirely on her own, seems to have been abandoned. But Anne apparently helped Mike to write a work of fiction. She "helped Barrett create the typescript". And we can see that at the start, Roger appears to resile from his earlier claim that Anne was responsible for 90% of the text although he muddies the water by talking about three separate stages: the "initial concept, the necessary research and the actual writing". So what's he saying? Tony and Mike came up with the initial concept, Mike did the necessary research and Anne, for some unknown and unexplained reason, then took over the entire project and wrote 90% of the text?

Wouldn't it make more sense if Mike had written 90% of the text but Anne had tidied it up?

But from this joint Devereux/Mike/Anne project, is he saying anything that's very different from what he appeared to be arguing with Michael Banks about? For, as I read Banks' posts, that's pretty much what he was saying might have happened.

I don't know whether the not-so-subtle shift from the diary starting off as novella written by Anne to a joint project involving Devereux and Mike, which, realistically, must have been a forgery scheme from the start, not a novella,was a response to Caroline Morris' decent point that Mike couldn't possibly have known if Anne's fictional novella matched the facts of both the Maybrick and Ripper cases in order for the diary to be passed off as genuine but Roger certainly never had an answer to it. The entire theory is now muddied. Was it written as a real diary or as a fictional novella? Who knows? I'm not sure Roger does any more.

To Tom Mitchell on 24th June 2022, Roger said:

"Ike - another assumption you seem to be making is that Anne Graham was always a willing participant during this 11-day span.

Is that what the evidence--such as it is--suggests?

You're still ignoring Anne's own account. She said she once tried to physically destroy the diary. If Barrett's account is substantially correct, this would have occurred during those 11 days that you characterize as a determined and efficient effort, filled with love and cooperation.

Yet, it was sometime in this same general era that Anne showed up to work, deeply upset, complaining about her husband's "book." This was not from the lips of Barrett, but from Anne's friend Audrey.

Many years ago, I tried to discuss this matter with Keith Skinner in a series of short emails and he was of the opinion that this upsetting event took place after Barrett had already brought the diary to London. I still see no reason to draw this conclusion. Keith said something about Anne being off work, but Audrey's account obviously dates to a time when Anne was still coming down to the office, and no 'hard date' could be given and Audrey seemed reluctant to tell tales behind her friend's back, which is interesting in itself.

Further, it would be natural to assume that Anne being upset at work is related to Little Caroline's account of Mike and Anne physically fighting on the kitchen floor--you know, the room where stoves are kept--and wasn't the obvious assumption that Little Caroline was referring to a fight that took place 'pre-Doreen'?

Further, didn't Graham have a full-time job at this time?"

In this post, Roger was saying that the attempt to destroy the diary would have occurred during the eleven day period while it was being created. But that contradicts Anne's own account that she was entirely confident that Mike's plan of getting the diary published would never succeed. This means that the only time she could have tired to burn it was after it was finished which was the same time she wanted it placed in a safe to protect it from fire. So the story isn't really making sense.

On 12th May 2023, a somewhat different story emerged, apparently based on something I'd said:

"David Barrat wrote an article along the lines of 'how the diary could have been legal.' The idea is that the fictional text was written in the scrapbook as a marketing ploy to sell the idea to potential publishers. I don't know if that was Barrett's plan, and I have my doubts, but I have long wondered if that is what he had told Anne. He could have told her it was just a marketing gimmick for the sake of his agent and the publishers, but once he got to London, he would make sure they understood it was a work of fiction. Only when Barrett did show up in London, he didn't tell them this. To his surprise, they took it seriously. And it is possible that when he got back to Liverpool and Anne figured this out, this was when they physically fought over the diary on the kitchen floor, as reported by their daughter to Paul Begg. Clearly, there was some sort of blow-up behind the scenes. I think it makes sense based on Anne's later statements about never intending to have had the diary published and believing that the literary agent would have just sent Mike "packing." It makes sense. It jives. It doesn't particularly jive with the idea of the diary being old and stolen, nor would Anne have gone deeper into the whole fiasco if she had had nothing to do with something Mike had just brought home from the pub."

There is a little bit of strange logic in Roger's post when it comes to the fact that Anne Graham wrote the introduction to the book, The Last Victim. Sure she did but the authors of the book on the front cover are stated to be Anne Graham and Carol Emmas. The fact that Anne Graham wrote the introduction by herself (although she would, no doubt, have been assisted by an editor at Headline Book Publishing which published the book) doesn't change that.

But we can see that Roger is of the belief that Anne may well have been the penwoman based on the handwriting evidence. And she was tricked by Mike into believing that all she was being asked to do was participate in a marketing ploy, or gimmick, by which Mike would use the genuine-looking diary as an interesting visual tool to persuade Doreen to publish Anne's fictional diary. Or at least I assume Roger is still saying it was Anne's fictional diary.

I should say that I'm sure I never suggested that the book was being written as a marketing ploy. What I think Roger may be referring to is me saying that it wasn't illegal to write out a Victorian diary of Jack the Ripper in the comfort of one's home and that, if asked, the Barretts could have said they were doing it as a marketing gimmick. But I don't for one second believe that this is what they were doing or, more importantly, that Anne believed she was laboriously writing out the entire diary into an old photograph album with a fountain pen to create something which could be used to market her own fictional novella of a diary to a London publisher.

Certainly, if Anne had believed that she was engaged in creating a marketing gimmick to accompany her novella in order to interest a London publisher in that work of fiction, Roger's above-quoted claim in May 2026 that 'she didn't expect Mike's fake to succeed in London and it's possible, even probable, that she didn't want it to succeed...Halfhearted co-conspirators do shoddy work' makes no sense at all. In that scenario, it wasn't 'Mike's fake', it was 'Anne's novella' which she would have wanted to succeed but Roger evidently has no confidence or belief in his own marketing gimmick suggestion... which then takes us back to what Anne thought she was doing when she wrote out the entire diary by hand with a fountain pen into an old photograph album.

On 30th April 2024 (#735 of "Who Were They?"), responding to Caroline Morris saying: "If she had helped Mike create it, either willingly or under some duress, to the extent of holding the pen and making sure the typescript would not betray them both, is it not strange that she would then have tried to destroy her own handiwork?", Roger said:

Not in the least, but it's interesting that you're now back to accepting the account of a "confirmed liar," or are you relying solely on little Caroline's version of the kitchen floor wrestling match?

As I've suggested about a million times, I think Anne humored Barrett because, to paraphrase her own words, Mike wouldn't accept the word "no" and was abusive. And again using Anne's own words, she thought Doreen would "just send Mike packing" anyway once she got one whiff of the dodgy diary.

I rather imagine the wrestling match took place after Mike returned to London and Anne finally realized that Doreen didn't send Mike packing.

So, you see, it depends on when this alleged fight took place, and we don't know that, do we?

From all accounts, Anne was extremely reluctant to attend the book launch and referred to it as a "nightmare."

Wonder why that is?

It seems rather doubtful it was because she feared Mike had nicked it--because she already willingly and spontaneously and somewhat humorously suggested that very scenario to a group of near strangers."

The story has changed. Now it wasn't a marketing ploy trick which caused Anne to write the diary, it was Anne humouring Mike because he was abusive. In which case, she always knew that Mike was planning to deceive Doreen with a forged diary so why did she later panic when the deception was successful? Well we can see that Roger now adopts Anne's claim that she thought Doreen would send Mike packing. So the attempted burning was after Mike returned from London not before as he had previously said. In which case, how does Roger explain Anne wanting the diary to be placed in a safe to protect it from fire? That's the thing. He doesn't explain it. He never once mentions it when setting out his theory.

Responding to Tom Mitchell's claim that he didn't think it credible that Anne was "tricked into entering Barrett's possibly pre-prepared text into the recently-acquired scrapbook", Roger said on 31 December 2024 (#308 of google ngrams):

"I don't know if you have lived a sheltered life, Ike (for your sake I hope you have), but your use of the word "tricked" reveals that you have a very superficial understanding of both what I suggested, and how convoluted the emotional dynamics can be between an alcoholic and a codependent---which, from my reading, is how I perceive the relationship of the two individuals who marketed the Maybrick Diary.

I've seen this 'dynamic' up close and personal with family members, so I think I'm qualified to speak of it without being labeled a fantasist.

Is the person who humors a scheming alcoholic truly "tricked," or--not so deep down--do they realize it's all bosh but find a way to pretend to believe because it allows them to take the path of least resistance?

I think it's very often the latter.

My suggestion--and that's all it is---but it's a damn good one--is that Barrett could have told his missus that the physical photo album confessional was just a marketing gimmick for their joint novella (and I hate to tell you this, old boy, but back in the 1980s there was a mystery novel marketed along similar lines in the United States)--which allowed her to suspend just enough belief to go along with Barrett's mad scheme.

Of course, the real reason was to humor him and thus keep peace in the house.

Would she have believed him?

Probably not.

But that's where the other angle comes in.

As I've told Caz about a zillion times, look no further than Anne Graham's own words.

I think Anne helped Barrett for the very reason she said she did--she assumed that when Barrett got to London with the ridiculous Diary, the literary agent Doreen Montgomery would "just send Mike packing."

Her own words!

In other words, that once the diary was seen by a sensible person---the melodramatic confession of Jack the Ripper in a quite possibly Edwardian photo album with newish ink and missing pages and a silly text, no less--- the gig would be up.

No one was more shocked than Anne that it wasn't. Which is why she later admitted that the book launch was a "nightmare."

This, I suspect, was Anne's guiding assumption in the first three months of 1992--Mike's scheme wouldn't work, so there was "no harm, no foul" in helping him.

There is nothing the least bit implausible in that, Ike.

Of course, I can appreciate why you need to insist there is, despite its coherence.

Roger wrote an additional qualification:

"I should qualify this statement.

Anne claimed that she helped Barrett (with the notes, the typescript, etc.) because she thought it should be a professional job---despite saying elsewhere that she didn't want the diary published and also stating their marriage was such that she & Mike couldn't collaborate. One of many contradictions.

Her statement that she thought "Doreen would just send Mike packing" was her mindset when Barrett took the diary to London in April 1992."

Roger is denying that there is a trick involved even though this version of his theory centres around a deception plan whereby Anne was tricked into writing out the text of the diary on the basis that she was assisting in a marketing gimmick even though Mike always intended to present the diary to Doreen Montgomery as the real diary of Jack the Ripper (as he had told Doreen over the telephone). But we are still no closer to knowing who actually created the text of the diary. Roger avoids mentioning it.

We may note, incidentally, that although Roger says that Anne's own words were that she thought Doreen would "just send Mike packing", this would seem to be a summary of what she said rather than her own words. Her own words, as cited in Inside Story (page 209) were that "she confidently expected Montgomery to throw her husband and the Diary out". While that could certainly be summarized as sending him packing, Roger shouldn't be wrapping something in quotation marks if those words were not used.

In February 2025, after Caroline Morris mischievously asked Michael Banks on Casebook how his beliefs were consistent with Roger's theory (which theory Banks didn't seem to be aware of), Banks asked Roger (on 6 February 2025, #359 - "Old Hoax or New or Not a Hoax at All?"), if there was a direct quote of Anne saying that she remembered her parents fighting over the diary). Roger replied:

"I'm afraid I can offer no insight into why another poster is attributing beliefs to you that you do not hold; I can only confirm that my own beliefs are often mangled and rephrased into vague parodies of what I actually wrote or believe.

Unless we are being mightily deceived, none of the diary researchers knew Barrett or Graham before Barrett turned up in London, and some didn't meet either of them until some years later.

On page 138 of Feldman's book there is an account of Caroline Barrett telling Paul Begg that her mother tried to burn the diary. This is while she was alone with Begg and away from her parents. I suppose one could argue that she was coached to say this, but it seems a pointless thing to coach her to say, unless you can think of how it would benefit the Barretts. What would be the purpose of it?

I think it only raised questions in the minds of the researchers, for they later asked Mike and Anne about it. I do think I need to correct one point, as I think it was Anne, and not Caroline, who mentioned the struggle taking place on the kitchen floor. But if she was going to burn the diary, wouldn't the kitchen be the logical place to do so? Still, Anne's own daughter would be the only one approaching 'corroboration.'

The reasons I think Graham was a reluctant participant are many, but they are by no mean conclusive. They include her complaint to her friend Audrey; her reluctance to attend the book launch; her behavior during the visit by police; the refusal of her royalty checks after splitting with Barrett. There may be others. Against this, it was Anne Graham who kept the diary afloat after Barrett started spilling the beans, and she did sign the collaboration agreement (though not, I understand, the publishing contract). I fully appreciate that one could argue that she was a full and willing participant. I just don't believe she was. I think Barrett's success in London scared the living hell out of her, and she had previously operated on the principle that nothing would come of the diary anyway.

Again, Roger has got confused into thinking that Caroline first mentioned the fight and the researchers later asked Anne and Mike about it. As we've seen, it was the other way round.

Roger, however, subsequently picked up on this:

"On reflection, it does sound like Paul or Martin did ask Caroline a leading question (or a series of leading questions): "Do you remember the row when your dad told your mum he was going to get it published?"

What had prompted Paul or Martin to ask that question?

Somehow, an account of the row must have prompted Caroline being asked about it. But if Feldman can be believed (and who knows) it was Caroline who added the detail about an attempt to burn the diary."

On 10 February 2025, Roger wrote to Tom Mitchell (#32 of "New Ideas and New Research on the Diary"):

"This is why I don't enjoy discussing the hoax with you, Ike. You don't act in good faith.

I did not suggest Anne was "tricked" into writing the hoax. This shows the fundamental dishonesty of your approach.

I suggested the hoax could have started out as a fictional diary. One doesn't need to "trick" someone into writing a work of fiction. (Although it is somewhat interesting that Anne herself claims she tried to "manipulate" Mike into doing so).

And it would hardly have been the first or last time a Ripper theory was presented as fiction. Martin Fido appears to have had the same suspicion.

I also suggested that Mike could have come up with the idea of creating a physical diary as a marketing gimmick and Anne--as a codependent to an alcoholic--went along to humor him, even though she would have been suspicious of his intent.

rjpalmer 12-31-2024:

"My suggestion--and that's all it is---but it's a damn good one--is that Barrett could have told his missus that the physical photo album confessional was just a marketing gimmick for their joint novella (and I hate to tell you this, old boy, but back in the 1980s there was a mystery novel marketed along similar lines in the United States)--which allowed her to suspend just enough belief to go along with Barrett's mad scheme.

Of course, the real reason was to humor him and thus keep peace in the house.

Would she have believed him?

Probably not.

But that's where the other angle comes in.

As I've told Caz about a zillion times, look no further than Anne Graham's own words.

I think Anne helped Barrett for the very reason she said she did--she assumed that when Barrett got to London with the ridiculous Diary, the literary agent Doreen Montgomery would "just send Mike packing."

--

She wasn't "tricked" Ike---that's a superficial rendering of what I suggested.

And if this suggestion is wrong, all it means is that Anne was a more willing co-conspirator than I suspect."

I'm not sure that Roger's protestations here about not having suggested Anne was tricked into writing the diary are correct. Remember what he told Caroline Morris in 2018?

"Shirley Harrison gives an amazing insight into Barrett’s modus operandi---a nasty little scheme involving readers of LOOT Magazine. Barrett, inadequate in things literary, fools other people into doing his work for him.

This is the key to the puzzle. Put your thinking cap on and work it out. The word 'novella' might be a helpful clue. Have a good week."

Barrett fools people into doing work for him.

He was saying there that Mike had fooled Anne into doing work for him. He had tricked her!

Was it it fair for Roger to accuse Tom of not arguing in good faith by summarizing Roger's plot as a "trick"? In the 2024/2025 version of Roger's theory what else was it but a trick? Roger was saying that Anne had been deceived by Tom in writing the diary out by hand because he told her it was a marketing gimmick.

Remember this:

"David Barrat wrote an article along the lines of 'how the diary could have been legal.' The idea is that the fictional text was written in the scrapbook as a marketing ploy to sell the idea to potential publishers. I don't know if that was Barrett's plan, and I have my doubts, but I have long wondered if that is what he had told Anne. He could have told her it was just a marketing gimmick for the sake of his agent and the publishers, but once he got to London, he would make sure they understood it was a work of fiction. Only when Barrett did show up in London, he didn't tell them this. To his surprise, they took it seriously. And it is possible that when he got back to Liverpool and Anne figured this out, this was when they physically fought over the diary on the kitchen floor, as reported by their daughter to Paul Begg."

That is a trick pure and simple. There is no other way of describing it.

While the concept of Mike tricking Anne into thinking she was spending her time helping him with a marketing gimmick is ingenious, it doesn't align with Anne's statement that she felt "physically ill" when Mike "talked of getting a publisher for the Diary". If he'd meant a publisher for the fictional diary, she would't have felt physically ill. She would have been delighted. So that means she must have been talking about feeling physically ill that Mike spoke of getting a publisher to publish the diary as if it was genuine. But he can't possibly have told her about this because he is supposed to have told her that he was only creating the fake diary as a marketing ploy for the fictional diary or novella. So once again Roger is confusing himself with his own theory.

Of course, that statement of Anne's being physically ill when Mike talked of getting a publisher for the diary doesn't particularly align with her later statement that she was confident that the literary agent, Doreen, wasn't going to be interested in taking on the diary and was going to throw it out. There would have been no need for her to feel physically ill. She would have been confident nothing would happen.

On 17 February 2025 Roger told Lombro (#691 of "Old Hoax or new")

"Why would anyone dealing with an allegedly stolen manuscript gratuitously reveal that their husband had writing aspirations and that she had tried to talk him into writing a novella on the same subject? It would only invite suspicion that they were in fact the authors. It's like the wife of a bloke trying to peddle an obviously bogus Picasso gratuitously admitting that they dabbled in expressionist painting themselves and were particularly fond of blue.

So why would Anne reveal this? The context here is that in mid-1994 Nick Warren at Ripperana began to unravel the fact that Barrett, the 'scrap metal dealer' had worked as a freelance journalist in the mid-1980s and had 'contributed features to national magazines'--something that Warren had learned from Devereux's daughters. From the beginning, Barrett admitted to owning a word processor--evidently a slip when he was asked if he could supply a transcript of the diary--which must have surprised Shirley, but Barrett invented a bogus cover story of having purchased the WP after he had received the diary from Devereux, which was a lie because he had bought it in the mid-1980s when he launched his writing career.

With the cat out of the bag, Anne incorporated Barrett's writing aspirations into her own cover story. That's how I see it."

When one compares Roger's statement: "she had tried to talk him into writing a novella" with his 2018 remark that "Anne wrote a novella about Maybrick-as-Jack... and did 99% of the actual work." it's hard to see what Roger is actually saying.

To Herlock on 2 July 2025 (#962 - Old Hoax or New) Roger said:

"If the wrestling match on the kitchen floor, as described by young Caroline was real (and I realize that you are skeptical of it) it might have occurred when Mike returned from London, beaming that he had "fish on the line." According to Shirley, who was there at the time, Anne could barely be dragged to the book launch and it was a relatively short time later that she left Barrett for good."

To Caroline Morris on 5 August 2025, Roger said:

"And who is to say that Anne approved of his shenanigans? According to your own theory, Anne didn't want it published. I agree. I even tend to agree with your belief that Anne and Mike fought on the kitchen floor. I can't wrap my mind around Little Caroline just making it up out of the blue."

Replying to Caroline Morris having said "Did Anne have no fear of what Mike might do if she had succeeded in destroying it instead?" , Roger stated in #1792 of "Old Hoax or New":

"And here I thought you BELIEVED Little Caroline's story of Anne and Mike wrestling for the diary on the kitchen floor?

She may or might not have feared for her life, but if the story is true, she certainly had a greater fear that Barrett would damage both their reputations by trying to publish this malarky.

Of course, as someone pointed out, only a week or so later Anne assured Doreen that the diary would be kept securely in a safe in case the house burnt down.

Sounds again like someone who couldn't keep her stories straight...or very inconsistent and conflicted....but hey...you once met her....you can read her like a book....!"

MAKE IT MAKE SENSE"

Roger's "MAKE IT MAKE SENSE" cry here applies to his own theory as much as anything Caroline Morris ever said about it. At the end of it not even sure what his theory is, and I think I've read all his posts.

PALMER AND BANKS

While Roger has been generally consistent over the years in saying that Anne had some role in the diary's creation, what is startlingly new in 2026 is his claim that Barrett was incapable of doing it himself.

It's difficult to believe that some sort of hidden agenda isn't involved in him suddenly parroting diary defender talking points. That agenda seems to involve him having a problem with Michael Banks.

Until this year, relations between the two men seemed to be good although, going through Roger's old posts from last year, there is one strange thing that should be noted. This is the strange unsolicited advice that Roger started to give Banks to stop posting. Hence on 17th December 2024, we find Roger saying:

"Hi Herlock - It's up to you, of course, but for the sake of your own sanity, it may be time to hang up your hat on the grounds that 'you can lead a horse to water,' etc., etc".

Then on 1st May 2025:

"You are your own man and can do as you please, but it might be asked whether there is any point in trying to convert someone like Ike".

Now it may be that Roger was aiming his comments more at Tom and Caroline Morris but he does seem to have been making an effort to persuade Michael Banks not to post which is extremely odd. It's especially odd given that Roger doesn't seem to be able to take his own advice and stop posting even though on too many occasions to mention he's posted things like "I'm done", "I'm out of here" "I'm off" etc. only to return a few hours or days later.

Here's one example:

And then another less than five hours later:

Those were posts #9982 and #9988 in the 'Incontrovertible' thread but he was back with posts #9989, #9994, #9995, #9996 and then celebrated post #10000 in the same thread on the very same day that he'd earlier said he had left for good:

There was one other unnecessary post by Roger that I've discovered which related to Michael Banks. Banks had posted this to Tom Mitchell on 10 August 2025:

"The story is full of holes and contradictions, different people say different things and their accounts are withheld and kept top secret to avoid Roger and myself (and others) ridiculing and debunking them."

For some reason, Roger couldn't help himself and posted:

"I wouldn't say that I'm motivated by a desire to 'debunk and ridicule' the Battlecrease provenance but, rather, to try to understand why people believe in it. To weigh, if I can, whether it is plausible or believable or if the 'evidence' is what some claim it to be."

I'm going to leave aside Roger's laughable claim that he's not in any way motivated by a desire to debunk and ridicule the diary defender nonsense because what Banks was alleging, as I read it, was that documents were not being produced by the diary defenders because they think that Roger, Banks and others will use those documents to debunk and ridicule their theories. In other words, it's irrelevant whether Roger actually wants to debunk and ridicule anything, only that the diary defenders believe that their defence of the diary will be debunked and ridiculed, which is the reason they withhold documents.

Michael Banks did say in response to Roger's post that his points were "fair points" and that "perhaps my choice of words like 'ridicule' wasn't the best" but that is probably because he is a nicer and more polite person than I would have been in such a situation. The real issue here, though, is that Tom was clearly on the ropes at this point, having been exposed by Banks as giving inconsistent reasons for withholding documents, yet Roger decided to pick up unnecessarily on what Banks had said about him rather than assisting Banks in applying more pressure on Tom to produce the secret documents. Talk about losing sight of the overall objective to engage in personal nitpicking.

We may note that there was an incident in February 2025 when Caroline Morris, in a post addressed to Michael Banks which referred to Anne's "blind forgery", said:

"According to the Barrett theory, it wasn't even an attempt by Anne to deceive anyone, but a piece of creative fiction which Mike evidently thought he could pinch and pass off as a genuine confession by JM/JtR."

She then asked him:

"How on earth he could have been remotely confident, let alone 'entirely satisfied' that what she had put into the diary's creation would not immediately be seen for what it was, is a question that no doubt Palmer feels most qualified to answer, but 'mental vegetable' sounds quite an apt description for anyone who would seriously present their wife's intentionally fictional story, hoping it would be mistaken for anything else. I mean, who does that in the real world? Has anyone heard of a comparable example?"

Now that was a good question in respect of Roger's theory but it didn't have anything to do with Michael Banks. Why was he being asked to defend some kind of "theory" he'd never mentioned. In fact, Banks seemed confused, saying:

"When you refer to "the Barrett theory" what exactly are you referring to Caz?"

When she eventually replied she said that she was the wrong person to ask! And she never explained it.

In the same post, Banks also asked her:

"Why could someone like Mike Barrett not have expected his wife's blind forgery to be authenticated as Maybrick's handiwork from 1888/9? I don't understand why not. You don't explain it."

Now this was all clearly mischief making by Morris who was forcing Banks to either agree with Roger's theory or disagree with him. If Banks understood this he didn't fall for it. Because two days later, on 6th February 2025, Roger addressed a post to him setting out "Fido's theory of the hoax" and then told him the very bare bones of his own theory

"I think Anne cooperated on that principle, convinced that no one would take the diary seriously, and because of that, the handwriting NOT being Maybrick's was only one more good reason for believing that Mike's scheme would never work. As such, what was the harm with helping him and keeping peace in the house??"

What he didn't tell him, strangely, was that he thought the diary started off as a work of fiction. All he seems to have been saying was that Anne was an unwilling accomplice when she wrote the diary. Roger added:

"It makes perfect sense, fits all the facts, and no one has been able to punch a single hole in it. She cooperated, but only on the assumption the whole thing would quickly implode."

I don't think it's quite true that "no one has been able to punch a single hole" in Roger's theory. In any event, he raised the question of whether Anne had tried to burn the diary and said he didn't know but didn't think little Caroline would have told a lie.

Michael's reply was diplomatic:

"Your theory about Anne seems to be similar to one she's been attributing to me. I don't suppose it's the only possible theory, though. Dunno why she thinks it's got anything to do with me."

He added one question:

"Can I ask you one thing though. Is there a direct quote of Caroline saying that she remembered seeing her parents fighting over the diary? And if that's all she saw, what's that got to do with burning it? I mean, how do we know they weren't fighting over who had control of it, or something like that? Maybe someone's asked this before but I'm hoping you'll be more receptive to a newbie like me asking questions that might already have been answered years ago."

There followed a perfectly polite conversation between Banks and Palmer in which Roger said:

"I fully appreciate that one could argue that she was a full and willing participant. I just don't believe she was. I think Barrett's success in London scared the living hell out of her, and she had previously operated on the principle that nothing would come of the diary anyway."

And now look at this classic post from 7th February 2025:

Please read that carefully:

"Whether the primary author was Anne or Mike or if it was both of them equally involved is unknowable, and to some degree irrelevant, and I merely offered my own conjecture, based on what is available. That’s all it is, and I’m not married to any particular dynamic."

So in 2025 it was "unknowable" whether the primary author was Anne or Mike and "to some degree irrelevant". This is exactly what Michael Banks has been saying in 2026 and the complete opposite of what Roger has been arguing. Now he most certainly is married to a particular dynamic. What has caused such a dramatic change of opinion?

On the same day, Banks said to Caroline Morris:

"More recently, you asked me if I have doubts about "the Barrett theory". But, as I don't know what it is, and you can't tell me, how am I supposed to respond?"

Meanwhile Banks had dug up the quote from Anne saying she wanted the diary placed in a safe to protect it from fire which, surprisingly, Roger didn't seem to be aware of:

"Thanks for that interesting quote, Herlock. I must have missed it back in 2018 and couldn't find a reference to it in the archive.

It's strange how, many years ago, Anne was marketed as plausible and consistent, yet the more one looks, the more she contradicted herself.

Anne being 'chirpy' and 'friendly' with the woman who is attempting to publish the book she doesn't want published is also troubling.

I might have to rethink my assumptions about how willing she was to accommodate Barrett's schemes, but people can disguise their emotions."

Roger doesn't appear to have done much rethinking of his assumptions in the meantime. He's never explained how Anne's desire to protect the diary from fire is consistent with her attempt to burn it in a fire. But the exchange ended politely with Michael Banks giving him a thumbs up.

We may note here that Roger discovered at this time that when Anne told the authors of Inside Story that she attempted to burn the diary after Mike returned from London this would appear to have been a lie because we now know that when Mike returned from London she wanted it placed in a bank safe:

"The claim Anne made to the 'Inside' authors appears to be the total opposite of the truth, in view of what she actually said at the time to Doreen. So much so that one can probably call it a lie!"

So when did the attempted burning happen? Roger doesn't say.

Anyway, I don't see any evidence of any other problems between Roger and Banks who seemed to get along reasonably well until an infamous incident on 12 March 2026 when, trying to justify his refusal to produce important documents in the case, Tom Mitchell falsely stated that in 2022 I'd privately asked him for some material which he freely gave me, thus supposedly showing what a helpful guy he really is. Michael Banks pointed out to him later that day that I'd posted a blog showing that this wasn't true. Tom replied, saying he found it hard to believe that his memory had let him down so badly and that he was "pretty sure" that I had asked him for a full list of Mike Barrett's 16 Celebrity articles. Even after I posted the full exchange of emails which showed that it was Tom who had initiated the exchange, and that in the exchange I never asked him for anything, Tom was still wondering why he would have sent me unsolicited material.

Michael Banks made a very simple post on 13th March 2026 in response to Tom's complaint that I had posted our email exchange:

"How else was Orsam supposed to demonstrate that what you were saying was false, Tom? Even after his first blog post you were still refusing to correct your error."

Roger decided to interfere and, quoting the above, posted:

"With respect, Mike, why keep the pot on the boil? What purpose does it serve?"

Well Banks was simply responding to Tom's childish whining. He wasn't keeping "the pot on the boil". He had also asked Tom a question (not cited by Roger)

Look at what you posted yesterday, Tom:

"A few years ago, David Barrat asked me for some material he realised I must have..."

Was that statement true or false?"

It was a very simple question addressed to Tom asking him a question for which the answer was within his personal knowledge.

Giving Banks some more unsolicited advice, Roger posted: "My advice is to let it go."

I think Michael Banks would have been in his rights to have told Roger exactly where to insert his advice but he didn't. He simply ignored him. But Roger couldn't stop himself and on 14th March he posted:

"It's sad to see Michael Banks keeping this ancient misunderstanding on the boil despite his own imperfect knowledge of what actually happened."

Banks again ignored Roger but said to Tom:

"It may be due what Roger calls my "imperfect knowledge", Tom, but I still don't understand why, in 2026, you were posting on this forum about what you thought David Barrat, who has never been a member of this forum, had been privately asking you to send him four years ago. What did that have to do with the price of fish? Why did you think it was sufficiently important to mention in a post defending your refusal to produce the documents in your possession? Can you please explain it for me in very simple terms that I'll be able to follow?"

That really was the key issue which Roger didn't seem to understand.

And Michael Banks' approach turned out to be entirely justified when Tom retracted his original claim in a post dated 18th March 2026, in which he admitted that: "I was incorrect to say "A few years ago, David Barrat asked me for some material he realised I must have" on being checked, it soon transpired to be a misunderstanding on my part which I probably should have spotted three and a half years ago but I didn't." thus showing that Banks did, after all, have good knowledge of "what actually happened". If Roger had had his way we may never have got that admission.

As I commented at the time on this blog, I think Roger was feeling guilty at his role in the affair and was trying to block further discussion about it for that reason. Otherwise I have no idea why he felt the need to continually interfere in Michael Banks' perfectly reasonable questions addressed to Tom. Once again, Roger seemed to lose sight of the bigger picture which was that Tom was spouting bullshit justifications for withholding documents, including the additional diary pages, and was being directly challenged about those justifications. But what we've seen is that instead of pressing Tom to release the withheld material, Roger has now decided to say that he isn't interested in seeing it after all!

This is particularly surprising given his attitude over the Gray/Barrett recordings and Barretts' diary transcript which Roger continually pressed to be made available. He ever promised to leave the forums if Keith supplied them! Hence:

As we can see, Roger said (my bold):

I'll tell you what. There's no reason why my presence on the scene, or my skepticism of Tom Mitchell, should in any way prohibit the release of appropriate materials to interested researchers.

Maybe we can come to an agreement?

If you release all 15 tapes for public airing, and you also make available the Barretts' typescript of the diary (which Peter Birchwood requested over two decades ago, and David Barrett requested 5 years ago) I will make no commentary whatsoever.

I'll stay completely out of it.

In fact, I'll quietly submit to having my account permanently and immediately removed from this website, and JTR Forums can also give me the heave-ho.

They are the only two forums I belong to; I have no Facebook account, etc. So, I'll be utterly ghosted as far as any public debate goes.

Fair enough?

RP

So, if Keith released the transcript and tapes Roger promised to "quietly submit to having my account permanently and immediately removed from this website, and JTR Forums can also give me the heave".

Well, Keith did release the requested documents within a few weeks of Roger's post. In fact, the transcript was made available a mere five days later on 15th December 2023, while the Gray/Barrett recordings were released on 3rd January 2024.

Did Roger keep his promise to have his accounts removed from both Casebook and JTR Forums? No, he did not! Of course he didn't.

Why he even said such a daft thing in the first place is unfathomable.

But we can see how keen he was to obtain unreleased evidence in the case that he would make such a promise. Today, for some reason, he's lost interest in seeing the additional seven diary pages created by Mike Barrett.

Now it may be that Roger's sudden transformation into a quasi-diary defender,or mini-Morris, was because Michael Banks ignored his requests to stop talking about the 2022 incident. But that seems unlikely. That incident came to an end on 18th March. It wasn't until (exactly) a month later, on 18th April, that Palmer's strange attack on Banks, replying to one of his posts from five months earlier, commenced.

So what's going on here?

Well one remarkable thing about Palmer's string of posts addressed to Banks which started on 18th April is the number of times I'm mentioned:

Let's follow them through starting with his #888 of the JTR Forums Diary Forgery thread:

"I agree with David Barrat's general point, which you have repeated several times on this thread that these unique documents should be made available...I also entirely agree with Barrat's observation that Mike was a freelance writer and hid this fact from his agent and other diary researchers...I'm just not as convinced as you and David apparently are that Barrett was the author, or the main author."

Why did he feel the need to agree or disagree with me? Until this post, I've barely even spoken about the additional diary pages after I first posted about them in my "Secret Ripper Diary Extracts" article in December 2023. In that article, I said that everyone needs to see those pages but I don't think I've made any demand for them to be produced since then. Why does Roger say that Banks is "repeating" my general point? It's as much Roger's general point considering that he invited Tom to post them in 2022, as we've seen.

Why does he also think I'm convinced that Barrett was the author or main author? I've always had an open mind as to who wrote the diary. The way I usually put it is to say that Mike's attempt to obtain a Victorian diary shows that he was involved in the creation of it. I've not commented in any categorical way about who wrote the text. But it does seem daft to use the expression that Barrett had "inside knowledge". What a silly way of putting it, especially as Roger's own theory involves Barrett actually writing at least some of the diary text (up to as much as 30% of it, although why not 40% or 50% is never explained).

That said, in August 2025, in direct contradiction to his 2026 position, Roger was happy to accept that Mike might have contributed as much as 50% to the diary:

"Nor have I ever suggested that Mike didn't contribute. I once estimated that Barrett's contribution could have amounted to roughly 10%--which is nothing more than a guess---it could have been 20% or 50%---and I know you know this because you've referred to it repeatedly. So why are you now misrepresenting my views? Is that a nice way to behave?"

So it could have been a joint 50/50 Mike and Anne project after all! I thought this was impossible. Boy if Michael Banks had suggested this he'd have received a good kicking from Roger.

We also see here Roger's classic gaslighting tactic - which I've only recently discovered is a tactic of his - of claiming to have been misrepresented when, in fact, the person is representing him perfectly well.

Going back to his 2026 debate with Michael Banks, I didn't get a mention in Roger's next few posts but in #922 we find:

"David Barrat and now Mike Banks have repeatedly called for these additional pages to be made public, but I don't particular care if I ever see them."

Again, why is Roger imagining me "repeatedly" calling for these additional pages to be made public? I've never even once called for them to be released! This is what I said in my December 2023 article:

"The wheeze having now rebounded on him, with his confession that all the lines sound exactly like they could have come from the diary, he's clammed up and no more pages have been forthcoming even though, in the current debate about Mike's writing ability, it would be extremely useful to see exactly what Mike was capable of.

Everyone needs to see those pages.

But no one can. Censorship is in place. The withheld pages are classified as top secret 'diary' pages even though there is literally no good reason for their suppression. Mitchell has them, he's allowed to post them, he just doesn't want to. It's yet another tragic example of diary defender document suppression."

That's not a call for publication. It's just me saying that everyone needs to see them. I have no contact with Tom Mitchell or Keith Skinner. I don't assume they will read these articles. So there's no point me calling for anything on this website.

Roger went on in the post to supposedly agree with me about certain things;

"Still, I certainly agree with David Barrat's exasperation that these documents are still playing hide & seek after all these years, particularly at a time when interest in the Maybrick Hoax has seemingly waned to an all-time low."

"I find it difficult to understand--if this was your attitude--and you have no pony in the race and simply want the truth---why you seem so reluctant to have Barrat look over the materials. Isn't a second set of eyes useful? Or do you have so little faith in his skills or his ability to be objective?"

"Anyone who suggests that Barrat isn't a keen observer of the Maybrick Diary is fooling themselves. His analysis is second to none--and I would encourage you two to cooperate before the sands run out of the hourglass."

It's very curious. Why isn't he referring to Michael Banks' exasperation? Where was he seeing my exasperation? Like I say, until this post I've barely commented on the three pages. Why does he think Tom is reluctant for me to look over the materials? I'm not even asking to see them.

When Roger unnecessarily reproduced a post by Michael Banks from 2017 in #977 he said:

"Now that you’ve completed your rather remarkable metamorphosis into a person who is completely aligned with David Barrat’s view of the diary as Mike Barrett’s ‘shoddy hoax’ how do you explain ‘Professor Mike Moriarty’s” ability to convince Drs. Forshaw and Canter that the diary is an insightful portrayal of a drug addict and murderer?"

Then in #995 we had:

"Looked at from a different angle than Banks and Barrat..."

In #1012:

"In the pursuit of defending a profoundly weak position, the likes of Banks and Barrat willingly dip into the known (or purported) history of Mike Barrett to pluck out whatever pieces they feel they can fit into their narrative."

In #1022:

"I think Messrs Barrat and Banks are quite wrong about Mike Barrett's capabilities"

Why is it always about me (and Banks)? Roger used to taunt Tom Mitchell with how I lived rent free in his head but I seem to have moved permanently into Roger's head free of charge these days.

But it didn't stop there. We then had this deranged remark:

"Obviously, Messrs. Banks and Barrat don't like their fundamental assumptions challenged but I say it is still very much an open question."

What the flaming heck is he talking about? Until now I'd not said a single word about this entire discussion. How do I suddenly not like my fundamental assumptions being challenged? Mind you, the same could be asked about Banks. What has he said which shows he doesn't like his fundamental assumptions being challenged? What are the fundamental assumptions that Palmer is even talking about?

Is it possible that Palmer has flipped out and gone to the dark side simply because I dared to question the idea that Montague Druitt was responsible for an attack on a woman in September 1887?

It's very hard to avoid this conclusion given the timing of events. Roger's post of 18th April was a mere 48 hours after my detailed response to Roger's Druitt theory in "Lord Orsam Says..." which was published on 16th April 2026. Suddenly, like a dog with a stick, he wants to challenge everything Orsam. Poor old Michael Banks seems to be bearing the brunt of it because Roger is undoubtedly associating him with me. We've seen how it's "Banks and Barrat" this and "Banks and Barrat" that.

As discussed in my "Nelson's Column" article, Scott Nelson once claimed to be addressing me when writing a post to Michael Banks. Tom Mitchell - the guy who flips out if you suggest that he might be Blackpool Brian when Blackpool Brian posts comments on this site which exactly reflect Tom's thoughts and Tom agrees entirely with everything Blackpool Brian says - remarkably appears to think the same thing if his strange response about Banks winning "The Most Ironic Comment of 2026" is anything to go by. I'm not quite sure if I'm supposed to be Banks, or pulling Banks' strings, or influencing him or even writing his posts. I'm not sure how any of that would even work or be humanly possible but Nelson is weird and Mitchell is a nut. I expected more from Roger Palmer though.

When Banks asked him: "Is Barrat in the room with you now?" he came back with the ludicrous statement that

"This is one of the most bizarre posts I've ever seen on the internet, Mike. Really quite strange. I'm going to ignore the lasts bits that are both incomprehensible and, I fear, mentally unhealthy."

As if he didn't have a clue why Banks would ask him if I'm the same room with him! To be clear, I'm pretty sure the suggestion was that Roger is seeing me everywhere and that is entirely confirmed by his posts.

We may note that both Roger and Tom, within a few days of each other, did the exact same thing in reproducing one of Banks' posts from September 2017 in which he had expressed scepticism that Mike Barrett could have written the diary on his own. As I read Banks' posts, that is still his position but, at that time, he appears to have believed that "one off instance" might be a 19th century expression thus leading him to think that the diary was or might be an older fake.

Had Roger and Tom continued with their examination of Michael Banks' old posts they would have seen his development in thinking as clear as day. As he's publicly stated long before now, he read Robert Smith's September 2017 book and was amazed by the poor response relating to the origins of "'one off" despite the resources available to Smith. He first explained this in a post dated 31st August 2018, within a year of publication of Smith's book:

"If I was on the pro-diary side, especially someone like Robert Smith, my main tactic would be to select the most convincing point against the diary and try to rebut it. To knock away a central pillar. I’d suggest that at this point in time the most convincing point against the diary is David’s ‘one-off instance.’ I can’t understand why Robert Smith didn’t commission an expert in the evolution of language to try and refute the point. ( I realise that those against the diary will mention Kate Flint but wasn’t her opinion given at a time when the phrase ‘one off’ was being considered in isolation? I could be wrong on this point though.)

How much stronger would the pro-case be if it could be said that Professor So and So, with 30 years of experience and knowledge and a couple of books published, had said “there’s no reason at all why James Maybrick couldn’t have used the phrase ‘one-off instance’ in 1888/9?” Most people would then have been likely to have accepted an acknowledged expert in the field’s opinion over David’s. The fact that Robert Smith chose to select a usage in prisons of the isolated term ‘one off’ which has absolutely no relevance to the debate as it applies to the moving of prisoners from one area of the prison to another does tend to hint at desperation on Mr Smith’s part. In fact, as I’ve said before, it’s difficult for me to believe that he couldn’t have known that this point wasn’t valid.

To sum up, it gives the appearance that David’s point has been pretty much conceded?"

That's exactly how a debate should work. He'd obviously read what I'd written about "one off" being a 20th century expression and was then astonished to read the weakness of the response from Smith, which was factually inaccurate, thus giving credibility to everything I'd said.

He further explained his thinking in a post from 2019:

"If I was Robert Smith and I was looking to prove that the diary was genuine my first move would have been to try and knock over the strongest argument against it by commissioning such an expert (or two) To be honest he did himself no favours with his attempt to disprove the point in his previous book."

He even did his own research, as he explained in a 2021 post (written after Caroline Morris had attempted to bamboozle him with nonsense):

"At the time I’d just read a book on the prison system and I thought I’d indulge in a bit of in depth research so I asked a bloke in the pub There was an oldish bloke in my local who’d been ‘detained’ around half a dozen times since the late 70’s purely because of his obsession for collecting (lead and copper piping mainly) A bit of a character who sadly died a couple of weeks ago. He told me that ‘one off’ was a well known and long-standing phrase in prisons but that it was to do with roll calls. Understandably prisons have to do roll calls at various times during the day to ensure that no one has ‘popped out’ so each area within the prison has to be certain of how many prisoners are there. If a prisoner has to be moved from one area to another (say for a dental appointment) the officer escorting him will say to the person in charge of the area “one off Mr ……..” Meaning “you need to take this prisoner off your roll and he’ll be added to the dentists roll."

As we can clearly see, Banks in 2017 had read a book about the prison system and subsequently worked out, from speaking to an ex-con, that contrary to what Smith was claiming in his 2017 book, "one off" was to do with prison roll calls and had nothing to do with "one off" from the diary to mean an unique or not-to-be-repeated event.

In August 2020, Banks asked if the presence of a phrase that couldn't have been employed in 1888/9 dampened a diary defender's enthusiasm for the diary.

On the same day, Banks told Barnett that the Bunny's Aunt post "seems convincing" as, indeed, it was.

Banks also told Barnett:

"If someone like Robert Smith wants to prove that the diary is genuine why doesn't he engage an expert in the evolution of language to research the strongest point against the genuineness of the diary?...the prison usage was a bit of a shocker to be honest..."

In 2021, Banks posted:

"No one has been able to refute David Orsam's 'one off instance' point. I've heard a few suggestions but none of them have come close to even putting a dent in the point. Robert Smith was reduced to a rather embarrassing prison-related 'explanation' in his book. Why doesn't this appear to bother anyone? Why, if he's so confident in the provenance of the diary, doesn't he simply commission an expert in the evolution of language to provide a refutation of David's point (which, after all, appears to be the strongest point against the genuineness of the diary.) if the diary as mine I'd want to attack the enemy's strongest point. Doesn't this smack of a lack of confidence?"

So we can see consistently, just as Banks said, after reading Robert Smith's book in 2017 his views on the diary changed and he was clearly reading my articles about the diary which, I might add, only commenced in July 2019 with my "One Off Article".

But let's get back to Roger's motives. There's obviously more to it than he likes to admit. It's not difficult to work out what's going on here.

As I've mentioned, on 16th April 2026 I published "Lord Orsam Says..." in which I defended my belief that Montague Druitt was unlikely to have been the person who attacked Minnie Cameron in September 1887 (or at least that there isn't sufficiently good evidence to say that he was) and a mere two days later Roger decided to reply to a post by Michael Banks from December 2025 to challenge his claim that the additional diary pages he wrote show that he was capable of writing the diary.

When Michael Banks asked him on 21st May if there was a connection between the two events (on the basis that Roger seemed to think that I am speaking through him) Roger, as we have seen, said it was "one of the most bizarre posts I've ever seen on the internet" and that his question was "incomprehensible and, I fear, mentally unhealthy". Yet, two days later, Roger was calling Michael Banks "Banks", as if he is not a real person, with the explanation that the person Roger was now calling "Banks" was:

"promoting a very narrow view of the case--and let's face it, it is David Barrat's view--there's not is a sliver of daylight between anything "Banks" has written over the past months and what has already appeared in Barrat's many blog posts and in his old posts on Casebook."

So there we have it. Poor old Michael Banks was getting the brunt of Roger's rage because - shock horror! - he agreed with my views about the diary.

Making a complete fool of himself, Roger went on to say:

"if anyone deviates even a millimeter from that Orthodoxy---such as rationally questioning Barrett's writing ability---or wonder why this truthful affidavit is filled with so many undeniable lies---"Banks" suddenly gets very antsy and suddenly changes the subject and tells us, rather arrogantly, that it 'doesn't matter." It only matters that it's a modern hoax. Don't open that door. Don't lift that curtain. And whatever you do, don't question his beliefs, hunches, and "feelings."

As we've seen, as recently as February 2025, Roger posted the exact same view that he was now criticizing Banks for. He had literally said that whether the primary diary author was Anne or Mike was "to some degree irrelevant" and, indeed, that it was "unknowable" who the primary author was.

Remember this:

"Whether the primary author was Anne or Mike or if it was both of them equally involved is unknowable, and to some degree irrelevant, and I merely offered my own conjecture, based on what is available. That’s all it is, and I’m not married to any particular dynamic."

That was Roger speaking.

Suddenly, when Michael Banks is saying the very same thing in 2026 as Roger was in 2025 he is arrogant and antsy.

You really couldn't make it up.

But, clearly, it goes back to my February blog post about Jonathan Hainsworth. I remember when writing it that I didn't want to mention Roger's theory about Minnie Cameron, and would have preferred it if Hainsworth had adopted it so that I could respond to Hainsworth rather than Roger. But that hadn't happened. I could hardly ignore Roger's theory in dealing with Hainsworth's claim that Druitt had, in fact, attacked Cameron. To have failed to have dealt with it, simply because Roger had said it, would have been cowardice on my part.

Roger's theory relied entirely on Minnie Cameron telling the truth about a barrister having attacked her. Roger thought it was unlikely that she would have lied about this but evidently missed that she had been drinking earlier that evening at the Old Bailey which would likely have been crawling with barristers so that she might have interacted with one. Oddly enough there is a parallel with Roger's belief that young Caroline Barrett must have been telling the truth about her mother wanting to burn the diary in a fire because he can't think why she would have lied about it. If only life was that simple and you can work out whether someone is lying based on whether they have a good reason to do so or not. I rather think that in reality things are more complex than this.

After I posted my blog about Hainsworth's magical thinking which mentioned Roger only in passing, Roger made the decision to respond to me on JTR Forums in a rash and ill judged post. Rather than calmly responding to set out his position in a normal way, he started his post with brimstone and fury on the (gaslighting) basis that I'd somehow misquoted or misstated his position when I had done no such thing. Apparently, challenging Roger's opinion is not allowed. I hadn't realized this.

I didn't agree with Roger's objections to my argument so I had no option but to include my response to him in my "Lord Orsam Says..." post of 16th April. As we've seen, this undoubtedly led to Roger starting to attack Michael Banks within 48 hours because, in Roger's view, Banks was "promoting a very narrow view of the case--and let's face it, it is David Barrat's view". The extreme irony of this is that the exact same thing could be said of Roger between the years 2020 and 2025.

If you search "Orsam" in Roger Palmer's Casebook posts you get 209 results, many of them speaking positively about things I'd said on this website (and not only in respect of diary matters). If you search Barrat you get a further 89 results. Here is just a very small selection of those results, as they relate to the diary, in no particular order, without any comment from me:

Amongst all those, you might have spotted the post from 20th January 2025 when Roger spoke of the "fear and paranoia" of Orsam being "at fever-pitch". Who'd have thought that in 2026 it would be Roger himself expressing fear and paranoia about Orsam?

At one point, as Roger himself says, he had been accused by Caroline Morris "of being in league with Orsam".

Now he turns into Caroline Morris and accuses Michael Banks of being in league with Orsam. You couldn't make it up!

After he once made a mistake based on a misunderstanding of one of my articles which he promptly corrected, and Caroline Morris posted in her charming and confused way that she bet that Orsam was "not best pleased at having to wipe your bottom for you", Roger replied to correctly state that I'd had nothing whatsoever to do with it:

"Lord Orsam never contacting [sic] me about this, nor corrected me, nor am I in secret communication with him regarding this, if that's what you're implying."

Now Roger has turned into a full bloom version of Caroline Morris without pausing to consider whether he is guilty of leaping to the exact same type of conclusion about my own relationship with Michael Banks that Caroline Morris was leaping to a few years back in respect of his relationship with me.

Indeed, the reason I've posted all those examples of Roger's posts mentioning me is to underline the point that I'm pretty sure that at any time over the past six years any diary defender could have written that Roger was "promoting a very narrow view of the case--and let's face it, it is David Barrat's view--there's not is a sliver of daylight between anything "Palmer" has written over the past years and what has already appeared in Barrat's many blog posts and in his old posts on Casebook". Can Roger seriously not see and appreciate this? Hell's teeth, if someone had said this to him even I would have agreed with it. Until very recently I didn't think there was a sliver of daylight between us in respect of the diary. I thought our views on the diary were pretty much perfectly aligned.

Sure, I was vaguely aware that Roger had occasionally put forward some theories about Anne being the driver behind the diary but I regarded that as just Roger being Roger, testing the waters with Caroline Morris. He does like his theories, does Roger, but I would have regarded it as harmless. While I recall thinking it wasn't a particularly good idea to post speculative hostages to fortune in this way, which did nothing but give Caroline Morris a good stick to beat him with, I didn't view his theories as being in any way opposed to anything I'd ever said because, like Michael Banks, and, indeed, like Roger from 2025, I think it's unknowable as to who the primary author of the diary was and regard it, like Roger from 2025, as to some degree irrelevant.

Roger has stunned me with his hostility to Michael Banks and I simply cannot believe his adoption of silly Caroline Morris lines on the diary such as when, on 23 May 2026, he suggested that Banks has failed to "wonder why this truthful affidavit is filled with so many undeniable lies". That is Caroline Morris all over.

To the extent that Roger is saying that I, Lord Orsam, have failed to wonder why Barrett's affidavit (which I've never called a "truthful affidavit") is full of so many "undeniable lies" well that isn't true but, even more, I'm unaware of what these "undeniable lies" are. I once asked Caroline Morris to tell me what the lies were in Mike's affidavit but she couldn't do it. All she could do was identify possible errors (such as the wrong dates) but I've said so many times that Alan Gray, who drafted the affidavit, is likely to have been responsible for those. There may be lies in Mike's affidavit because he was a liar but I don't know how Roger is able to refer to "undeniable lies". What are they? It's very strange diary defender behaviour which I can only compare to how The Baron, after years of making posts that the diary is an obvious fake, suddenly decided that it might be genuine after all which, funnily enough, appears to have been the result of a personal grudge against Michael Banks rather than a genuine conversion to diary defending.

Ironically, it was Roger who pointed out to The Baron on Casebook that what he'd said about the diary in the past contradicted what he was saying now. Does Roger really lack the self-awareness to understand that he has turned into The Baron?

The Baron was, of course, another character who, at one time, people seemed to think was either me or somehow under my control. Anyone who agrees with me about the diary is treated as me or my representative. Roger, as someone who, as we've seen, regularly repeated my own views on Casebook about the diary, should know better. A lot better.

DEEPER THAN DRUITT?

Is it possible that Roger's burst of hostility towards Michael Banks and, by extension, towards me goes deeper than my recent posts about his Druitt theory?

I think it might.

Back in 2015 I posted an article as part of my "Suckered! Trilogy" which was entitled The Third Man. The trilogy was a response to the works of three individuals: Simon Wood, Wolf Vanderlinden and Roger Palmer.

In respect of Palmer, I was responding to his 2010 trilogy published in Casebook Examiner in which he argued that Inspector Walter Andrews went to Canada in November 1888 in order to carry out secret background research into Francis Tumblety in the event of his being charged by Scotland Yard with the Whitechapel Murders. To get him to Canada, Roger believed that a fraudster called Roland Barnett 'became Scotland Yard's vehicle for sending Andrews to America in late November 1888.' For Palmer, Roland Barnett was only the cover to enable Andrews to get to Canada for the far more important Ripper-related Tumblety research.

I wasn't terribly kind to Palmer's arguments. In particular, Roger had noted the existence of a letter written by Robert Anderson on 19th November 1888 on the subject of Roland Barnett. The letter was missing - no one in the world of Ripperology or history in general had ever seen it - but its existence was known because Godfrey Lushington, the permanent under secretary at the Home office, had mentioned it in a letter four days later. Roger could only speculate as to what Anderson's letter was about. His conclusion was that ."..it is clear from Lushington's letter that Robert Anderson had inquired about the feasibility of sending a man to North America and was further asking if he could use the extradition of the prisoner to Roland Barnett to do it.'

Now, in one of those incredibly rare moments that hardly ever happens in real life, I actually discovered Robert Anderson's hitherto unseen letter of 19th November 1888 in an obscure file in the National Archives. Wow! I was as surprised as anyone. It revealed that Anderson had not been inquiring about the feasibility of sending a man to North American and was not asking if he could use the extradition of the prisoner Roland Barnett to do it. Further, even without my discovery, the fact of the matter is that there was nothing in Lushington's letter which could have sensibly led Roger to the inference he had drawn from it.

Normally one can only counter a speculative theory with more speculation but, unusually, here I had the documentary proof that Roger's theory was incorrect.

Here is what I said in my 2015 article:

"With the greatest respect to Mr Palmer, and even allowing for the fact that he had not seen the letter from Anderson (quoted in full above), this is nonsense of the highest order.  No such thing was clear at all from Lushington's letter and it certainly does not feature in Anderson's actual letter.  It is an example of someone reading what they wanted to read into a document because of a pre-determined theory."

There were various other similar pretty harsh statements made by me about Palmer's arguments in my article.

Now, after I published the article (plus the other two in the trilogy) I received raving and barmy personal attacks from Simon Wood and Wolf Vanderlinden, neither of whom did themselves any favours by arguing the unarguable, to the extent that they even argued anything other than just attacking me and my motives.

Roger Palmer, on the other hand, stayed silent and has never commented on my article in public (nor did he ever say anything to me in private). He wasn't actively posting at the time I published it so I can't say for sure that he even read it but I assume that he has done. However, I greatly respected him for saying nothing. The truth is that there was nothing he could say. I had demolished his theory. The Anderson letter by itself proved he was wrong in his speculation. But that happens. Theories are only theories and are not necessarily right. Silence was the sensible course and Roger adopted the sensible course.

Roger and I started to communicate by email in the latter part of 2018 (but not about the diary until 2019). I never noticed even the remotest trace of hostility towards me in his emails. The fact that Roger was able to privately discuss the diary with me in a most civilized fashion really did cause me to have a great deal of respect for him. It was a conscious thought in my head at the time because I knew I had been very harsh towards his Tumblety theory. It was incredible that he didn't seem to hold anything against me and, I assumed, he must realized that he had been in error and didn't mind.

But human nature is human nature. It wouldn't be in any way surprising if there was a certain amount of pent up resentment against me by Roger over the years due to my "Third Man" article which has suddenly exploded, with poor Michael Banks being at the sharp end. I certainly can't help feeling that this is part of what we saw on the JTR Forums in April and May of this year.

It was Roger himself who brought up the concept of the narcissism of small disputes (in which he was involved) so he must have recognized a certain element of narcissistic behaviour on his own part. It's difficult to view his actions as anything but narcissism fuelled by personal animus. Someone with a less ego-centric driven view of the world would surely have recognized that he and Michael Banks were on the same "side", saying essentially the same thing about the fake diary being a creation of Mike and Anne Barrett. Had he put as much energy into calling for Tom and Keith to release the seven additional pages as he has done in arguing that Mike Barrett wasn't capable of writing the diary, we might actually have seen those pages. But he preferred to take a different course which has, sadly, done nothing but expose his twisting and his bad faith arguments.

I never expected to be writing a post about Roger's diary beliefs. They were totally irrelevant to me. I didn't care what he thought about the specifics of the diary creation or even if what he thought made sense. My view is there's absolutely no point in speculating about such impossible-to-know matters but if you want to speculate knock yourself out. Have fun with it. It's probably gonna get you a whacking from Morris but if you like being whacked by Morris go ahead. What is astonishing is for Roger to be criticizing and, indeed, attacking another person who thinks that the diary is an obvious fake for not sharing his beliefs. Now I look back over his posts in a new light, I can see massive weaknesses in his theory which has been ever-changing and contradictory. As far as I can tell, he's never even explained it properly and resists attempts to get him to clarify it.

This is truly a sad story. One of someone with a very thin skin and an inability to respond sensibly to criticism. Someone who has behaved in an unbelievably petty fashion. I can only hope that Roger sits down and calmly reflects on his actions and realizes that what he's done is neither acceptable nor sensible.

LORD ORSAM

16 July 2026