Jack the Ripper (12 page)

Michael Barrett claimed that he had been given the diary by Tony Devereux, a retired compositor at the
Liverpool Echo
, whom Barrett occasionally drank with in the Saddle Inn in Kirkdale, Liverpool. He said that he had asked Devereux on many occasions where the book came from, but Devereux refused to answer his questions. In August 1991, Devereux died from a heart attack, so he was unable to substantiate the story. Since 1992, Barrett’s account of how he acquired the diary has changed on a few occasions, including one version in 1994, in which he claimed that he had concocted it himself and had dictated it to his wife. To make matters even more confusing, Anne Graham (Barrett’s wife’s name following their divorce) has also provided a different account of the origins of the diary. She claimed that it had been passed to her by her father, and that she had given it to Devereux to give to her husband, whom she hoped would use it to write a novel. Her father, Billy Graham, would later say that he had been given it by his step-grandmother, Elizabeth Formby, who had supposedly been a friend of Nurse Yapp, who had worked at the Maybrick’s house. Barrett now claims that his original story is the true version of events and that he did not forge the diary. He blames his changing accounts on the pressures of media intrusion and the breakdown of his marriage.

The debate over James Maybrick’s credentials as Jack the Ripper took yet another twist with the emergence of the Maybrick watch, in 1993. It was a small engraved pocket watch, which had scratches on the inside cover of the case. Around the edge were scratched the initials of the five canonical Ripper victims; in the middle were the words, ‘I am Jack’; and at the bottom was a signature, ‘J. Maybrick’. To many, the watch was an even more obvious forgery than the diary, and even Shirley Harrison initially thought that it marked the ‘first of the bandwagon riders’, who would try to capitalise on the diary.
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The owner of the watch was Albert Johnson. He said that he bought it for £225 from a jewellery shop in Merseyside, as an investment for his granddaughter, and that he only noticed the scratches at a later date. The watch has been scientifically tested twice; firstly, by Dr Turgoose of UMIST in 1993; and secondly, by Dr Wild of Bristol University, in 1994. Both experts agreed that the scratches were decades old and that it would have been extremely difficult for anyone to have forged them, and to have made them look old. One person who was convinced by the reports was the author and Ripperologist Paul Feldman. He came to believe that Albert Johnson had a Maybrick family connection, and that the watch had been in his family for many years. However, Johnson, who died in October 2008, never changed his account of how he obtained the watch. He always appeared an unlikely forger and his personal integrity was seemingly demonstrated by his willingness to have the watch scientifically tested. He even paid for the first tests out of his own pocket, something a forger would have been unlikely to have done.

A series of scientific tests have also been carried out on the paper and ink of the diary. Tests on the paper suggested that it did date from the Victorian era. However, tests on the ink produced contradictory results. Dr David Baxendale, of Document Evidence Ltd, concluded in July 1992 that the ink was not iron-based and this was significant, as he believed iron was a key constituent in all inks from that period. He later said that he had found a synthetic dye called nigrosine in the ink which had only been in use since the 1940s; thus the diary must have been written since 1945. Dr Baxendale’s reports were undermined when Shirley Harrison found that nigrosine was commercially patented in 1867, and was in general use in writing inks, by the 1870s.
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A second set of tests was carried out by Dr Nicholas Eastaugh, a specialist in dating old manuscripts. Using a proton microprobe to test samples of ink, he found the presence of iron and concluded that, ‘the results of various analyses of ink and paper in the Diary performed so far have not given rise to any conflict with the date of 1888/9.’
3
However, he did add that it was possible that it could be a sophisticated modern forgery. A test conducted in 1994 by Analysis for Industry (AFI), for Melvin Harris, indicated the presence of a preservative called chloroacetamide, which was not produced commercially until 1972. However, the following month, tests conducted at Leeds University concluded that it was not present in the ink. Shirley Harrison later ascertained that chloroacetamide had been found in preparations dating from the 1850s.

The controversy over the results of the scientific tests, and the poor provenance of the diary, has led many people to simply dismiss it as a forgery. Philip Sugden has described it as a ‘transparent hoax.’
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However, some research seems to reinforce the view that James Maybrick is a credible candidate to be the Whitechapel murderer. For example, it has been established that Maybrick was a frequent visitor to London. Sir Charles Russell, Florence’s counsel at her trial, said about James, ‘You cannot follow closely the habits of a man who is in Liverpool, London, and other places going about his business.’
5
Professor Rubinstein has argued that the fact that all the Ripper killings took place at the weekend is very suggestive. Prostitutes walked the streets every night of the week; so why should someone want to commit murder at the weekend, when there were potentially more witnesses around? Rubinstein argues that such a pattern ‘is consistent with the lifestyle of a Liverpool cotton broker who spent the weekdays at the Liverpool Cotton Exchange but was free to travel on weekends (as Maybrick was).’
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Maybrick not only visited London frequently, he also had knowledge of the Whitechapel area. In 1858, he had moved to London to work in a shipbroking office. While there, he started a long-term relationship with a woman called Sarah Ann Robertson, who lived close to Whitechapel. The diarist wrote that he took a flat in Middlesex Street, in the heart of Whitechapel (though he provided no actual details that would have allowed this statement to have been fully verified).

David Canter, Professor of Investigative Psychology at Liverpool University, has argued that the location fits in perfectly with what we know about the ‘activities and movements of many, but certainly not all, serial killers.’
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We also know that Maybrick regularly used prostitutes. Mary Hogwood, a brothel-keeper in Norfolk, Virginia, stated that James frequented her brothel when he was in America. William T. Stead visited Liverpool in the early 1890s, to try to establish the truth about Florence’s guilty verdict. He was scathing about Maybrick’s character and wrote that he maintained ‘relations with loose women’.
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The diary has many references to arsenic and James Maybrick was a regular user of the drug. At Florence’s trial, Edwin Heaton testified that Maybrick visited his chemist shop between ‘two and five times a day’ to drink a preparation that contained arsenic.
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Dr Hopper, Maybrick’s doctor, testified that between June and September 1888, he saw him ‘perhaps twenty’ times.
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Sir Charles Russell stated that Maybrick ‘had been ordered to Harrogate for his health’ in 1888.
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It was around this time, Florence told Dr Hopper that James was ‘taking some very strong medicine which had a bad influence on him.’ Therefore, at the time of the Ripper Murders, Maybrick’s long-term addiction to arsenic was clearly having a detrimental affect on his health. Rubinstein argues that the reason why the Ripper stopped killing after 9 November 1888, was that on 19 November, Maybrick changed doctors and started seeing Dr Drysdale. He treated him, on at least five occasions, with homeopathic remedies and there was a gradual improvement in his health.

As research into the life of James Maybrick began to reveal that this outwardly respectable Victorian gentleman had a darker side to his character, other research unearthed details that supported the notion that the diary might be authentic. One example was the diarist’s referral to himself as ‘Sir Jim’, on no fewer than thirty-three occasions. Maybrick’s usage of this nickname was to be confirmed by an unpublished letter, written by Florence Aunspaugh and archived in the Trevor Christie Collection, which a modern forger would have been unlikely to have seen. Also, both Shirley Harrison and Paul Feldman have pointed to a composite sketch of the Ripper suspect that appeared in the
Daily Telegraph
on the 6 October 1888, and argued that it looks like Maybrick. Even more controversially, it has been suggested that there are bloodstained markings on the wall behind the mutilated body of Ripper victim Mary Kelly, that denote the letters ‘FM’, possibly standing for Florence Maybrick. Some have also suggested that the markings on her right lower leg are not random bloodstains, but the letters M A Y S. Donald Rumbelow totally refutes this view, writing that ‘reading letters into the bloodstains is like reading faces in the clouds.’
12
Professor Rubinstein has focused attention on a letter that was published in the
Liverpool Echo
, in October 1888. The writer of the letter, who claimed to be Jack the Ripper, stated that he was about to sail to New York. He signed the letter: ‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper DIEGO LAURENZ (Genuine).’ Rubinstein wrote that this was the most important clue that we have about the identity of the killer. ‘Diego’ is Spanish for James, while ‘Laurenz’ is meant to rhyme with ‘Florence’. Rubinstein wrote that the letter also explains the inexplicable gap of five weeks between the two murders on 30 September 1888, and the fifth killing on 9 November. Rubinstein also suggests that the very name, Jack the Ripper, could have been taken by Maybrick from the notorious High Rip Gang, who were active in Liverpool in the 1880s. In June 1888, a Liverpool newspaper carried a story about the gang’s violent attack on a police constable, referring to them as ‘high rippers’.
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If James Maybrick was Jack the Ripper, he could have constructed the title by amalgamating words taken from the rippers and from the mythical figure Spring-Heeled Jack. The
Liverpool Citizen
makes it clear that, ‘everyone’ in Liverpool was talking about Spring-Heeled Jack in 1887.
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The report even suggests that the character may have been a young ‘buck’, from the Cotton Exchange, where James Maybrick worked, who was acting in the manner of the mythical demon to win a bet.

Despite this evidence, the authenticity of the diary is undermined by certain key issues. First and foremost, there is not a clear line of provenance that can trace the diary back to James Maybrick. Secondly, there is a problem with the chronology of events. It is often assumed that the ‘whore master’ referred to in the diary, is Alfred Brierley, with whom Florence Maybrick had an intimate relationship. However, in a newspaper interview, Brierley stated that prior to November 1888, he and Florence were ‘merely distant acquaintances.’
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In other words, the Ripper killings took place before Florence’s affair with Brierley, not after it. This view is supported by other eye-witnesses. Edwin Maybrick, James’ brother, told Florence’s mother, Baroness von Roques, when she arrived at Battlecrease after James’ death, that Florence had only met Brierley ‘this winter at some dances.’
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The Baroness herself, in a letter to the Home Secretary in August 1892, wrote that in her early years of marriage, Florence was ‘a delicate invalid, nursing little children, attending to the house…The December of 1888 was the first time during her married life she had been able to dance or had been out in society; and her health was then stronger.’
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Another problem is that the Whitechapel Murders stopped in November, with the Mary Kelly killing, but James Maybrick lived for another six months. Is it possible to believe that the man who savagely killed Mary Kelly could have gone back to living a normal and respectable life?

Studies of the handwriting in the diary have also proved problematic for those who think it is genuine. The problem is, as Donald Rumbelow has written, ‘the handwriting of the diary did not match the writing and signature on Maybrick’s will or on his marriage certificate.’
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Also, cleverly, the author of the diary provides no actual dates and is often very sketchy in his description of events. One possible reason for this is that the author is trying to avoid writing something that could later be shown to be inaccurate. Those who think that the diary is a modern forgery have argued that some of the words or phrases found in the document, simply did not exist in the late 1880s. An example of this was the term ‘one-off’, used by the diarist, which does not appear in dictionaries until the early twentieth century. However, research by Shirley Harrison found the term being used by a building company in Kent, in the 1860s.
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William Beadle has argued that the style of writing in the diary appears to be ‘more in tune with the twentieth century than the nineteenth.’
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He believes that, while words and phrases that weren’t in use in Victorian times have not been found, the diary lacks the over-elaborate style of writing that one would expect in a nineteenth-century journal. Caroline Morris disagreed with this view, and pointed out that the diarist consistently avoided modern contractions such as isn’t and did tend to favour ‘longwinded constructions’ in the journal.
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The Ripper Murders could only have been committed by someone who was criminally insane, yet Maybrick was well-respected by his contemporaries. Even Sir Charles Russell, Florence Maybrick’s counsel, described him as ‘a man who seemed to have been liked by his friends and not without a kindly and generous nature.’
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Maybrick’s supposed motive for mass murder is that his wife was having an affair. If he really had been a murderer, then surely the first two people he would have killed would have been his wife and her lover. There are a few references in the diary that are either inaccurate, or have not been substantiated by research. One is the reference to the Poste House. The problem is that there is no record of any public house, in either Liverpool or London, having such a name in the 1880s. The pub that is usually identified is the Poste House in Cumberland Street, Liverpool, but records show that it was known as The Muck Midden in 1888; it was not until the 1960s that it was given the name Poste House. The diarist refers to the Liverpool Cotton Exchange, but anyone who worked there, as Maybrick did, referred to it as the ’Change. Another problem is the reference to Mrs Hammersmith. As the woman had such a distinctive surname, she should have been easy to track down, but research has failed to identify her. Yet another issue is the diarist’s use of the words ‘tin match box empty’. The empty tin matchbox was not known to the general public until 1987, when a police list of Catherine Eddowes’ possessions was first published. The wording in the diary is almost identical to the wording on the police list, published in 1987, suggesting, therefore, that the author of the diary was either really the Ripper, or he (or she) simply copied it from the list. Also, would the killer really have had the inclination or the time to have sorted through Eddowes’ possessions, in the dark, and then have placed them all back in her pockets? There are also factual errors in the diary, concerning the death of the last Ripper victim, Mary Kelly. The diarist wrote that he cut her breasts off and ‘left them on the table with some of the other stuff.’ However, according to the police surgeon’s report, the breasts had been left ‘one under the head and the other by the right foot.’