Did James Maybrick Really Write Jack the Ripper's Diary?
James Maybrick, cotton merchant and Jack the Ripper suspect.
The Big Question Is Who Was Jack The Ripper?
We all know Jack the Ripper. He has appeared in countless stories, stories passed on in families, stories in newspapers that still appear every time a new contender appears, stories in novels, and stories in nonfiction.
He has appeared in television documentaries, television dramas, and even blockbusters on the big screen.
His notoriety is such that I was once asked on one of my tours why the police hadn’t arrested him when they knew his name.
His influence is so pervasive that he has become a household name, a symbol of unsolved mysteries.
In a way, we probably all have a mental image whenever his name gets mentioned.
He was a member of the Royal Family, a doctor, a barrister, a fish porter, a barber, a Jewish immigrant, a merchant sailor, a famous artist, and the list goes on.
One suspect in that list comes from my home town of Liverpool.
In 1992, a diary was taken to London by an unemployed Liverpool scrap metal dealer, Michael Barrett.
It was a black leather-bound book with the first 64 pages ripped out. Only 144 pages remained. On the last page, the bombshell exploded. The writer had signed it, “Yours truly Jack the Ripper. Dated this the third day of May 1889”.
It was claimed that the writer was a Liverpool cotton merchant, James Maybrick.
Eight days after “the third day of May 1889”, the 50-year-old Maybrick died on May 11 1889
Three months later, his 26-year-old American wife, Florence, was sentenced to death for her husband’s murder.
It has become one of Britain’s most sensational miscarriages of justice presided over by a judge on the edge of insanity, an incompetent jury and no evidence to connect Florence with the crime.
The sentence was commuted, but the poor woman spent 15 years in prison.
After her release, she returned to the USA, where she gave lectures on the need for prison reform.
Her time in prison had taken a heavy toll, and she ended her days as a recluse in a squalid three-bedroomed bungalow in New Milford, Connecticut. She died in poverty in 1941 at the age of 79.
The truth of what happened in the Maybrick household remains a mystery—a mystery Bruce Robinson investigated in depth in They All Love Jack.
At no point was any connection between the Maybricks and the Jack the Ripper murders ever made until the diary was revealed.
James Maybrick’s name doesn’t appear. It was, after all, signed ‘Jack the Ripper’. However, on page two appears “Tonight I shall return to Battlecrease”.
In 1888-9 the tenant of Battlecrease House, Riversdale Road, Liverpool, was James Maybrick.
The names of his children and his pet name for his wife also appeared.
The murders of Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Kate Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly are described in graphic detail, as is the pain and suffering of a man addicted to arsenic and strychnine who believed his wife had slept with another man.
If the diary was genuine then the Jack the Ripper mystery was finally a mystery no more.
It fell to writer Shirley Harrison to investigate.
Michael Barrett told her that the diary had been given to him by a dying friend in 1991. Shirley Harrison says he had no idea of the impact it would have.
However, it must be said that in 1991, publicity around ‘Jack’ had seriously cranked up with the centenary of the murders just three years earlier. The publicity did a good job of reminding the world of its best-known true crime serial killer.
He must have had some idea that a diary signed by Jack the Ripper might have some impact; otherwise, why take it 200 miles from Liverpool to the office of a London literary agent?
For Shirley Harrison the priority was to check the diary was genuine.
As she said. “Michael Barrett’s story was hardly reliable”.
However, she said, “Michael Barrett could not have written the diary. So who did and when?”.
This obviously requires serious research.
Shirley Harrison writes:
“Serious research needs financial backing and as a writer the only way I knew to find sufficient resources was through the interest of a publisher. A publisher’s advance (deducted later from royalties) would be a start.”
Three questions, then.
Would anybody buy a book about ‘The Diary of Jack the Ripper’ that ended up proving it was a fake?
On the other hand, if it is genuine, would you have a guaranteed blockbuster?
Could that impact scientific objectivity?
The paper and the ink have been analysed to show whether this could have been written in the 1880s.
The handwriting has been examined.
There remains some disagreement over the results.
The content has been subjected to analysis by a criminal psychologist.
It has still left many unconvinced that the person who wrote it killed five women in Whitechapel in 1888.
Inevitably, it has become a complicated case for those on both sides of the argument.
This became more complicated when, in January 1995, Michael Barrett swore in two separate affidavits that “the Manuscript was written by my wife Anne Barrett at my dictation.”
Then Barrett’s solicitor repudiated his affidavit.
Then Barrett withdrew the repudiation.
From August 1888 to August 1889, two criminal cases dominated the headlines.
The Whitechapel Murders arguably secured the future of The Star, a newspaper that began in the same year that gave us Jack the Ripper. It began publication in January 1888.
Its sensationalist reporting of the murders established it as a mass-circulation newspaper.
Then, less than six months after the murder of the fifth victim, Mary Jane Kelly, the death of James Maybrick made the headlines.
The trial of his wife, Florence, for his murder filled the front pages of the newspapers.
The Whitechapel Murders didn’t just send journalists on a writing spree.
Men and women read the sensational accounts of the gruesome murders and sat down to write their own tales.
Tales which were guaranteed a national and even worldwide print run when they signed their creations, Jack the Ripper.
The first of these creations arrived at the Central News Agency on September 27, 1888.
On the 29th, it was forwarded to Scotland Yard.
On the 30th, the signature from the letter, Jack the Ripper, was the headline above the report of two more homeless women found with their throats cut within a twenty-minute walk of where two other homeless women had been found with their throats cut.
The letter gave the world the name of the killer, Jack the Ripper, and it has been a headline-grabbing story ever since.
Dear Boss,
I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn't you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife's so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck. Yours truly Jack the Ripper
Dont mind me giving the trade name
PS Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it. No luck yet. They say I'm a doctor now. ha ha
“The creation of an enterprising London journalist.”
Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Robert Anderson, commented:
“I will only add here that the 'Jack-the-Ripper' letter, which is preserved in the Police Museum at New Scotland Yard, is the creation of an enterprising London journalist.”
And Melville Macnaghten, who became Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 1889, wrote:
"In this ghastly production I have always thought I could discern the stained forefinger of the journalist indeed, a year later, I had shrewd suspicions as to the actual author!"
There is a report that in 1931, Fred Best, a journalist who had been a young journalist on The Star confessed that he and another young journalist, Tom Bullen, had written the letter to keep the story running.
Whoever wrote the so-called ‘Diary of Jack the Ripper’ certainly borrowed phrases from the Dear Boss letter apart from that remarkable brand name - Jack the Ripper.
The brief descriptions of each of the five murders in Jack the Ripper’s Diary could certainly be explained by them being written not by the killer but by somebody familiar with the newspaper accounts.
There is one description of the five murders that indicate it was indeed newspaper accounts rather than hands-on experience that informed them.
Writing about the murder of Mary Jane Kelly.
“I have read about my latest, my God the thoughts, the very best. I left nothing of the bitch, nothing. I placed it all over the room, time was on my hands.”
There were sensational reports in newspapers that the killer had decorated the room with the organs he had removed from Mary Jane Kelly’s body.
It was perhaps an example of Mark Twain’s advice: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
Decorating the room with body parts is certainly more dramatic than the reality described by City Police Surgeon Dr Thomas Bond:
“The whole of the surface of the abdomen and thighs was removed and the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds and the face hacked beyond recognition of the features. The tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone. The viscera were found in various parts viz: the uterus and kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side and the spleen by the left side of the body. The flaps removed from the abdomen and thighs were on a table.”
So, apart from the flesh from the abdomen and thighs, everything was on the bed close to or even beneath the victim.
“I placed it all over the room” would be in line with the descriptions given by some journalists. It would not be what the killer actually did.
Writers who support other contenders for the crown of Jack the Ripper are, of course, not impressed at all by The Diary of Jack the Ripper.
“Of course the ‘diary’ is a forgery.”
A good example is contained in Bruce Rubinson’s They All Love Jack.
“Of course Florence Maybrick didn’t poison her husband. Of course James Maybrick wasn’t the Ripper. Of course the ‘diary’ is a forgery. Of course its handwriting doesn’t look like James Maybrick’s, and of course its creation has nothing whatsoever to do with an idiot called Michael Barrett.”
Bruce doesn’t pull his punches at any point in his investigation into the Whitechapel Murders of 1888.
He is absolutely convinced that his investigation has proved that James Maybrick’s brother, Michael Maybrick, was Jack the Ripper.
But then, so is Shirley Harrison.
Of course, you can read The Diary of Jack the Ripper, and They All Love Jack and make up your own mind.
Thank you for checking out this post.
I hope I’ll get to see you on one of my tours.