Free The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper by Paul Begg, John Bennett Page A

and the supposed signature of James Maybrick himself. This too went for testing with seemingly more consistently favourable results showing that it was contemporary with the 1880s.
    Following earlier hints in the press, the proper media eruption took place on 23 April 1993, when it seemed that all the national papers were plastered with headlines about the ‘new’ discovery. The alleged diaries of notorious historical characters had become a sore point for journalists following the press attention on the so-called Hitler Diaries in 1983, a publishing
faux pas
of gargantuan proportions 20 . Despite giving tremendous publicity to the Maybrick Diary, the press was guarded, and the
Observer
even went as far as to call the document ‘bogus’ from the outset. 21
    The unfurling saga of the Maybrick Diary generated a series of disasters for many concerned, as well as litigation,accusations of foul play, threats of violence and, in one case, suspected murder. Press attention kept the controversy afloat, though a film based on the Maybrick story contained within the diary was planned, but after tests on the diary proved inconclusive, its backers pulled out. Paul Feldman, who had become a staunch supporter of the diary, eventually produced a video documentary which told the story of the diary and the resulting investigation. In one sequence, a round table of experts including Colin Wilson, Donald Rumbelow, Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Martin Howells, as well as Feldman and Shirley Harrison, are shown in debate, with Messrs Begg and Fido particularly in full swing. Feldman himself, passionately committed to the idea that Maybrick was indeed the Ripper, was later involved in a notoriously angry confrontation with diary sceptic Melvin Harris at a book launch party.
    Regrettably for those clinging on to the notion that the diary was at least promising, Michael Barrett would later drop the bombshell that he had forged it, putting the story back into the headlines. He subsequently retracted his statement, but matters took another twist when Anne Graham (Barrett’s estranged wife) also claimed that the diary had been in her family for many decades, further adding confusion and disagreement to the already bubbling pot. Barrett later said that his claim of forgery was merely to ‘get at’ Anne, as the two were going through an acrimonious divorce at the time. Subsequently, it has become impossible to go into any real depth about the diary without getting drawn into a myriad of claims and counter-claims, and Maybrick’s candidacy as the Ripper is still hotly debated twenty years on.
    What the Maybrick Diary presented to the avid researcher was a rarity; usually a theorist would find a suspect and use the facts to build a case, or use the facts to direct them to a suspect.But, as with Macnaghten’s memoranda or Swanson’s marginalia, the theory presented
itself
to the researcher. Name and motive were already in place, and the difficulty lay in making sure that all the information added up. Unfortunately, in situations such as this, it never completely does, and with the Maybrick Diary we had the opinions of experts divided over the provenance and date of creation of the document offset with the more positive deductions surrounding the watch.
    As the Maybrick debacle ground on, a slew of new studies on the Whitechapel murders emerged. A. P. Wolf produced
Jack the Myth
, 22 a work which attempted to demolish what the author saw as damaging assumptions served to a gullible public by the old guard of ‘Ripperology’, with Colin Wilson receiving a large proportion of the author’s ire. In the process, Elizabeth Stride was removed from the ‘canonical’ five victims (her lover Michael Kidney was the culprit in this case) and Thomas Cutbush, the suspect mooted by the
Sun
but exonerated by the Macnaghten memoranda in 1894, was held responsible for the other Ripper crimes. A. P. Wolf importantly set no store by the old canards of the Ripper