Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sudgen Read Free Book Online Page A

Abberline is well known to students of the Ripper case. In 1888 he co-ordinated the hunt for the murderer in Whitechapel and he died in Bournemouth in 1929. I do not know whether the diaries have been subjected to competent forensic examination. I do know they are not true bill. The diaries, which incriminate a galaxy of public figures, including Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir William Gull and James K. Stephen, Prince Albert Victor’s tutor at Cambridge, conflict with Abberline’s known views on the identity of Jack the Ripper. On one page, reproduced by Fairclough, the detective’s name is incorrectly signed ‘G. F. Abberline.’ Still more telling, biographical notes on four of the murder victims, set down in the diaries, supposedly by Abberline, appear to have been cribbed, sometimes almost word for word, from a research article published in True Detective in 1989! 9
    It is in this context that we must view the recent ‘discovery’ of the alleged Jack the Ripper diary.
    This document is a black-and-gilt calf-bound volume containing sixty-three handwritten pages. It is signed ‘Jack the Ripper’.
    The owner of the diary is Mike Barrett, a one-time scrap-metal dealer who lives in Liverpool. It was Barrett who brought the diary to the offices of Rupert Crew Ltd., a London literary agency, in April 1992. Its commercial potential was obvious. The publishing rights were snapped up by Smith Gryphon Ltd and on 7 October 1993 the diary hit the bookshelves amidst a blaze of hype. ‘7 October 1993,’ ran the pre-launch publicity, ‘the day the world’s greatest murder mystery will be solved.’
    Unfortunately, it isn’t solved. And the diary is an impudent fake.
    Forensic examination of the diary is as yet inconclusive. There seems no doubt that the volume itself is genuinely Victorian. This, of course, proves nothing. Family and business archives contain many used and partly used Victorian diaries, ledgers and notebooks. They frequently come on the market and can be bought at market stalls and from antiquarian book dealers. Significantly, the first forty-eight pages of the Ripper diary are missing, apparently cut out with a knife. Rectangular stains on the flysheet suggest that the volume was originally used for mounting photographs.
    Tests on the ink have been made. It should be noted, however, that there is little difference between Victorian iron-gall blue-black ink and modern permanent blue-black ink and that comprehensive and diverse tests are necessary to distinguish the two. In any case it is not difficult to age ink artificially. Amalia and Rosa Panvini, the forgers of the Mussolini diaries in 1967, used modern ink. Nevertheless, they fooled the experts by baking the diaries at low heat in a kitchen oven for half an hour, a process which aged the ink so perfectly that no scientific test was able to fault it. The evaluation of the Ripper diary will doubtless continue. But at least two out of three experts who have already made tests on the ink have concluded that it is of later than Victorian age.
    The diary has no pedigree before May 1991. Mike Barrett says that it was given to him at that time by a friend, a retired printer called Tony Devereux, and that Devereux refused to account for its history or explain how he came by it. Devereux died a few months later. His family insist that he never mentioned the diary to them.
    All this raises a crucial question. If the diary is genuine where has it been for the last century? No one knows. It purports to be the diary of James Maybrick, a wealthy cotton merchant, and identifies Maybrick as the Ripper. Maybrick will already be familiar to devotees of true crime. He died at Battlecrease House in Aigburth, a suburb of Liverpool, in May 1889, and his wife Florence was accused of poisoning him with arsenic extracted from flypapers. Florence was convicted and sentenced to death but her sentence was commuted to one of penal servitude for life. She was released in 1904 and died