James maybrick diary online
JAMES MAYBRICK - THE DIARY OF JACK THE RIPPER
THE LIVERPUDLIAN COTTON MERCHANT
In 1992 Michael Barrett, a former Liverpool scrap metal merchant, produced a journal which, he claimed, had been given to him by a friend, Tony Devereux, in a pub the previous year.
Although the author of the diary doesn’t actually identify himself by name, it is quite obvious from various personal references, and from other information contained within the journal, that the diarist is meant to be the Liverpool Cotton merchant James Maybrick.
Maybrick died in May 1889 and, shortly after his death, his wife, Florence, was arrested and charged with murdering him by poisoning him with arsenic.
WHY HE STARTED MURDERING
In the diary, the author makes the claim that he had seen his wife - whom calls “the bitch,” or “the whore” in the pages of the diary - with her unnamed lover in the Whitechapel district of Liverpool.
The subsequent rage that he experienced following this sighting sent him on a murderous rampage in the Whitechapel district of London in the course of which he mutilated and killed five prostitutes.
THE AUTHOR DESCRIBES THE MURDERS
The journal contains a somewhat long-winded description of the murders before ending with the assertion "I give my name that all know of me, so history do tell, what love can do to a gentle man born. Yours truly, Jack the Ripper."
A TOTALLY NEW JACK THE RIPPER SUSPECT
Up until the emergence of the diary there had never been any suggestion that James Maybrick may have been Jack the Ripper and the only real evidence against him as a suspect is his own supposed confession in the pages of his diary. So his viability as a Jack the Ripper suspect comes down to whether or not he wrote the diary and, if he did, does what he writes about his crimes correspond with the known facts.
DIVIDING THE RIPPEROLOGISTS!
It has to be said that the provenance of the diary has proved a hugely dividing issue amongst Ripp James and Florence Maybrick On the 9th March 1992, it’s alleged that a man called Mike Barrett contacted London literary agent Doreen Montgomery with a question: "I've got Jack the Ripper's diary, would you be interested in seeing it?" A year later, ‘The Diary of Jack the Ripper: The Chilling Confessions of James Maybrick,’ by Shirley Harrison hit the shelves. Though the Diary was never actually signed by James Maybrick, a wealthy cotton merchant from Merseyside, there were more than enough clues to suspect that he was the sole author. So, James Maybrick’s name was added to the long list of Ripper suspects, a list that included, in no particular order, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Queen Victoria’s grandson, Winston Churchill’s dad, an escaped orang-utan and renowned painter, Walter Sickert, who had the dubious of honour of featuring in his very own ‘hedunnit’ bestseller by prolific novelist, Patricia Cornwell. In her 2002 book, somewhat optimistically titled, ‘Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed’, Cornwell echoes the sentiment of two previous publications (none of which are cited in her book) ‘Jack the Ripper and the final solution’ by Stephen Wright and Jen Overton Fuller’s ‘Sickert and the Ripper Crimes’, but fails to make a cohesive case for her suspect, especially in the light of evidence that shows that Sickert was probably in France when four out of the five Ripper murders took place -Cornwell, of course, refutes this. In investigating material for ‘Portrait of a Killer’, Cornwell spent over £2m buying up at least thirty-two of his paintings, some of his letters, his writing desk, and was accused of physically destroying a painting to glean some conclusive DNA, and to this day maintains that some of the Ripper letters were not a hoax but actually penned by Sickert. Indeed, her unwavering belief in the fact that Sickert was the Ripper is neatly summed up in the title of her 2017 sequel: ‘Ripper: The Secre I recently added a new offering to my videos about the various Jack the Ripper documentaries, about one of the most intriguing suspects to have surfaced in recent years – James Maybrick. You can watch it on the following video. On Saturday the 11th of May 1889, cotton merchant James Maybrick died after a short illness at his home, Battlecrease House in the Grassendale suburb of Liverpool. Following his death, two doctors became suspicious about the manner of his death, and they refused to grant a death certificate. A police investigation was therefore launched, and from the outset the police were convinced that James Maybrick had been murdered by his American wife, Florence Elizabeth Maybrick. On Saturday the 18th of May, magistrate Colonel Bidwell, accompanied by Mr. Swift, Clerk to the County Magistrates, went to Battlecrease House, where they were met by Superintendent Bryning, who then accompanied them to the bedroom where Mrs. Maybrick was lying ill. According to The Liverpool Echo:- “Superintendent Bryning, took up his position at the foot of the bed and said:- “This person is Mrs Maybrick, the wife of the late Mr. James Maybrick. She is charged with having ceased his death administering poison to him.” That night, Florence Maybrick was taken to Kirkdale Prison. On Wednesday the 31st of July, 1889 her trial began at St George’s Hall in Liverpool. After what many consider to have been a decidedly unsatisfactory trial, that was presided over by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Florence was found guilty and was sentenced to death. However, on the 22nd of August the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, issued a reprieve and her sentence was commuted to one of penal servitude for life. Having served fifteen years in prison, she was released from Aylesbury Prison in February 1904, after which she returned to A Jack the Ripper's Diary
THE DEATH OF JAMES MAYBRICK
THE ARREST OF FLORENCE MAYBRICK
FLORENCE MAYBRICK’S TRIAL
HER RELEASE FROM PRISON
In 1992 a manuscript pretending to be Jack the Ripper's personal journal was made public by Mike Barrett, an unemployed former scrap metal dealer in Liverpool; the author's name does not appear anywhere, but it is clear from the context that it would be James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton merchant born in 1838 and died in 1889 probably after being poisoned by his wife.
Barrett never fully explained where the document was kept between the death of the alleged author and its publication, at first he claimed that he was given as a present by a friend in a pub and then changed his version saying that it was Barrett's wife (who had kept it for decades) to give it to his friend so he could give it to Mike.
The text was published in a book entitled The Diary of Jack The Ripper: the discovery, the investigation, the debate, and was accompanied by an analysis by writer Shirley Harrison who supports its authenticity. The publisher of book, Robert Smith, is the current owner of the manuscript and agrees with Harrison.
The diary tells the life of James Maybrick and describes in detail the five murders in Whitechapel he allegedly committed. At the time Maybrick was considered completely foreign to the facts, the police never investigated him or found other documents indicating him as a suspect. The man is on the list of modern suspects only because of this diary.
Numerous examinations for dating have been carried out on the text but gave inconclusive results. However just reading the text is enough to realize that it contains too many absurdities and factual errors to be legitimate. First of all, Maybrick did not live in London, so it is not clear why he would have chosen Whitechapel to carry out his murders; secondly, the man had no in-depth knowledge of the area, which the actual Ripper must necessarily have. Also at the time of the murders Maybrick was fifty years old, while the Ripper's profile (for