Originally posted by Caroline Brown
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We know that was the case because Martin Earl said he: 'Always contacted [the] customer to talk through an item and get agreement for me to purchase from [the] supplier.'
He added: 'I would have had to pay for the book from the supplier so there would need to have been an agreement from any customer for me to order and pay for any book located.'
So the 1891 diary was described to Mike, together with the purchase price, and duly ordered for him and sent out on his request. But Martin didn't ask for payment in advance, as was his normal practice, and the diary arrived towards the end of March 1992, but wasn't paid for until the middle of May.
There is no dispute about this, and no reason to think Martin had quite lost his senses on this one occasion. Any reasonable person would grasp that Mike was not committed to purchase the item sight unseen, on the basis of the description, or he'd have been asked to pay for it before it was ordered and sent out. Can you think of any possible reason why Martin would have paid for it out of his own pocket, if Mike was already committed to the purchase? He wasn't running a charity and he didn't know Mike from Adam.
The very fact that Mike asked Martin to order this 1891 pocket diary, and Anne later agreed to sign a cheque for it when he was being chased for payment, would suggest that she'd had nothing to do with it, and assumed it was something Mike had ordered rashly, for no good reason. Had they both known it was ordered with Maybrick's fake diary in mind, it could have been returned promptly with no comeback, when they saw just how spectacularly unfit for the purpose it was. They weren't communicating very effectively as fraudsters if Mike kept the thing without Anne's knowledge and they finished up with a perfect paper trail back to the advert for it.
I think you have it spot on with your first sentence. But things were different back in 1992, and £25 was a considerable sum to pay for something ordered by mistake. This was an ordinary household, living on Anne's modest income from her secretarial job, plus whatever Mike contributed from his unemployment or disability benefits. And don't forget, they had not actually paid for the 1891 diary, so it wasn't a question of having to return it if they wanted their money back, and possession is nine-tenths of the law. They kept it and then paid for it.
I would suggest, if it had been ordered with fraud in mind, they'd have had even more reason to return it, not only to save themselves the £25, but also the record of the entire transaction. And they most certainly would not have been leading 'very normal lives' in the two years leading up to this purchase, if they were busy planning the criminal enterprise you have in mind. If they had been able to use the 1891 diary for this criminal enterprise, they would still have paid for it, leaving a record of the transaction to be discovered at any time.
Yes, but I would think that was more likely on Mike's part, failing to consult Anne until he was finally chased for payment. Why they didn't return it at that point is not clear, considering that the Maybrick diary had been seen in London by then, but if it was just laziness, I would question whether either of them had any inkling in 1992 that a little 1891 appointments diary might one day be seen as evidence that they faked the Maybrick one.
The Barretts were certainly very far from being 'master criminals' and yet, in the real world, these 'amateurs', supposedly 'fumbling around' to get a suitable volume from somewhere, did not 'inevitably' lead the scrapbook's origins and contents to be traced back to them. We will never know if the police could have proved anything, so it's pointless to speculate that they'd have done so if only they'd had sufficient cause to try. And as for the strange internet subculture, how much has been achieved in those 20 years devoted to tracing the diary's creation back to the Barretts? It's all still suspicion and speculation, with no substance.
It seems that the Barretts didn't need to be 'master criminals' in 1992 to know that a bunch of amateur armchair sleuths nearly 30 years later would still be unable to touch them. And the less said about the mythical auction at the end of March 1992, which Mike supposedly attended [but dated back to January 1990] the better.
I hope you were not judging others by your own standards on this one. If Doreen had no professional obligation to question the diary's authenticity, she did have her professional pride and reputation as a literary agent to consider, and of course she couldn't simply have taken the path of least resistance if she wanted to attract a serious author and publisher. Why were those most closely involved seeking professional opinions and advice from experts in all the relevant fields, if they only needed to publish a facsimile of the diary, bash out a book based on a couple of ripper and Maybrick sources, then sit back to watch the sales figures soar?
So I'm the one heaping abuse on the 'poor guy', while you merely accuse him [and his ex wife] of fraud, many years after he retracted his last ever 'confession'? I think you have this arse about face. The onus is not on me to demonstrate that Mike was too talentless, too drunk or too stupid to have planned or created this diary in a million years, or that Anne was far too grounded to have allowed herself to be drawn into such a scheme with this man. The onus is on you, as a believer in the Barretts' guilt, to demonstrate that they were not only capable - physically, mentally, intellectually and psychologically - of doing this together, but that they actually did so, despite all the objections from the people who met and worked with them, or grew to know them well.
Ah, now this is where you are making a mistake. To make this argument, you first have to presume Mike did attend Orsam's awesome auction at the end of March 1992, and that he did choose to use the same alias to purchase the scrapbook as he had used earlier the same month for his initial contact with Doreen. At least you admit this would have been a mistake on his part, but nobody has yet demonstrated that he did anything of the sort. I wonder how many other mistakes made by Mike you'd be willing to take on board, in order to keep him as your faker, before you begin to wonder why none of them ever caught up with him. I'll give you a clue: he didn’t make those mistakes in the first place if he didn't fake the diary and didn't attend an auction, in 1992 or 1990 or at any other time. He had no need if he obtained it already written from a dodgy source. That was his one big mistake, and it ruined his life. The 'poor guy' was out of his depth from day one. Everything he said and did in relation to the diary bears witness to his lack of awareness, from 9th March 1992, of what he was letting himself in for.
Kattrup:
Originally posted by Kattrup View Post
The confusion is caused by you stating for a fact that MB arranged to see the diary before committing to purchasing it.
The confusion is caused by you stating for a fact that MB arranged to see the diary before committing to purchasing it.
We know that was the case because Martin Earl said he: 'Always contacted [the] customer to talk through an item and get agreement for me to purchase from [the] supplier.'
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