The Maybrick Hoax
Unraveling James Maybrick as Jack the Ripper
James Maybrick (1838–1889) was a cotton merchant in Liverpool who in 1992, more than a century after his death, was suspected of being responsible for the notorious Jack The Ripper murders. This theory was based on the surfacing of a diary that followed Maybrick’s established lifestyle, though the author’s name was never mentioned.
The first tests on the ink of the diary were made by David Baxendale. He observed that the ink wasn’t iron-based, which was common in inks from the 19th century. In another test, he dissolved the ink from the paper with a suitable extraction solvent and determined that the ink was characteristic of a synthetic dye, nigrosine. The ink was said to have dissolved too easily from the paper to be from the 19th century, and the document was likely to have been written sometime after 1945.
Nicholas Eastaugh next used Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) tests in August 1992 to confirm that the ink was based on iron-gall and therefore not in conflict with the type of ink used in the late 1880s, directly contradicting Baxendale’s claim that there was no evidence of iron. Nothing was found that betrayed the ink as using any modern dye-stuffs. (Nigrosine itself, though rarely used in writing inks, was used in inks in the Victorian era, so its presence presented no problems.)
The ink was visually examined by Melvin Harris, Joe Nickell, Kenneth Rendell, Maureen Casey Owens, and Robert Kuranz in August and October 1993, and it revealed no signs of aging — the six individual examiners all agreed that it showed a washed-out looking ink.
It’s worth noting that Nicholas Eastaugh’s results from the year before had been referenced where they seemed to help confirm the diary’s antiquity, but in reality the results simply recorded the existence of an iron-gall ink. The chemical profile of an iron-gall ink made 50 years ago or 20 years ago will match that of iron-gall inks made a century ago.
Things remained static until Mike Barrett came out with his confession. He appeared to have inside knowledge and, in his initial statement, pointed to a Liverpool source for the ink used in writing the diary. He named it as The Bluecoat Art Shop, and checks with that shop suggested that the ink could have been a Victorian-style black manuscript ink made by Diamine of Liverpool. Checks with the manufacturers showed that this ink was indeed an iron-gall based product, using some nigrosine as a temporary color. This was unusual and seemed to be the only known writing ink around using nigrosine.
However, the ink contained a small amount of a preservative known as chloroacetamide, which was not put into commercial production until after the Second World War, and was not used by Diamine until 1974. This preservative wouldn’t be spotted by the standard types of ink analyses unless it was explicitly sought out.
The Harrison party and those claiming the diary was authentic were urged to take action and test the ink for chloroacetamide but no action was taken. Mrs Harrison even issued a dismissive statement claiming that the Diamine ink “contains a modern synthetic dye that any of our analysts would have spotted in the ink of the diary.” However, forensic ink analyst Robert Kuranz had kept 12 unused ink-on-paper samples under optimum storage conditions and he sent a capsule containing six tiny samples to Melvin Harris who commissioned the Analysis For Industry (AFI) laboratories’ test of the samples for the presence of chloroacetamide. They concluded in October 1994 through gas-liquid chromatography that chloroacetamide was detected on the document. While not a dye, its presence suggested the ink may have been modern as (again) it was not used by Diamine until 1974.
Following the AFI Report, Mrs Harrison’s publisher agreed with Melvin Harris to conduct further tests to duplicate the procedures used by the AFI. It was originally agreed that these tests would be staged by the AFI and a second laboratory chosen by the Harrison party, but these tests never happened as Mrs Harrison later arranged for different tests to be carried out at Leeds University.
The reports from Leeds University were contradictory. One originally showed the detection of chloroacetamide before a re-test failed to detect its presence. This was because they used contaminated equipment the first time, and because their equipment was inferior to what was used by the AFI.
Another Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) test at Leeds University led to the conclusion that the ink didn’t use nigrosine since nigrosine contains sodium salts and the presence of sodium was not detected in any of the materials examined. Mrs Harrison used these results in December 2004 to state that the findings showed absolutely no connection with Diamine ink, and that there was no chloroacetamide or nigrosine in the ink.
Melvin Harris, however, was not fully convinced. Nicholas Eastaugh had also used SEM tests in 1992 to test the ink, yet his conclusions were never referenced nor made publicly available. Harris sought out a copy of the Eastaugh report but it proved a difficult task, and it took roughly 2 years (until December 1996) before he ascertained a copy from the Legal Department of The Sunday Times. The results were, as Harris put it, “eye-opening.”
Eastaugh’s report showed that he tested four samples of the diary ink and his results were in direct contradiction with those from Leeds University; each test recorded the presence of significant amounts of sodium in the diary ink. Given that the report had been handed to Smith and Harrison in October 1992 — about 2 years prior to their statement — and that it was also known to Paul Feldman, it raises the question of why they relied on the Leeds University report when Eastaugh’s graphs and texts fully disproved its claim. Whether they knew about or fully understood the implications of the report or not, it was damning of them not to reference it at all and it created the impression that they were guilty of trying to hide the results of the elusive document.
Furthermore, the Harrison party has often cited Roderick McNeil’s ion-migration tests where, using Scanning Auger Microscopy, he claimed that he could measure the migration of tiny particles in the ink and, from those measurements, calculate the time the ink has been on paper. However, ion-migration tests had been around for over sixty years prior to the release of that report, yet no other expert ever claimed that the test could be modified to provide accurate dating. (The tests prior had simply been used to determine the difference in age between two writings supposed to have been created at the same time and under the same conditions.)
McNeil’s report initially calculated the diary’s median date as 1921 plus or minus twelve years, conflicting with earlier tests and the present evidence which showed the ink to be a modern forgery. He later accepted that the results may have been distorted by artificial aging of the document, akin to the fake Mussolini diaries which had been falsely aged by being heated in an oven, and acknowledged that the heavy, unsized paper of album used to create the diary would have defeated his attempts to match up with the reference samples. This is important because unsized paper is extra absorbent and a simple ink-solubility test determined that the ink was barely dry on the pages.
Ironically, Robert Smith himself has written that McNeil and Rendell would be unable to scientifically explain his dating technique or even prove that such a technique is possible. He cited respected auger microscopist Robert Wild’s tests that couldn’t obtain a result because when the machine bombarded the paper with electrons, it created a static charge which distorted the signals. Smith further stated that both Dr. Wild and Dr. Eastaugh were skeptical that McNeil would be able to explain to the scientific community how he used the microscope to date manuscripts with any degree of useful accuracy.
Ultimately, the four examiners who met Smith in Chicago all agreed that the document was modern. The drawbacks in McNeil’s report were soon identified and it was never accepted as conclusive. It’s also worth noting that their conclusions and Dr Baxendale’s were independent of any commercial interest which all-but-rules out any ulterior motives; they were never under any pressure to agree with each other, or return a verdict that went one way or another.
Given all this information as referenced from an extract of Melvin Harris’ report, I believe it is fairly conclusive that the document was a modern forgery. I had my doubts after reading the Lab Reports but, given this extra perspective, I find that there is little room for doubt over the inauthenticity of the Maybrick Diary.
