Is the Diary of Jack the Ripper real?
Added: 2003-03-13 17:57:17 In the early 1990s, a diary surfaced which was signed Jack the Ripper. Internal evidence showed that the diarys author was obviously James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton merchant, and himself the subject of a famous 1889 murder trial. Although three books have been written about the diary, supporting Maybrick as the Ripper, the vast majority of serious researchers dismiss the whole thing as a patent hoax. Michael Barrett, who first brought the diary to light in 1993, has since confessed on numerous occasions to having forged it. These confessions were later retracted, but the fact remains that there are serious problems in the provenance of the document. Whether it is a modern hoax, or an old hoax that was only recently brought to light, remains unclear but no, in all probability, the diary is not real.
