If it were real, it would solve one of the most nettlesome mysteries of the last 100 years and probably put a lot of amateur speculators out of business. But a document presented as the diary of Jack the Ripper has now been declared a forgery by an American expert, and Warner Books, which had planned to publish 200,000 copies this fall, says it is scrapping the project altogether.
A few weeks ago, another publisher, William Morrow, canceled publication of the supposed memoirs of Abraham Lincoln's laundress because of doubts about their authenticity.Warner Books had high hopes for Jack the Ripper, but its president, Laurence J. Kirshbaum, said the expert's report left him with no choice but to cancel the book. At the same time, though, the book's British publisher, Smith Gryphon, denounced the new analysis as cursory and inconclusive, and said it planned to go ahead with publication of the diary and a 235-page companion book.
The diary, 63 pages of murderous ramblings, was supposedly found in a Liverpool house being fitted for central heating. Robert Smith, the managing director of Smith Gryphon, showed it to some 30 experts, he said, asserting afterward that its authenticity had been conclusively proved: the diary's author and the true Ripper, the publisher concluded, was clearly James T. Maybrick, a cotton merchant from Liverpool, addicted to strychnine and arsenic, who was murdered by his wife in 1889.
But that was hardly enough for the armies of Ripper aficionados who have all sorts of theories, wild and sober. And Warner, doubtless remembering the scandal of 1983, when diaries supposedly written by Hitler were found in fact to have been written by a dealer in Nazi memorabilia, declared this summer that it would not publish the Ripper diaries until it received the results of an independent test.
That came on Tuesday, in the form of an 11-page report by Kenneth W. Rendell, a dealer in historical documents who concluded, based in part on handwriting analysis and tests of ink and paper, that the diary could not have been written by Maybrick and could not have been written in the 1880s, when Jack the Ripper stalked the prostitutes of London. "There is no credible evidence whatsoever that this diary is genuine," Rendell concluded.
For his part, Smith said that he had heard of Rendell's report just as it was being released to the press, and that he did not understand why Warner would cancel the project without giving him a chance to rebut its conclusions. "We've looked at this from every angle and given it to every external expert, and we would have put those points to them," he said. "I think they will come to realize that they've been too precipitous."