In his book They All Love Jack, writer, researcher, and filmmaker Bruce Robinson produced an argument that it was his brother, Michael Maybrick, who was the true killer.

A serial killer, who became known as the Servant Girl Annihilator, preyed during 1884 and 1885 upon the city of Austin, Texas, and there have also been attempts to link Maybrick to those murders.

Maybrick's cotton trading business required him to travel regularly to the United States and in 1871 he settled in Norfolk, Virginia, to establish a branch office of his company.

During the journey he was introduced to Florence (Florie) Elizabeth Chandler, the daughter of a banker from Mobile, Alabama, and their relationship quickly blossomed.

The couple returned to Liverpool to live at Maybrick's home, "Battlecrease House" in Aigburth, a suburb in the south of the city.

The circumstances of his death were deemed suspicious by his brothers and an inquest, held in a local hotel, came to the verdict that arsenic poisoning was the most likely cause, administered by persons unknown.

She stood trial at St George's Hall, Liverpool, and after lengthy proceedings, the fairness of which was the subject of some debate in later years, she was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

The way in which the judge conducted her trial was questioned, and this may have been the reason her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, some of which she served in a prison in Woking, Surrey, and then at the "House of Detention" at Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire.

Modern experts, assisting the QCs, stated that Victorian society used arsenic as a beauty aid, and for someone like Mrs Maybrick to extract a small amount of the poison from flypaper would have been commonplace.

In 1911, at the age of 29, while working at the Le Roi Gold Mine in Canada, he died after drinking cyanide, apparently thinking it was just a glass of water.

His sister Gladys went to live in Ryde, Isle of Wight, with her uncle and aunt Michael and Laura (née Withers) Maybrick before marrying Frederick James Corbyn in Hampstead, London, in 1912.

The diary's author does not mention his own name, but offers enough hints and references consistent with Maybrick's established life and habits that it is obvious readers are expected to believe it is him.

The diary was first introduced to the world by Michael Barrett, an unemployed former Liverpool scrap metal dealer, who claimed at the time that it had been given to him by a friend, Tony Devereux, in a pub.

Written in a genuine Victorian scrapbook, but with 20 pages at the front end torn out, he also found this suspect as there was no logical explanation for the purported author to use such a book.

Some people, including Robert Smith, the present owner of the diary and original publisher of the associated book by Shirley Harrison, insist it may be genuine.

[16] In June 1993, a gentleman's pocket watch, made by William Verity of Rothwell (near Leeds) in 1847 or 1848, was presented by Albert Johnson of Wallasey.

[17] The watch was examined in 1993 by Dr Stephen Turgoose of the Corrosion and Protection Centre at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, using an electron microscope.

They could have been produced recently, and deliberately artificially aged by polishing, but this would have been a complex multi-stage process...many of the features are only resolved by the scanning electron microscope, not being readily apparent in optical microscopy, and so, if they were of recent origin, the engraver would have to be aware of the potential evidence available from this technique, indicating a considerable skill and scientific awareness".