Pelham places the murder on the evening of 5 August 1814, at No. 27 Mount Street. At the trial, Macey assigned Mitchell’s visit to 4 August, recounting that Welchman, having joined the others in the kitchen, returned upstairs to the workroom to prevail upon him to depart. The women heard her shriek, followed by two detonations. Pelham relates that her companions mounted the stairs and found Welchman mortally wounded; Macey specifies that she herself stopped in the parlour, while Watkins described his discovery of the body lying half across the doorway. Mitchell had vanished. The two accounts disagree as to the day, and their divergence must remain visible.
This sequence, which stands at the core of the depositions heard at the Old Bailey, does not begin with the pistol shots. It opens upon a courtship the young woman was endeavouring to bring to an end. Mitchell had introduced himself to her under the name of Smith. Macey stated that she had not heard Mitchell describe his circumstances; Pelham claims he represented himself as a ship’s purser. This detail must be left to the retrospective compiler, rather than converted into words directly attested by Macey. What the proceedings establish more directly is that he returned to Macey’s house despite Welchman’s wish that he be gone.
On 4 August, Mitchell was admitted to the workroom shortly before eight o’clock in the evening. Macey was present with several needlewomen and Welchman’s sister. According to her, Mitchell took offence when the young woman accused him of taking a pair of scissors. The others quit the room but lingered in the adjoining parlour, whence they could overhear their voices. He urged Welchman to go out to supper with him; she refused. He then demanded that salmon be procured for his late repast. When Macey returned to bid him depart, Mitchell answered that he would not stir without a letter of Welchman’s. She replied that she had destroyed it.
The house, that night, was guarded by several doors and several witnesses. Macey saw the maidservant fasten the shutters of the windows looking out upon the street. Later, she and the others went down to the kitchen. Welchman joined them, remained scarcely a minute, and went back upstairs. She hoped, she said, to obtain at last Mitchell’s departure. The shriek, then the two shots, broke upon their meal. Macey halted in the ground-floor parlour; she did not see the man leave, nor did she hear the door close. She conceded, however, that he might have descended without crossing her path.
Robert Watkins, who kept the house, had been summoned by his housekeeper before the shots were fired. He found Welchman lying partly in the doorway, wounded in the head. In the front room, a window stood open above a leaded canopy; a man, in his estimation, might have climbed out there to reach the street. Two pistols were discovered in different rooms. Moon said they appeared recently discharged, but noted he had not examined them. Russell, the surgeon, found them damp to the touch and judged they had been freshly fired; he likewise observed two wounds to the head. Ann Stennett picked up a ball near the body and delivered it to Watkins.
The record of the session also permits us to trace the precise order in which the witnesses were heard: Macey, Watkins, Moon, Collinson, Kingston, Russell, Stennett, Chapman, Picken, Foy, and then Bracken. This procession does not elevate each detail into an independent proof; it afforded the jury the means to weigh the narratives of the household against the physical objects and material traces.
The hat became another strand of the inquest. Thomas Chapman, a hatter, identified the one shown to him as a model he had sold to Mitchell in June. The customer had spoken to him of his design to marry a young woman employed in Mount Street. Chapman acknowledged as well that, had he not heard of the murder, he would not have known how to connect the hat to the affair. The question, therefore, was not one of simple, immediate recognition: the object took on meaning only because the customer’s name and history had been communicated to him.
Picken, servant to a general, related that Mitchell had come to borrow a hat on Friday, 5 August—the day after the date advanced by Macey, and the day adopted by Pelham. He claimed to have lost his own at Bartholomew Fair; Picken believed the fair had already concluded by that date. The constables subsequently discovered at Mitchell’s lodging pistol cases, bullet moulds, and four leaden balls. Officer Foy declared that the balls, the cases, and a key corresponded with the seized pistols. None of this was tendered as an eyewitness to the murder; the case was erected through the convergence of objects, movements, and declarations.
A neighbour, William Collinson, had seen a hatless man fall upon the pavement following a cry and run toward Charles Street. He could not swear it was Mitchell. William Kingston likewise saw a man without a hat make for the same street, but did not pretend to have identified him. These two depositions lent a direction to the flight, not an assured countenance.
For several days, the search led nowhere. Mitchell had long been out of employment, and the pursuers could not easily ascertain his last address. The breach came from another reading of the public prints. Henry Bracken, a farmer near Salisbury, had formerly employed Mitchell. Having read the description published after the murder, he recognised him in the neighbourhood and had him apprehended on 9 August, some eleven or twelve miles from Salisbury. The pursuit did not terminate in an imposing operation of the police: it hung upon the memory of a former master and an advertisement in print.
On 13 August, Officer Taunton brought Mitchell before the magistrates at Bow Street. He was subsequently committed to Newgate. The Proceedings enter the case under the session opened on 14 September; that date does not necessarily establish the precise day of the trial. Pelham places the hearing on Friday, 16 September. The depositions rehearsed once more the weapons, the hat, the wounds, the man glimpsed bareheaded, the articles found in the lodging, and Bracken’s recognition. Mitchell denied the indictment. He maintained that the hat was not his, that he had lost his own in Burlington Gardens, that the pistols were not his property, and that he had never called for supper. He called no witnesses.
The jury pronounced him guilty, and the record of the session bears the sentence of death. Pelham, in his retrospective compilation, assigns the execution to 19 September and describes the concourse assembled before Newgate; this scene belongs to his narrative, not to the official minute. He relates further that after the hanging, women were admitted to touch the dead man’s hand, a practice credited with the power to dispel certain wens and blemishes. The detail exposes the atmosphere that then encompassed the judicial spectacle: after the evidence had settled responsibility in the eyes of the jury, others still sought in the felon’s corpse a cure handed down by ancient belief.
The record thus preserves several manners of recognition, by no means of equal weight: two neighbours caught sight of a hatless man without identifying Mitchell; the hatter linked an object to a former patron; Bracken at last recognised the man described in the gazette. The open window rendered flight possible, though no witness at the bar affirmed having seen him issue through it. The jury resolved this assemblage of depositions and material things into a conviction, despite Mitchell’s denial. Nothing restored Welchman to her workroom or to the place she was to hold in Macey’s business; the prosecution moved forward without an eyewitness to the fatal blow, sustained by clues of which each possessed its own inherent limit.