On 26 September 1817, shortly past one in the afternoon, Mary Barry answered the door of John Jones’s dwelling in Gibraltar Row. She recognized David Owen, her master’s brother-in-law. Before she could inquire after his business, Jones stepped from the back parlor to greet his kinsman; Owen instantly drew a large knife from beneath his coat and struck him down.
The two households had been intimately bound long before that fatal day. Jones and his wife had reared Owen’s two sons, and Mary Barry, a servant in the house since her earliest girlhood, was deeply attached to them. She was in her early twenties; the Joneses were around forty. Owen, a man of forty-five to fifty and of powerful frame, earned his bread as a cow-keeper at Edmonton; Borrow notes that he had also kept a public house in that parish.
Jones raised his hand in self-defense, receiving severe wounds to the belly and hand. His wife rushed forward. Barry likewise sprang to seize the blade; Owen wrenched it from her grasp, cutting her hand, and then laid about him, striking at all three. He wounded Mrs. Jones about the head and face, and slashed the servant across the face, neck, and arm. Mrs. Jones heard Owen shout, “You villains, I will kill you all.” Jones sank into insensibility. Barry fled into the street, crying for help.
When she returned with a young man, she found Jones stretched out in the back room and Owen leaning over him, the knife concealed beneath his clothes. Mrs. Jones lay upon the floor. Barry and her companion succeeded in wresting the weapon from him and handed it to Constable Holmes. The wounded were conveyed to the hospital. Owen, meanwhile, barricaded himself inside the house, swearing to butcher any man who dared approach. The bolted door no longer shielded a family quarrel; it now stood between the victims and an armed man at bay.
The constables tarried nearly an hour before resolving upon an assault. Neighbors fetched iron bars and fire-irons; ladders were reared against the upper windows. They forced the house simultaneously from above and below. Upon the landing, they came upon Owen, defiant, whetting two knives against each other. An officer struck him upon the head with a crowbar; another seized him by the leg and threw him to the boards. Owen resisted with such desperation that he had to be battered and wounded before he could be overpowered. His arms and legs were pinioned. Holmes found two further knives and a razor case in his pockets.
The house bore the violent marks of the siege: the rear casements had been wrenched away and the stair-rails splintered beneath the press of the assailants. Owen was conveyed by carriage to prison amidst the execrations of the crowd. Once the tumult had subsided, the magistrates heard the family hark back to an ancient lawsuit over debt—the very grievance from which Owen had forged his rancor.
When brought before the bench, Owen glared at Cohen, the attorney who had represented Jones in the earlier proceedings, and denounced him as the author of all that had come to pass. The feud between the two brothers-in-law turned upon the maintenance and labor of Owen’s two boys. Years before, Jones and his wife had brought the lads from Wales and reared them as their own. They lived under their aunt and uncle’s roof; the elder, then aged about eleven, had served a large portion of Jones’s milk-walk.
After Owen, by this account, had ill-used Jones, the latter brought an action to recover the charges of boarding and educating the boys. Owen retaliated by demanding wages for the years of labor his sons had rendered to his brother-in-law. The arbitrators admitted the counter-claim, awarding Owen a balance of one hundred pounds beyond the sum demanded by Jones. Thereupon Jones and his wife quitted a house in Newington belonging to Owen; Owen subsequently let it to other tenants.
According to Borrow, the boys had ever preferred the company of their aunt and uncle to that of their father. Arbitration had placed a price upon their sweat; it had done nothing to heal the breach between the families. Jones was to state that he had not spoken with Owen since August 1816.
Later, when Owen repaired thither to collect his rent, he found the Newington house deserted and the new tenants flown. Borrow records that this discovery, coupled with the bitter memory of the lawsuit and the death of Mrs. Owen two days after the service of the process, wrought in him a sudden frenzy. Such is the chronicler’s explanation, rather than a fact demonstrated by the other witnesses. Owen went to dine at a neighboring house, drank ardent spirits, and then turned his steps toward Gibraltar Row.
At the trial, Mary Barry related what she had witnessed. Owen had entered without uttering a syllable; she had called Jones, then struggled alongside Mrs. Jones to wrest the knife from him. When Barry fled for help, she was already bleeding. Returning, she found Owen lying upon Jones, a blade thrust beneath her master’s clothes. John Jones confirmed the onslaught; his disabled hand had prevented any defense, and he had fainted away, discovering his neck and ear slashed only upon reviving. Mrs. Jones described the blow dealt to her husband and the wounds she herself had received. Young Charles Hopkins, who had hastened in with Barry, testified to his part in disarming the prisoner. Constable Holmes related the capture and the further weapons discovered upon Owen’s person.
The witnesses likewise made plain Barry’s deep attachment to the family: she had grown up beneath their roof and had given evidence on Jones’s behalf before the arbitrators. Borrow conjectures that her former testimony had fed Owen’s hatred toward her. One cannot elevate this conjecture to a certainty; nevertheless, the young woman, having risked her life to stay the blade, was obliged to recount in open court the butcher’s work she had seen wrought upon those she had served from girlhood. In court, the weapon was produced: a carving knife fourteen inches long, encrusted with blood.
The proceedings laid bare the wreckage of the assaulted house, the bloodstained blade, and the murderous threat Mrs. Jones remembered hearing. Owen remained impassive during the depositions. Borrow paints him as glaring upon his victims with malice; this judgment belongs to the narrator, not to any scrutiny of the prisoner’s mind. A very different testimony, however, came from the witnesses summoned for the defense. They deposed that he had suffered a violent fever nine years before, since which time he had been subject to fits of melancholy and mental derangement. The loss of his wife and the ruin of his fortunes had, they maintained, unsettled his reason. They had hitherto known him as a mild and humane man.
On 4 April 1818, at the Kingston Assizes, Owen stood indicted for cutting and maiming John Jones. The jury returned a verdict of guilty, but recommended him to mercy in consideration of the character given him by the defense. The judge passed sentence of death, warning Owen that he could entertain no reasonable expectation that such a recommendation would commute his doom. Borrow’s narrative halts there, silent as to the fate of the petition for royal mercy. The three victims had survived; the law’s ultimate reckoning remained to be fulfilled.