On 6 October 1828, Edward Barnett was brought back to Monmouth following his apprehension in Liverpool. Fuller, the officer who had taken him into custody, conducted him before the magistrates. The young man appeared to be about twenty-three years of age. He still wore the trousers and waistcoat he was believed to have worn on the day of the crime; his shoes, according to Pelham, had been begged at a turnpike gate near Irchester. The chronicler likewise notes his battered hat, his soiled yellow corduroy waistcoat, and his grime-stained shirt sleeves; he had no coat. The compilation places his arrest in Liverpool, but passes almost entirely in silence over the trial that was to follow.
On Sunday, 28 September, the door of Esther Stevens’s dwelling was found standing open. Several persons mounted the stairs and discovered her lifeless body upon the floor of the bedchamber. Pelham records that she was known by the sobriquet of “Hall of the Kymin,” derived from the eminences overlooking Monmouth where she had been born. Her husband, a waterman whose calling frequently summoned him from home, was at first suspected; yet the inquiry soon established that he had not slept beneath his own roof that night. A neighbour named Pearce recounted that footsteps and cries had been heard during the hours of darkness. Household disputes having been frequent, he had not seen fit to summon the authorities.
Within the bedchamber, a deep gash across the throat declared the immediate cause of death. A blood-stained table knife lay near the corpse; the blade, in Pelham’s view, appeared to have been taken from the open drawer of a table. Bloody finger-marks stained the staircase; the victim’s bonnet and earrings had fallen close by. Barnett had vanished. In the room were found his shot-bag, containing thirty pounds in banknotes, gold, and silver, alongside his fustian jacket and boots. A full kettle was still boiling upon the fire; the utensils for a meal stood prepared. Pelham conjectures that Esther had risen to set the downstairs room in order, and that Barnett, believing her returned after an absence, had fallen upon her. This conjectural scene belongs solely to the compiler.
Prior to the murder, Barnett had quitted his mother’s roof in order to persuade Esther to return to Monmouth. She had passed the night in the woods of the Kymin; the following morning, he had been seen parting from her at the edge of the covert. He had returned to his lodgings and drawn a loaded pistol from his pocket. In a letter addressed to William Davis, Esther had written that an awful event was at hand. Pelham collates these disparate signs and presumes that Barnett had threatened her should she return to Davis, with whom she had lived under an assumed name. The motive of jealousy he advances is the compiler’s own construction, not a verbatim declaration preserved by the court.
On the Saturday, Barnett received a letter from Esther entreating him to meet her. He departed from his house and returned no more. He had with him at that time the bag containing thirty pounds and wore, according to witnesses, a shooting jacket and laced boots. On the morrow, these very articles were discovered within the chamber of death.
The search broadened through the environs of Monmouth. Barnett was seen crossing the Wye destitute of coat, hat, or boots. Messengers were dispatched in sundry directions. The bloody traces lingered in the house; the chapter fails to disclose what clues guided Fuller to Liverpool. The pursuit is dispatched in a few brief lines; its outcome delivered the fugitive into the hands of the magistrates on 6 October.
Prior to this appearance, the coroner’s inquest had bound over thirty-three persons to appear at the assizes. Upon the table were displayed Esther’s blood-spattered garments, the knife, and the apparel and money attributed to Barnett. His mother was compelled to sign her deposition and enter into recognisances to give evidence against her son; Pelham depicts her trembling hand as she laboured to affix her mark. Esther’s husband and father were likewise in attendance. Such are the kinsfolk whom the compilation gathers in the room, without recording their own words upon the scene.
The coroner’s jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against Edward Barnett. On 6 October, when the depositions were read aloud before him, he remained standing, his eyes fixed upon the town clerk. The coroner informed him that he was at liberty to question the witnesses or require their recall; the clerk admonished him to utter nothing that might incriminate him. Pelham observes that Barnett sighed when the constable produced his garments, yet betrayed no visible emotion at the sight of the knife. Asked whether he had any observation to make, he kept silence at first; the question being repeated, he uttered only “No.” He then sat down, apparently overcome with exhaustion; Pelham suggests that the oppressive heat of the crowded room may have accounted for his faintness. The chronicler also remarks a slight twitch of the lip and a sigh during the reading of the husband’s testimony.
The compilation states that he made a general confession of his guilt to Fuller upon his arrest, though it fails to preserve the words employed. At the inquest, according to Pelham, his apparel bore no mark of blood. The chronicler describes his light red hair, his periodically flushed complexion, and his erect carriage; he adds that he smiled on occasion and that his composure was widely remarked. These traits, like his silence, represent mere impressions of spectators transmitted by Pelham, and prove nothing as to the formal indictment. The depositions having been read, a warrant of commitment was drawn, and a post-chaise conveyed him to the county gaol to await the assizes.
Barnett remained in confinement until the following spring assizes. Pelham dispatches the essential matter in a single sentence: the evidence was so conclusive that the jury could find no alternative but to pronounce him guilty. Sentence of death was passed forthwith. The chapter provides no account of the testimony delivered before the judge, nor of the arguments of counsel, nor of the jury’s deliberations. It furnishes no transcript of the confession. One must therefore abide by the recorded outcome, without fabricating a court scene which the chronicle has omitted.
On Thursday, 9 April 1829, Edward Barnett was executed. Pelham records that he preserved his composure and fortitude to the end, mounting the scaffold without hesitation. This final portrait proceeds from the very narrator who marshalled the suspicions and clues surrounding Esther’s chamber. The record offers no explanation as to why a woman found herself at the centre of rivalries known to us only through the men who spoke of her; it delivers rather a clutch of material objects—a letter, a purse, a knife—and the mechanical progress of a legal procedure whose concluding pleadings are lost to history.
The Monmouth record thus concludes with a conviction and an execution, but without a reconstructed trial. Strangers step through an open door; a neighbour hears cries and keeps his bed; a mother makes her mark against her son; magistrates and jurymen pronounce their decrees. The 1891 compilation transmits these successive acts in the guise of a completed tale. It cannot supply the missing minutes of the assizes. What may be traced, without straying beyond that boundary, is how material relics and reported utterances conducted the course of justice from the chamber at Monmouth to the foot of the gallows.