On Monday, the 2nd of March, 1829, Mrs. Dyott returned to the modest dwelling in Prospect-row, Portsmouth, where it was her practice to assist Christian Joliffe in the care of Mr. Langtrey. On the previous evening, shortly after six o’clock, she had presented herself as usual to help prepare the old gentleman’s bed; no one had answered her knock. After making a considerable stir, she had withdrawn, presuming the inhabitants to be asleep. On the morrow, the same heavy silence confronted her at the threshold. A neighbour was summoned, and an entrance was forced through the back of the house.
Pelham next places Joliffe, a housekeeper upwards of sixty years of age, in the ground-floor room; upstairs lay Langtrey, nearly an octogenarian, and so infirm as to be incapable of leaving his bedchamber. A slater’s hammer belonging to the old gentleman and fragments of a broom-handle were discovered near the woman. In this relation, both chambers bore the marks of a desperate struggle and repeated blows. Within Langtrey’s apartment, drawers and chests had been ransacked; papers, apparel, and coin lay scattered in confusion. A bag reputed to contain six hundred sovereigns had vanished.
Langtrey, formerly a brick-maker, had amassed a substantial competence and was reputed to keep bank-notes and specie about him. The motive of robbery was thus immediately apparent to the authorities, yet the perpetrator remained unknown. Officers from London were summoned to Portsmouth. For several days, Pelham reports, young Stacey continued his ordinary duties as a barber’s apprentice. He had been acquainted with Langtrey, whom he was accustomed to shave whenever the old gentleman’s infirmities prevented him from doing so himself; he was likewise familiar with the domestic habits of a house wherein Joliffe was virtually the sole attendant upon the invalid.
Presently, his conduct assumed a suspicious complexion in the eyes of the investigators. On a Friday, he complained of an injured hand and requested leave from his master’s shop; on the following Monday, he began to expend money with lavish freedom, notwithstanding that his wages were but two shillings and sixpence a week. He quitted Portsmouth in a hired carriage, accompanied by two women, upon what he termed an excursion. Not far from the scene of the crime, between that house and his father’s residence, there had been discovered a knife stained with blood and human hair, resembling an instrument known to belong to him. The weapon with which Joliffe’s throat had been severed had not been found within the dwelling.
These circumstances did not yet constitute a complete narrative. It was the testimony of Connamore, his fellow-apprentice and the brother-in-law of their master, which fixed a decisive hour and purpose to the evening of Sunday, the 1st of March. On that day, both youths had quitted their master’s premises together to repair to the elder Stacey’s house. The young man carried with him a treatise entitled The Book of Martyrs, which he represented as being intended for Langtrey. He had prevailed upon Connamore to advance the money for the volume, declaring that the old gentleman had commissioned him to purchase it.
Towards twenty minutes to six, Stacey set forth alone with the volume. He did not return until near eight o’clock. Connamore admitted him; the youth brushed past him in haste and ran upstairs, calling for his father. The father followed him, and the pair remained in secret colloquy for a considerable space. Stacey’s stepmother subsequently joined them. Connamore thereupon heard sounds which led him to believe that garments were being washed in a tub. Shortly thereafter, the father dispatched him to buy bread and cheese at a distant shop. Upon his return, the apprentice perceived Stacey seated by the hearth stripped to the waist, whilst the stepmother dried and ironed his shirt. Later, as they walked home together, Stacey told him he had been in a fray and had blooded his clothes; Connamore observed upon his coat a stain so extensive that, as he remarked, it would need to be scraped off with a knife.
The religious treatise was discovered lying hard by the blood-stained knife. Another witness deposed to having seen Stacey scale the palisades of Langtrey’s house on the night of the catastrophe. The constables further ascertained that a glove left behind upon the premises formed part of a pair presented to the youth by a gentleman, and which Stacey had worn that very day. The material traces, the hours recounted by Connamore, and the conduct of the family thus converged upon the interval of the young apprentice’s absence.
He was apprehended at Porchester, in a house where he was lodging with his female companions. At the sight of the constables, he cried out: “I am done!” and attempted to conceal himself within a barn. Being conveyed back to Portsmouth, he was examined before the magistrates. His father was likewise arrested; Pelham records that he was charged with the lesser offence of harbouring his son.
During his confinement, the youth at first manifested, according to the compiler, little contrition. Following an interview with his three sisters, he is said to have acknowledged his guilt to a fellow-prisoner and to have described the circumstances of the deed. In this reported confession, he stated that he had first attempted to strangle Joliffe, before striking her with a candlestick and a broken broomstick; he had then mounted the stairs to demand Langtrey’s money, whereupon the old man defended himself with his walking-stick. Stacey asserted that he felled him to the floor and dispatched him with blows from the hammer. Having descended to the ground floor, and fancying that Joliffe still stirred, he struck her again and severed her windpipe. A knocking at the door startled him; he then set about his plunder, yet he affirmed that he had cut the old man’s throat before carrying off the bag, to ensure that the dying victim could not watch his movements. The ferocity of these particulars derives from the confession as recorded by Pelham, and must not be confounded with an independent view of the scene.
On that same day, the father made a disclosure in his turn, indicating the spot where he had buried the bag, beneath a freshly cut piece of turf. Nearly the whole of the money was recovered. Approximately thirty pounds were wanting, which young Stacey was believed to have squandered on a watch, trinkets, and clothing. The robbery had thus failed to strip the old gentleman of his entire hoard; yet it had left two corpses in its train, and linked an entire family to the catastrophe.
The trial of the two prisoners took place at Winchester before Mr. Justice Burrough, according to the relation. Pelham assigns the proceedings to Thursday, the 30th of August, 1829; he subsequently records the execution as having occurred on Monday, the 2nd of September of the same year. These days of the week do not correspond with the dates given; in the absence of independent judicial records, it is fitting to retain the dates of the compilation without attempting to rectify the calendar by conjecture. The narrative records a verdict of guilty against both prisoners. Young Stacey was condemned to death; his father was sentenced to transportation for life as an accessory after the fact.
The execution took place, Pelham writes, before Winchester gaol, on the day of the Magdalen Hill fair, when a vast multitude was assembled. Stacey rejected the ministrations of the ordinary, whom he had dismissed on the eve of his death. At the foot of the gallows, he declared that another man had assisted him in the murders; the compiler adds that this individual subsequently established his innocence. This dying declaration altered neither the judgment nor the penalty; yet it stands as a reminder that a narrative of blood may outlive its actors, leaving behind one final accusation whose named author is withheld from the reader.
Thus terminates Pelham’s account: a recovered bag, the restitution of nearly the whole sum, a father transported for life, and a son executed upon the scaffold. Between these occurrences lie a door that remained barred, the testimony of a fellow-apprentice, and confessions reported at second hand. The narrative is bound fast by the sentence of the law; yet the printed days remain discordant, serving as a reminder that even an account confident in its conclusion has not always secured every one of its landmarks.