The mistress of the public house opposite had received an unusual charge: to keep watch over the neighbouring dwelling. When the front door closed behind the men, she was not long in raising the alarm.
The plot turned upon an accepted bill, lodged at a banking house and payable when due; the money was subsequently to be remitted to the address inscribed upon the paper, a house then standing tenantless. Before the bill reached maturity, two men rented this house under the pretext of having it cleansed, and made haste to obtain the key. The landlord grew suspicious of their descriptions and their excessive hurry. He instructed the mistress of the public house across the street to keep watch upon the premises.
On the day the bill fell due, the watcher observed two men enter the house and throw open the parlour windows. A third man shortly arrived, knocking at the door; he was admitted, and the door was shut fast behind him. She then caught the sound of a faint, half-strangled voice crying: “Murder!” followed by a death-rattle. Peering through the keyhole, she beheld two men dragging the third toward the cellar stairs. She cried aloud that a man was being murdered within. She implored the passers-by to force the door, yet not a soul stirred. Thereupon she forced the window herself and prepared to climb inside. One of the assailants fled; at the hue and cry of “Stop thief!” he was seized by men in the street. Mrs Bouchier took the other by the throat and dragged him across to her alehouse.
The victim had been rifled of his pocket-book. The men had choked him near to suffocation to prevent his raising the alarm, and were hauling him toward the back cellar; Borrow judges that they would in all likelihood have dispatched him there but for Mrs Bouchier’s intervention. William Newton and Abraham Darnford, arraigned for robbery and attempted murder, were brought to trial on 17 September 1780. The woman who had watched the house across the way recounted to the jury all she had heard and seen.
Borrow attributes the conviction at trial directly to Mrs Bouchier’s testimony. The clerk refused to take the oath because he was a Quaker, and the compilation offers no further particulars as to his role. The alehouse keeper thus remained the solitary voice describing the entry of the men, the assault, and the intervention that cut short the strangling.
The jury found Newton and Darnford guilty. Within Newgate gaol, on 21 November, Darnford made a confession of his earlier offences. He detailed his method: waiting at coaching inns for the arrival of parcels brought by the stagecoaches, then transcribing the address of one of them onto a letter bearing a forged postmark. The booking clerk, deceived by the matching address, would deliver the parcel to him upon payment of the carriage. Once the parcel was in hand, Darnford determined alone how to dispose of the contents: whether to discount a bill, demand gold, purchase lottery tickets, or sell the cloth. According to the nature of the parcel and its intended recipient, he altered his name and his stratagems.
In September 1777, in London, he procured at an inn a parcel sent from Norwich and addressed to Smith, Wright, and Gray. It contained bills for upwards of five hundred pounds, among which was one for 216 pounds and five shillings. Darnford endorsed the bill and draft in the name of John Watkins; Gaussen accepted the instrument and paid over the cash, deducting the customary discount. Darnford cashed the proceeds at the Bank of England, left other bills awaiting acceptance, and destroyed the remainder. In July 1778, at the Bull and Mouth inn, he singled out a trunk addressed to a Mr Ford in Lombard Street. He carried it to Cheapside, took a coach home, and opened it in his lodgings. He found therein more than one hundred pounds in cash, together with several bills. He negotiated several of these, and then returned the remaining bills in an envelope to the senders in Birmingham, Messrs Whitworth and Yates.
He was accustomed to endorse the bills in the name of Thomas Downer of Tooley Street, subsequently conveying the purchased goods in a box to Ford’s residence, where he left the whole. As for the Birmingham parcel, he discounted two bills with Hazard for lottery tickets, two with Cox for gold, and one with Crafton for stockings. Crafton’s shopman carried these to a box-maker’s, where Darnford bought suitable packing for the stockings. In another instance, he intercepted a parcel directed to Sir William Lemon and subjoined to the letter a request for twenty-five lottery tickets. Having subsequently learned that the recipients had purchased them, he dispatched a porter to claim them, but they refused to deliver them up.
A parcel from Lynn contained nothing beyond livery clothes and a letter. The letter disclosed that the Boydells owed approximately thirty pounds to the sender, Curtis. Darnford wrote to the Boydells as though he were Curtis himself. He feigned having scalded his hand and having engaged a neighbour to write on his behalf. Enclosed with the letter, he forwarded a bill of twenty-five pounds payable at sight; the Boydells duly discharged it to the porter he had sent to collect the cash. To persuade his correspondents, he cited a ticket drawn a few days earlier with a prize of five hundred pounds, alleged it was his own, and promised to send it to them to be sold. He further confessed to having taken, at the Bell and Crown in Holborn, a parcel of Irish linen destined for Mr Fox of Cheapside: a fifty-pound bill was employed to purchase lottery tickets, while other bills, to the value of roughly twenty pounds, were turned into specie. A package for Mr Bedford contained merely some dimity cloth, which he sold for the best price he could command. Finally, a hamper addressed to Mr Stock, a linen-draper, yielded a goose and a bill drawn upon Mr Branwaite. The latter accepted it, and Darnford negotiated it with a refiner.
Throughout his confession, he insisted that he had acted entirely alone, presenting his disclosure as a voluntary act. Being unable to make restitution of the sums, he wished, so he wrote, to name those whom he had wronged. He maintained that his wife and children were innocent and had known nothing of his frauds—an assurance that rests on his word alone. This confession of Darnford’s took place after the verdict against the two men for the outrage in the house; it does not implicate Newton in the mail thefts. Darnford signed it at Newgate on 21 November. He and Newton were executed the following day, 22 November 1780.