On Monday the 31st of May, 1813, at Camden Place, the country seat of the Bonars near Chislehurst, an open door and a missing lamp guided the servants towards the chamber where their master and mistress had passed the night. Philip Nicholson, the young footman, was presently dispatched to London to fetch assistance. He rode off on horseback; he was to return to the very center of the inquiry before the first suspicions had settled upon their proper mark.
On Sunday evening, Thomson Bonar had retired at his customary hour. His wife joined him only towards two o’clock in the morning, having instructed her maid to waken her at seven. The couple occupied two narrow beds, drawn close together. The household had not been entirely asleep: the groom, William Evans, affirmed that he had remained with Nicholson past midnight; a washerwoman, having entered towards four o’clock, had unlocked a side door. None of the domestics reported having heard any cry.
In the morning, Susannah Curnick observed that the hall door stood ajar. She closed it, went the round of the rooms, and ascended to the upper floor. In the ante-chamber, the key was found in the outer side of the lock. Dark marks stained the floor; the small rushlight kept burning through the night was gone. She called Mary Clarke, the housemaid. Clarke understood before she had even crossed the threshold: she cried aloud that their master and mistress were murdered.
The spectacle exceeded whatever they might have imagined. Thomson Bonar lay stretched upon the floor, his head battered in several places; his wife was still in her bed, grievously wounded and insensible. A kitchen poker, bent near the upper end, lay near the body. The two beds left scarcely room for a single person to pass between them. Mrs. Bonar was still breathing. The servants sent for a London surgeon, but he arrived too late: she expired towards one o’clock in the afternoon, without ever regaining consciousness. Borrow attributes to her but a single brief exclamation during those lingering hours.
The violence offered few clues. Nothing appeared to have been forced; the house door stood open, yet the rooms had not been ransacked, nor had the money that might have been sought there been taken. The master, aged seventy years, was described as a stout, robust man, still capable of offering resistance. His hands bore wounds. His nightcap, fallen a few paces from his head, retained a tuft of white hair matted with blood. In the adjacent bed, the linen was soaked, yet the face of his wife, according to Borrow, had preserved a composed countenance that stood in stark contrast to the savagery of her injuries.
That same evening, their son, Colonel Bonar, arrived from Faversham. In spite of those who sought to hold him back, he made his way up to the bedchamber, went in, and locked the door behind him. It had to be forced to reach him: he was found upon his knees, his hands clasped above the lifeless body of his father.
Meanwhile, Nicholson had quitted the house on horseback. He was charged with carrying the intelligence to London and summoning the surgeon Astley Cooper, then warning Mr. Angerstein, Mr. Bonar’s partner. At a public-house along the road, he drank rum; nevertheless, he completed the journey of some twelve miles in forty minutes, according to the depositions at the trial. Before reaching Bow Street, he stopped at the Red Lion, near Bedlam, and spoke there with Dale, the late butler. He informed him that he was suspected, yet added that he had had no hand in the crime. Before the Bow Street officers, his insinuations proved sufficient to turn the hue and cry towards that man. Dale had been dismissed a fortnight before, but he was able to prove that he had remained at the Red Lion the whole night. The charge against him fell away.
Having delivered his tidings, Nicholson did not take the direct road back to Chislehurst. He repaired to Whitechapel, where he met acquaintances and continued to drink. When an officer of the City constabulary came upon him at the Three Nuns inn, he resisted apprehension; the struggle left him covered with bruises. At his examination, the magistrate looked for such marks as his master might have inflicted while defending his life; the injuries observed upon him, particularly upon his brow, were attributed to the fray with the officer.
The interrogation bore also upon the sheets. When the servants had first run upstairs, Nicholson had covered the body of his master and wiped the floor with the bed linen; thereafter, he had rolled the bloody sheets into those of his own bed and laid them beneath it. He maintained that he had sought only to spare the others the sight of so harrowing a spectacle. Yet Curnick declared she had seen him carry the bundle down the stairs, and Clarke remembered his haste in declaring that Mrs. Bonar was still alive. The linen, the footsteps, and his contradictory statements soon fixed upon him as the chief suspect.
The shoes were examined. One was worn down at the toe and had a common heel; the other was fitted with a spring heel. Their prints were compared with the bloodstained impressions in the ante-chamber, and blood was subsequently found upon the soles and uppers. Nicholson acknowledged the shoes were his, adding that he believed one might have slipped from his foot while he carried the sheets. He also identified a spotted nightcap, asserting that the blood might have come from the linen. The domestics did not all offer an identical account of the morning, yet these articles firmly bound his bedchamber to that of the dead.
At the coroner’s inquest, the jury returned a verdict of wilful murder. Shortly thereafter, Nicholson attempted to cut his throat with a razor he had purloined from the pantry. The wound was so deep that his life was despaired of; yet so long as he retained the power of speech, he denied the deed. On the 7th of June, after visitors of high rank had quitted him, the haemorrhage broke out afresh. The Catholic priest, Mr. Bramston, was summoned. On the following day, Nicholson himself requested that Colonel Bonar be brought to his side. Weeping, he professed a desire to confess all, and subsequently signed a deposition acknowledging the murder. The bloody garments he had concealed beneath some leaves near a garden gate were brought to light after he had disclosed their hiding-place.
At the Maidstone Assizes, Nicholson was indicted for petty treason: the indictment charged him not merely with homicide, but with the murder of his master by a servant. Despite the confession he had signed, he pleaded not guilty, declaring he had been urged thereto by several persons. The witnesses rehearsed once more the discovery of the bodies, the hidden linen, and the shoes. In his statement, the prisoner described what he claimed to have taken place. Having awakened towards three o’clock, he had taken a poker and a candle, then wrapped a length of sheet about his person that he might not be recognized. He said he had struck Mrs. Bonar before turning upon her husband; the latter had risen and grappled with him. The two men, according to his account, had struggled for a quarter of an hour. Neither this confession, nor his explanations regarding the absence of robbery and accomplice, afforded any insight into the moment when the design had first taken shape.
The jury found him guilty. After sentence had been pronounced, Nicholson delivered a written declaration wherein he admitted having slain his master and mistress, denied all complicity, and declared that he had sought no plunder. He attributed his act to a sudden fit of frenzy brought on by drink; elsewhere, however, he had protested that he had drunk only beer before retiring, and had never entertained a thought of murder until he awoke. The contradiction endured, and the dying man did nothing to resolve it.
Upon the scaffold, with the halter already about the convict’s neck, a gentleman stepped forward to question him once more at the desire of Colonel Bonar: had he acted alone, and had he harboured any prior resentment? Nicholson answered that he had had no accomplice. To the final question, he clasped his hands together despite his irons, and repeated that it was a sudden thought of the moment. It was the only explanation he ever vouchsafed; neither the poker, nor the footprints, nor the sheets concealed beneath the bed could supply its place.