ABSTRACT
One particularly interesting feature of this chapbook is that the first part appears to have been printed and distributed before the author had any knowledge of the murderer. Once John Randal was discovered and confessed his crime, the author or printer reissued the earlier tract, with the addition of the new information. (In fact, I have reversed the arrangement here to preserve the chronology; the original chapbook begins with the discovery of John Randal and then appends the first book.) Rather like modern news reporting, the information was provided to the public as it became known, and guesswork was used to help complete the initial story. In the first book, the author predicts that the murderer was known to the victim because the robber did not have to force his way in; Widow Burton would not have let a stranger into the house, and, if it was a stranger, he would merely have bound and gagged her rather than kill her, as she would not know the robber’s identity. The author is also certain that “time will produce and justice will reward” the murderer. As it turned out, the author’s predictions came true in their entirety. John Randal was indeed known to Widow Burton, explaining both why he was allowed into the house and why he needed to murder her to rob Esquire Bluck’s home, because she could easily have identified him to the authorities had she survived. Randal was captured because he returned to a nearby shop to collect razors he had previously brought in for sharpening, where a witness recalled that Randal had been the last person seen entering Bluck’s home while Burton was house-sitting. Returning for his razors after murdering a woman and stealing more than forty pounds worth of silver plate led to Randal’s undoing and surely shows Randal to have been a greedy, arrogant, and overconfident man, in addition to being an amateur murderer and thief.
