Joe Travis and Charles Copeman were two young drinking friends who liked wandering around their favourites inns around Blyborough and Kirton. Just before Christmas, 1847, the famous Year of Revolutions in Europe, young Travis was about to do something that would cause something of a revolution in his own life: knife his friend Charles, a man about to be married. They had stopped in a field on the way home, and after a night of teasing and ribbing, something happened to cause one friend to murder the other.
The lanes and fields around this area are often dark and isolated; add to that the fact that both men had drunk a large amount of beer, and that opens up all kinds of possibilities for crime. After all, they were walking in the midst of rolling farmland, broad, open fields and hedgerows. The place was already riddled with superstition, and in years gone by many people must have been attacked in such lonely places around Kirton, on the escarpment up from the plain to the old Roman road to Lincoln.
It is known that Travis was in debt, and that Charles had some money on him: some silver coins. They left the Greyhound at Blyborough, and with Charles’s little terrier in tow, they set off for the Red Lion in Kirton. The next morning, the body of Charles Copeman was found dead in the field, his throat cut, and there were many more knife wounds to his head and face. If it had been a case of a friends’ fall out, then it entailed a considerably forceful and raging frenzy. Surely the gallows would almost have been ordered for Travis when his multi-bladed pocket knife was found nearby.
The dog was still by his master’s body, and it took more than one man to move him away. It was a sign that this was not going to go away, even though young Travis had one thing on his side: there was no sign of any of his clothes, and they would have been very blood-stained indeed after that attack. The money had been stolen, after the man’s pockets had been ripped open, and so fierce was the cut that it had severed the jugular.