There is no need here to enlarge upon the oddly slack and casual conditions of the prison life of the time as revealed in this evidence. It will be no news to anyone who has studied contemporary criminal history. There is a point, however, that may be considered here, and that is the familiarity it suggests on the part of Sarah with prison conditions and with the cant terms employed by criminals and the people handling them. Sarah, though still in her earliest twenties,[20] was known already--if not in the Temple--to have a bad reputation. It is said that her closest friends were thieves of the worst sort. She was the daughter of an Englishman, at one time a public official in a small way in Dublin. Her father had come to London with his wife and daughter, but on the death of the mother had gone back to Ireland. He had left his daughter behind him, servant in an ale-house called the Black Horse. Sarah was a fairly well-educated girl. At the ale-house, however, she formed an acquaintance with a woman named Mary Tracey, a dissolute character, and with two thieves called Alexander. Of these three disreputable people we shall be hearing presently, for Sarah tried to implicate them in this crime which she certainly committed alone. It is said that the Newgate officers recognized Sarah on her arrival. She had often been to the prison to visit an Irish thief, convicted for stealing the pack of a Scots pedlar. It will be seen from Sarah's own defence how she tried to implicate Tracey and the two Alexanders: "I freely own that my crimes deserve death; I own that I was accessory to the robbery, but I was innocent of the murder, and will give an account of the whole affair. "I lived with Mrs Lydia Duncomb about three months before she was murdered. The robbery was contrived by Mary Tracey, who is now in confinement, and myself, my own vicious inclinations agreeing with hers. We likewise proposed to rob Mr Oakes in Thames Street. She came to me at my master's, Mr Kerrel's chambers, on the Sunday before the murder was committed; he not being then at home, we talked about robbing Mrs Duncomb. I told her I could not pretend to do it by myself, for I should be found out. 'No,' says she, 'there are the two Alexanders will help us.' Next day I had seventeen pounds sent me out of the country, which I left in Mr Kerrel's drawers. I met them all in Cheapside the following Friday, and we agreed on the next night, and so parted. "Next day, being Saturday, I went between seven and eight in the evening to see Mrs Duncomb's maid, Elizabeth Harrison, who was very bad. I stayed a little while with her, and went down, and Mary Tracey and the two Alexanders came to me about ten o'clock, according to appointment."