A Family Affair: the Killing of Saville Kent

 

Sixteen-year-old Constance Kent and her younger brother William were home from school for their summer holiday. It was June 1860. The Kents’ home was Road Hill House in the village of Road (which these days is spelt Rode), on the Somerset-Wiltshire border about three miles north of the town of Frome.

Constance’s father was Samuel Kent. He had several children and a new wife. He was socially ambitious and decided it would be advantageous to move close to Bath, which was still a fashionable city where his daughters might show themselves and pick up good husbands. Road Hill House, eight miles outside Bath, seemed ideally located for this purpose. It was a big house with stables, a fine garden, a shrubbery and pleasant views across fields and country lanes. It was a good place to bring up children.

Samuel Kent’s household was affluent and respectable, but not happy. It was rigid and there was too little affection to share among the many children. Samuel Kent and his second wife had a new baby, Francis Saville Kent. They were besotted with him. Their affection for baby Saville seems to have completely displaced any affection they had had for Constance, who was both aware of this and acutely jealous of Saville.

On 29 June 1860, Saville had been put to bed early. He slept soundly because he had been unable to sleep during the day; it was the day the chimneys had been swept.

The Kents kept two dogs. One was allowed to roam about inside the house. The other was kept chained up in the yard. Mr Kent went out into the yard at ten in the evening in his usual way to feed the dog. William and Constance went up to bed at the same time, as did their older sisters Mary Anne and Elizabeth. Mr and Mrs Kent stayed up talking for about another hour before they too went to bed. It was an evening like any other in the Kent house.

Mr and Mrs Kent slept through the night without being disturbed at all. Mrs Kent woke at dawn, when she thought she heard a sound like one of the drawing room windows being opened. During the night, a man out fishing in the River Frome heard a dog barking, apparently at the Kents’ house. The village constable heard the dog barking, too. He also saw lights at the Kents’ house, at the nursery window and in one of the downstairs windows.

The children’s nurse, Elizabeth Gough, woke at five o’clock and saw that the four-year-old Saville was not in his bed. She saw that the sheets had been replaced neatly, and she assumed from this that Saville had been lifted from his bed by his mother, who was nursing him in her room. Thinking that nothing was wrong because Saville was safe with his mother, Elizabeth Gough went back to sleep.

Mrs Kent was pregnant, so when Elizabeth Gough got up at seven o’clock, went to Mrs Kent’s room and got no answer to her gentle knock she returned unconcerned to her own room and read her Bible. An hour later the assistant nurse arrived, and Elizabeth Gough went back to Mrs Kent’s room. To her consternation Saville was not there. Miss Gough explained what she thought had happened and Mrs Kent was angry with her for imagining that, in her condition, she would have gone wandering round the house at night looking for children.

Miss Gough was now seriously worried. She had no idea where the boy was and knew he must have been missing more than two hours. She went to the children and asked them if they knew what had happened to Saville. None of them knew anything. Miss Gough was getting frightened. She asked the parlour maid, Sarah Cox, if she had seen Saville. She had not, but she had found the drawing room window open.

At this point Elizabeth Gough raised the alarm. The boot boy was sent to the parish constable, then to the village constable, who always insisted that the parish constable should attend because the parish was mainly in Wiltshire while the village was in Somerset; there was a complicated division of responsibility. The two policemen duly arrived and came to the conclusion that the boy Saville Kent had been kidnapped. The policemen advised Mr Kent that the matter should be reported immediately to the Wiltshire police; Mr Kent rode off straight away to Southwick, just two and a half miles along the Trowbridge road (now the A361), to report the crime.

The villagers disliked the Kents and freely admitted it. Samuel Kent was a brusque incomer and had a high-handed attitude to the locals. He did not like the idea of his house being overlooked by the occupants of a row of cottages nearby, and he had had a high fence erected to block their view. He also insisted on having sole and exclusive fishing rights to a particularly rich stretch of the River Frome, which ran past the village to the west. The Kents’ unpopularity was underlined by the behaviour of the village children, who were far from deferential; they jeered at the Kent children and openly taunted them.

In spite of this well-established and fully justified dislike of the Kent family, the villagers rallied to the family’s support in its moment of crisis. The plight of a lost baby touched them and they set about trying to find it. Two of them, William Nutt and Thomas Benger, began searching the grounds of the Kents’ house. Constance had once run away dressed as a boy, first cutting her hair and leaving her locks in an old privy in the shrubbery. Nutt and Benger went there and found an ominous pool of blood on the floor, but no splashes of blood on the privy seat. They peered down into the privy, but it was too dark to see down into the cess-pit, so Nutt went off to get a lamp. While he was gone, Benger’s eyes gradually became accustomed to the dark and he saw something pale. He reached in and pulled it out. He found that it was a blanket, heavily bloodstained. The Nutt returned with a candle. With the help of its light they saw the boy. He was dead. His body was resting on a splashboard under the seat; the blanket had been covering the baby. The water was later drained from the cess-pit, revealing a bloodstained piece of flannel, a piece of women’s clothing and a newspaper that had been used to wipe clean a knife.

There was no doubt now about what had happened to Saville Kent. He had been savagely murdered. Messengers were sent to fetch Mr Kent back from Southwick and the doctor, Mr Parson, from Beckington, another nearby village. By this time, Mr Kent had reached Southwick toll gate and was reporting that his child had been kidnapped in a blanket and asking that anyone seen with a child wrapped in a blanket was to be stopped. This was an odd detail to pass on; no one knew at that stage that a blanket was missing from the house, and the child had not been found together with the blanket in the privy until well after Kent had left for Southwick. How did Mr Kent know that his son had been carried to the privy in a blanket?

There was something else that was very peculiar about Mr Kent’s ride to Southwick. The messenger who went after him to tell him the child had been found dead discovered that Mr Kent had only reached the toll gate. He had not reached Southwick, which itself was only two miles away, and yet he had been gone an hour and a half. Obviously people ride their horses at different speeds; maybe Mr Kent stopped along the road to relieve himself. But even allowing for these variations more than an hour is left unaccounted for, and the lost hour was never explained. What exactly was Mr Kent doing during this crucial time, when he should have been riding as fast as possible to get help? Had he secretly returned to Road Hill House to destroy some incriminating evidence, or to confer with Constance? Or had he instead ridden to some other destination, to one of the other villages on some other errand, before he was ready to report the baby missing? These questions have never been answered.

Back at the house, the case had been taken over by Inspector Foley. Foley’s police constable found a bloodstained shift, belonging to a woman, above the boiler in the kitchen, though for some reason this was left unmentioned until three months later. All the night dresses in the house were inspected. Only one of them had blood on it and that, the doctor confirmed, was menstrual blood and therefore nothing to do with the murder. The investigators rapidly came to the conclusion that no outsider was involved. The murderer knew the layout of the interior of the house perfectly, knew that the drawing room window could only be opened in a certain way without creaking, knew about the old privy hidden in the shrubbery, and so on. It was what detectives in the twentieth century would call ‘an inside job’.

The night dresses were inspected for blood because of the way the baby had been killed. The little boy had had his throat cut with a razor and died instantly. There was another injury too, one that was harder to explain. A weapon of some sort had penetrated the child’s night gown and made a small wound in his chest. This had not bled. There were also two more tiny wounds in the boy’s left hand; they too had not bled.

When the parlour maid collected the laundry, she took Constance’s night dress along with the others. The girl followed her and asked if she would get her a glass of water. The maid later reflected that this was odd, as the girl had a jug of water in her room. When the maid returned she went on with her tasks, but the next day she discovered that Constance’s night dress was missing. It was never found. The bloodstained shift in the kitchen was a different garment, and no one knows whose shift that was. This episode suggested that Constance deliberately diverted the parlour maid on the pretext of wanting a glass of water; what she really wanted was to get the parlour maid out of the way for a few minutes so that she could retrieve her night dress from the pile. The only conceivable reason for doing that was to prevent the parlour maid from examining her night dress; the maid would have seen bloodstains that seriously incriminated Constance. Presumably, once she had her bloodied night dress in her possession she secretly destroyed it. When asked why her night dress was not in the pile, Constance used the occasion to pour blame on the local village women who did the laundry for them; the Kents, she said, were always short of nightwear because the local laundresses were always losing their clothes. It was not surprising that the Kents were so hated by the locals.

The inquest on Saville Kent was opened in the Red Lion Inn. There was evidence that the amount of blood spilt in the privy was about a pint and a half, which was considered not enough given the nature of the wound. The jury wanted to question the children, who were clearly emerging as suspects, especially William and Constance, but among the crowd of spectators there was such a strong antipathy towards the children that the inquest had to be adjourned to the safety of the Kents’ house. An element of unfairness had already crept into the proceedings. The children of Kent’s first marriage were questioned, but Mr and Mrs Kent themselves were never questioned.

Constance said she knew nothing, had gone to bed at half past ten, had heard nothing unusual, knew of no resentment against the boy, and found the nurse always kind and attentive. William said much the same. The verdict was wilful murder – by person or persons unknown. That was a perfectly correct and legal outcome; even if the coroner and everyone else present had been convinced that they knew who the murderer was, that that person was present in the room, and that she was Constance Kent, the inquest verdict was still correct in stopping short of accusing her. Her guilt was for the courts to decide.

There was local outrage at the crime, and Scotland Yard was called in. Inspector Whicher from Scotland Yard quickly concluded that Constance had murdered her half-brother and charged her accordingly. She broke down in tears and pleaded her innocence. The nurse supported Constance. She had never known Constance behave other than well towards the child. She also made the point that the walls of Constance’s room were so thin that she could not have gone out in the night without others hearing what she was doing. Constance mentioned giving the child a present and that they had played together.

At the committal hearing at Devizes in July 1860, two school friends of Constance gave a very different story. They said that Constance had told them how much she resented her stepmother’s attitude, that her father and stepmother favoured the two youngest children and treated the children of the first Mrs Kent as servants. She said that William was made to use the back stairs like a servant, and was always compared unfavourably with the baby Saville. In adversity, Constance and William had always stuck together.

Overall, there was a powerful impression that Constance was guilty. There was insufficient evidence against her, especially since she had (apparently) succeeded in destroying the incriminating night dress, and the trial failed. The trial had been badly set up. The magistrate gave Whicher just seven days to prepare the case against Constance. Mr Kent hired a barrister to defend Constance, and the defence barrister dominated the proceedings. In spite of this unsatisfactory outcome, like many police officers in this situation over the decades, Inspector Whicher was sure she was guilty. Others were of the same mind. Constance was therefore not formally acquitted. Instead the trial was stopped, and she was released on bail, discharged into her father’s care. There was clearly not enough solid evidence to continue with the trial, and it never reopened. Whicher was heavily criticized for incompetence. Later the local police had a go at bringing Elizabeth Gough to trial, but that too was a failure.

Constance’s father, Samuel Saville Kent, had married Mary Anne Windus in 1830, when he was twenty-eight and she was twenty-one. They were both from middle class commercial families and to begin with they lived in London. Samuel Kent became ill and the doctor’s advice was to move to the coast for better air, so they moved to Sidmouth, where Kent took a job as a factory inspector at £800 a year. A son, Edward, was born in 1835, but the four children born between 1837 and 1841 all died in infancy. The first Mrs Kent was herself not strong, and she had already shown symptoms of consumption when she was carrying Edward. She then started to show signs of mental instability. She took the children out and got lost. She also had a knife hidden under her bed.

The doctor advised Samuel Kent to hire a housekeeper, mainly to keep a close eye on his unstable wife. In 1844, Mrs Kent gave birth for the ninth time in fourteen years. This time it was Constance. Under the care of the new housekeeper, Miss Pratt, Mrs Kent gained strength and gave birth to William. By this time Mary Kent was completely insane. In characteristic Victorian style, Samuel Kent shut his wife away without any treatment and pretended that everything was normal. Then, in 1853, while Miss Pratt was away visiting relatives, Mary Kent developed a bowel problem and quickly died.

The children were used to Miss Pratt, who had been with the Kent family for a decade by this time, but they were nevertheless very shocked when their father announced that he and Miss Pratt were to be married. Edward was so disgusted by the idea that when he returned home from school he had a blazing row with his father about the marriage, left the house and went to sea.

It was then that Samuel Kent and his new wife moved to Somerset, but the problems simmered away. Constance was as angry and resentful of the marriage and its implications as Edward. She became hypersensitive to what were probably never intended to be slights. She became sullen, sulky and often rude. The jeering of the Road village children probably isolated her more, made matters worse, and she became paranoid.

The second Mrs Kent seems to have been a very patient woman, but she must have found Constance very hard to deal with. In the end, Constance just became a domestic nuisance and Mr and Mrs Kent decided she should go away to school in London, which she also deeply resented. When she returned from school on holiday, it was to find that her mother’s successor had had another baby. This was the unfortunate Saville, and the Kents openly doted

on him.

In 1854, the news came that Edward had been lost at sea, Mr Kent was distraught, Then, eventually, a letter came from Edward to say that other officers had died, but that he had survived. In 1858, he died of yellow fever. Only William was left, and like Constance he was sent away to school. The two surviving siblings were reunited in the holidays, and at the end of one of them they decided to run away rather than be separated again. Constance disguised herself as a boy and they walked to Bristol. They tried to book a room in a hotel but, not surprisingly, they were turned over to the police. Forced to explain herself to her father, Constance said she wanted to leave England and was not sorry.

Mr and Mrs Kent persevered. They found a school that was nearer to home, and her behaviour there was better, though she was still just as churlish and difficult when she was at home. After the murder of Saville, Samuel Kent sent his daughter to St Mary’s Home for Female Penitents in Queen Square, Brighton. There, subjected to harsh discipline, she served as a probationer nurse. The Revd Arthur Wagner, who ran the home, initiated a series of interviews with Constance. He was determined to get to the bottom of the matter, and he had a strange hold over her. In the wake of her ordeal, Constance had developed religious leanings. She wanted to be confirmed, she wanted to take Holy Communion. The Revd Wagner refused to accept her as a confirmand ‘because the stain of the suspicion of murder was still attached to her.’ So she agreed to what Wagner required of her. In 1864, after a three-day interrogation by Wagner, Constance confessed to the murder of her half-brother Saville. The Revd Wagner wrote it all down and took the written statement to London to show it to the Home Secretary and insist that Constance be brought to trial (again). At Wagner’s instigation, Constance made her confession to the murder public.

On Lady Day 1865, Constance appeared at Bow Street Magistrates Court dressed in black and made her public confession. Then she collapsed in tears. Her father, who evidently had not known that she was going to do this, read about the extraordinary confession, which was given a high profile in the English press, and decided to visit her. Following the Bow Street confession, she was sent to Salisbury to stand trial in 1865. Again she appeared in black, looking tall, grave and inappropriately noble. At her second trial for the same murder, Constance (in the written statement) added a few details to her confession.

She claimed she had taken a razor from her father’s wardrobe a few days before the murder, though he had not noticed. She had placed candles in the privy, then went to bed, waited for everyone in the house to go to sleep. She went downstairs and opened the window shutters, Then she went to the nursery, picked Saville up from his bed, took out one of the blankets, replaced the other covers, then wrapped the boy in the blanket. She took the boy downstairs, put on galoshes, climbed out of the window, walked to the shrubbery and cut Saville’s throat with the razor. She thought blood would gush out but it did not come. She thought this meant Saville was not dead, so she tried to stab him in the chest with the razor.

This was a peculiar claim because the post mortem showed that the chest wound could not have been caused by a razor. She put the body still wrapped in the blanket into the privy. This too was inconsistent with what the men had found; the blanket was definitely on, and not round, the body as they had pulled the blanket up first and only then seen the body.

Constance went on to explain in detail how she had only found two spots of blood on her night dress. This is almost incredible, given the act she claimed she had just committed. She washed the blood out herself and the next day her night dress was dry, which also seems unlikely.

The bloodstained shift in the kitchen was never explained, by Constance or anyone else. There are several disconcerting and unsettling things about Constance’s confession, in addition to the details already mentioned. One is the fact that ‘her’ description of the murder – the murder that she committed – was recorded in the words of the Revd Wagner. The details she added were unconvincing attempts to explain things that no one else understood either. How could she have put on her galoshes and then climbed soundlessly out of a half-opened window while carrying a sleeping child wrapped in a blanket?

The trial was a very controversial one. Because Constance was the accused, she was, according to the law at that time, not allowed to speak. The only statement about what she had done was the ‘written statement’, which everyone knew was not in her own words but the Revd Wagner’s. She was being condemned without an opportunity to say what happened in her own words. To make matters worse, Wagner absolutely refused to reveal in detail what Constance had said to him, claiming benefit of clergy. There were questions about this in Parliament and the Lord Chancellor made it clear that Wagner had no legal right whatever to conceal evidence, whether he was a priest or not. There was a general feeling that the trial was unfair. The outcome was in any case predetermined by Constance’s public confession. She was found guilty, condemned to death.

There was a public outcry. There were wild allegations that Constance had only confessed in order to protect her father, who was the real villain; he not only killed the child but was having an affair with the nurse. The Home Secretary sensed that the conviction was unsafe because of the circumstances. Down in Brighton the Sisters of St Mary were abused in the streets by a mob and the Revd Wagner, who had goaded Constance into confessing and then shopped her to the Home Secretary, was set upon and badly injured. Public feeling ran so high that a reprieve was allowed. Constance was, after all, not to be hanged. Instead, she spent twenty years in prison at Portland and Millbank.

She was released in 1885 at the age of forty-one, into the custody of the Revd Wagner. After that, presumably with Wagner’s help, she completely disappeared as far the English were concerned. One sensational theory is that she washed up in the East End of London three years later and, perhaps not using Papa’s razor but someone else’s, carried out the Whitechapel murders – not Jack but Jill the Ripper. The truth is more mundane, but in its way just as remarkable. Arthur Wagner seems to have helped her to emigrate to Australia, where she lived on under a new name.

Constance Kent may have murdered her half-brother, Saville Kent, out of hatred for her stepmother. Certainly she could have done the awful deed if she inherited her own mother’s insanity and latent violence. She was profoundly unhappy with the ménage at Road Hill House, to the point where she had tried to run away with her brother. She had also used the privy in the shrubbery to conceal her misdeeds on that earlier occasion, and it looks as if she returned to this old haunt when she was looking for somewhere to kill Saville and dispose of his body. And she eventually confessed to the crime.

But, in spite of all of this, like several others who have looked at the details of her case, I am not completely convinced that in her confession Constance was telling the truth. Several points do not ring true:

 

1) When she cut Saville’s throat he did not bleed. This is not consistent with the one and a half pints of blood found on the privy floor when Saville’s body was discovered. Another puzzle is that one forensic test suggested that Saville died of suffocation and not by having his throat cut at all.

2) She stabbed Saville in the chest with the razor. The injury was not consistent with the use of a razor. Something else must have been used to make the small (and inexplicable) wounds in the chest and hands.

3) She climbed out of a half-open window wearing a night dress and galoshes without making any noise. If she attempted something like that without help she must have made a noise; perhaps someone else held the baby while she climbed out.

4) Her night dress had only two small spots of blood on it. Cutting the baby’s throat produced a significant amount of blood, and she would have got more on her clothing.

5) She washed her bloodstained night dress after the murder and it was dry by the morning. Mrs Kent heard the drawing room window being opened at dawn, which must have been the time of the murder. The night dress must have been washed after that and could not have dried by the time it was seen only a few hours later.

6) She offered no explanation for the bloodstained shift left in the kitchen. No one has been able to come up with a plausible explanation for the shift.

 

Was Constance spinning this version of events in order to cover up for someone else? For her brother William, perhaps, or even her father? It is certainly not beyond the bounds of probability that she and William carried out the murder together.

But what lay behind Mr Kent’s one hour delay in riding to the next village? Was it simply that he had ridden on through Southwick to Trowbridge, in order to inform Inspector Foley in person, and that the messenger encountering Kent back in Southwick did not realize that Kent had been on this extra journey? It is even so difficult to understand how Mr Kent knew so much about the circumstances of the disappearance. How did he know the baby would be found with a blanket? If Mr Kent was the murderer, what possible motive could he have had? If he committed the murder himself, it is hard to see why the churlish and discontented Constance would have confessed on his behalf – unless of course her inherited mental instability, the ordeal of being suspected of a crime and her time at St Mary’s conspired to convince her that she had done something she had not. Perhaps she brainwashed herself into taking on the burden of the sins of the world, in imitation of Christ. Perhaps she was talked into it by the determined, high-minded and self-righteous Wagner. It is after all not all that uncommon for innocent suspects to sign confessions after they have been interrogated for a while by experienced police officers; priests and policemen are quite capable of persuading people that they are guilty when they are not.

Much speculation has surrounded Constance Kent’s later life; she came out of prison when she was just over forty. Some painstaking recent research has revealed that in either late 1885 or 1886 she did indeed emigrate to Australia, where she joined her brother William, who had arrived there in 1884, and other family members; her half-brother Acland emigrated to Australia in 1885. Completely free at last, Constance launched on a long professional career in nursing. She went on working, amazingly, until her death at the age of 100 in 1945. Nobody in Australia knew about her extraordinary past, because there she was known as Ruth Emilie Kaye. She and her brother William were determined to leave their shared unhappy past (and possibly their shared crime) behind. William became an eminent naturalist and president of the Royal Society of Queensland. Constance trained as a nurse at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, then nursed at Prince Henry’s Hospital in Sydney. For over a decade she was matron-superintendent of the Parramatta Industrial School for Girls. Her last venture was to manage a Nurses Home at Maitland. None of this makes up for murdering an innocent four-year-old boy, if that is what she did, but Constance herself may have seen her commitment to a selfless life of nursing as her only possible path to redemption.