August 28, 2023 • 40 mins
The brutal murder of a 3-year-old shocked Victorian England not only because of how it happened, but because of who the police suspected. Could one of Britain’s most famous detectives solve the case? Author Kate Summerscale tells us the story at the center of her book, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
This seems so anomalous, and the house had seemed so
well secured with the great wall around it, and it
seemed like the safest place to have a child and
to protect a child.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast Tenfold War Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:51):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold War
Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. The brutal murder of a three year
old shocked Victorian England, not only because of how it happened,
(01:15):
but because of who the police suspected. Could one of
Britain's most famous detectives solve the case. Author Kate Summerskille
tells us the story at the center of her book,
The Suspicions of Mister Witcher. Let's start with where we
are in time, what year are we talking about, and
where does the central action take place in your story.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
This murder took place in a village in the English
countryside in Wiltshire in eighteen sixty, so it was the
height of Victoria's reign over Britain and a time when
the domestic ideal was at his height as well, the
idea of the sanctity of the home and the perfection
(01:57):
of the sort of bourgeois middle class family.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Tell me a little bit about the village, because we
have a largely American audience who I'm sure is picturing idyllic,
you know, British countryside and the thatched roofs and just
the beauty of it. Is that what we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
It's not so much that thatched ruse in that part
of west of England, but very lovely, yes, very sort
of lush fields and in the summer of eighteen sixty
all the sort of harvests were being cut, lots of
as a wild flowers and birds, and it's a pretty
idyllic hamlet, mostly stone houses and the house in which
(02:39):
the murder took place was the grandest house in the village,
a Georgian building with its own grounds and enclosed with
a high stone wall.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Tell me what the family dynamic was for people in
the eighteen sixties in this particular village. Are we talking about,
you know, a husband who's a laborer predominantly, or are
we talking about wealthier people.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
We're talking wealthier people. The patriarch, the father in this household,
was a factory inspector, so there was some resentment against
him in the village because it was part of his
job to stop children going into the factories to work,
which left many families hard up because they've been relying
on their children's wages. And he was a bit sort
(03:21):
of bad tempered and quite private man who was not
much liked by the family. And he lived in the
house with his second wife, formerly the governess to his children,
his first wife having died apparently insane, and with the
four children of the first marriage and also two new children,
(03:43):
and his wife was pregnant with a third so it
was a big family and a mixed family. Two families
in one.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Really tell me more about the ill tempered part of
the patriarch of the family before we talk a little
bit more about all these children and everything that's happening
in the house. Is someone we would label as physically
and verbally abusive in modern times.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
He was the standards of his time, conventionally harsh, and
it was more that he was reputed to be harsh
with the villagers, with the people of the lower classes,
than with his own family. Traditionally people have been able
to fish in the river on his land, and he
banned them from doing so. He excited quite a lot
of resentment among the locals.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Now, I would like to go down the rabbit hole
of the factory inspections. How young are we talking about
of kids entering the workforce in these factories, and I'm
assuming it's dangerous work.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah, extremely young children went into factories from the age
of eight or so, and the New Factory Act limited
the time that young children could work, but also the
age from which they could work. So I think it
was they couldn't work at all in the factories until
they were fourteen, and then there was a limit on
how many hours per day they could do. It was
(04:57):
intended to be a humane law that stopped the exploitation
of child labor. But it hit some poor families very hard,
and it was Samuel Kent's job, the patriarch in this family,
to enforce the act, to go into the local mills
and factories and stop people from working if they were underage.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
I'm assuming that he was someone who had been offered
many payoffs in his career. Did you find anything about that.
I mean, I'm assuming people were really trying to get
him on their side.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Well, I think perhaps his harshness was part of I
think he was a fairly effective factory inspector and played
by the rules, which is why he was so resented.
I didn't come across anything to suggest that he colluded
with the villagers or the people in the mills. Quite
the reverse. He was very strict at enforcing the rules,
which was why they were so cross with him.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Tell me a little bit about his wife. What's her name?
And she was the governess, which I know we've throughout
history heard about, you know, women coming in and taking
care of the children or the family, and then when
the why dies, she marries the husband. What's the feel
you have of the dynamic between Samuel Kent and his wife.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Well, she was a much loved governess, especially by Constance Kent,
the younger daughter, when the mother was alive, but there
were rumors that she had been having an affair even
during the first wife's life. Her first wife was apparently
confined to one wing of the house. They were living
(06:27):
in a different part of the country then, and Mary
and Samuel Kent were having an affair which her children
were unaware of. When Constance later found this out, she
felt very much betrayed by the governess who was now
her new stepmother, and even more so when the new
stepmother started having her own children and became less affectionate
(06:51):
towards the children that she had looked after as a governess.
The children of the first marriage.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Remind me the distribution between the children from the first
wife and the children from Mary Kent. Is it two?
She has two of her own? Is that right?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Yes, she has two of her own, and she's pregnant
with a third. In the summer of eighteen sixty and
there were four from the first marriage, two older girls
who are very close in age and very close to
one another, and then the younger ones, which were Constance,
who was sixteen at the time of the murders and
(07:26):
her brother William, to whom she was very close, who
was fourteen.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Okay, so we have a lot of people in the house.
So all of these people are in the house. You've
got four kids from a previous marriage, two kids from
the current marriage, plus you know, she's pregnant. Everybody's in
the same house. And it's a large house.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yeah, and there's servants too, of course, because it was
that kind of a house. So there was a cook
and a maid, and there were gardeners coming and going,
and cobblers and so you know, there was there was
a lot of traffic from the servants in the house
and a nurse, a nursemate called Elizabeth Goff who featured
in the story.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
And a factory inspector would earn that type of income
to be able to afford this sort of lifestyle with
all of these servants and kids in a large house.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yeah. Well, he was the factory inspector of the whole
of the West of England. He wasn't just supervising the
factories and mills in his immediate vicinity. And it was
a very prosperous kind of wool country. Lots of sheep,
lots of wool, lots of people making fabric, and it
was the main trade round there, so he was a
(08:34):
busy man. He was constantly touring the various different wool
mills and factories, and it was a highly responsible job,
reporting directly to the government.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
And you have the impression that he was a father
who was a good father, who was affectionate with his kids,
even if he was absent for a large part of
the time.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
I don't think he was very affectionate towards his kids,
but that was standard for a Victorian, middle class patriarch.
He was very, very fond of his youngest son, Savile,
with whom he constantly played a lot of horseplay and
so on. Less interested in the girls, I would say,
who he allowed to just sort of get on with it.
(09:14):
He wasn't tyrannical. He was distant and busy, and they
were left very much in the care of their step
mother and the nursemaid.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Okay, will you lay out whichever day you think becomes pivotal,
you know, all the way through the murder. Where do
we start with that part of the story.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Well, the family woke up one day at the very
end of June and the former governess new stepmother discovered
that her son, her youngest son, Saville, was missing from
his cot. He was just three years old and seemed
impossible to believe he'd climbed out. It was a high
sided cot, so she so raised the alarm. She asked
(09:56):
the nursemaid where he was. She rushed around looking for
him and raised everyone else from the staff, her stepchildren,
and everyone was searching for Savil. Eventually villagers were roped
in invited to come and help search the grounds, and
eventually two local men found him dead. His throat had
(10:18):
been cut horribly and he'd been stuffed down and outside
toilet as privy as they called it, just outside the house.
So it was an absolutely horrific scene, and the mother
was beside herself with distress.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
And I'm assuming that Samuel Kent had a similar reaction.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yes, he got on a horse and raced off to
fetch the local policeman to come and see what had
happened and work out who had done it. The police
came quickly and they interviewed the staff, the family, the
villagers looked for clues tried to work out who it
might be. They spent two weeks on the case, with
(11:00):
finding any leads whatsoever. Was such a horrific murder, so
inexplicable and mysterious and striking at the heart of this
rather affluent, well to do, respectable family that it was
a national news story. It was reported in the national papers,
and eventually there was an outcry about why the police
(11:22):
had not got anywhere with it.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Do you think a lot of this has to do
with their class and of course their skin color.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Yeah, for sure. It was very shocking and it felt
like an assault on the Victorian domestic ideal. The fuss
was so great that people were writing to the papers
and very agitated, sending in their own suggestions for who
might have killed the boy that eventually the government dispatched
to detective policemen from Scotland Yard to go down to
(11:53):
Wiltshire to try to solve the case themselves, and one
of those was Jack Witcher, who had joined the Detective
Division when it was first formed in eighteen forty two
and who was known as the Prince of Detectives. He
had a great reputation as an investigator and a kind
of visionary who could detect crimes that no one else could.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Well, I think it'll be interesting because of course I'm
very interested in the forensics and who has access to
what and all of that. But I think we can
probably talk about through Jack Witcher's eyes, right, because he's
the one who's investigating the case. Can we talk a
little bit about where we are with detectives at this time,
you know, specifically with Scotland Yard. The Moost Street runners
are gone, I'm assuming right.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Right, And these detectives in the division set up in
eighteen forty two were the first plane clothes police officers
in Britain and they were very exciting figures in a way.
To begin with, there were only eight of them. By
eighteen sixty there were twelve, you know, very elite call,
(12:58):
but they were all working class men. They were ordinary
coppers who had been elevated to this role because they
were so good at their jobs. Charles Dickens, for example,
was extremely thrilled by the detectives and the idea of
the detectives. He liked to consort with them, drink with them,
ask them about their adventures because they had this extraordinary
(13:20):
access in a very stratified society. The detective could go
anywhere from the slums of London to palaces and stately homes,
and like Dickens himself, they could range across the different
strata of society. But they were also to others threatening
figures because they were working class and they had this
(13:42):
unprecedented access and power, and the British had of long
held mistrust of surveillance and spies, and these playing clothes
officers who were unable to cross the threshold of the
family home, who had had this kind of access, were
seen as sinister and threatening to some.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
What is the difference in the access between you know,
a regular copper, regular officer who might have to go
and look into a murder and a detective no warrants
needed if you're a detective, or no permission needed essentially, well, I.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Think you'd need a warrant. But the local police in
Wiltshire who first investigated this crime, they were very polite
and deferential to the family. They understood that the family
were superior to them in social class and that they
would need to be invited into the home. They would
ask to come in, they wouldn't demand it, they wouldn't
(14:39):
take it as a right. So their attitude and the things,
the questions they asked, the evidence they sought was very different.
So it was more as sort of attitude and custom
than the legal force of it that had changed.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
So let me do a quick summary here. So we
have an eighteen sixty end of June. A three year
old boy from a wealthy family, savl Kent has gone
missing and then has found at the bottom of a
privy with his throat cut and everybody is in despair.
It's a couple of weeks and the police have no clues,
and there's all of this public outrage in the newspapers.
(15:16):
Not surprising, and we have two detectives from Scotland Yard
come in.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah, So Jack Witcher and his sidekick, Dolly Williamson, they
arrived at the house, went in interviewed all the members
of the family in more detail than the local offices had.
Jack Witcher realized that the killer must have been inside
the house because although a window had been firmed open,
(15:41):
it would have been impossible for anyone to take the
boy out to gain access through the window, and so
he thought that the open window was a decoy to
try to suggest that someone had broken in. He was
absolutely convinced that the killer was one of the people
within the building. He interviewed the staff and the family
(16:02):
very closely, and he asked to see their clothes, especially
their nightclothes and their underwear, the things they might have
been wearing at the time of the murder in the night,
And this in itself was seen as outrageous, especially when
he asked to see the nightclothes and shifts of the
young ladies in the household. He was literally going through
(16:25):
their underwear, taking it into public view, and there was
a certain amount of horror, certainly from Samuel Kent, the father,
but also people became quite uncomfortable at his intrusion and
his apparent insensitivity, because most people assumed that this family,
(16:46):
or each and every one of them was in terrible
grief over the death of the boy, and he was
just sort of barging in and asking for intimate questions
and making it clear that every one of them was
under suspicion.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
How many viable suspects does he have in that house
based on the kid's age, because I can't remember the range.
I know we have a sixteen year old girl, But
who else is capable in that house besides the parents
of doing this.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Well, there's the fourteen year old boy, William. They're also
the two older sisters, mary Anne and Elizabeth, who were
in their late twenties and lived on the top floor.
Constance and William were just along the corridor from Saville's room.
Saville's mother was pretty much ruled out as a suspect
because she was well. Not only was she his mother,
(17:36):
which was thought impossible that she should want to harm
her child, but she was also heavily pregnant. But the
nurse maid came under suspicion she had access to the nursery.
She had been the first one the mother turned to
and asked where he was. She was the one who
was expected to know where he was. And of course
it was possible that the cook and the maid downstairs
(17:57):
had been somehow involved, but there were suggestions that the
nurse maid in particular. There was one story that went
around that perhaps she'd had a lover, a man from
the village, and the little boy had woken Because she
shared a room with younger children, so somehow the boy
had been spirited out of the room while she was there.
(18:19):
There was one theory the boy had woken up and
seen her in bed with a man, and that in
order to silence him, they had between them killed him.
Another theory was that it was the father who'd been
in bed with the nursemaid, and again that the boy
had woken up and that they had killed him so
(18:39):
that he wouldn't report it to his mother. So there
were some very wild theories going around the name of
this family, and all the speculation and rumor and fantasy
about what might be happening was being sort of dragged
through the mud, and all the stuff came out about
the fact that the boy's mother had previously been the governess,
(19:02):
that she'd been having an affair with the father before
they moved to the village, and it was all very
disgracing and shaming for the family. And the news about
the previous wife having been insane, people started speculating about
whether one of her children, Mary Anne Elizabeth Constance William,
might have inherited her insanity and killed the boy for
(19:26):
that reason. The idea that this family who'd been struck
by tragedy were also being speculated about when libel laws
were very weak, very freely in the pages of the
press and apparently in the minds of the detective officers.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
So which of these theories did Jack Witcher and his
partner subscribed to the most strongly. What did they believe?
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Jack Witcher? He came to believe that Constance Kent, the
sixteen year old half sister of Saville, the boy who
had died, had killed him, and he backed up this
belief with a story about how she had a missing
a night dress missing. The number of night dresses in
(20:25):
her drawers was incorrect, it was one short. She insisted
that the correct number of night dresses had gone to
the laundry that week, but that one had not been returned,
and the lawn dress seemed to confirm this. But he
was convinced that somehow, by some sleight of hand, Constance
(20:47):
had hidden and destroyed a bloodied night dress, and that
she was the perpetrator.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
What was the motive? What did he think was the
reason behind it?
Speaker 2 (20:56):
He thought that she wanted to hurt her stepmother because
she had loved her so much as a child, loved
her more than her own mother, and had felt deeply
betrayed when the stepmother married her father and more or
less abandoned her. She became much more interested in her
(21:17):
actual children, her new babies, than the children of Samuel
Kent's previous wife, which's theory was that Constance was burning
with rage against her stepmother, and she knew what would
hurt her more than anything and hurt her father too,
was to take their favorite child and kill it. And
(21:38):
I suppose the boy, which had thought the boy represented
everything that she resented as well, because he was the
apple of his parents' eye, and the previous family had
become secondary. They were more or less ignored. They weren't
given new clothes, they had to sort of make do
with what they had, and she felt neglected and enraged
(22:02):
on the behalf of her brother to her brother, William,
her younger brother fourteen years old, who she was extremely
fond of. She and William previously a few years earlier,
had once run away together. They tried to run away
to see Constance had chopped off all her hair and
she'd thrown it in the privy, the same privy that
(22:23):
Saville was found. And Wicher thought this was very significant
and that it also indicated her capacity for rebellion and
the depths of her anger with her father and her stepmother.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Tell me about access again. You said, there's a large
wall around the house, right, but there was a window open.
But Wicher felt like the window was a decoy, and
did he feel strong like there is no way anybody
from the outside world could have gotten into this house
without a key or something.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Samuel Kent went round the building every night making sure
that all the windows and doors were locked, and he
confirmed that he had done that on the night before
his son was murdered. And it was impossible to open
this window from the outside. It was impossible to open
it from the outside.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
And did you say the privy was within the wall,
within the property or is it a separate place.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
It's separate. It was an outhouse. It was next to
something called the knife house and the boothouse. There were
little sheds just beyond the kitchen outside the building itself.
The buildings very sort of elegant and had various outhouses
for different purposes. So this was a privy not used
by the family, but used by the laborers, the people
(23:40):
who worked in the grounds.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Could constance with what you know have done this? Did
she have the access? Could she have slipped away? Could
all of this reasonably happened based on what you know
of how tightly locked up this place was and where
everyone was located at the time.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
It seems possible one thing. Another thing which concluded, which
seems right to me, is that whoever took Savile from
his cot in a room where his nursemaid was sleeping,
he must have known whoever took him, because they were
confident that he would make no noise unless it was
(24:18):
the nursemaid herself, or, as people speculated, a lover. It
had to be somebody who savel would willingly be taken
by in order for them, and or who could explain
their presence if he did wake up and cause a fuss.
There was suggestions that he'd been anesthetized. There was no
evidence of this, but this was one of the speculations
(24:40):
as a way of getting him out of the house silently.
But there was no evidence of that, and it does
seem likely that somebody who he knew would have been
able to lift him out of his cot and take
him away without his complaining, and if they had been caught,
could have explained it as oh, they were just playing
or just visiting, or something like that, if they'd been
(25:01):
caught in the act of taking him from his room.
On that score, it seemed possible. Also, she was a
strong young woman. She was quite unlike her younger brother William,
who was quite slight. She was reputed to like doing
boxing matches with other girls at school. She was quite
(25:22):
she was quite a tough girl, and which had deemed
her physically capable of taking the boy, though he was
puzzled by how she'd managed to both carry him and
open the window and hustle him out and take him
to the privy and carry the knife. It did all
seem quite difficult, but not impossible. And yes, physically it
(25:46):
did seem that whoever took him must have been sleeping
in the house that night, must have been staying in
the house that night. He seemed absolutely right on that.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
But Elizabeth, the nurse maid, was sleeping in Saville's room.
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Yeah? Wow, So again these speculations that it could only
have been her. For a while, they had a lot
of traction. She came under a lot of suspicion, she
was arrested, she was taken to the magistrates court. There
was for some time she was the chief suspect. And
it was Witcher really who intervened and said, no, I
(26:22):
don't think so. I think it's Constance.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
I just don't see how a shift in a kind
of a tough girl would have convinced him over an
adult who's sleeping in the same room next to this
boy who's not a member of the family.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, although he sort of proceeded with kind of quite
forensic care, and the theory came up with about the
night dress and how it had been concealed was very ingenious. Really,
what he was about was psychology. He talked to these women,
and he believed Elizabeth Goff. There was no evidence that
(26:58):
she'd had a man in her room, and he didn't
think she had. He believed her, and when he spoke
to Constance, he detected something in her, something angry and defiant,
and he fixed on her in an almost in an
intuitive way. And it was his downfall really that he
(27:21):
could not find the night dress. They trolled the nearby river,
or the knife, the murder weapon was not found, and
he couldn't find any evidence to prove his suspicions. They
were suspicions, they were his reading of character and body
language and mannerism and speech. He couldn't back it up
with evidence, and as a result, when he put his
(27:45):
case to the magistrates, he was put under a lot
of pressure to come up with a solution. Quickly. He
said he needed more time, and they wouldn't give him
it because of the national scandal of this case and
the outrage of it not being sold. He accused Constance,
admitted he didn't have any physical evidence, and was severely
(28:07):
censured by some of the magistrates and the press and
so on for the terrible aspersions he was casting on
this bereaved sixteen year old girl without any evidence to
back it up.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
And I'm assuming the Kent family, so Samuel and Mary
and these kids, are they all saying the same thing.
There's no way she did it, A stranger must have
done it, or does anybody cast suspicion on Constance at
any point in the media, at least from the family's
point of view.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Samuel Kent, the boy's father, he said, of course she
couldn't have done it, but there was some ambivalence in
him which Richard detected, and in a local doctor who
knew the family well and who said things about Constance
that suggested that she was unstable. Samuel Kent seemed to
(28:58):
be playing a sort of bit of a double game
of sometimes defending her but sometimes saying things that suggested
he didn't trust her, and that she had been resentful
of the young child. The others in the family all
fiercely defended her and said, of course it was impossible
that she could have done such a thing, but the
(29:18):
mother that Saville's mother, was very uneasy about her and
feared that she might have been capable of doing it.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
So Constance is never charged, right, and Witcher has been
severely censured. Is there anything that happens in this case
while Witcher is still alive, while Constance is still living
in the house.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
Well. Costance was briefly charged and her father went to
see her in prison where she was being held, but
she was then discharged after the magistrates basically throughout Witcher's case,
which of them went back to London pretty much in disgrace.
I mean, the backlash from this case and the sense
of the impropriety and insolence with which he'd behaved, the
(30:01):
tactless nurse and cruelty as it was perceived of his
investigation basically ended his career. He was never put on
another major murder investigation. He just did desk work and
behind the scenes stuff for the next five years and
eventually retired from the detective force with a condition He
(30:23):
called congestion of the brain. I think he had a breakdown,
a nervous breakdown. Constance continued to live at home for
a bit, but then her father sent her off to
various places, to finishing schools, to a convent in France.
There was a sense that the family were trying to
sort of get her out of the way. The cloud
of suspicions still hung over all of them. So Samuel
(30:46):
Kent was treated with contempt at the factories he visited
and so on. He had to move away from the
area because many people believed the story that he had
killed his son because he'd been having an affair with
the nursemaid. So this carried on for a few years.
But when Constance was twenty one, so five years after
(31:07):
the murder, she suddenly came forward. She went to London,
which had retired from the force, and she made a confession.
She said that she had killed her brother. She didn't
really give her a good reason for it. She denied
completely that it had been jealousy, but she said she'd
done it, and she very calm about it. She was tried,
(31:31):
sentenced to death, but then the sentence was commuted to
life imprisonment, and she served the next twenty years in prison, wow,
which it was vindicated, and he had a sort of
second wind in that he became a very pioneering private
investigator in London, and rather late in life he married
(31:52):
his landlady. But yes, he'd been broken by the case,
but her confession partly redeemed him. When I read the
files on the case in the Metropolitan Police archives, I
could see all his original notes, all his expenses files,
his notes on his interviews with Constance and everyone else,
(32:13):
his reports to his officers back in Scotland yard while
he was down in Wiltshire, and I realized that something
he'd not said at the time, but that he thought
that someone else had been involved in the murder too,
not only Constance. And when she confessed, he wondered if
her confession had actually that she had carried out the murder,
(32:35):
but the purpose of the confession was to shield the
other person who had been involved, and that she has
still not told the complete truth.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Why would she come forward after five years? I know
it was sort of always speculation, but nobody's reopened this case.
I'm assuming at that point she had.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Come under the influence of an Anglican priest and she
had become slightly spiritual in her beliefs, more spiritual than
she had been. But she said that wasn't the reason.
The priest said he hadn't urged her to confess, but
there were some things about the timing of it. Without
divulging who exactly she may have been protecting, as I said,
(33:19):
she had, this cloud had been hanging over her entire family,
and perhaps she wanted to lift that cloud and to
enable her family to have some freedom. Perhaps that was
the thing, rather than contrition for the murder itself. It
was more about the fates of living people that she
(33:39):
cared at that point, and she realized she could do
something about it. She could clear their names by coming
forward herself.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Did it clear the Kent family name?
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Yes, it did. They made it easier for Samuel Kent
and his wife Mary and their children to live a
life free of suspicion, and Constance's older sisters were also
completely cleared of any suspicion that had attached to them,
and her brother William was able to pursue his ambitions
(34:12):
to be a marine biologist and naturalist, and he moved
to Australia, where he became one of the first people
to chart and paint the Great Barrier Reef and did
some very beautiful work in terms of his observations and
sort of artistic renderings of the flora and fauna he
(34:33):
found out there.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Well, not to get too detailed, but I'm still stuck
on Witcher back in eighteen sixty on Witcher being focused
on how could she have carried out a sleeping savile
through a window? Did she give any insight on the
actual procedure, what she did, where she killed them, how
all of it worked without anyone in this house knowing.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Her story didn't quite add up. That was part of
the thing that, you know, when she eventually confessed, it
still didn't really make sense. It physically didn't work what
she was describing, which confirmed which is suspicion that there
might have been someone else involved, because of course, if
somebody else had been there, another person could have carried
(35:18):
the knife, opened the window, open doors, because she had
to go downstairs and outside and then get rid of
the evidence, And she didn't really account for quite a
lot of that. She didn't really explain quite a lot
of that. It was as if, you know, there were
gaps in her confession in terms of the plausibility of it.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
What do you think do you think there was another
person involved with this? And do you believe her to
begin with?
Speaker 2 (35:43):
I believe she did do it, and I believe there
was another person involved in it.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Can you narrow down kid or adult kid? Okay, I
bet we could figure that one out well.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Constance Kent, she too ended up in Australia, like amazingly,
although she served twenty years in prison, which is essentially
a life center, she was only forty one when she
came out, and she went out to Australia under an alias,
and she became a nurse, and she worked with delinquent
(36:17):
children and on a leprosy colony. And she lived to
the age of one hundred and one.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Oh my gosh, she.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Lived right into the nineteen forties, which is quite sort
of astonishing. It's such a Victorian story. But her resilience
and I'd like to think some sort of atonement in
the work she did out in Australia, the way she
dedicated herself to helping others, especially young others, which could
(36:48):
correlate both to her young self but also to the
child she had killed. But it does suggest she took
some sort of moral responsibility for what had happened.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Is there anything that which or Scotland Yard could have
done in eighteen sixty more, if Witcher had been taken
seriously in his accusations against Constance, is there anything that
they could have done that could have tied her more
tightly to the crime or was this some sort of
missed opportunity, because from what you're telling me, you know,
(37:18):
even though yes, she confessed, there's definitely not enough evidence
now there wouldn't be enough evidence, but there's a lot
more that could be done now.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
I think he was hampered both by the amount of
time he was given, but also by how everyone was
flinching at the fact he was interviewing this family at all.
You know, he was not really allowed to or encourage
to intrude on their grief, to interview them sufficiently. It
was like, no, you've talked to her, you've talked to
(37:47):
the father. That's enough now. So he wasn't given that
sort of support because of the class issues for social
issues around it. But I think in essence, Constance had
done a very good job of sticking by her story
of getting rid of the evidence. He couldn't find anything
and his story about the night dresses, it turned out
(38:08):
was true about the way that she'd given it to
the lawn dress and then got someone to go and
get glass of water stolen the night dress back. It
seemed so far fetched, but it turned out in her
confession that that's exactly what she did. But it was
such a complex little story, like a contrack, that I
don't think people understood it at the time and just
thought he was talking nonsense. The way it was reported
(38:31):
in the papers made it sound ridiculous. He wasn't given
enough sort of credit, or his intelligence and credibility weren't
respected enough, he wasn't given enough time. But truly, maybe
no one could have nailed this case because it was
extremely difficult, and with his two weeks that had passed
between the commission of the murder and his arrival in Wiltshire,
(38:53):
there'd been plenty of time to concoct stories, dispose of evidence,
and so on. It was perhaps an impossible task that
could only be solved by a hypothesis. Turns out his
hypothesis was right.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Tell me what you think the lesson learned is what
can we take from this story and move forward into
our time about crime, who commits the crime, How we
investigate crimes.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Well, it sort of reminds me in detective fiction and
crime fiction and mysteries, we get very hung up on
the and intrigued by the sort of puzzle aspect of it,
the clues, the forensics, all this kind of thing. It's
very absorbing and enjoyable. But in life, I think the
detective who can just read character, the intuition and a
(39:44):
feel for what's likely and what's possible is actually often
the thing that gets things solved.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amerosi. Our associate
producer is Alex Chi. This episode was mixed by John Bradley.
Curtis heath Is our composer, artwork by Nick Toga. Executive
(40:24):
produced by Georgia Hartstark, Karen Kilgariff and Danielle Kramer. Follow
Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked
and on Twitter at tenfold more and if you know
of a historical crime that could use some attention from
the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info
at Tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for
(40:45):
true crime authors for Wicked Words
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
This seems so anomalous, and the house had seemed so
well secured with the great wall around it, and it
seemed like the safest place to have a child and
to protect a child.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast Tenfold War Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:51):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold War
Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. The brutal murder of a three year
old shocked Victorian England, not only because of how it happened,
(01:15):
but because of who the police suspected. Could one of
Britain's most famous detectives solve the case. Author Kate Summerskille
tells us the story at the center of her book,
The Suspicions of Mister Witcher. Let's start with where we
are in time, what year are we talking about, and
where does the central action take place in your story.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
This murder took place in a village in the English
countryside in Wiltshire in eighteen sixty, so it was the
height of Victoria's reign over Britain and a time when
the domestic ideal was at his height as well, the
idea of the sanctity of the home and the perfection
(01:57):
of the sort of bourgeois middle class family.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Tell me a little bit about the village, because we
have a largely American audience who I'm sure is picturing idyllic,
you know, British countryside and the thatched roofs and just
the beauty of it. Is that what we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
It's not so much that thatched ruse in that part
of west of England, but very lovely, yes, very sort
of lush fields and in the summer of eighteen sixty
all the sort of harvests were being cut, lots of
as a wild flowers and birds, and it's a pretty
idyllic hamlet, mostly stone houses and the house in which
(02:39):
the murder took place was the grandest house in the village,
a Georgian building with its own grounds and enclosed with
a high stone wall.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Tell me what the family dynamic was for people in
the eighteen sixties in this particular village. Are we talking about,
you know, a husband who's a laborer predominantly, or are
we talking about wealthier people.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
We're talking wealthier people. The patriarch, the father in this household,
was a factory inspector, so there was some resentment against
him in the village because it was part of his
job to stop children going into the factories to work,
which left many families hard up because they've been relying
on their children's wages. And he was a bit sort
(03:21):
of bad tempered and quite private man who was not
much liked by the family. And he lived in the
house with his second wife, formerly the governess to his children,
his first wife having died apparently insane, and with the
four children of the first marriage and also two new children,
(03:43):
and his wife was pregnant with a third so it
was a big family and a mixed family. Two families
in one.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Really tell me more about the ill tempered part of
the patriarch of the family before we talk a little
bit more about all these children and everything that's happening
in the house. Is someone we would label as physically
and verbally abusive in modern times.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
He was the standards of his time, conventionally harsh, and
it was more that he was reputed to be harsh
with the villagers, with the people of the lower classes,
than with his own family. Traditionally people have been able
to fish in the river on his land, and he
banned them from doing so. He excited quite a lot
of resentment among the locals.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Now, I would like to go down the rabbit hole
of the factory inspections. How young are we talking about
of kids entering the workforce in these factories, and I'm
assuming it's dangerous work.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah, extremely young children went into factories from the age
of eight or so, and the New Factory Act limited
the time that young children could work, but also the
age from which they could work. So I think it
was they couldn't work at all in the factories until
they were fourteen, and then there was a limit on
how many hours per day they could do. It was
(04:57):
intended to be a humane law that stopped the exploitation
of child labor. But it hit some poor families very hard,
and it was Samuel Kent's job, the patriarch in this family,
to enforce the act, to go into the local mills
and factories and stop people from working if they were underage.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
I'm assuming that he was someone who had been offered
many payoffs in his career. Did you find anything about that.
I mean, I'm assuming people were really trying to get
him on their side.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Well, I think perhaps his harshness was part of I
think he was a fairly effective factory inspector and played
by the rules, which is why he was so resented.
I didn't come across anything to suggest that he colluded
with the villagers or the people in the mills. Quite
the reverse. He was very strict at enforcing the rules,
which was why they were so cross with him.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Tell me a little bit about his wife. What's her name?
And she was the governess, which I know we've throughout
history heard about, you know, women coming in and taking
care of the children or the family, and then when
the why dies, she marries the husband. What's the feel
you have of the dynamic between Samuel Kent and his wife.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Well, she was a much loved governess, especially by Constance Kent,
the younger daughter, when the mother was alive, but there
were rumors that she had been having an affair even
during the first wife's life. Her first wife was apparently
confined to one wing of the house. They were living
(06:27):
in a different part of the country then, and Mary
and Samuel Kent were having an affair which her children
were unaware of. When Constance later found this out, she
felt very much betrayed by the governess who was now
her new stepmother, and even more so when the new
stepmother started having her own children and became less affectionate
(06:51):
towards the children that she had looked after as a governess.
The children of the first marriage.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Remind me the distribution between the children from the first
wife and the children from Mary Kent. Is it two?
She has two of her own? Is that right?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Yes, she has two of her own, and she's pregnant
with a third. In the summer of eighteen sixty and
there were four from the first marriage, two older girls
who are very close in age and very close to
one another, and then the younger ones, which were Constance,
who was sixteen at the time of the murders and
(07:26):
her brother William, to whom she was very close, who
was fourteen.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Okay, so we have a lot of people in the house.
So all of these people are in the house. You've
got four kids from a previous marriage, two kids from
the current marriage, plus you know, she's pregnant. Everybody's in
the same house. And it's a large house.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yeah, and there's servants too, of course, because it was
that kind of a house. So there was a cook
and a maid, and there were gardeners coming and going,
and cobblers and so you know, there was there was
a lot of traffic from the servants in the house
and a nurse, a nursemate called Elizabeth Goff who featured
in the story.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
And a factory inspector would earn that type of income
to be able to afford this sort of lifestyle with
all of these servants and kids in a large house.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yeah. Well, he was the factory inspector of the whole
of the West of England. He wasn't just supervising the
factories and mills in his immediate vicinity. And it was
a very prosperous kind of wool country. Lots of sheep,
lots of wool, lots of people making fabric, and it
was the main trade round there, so he was a
(08:34):
busy man. He was constantly touring the various different wool
mills and factories, and it was a highly responsible job,
reporting directly to the government.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
And you have the impression that he was a father
who was a good father, who was affectionate with his kids,
even if he was absent for a large part of
the time.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
I don't think he was very affectionate towards his kids,
but that was standard for a Victorian, middle class patriarch.
He was very, very fond of his youngest son, Savile,
with whom he constantly played a lot of horseplay and
so on. Less interested in the girls, I would say,
who he allowed to just sort of get on with it.
(09:14):
He wasn't tyrannical. He was distant and busy, and they
were left very much in the care of their step
mother and the nursemaid.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Okay, will you lay out whichever day you think becomes pivotal,
you know, all the way through the murder. Where do
we start with that part of the story.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Well, the family woke up one day at the very
end of June and the former governess new stepmother discovered
that her son, her youngest son, Saville, was missing from
his cot. He was just three years old and seemed
impossible to believe he'd climbed out. It was a high
sided cot, so she so raised the alarm. She asked
(09:56):
the nursemaid where he was. She rushed around looking for
him and raised everyone else from the staff, her stepchildren,
and everyone was searching for Savil. Eventually villagers were roped
in invited to come and help search the grounds, and
eventually two local men found him dead. His throat had
(10:18):
been cut horribly and he'd been stuffed down and outside
toilet as privy as they called it, just outside the house.
So it was an absolutely horrific scene, and the mother
was beside herself with distress.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
And I'm assuming that Samuel Kent had a similar reaction.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yes, he got on a horse and raced off to
fetch the local policeman to come and see what had
happened and work out who had done it. The police
came quickly and they interviewed the staff, the family, the
villagers looked for clues tried to work out who it
might be. They spent two weeks on the case, with
(11:00):
finding any leads whatsoever. Was such a horrific murder, so
inexplicable and mysterious and striking at the heart of this
rather affluent, well to do, respectable family that it was
a national news story. It was reported in the national papers,
and eventually there was an outcry about why the police
(11:22):
had not got anywhere with it.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Do you think a lot of this has to do
with their class and of course their skin color.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Yeah, for sure. It was very shocking and it felt
like an assault on the Victorian domestic ideal. The fuss
was so great that people were writing to the papers
and very agitated, sending in their own suggestions for who
might have killed the boy that eventually the government dispatched
to detective policemen from Scotland Yard to go down to
(11:53):
Wiltshire to try to solve the case themselves, and one
of those was Jack Witcher, who had joined the Detective
Division when it was first formed in eighteen forty two
and who was known as the Prince of Detectives. He
had a great reputation as an investigator and a kind
of visionary who could detect crimes that no one else could.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Well, I think it'll be interesting because of course I'm
very interested in the forensics and who has access to
what and all of that. But I think we can
probably talk about through Jack Witcher's eyes, right, because he's
the one who's investigating the case. Can we talk a
little bit about where we are with detectives at this time,
you know, specifically with Scotland Yard. The Moost Street runners
are gone, I'm assuming right.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Right, And these detectives in the division set up in
eighteen forty two were the first plane clothes police officers
in Britain and they were very exciting figures in a way.
To begin with, there were only eight of them. By
eighteen sixty there were twelve, you know, very elite call,
(12:58):
but they were all working class men. They were ordinary
coppers who had been elevated to this role because they
were so good at their jobs. Charles Dickens, for example,
was extremely thrilled by the detectives and the idea of
the detectives. He liked to consort with them, drink with them,
ask them about their adventures because they had this extraordinary
(13:20):
access in a very stratified society. The detective could go
anywhere from the slums of London to palaces and stately homes,
and like Dickens himself, they could range across the different
strata of society. But they were also to others threatening
figures because they were working class and they had this
(13:42):
unprecedented access and power, and the British had of long
held mistrust of surveillance and spies, and these playing clothes
officers who were unable to cross the threshold of the
family home, who had had this kind of access, were
seen as sinister and threatening to some.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
What is the difference in the access between you know,
a regular copper, regular officer who might have to go
and look into a murder and a detective no warrants
needed if you're a detective, or no permission needed essentially, well, I.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Think you'd need a warrant. But the local police in
Wiltshire who first investigated this crime, they were very polite
and deferential to the family. They understood that the family
were superior to them in social class and that they
would need to be invited into the home. They would
ask to come in, they wouldn't demand it, they wouldn't
(14:39):
take it as a right. So their attitude and the things,
the questions they asked, the evidence they sought was very different.
So it was more as sort of attitude and custom
than the legal force of it that had changed.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
So let me do a quick summary here. So we
have an eighteen sixty end of June. A three year
old boy from a wealthy family, savl Kent has gone
missing and then has found at the bottom of a
privy with his throat cut and everybody is in despair.
It's a couple of weeks and the police have no clues,
and there's all of this public outrage in the newspapers.
(15:16):
Not surprising, and we have two detectives from Scotland Yard
come in.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah, So Jack Witcher and his sidekick, Dolly Williamson, they
arrived at the house, went in interviewed all the members
of the family in more detail than the local offices had.
Jack Witcher realized that the killer must have been inside
the house because although a window had been firmed open,
(15:41):
it would have been impossible for anyone to take the
boy out to gain access through the window, and so
he thought that the open window was a decoy to
try to suggest that someone had broken in. He was
absolutely convinced that the killer was one of the people
within the building. He interviewed the staff and the family
(16:02):
very closely, and he asked to see their clothes, especially
their nightclothes and their underwear, the things they might have
been wearing at the time of the murder in the night,
And this in itself was seen as outrageous, especially when
he asked to see the nightclothes and shifts of the
young ladies in the household. He was literally going through
(16:25):
their underwear, taking it into public view, and there was
a certain amount of horror, certainly from Samuel Kent, the father,
but also people became quite uncomfortable at his intrusion and
his apparent insensitivity, because most people assumed that this family,
(16:46):
or each and every one of them was in terrible
grief over the death of the boy, and he was
just sort of barging in and asking for intimate questions
and making it clear that every one of them was
under suspicion.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
How many viable suspects does he have in that house
based on the kid's age, because I can't remember the range.
I know we have a sixteen year old girl, But
who else is capable in that house besides the parents
of doing this.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Well, there's the fourteen year old boy, William. They're also
the two older sisters, mary Anne and Elizabeth, who were
in their late twenties and lived on the top floor.
Constance and William were just along the corridor from Saville's room.
Saville's mother was pretty much ruled out as a suspect
because she was well. Not only was she his mother,
(17:36):
which was thought impossible that she should want to harm
her child, but she was also heavily pregnant. But the
nurse maid came under suspicion she had access to the nursery.
She had been the first one the mother turned to
and asked where he was. She was the one who
was expected to know where he was. And of course
it was possible that the cook and the maid downstairs
(17:57):
had been somehow involved, but there were suggestions that the
nurse maid in particular. There was one story that went
around that perhaps she'd had a lover, a man from
the village, and the little boy had woken Because she
shared a room with younger children, so somehow the boy
had been spirited out of the room while she was there.
(18:19):
There was one theory the boy had woken up and
seen her in bed with a man, and that in
order to silence him, they had between them killed him.
Another theory was that it was the father who'd been
in bed with the nursemaid, and again that the boy
had woken up and that they had killed him so
(18:39):
that he wouldn't report it to his mother. So there
were some very wild theories going around the name of
this family, and all the speculation and rumor and fantasy
about what might be happening was being sort of dragged
through the mud, and all the stuff came out about
the fact that the boy's mother had previously been the governess,
(19:02):
that she'd been having an affair with the father before
they moved to the village, and it was all very
disgracing and shaming for the family. And the news about
the previous wife having been insane, people started speculating about
whether one of her children, Mary Anne Elizabeth Constance William,
might have inherited her insanity and killed the boy for
(19:26):
that reason. The idea that this family who'd been struck
by tragedy were also being speculated about when libel laws
were very weak, very freely in the pages of the
press and apparently in the minds of the detective officers.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
So which of these theories did Jack Witcher and his
partner subscribed to the most strongly. What did they believe?
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Jack Witcher? He came to believe that Constance Kent, the
sixteen year old half sister of Saville, the boy who
had died, had killed him, and he backed up this
belief with a story about how she had a missing
a night dress missing. The number of night dresses in
(20:25):
her drawers was incorrect, it was one short. She insisted
that the correct number of night dresses had gone to
the laundry that week, but that one had not been returned,
and the lawn dress seemed to confirm this. But he
was convinced that somehow, by some sleight of hand, Constance
(20:47):
had hidden and destroyed a bloodied night dress, and that
she was the perpetrator.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
What was the motive? What did he think was the
reason behind it?
Speaker 2 (20:56):
He thought that she wanted to hurt her stepmother because
she had loved her so much as a child, loved
her more than her own mother, and had felt deeply
betrayed when the stepmother married her father and more or
less abandoned her. She became much more interested in her
(21:17):
actual children, her new babies, than the children of Samuel
Kent's previous wife, which's theory was that Constance was burning
with rage against her stepmother, and she knew what would
hurt her more than anything and hurt her father too,
was to take their favorite child and kill it. And
(21:38):
I suppose the boy, which had thought the boy represented
everything that she resented as well, because he was the
apple of his parents' eye, and the previous family had
become secondary. They were more or less ignored. They weren't
given new clothes, they had to sort of make do
with what they had, and she felt neglected and enraged
(22:02):
on the behalf of her brother to her brother, William,
her younger brother fourteen years old, who she was extremely
fond of. She and William previously a few years earlier,
had once run away together. They tried to run away
to see Constance had chopped off all her hair and
she'd thrown it in the privy, the same privy that
(22:23):
Saville was found. And Wicher thought this was very significant
and that it also indicated her capacity for rebellion and
the depths of her anger with her father and her stepmother.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Tell me about access again. You said, there's a large
wall around the house, right, but there was a window open.
But Wicher felt like the window was a decoy, and
did he feel strong like there is no way anybody
from the outside world could have gotten into this house
without a key or something.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Samuel Kent went round the building every night making sure
that all the windows and doors were locked, and he
confirmed that he had done that on the night before
his son was murdered. And it was impossible to open
this window from the outside. It was impossible to open
it from the outside.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
And did you say the privy was within the wall,
within the property or is it a separate place.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
It's separate. It was an outhouse. It was next to
something called the knife house and the boothouse. There were
little sheds just beyond the kitchen outside the building itself.
The buildings very sort of elegant and had various outhouses
for different purposes. So this was a privy not used
by the family, but used by the laborers, the people
(23:40):
who worked in the grounds.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Could constance with what you know have done this? Did
she have the access? Could she have slipped away? Could
all of this reasonably happened based on what you know
of how tightly locked up this place was and where
everyone was located at the time.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
It seems possible one thing. Another thing which concluded, which
seems right to me, is that whoever took Savile from
his cot in a room where his nursemaid was sleeping,
he must have known whoever took him, because they were
confident that he would make no noise unless it was
(24:18):
the nursemaid herself, or, as people speculated, a lover. It
had to be somebody who savel would willingly be taken
by in order for them, and or who could explain
their presence if he did wake up and cause a fuss.
There was suggestions that he'd been anesthetized. There was no
evidence of this, but this was one of the speculations
(24:40):
as a way of getting him out of the house silently.
But there was no evidence of that, and it does
seem likely that somebody who he knew would have been
able to lift him out of his cot and take
him away without his complaining, and if they had been caught,
could have explained it as oh, they were just playing
or just visiting, or something like that, if they'd been
(25:01):
caught in the act of taking him from his room.
On that score, it seemed possible. Also, she was a
strong young woman. She was quite unlike her younger brother William,
who was quite slight. She was reputed to like doing
boxing matches with other girls at school. She was quite
(25:22):
she was quite a tough girl, and which had deemed
her physically capable of taking the boy, though he was
puzzled by how she'd managed to both carry him and
open the window and hustle him out and take him
to the privy and carry the knife. It did all
seem quite difficult, but not impossible. And yes, physically it
(25:46):
did seem that whoever took him must have been sleeping
in the house that night, must have been staying in
the house that night. He seemed absolutely right on that.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
But Elizabeth, the nurse maid, was sleeping in Saville's room.
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Yeah? Wow, So again these speculations that it could only
have been her. For a while, they had a lot
of traction. She came under a lot of suspicion, she
was arrested, she was taken to the magistrates court. There
was for some time she was the chief suspect. And
it was Witcher really who intervened and said, no, I
(26:22):
don't think so. I think it's Constance.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
I just don't see how a shift in a kind
of a tough girl would have convinced him over an
adult who's sleeping in the same room next to this
boy who's not a member of the family.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, although he sort of proceeded with kind of quite
forensic care, and the theory came up with about the
night dress and how it had been concealed was very ingenious. Really,
what he was about was psychology. He talked to these women,
and he believed Elizabeth Goff. There was no evidence that
(26:58):
she'd had a man in her room, and he didn't
think she had. He believed her, and when he spoke
to Constance, he detected something in her, something angry and defiant,
and he fixed on her in an almost in an
intuitive way. And it was his downfall really that he
(27:21):
could not find the night dress. They trolled the nearby river,
or the knife, the murder weapon was not found, and
he couldn't find any evidence to prove his suspicions. They
were suspicions, they were his reading of character and body
language and mannerism and speech. He couldn't back it up
with evidence, and as a result, when he put his
(27:45):
case to the magistrates, he was put under a lot
of pressure to come up with a solution. Quickly. He
said he needed more time, and they wouldn't give him
it because of the national scandal of this case and
the outrage of it not being sold. He accused Constance,
admitted he didn't have any physical evidence, and was severely
(28:07):
censured by some of the magistrates and the press and
so on for the terrible aspersions he was casting on
this bereaved sixteen year old girl without any evidence to
back it up.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
And I'm assuming the Kent family, so Samuel and Mary
and these kids, are they all saying the same thing.
There's no way she did it, A stranger must have
done it, or does anybody cast suspicion on Constance at
any point in the media, at least from the family's
point of view.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Samuel Kent, the boy's father, he said, of course she
couldn't have done it, but there was some ambivalence in
him which Richard detected, and in a local doctor who
knew the family well and who said things about Constance
that suggested that she was unstable. Samuel Kent seemed to
(28:58):
be playing a sort of bit of a double game
of sometimes defending her but sometimes saying things that suggested
he didn't trust her, and that she had been resentful
of the young child. The others in the family all
fiercely defended her and said, of course it was impossible
that she could have done such a thing, but the
(29:18):
mother that Saville's mother, was very uneasy about her and
feared that she might have been capable of doing it.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
So Constance is never charged, right, and Witcher has been
severely censured. Is there anything that happens in this case
while Witcher is still alive, while Constance is still living
in the house.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
Well. Costance was briefly charged and her father went to
see her in prison where she was being held, but
she was then discharged after the magistrates basically throughout Witcher's case,
which of them went back to London pretty much in disgrace.
I mean, the backlash from this case and the sense
of the impropriety and insolence with which he'd behaved, the
(30:01):
tactless nurse and cruelty as it was perceived of his
investigation basically ended his career. He was never put on
another major murder investigation. He just did desk work and
behind the scenes stuff for the next five years and
eventually retired from the detective force with a condition He
(30:23):
called congestion of the brain. I think he had a breakdown,
a nervous breakdown. Constance continued to live at home for
a bit, but then her father sent her off to
various places, to finishing schools, to a convent in France.
There was a sense that the family were trying to
sort of get her out of the way. The cloud
of suspicions still hung over all of them. So Samuel
(30:46):
Kent was treated with contempt at the factories he visited
and so on. He had to move away from the
area because many people believed the story that he had
killed his son because he'd been having an affair with
the nursemaid. So this carried on for a few years.
But when Constance was twenty one, so five years after
(31:07):
the murder, she suddenly came forward. She went to London,
which had retired from the force, and she made a confession.
She said that she had killed her brother. She didn't
really give her a good reason for it. She denied
completely that it had been jealousy, but she said she'd
done it, and she very calm about it. She was tried,
(31:31):
sentenced to death, but then the sentence was commuted to
life imprisonment, and she served the next twenty years in prison, wow,
which it was vindicated, and he had a sort of
second wind in that he became a very pioneering private
investigator in London, and rather late in life he married
(31:52):
his landlady. But yes, he'd been broken by the case,
but her confession partly redeemed him. When I read the
files on the case in the Metropolitan Police archives, I
could see all his original notes, all his expenses files,
his notes on his interviews with Constance and everyone else,
(32:13):
his reports to his officers back in Scotland yard while
he was down in Wiltshire, and I realized that something
he'd not said at the time, but that he thought
that someone else had been involved in the murder too,
not only Constance. And when she confessed, he wondered if
her confession had actually that she had carried out the murder,
(32:35):
but the purpose of the confession was to shield the
other person who had been involved, and that she has
still not told the complete truth.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Why would she come forward after five years? I know
it was sort of always speculation, but nobody's reopened this case.
I'm assuming at that point she had.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Come under the influence of an Anglican priest and she
had become slightly spiritual in her beliefs, more spiritual than
she had been. But she said that wasn't the reason.
The priest said he hadn't urged her to confess, but
there were some things about the timing of it. Without
divulging who exactly she may have been protecting, as I said,
(33:19):
she had, this cloud had been hanging over her entire family,
and perhaps she wanted to lift that cloud and to
enable her family to have some freedom. Perhaps that was
the thing, rather than contrition for the murder itself. It
was more about the fates of living people that she
(33:39):
cared at that point, and she realized she could do
something about it. She could clear their names by coming
forward herself.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Did it clear the Kent family name?
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Yes, it did. They made it easier for Samuel Kent
and his wife Mary and their children to live a
life free of suspicion, and Constance's older sisters were also
completely cleared of any suspicion that had attached to them,
and her brother William was able to pursue his ambitions
(34:12):
to be a marine biologist and naturalist, and he moved
to Australia, where he became one of the first people
to chart and paint the Great Barrier Reef and did
some very beautiful work in terms of his observations and
sort of artistic renderings of the flora and fauna he
(34:33):
found out there.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Well, not to get too detailed, but I'm still stuck
on Witcher back in eighteen sixty on Witcher being focused
on how could she have carried out a sleeping savile
through a window? Did she give any insight on the
actual procedure, what she did, where she killed them, how
all of it worked without anyone in this house knowing.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Her story didn't quite add up. That was part of
the thing that, you know, when she eventually confessed, it
still didn't really make sense. It physically didn't work what
she was describing, which confirmed which is suspicion that there
might have been someone else involved, because of course, if
somebody else had been there, another person could have carried
(35:18):
the knife, opened the window, open doors, because she had
to go downstairs and outside and then get rid of
the evidence, And she didn't really account for quite a
lot of that. She didn't really explain quite a lot
of that. It was as if, you know, there were
gaps in her confession in terms of the plausibility of it.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
What do you think do you think there was another
person involved with this? And do you believe her to
begin with?
Speaker 2 (35:43):
I believe she did do it, and I believe there
was another person involved in it.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Can you narrow down kid or adult kid? Okay, I
bet we could figure that one out well.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Constance Kent, she too ended up in Australia, like amazingly,
although she served twenty years in prison, which is essentially
a life center, she was only forty one when she
came out, and she went out to Australia under an alias,
and she became a nurse, and she worked with delinquent
(36:17):
children and on a leprosy colony. And she lived to
the age of one hundred and one.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Oh my gosh, she.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Lived right into the nineteen forties, which is quite sort
of astonishing. It's such a Victorian story. But her resilience
and I'd like to think some sort of atonement in
the work she did out in Australia, the way she
dedicated herself to helping others, especially young others, which could
(36:48):
correlate both to her young self but also to the
child she had killed. But it does suggest she took
some sort of moral responsibility for what had happened.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Is there anything that which or Scotland Yard could have
done in eighteen sixty more, if Witcher had been taken
seriously in his accusations against Constance, is there anything that
they could have done that could have tied her more
tightly to the crime or was this some sort of
missed opportunity, because from what you're telling me, you know,
(37:18):
even though yes, she confessed, there's definitely not enough evidence
now there wouldn't be enough evidence, but there's a lot
more that could be done now.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
I think he was hampered both by the amount of
time he was given, but also by how everyone was
flinching at the fact he was interviewing this family at all.
You know, he was not really allowed to or encourage
to intrude on their grief, to interview them sufficiently. It
was like, no, you've talked to her, you've talked to
(37:47):
the father. That's enough now. So he wasn't given that
sort of support because of the class issues for social
issues around it. But I think in essence, Constance had
done a very good job of sticking by her story
of getting rid of the evidence. He couldn't find anything
and his story about the night dresses, it turned out
(38:08):
was true about the way that she'd given it to
the lawn dress and then got someone to go and
get glass of water stolen the night dress back. It
seemed so far fetched, but it turned out in her
confession that that's exactly what she did. But it was
such a complex little story, like a contrack, that I
don't think people understood it at the time and just
thought he was talking nonsense. The way it was reported
(38:31):
in the papers made it sound ridiculous. He wasn't given
enough sort of credit, or his intelligence and credibility weren't
respected enough, he wasn't given enough time. But truly, maybe
no one could have nailed this case because it was
extremely difficult, and with his two weeks that had passed
between the commission of the murder and his arrival in Wiltshire,
(38:53):
there'd been plenty of time to concoct stories, dispose of evidence,
and so on. It was perhaps an impossible task that
could only be solved by a hypothesis. Turns out his
hypothesis was right.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Tell me what you think the lesson learned is what
can we take from this story and move forward into
our time about crime, who commits the crime, How we
investigate crimes.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Well, it sort of reminds me in detective fiction and
crime fiction and mysteries, we get very hung up on
the and intrigued by the sort of puzzle aspect of it,
the clues, the forensics, all this kind of thing. It's
very absorbing and enjoyable. But in life, I think the
detective who can just read character, the intuition and a
(39:44):
feel for what's likely and what's possible is actually often
the thing that gets things solved.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amerosi. Our associate
producer is Alex Chi. This episode was mixed by John Bradley.
Curtis heath Is our composer, artwork by Nick Toga. Executive
(40:24):
produced by Georgia Hartstark, Karen Kilgariff and Danielle Kramer. Follow
Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked
and on Twitter at tenfold more and if you know
of a historical crime that could use some attention from
the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info
at Tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for
(40:45):
true crime authors for Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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