Constance whicher

He appears, also, to have expressed an opinion that the public was not at the time in a temper to bear any alteration of the rule compelling the disclosure of such evidence. Constance Kent was sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life in prison owing to her youth at the time and her confession.

She served twenty years in a number of gaols including Millbank Prison and was released in , at the age of During her time in prison, she produced mosaics for a number of churches, including work for the crypt of St. Paul's cathedral. In Noeline Kyle's book A Greater Guilt she discusses the work Constance Kent was engaged in while incarcerated, and what Kyle describes as the myth of the mosaics. Kent emigrated to Australia early in and joined her brother William in Tasmania, where he worked as a government adviser on fisheries.

She worked for a decade at the Parramatta Industrial School for Girls from to , was domiciled in the New South Wales country town of Mittagong for a year, and was then made matron of the Pierce Memorial Nurses' Home at East Maitland, serving there from until she retired in , Constance Kent died in a private hospital in the Sydney suburb of Strathfield at the age of , on 10 April This story is loosely based on the Constance Kent case; "Christmas Party" was an original screenplay based on an original story by the screenplay author Angus MacPhail.

While playing hide and go seek in an old house, Howes hears a child sobbing and comes into a bedroom where she meets a little boy named Francis Kent whose sister Constance is mean to him. Howes comforts the child, and then leaves him when he is asleep.

Then she finds the others from the party and learns that Francis was killed by Constance over eighty years before. Jonathan Whicher was one of the original members of the Detective Branch which had been established at Scotland Yard in In he was called in to assist the investigation into the horrific murder of 4-year-old Francis Savile Kent.

The child had been taken from the nursemaid's bedroom at night and was found, with his throat cut, in an outside privy in the garden of his family's house the next morning. The murder brought notoriety to the small village of Road sometimes spelled Rode in Wiltshire. When the nursemaid, Elizabeth Gough, reported the child missing at am to Mrs Kent, a search commenced for the child, who was found dead in an outside privy with his throat cut and a stab wound to the chest.

There was no sign of blood in the house, but the drawing room window had been found open despite the servants having closed it the night before. The local magistrates soon became impatient for results from the local police Superintendent Foley's investigation, which was largely directed towards the nursemaid Elizabeth Gough who had had responsibility for the child.

They asked the Home Office for assistance from Scotland Yard without the agreement of the local Chief Constable, and it was after a second request from them that Detective Inspector Jonathan Whicher, then the most senior and well known of the detectives at Scotland Yard, was sent. Whicher concentrated on a missing night dress, possibly blood stained, belonging to Constance, and there was also circumstantial evidence against her.

The magistrates directed Constance's arrest and gave Whicher seven days to prepare a case. Mr Kent provided a barrister for his daughter who dominated proceedings. Constance was released on bail and the case was later dropped. The reaction in the newspapers was sympathetic to Constance, Whicher was heavily criticised, notwithstanding the difficulties he had faced, and his reputation never recovered. The nightdress was never found and Whicher returned to London.

Five years later, in April , after a period abroad and in a religious institution in Brighton, Constance attended Bow Street magistrates court and confessed to the murder. Her motive had apparently been to exact revenge against the second Mrs Kent for her treatment of Constance's mother. Constance was subsequently sentenced to death, but this was commuted to 20 years' penal servitude. The confession from Constance came too late to save the career of Jonathan Whicher who had been pensioned before Constance's appearance at Bow Street confirmed his original suspicion.

It is a classic illustration of how early investigations were directed heavily by magistrates, of the influence which well-to-do people could exert over local police officers, and of the importance of immediately searching and questioning the whole household at the scene of a crime, regardless of social status.

Samuel Savile Kent was the deputy inspector of two clothing factories and he lived with his family in a large, three-storey mansion, called Road Hill House, in the village of Road, near Trowbridge in Somerset. They had a large family with his first wife giving him ten children of whom only four survived, before she died in Because Samuels wife had been ill for a long time the young family had been looked after for several years by a governess, Miss Pratt, a voluptuous and attractive woman.

Once his wife was dead Samuel soon married Miss Pratt. By his second wife had managed to produce three more offspring and had another on the way. One of these was three-year-old Francis Savile, a precocious favourite of his father. Because of his wife's pregnancy Samuel felt it was once more necessary to employ a nurse, Elizabeth Gough, to look after the smaller members of the family.

Mr and Mrs Kent slept in a second-floor room with a small daughter in a crib. Across the landing was the nursery occupied by Francis, a one-year-old daughter and Elizabeth Gough.

Also on the same floor were year-old Constance and year-old William, in separate rooms. Rooms on the top floor were occupied by the housemaid and the cook. Miss Gough awoke at about 5am on June 30th She looked in to check on the baby and then into the cot where Francis slept. He was not there. Miss Gough was not unduly alarmed as Mrs Kent often came and collected her son during the night, so she went back to bed.

An hour later she got up, dressed and went to the Kent's room to enquire of her mistress if she should take Francis. But Mrs Kent hadn't been in to fetch the child. A frantic search ensued. There was no sign of the child in the house but a window was found open in the drawing room. Samuel Kent, fearing that his son had been kidnapped, hurriedly dressed and rode off to the police station in Trowbridge. Soon the alarm was raised in the village all of the villagers gathered and started to conduct a search for the missing child.

Two of the villagers found a disused servant's outhouse and, on looking inside, found the child's body. There was a deep wound in his side and his throat had been slashed so severely that the head was almost severed.

By the time that the body had been recovered back to the house Samuel Kent had returned from Trowbridge with the police. An inquest returned a verdict of murder by some person, or persons, unknown. The police inspector now decided that he had a suspect and arrested Elizabeth Gough but soon had to release her through lack of evidence.

Whicher was hindered more than helped by the local force. While carrying out his investigation he found out that the household had an unusually large turnover of servants. He decided to interview them all in order to get a bit of background on the household. He learnt from them that the two older children did not receive the same favour from their parents as their younger siblings.

This especially applied to Constance, who it had to be said bore a great deal of resentment. After interviewing Constance he became more and more convinced that she had more to do with the death than she was saying.

The problem was finding enough hard evidence to prove it. Whicher re-interviewed the servants and found out from the maid that, on the Monday following the murder, Constance had approached her while she was preparing the laundry to go to the local washerwoman.

Constance had asked for her night-gown, telling the girl that she may have left her purse in the pocket. Once they had established that the gown was in the laundry Constance asked the maid to fetch her a glass of water.

By the time that the maid had returned the night-gown had gone. Whicher surmised that Constance had distracted the maid's attention so that she could remove the gown to her room, having once established its presence in the laundry. If the gown had gone missing while it was away being washed, then it wasn't her fault, she could account for all her gowns. This would cover up the fact that, in reality, she was missing a gown, a bloodstained one.

It was not a lot of evidence to go on but Whicher had decided that it would have to be enough. He arrestedd her on the 20 July. If he was expecting her to be overawed and break down under questioning he was to be disapointed. She may have only been a young girl but Constance was made of sterner stuff and maintained her denial of any involvement in the killing. When the case came before the magistrates on 27 July the evidence was so thin that many in the audience openly laughed at it.

Whicher was reviled by many and Constance was released on bail. Although she had not been acquitted it was obvious that the charge would not stand up against her. Whicher returned to London and, shortly after, retired on the grounds of 'ill health'. Nurse Gough, who had moved to a neighbouring town and taken a job as a seamstress, was again arrested and brought before the magistrates.

Again, there was no evidence and she was released. Because of the attention that his family had been receiving, Samuel Kent moved his family to Wales and Constance was sent to a convent in France in early This was a religious retreat where she was a paying guest.

It would seem that Constance was not all bad and perhaps being unable to put up with something like murder on her concious she decided she could go on with the deception no longer. On 25 April Constance, accompanied by Reverend Wagner, the director of the home, walked into the magistrate's office on Bow Street and confessed to the murder to Sir Thomas Henry, the Chief Magistrate. She was brought to trial on July 21 at Salisbury Assizes and pleaded guilty.

No witnesses were called and she was sentenced to death. Because of her age at the time of the crime her sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life. She was released from Millbank Prison in , after serving twenty years, and died in The first whodunnit: How the murder of a three-year-old boy gave us the fictional detectives we know today. It was the case that took the Victorian world by storm, and inspired Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others, to pen murder mysteries.

Now a new book exploring the mysterious case has won a top literary prize and is set for a TV adaption. The sun's rays were just appearing over the horizon in the early hours of a Victorian summer's morning. In an elegant Georgian house in the hamlet of Road in Wiltshire, all was quiet. The prosperous Kent family - nine family members, and three servants - were all asleep in their beds. Or so it seemed.

An hour after midnight the family's Newfoundland dog - notorious for reacting to the slightest provocation - had barked loudly, but no one paid the slightest attention. The inhabitants of Road Hill House slept on soundly. It wasn't until just after 5am that Saturday that Elizabeth Gough - the family's year-old nursemaid, who looked after the three smallest children of factory inspector Samuel Kent - woke up, and noticed that one of her charges, three-year-old Saville Kent wasn't in his cot on the other side of her room.

For two hours Gough was convinced that the boy had been removed by his mother Mary, Samuel Kent's second wife. But the child had not found his way to his mother's bed - far from it. He had disappeared. Less than an hour after the search had begun two local men, William Nutt, a shoemaker, and Thomas Benger, a farmer, opened the door of a servants' privy set among dense shrubbery to the left of the house's great gravel drive.

The two men peered inside, and saw a pool of blood on the floor. Lifting the lid of the privy, and peering into the darkness, Benger saw what looked like a blanket. When he reached down to pick it up, he found it was soaked in blood. About two feet beneath the privy's seat - on the wooden 'splashboard' that partly blocked the descent into the pit beneath - lay the body of Saville Kent.

As Benger lifted the boy's body out of the privy, his head tipped back to expose the clean cut across his neck. Benger said: 'His throat was cut, and blood splashed over his face It is also set to be turned into a major television drama for ITV. Just as the disappearance of little Madeleine McCann today produced a massive reaction among the public, so the gruesome murder of Saville Kent provoked national hysteria in Victorian England - not least because of intense public speculation and rumour about life behind the closed doors of that most respectable of houses in the gentle Wiltshire countryside.

Within a matter of days of the discovery of the small boy's body, rumours of madness and adultery among the Kents began to circulate. The murder investigation was first led by the local superintendent, John Foley, aged He suspected the nursemaid Elizabeth Gough had killed the boy, believing it to be impossible that Saville had been abducted without her knowledge.

Foley's theory was this: that Saville Kent had woken up and seen a man with Gough in her bed on the other side of the room. To silence the boy, the lovers had suffocated him. The police already knew the little boy was a ' telltale' - because Gough herself had told them that he 'goes into his mamma's room and tells everything'.

The Wiltshire police were convinced that the lovers then mutilated the body to disguise the cause of death - and even suggested Gough's lover that night was the master of the house, Samuel Kent. And so, on the evening of Tuesday, July 10, , the local magistrates agreed with the police's theory and directed them to arrest Elizabeth Gough.

Rumours quickly spread that she had confessed, naming Samuel Kent as the murderer and her as his accomplice - but in reality she had done no such thing. That very morning, the influential national newspaper, the Morning Post, had ridiculed the Wiltshire police's efforts to find Saville Kent's killer, and called for 'the most experienced of detectives' to take over the case.

In an editorial, the Morning Post insisted: 'A crime has just been committed which for mystery, complication of probabilities, and hideous wickedness, is without parallel in our criminal records On July 14, the Wiltshire magistrates succumbed to public pressure and wrote to the Home Secretary to ask that a detective be sent to Road Hill House to investigate the case.

And so, year-old Detective Inspector Jack Whicher was dispatched to investigate. Called 'the prince of detectives' by his colleagues, Whicher was 'a stout, scuffed man with a delicate manner' to use Summerscale's words. He was also 'shorter and thicker set' than his fellow officers, according to Charles Dickens.

He had been one of the eight founding members of Scotland Yard's detective force 18 years before. Dickens also described Whicher as possessing 'a reserved and thoughtful air, as if he were engaged in deep arithmetical calculations'.

Whicher was 5ft 8in, with brown hair, a pale skin pitted with smallpox scars and startling blue eyes. He was to become the prototype of every reserved, analytical fictional detective from that day to this - from Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone to David Jason's unmistakable Inspector Frost.

Whicher's takeover of the case took place just as the rumour mill surrounding the Kent family grew ever more fevered and salacious. It transpired that Samuel Kent's first wife, Mary Ann, was insane. She'd had no fewer than ten children, growing increasingly mad as the pregnancies mounted.

Indeed, four or five of her children died within a year of their birth. Samuel Kent was understandably concerned about the care for his children - and so, at the birth of his ninth child, a daughter called Constance in , Kent had hired a governess. She was Mary Drewe Pratt, a short, attractive, self-assured young woman. Barely four years later, in , one of Samuel Kent's bosses urged him to move house to escape the increasing gossip about his living arrangements.

The man with a deranged wife and an increasingly favoured governess is a triangle that has astonishing parallels with Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre, published the year before. The Kent family moved twice in the next four years, and on May 5, , the first Mrs Kent died at the age of just 44, from 'an obstruction of the bowel'. Fifteen months later, Kent married the governess, who bore him three further children - among them, the unfortunate Saville.

Mary was eight months pregnant with a fourth child when Saville was murdered. This was the background Inspector Whicher painstakingly pieced together as he took charge of the murder case. As he did so, further dark secrets about the Kents began to emerge. A witness came forward, insisting that while the first Mrs Kent was still alive, Samuel Kent had taken the family governess, Miss Pratt, as his lover. Some of the villagers described Kent as an arrogant, bad-tempered man, who was either rude or lascivious to his servants.

Indeed, more than staff had passed through his house. Nevertheless, Whicher dismissed Samuel Kent as a suspect. He also dismissed William Nutt, one of the two men that discovered Saville's body, whom some locals had claimed was the nursemaid Elizabeth Gough's lover. Whicher was also convinced of her innocence.

To the surprise and consternation of the local population, Whicher suspected Samuel Kent's year-old daughter Constance. He asked magistrates to remand her in custody for a week while he continued his investigation. In a five-page letter to the Commissioner at Scotland Yard, Whicher explained the reasons for his suspicions - citing Constance's physical strength, the fact that she slept alone in her own room, and that she had used the privy as a hiding place before.

Constance was certainly strong enough - both physically and psychologically - to have killed her stepbrother, as 'she appears to possess a very strong mind', Whicher concluded. But to the detective's despair, the Wiltshire magistrates disagreed, and Constance Kent was released from custody and returned to Road Hill House.

Three years later, she moved to Brighton, where she asked for admission to St Mary's home, a house for 'religious ladies', where she was to remain for the next two years. Could this have been a sign of her sense of guilt? Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is not just a dark, vicious true-crime story; it is the story of the birth of forensic science, founded on the new and disturbing idea that innocent, insignificant domestic details can reveal unspeakable horrors to those who know how to read them.

Lev Grossman - Time. It sweeps us irresistibly into the investigation, turning us into armchair detectives Under the spell of [her] scrupulous intelligence and mesmerizing research, we are drawn into a detective story within a detective story that takes us halfway into the 20th century and across the sea to Tasmania before the clues finally add up to what surely must be the last word on the Road Hill Murder.

Daily Mail UK. Starred review. Summerscale delivers a mesmerizing portrait of one of England's first detectives and the gruesome murder investigation that nearly destroyed him. In , three-year-old Saville Kent was found murdered in the outdoor privy of his family's country estate. Local police scrambled for clues, but to no avail. Scotland Yard Det. Jonathan Jack Whicher was called in and immediately suspected the unthinkable: someone in the Kent family killed Saville. Theories abounded as everyone from the nursemaid to Saville's father became a suspect.

Whicher tirelessly pursued every lead and became convinced that Constance Kent, Saville's teenage half-sister, was the murderer, but with little evidence and no confession, the case went cold and Whicher returned to London, a broken man.

Five years later, the killer came forward with a shocking account of the crime, leading to a sensational trial. Whicher is a fascinating hero, and readers will delight in following every lurid twist and turn in his investigation. Publishers Weekly. An English country house, a ghastly child murder, family secrets, a brilliant detective—all the elements of a Victorian crime novel are here in this true account of a celebrated murder in An incompetent police investigation proved fruitless, so the magistrate called in London detective James Whicher.

Detectives, who investigated crimes across different police districts, were viewed with both awe and suspicion; their investigations often threatened the sacred privacy of the home. Whicher was certain that a member of the family had murdered the child, but a flat denial and the outrage of the community sent him back to London in disgrace.

Later developments proved him right, but Whicher's real claim to fame was as the template for fictional detectives, particularly Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone. Summerscale organizes the book like a period novel, with a denouement that suggests that full justice was never done.

For public and academic libraries. Library Journal. Painstaking but never boring recreation of a sensational murder brings to shivering life the age of the Victorian detective.

The Road Hill case served as fodder for the emerging detective genre taken up with relish by such authors as Dickens, Poe and Wilkie Collins. She models this engaging true-crime tale on the traditional country-house murder mystery, packed with secretive family members moving about with hidden motives in a commodious old manor house.

On June 30, , in the Wiltshire village of Road, three-year-old Saville Kent was removed in the dead of night from his cot in the room he shared with his nursemaid, suffocated, stabbed and dumped in the privy outside the kitchen. In addition to his parents, Samuel and Mary Kent, the inhabitants of Road Hill House included numerous servants and Samuel's four children from his previous marriage, each harboring various grievances since their mother's untimely death.

After the local constable made a mess of the investigation, authorities called in Scotland Yard's "prince of detectives," Jonathan Whicher, then at the height of his career at age The author dispassionately presents highlights from the record of Whicher's interviews with servants and family members, allowing readers to fill in the blanks much as the detective had to do. On largely circumstantial evidence, he arrested Samuel's year-old daughter Constance, but she was soon released, and the press ridiculed Whicher for accusing an innocent girl.

In , however, she confessed to the crime and after a sensational trial served a year prison sentence. Summerscale pursues the story over decades, enriching the account with explanations of the then-new detective terminology and methods and suggesting a convincing motive for Constance's out-of-the-blue confession. He reported his suspicions to the magistrates. There was also other circumstantial evidence.

The magistrates directed Constance's arrest and gave Whicher seven days to prepare the case against her. Mr Kent provided a barrister for his daughter who dominated proceedings.

Constance was released on bail and the case was later dropped. The reaction in the newspapers was sympathetic to Constance and Whicher was heavily criticised.

His reputation never recovered. The nightdress was never found and Whicher returned to London. Subsequently the local police conducted a prosecution against Elizabeth Gough, but that also failed. The baby is taken from the bedroom Constance Kent in later years. Nurse Gough arrested for second time With Mother Superior. The case is a classic illustration of how early investigations were directed heavily by magistrates, of the influence which well-to-do people could exert over local police officers, and of the importance of immediately searching and questioning the whole household at the scene of a crime, regardless of social status.

Later, Constance Kent admitted her crime after a conversation with the Mother Superior at the religious establishment at Brighton where she lived, and went to Bow Street court where she made a confession of carrying out the crime.