The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

by Kate Summerscale

  So far, the identity of the 'violent man' was at least partly ambiguous, but in the closing sentences of the piece the author all but named Samuel Kent:

  A child is lost from its bed-room, not an exposed one, but upstairs, and in the penetralia of the mansion, at an hour when no visitor from outside can have approached the room, and a man, to whom that child should have been most dear, a man who should be most intense and practical in his researches after it, adopts the frivolous, novel-reader's idea that the child has been stolen by gipsies! Had he said that it had been flown away with by angels, the suggestion under the circumstances could not have been more ridiculous.

  There was a consensus that sex was the motive for the murder - more particularly, that the catastrophe sprang from the fact that a child had witnessed a sexual transgression. In Whicher's view, Constance avenged the sexual affair between her father and her former governess by destroying the offspring of that liaison. In the popular view, it was Saville who witnessed a sexual encounter, and was killed for what he saw.

  The dominant theme in the press was bewilderment. So much was known and yet so little could be concluded: the columns of coverage only amplified the mystery. 'Here our knowledge ends,' ran an editorial in the Daily Telegraph. 'Here our inquiries are baffled. We stumble on the threshold, and the vast vista of the crime lies all undiscovered beyond.' The story behind the murder was momentous, but hidden from view. Road Hill House may have been searched from cellar to cockloft but, symbolically, its door was shut fast.

  In the absence of a solution, Saville's death became a pretext for unfettered speculation; it let loose a kind of wild imagining. There was no knowing what hidden identities might emerge at 'that strange, pale hour of morning'. The characters in the case had come to have double selves: Constance Kent and Elizabeth Gough were angels in the house, or she-devils; Samuel was the loving father, overwhelmed with grief and insult, or a ruthless, sex-crazed tyrant; Whicher was a visionary, or a vulgar fool.

  An editorial in the Morning Post showed how suspicion still fell on just about everyone in the house, and several beyond it. Samuel or William might have killed Saville, the piece argued, or Mrs Kent might have done it, 'under one of those delusions to which women in her condition [that is, pregnancy] are sometimes liable'. Saville could have been murdered by 'one or more of the juveniles in the family, in a passion of jealousy; or, by anyone who wished to wound the parents in the tenderest point'. The writer wondered about the antecedents of Sarah Kerslake, the knives of William Nutt, the lies of Hester Holley. His imagination took him into the dips and hollows of Road Hill House, its tenderest points. 'Have the wells been searched, the ponds, the drains, the chimnies, the trunks of trees, the soft earth in the garden?'

  'Dark as the mystery is,' he wrote, 'we are persuaded it turns on the nightgown and the knife.'

  Within days of reaching London, Jack Whicher and Dolly Williamson were set to work on a fresh murder case, another domestic horror show that featured nightgowns and a knife. 'No sooner do we hear of one atrocious and cruel murder being committed,' observed the News of the World, 'and that it is not likely to be discovered, than we are startled at finding that the impunity is causing its usual result, and murder upon murder springs up in different directions, as though it were some fearful epidemic suddenly bursting forth.' An unsolved murder seemed to be infectious. By failing to catch one killer, a detective might unleash a host of them.

  On Tuesday, 31 July, the police were called to a house in Walworth, a district of south London between Camberwell and the river. The landlord and a lodger had heard a scream and a thump soon after dawn. When the local police officers reached the house, they found a short, very pale young man in a nightshirt standing over the dead bodies of his mother, his two brothers (aged eleven and six) and a woman of twenty-seven. All were dressed for bed. 'This is my mother's doing,' said the man. 'She came to the bedside where my brother and I were sleeping. She killed him with a knife and made a stab at me. In my own defence I wrenched the knife from her hand and killed her, if she is dead.' The survivor of the massacre was William Youngman. When he was arrested on suspicion of murder, he said: 'Very well.'

  Whicher and Williamson were assigned to assist Inspector Dann of the Lambeth division. Unlike Foley, Dann was an able officer, and he remained in charge of the investigation. The police soon established that Youngman had been engaged to marry the young woman, Mary Streeter, and had taken out a PS100 insurance policy on her life six days before she died. Whicher found that the banns to the couple's marriage had already been published at the parish church. It emerged that Youngman had purchased the murder weapon two weeks before the killings - he claimed he had bought it to cut his bread and cheese.

  There were similarities between the murders at Road and at Walworth: the composure of the chief suspects, the extreme violence towards members of the immediate family, the intimations of madness. But The Times found the differences were greater. The London killing had a 'repulsive literality and distinctness', it argued, appearing to accept that Youngman's motive for slaughtering his family was purely financial. 'The public mind is neither harrowed by suspense nor excited by uncertainty.' The solution was too obvious, and the crime meant nothing beyond its own ugly horror. There was nothing missing. The Road case, by contrast, posed a tantalising riddle, and its solution seemed of urgent, personal concern to many middle-class families.

  The News of the World concurred that there was something about the Road Hill murder that 'seems to set it altogether apart, in a class by itself'. Yet the newspaper saw a disturbing connection between the various vicious murders of 1860 - all were virtually motiveless: 'you are astonished, at once, by the brutality of the crime and the smallness of the motive'. Both the Road and the Walworth killers seemed almost, but not quite, insane: their ferocity seemed disproportionate to any possible gain, and yet they had carefully planned to commit and then conceal their crimes. The newspaper remarked of the Walworth murders, 'Either, then, this crime is an outbreak of insanity, or else it is the most horrible and appalling murder that has ever been committed by human hands.'

  Just over a fortnight after the investigation began, Youngman was tried at the Old Bailey. He 'appeared perfectly unconcerned', reported The Times, 'exhibited the most extraordinary coolness and self-possession, and . . . did not evince the least emotion'. When the jury convicted him of murder, he said, 'I am not guilty,' turned around and 'walked with a firm step out of the dock'. The suggestions that he was insane were rejected, and he was sentenced to death. As soon as Youngman reached his cell he demanded supper. He ate it with gusto. While he waited in prison for his execution a lady sent him a religious tract, on which she had underlined the passages she thought applicable to his case. 'I wish she had sent me something to eat instead,' he remarked, 'as I could do a fowl and a piece of pickled pork.'

  Whicher's part in the Walworth case went almost unnoted in the press, which continued to publish indignant criticisms of his investigation at Road Hill. As he scribbled his ripostes on the letters that arrived at Scotland Yard, he had to stay silent on the public discussion of his conduct.

  On 15 August, the day before Youngman's trial, Whicher was denounced in Parliament. Sir George Bowyer, the leading Roman Catholic spokesman in the Commons, complained about the quality of Britain's police inspectors, using Whicher as his example. 'The recent investigation with regard to the Road murder afforded striking proof of the unfitness of some of the present officers,' he said. 'An inspector named Whicher was sent down to inquire into the matter. Upon the slightest possible grounds, merely because one of her nightgowns happened to be missing, that officer arrested a young lady who lived in the house where the murder was committed, and assured the magistrates that he would be prepared in a few days to produce evidence which would bring home the murder to her.' He accused Whicher of acting 'in a most objectionable manner. After all his boasting of the evidence he could produce, the young lady was discharged by the magistrates.' Sir George Corne
wall Lewis, the Home Secretary, mildly defended the detective, arguing that 'the officer was justified in the course he adopted'.

  The national mood, though, was with Bowyer. 'We can unhesitatingly state the public feeling,' claimed the Frome Times. 'An officer who can play at hap-hazard with such an awful charge as that of wilful murder, and can promise that which he must have known he could not perform, cannot expect to be looked on otherwise than with distrust.' 'The Whicher theory has failed to throw any light whatever upon the thick darkness of this horrible mystery,' said the Newcastle Daily Chronicle. 'A new clue must be discovered before justice can thread the mazes of the labyrinth of Road.' The Morning Star was dismissive of the 'frivolous, gossiping, and utterly vapid school-girl testimony' upon which Whicher had relied.

  The Bath Chronicle criticised 'the slender speculations which were loosely strung together and adduced as evidence . . . the experiment made, has been a fearfully cruel one'. In an essay in the Cornhill Magazine, the distinguished lawyer Sir James Fitzjames Stephen argued that the cost of trying to solve a murder - the damage wrought by the exposure, the police intrusion - was sometimes too high: 'The circumstances of the Road murder are extremely curious, because they happen to afford an illustration of the amount of this price so exact that had it been committed on purpose it could hardly have been better arranged.' Since no other culprit could be found, Whicher was blamed for the muddle and mystery of Road. The 'Disciple of Edgar Allan Poe' played on the sinister associations of his name when he noted in his pamphlet that 'Constance is recognised as innocent, though metropolitan witchery once jeopardised her.'

  One of the most damaging charges laid against Jack Whicher was that he was driven by greed. The early detectives were often presented as glamorous rogues, only a step away from the villains they sought. The French felon-turned-detective Eugene Vidocq, whose heavily fictionalised memoirs were translated into English in 1828 and dramatised for the London stage in 1852, had breezily swapped villainy for police work when it served his financial interests.

  The rewards that detectives could earn were descendants of the eighteenth-century 'blood money' paid to thief-takers or informants. In August 1860 the Western Daily Press scornfully alluded to Whicher's 'zeal sharpened by the offer of a handsome reward'. A letter from 'Justice' in the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette compared Whicher to Jack Ketch, a notoriously clumsy seventeenth-century hangman who inflicted great suffering on his victims: Whicher was 'utterly irresponsible', wrote 'Justice', 'tempted with the vision of PS200 reward, getting a young lady of 15 incarcerated in a common gaol for a week'. Like many correspondents, 'Justice' showed distaste for the working-class fellow who had meddled in middle-class affairs. The detectives were greedy and inept because they were not gentlemen. Perhaps Whicher was so vehemently condemned because he was doing in fact what the legions of new newspaper readers were doing in the mind's eye - peeping and prying, goggling and wondering at the sins and sufferings of others. The Victorians saw in the detective a picture of themselves, and in collective self-revulsion they cast him out.

  A few voices were raised in Whicher's defence. The ever-loyal Somerset and Wilts Journal criticised Edlin's 'ingenious bamboozling', and the 'cunning trick' whereby he had distorted the theory about the nightgown. The Daily Telegraph agreed: 'We cannot concur with Mr Edlin in his fervid denunciations of the cruelty of arresting this young lady . . . To believe the ad captandum reasoning of this young lady's advocate, the important point of her garment not being forthcoming has been satisfactorily cleared up; but the contrary would seem to be the case. Where is the nightgown? . . . Far different would it have been if a bedgown stained with blood had been discovered. Some of our readers may remember the awful circumstance of the gory sheet in the story of Beatrice Cenci. That one link would complete a chain of evidence that would speedily change into a halter of hemp.' Beatrice Cenci was a sixteenth-century Roman noblewoman executed for killing her father; in the nineteenth century she had become something of a romantic heroine, the beautiful avenger of a violent, incestuous bully. A bloody bedsheet provided proof of her guilt. Shelley cast Beatrice as an impassioned rebel in his verse drama The Cenci (1819). A character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860) describes her as 'a fallen angel, fallen and yet sinless'.

  The Northern Daily Express remarked that 'The nightdress of Constance Kent, with plain frills - the wearer not having reached the years of maturity and lace - bids fair to become as famous as the ruffs of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespere, the snuff-coloured suit of Dr Johnson, Cowper's nightcap as painted by Romney, or the striped waistcoat of Burns.'

  Henry Ludlow, the chairman of the Wiltshire magistrates, continued to lend Whicher his support. 'Mr Inspector Whicher's conduct in regard to the Road Murder has been much blamed,' he wrote in a letter to Mayne. 'Mr Ludlow feels much pleasure in bearing testimony to his good judgment and ability in the case. I fully agree with Mr Whicher as to the perpetrator of that most mysterious murder . . . he was perfectly justified in acting as he did.' Perhaps Ludlow felt guilty for the part he had played in encouraging Whicher to arrest Constance. All the blame for the case had attached to the detective.

  'I beg further to report,' began Whicher on Monday, 30 July, 'for the information of Sir R. Mayne in reference to the murder of "Francis Saville Kent" at Road Wilts on the night of the 29th June that the re-examination of "Constance Kent" took place at the Temperance Hall Road on Friday Last . . .'

  Over sixteen pages, in a forward-thrusting hand, Whicher argued his case. He irritably discounted the various rival theories advanced by the letter-writers and the journalists. He expressed his frustrations with the local police investigation: the evidence against Constance 'would have been far more conclusive', he said, 'if the Police had ascertained as soon as they arrived, how many night gowns she ought to have had in her possession'. If Foley had only 'taken the hint given' by Parsons as to the nightdress on Constance's bed appearing very clean, and had 'interrogated her at once as to how many she had in her possession I believe the blood stained bed gown would have been missed at once and possibly found'. Constance's lawyer, Whicher complained, had 'said that the mystery respecting the missing night dress had been cleared up, but such is not the case, as one of her three which she brought home from school is still missing and I have possession for the present of the remaining two'. He suspected that a confession would come soon but 'would no doubt be made to some of the family, and then possibly not made known'.

  Whicher signed but did not send the document. Shortly afterwards he scratched out his signature and continued: 'I beg further to report . . .' and wrote two more pages, expanding and clarifying his findings. And nine days after that, still unable to let the matter rest, he resumed: 'I beg to add the following remarks and explanations . . .' The report that he submitted to Mayne on 8 August - twenty-three pages in total - was strewn with inky underlinings, corrections, adjustments, insertions, asterisks, double asterisks and crossings-out.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A GENERAL PUTTING OF THIS AND THAT

  TOGETHER BY THE WRONG END

  August-October 1860

  In early August, with the Home Secretary's permission, the Wiltshire police exhumed Saville Kent's body. They said they hoped to find his sister's nightdress hidden inside the coffin. It was as if the police, in their frustration, could do no more than return to where they began. The officers dug up and unscrewed the box, but were faced only with Saville's corpse in its death robes. The foul gases that emanated from the coffin were so powerful that Superintendent Wolfe fell ill, and did not recover for several days.

  The constables watched Road Hill House around the clock. They yet again examined the sewer that ran from the house to the river. Their chiefs briefed the local press on their tireless efforts: 'The assertion that the local police did not render Mr Whicher that assistance they should have done in investigating the circumstances of this mysterious case, is totally unfounded,' reported the Bath Chronicle, 'they having furnished
him with all the information they had previously obtained, in addition to accompanying him on every occasion when necessary. There is no doubt that the late hasty steps taken by Inspector Whicher have, in a very great measure, impeded, if not increased, the difficulty which the County Police have to contend with in pursuing their enquiries.'

  The police continued to receive letters from the public. A man in Queenstown, Ireland, informed them that Constance Kent had committed the murder; if they would send him the fare, he added, he would bring the missing nightdress to them. They turned down the offer.

  At Wolverton railway station, Buckinghamshire, on Friday, 10 August - the day after Saville Kent would have turned four - a stumpy man with a round, red face approached Sergeant Roper of the North-Western Railway Police and confessed to the murder: 'It was I did it.' The man claimed to be a London bricklayer who had been promised a sovereign (about PS1) if he killed the boy. He refused to identify the person who had hired him, or to give his own name - he said he did not want his mother to know where he was. He had given himself up, he said, because he could picture the murdered child walking before him wherever he went. He had been about to lay his head on the track and let a train pass over him, but he had decided to surrender himself instead.