Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  Thursday 19 February: Saw Mimi a few moments was very ill during the night.

  Friday 20 February: Passed two pleasant hours with M. in the Drawing Room.

  Saturday 21 February: Don’t feel well.

  Sunday 22 February: Saw Mimi in Drawing Room – Promised me French Bible. Taken very ill.

  The next day Emile told Kennedy he was very ill and visited a doctor. On 2 March, he told Mary Perry he had been very ill after his last visit to Madeleine, saying, ‘Well, I never expected to see you again.’ A week later, on 9 March, Emile took tea with Mary Perry and told her about a cup of chocolate that had made him very ill: ‘I can’t think why I was so unwell after getting that coffee and chocolate from her.’ Mary Perry evidently did not pick up the hint, so he spelt it out for her. ‘It is a perfect fascination I have for her – if she were to poison me I would forgive her.’ He put on much the same performance when he visited Mr and Mrs Towers of Portobello on 16 March. He talked almost the whole time about his health, saying that he thought he might have been poisoned. One interpretation of this is that L’Angelier had decided to kill himself and he wanted Madeleine to be blamed for his death. He was framing her.

  L’Angelier was certainly not lying about being ill. He was indeed being poisoned, but it is not clear whether by Madeleine or by himself. Mrs Jenkins, Emile’s landlady, went to his room on 20 February to call him for breakfast and found that he was unwell. During the night he had been very sick after feeling violent stomach pains on the way home. Four days later Mrs Jenkins was awakened by Emile’s groans. He had the same symptoms as before. The symptoms were those of arsenic poisoning. It emerged at her trial that Madeleine had been shopping for arsenic at exactly this time. The chemist gave it to her mixed with indigo according to the law as a way of making the normally white powder detectable if it contaminated food or drink. The chemist was surprised that Madeleine was concerned about the colour of it; why would it matter if she was giving it to rats, as she said? She clearly wanted the arsenic to be colourless and undetectable.

  On 22 March, Emile arrived at his lodgings very late, presumably after seeing Madeleine again. This time he was doubled up with pain. A doctor was fetched, but Emile died the next morning. Emile had enough arsenic in his stomach to kill forty men, and the presence of arsenic throughout his body showed that he had taken several doses.

  At her trial, Madeleine pleaded not guilty and changed her explanation about the arsenic; she had bought it for cosmetic reasons. The prosecution explored the idea that she had used the dark-coloured arsenic to lace the coffee and chocolate and fed the drinks to Emile L’Angelier through the bars. She had got herself into such a difficult position that murder seemed the only way out. But the defending advocate argued that Emile was vain, unable to accept rejection. He had also boasted of being an arsenic eater. It is possible that in his depressed and desperate state Emile took the arsenic hoping to incriminate Madeleine. If he couldn’t have Madeleine, no other man would have her either, as he had threatened. If he could commit suicide in a way that reflected badly on Madeleine, so much the better. If he could make it look as if she had murdered him, best of all.

  There is also the possibility that Emile was not just an habitual arsenic eater, but that Madeleine knew he was and that had given her the idea of giving him additional doses, over and above his intended intake. It was the perfect way of getting rid of him. Perhaps they both killed Emile.

  The coldness of Madeleine Smith at her trial was incriminating in itself. She showed no feeling when the sufferings of Emile L’Angelier were described. She showed the same indifference to William Minnoch’s sufferings. The whole devastating affair had made Minnoch ill. Yet when asked about the welfare of the man she had recently said she would marry, she said, ‘My friend I know nothing of. I hear he has been ill, which I don’t much care.’ The jury in Glasgow in 1857 could not decide – they gave a verdict of ‘Not Proven’ – and it is no easier for us to decide now. Could she possibly have committed that cold-blooded murder? If she did, she was indeed evil. It was noted at the trial that her defending advocate, normally a courteous man, pointedly left the courtroom after the verdict without so much as a glance at his client, implying that he thought her guilty.

  Guilty or not, Madeleine Smith was a free woman. She moved to London, married an artist and led an interesting and fulfilled life. At the turn of the twentieth century she and her husband separated and the last years of her life are surrounded by mystery.

  It is believed that she spent her later years in North America, where she survived under an assumed name and died, of natural causes, at the age of ninety-one. A problem with this theory is the discrepancy in the age of the old lady who died in North America and the age Madeleine would have been – a discrepancy of more than twenty years. On the other hand, Madeleine always looked much younger than her years, and she may well have lied about her age; she had already told a great many lies to save herself from the gallows. It is also possible that the ‘64’ written on the death certificate was a result of a clerical error and that ‘84’ was intended; ‘84’ was a relatively small lie for a lady who was really ninety-one, and well within the bounds of social convention. It has been argued that that the fact that her death certificate gives her country of birth as England proves that she could not have been Madeleine, who was born in Scotland. This is a specious argument, because Americans often refer to Britain or the United Kingdom as ‘England’, as if Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were really counties within England. So an American document saying that Madeleine was ‘born in England’ does not preclude her having been born in Scotland.

  Madeleine was posing as Lena Wardle Sheehy when her secret was discovered in New York in 1927. She was approached by a film company who wanted her to appear in a film about her life. Not surprisingly she refused. The slighted producer then revealed her secret to the press, and she was questioned by the US authorities, mainly because they were concerned about her ability to finance her declining years. Madeleine managed to convince them that she had enough money to support herself and it seems they left her alone.

  Even in old age, Madeleine led a complicated life, full of mystery, misunderstandings, half-truths and deceptions. There is a photograph of Madeleine Smith, taken when she was an old lady in North America. She is fastidiously and beautifully dressed, giving the camera a sunny, direct and guilelessly open smile. She looks happy, untroubled, innocent. But we are often deceived by appearances.

  A Family Affair: the Killing of Saville Kent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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