Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  on him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The Tichborne Claimant

  This story is not a story about murder, but about imposture. The crime was impersonating someone else for financial gain. The impostor was pretending to be Roger Tichborne, the elder of two surviving sons of Sir James and Lady Henrietta Tichborne. Roger Tichborne was born in Paris in 1829. Lady Henrietta, who was French, hated England and wanted to raise her son as a Frenchman. Roger therefore lived in France for his first fifteen years in Paris, while his father ran his estates in England. Roger naturally spoke French as his first language and English only with a French accent. This worried Sir James, as Roger was to inherit the estate and the English baronetcy. To make him more ‘English’ and fit into his eventual adult role, Sir James enrolled Roger at Stonyhurst, a Jesuit seminary in Lancashire. Because of the way he had been brought up by his mother, Roger had difficulties in making this switch into the English educational system.

  Against his mother’s wishes, Roger Tichborne went into the army in 1849, joining the 6th Dragoon Guards. He quickly discovered that he was not cut out to be an officer and the men understandably ridiculed his French accent. He resigned his commission and after that could not settle to anything. There was enough family money for him not to need to work, but he needed something to do. A second bad decision was to allow himself to fall in love with his first cousin, Catherine, a relationship that was do
omed from the start.

  At this point, Roger Tichborne decided to leave England and become an explorer in South America. His parents tried to talk him out of it, but he was insistent. One reason for leaving was the intolerable atmosphere in the family, with his mother and father always quarrelling. Roger once described his home life with them as hell on earth. He set off in 1854, fully aware of the hazards ahead, and making a will before he went.

  Roger Tichborne had ample financial resources for his expedition. He had an allowance of £1,000 a year, a huge income in those days. He set off with the idea of spending eighteen months in South America, before going on to India. He was a great letter and journal writer and kept his mother continually informed of his travels. He also sent back a steady stream of animal skins, stuffed birds and other items back to Tichborne Hall to be added to the ancestral collection. His mother circulated his letters to the staff on the estate, who were fascinated by his travels.

  Roger Tichborne’s travels came to an abrupt end on 30 April 1855, on a voyage from Rio de Janeiro to New York aboard the British cargo schooner Bella. Four days into the voyage, the Bella foundered. The ship may have encountered bad weather or a badly stowed coffee cargo may have shifted in the hold, causing her to capsize. Whatever happened must have happened suddenly as no one survived. The only evidence of her existence and her end were an empty longboat and an area of flotsam. The Bella, her crew and her single distinguished passenger were declared lost at sea.

  But Roger Tichborne’s story was far from over. His mother characteristically refused to believe that he was dead. She had lost two children through miscarriages and could not bear the thought of losing another, especially when the remaining son, Alfred, was dismissed as a waster. Lady Tichborne took to leaving a lantern at the entrance to Tichborne Hall, so that when Roger returned he would be able to find his way to the door. Her husband Sir James died in 1862 and Alfred died in 1866.