Road Hill House stood in the village of Rode, Wiltshire. In June 1860 it held a respectable household, a factory inspector’s family and its servants. By the morning of June 30 the youngest child was dead, and the nation was following the case closely.
The Horror
Francis Saville Kent was almost four. He disappeared from the nursemaid’s bedroom during the night of June 29 to 30, 1860. His body was found in the vault of the outdoor privy used by the servants, in his nightshirt and wrapped in a blanket. His throat had been cut so deeply that he was almost decapitated, and he had knife wounds on his chest and hands. That is as much as needs to be said about the child.
His father, Samuel Saville Kent, was a Home Office factory inspector. His mother, Mary Drewe Pratt, had been the family’s nanny, whom Samuel courted while his first wife was dying and later married. Constance, sixteen, was a daughter of the first marriage. The nursemaid, Elizabeth Gough, was arrested first.
After magistrates complained of slow progress, Scotland Yard sent Detective Inspector Jack Whicher in July. He focused on a missing nightgown that belonged to Constance and on other circumstantial evidence. The magistrates ordered her arrest on July 16 and gave him seven days to prepare the case. She was released and the case was dropped for lack of evidence. The nightgown was never found. The national press backed Constance and attacked Whicher, who returned to London seen as a failure. He retired in March 1864 for ill health, became a private detective by 1867, and died on June 29, 1881.
In April 1865 Constance, who had confessed to the Anglo-Catholic clergyman Arthur Wagner, was prosecuted. Wagner withheld the details under the seal of confession, which led to a national debate about priest-penitent privilege. At Devizes she pleaded guilty. She was sentenced to death, and the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment because of her youth and her confession. She was released in 1885, after about twenty years. The confession as reported describes a killing in the privy with a razor taken from her father, out of revenge against her stepmother.
The Doubt
The confession was not universally believed at the time. Some people suspected the father, Samuel Kent, though that theory is speculative. Kate Summerscale argues that if the confession was false, Constance may have been shielding her brother William, who was suspected but never charged, and concludes that the killing was likely revenge against the father for favouring his second family. Constance never recanted and never explained her motive further. The motive and the question of whether she acted alone remain disputed.
The Modern Relic
Constance emigrated to Australia in 1886, joined her brother William in Tasmania, and took the name Ruth Emilie Kaye. She trained as a nurse and was matron of the Pierce Memorial Nurses’ Home in East Maitland from 1911 until she retired in 1932. She died on April 10, 1944 at Strathfield, New South Wales, aged 100.
The case fed Victorian fiction. Wilkie Collins drew on elements of it for The Moonstone (1868), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon did the same for Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Charles Dickens followed it and was among those who suspected the father, and he based a character’s flight in The Mystery of Edwin Drood on Constance’s early life. Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008) won the Samuel Johnson Prize. The present state of Road Hill House is unconfirmed, so no visit is suggested.
