In Bristol and back in Trowbridge, Whicher briefed reporters on his investigation, emphasising the unhappiness of Constance and the insanity in her mother's line. 'The question of probable insanity is one to which Mr Whicher's inquiries have been specially directed,' said the Trowbridge and North Wilts Advertiser. The reason for this, its reporter was told, was that 'there are few, if any, recorded instances of murder, the victims of which have been children of a few years old, in which the murderer has not been acting under the influence of a morbid condition of mind'. As for motive: 'The deceased child, we are told, was the pet of the family, and doated upon by his mother.' The reporter was informed that the servants and the children of the first family were treated harshly, the second Mrs Kent 'ruling, it is said, with a severe hand, all beneath her sway'.
Detective-Sergeant Williamson reached Trowbridge in the afternoon of 21 July. That day's issue of All the Year Round carried a piece by Wilkie Collins about a new biography of the French detective Eugene Vidocq. Collins praised Vidocq's 'impudent, ingenious, and daring' methods, his 'address and powers of endurance in tracking out and capturing his human game', his 'cleverness'. The Frenchman - a master criminal turned police chief - was the detective hero against whom his English counterparts were measured.
From his room in the Woolpack Inn on Sunday, 22 July, Whicher wrote his second report to Sir Richard Mayne, a five-page document that outlined the evidence against Constance. His case rested, he said, on the missing nightdress and on the testimony of Constance's schoolfellows. He listed the other suspicious circumstances: the murder took place soon after Constance and William came home from boarding school; she and William were the only people in the house who slept alone; the pair had used the privy as a hiding place before. She was powerful enough to have killed Saville, he assured Mayne, both physically and psychologically - 'she appears to possess a very strong mind'. Whicher thanked Mayne for sending him Williamson, and reminded him of his unhappy relations with the local police. 'I am very unpleasantly situated as regards acting with the County Police, in consequence of the natural jealousy entertained in this matter by them, they suspecting Mr Kent and the Nurse, and should it appear in the end that my opinions are correct, they would be considered at fault, but I have studiously endeavoured to act in concert with them as far as possible.' Whicher was careful to protect himself from charges of disrespect towards other policemen.
In his reports to Mayne, Whicher gave his reasons for rejecting the conjectures of the Wiltshire police. He defended Samuel Kent's behaviour in the immediate aftermath of the murder. Many were suspicious of Samuel's motives in leaving the house - if he had been involved with the murder, the flight to Trowbridge would have given him an opportunity to dispose of any incriminating evidence, as well as saving him from being present when the body was discovered. But there were innocent explanations for his behaviour: the desire to be sure that the alarm was raised, the restlessness aroused by anxiety. 'As regards the suspicion against Mr Kent,' wrote Whicher, 'in reference to his conduct after the murder was discovered in riding off four miles to Trowbridge to give notice to the Police that his child had been stolen, I think it perfectly consistent under the circumstances and the most natural course for him to have taken as it would in my opinion have been much more suspicious had he remained at home, a partial search of the premises having been made before and was being continued at the time of his departure.'
There were contradictory accounts of how long it took Samuel to make the trip to Trowbridge, and of whether Peacock caught up with him before or after he summoned Foley. The version in the Somerset and Wilts Journal of 7 July had it that Peacock overtook Kent before he reached Trowbridge, and that Kent returned instantly, while the clergyman rode on to the town to fetch Foley and his men. Since Kent was away for an hour, and Trowbridge was just four or five miles from Road, this left a lot of time unaccounted for. Could Kent have been using that time to dispose of a murder weapon or other evidence? A month later the Journal corrected its original story: Kent was on his way back to Road when Peacock accosted him, it reported, and he had already informed Foley of the loss of the child. This account - which concurred with the first published version of these events, in the Bath Chronicle of 5 July - made the timings more reasonable.
Some of the villagers spoke of Kent as an arrogant, bad-tempered master who was either rude or lascivious towards his servants, more than a hundred of whom were said to have passed through Road Hill House since he had moved in. But Whicher found him a decent, even sentimental man. 'As regards his moral character,' wrote Whicher, 'I cannot find that there is anything against him, and I am informed by the Servants now in the family, and by those who have left that he and Mrs Kent lived in perfect harmony, and one of them (the monthly nurse) stated that she considered him foolishly fond and indulgent towards her, and doatingly fond of the deceased child which I fear led to his untimely death.'
Another suspect was William Nutt, who had seemed to predict his own discovery of Saville's body. He had a grudge against Samuel, who had prosecuted a member of his family for stealing apples from the Road Hill orchard. Some named Nutt as Elizabeth Gough's imagined lover. 'I do not think there are grounds for the suspicion entertained relative to the witness "Nutt" who found the child,' Whicher wrote, 'as it appears very natural that he would have made the remark of "looking for a dead child as well as a living one" as at that time he and Benger had searched other places and were then going to search the privy.' As for the suggestion 'that he was improperly connected with the Nursemaid, there is not the slightest grounds for that suspicion, as she in the first place was not acquainted with him and in the next place I do not suppose she hardly ever spoke to him nor would condescend to speak to him in any way much more as an admirer, as she is rather a superior girl for her station in looks and demeanour, while on the other hand "Nutt" is a slovenly dirty man, weakly, asthmatical, and lame'.
Whicher steadfastly defended Gough's innocence. He said he saw nothing in her conduct to make her a likely suspect. This ignored her strange contradictions about the time at which she became aware that Saville's blanket was missing: at first she said she had noticed before his body was found, then that she noticed only afterwards. But if this was a lie rather than a confusion, it seemed a pointless one. There was no need for Gough to conceal her knowledge that the blanket had been taken - it would have been natural for her to check the bedding carefully. By changing her story, she only drew suspicion to herself. A similar ambiguity hung over her account of why she did not raise the alarm when she noticed Saville was missing at 5 a.m.: her delay seemed odd; yet if she had been guilty, she would surely not have brought it up at all. Some thought it suspicious that Gough had not mentioned Saville's absence to Emily Doel, her assistant, just before seven on the morning of his disappearance; Whicher thought her silence 'seems to tell in her favour', because it indicated that she really did believe the boy's mother had taken him, and that there was no cause for alarm. He also pointed to the innocence implied by the words she used when she roused Mrs Kent at 7.15: 'Are the children awake?'
The police in Isleworth, Gough's home town, had been directed to make inquiries about her character, and the report they sent on 19 July accorded with Whicher's perceptions: she 'is well known to be respectable, quick, kind, good tempered and very fond of children'. As for her supposed lover, the detective could find no evidence 'that she was even acquainted with any male person, either at Road, or the Neighbourhood'.
Some people speculated that Mrs Holley had destroyed Constance's nightdress in order to incriminate the girl and protect William Nutt, who was married to one of her daughters - the fullest version of this theory identified five conspirators: Nutt, Holley, Benger (whom Samuel Kent had apparently once accused of overcharging him for coal), Emma Sparks (the nursemaid who testified about the bedsocks, and had been dismissed by Samuel the previous year) and an unnamed man whom Samuel had prosecuted for fishing in the river. There was little evidence against any of t
hem, other than the mildly suspicious fact that Mrs Holley claimed to have heard a rumour before Monday, 2 July that a nightdress was missing. Whicher had an explanation for this: 'The rumour about the nightdress . . . must have related to Mary Ann's stained nightdress, which the police had confiscated and examined but which had that morning been returned to her.'
On Sunday, Samuel Kent was given permission to visit his daughter in prison. He was accompanied to Devizes, another Wiltshire wool town, by William Dunn, a widowed solicitor born in east London and living in Frome. (Rowland Rodway had resigned as Samuel's legal representative because he believed Constance was guilty; he later agreed to represent Mrs Kent, who must have shared his view.) This case was far outside Dunn's regular remit. In the county court the previous month he had represented a man who had been sold a faulty turnip-cutter, and another whose cow had developed a lump as fat as two fists after being 'pogged' (poked with a stick) by a rival dairy farmer.
When they reached the gaol - designed like a wheel, with the governor's office at the hub and a hundred cells radiating out from it - Samuel found himself unable to face his daughter and sent Dunn to her cell in his stead. His reasons were inscrutable. The Times said that 'the feelings of the father overcame him, and he was unable to undergo the interview', but did not make clear whether these were Samuel's feelings as a father to Constance or to Saville: he might have collapsed under the weight of his pity for Constance, or of his horror at her. The Bath Chronicle echoed the uncertainty: 'he could not bear the ordeal of an interview with his daughter, and, therefore, remained in an adjoining room, while the solicitor conferred with Miss Kent'. It could be that Samuel recoiled from any discussion of his son's death. In the weeks since the murder, his strategy had seemed to be silence. 'Mr Kent has never alluded to the murder to me from first to last,' Elizabeth Gough remarked later. 'The young ladies have, and so has Miss Constance, but not Mr Kent. Master William has frequently cried over it.'
When Dunn visited Constance in her cell, she repeatedly told him that she was innocent. The solicitor sent to a local hotel for a comfortable mattress, to make her week in gaol more pleasant, and arranged for her to be provided with special rations.
A prison officer afterwards briefed the waiting reporters. 'We are credibly informed that Miss Kent's demeanour in the prison was calm and quiet,' said the Western Morning News, 'and that she appeared to be conscious of her innocence and ashamed of being placed in such a position.'
'We understand she was perfectly calm and collected throughout the interview,' said the Bath Chronicle, 'as, indeed, she has continued to be since her incarceration, although the painfulness of her awfully critical position had, very naturally, wrought somewhat of a change in her features; still, her general demeanour has made such an impression upon the officials of the Gaol, that they do not hesitate to state that her appearance, at all events, bespeaks her innocence of this horrid transaction.'
CHAPTER TEN
TO LOOK AT A STAR BY GLANCES
23-26 July
At the time he was assigned the murder at Road, Whicher had twice before led investigations into the mysterious death of a small boy. One was the case of the Reverend Bonwell and his illegitimate son, which even now was being heard at the Court of Arches, the chief ecclesiastical court in London. The other took place a decade earlier, in December 1849, when a police superintendent from Nottinghamshire turned up at Scotland Yard and asked for the help of the London detectives in a suspected infanticide. Whicher was given the case.
A man in North Leverton, Nottinghamshire, had informed the police that he had received, by post, a box containing the corpse of a boy. The child was dressed in a frock, a straw hat, socks and boots, and wrapped in an apron marked 'S Drake'. The man told the police that his wife had a sister called Sarah Drake who worked as a cook and housekeeper in London.
Whicher and the Nottinghamshire superintendent went directly to the house in which Sarah Drake worked, 33 Upper Harley Street, and charged her with killing the child. 'How do you know that?' she asked. They told her about the apron marked with her name. She sat down and cried.
The same night at the police station Drake confessed to the 'searcher' employed to examine her clothes and belongings that she had killed the boy, whose name was Louis. He was her illegitimate son, Drake told the searcher, and for the first two years of his life she had managed to keep her job as a servant by paying another woman to look after him. When she had fallen behind with the payments, though, the foster mother angrily returned Louis to her. Terrified of losing her 'place' in Upper Harley Street, which paid about PS50 a year, Sarah Drake had strangled her son with a handkerchief. She then packed him up in a box and sent him to her sister and brother-in-law in the country, hoping that they would bury him.
Whicher gathered the evidence to confirm Drake's confession. It was a pitifully easy task. In her bedroom he found three aprons identical to the one in the box, and a key that fitted the box's lock. He interviewed Mrs Johnston, the woman who had looked after Louis since he was three months old, for five shillings a week. She said that on 27 November she had returned Louis to his mother at Upper Harley Street. When Drake pleaded with her to keep him for another week, she refused. She was fond of the boy, she said, but his mother had too often defaulted on the payments and was now several months in arrears. Before leaving Louis at Upper Harley Street, Mrs Johnston urged Sarah Drake to take care of her son.
I told her that he was quite well, and had grown a hearty little fellow. I then told her she had better take his hat and pelisse [a fur-trimmed jacket] off, or he would take cold when he went out. She did so. There was a little handkerchief about his neck, and she said to me, 'This is yours, you had better take it.' I said, 'Yes, but keep it to put about him when he goes out to keep him warm.' I also told her he would soon want something to eat - to which she replied, 'Very well; will he eat anything?' I said, 'Yes', and left the house.
As she was going, Drake called out to ask exactly how much she owed. Mrs Johnston told her it was PS9.10s., to which Drake said nothing.
Mrs Johnston told Whicher that when she called to see Louis the next Friday, Sarah Drake claimed that he was staying with a friend. 'I asked her to kiss the baby for me. She said, "Yes, I will." '
Whicher interviewed the staff at 33 Upper Harley Street. The kitchen maid recalled that on the evening of 27 November, Drake had asked her to carry a box from her bedroom to the butler's pantry: 'It was as much as I could lift.' The butler said that Drake asked him to address the box and to arrange for it to be taken the next morning to Euston Square station. The footman said that he took the box to the station, where it was weighted at thirty-eight pounds, and he paid eight shillings to send it to Nottinghamshire.
Mrs Johnston accompanied the police to North Leverton to identify the body. She confirmed that it was Louis. 'The handkerchief which I left on its neck, the pelisse, and the cape, were also there.' The surgeon who conducted the post-mortem said he was not sure that the handkerchief had been pulled tight enough to kill the boy; there was evidence that he had been beaten, and this was the more likely cause of death.
At her trial Sarah Drake stared at the ground and rocked her body to and fro, occasionally convulsing. She showed signs of great anguish. The judge told the jury that though she had no history of insanity, they might decide that the shock and terror of the child being suddenly left on her hands had unbalanced her reason. He warned that 'they must weigh well before they did so . . . it never could and never would be right or correct for juries to infer insanity merely from the atrocity of the crime'. The jurors found Sarah Drake not guilty, on the grounds of temporary insanity. She fainted.
Many illegitimate babies were killed by poor and desperate women in Victorian England: in 1860, child murders were reported in the newspapers almost daily. Usually the victims were newborns, and the assailants were their mothers. In the spring of 1860, in a weird reprisal of Sarah Drake's crime, Sarah Gough, a housekeeper and cook at Upper Seymour Street,
a mile or so from Upper Harley Street, killed her illegitimate child, parcelled it up and sent it by train from Paddington to a convent near Windsor. She too was easily traced: in the package was a paper bearing the name of her employer.
Juries showed compassion to women such as Sarah Drake and Sarah Gough, preferring to find them deranged than depraved. They were helped in this by new legal and medical ideas. In the law courts the 'McNaghten rule' had since 1843 allowed 'temporary insanity' to be used as a defence. (In January 1843 a Scottish woodturner, Daniel McNaghten, had fatally shot Sir Robert Peel's secretary, mistaking him for the Prime Minister.) Alienists detailed the kinds of madness to which the apparently and usually sane could fall victim: a woman might suffer from puerperal mania just before or after giving birth; any woman might be overcome by hysteria; and anyone might be struck by monomania, a form of madness that left the intellect intact - the sufferer could be emotionally deranged yet show cold cunning. By these criteria, any unusually violent crime could be understood as evidence of insanity. The Times put the dilemma neatly in an editorial of 1853:
Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity . . . Make the definition too narrow, it becomes meaningless; make it too wide, and the whole human race becomes involved in the dragnet. In strictness we are all mad when we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, prejudiced and vain people were to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the key to the asylum?
The suspicion that Constance Kent or Elizabeth Gough was mad kept surfacing in the press. It was even suggested that Mrs Kent had killed her son during a fit of puerperal mania. While Constance waited in prison, a Mr J.J. Bird wrote to the Morning Star to suggest that the murder of Saville was the act of a somnambulist. 'Most people know with what precision and care sleepwalkers act,' he said. 'The parties suspected should be watched by night for some time.' He cited a case in which a hallucinating somnambulist, his eyes open and fixed, had stabbed an empty bed three times. If sleepwalkers could commit unconscious violence, he said, it was possible that Saville's murderer was unaware of his or her own guilt. Perhaps the killer had a double consciousness. The idea that madness could take this form, that several selves could inhabit one body, fascinated mid-century alienists and newspaper readers. Bird's letter was reprinted over the next week in several provincial papers.
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher Page 13