Barbaric Murders - Child victims, lady-killers and bodies in boxes (Infamous Murderers)

by Rodney Castleden

  Messengers were sent off to fetch Mr Kent from Southwick and the doctor, Mr Parson, from Beckington. By this time, Kent had reached Southwick toll gate, and was reporting that his child had been stolen in a blanket and that anyone with a child in a blanket was to be stopped. This was an odd thing for him to report; no-one knew that a blanket was missing, and the baby had not been found together with the blanket 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 very peculiar about Mr Kent’s ride to Southwick. The messenger who went after him to tell him the baby had been found dead, discovered that Mr Kent had only reached the tollgate. He had not reached Southwick itself, which was only a mile away, yet he had been gone an hour and a half. The lost hour was never explained. What was Mr Kent doing during this crucial time, when he should have been riding as fast as possible to get help?

  Back at the house, the case had been taken over by Inspector Foley. Foley’s policeman found a bloodstained shift, belonging to a woman above the boiler in the kitchen, though this was only mentioned 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 – 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 inside of the house perfectly, knew that the window could only be opened a certain way without creaking, knew about the privy in the shrubbery, and so on.

  The nightdresses were inspected for blood because of the way the baby had been killed. The poor 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 smaller wound in the chest. This had not bled. There were also two more tiny wounds in the left hand; they too had not bled. When the parlour maid collected the laundry, she took Constance’s nightdress along with the others. The girl followed her and asked her if she would get her a glass of water; the maid later thought this odd, as the girl had a jug of water in her room. When she returned she went on with her tasks, but next day discovered that Constance’s nightdress was missing. It was never found. The boodstained shift in the kitchen was a different garment, and no-one knows who that belonged to.

  The inquest 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, 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 there was such a strong feeling against the children that the inquest had to be adjourned to the Kents’ house. 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.

  There was great local outrage about the crime, and Scotland Yard became involved in the case. Inspector Whicher quickly concluded that Constance had murdered her half-brother and charged her accordingly. She broke down in tears and pleaded her innocence. The nurse suported 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.

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

  Overall there was insufficient evidence, but Whicher was sure she was guilty and she was not acquitted. Instead she was discharged into her father’s care.

  Samuel Saville Kent had married Mary Anne Windus in 1830, when he was 28 and she 21. 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. Mrs Kent was herself not constitutionally strong, and she had already shown symptoms of consumption when she was pregnant with 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, to keep a close eye on his wife. In 1844, Mrs Kent gave birth for the ninth time in fourteen years – this time to Constance. Under the care of the new housekeeper, Miss Pratt, Mrs Kent gained strength and then gave birth to William. By this time Mary Kent was completely insane and, in typical Victorian style, Samuel Kent shut his wife away without any treatment and pretended 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 family for a decade, but they were nevertheless shocked when their father announced that he and Miss Pratt were to be married. Edward was so disgusted 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.

  Then Samuel Kent and his new wife moved to Somerset, but the problems simmered away. Constance was as angry and resentful as Edward. She became hyper-sensitive to what were probably never intended to be slights. She became sullen, sulky, often rude. The jeering of the Road village children probably 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 nuisance and Mr and Mrs Kent decided she should go away to school in London, which she also resented deeply. When she returned from school on holiday, it was to find that Mrs Kent had had another baby. This was the unfortunate Saville, and the Kents 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 he too was sent away to school. They were reunited in the holidays, and at the end of one of them, rather than be separated again they decided to run away. Constance disguised herself as a boy and they walked to Bristol. They tried to get a room in a hotel, but they were turned over to the police. Forced to explain herself to her father, Constance said that she wanted to leave England and was not sorry.

  Mr Kent decided to try a new school nearer to home, and her behaviour there was better, though she was still just as churlish at home. After the murder of Saville, Samuel Kent sent her to a French convent, probably to get her away from the village children and the English press. Constance stayed there for two years – and it was her kindness to children that was remarked on. It seems that she became deeply religious. In around 1864, Constance confessed to the murder of Saville and asked for her confession to be made public, probably encouraged by the priests she came in contact with.

  On Lady Day 1865, Constance appeared at Bow Street Magistrates Court dressed in black and confessed publicly to the murder. Then she collapsed in tears. Her father read about the extraordinary confession and visited her. She was then sent to Salisbury to stand trial in July 1865. Again she appeared in black, looking tall, grave and noble. She added a few details to the earlier confession.

  She claimed she had taken a razor from her father’s wardrobe a few days before the murder, though he did not notice. 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 cot, took out one of the blankets, replaced the other covers, then wrapped the boy in the blanket. She took the baby 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 this 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 found; the blanket was definitely on, not round the body.

  Constance went on to explain in detail how she had found only two spots of blood on her nightdress. This is almost incredible, given the act she had just committed. She washed the blood out herself and the next day her nightdress 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, apart from the details already mentioned. One is the fact that her description of the murder – her murder – was lifted almost word for word from an account published in a book written by someone else in 1861. The details she added were unconvincing attempts to explain things that no-one else understood either. How could she possibly have put on her galoshes and climbed out of a half-open window while carrying a sleeping baby wrapped in a blanket?

  Constance spent 20 years in prison at Portland and Millbank. She was released in 1885 at the age of 41, and after that moment she disappeared completely. No-one knows what happened to her after that. One sensational theory is that she washed up in the East End of London three years later and, using perhaps not Papa’s razor but someone else’s, carried out the Whitechapel murders – not Jack the Ripper but Jill.

  It is rather more likely that she emigrated, possibly to America or Australia.

  Constance may have murdered her half-brother, Francis 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. But I am left with a peculiar sensation that in spite of Constance’s confession she was not telling the truth. Was she telling this version of events in order to cover up for someone else? For her brother William, perhaps, or her father? It is certainly not beyond the bounds of probability that she and William carried out the murder together. But what was behind Mr Kent’s one hour delay in riding to the next village? What was he doing during that time? And how did he know the baby would be found wrapped in a blanket? If Mr Kent was the murderer, what possible motive could he have had? If he committed himself the murder, it is hard see why the churlish and discontented Constance would have confessed on his behalf – unless of course her inherited mental instability and her time at the convent conspired to convince her that she had done something she hadn’t. Perhaps she brainwashed herself into taking on the burden of the sins of the world, in imitation of Christ. 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 they are guilty when they are not.

  Carl Bridgewater

  ‘the death of a newspaper boy’

  The James Hanratty case was a classic example of a police investigation that was engineered to produce a conviction. Hanratty was hanged, yet it is still uncertain whether he was really was the A6 murderer, or simply targetted by the police as someone round whom a prosecution case could be built. The Carl Bridgewater case, coming a little later, at least did not result in a hanging, so the possibility remained of putting a wrong judgement right.

  Carl Bridgewater, the unfortunate victim in this murder case, of course remains dead. No amount of legal back-tracking can change that. Carl was a thirteen year old schoolboy, taking on a newspaper round to earn a little pocket money. It seems that during the course of delivering the newspapers one day he accidentally stumbled on a burglary. The case against the burglar-murderers was that they must have killed the boy in order to prevent him from reporting the crime and make sure that he would not be able to identify any of them later.

  Carl died on 19 September, 1978. He had not been doing the paper round for very long, just two months, and the last call he made was one of the last in the round. He was delivering a newspaper to Yew Tree Farm near Stourbridge in Staffordshire. This isolated farmhouse was the home of an elderly couple with mobility problems, and the arrangement they made was for the newspaper to be left on a particular chair inside the house. The owners, Mary Poole and Fred Jones, were both disabled. As it happened, they were out for the day. The boy let himself into the house by the back door, as was expected by the couple, and evidently walked right into the middle of a robbery. The boy was taken through into the sitting room and shot in the head at close range immediately, in cold blood. Carl’s body was discovered by a friend of the family at 5.30 p.m., less than an hour after he had been killed. A blue estate car was seen near the farmhouse at around the time of the robbery.

  The innocent boy’s callous murder shocked the whole country and there was enormous pressure on the police service to find the people who killed him and bring them to justice. The inquiry was led by Detective Chief Superintendent Robert Stewart, who commented that the killing of a young boy seemed completely unnecessary. ‘Every police officer on this inquiry is appalled by the viciousness of this unmerciful killing. It’s possible, however, that Carl had to be silenced because he recognised someone.’ That final point later proved very telling. The high profile of the case meant that the police were less likely to produce a fair and just result; they were being pressed for a quick result. A large number of extra police was drafted into the investigation from the West Midlands Regional Crime Squad.

  Not long after the murder at Yew Tree Farm, on 30 September, 1978, a similar robbery to the Yew Tree Farm robbery took place not far away at Chapel Farm, Romsley. At least it was similar except that no murder took place. The police quickly connected this crime to a small-time criminal called Patrick Molloy and his associates. It turned out, from the way the police constructed the evidence, that Molloy and the other three, James Robinson and cousins Michael and Vincent Hickey, had all taken part in the Yew Tree Farm robbery. Under aggressive and highly pressured police questioning, Molloy made a statement that he had been at Yew Tree Farm on the afternoon when Carl Bridgewater was shot. According to the statement he was upstairs looking for things to steal when the boy was shot. Arrests quickly followed.

  On 9 November, 1979, at Stafford Crown Court, Robinson and the Hickeys were found guilty of murder, sentenced to life: a recommended twenty-five years in prison. Molloy was found guilty of manslaughter and aggravated assault, and sentenced to twelve years in prison. Patrick Molloy died in prison in 1981, less than two years after his ordeal.

  In November 1981, five months after Molloy’s death, a new name was introduced into the Yew Tree Farm case. This was an ambulance driver. There had until now been no eye-witness identification of the four men who committed the Yew Tree Farm robbery and murder, but an eye-witness did report seeing a man in a blue uniform leaving the farm house round about the time of the murder. The uniformed ambulance driver had in fact got a serious criminal record; he had been found guilty of murder and robbery at another location and had dealt with his victims in an equally brutal way. It also turned out that he knew Carl Bridgewater; that fact alone meant that it would have been essential – in his mind – to dispose of the boy, who would certainly have been able to make a positive identification.

  The defence of the so-called ‘Bridgewater Four’ now argued that there was reasonable doubt as to their guilt. The appeal judge, Lord Lane, wrote off the argument based on the new evidence as a red herring.

&
nbsp; In February 1983, the Hickeys attempted to draw public attention to their beached case for a re-trial by staging a rooftop prison protest. It was done in very cold weather, yet they managed to stay out on the roof for several days. The protest had the desired effect, and the following month the Home Secretary ordered a new enquiry into the case, in view of complaints about the conduct of the police in the case. The police insisted there was no case to answer and the enquiry petered out.

  In October 1987, when Douglas Hurd was Home Secretary, the case was referred back to the Court of Appeal, where it was investigated for over a year. In March 1989 the court threw out the appeal, saying that the original verdicts had been correct. A few months later, the defendants were denied the right to make further appeals, in spite of the fact that the situation was changing significantly. Members of the West Midlands Regional Crime Squad, who had been directly involved in the Yew Tree Farm investigation, were under investigation themselves now, on 97 charges of malpractice. The malpractices were so widespread that the squad was disbanded. The policeman who conducted the key Yew Tree Farm interview, the interview with Molloy which induced the ‘confession’, was indicted and cautioned for ‘violence towards suspects and helping to fabricate evidence’. Seventeen other charges were brought against this same officer. Yet the appeal court ruled that this newly emerging information was irrelevant to the convictions for the murder of Carl Bridgewater.