Kent, Constance Emilie

Samuel Savile Kent was the deputy inspector of two clothing factories and he lived with his family in a large, three-storey mansion, called Road Hill House, in the village of Road, near Trowbridge in Somerset. They had a large family with his first wife giving him ten children of whom only four survived, before she died in 1852. Because Samuels wife had been ill for a long time the young family had been looked after for several years by a governess, Miss Pratt, a voluptuous and attractive woman.

Once his wife was dead Samuel soon married Miss Pratt. By 1860 his second wife had managed to produce three more offspring and had another on the way. One of these was three-year-old Francis Savile, a precocious favourite of his father. Because of his wife's pregnancy Samuel felt it was once more necessary to employ a nurse, Elizabeth Gough, to look after the smaller members of the family.

Mr and Mrs Kent slept in a second-floor room with a small daughter in a crib. Across the landing was the nursery occupied by Francis, a one-year-old daughter and Elizabeth Gough. Also on the same floor were 16-year-old Constance and 15-year-old William, in separate rooms. Rooms on the top floor were occupied by the housemaid and the cook.

Miss Gough awoke at about 5am on June 30th 1860. She looked in to check on the baby and then into the cot where Francis slept. He was not there. Miss Gough was not unduly alarmed as Mrs Kent often came and collected her son during the night, so she went back to bed. An hour later she got up, dressed and went to the Kent's room to enquire of her mistress if she should take Francis. But Mrs Kent hadn't been in to fetch the child. A frantic search ensued. There was no sign of the child in the house but a window was found open in the drawing room. Samuel Kent, fearing that his son had been kidnapped, hurriedly dressed and rode off to the police station in Trowbridge.

Soon the alarm was raised in the village all of the villagers gathered and started to conduct a search for the missing child. Two of the villagers found a disused servant's outhouse and, on looking inside, found the child's body. There was a deep wound in his side and his throat had been slashed so severely that the head was almost severed. By the time that the body had been recovered back to the house Samuel Kent had returned from Trowbridge with the police.

An inquest returned a verdict of murder by some person, or persons, unknown. The police inspector now decided that he had a suspect and arrested Elizabeth Gough but soon had to release her through lack of evidence. On 15th July Scotland Yard stepped in and sent Inspector Jonathon Whicher to investigate. Whicher was hindered more than helped by the local force. While carrying out his investigation he found out that the household had an unusually large turnover of servants. He decided to interview them all in order to get a bit of background on the household. He learnt from them that the two older children did not receive the same favour from their parents as their younger siblings.

This especially applied to Constance, who it had to be said bore a great deal of resentment. After interviewing Constance he became more and more convinced that she had more to do with the death than she was saying. The problem was finding enough hard evidence to prove it.

Whicher re-interviewed the servants and found out from the maid that, on the Monday following the murder, Constance had approached her while she was preparing the laundry to go to the local washerwoman. Constance had asked for her night-gown, telling the girl that she may have left her purse in the pocket. Once they had established that the gown was in the laundry Constance asked the maid to fetch her a glass of water. By the time that the maid had returned the night-gown had gone. Whicher surmised that Constance had distracted the maid's attention so that she could remove the gown to her room, having once established its presence in the laundry. If the gown had gone missing while it was away being washed, then it wasn't her fault, she could account for all her gowns. This would cover up the fact that, in reality, she was missing a gown, a bloodstained one.

It was not a lot of evidence to go on but Whicher had decided that it would have to be enough. He arrestedd her on the 20 July. If he was expecting her to be overawed and break down under questioning he was to be disapointed. She may have only been a young girl but Constance was made of sterner stuff and maintained her denial of any involvement in the killing.

When the case came before the magistrates on 27 July the evidence was so thin that many in the audience openly laughed at it. Whicher was reviled by many and Constance was released on bail. Although she had not been acquitted it was obvious that the charge would not stand up against her.

Whicher returned to London and, shortly after, retired on the grounds of 'ill health'. Nurse Gough, who had moved to a neighbouring town and taken a job as a seamstress, was again arrested and brought before the magistrates. Again, there was no evidence and she was released. Because of the attention that his family had been receiving, Samuel Kent moved his family to Wales and Constance was sent to a convent in France in early 1861.

In August 1863 Constance returned to England and went to St Mary's Home in Brighton. This was a religious retreat where she was a paying guest. It would seem that Constance was not all bad and perhaps being unable to put up with something like murder on her concious she decided she could go on with the deception no longer. On 25 April 1864 Constance, accompanied by Reverend Wagner, the director of the home, walked into the magistrate's office on Bow Street and confessed to the murder to Sir Thomas Henry, the Chief Magistrate.

She was brought to trial on July 21 1865 at Salisbury Assizes and pleaded guilty. No witnesses were called and she was sentenced to death. Because of her age at the time of the crime her sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life. She was released from Millbank Prison in 1885, after serving twenty years, and died in 1944.

The first whodunnit: How the murder of a three-year-old boy gave us the fictional detectives we know today

By Geoffrey Wansell - DailyMail.co.uk

July 17, 2008

It was the case that took the Victorian world by storm, and inspired Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others, to pen murder mysteries. Now a new book exploring the mysterious case has won a top literary prize and is set for a TV adaption.

The sun's rays were just appearing over the horizon in the early hours of a Victorian summer's morning. In an elegant Georgian house in the hamlet of Road in Wiltshire, all was quiet. The prosperous Kent family - nine family members, and three servants - were all asleep in their beds. Or so it seemed.

An hour after midnight the family's Newfoundland dog - notorious for reacting to the slightest provocation - had barked loudly, but no one paid the slightest attention. The inhabitants of Road Hill House slept on soundly.

It wasn't until just after 5am that Saturday that Elizabeth Gough - the family's 22-year-old nursemaid, who looked after the three smallest children of factory inspector Samuel Kent - woke up, and noticed that one of her charges, three-year-old Saville Kent wasn't in his cot on the other side of her room.

'The impression of the child was still there, as if he had been softly taken out,' she remembered later. For two hours Gough was convinced that the boy had been removed by his mother Mary, Samuel Kent's second wife.

But the child had not found his way to his mother's bed - far from it. He had disappeared. By 8am, a full scale search of the grounds had begun, with a reward of £10 (worth about £650 today) being offered by Samuel Kent to anyone who found his youngest son.

Less than an hour after the search had begun two local men, William Nutt, a shoemaker, and Thomas Benger, a farmer, opened the door of a servants' privy set among dense shrubbery to the left of the house's great gravel drive. The two men peered inside, and saw a pool of blood on the floor.

Lifting the lid of the privy, and peering into the darkness, Benger saw what looked like a blanket. When he reached down to pick it up, he found it was soaked in blood.

About two feet beneath the privy's seat - on the wooden 'splashboard' that partly blocked the descent into the pit beneath - lay the body of Saville Kent.

As Benger lifted the boy's body out of the privy, his head tipped back to expose the clean cut across his neck. 'His little head fell off, almost,' Nutt said later. Benger said: 'His throat was cut, and blood splashed over his face... he was a little dark about the mouth and eyes, but he looked quite pleasant, and his little eyes were shut.'

So began one of the most dramatic murder cases in British history, a crime that inspired the murder mysteries of the Victorian authors Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle - and which has just been brought memorably back to life in the book, The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher, by Kate Summerscale - which was awarded the £30,000 BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize on Tuesday. It is also set to be turned into a major television drama for ITV.

Just as the disappearance of little Madeleine McCann today produced a massive reaction among the public, so the gruesome murder of Saville Kent provoked national hysteria in Victorian England - not least because of intense public speculation and rumour about life behind the closed doors of that most respectable of houses in the gentle Wiltshire countryside.
Within a matter of days of the discovery of the small boy's body, rumours of madness and adultery among the Kents began to circulate.

The murder investigation was first led by the local superintendent, John Foley, aged 64. He suspected the nursemaid Elizabeth Gough had killed the boy, believing it to be impossible that Saville had been abducted without her knowledge.

Foley's theory was this: that Saville Kent had woken up and seen a man with Gough in her bed on the other side of the room. To silence the boy, the lovers had suffocated him. The police already knew the little boy was a ' telltale' - because Gough herself had told them that he 'goes into his mamma's room and tells everything'.

The Wiltshire police were convinced that the lovers then mutilated the body to disguise the cause of death - and even suggested Gough's lover that night was the master of the house, Samuel Kent.

And so, on the evening of Tuesday, July 10, 1860, the local magistrates agreed with the police's theory and directed them to arrest Elizabeth Gough. Rumours quickly spread that she had confessed, naming Samuel Kent as the murderer and her as his accomplice - but in reality she had done no such thing.

That very morning, the influential national newspaper, the Morning Post, had ridiculed the Wiltshire police's efforts to find Saville Kent's killer, and called for 'the most experienced of detectives' to take over the case.

In an editorial, the Morning Post insisted: 'A crime has just been committed which for mystery, complication of probabilities, and hideous wickedness, is without parallel in our criminal records... the security of families, and the sacredness of English households demand that this matter should never be allowed to rest till the last shadow in its dark mystery shall have been chased away by the light of unquestionable truth.'

The Times reprinted the same editorial the following day.

On July 14, the Wiltshire magistrates succumbed to public pressure and wrote to the Home Secretary to ask that a detective be sent to Road Hill House to investigate the case.
And so, 45-year-old Detective Inspector Jack Whicher was dispatched to investigate.

Called 'the prince of detectives' by his colleagues, Whicher was 'a stout, scuffed man with a delicate manner' to use Summerscale's words. He was also 'shorter and thicker set' than his fellow officers, according to Charles Dickens. He had been one of the eight founding members of Scotland Yard's detective force 18 years before.

Dickens also described Whicher as possessing 'a reserved and thoughtful air, as if he were engaged in deep arithmetical calculations'.

Whicher was 5ft 8in, with brown hair, a pale skin pitted with smallpox scars and startling blue eyes. He was to become the prototype of every reserved, analytical fictional detective from that day to this - from Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone to David Jason's unmistakable Inspector Frost.

Whicher's takeover of the case took place just as the rumour mill surrounding the Kent family grew ever more fevered and salacious. It transpired that Samuel Kent's first wife, Mary Ann, was insane. She'd had no fewer than ten children, growing increasingly mad as the pregnancies mounted.

Indeed, four or five of her children died within a year of their birth.

Samuel Kent was understandably concerned about the care for his children - and so, at the birth of his ninth child, a daughter called Constance in 1844, Kent had hired a governess. She was Mary Drewe Pratt, a short, attractive, self-assured young woman.

Barely four years later, in 1848, one of Samuel Kent's bosses urged him to move house to escape the increasing gossip about his living arrangements. The man with a deranged wife and an increasingly favoured governess is a triangle that has astonishing parallels with Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre, published the year before.

The Kent family moved twice in the next four years, and on May 5, 1852, the first Mrs Kent died at the age of just 44, from 'an obstruction of the bowel'.

Fifteen months later, Kent married the governess, who bore him three further children - among them, the unfortunate Saville. Mary was eight months pregnant with a fourth child when Saville was murdered. This was the background Inspector Whicher painstakingly pieced together as he took charge of the murder case. As he did so, further dark secrets about the Kents began to emerge.

A witness came forward, insisting that while the first Mrs Kent was still alive, Samuel Kent had taken the family governess, Miss Pratt, as his lover. Some of the villagers described Kent as an arrogant, bad-tempered man, who was either rude or lascivious to his servants. Indeed, more than 100 staff had passed through his house.

Nevertheless, Whicher dismissed Samuel Kent as a suspect. He also dismissed William Nutt, one of the two men that discovered Saville's body, whom some locals had claimed was the nursemaid Elizabeth Gough's lover. Whicher was also convinced of her innocence.

To the surprise and consternation of the local population, Whicher suspected Samuel Kent's 16-year-old daughter Constance. He asked magistrates to remand her in custody for a week while he continued his investigation.

In a five-page letter to the Commissioner at Scotland Yard, Whicher explained the reasons for his suspicions - citing Constance's physical strength, the fact that she slept alone in her own room, and that she had used the privy as a hiding place before.

Constance was certainly strong enough - both physically and psychologically - to have killed her stepbrother, as 'she appears to possess a very strong mind', Whicher concluded.

But to the detective's despair, the Wiltshire magistrates disagreed, and Constance Kent was released from custody and returned to Road Hill House.

Three years later, she moved to Brighton, where she asked for admission to St Mary's home, a house for 'religious ladies', where she was to remain for the next two years. Could this have been a sign of her sense of guilt?

Just four years later - in 1864 - Inspector Whicher retired from the Metropolitan Police, apparently without catching the killer of Saville Kent, although he did tell a friend 'we will only know the truth when Constance Kent confesses'.

And there lies the final sting in this tale of brutal murder and family secrets. On Tuesday, April 25, 1865, Constance Kent - by then aged 21 - walked into London's Bow Street Magistrates' court, accompanied by a priest and confessed to the killing of her stepbrother.

She insisted that she'd acted 'quite alone' and 'not out of jealousy', although she later explained to a friend that she had done it out of hatred for her step-mother, who had usurped her own mother, Mary Ann, in the Kent household.

Constance Kent was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death by hanging, only to be reprieved by Queen Victoria. She went on to serve 20 years in prison before finally being released in July 1885, at the age of 41.

After her release, the murderer of Road Hill House disappeared completely from public view. It was to be nearly a century before anyone discovered that she'd sailed to Australia in 1886 - using the name Emily Kaye - where she worked as a nurse until her death in 1944, two months after her 100th birthday.

And her pursuer, Jack Whicher? He had been dead for nearly 60 years by then, destined to be remembered more through the fictional detectives he had inspired, than for his own forensic skill as a detective.

Kaye, Ruth Emilie

By Noeline J Kyle

Ruth Emilie Kaye was the pseudonym of Constance Emilie Kent. Born in Sidmouth, Devon in 1844, Constance Kent confessed in 1865 to the killing of her three-year-old half-brother in 1860. She served 20 years in English prisons before changing her name and emigrating to Sydney, Australia in 1886.

The Road murder

Francis Savill Kent, aged three years and ten months, was found dead in a disused, outside privy, his throat cut, on the morning of 30 June 1860, near his home, Road Hill House, Wiltshire. The local police conducted an inept investigation and the Scotland Yard detectives brought in to help were unable to gain a conviction. The father of the child, Samuel Savill Kent, was a factory commissioner, employed in southern counties of England to inspect factories employing women and children. He was not well-liked in the local community but did have important social and political contacts within the coterie of local magistrates and public officials, including those who would sit in judgment on this case. As a result, he was able to intimidate local police and partially subvert the various investigations. The children's nurse Elizabeth Gough was put on trial but to no avail. Constance came under suspicion because of perceived dysfunction in the family and her dislike of her stepmother, the mother of the murdered child, and she was arrested but released because of insufficient evidence. There was no successful prosecution in the case.

A family in flight

The Kent family moved to Wales. Constance was sent to France. In 1865 Constance Kent, now 21, confessed and went to prison for 20 years. Debate has ensued since on whether she was guilty or not. [1]

The mythology of how, when and with whom Constance Kent travelled to Australia has grown since 1987, when Bernard Taylor and his researchers found that she had indeed lived out her latter years in the Antipodes under the assumed name of Ruth Emilie Kaye. [2] The family name is also variously written with an 'e' or without despite Kent family records showing the spelling Savill. William did change his name to Saville-Kent using the hyphen to partially conceal his relationship to that awful past. [3] Despite intense and continuing interest since, no writer has written about Constance's journey away from England with any accuracy, or about her subsequent life in Australia, in any detail. A representative example is the work of Lucy Sussex:

In 1884, William [Constance's brother], who had informally changed his surname to Saville-Kent, his wife (another Mary Ann) and Mary Amelia [4] emigrated to Australia. The two eldest Kent daughters were settled and middle-aged in England, but Acland, Florence and Eveline [5] followed William to Australia the year after. With them went Constance, now known as Ruth Emilie (or Emilia) Kaye. Of the many curious things about the Road Murder, one of the oddest is that a convicted murderess should, so soon after her release, chaperone her victim's siblings on a voyage across the world. They must have been singularly forgiving, feeling her to be no threat. [6]

Most assume she travelled with her half-siblings – as Lucy Sussex notes in the quote above – or with her brother William, returning from one of his trips to England. [7] However, Constance Kent arrived on the Carisbrook Castle on 27 February 1886, just a little more than six months after her release, and she was alone. The Kent children's emigration to Australia was related to their desire to find anonymity and a new life away from and apart from the sensational and horrible events of the murder. They did not want the prying eyes of the public, the press or the police in their lives. Travelling with or being seen near Constance, even under her new alias of Ruth Emilie Kaye, was risky. None of them subsequently showed any such recklessness or boldness in behaviour, character or personality. It was as a single, independent woman that Constance arrived in Sydney and began to carve out a successful career for herself in this new land.

Sister Ruth

Constance quickly established herself in the colony, working first as a volunteer in the typhoid tents in Melbourne in 1888 and 1889. Invited to train as a nurse from 1890 to 1892 at the Alfred Hospital, she took up her first substantive appointment as sister-in-charge of the Female Lazaret at the Coast Hospital, at Little Bay in Sydney in 1894. As she worked her way through 1894 and then 1895, it was clear that Constance was a capable administrator and a proficient nurse. Constance was one of the few appointed to oversee the Lazaret to be well liked by staff and patients alike. She remained at the Coast Hospital for two more years until mid-1898, when she left to take up a position as Matron of the Industrial School for Girls at Parramatta. After Constance left, Matron Jean McMaster wrote in her register that there was a 'period of comparative calm' during the administration of 'Sister Ruth' and that it took some time after she left for suitable staff to be retained. [8]

Matron Kaye

Throughout her 11 years at the Industrial School from 1898 to 1909, Constance was known as Miss Kaye or Matron Kaye. This posting fulfilled her ambitions to earn a good salary and gain prestige in the community, and she would have been pleased with its location in the growing suburb of Parramatta. The buildings and grounds of the school were large and commodious, if somewhat forbidding for inmates. As Matron, Constance was allocated spacious and comfortable lodgings. She was, for the first time since arriving in Australia, afforded the luxury of servants attending to her domestic and personal needs. Senior girls were assigned to clean her rooms, and prepare and cook her food.

As Matron and second-in-charge of the Industrial School, Constance supervised the work of the kitchen, the laundry and every aspect of the health and welfare of the girls. She was also given additional duties, reflecting her close involvement with the daily regime of the girls. She was involved in organising and facilitating their evening activities, consisting of 'readings, recitations and vocal and instrumental music'. [9] As a young woman, Constance had been taught the 'accomplishments' at various private schools in England and France. She could read music, knew well the works of significant composers, and she was familiar with English poetry and literature. Constance had read widely as a child, her favourite books focusing on the heroines of her age, such as Florence Nightingale. She had scandalised her family by reading Darwin's On the Origin of Species while still at school.

Constance also gave a series of 'plain talk' lectures to the older girls. These talks were aimed at circumventing the 'sexual delinquency' thought to be rampant among the older girls committed to the school. Although never stated outright, after 1900 the Industrial School for girls was in reality a 'lock hospital'. [10] The girls were examined by a visiting surgeon for any 'infectious or contagious complaint' on admission, and the superintendent wrote at length about the 'immorality' of girls in his care. He also wrote of the excellent nursing care provided by Matron Kaye as each girl arrived and was placed in her care.

Constance received news in October 1908 that her brother William had died in England. William had once been her best friend. As children, they had been inseparable. After the death of their mother, they had watched with dismay as their stepmother turned their childish world upside down. William died of heart failure on 11 October 1908 shortly after an operation for a blockage of the bowel. His wife and his sister Mary Ann Alice were at his bedside. He was 62. William had lived an eventful life. His career, first at the British Museum and then in fisheries management in Australia, was extraordinarily successful. He travelled widely collecting specimens for his work and wrote several books and numerous scholarly articles. [11] At the same time as William died, a new Superintendent arrived at the school. Alex Thompson, a career bureaucrat, arrived at the same time as another change in government policy, which included the appointment of officers possessed of 'qualifications necessary' to improve the character of the training offered at the school. [12] He was effusive in his praise of the younger Edith Bubb who replaced Constance in August 1909. Not that Thompson complained about Constance. She left the position of her own accord. Her age (she was now 55) may have been a factor in her decision, leading her to seek a less demanding occupation.

Constance left to establish 'Devon Electric Treatment' at Mittagong. This move reflected both her interest in the alternative therapies of Albert Schuch and her political interest in the Henry George movement. Constance was a supporter of George's Australian branch of the Free Trade and Land Valuers' League. Constance was at Mittagong for a year before taking up an appointment as Matron of the Pierce Memorial Nurses' Home at East Maitland. She retired from this position in 1932, and in the late 1930s she left Maitland to reside at Albert Street, Strathfield, Sydney at the Loreto Rest Home. She died here on 10 April, 1944 and was cremated at Rookwood the next day.

There were several press and other publications about the Road Murder which would have been seen by Constance while she was in Sydney. In 1899 the Sydney Truth printed a sensational piece which was reprinted in other newspapers. Sir Willoughby Maycock's Celebrated Crimes & Criminals (1890) and James Beresford Atlay's Famous Trials of the Century (1899) both had chapters on the Road Murder and Constance Kent's part in it. It was John Rhode's The Case of Constance Kent however, published in 1928 by Geoffrey Bles, that provided the impetus for a 3,000-word letter mailed from Sydney in 1929. Bernard Taylor argues that there is no doubt Constance Kent read Rhode's book and then sat down to pen the letter, named the Sydney Document by the Detection Club who acquired it in 1933.[13] The Sydney Document takes Rhode to task for focusing on the alleged 'insanity' of Constance's mother and is a forceful critique of the stepmother. Constance was good with words (she wrote more than 40 long and eloquent petitions while in prison) and this long essay not only details much of the acrimonious relationship between herself and the stepmother but also describes her part in the murder (an account very similar to that of her confession and other court records from 1865). In these reflections on her childhood, growing up and the murder, Constance presents herself not as a victim, but rather as incorrigible, smart, fearless and intelligent. She describes a child well able to outsmart those around her:

…she was sent to some relatives, of her step-mother, they were extremely proper & she delighted in shocking them, it was only too easy, she was considered blasphemous because she would always speak of Sara Bernhardt as La Divine Sara, she was not with them long as she was considered incorrigible.

A final confession

In the few weeks before her death in April 1944, Constance Kent contacted her niece Olive Bailey, [14] asking her to visit her in Strathfield. During one of these visits she told Olive who she was and the story of Constance Kent and the Road murder:

Olive did not know the facts until long after her mother died. She was contacted by the matron and asked to come down to Loreto as Miss Kaye wanted to see her. I gather it was then that Constance revealed the secret. [15]

Of course, we do not know what Constance told Olive. Did she tell her the 'facts' of the case as we know of them now? That the child was murdered, that she confessed in 1865 and was in prison for 20 years? Did she confess to Olive that she was guilty, or that some other party was involved? This we cannot know, but my guess is that Constance told Olive the 'facts' as she had recounted them as she stood in the dock in 1860 and in 1865, and that the secrets of the actual events of that night died with her, never to be revealed.

Was she guilty? There are proponents who would answer yes, [16] and those who are as determined to answer no. [17] It is 150 years since the murder and of those who were resident at Road Hill House that night, Constance Kent was the last to die. We can point to her obvious personal and professional success after she left prison – especially the 16 years she worked in senior public service positions with the New South Wales government. In her work as a nurse and a public servant Constance appeared to have a natural talent for administration and the supervision of others. In addition, in her interaction with patients and with the young women at Parramatta, there is no hint of meanness, anger, malice, cruelty or even unkindness. There is no record of inappropriate behaviour. On the contrary, Constance was praised for her skill and her ability to do her work. She was not mad and nor did she exhibit visible aspects of an unstable or unbalanced character.

Any writer on this event can only refer to the same lengthy trial transcripts and depositions of witnesses, and similar newspapers reports of the time. There is no new evidence, no lost letters to be found and no one to re-interview about the crime. What is puzzling however is that no previous writer has interrogated the night of the murder or later events in the light of Constance Kent's 1865 confession and its meaning for the case. Summerscale views the confession as an act of great sacrifice. [18] Taylor argues it is simply a means of covering up the truth. I think Constance Kent's confession was a real event and it has to mean something. We cannot dismiss it as a whim, or a rant or as simply Constance's way of protecting her family or liberating William. It may have contained elements of all of these things of course; protection for the family, a way of supporting William and an act of great sacrifice. Constance Kent was only 21 and when she confessed she thought she would die in a hangman's noose. In fact, everyone thought she would die. The sentence for murder was death by hanging and she would not, indeed insisted she should not, plead insanity or any other case for remission. She did not know when she confessed that her sentence would be commuted. It was a daring and risky act.

So why did she confess? I agree with Taylor and others that she was guilty and also that her brother William played some part in the murder. He was a strong lad of 15, able to carry out such a physical act, and, like Constance, had a real hatred of his stepmother. How the actual murder was enacted remains a mystery but it is certain that Constance's part in it and her confession are central. In all her years growing up in that middle-class family Constance had played a leadership role. She had been the persuader, leading William in many of their childish pranks. It was she, too, who would not apologise and or say she was sorry for any of her rash or silly actions. And I think this act of horror, of murder, was also her idea. It was her idea (whether carried out with William or not) to kill the child as an act of revenge against the stepmother. It was not William's idea, after all he was a follower and he followed her as he always did. She believed that because of her act of thinking of the idea of murder, of revenge, and of (possibly) convincing William to help her do it that she was truly, irretrievably guilty. Her confessions, the first in 1865 and the second on her deathbed, her writing of the Sydney Document and the more than 40 petitions while in prison, her career as a public servant, her mental and physical toughness and her obvious competence as a professional and in her personal life, and the detail of her long life lived in Sydney, Australia reveal a woman of talent and fortitude. Her final words in the Sydney Document are prescient as a final note on how Constance Kent constructed herself and the way she wanted to be remembered:

After her release she changed her name and went overseas and single handed fought her way to a good position and made a home for herself where she was well liked and respected before she died.

References

Noeline Kyle, A Greater Guilt: Constance Emilie Kent and the Road Murder, Boolarong Press, Salisbury, Brisbane, 2009

'Constance Kent and the Road Murder', Late Night Live, ABC Radio National website, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2009/2752376.htm, viewed 2 August 2011

Notes

[1] Noeline Kyle, A Greater Guilt: Constance Emilie Kent and the Road Murder, Boolarong Press, Salisbury, Brisbane, 2009

[2] Bernard Taylor, Cruelly Murdered: Constance Kent and the Killing at Road Hill House, Souvenir Press, London, 1979

[3] Handwriting Collection, Letter from Elizabeth Kent, 29 January 1919, Natural History Museum, London.

[4] Mary Amelia Savill Kent was aged five on the night of the murder. She married Alfred Hutchinson in 1899 at Croydon, Sydney and had one daughter Olive. Olive married Charlies Bailey in 1936 and they settled in Newcastle, New South Wales.

[5] Acland Savill Kent was born one month after the murder. He arrived in Australia in 1885. He died in 1887 at Bendigo, Victoria. Florence Savill Kent was born one year after the murder. She never married and died at Newcastle, New South Wales in 1957. Eveline was aged two in 1860. She married Frederick Johnson and died in 1940 at Melbourne, Victoria

[6] Lucy Sussex, 'Atonement: The Mystery of Constance Kent,' in Kerry Greenwood (ed), On Murder 2: True Crime Writing In Australia, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2002, pp 264–265

[7] William Saville-Kent travelled to Australia in 1884 to take up the position of Commissioner of Fisheries with the Tasmanian government. He returned permanently to England in the early 1900s

[8] Nurses Register, 1891–1917, Prince Henry Hospital Archives, Nursing & Medical Museum Prince Henry, Little Bay, p 304

[9] Superintendent's Report, 1899, Industrial School for Girls, Parramatta, Votes & Proceedings, New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 1900, vol 6, p 483; Noeline Kyle, 'Agnes King inter alios: Female Administrators in Reformatory Schools', Journal of Australian Studies, November 1984, pp 58–69

[10] G Scrivener, 'Rescuing the rising generations': Industrial Schools in New South Wales, 1850–1910', PhD thesis, University of Western Sydney, 1996; Noeline Williamson (now Noeline Kyle), 'Reform or Repression? Industrial and Reformatory Schools for Girls in New South Wales, 1866 to 1910', Honours thesis, University of Newcastle, 1979

[11] Anthony J Harrison, Savant of the Australian Seas: William Saville-Kent (1845-1908) and Australian Fisheries, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart, 1997, p 135; William Saville-Kent, The Great Barrier Reef: its products and potentialities, John Currey O'Neill, Melbourne, 1972, (first published 1893); William Saville-Kent, The naturalist in Australia, Chapman & Hall, London, 1897

[12] Superintendent's Report, Industrial School for Girls, Parramatta, 1909

[13] Bernard Taylor, Cruelly Murdered: Constance Kent and the Killing at Road Hill House, Souvenir Press, London, 1979 p 59

[14] Olive's mother was Mary Amelia Savill Hutchinson (née Kent)

[15] Typescript of interview notes by Shirley Richards with Olive Bailey, 1989

[16] Yseult Bridges, Saint – with Red Hands? A reissue of a chronicle of a great crime – the Case of Constance Kent, MacMillan, London, 1970, (reprint of The Tragedy of Road-hill House, by Yseult Bridges, first published 1954, Rinehart, New York)

[17] Bernard Taylor, Cruelly Murdered: Constance Kent and the Killing at Road Hill House, Souvenir Press, London, 1979

[18] Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, Walker & Company, New York, 2008

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