true crime

The grisly murder of a three-year-old boy in 19th-century England caused a national sensation and inspired many early crime writers. The original article I wrote can be found here.

A country house situated near the town of Frome in Somerset, Road Hill House was the residence of Samuel Kent, who worked as a factory sub-inspector, and his second wife Mary Kent, along with their three children Mary Amelia, Saville, and Eveline. Also in residence were four children from Samuel Kent’s first marriage – Mary Ann, Elizabeth, Constance, and William – as well as three servants: Nursemaid Elizabeth Gough, housemaid Sarah Cox, and cook Sarah Kerslake.

Saville Kent Goes Missing

Elizabeth Gough, sleeping in the same room as Saville and Eveline, first noticed that the little boy was not in his bed. At first she was unconcerned, thinking the boy’s mother Mary Kent had taken the boy to sleep in the Kents’ bed. But it wasn’t long before it was discovered that Saville was missing, and that one of the tall windows in the drawing room was open. Patriarch Samuel Kent organized family members and servants for a search of the house and grounds, sent his son William to fetch the parish constable, then took his own carriage to Trowbridge to summon the police superintendent.

The Discovery of Saville Kent’s Murder

William Nutt and Thomas Benger, both of whom lived in the nearby village and had joined in the search, were the first to come across the gruesome remains of the three-year-old. Saville’s throat had been cut so deeply that the head was almost severed; he had been stabbed in the chest and bore dark bruises around his mouth. The tiny corpse had been stuffed into the privy located near the gate to the stable yard. Apparently the murderer had wished for Saville’s body to be hidden in the mounds of excrement in the cistern beneath the privy, but a recently installed splashguard prevented the corpse from falling.

Suspicions Among the Kent Family

From the start, it was presumed someone in the house had murdered the boy. Although the open drawing room window seemed to point to a break-in, police determined that the shutters could only have been opened from the inside. There were also several clues that hinted at dark doings within the family. Nurse Elizabeth Gough claimed not to have heard anything, though she slept near Saville’s cot; in addition, she also called the boy a “tell-tale” and was heard to categorize the murder as “revenge.” There was also the matter of an allegedly bloodstained nightgown belonging to 15-year-old Constance Kent, which later turned up missing. A piece of newspaper that was found near the privy looked as though it had been used to wipe a bloody knife; the paper was The Times, to which Samuel Kent subscribed. And when the cistern beneath the privy was drained, a piece of flannel was discovered, of the type women wore over their breasts to prevent their corsets from chafing. This flannel was found to perfectly fit Elizabeth Gough.

By far the most popular theory circulated by the press was that Samuel Kent and Elizabeth Gough had murdered the child after he had witnessed them in bed together; they feared that Saville would tell his mother what he had seen. But Jonathan Whicher, the investigator sent from Scotland Yard two weeks after the murder, pointed the finger at Constance Kent, whose strangely detached demeanor, coupled with the confusion about her missing nightdress, made her a prime suspect. Whicher discovered that several years earlier, Constance and her brother William had run away from home; Constance had cut off her long hair in order to pass as a boy, and had discarded the hair in the same privy where Saville’s body was found.

A Suspect Arrested

Whicher had Constance brought into custody. But there was a public outcry, as most people – including Charles Dickens, who used aspects of the case in his unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood – believed that Samuel Kent and Elizabeth Gough were the killers. Whicher was reviled as a lower-class snoop who took salacious delight in airing a proper Victorian family’s dirty laundry, and who enjoyed bullying an innocent teenage girl. Constance was released, and later went to a convent home, St. Mary’s. The rest of the family still suffered under a cloud of suspicion; Samuel Kent’s job was constantly in jeopardy and he was reassigned many times, and other family members were taunted and spat at in the streets. The theme of an upright family harboring terrible secrets in its midst was fictionalized in Wilkie Collins’s hugely successful novel The Moonstone, a locked room mystery and the first English detective novel. The book’s detective, Sgt. Cuff, was based directly on Whicher.

A Suspect Confesses

In 1865, Constance Kent entered Bow Street magistrates’ court in London and confessed to killing her half-brother Saville, using a razor she had stolen from her father’s bag. She claimed she had acted alone, and had killed the boy in order to punish her stepmother. Despite her confession, she received an enormous amount of public sympathy, with many people suspecting that she was insane or had been coerced into confessing. But Constance was duly convicted of murder, though she was spared the death penalty. She made many petitions for early release, but ended up serving her entire 22-year sentence. After her release, she went to Australia to stay with her brother William, who had become a well-regarded naturalist. Constance herself trained as a nurse and spent many years caring for patients with leprosy. It later came to light that Constance and William may have conspired together to murder Saville, but that Constance took the entire blame to protect William. Constance Kent died in 1944, at the age of 100.

Source:

Summerscale, Kate (2008). The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective. Walker Publishing Company, Inc. ISBN 0802715354.

This is an article I wrote a while back about the real case that Poe used as an inspiration for his story, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” The original article appeared here.

Tragic American scribe Edgar Allan Poe, while most popular today for his gruesome horror stories, in fact wrote successfully in many genres and is generally credited with pioneering the modern detective story through the invention of his fictional sleuth, C. Auguste Dupin.

Several of Poe’s stories were partly based on true events, but one of the most intriguing examples was the detective story “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” inspired by the brutal 1841 rape and murder of a pretty twenty-year-old woman in New York City. There has been rampant speculation as to what happened to Mary Cecilia Rogers, the “real” Marie Rogêt, but even now, almost 170 years after her death, her killer remains unidentified.

The Disappearance of Mary Rogers

It was on the morning of Sunday, July 25, 1841 that twenty-year-old Mary Cecilia Rogers told her fiancé Daniel Payne that she was going uptown to visit her aunt. Mary, by all accounts a stunningly beautiful young woman, was clad in a white dress with a black shawl and a blue silk scarf, her black hair tucked under a flowered hat. Daniel Payne agreed to meet Mary at the omnibus station when she returned from her aunt’s house later that evening. But Mary Rogers would never be coming back.

Payne, alarmed when Mary had not returned by Monday, placed a missing persons ad that ran in Tuesday’s New York Sun. Upon hearing of Mary’s disappearance, a former sweetheart named Alfred Crommelin also joined the search. It was Crommelin who, on Wednesday the 28th, saw the commotion around the Hudson river, where a woman’s body had been pulled from the water. Crommelin initially identified Mary by the presence of a birthmark on her arm — the face was too battered for easy recognition — and Mary’s mother later identified the clothing the girl had been wearing when she’d last been seen alive.

An Unlikely Drowning and a Range of Suspects

In the early stages of the investigation, it was thought that Mary Rogers had simply drowned, but even a peremptory examination of the body demonstrated that Mary had obviously been dead before going into the water, which of course pointed to murder. Payne and Crommelin were naturally questioned, though both had unimpeachable alibis, as did Mary’s former employer, tobacconist John Anderson, and all of her other friends and fellow residents at the boarding house where she lived. In the absence of a clear suspect, rumors began to circulate almost immediately.

A Clandestine Abortion

One of the most insidious of these was that Mary had died either during or shortly after a botched abortion, and had been disposed of to cover it up. This tenacious rumor was based on the alleged confession of a tavern keeper who had supposedly seen Mary in the presence of a physician and knew that the abortion had been performed in his tavern. The “confession” turned out to be completely fabricated, but the abortion story not only turned up in a later revision of Poe’s fictional account of the crime, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” but continued to be repeated as truth in several books about the murder, right up into the modern day. It was also apparently a factor in abortion becoming criminalized in New York State in 1845.

The Suicide of Daniel Payne

Though Payne was quickly dismissed as a suspect, new stories began swirling about his involvement after he took his own life in October of 1841, by taking an overdose of laudanum. A cryptic suicide note was found in his pocket that some interpreted as a confession, but the note could also be read as simply a statement of grief, an unwillingness to go on living after Mary’s death. Indeed, Payne’s friends claimed he had been inconsolable after the murder, and were not terribly surprised that he would take such drastic action.

Who Really Killed Mary Rogers?

It was clear that someone had murdered the girl, but the mystery of who had done it was becoming murkier. In Poe’s story, the killer is thought to be a naval officer, perhaps the fictional counterpart to Mary’s real-life fellow boarder, sailor William Kiekuck, who was questioned about the crime but had a solid alibi. There was also speculation that Mary had been set upon by a gang; initial autopsy reports stated that Mary had been “violated by more than two or three persons,” though later investigation suggested otherwise.

In a recent article in Skeptical Inquirer, Joe Nickell analyzed the many books and articles written about the unsolved murder, and also went back to revisit contemporary news stories and police reports. His conclusion, also reached by other scholars, was that Mary was likely raped and killed by a single assailant, an unidentified “swarthy” man who a few witnesses saw walking with her shortly before her disappearance.

She was raped and then strangled with a piece of lace trim; her unknown murderer then tore a strip from her petticoat and used it to fashion a sort of sling which he used to drag the body to the river (this fact alone casts doubt on the gang-rape theory, as a group of men could have easily carried the body). Whoever he was, the man who killed Mary Rogers evidently got away with his crime. Mary herself lives on in the pages of Poe’s masterful fiction.

Source:

Nickell, Joe. “Historical Whodunit: Spiritualists, Poe, and the Real ‘Marie Rogêt'”. Skeptical Inquirer July/August 2010: 45-49.