The Invention of Murder (52 page)

Unlike Harriet Parker, she did have competent legal counsel. Her barrister demonstrated that the doctors, so certain in their postmortem diagnosis, had never seen a fractured skull, nor a skull kicked by a horse, nor even a skull wounded by a poker or flat-iron. He also forced them to admit to knowledge of cases where the most extraordinary head wounds had not disabled their victims, who had walked and talked long after a supposedly fatal blow. Finally, he reminded the jury that her husband was Mrs Brown’s sole source of income: with his death she was completely impoverished. In fact, he did his job so well that, in an age of rapidly achieved verdicts, the jury took a notably prolonged three hours to reach theirs. But they still found Elizabeth Martha Brown guilty. She probably would have done better had she used as a defence her confession from gaol. She said Brown had come home drunk and vicious; he had hit her, then reached for a horsewhip and started to lash her with it, threatening to ‘knock your brains out through the window’. She grabbed at the hatchet she had been using to break up the coal, and struck out. ‘I had never struck him before, after all his ill-treatment, but when he hit me so hard. I was almost out of my senses and hardly knew what I was doing.’

Mrs Brown was unfortunate in her timing. Attitudes to male brutality were changing, and had she committed her murder a decade later, she would almost certainly have been acquitted. Previously, male violence towards women had been considered a private matter, but by 1846,
The Times
noted with disapproval a case where a man found his wife drinking and hit her with a brick, killing her, to be sentenced to only three months’ hard labour. The
Examiner
agreed, highlighting the following year a sentence that suggested it was ‘one of the marital rights to kick and beat a wife to death’. The
Daily News
berated the courts for continuing to believe that wife-murder was ‘at the best, justifiable homicide, at the worst, manslaughter’. While the courts did not yet reflect public opinion, the newspapers do show less acceptance of private violence.

These were all wife-murders. The commentary on husband-murders reflected much more harshly on the women, but did not necessarily reflect reality. From the 1840s to the 1890s, the number of women charged with murdering their husbands dropped from twenty per decade to seven, while the number of men charged with murdering their wives rose from seventy-seven to 158. Only seventeen women were executed for husband-murder in the sixty years from 1840, and five of those were poison-panic cases. Mrs Brown was unlucky in being found guilty: the conviction rate for husband-murder was only 46 per cent. She was even unluckier in being executed: of the women sentenced to death for murder after 1843, only 13 per cent were hanged.
*
Mrs Brown was one of only twenty-four women throughout the Victorian period to be hanged for killing her husband.

Despite its rarity, contemporaries viewed the story as ordinarily brutal, and it aroused little interest. The
Morning Chronicle
reported a ‘concourse … not very large’ to watch the execution in Dorchester, although the
Bristol Mercury
thought the crowd was ‘large … in spite of the thick, hazy rain which was falling’. Among those watching was a sixteen-year-old apprentice architect who in 1926 still remembered Mrs Brown’s ‘fine figure’. Later he added, ‘I saw – they had put a cloth over the face – how, as the cloth got wet,
her features came through it.
That was extraordinary.’ That apprentice grew up to become the novelist Thomas Hardy, and it has long been suggested that the death of Mrs Brown was transformed, three decades later, into the image presiding over
Tess of the d’Urbervilles,
subtitled ‘A Pure Woman, Faithfully Presented’.
*

By the time Hardy came to write
Tess,
both he and his readers had long been accustomed to executions taking place behind prison walls. The heroine of the novel is therefore executed offstage, unlike Mrs Brown, and Hardy used the watchers’ response to produce the effect that was generated by Mrs Brown on Hardy himself that dank day in 1856:

*&*&*&

The murdered Francis Savile Kent was only a bit younger than little Robert Blake, who had been smothered by his father’s common-law wife in a back street. No one wrote about Robert Blake, but when ‘a child is found mysteriously dead in the bosom of a respectable family’, as
Blackwood’s
noted, people paid attention, and hordes descended on the quiet village of Road on the Somerset/Wiltshire border.
†
As Mrs Braddon wrote, a murder ‘uncommonly cruel, cowardly, and unmanly, and moreover occurring in a respectable rank of life’ was always bound to create interest. Francis was killed by – well, by whom was a question that convulsed Britain for half a decade.

On the morning of 29 June 1860, Elizabeth Gough, a nursemaid, tapped on the door of her mistress’s bedroom, looking for three-year-old Francis. He was not there, and a wider search was quickly under way: the four children of Samuel Kent’s first wife, the cook and the nursemaid all hunted through the house; Samuel Kent rode off to fetch the Trowbridge policeman; the inhabitants of the nearby cottages searched the grounds. On Kent’s return he was met with the news that the toddler had been found thrust down the outside privy, his throat cut, and with a stab wound in his chest. Kent, a sub-inspector of factories for the west of England, took charge. He told the police which areas they might and might not search – not in the house, for example, for ‘the murderer would not be found there’. He pushed them towards the locals, who resented, he said, his limiting their fishing rights, and to ‘former nursemaids’ who might have wanted to take revenge. He even suggested that old melodrama staple, the gypsies.
*

It is not clear what revenge he thought the nursemaids might feel owing to them, but Samuel Savile Kent had left some vengeful feelings behind as he passed through life. The son of a carpet manufacturer, he had married the daughter of a City merchant, who gave him two daughters and a son before developing signs of insanity. This slowed him down not a jot, and he fathered another six children on her. By 1852, when she died, of those children that survived, the youngest daughter, Constance, was eight. The family moved house, and the nursemaid, Mary Pratt, the daughter of a greengrocer, moved too – into Kent’s bed, shortly to emerge as the second Mrs Kent. Possibly because of this, the family had a bad reputation: the Board of Factory Commissioners had earlier questioned Kent about his first wife’s seclusion; it was also whispered that the family could not keep servants – a hundred were said to have passed through the house in only four years. There was no question that the Kents were living well beyond their means. Kent earned less than £400 as a factory inspector; he may have had another £300 or £400 in private income; and while £700–800 a year would place him among the middle of the prosperous middle classes, his large house and several servants required much more. Then there was the treatment of his first wife’s children: neighbours spoke openly of their stepmother’s harshness towards them. Three years previously Constance and her brother William had run away from home; Constance – a true scandal this – had cut her hair short and
dressed as a boy.

The police decided right away that the murder had been committed by one of the household. Mrs Kent was very advanced in pregnancy, and would not have been able to carry the toddler from his nursery, through the house, and outside to the privy; her two other children were too young. That left as suspects Mr Kent, the four children of the first marriage, the nursemaid, the cook and the housemaid. The nursemaid was the focus of police attention: she slept in the same room as the child, but claimed to have heard nothing during the night; she also said that when she woke and saw he was gone, she assumed he had been taken by Mrs Kent, even though she had never done such a thing before. The sixteen-year-old Constance Kent was also an object of suspicion: she resented the second family, her nightgown had gone missing on the night of the murder, and a bloody shift had been found jammed in the scullery boiler. This second, or first, shift was passed around like a parcel in a children’s game. It was found in the first place only because, in the excitement of the morning, the housemaid had forgotten to light the boiler. When the local police saw the bloody garment, they appear to have assumed that it was stained with menstrual blood, and, embarrassed, ignored it. When Miss Kent’s nightgown was discovered to be missing, attention returned to the shift. Kent arranged for the police to stake out the kitchen overnight (although not, for unexplained reasons, the scullery where the shift had actually been found), to ambush anyone who came to retrieve it. However, when Kent went to bed he quietly locked them in, with no access to the scullery or the rest of the house. By the time they were released in the morning, the shift had vanished, and between the embarrassment of menstrual blood and the embarrassment of being locked in by a suspect, the shift was never mentioned when twelve days after the crime a Scotland Yard detective arrived.

The Wiltshire magistrates had requested help a week after the crime, but ‘Now that the County Police is established, the assistance of London officers is seldom resorted to,’ the Home Office replied. The inquest was, at best, incompetent. The coroner refused to permit a routine adjournment for police investigation; he prevented the doctor who performed the post-mortem from describing the wounds, so no cause of death could be recorded. The Kent family was only questioned at the jury’s insistence – the coroner thought it unseemly to imply suspicion of such a respectable family. He also failed to present the alternatives of manslaughter or murder to the jury, nor did he give them the opportunity to state their own verdict, but simply told them to countersign a form he had himself filled out. The Home Secretary changed his mind and arranged for Scotland Yard to step in.

Inspector Jonathan Whicher of Scotland Yard appeared before the magistrates primed by Samuel Kent and his friends with stories of Miss Kent’s eccentricities, including an episode three years earlier, when she was thirteen, and had secretly read the
Times
reports on the shocking Miss Madeleine Smith. Then there was the missing nightgown; Whicher thought it had been worn by Miss Kent when she killed her half-brother, and later destroyed because it was covered in blood. He asked the magistrates to have her arrested, and somewhat dubiously they agreed, to the horror of the middle-class world – arrest the daughter of a middle-class house purely on suspicion? Whicher appears to have assumed that Miss Kent, once arrested, would confess, but she simply sat mute. The magistrates’ hearing the following week was as blatantly slanted to favour the Kents as the inquest had been: the family was not required to give evidence, or even to attend the hearing; jurymen known to be hostile to the Kents were removed; the foreman was a friend of Samuel Kent, who said it was his ‘duty to spare the feelings of the family as far as possible’. The evidence presented to suggest Miss Kent’s guilt was only her jealousy of her father’s second family and the missing nightdress, coupled with her earlier attempt to run away from home. Her very able solicitor then highlighted her mother’s insanity, before presenting Whicher to the magistrates as a presumptuous working-class meddler who was mixing with decent middle-class families in a case beyond his understanding. Even so, the magistrates were half-persuaded by the prosecution’s case, and released Miss Kent only on recognizance of £200.

Most of the newspapers crowed that Miss Kent had been found innocent, overlooking the fact that this was a preliminary hearing, not a trial. Whicher returned to London with his reputation destroyed:
Punch
later mocked him as Inspector Watcher of the Defective Force. That this was a class response cannot be in doubt. After Miss Kent was released, the nursemaid Elizabeth Gough was in turn arrested, and soon also released for lack of evidence. While
The Times
had berated Whicher for his ‘indecent’ mentions of Miss Kent’s nightgown, the same paper speculated at length on a possible solution to the crime revolving around the nursemaid and an unknown lover being discovered in bed by the child, whom they accidentally smothered in an attempt to prevent him waking the house. While this is as plausible a scenario as any, what is striking is the newspaper comfortably imagining this scene of illicit sex involving a working-class woman, while ferociously rejecting the word ‘nightdress’ in connection with a middle-class girl.
*

The working classes were no happier with the police’s work than their middle-class counterparts. As the Kent case continued unsolved, another murder, in London, hit the headlines. Mrs Emsley, the prosperous widow of a local builder (and, it was suggested, a ruthless small-scale slum landlady in her own right) was found dead at home, her head beaten in. On the testimony of one George (sometimes James) Mullins, a shoemaker named Emms, who collected rents for Mrs Emsley, had his shed searched, and items identified as coming from her house were found. But very swiftly the evidence was turned on its head. Emms was shown to be a man of unimpeachable character, while Mullins had worked undercover for the police spying on suspected members of an Irish secret society, using forged documents and attending clandestine political gatherings. He had also, it was discovered, served a sentence for robbery. He was ultimately convicted of the murder himself, and of planting the evidence in order to claim the reward. The general opinion was that such behaviour was all that could be expected of a police spy. Andrew Forrester’s
Female Detective
used this episode as a curious little prologue to another story, about a kidnapped child. Here ‘a lady of somewhat solitary and reserved life’ is found brutally murdered, and the police receive information that the goods stolen from her home are to be found in a shed; they are commended for making ‘a wonderful series of fortunate guesses and industrious inquiries’ – even at this stage, ‘fortunate guesses’ are a praiseworthy part of detective work.