Constance Kent
| Constance Kent | |
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Contemporary portrait of Constance Kent
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| Born |
Constance Emily Kent 5 February 1844 Sidmouth, Devon, England |
| Died | 10 April 1944 (aged 100) Strathfield, New South Wales, Australia |
| Other names | Ruth Emilie Kaye |
Constance Emily Kent (6 February 1844 – 10 April 1944) was an English woman who confessed to a notorious child murder that took place when she was 16 years old. The Constance Kent case in 1865 raised a series of questions about priest–penitent privilege in England. In later life Kent changed her name to Ruth Emilie Kaye.
She was born in Sidmouth, Devon in 1844, the daughter of Mary Ann Kent (1808–1852) and Samuel Saville Kent (1801–1872), an Inspector of Factories for the Home Office.
Sometime during the night of 29 June and the morning of 30 June 1860, Francis "Saville" Kent, almost four years old, disappeared from his room in his father, Samuel Kent's house called the Road Hill House, in the village of Rode (spelled "Road" at the time), then in Wiltshire. His body was found in the vault of an outhouse (a privy) on the property. The child, still dressed in his nightshirt and wrapped in a blanket, had knife wounds on his chest and hands, and his throat was slashed so deeply that the body was almost decapitated. The boy's nursemaid, Elizabeth Gough, was initially arrested.
Elizabeth was released when the suspicions of Detective Inspector Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard moved to the boy's 16-year-old half-sister, Constance. She was arrested on 16 July but released without trial owing to public opinion against the accusations of a working class detective against a young lady of breeding. This difference in class was used as subplot by Wilkie Collins in his detective novel The Moonstone (1868).
After the investigation collapsed, the Kent family moved to Wrexham in the north of Wales and sent Constance to a finishing school in Dinan, France.
Constance Kent was prosecuted for the murder five years later, in 1865. She made a statement confessing her guilt to an Anglo-Catholic clergyman, the Rev. Arthur Wagner, and expressed to him her resolution to give herself up to justice. He assisted her in carrying out this resolution, and he gave evidence of this statement before the magistrates. But he prefaced his evidence by a declaration that he must withhold any further information on the ground that it had been received under the seal of "sacramental confession". He was but lightly pressed by the magistrates, as the prisoner was not contesting the charge.
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