The Road Hill House Murder

A locked country house, a missing nightdress, and the detective nobody believed.

On a summer morning in 1860 the household at Road Hill House woke to find three-year-old Saville Kent missing from his cot. He was found dead in an outdoor privy in the grounds. The house had been locked up for the night. A drawing-room window was found open, but it had been opened from the inside. Whoever had taken him, it seemed, belonged to the house.

The puzzle

That left a small circle of suspects: Saville's father Samuel, his second wife, the children of both marriages, a nursemaid and the servants. The local police floundered, and Scotland Yard sent one of its first detectives, Inspector Jonathan Whicher.

Whicher fixed on the boy's sixteen-year-old half-sister, Constance. His reasoning turned on laundry: one of Constance's nightdresses had gone missing from the wash, and Whicher believed she had disposed of it because it was stained.

What happened next

Magistrates thought the evidence far too thin and released Constance. The press and public turned on Whicher for accusing a young lady of good family on the strength of a nightdress, and his reputation never fully recovered.

Five years later Constance Kent, by then living in a religious community in Brighton, confessed. She pleaded guilty, and her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She served twenty years, was released in 1885, and emigrated to Australia, where she worked as a nurse under a new name. She died in 1944, aged 100. Some writers have since wondered whether her confession told the whole story, or whether she was protecting someone.

Why it still fascinates

The case gave the Victorian public its first good look at a professional detective, and it fed straight into fiction: Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, with its missing nightgown and its methodical Sergeant Cuff, is often read as a reply to it.