The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (23 page)

On 15 August, the day before Youngman's trial, Whicher was denounced in Parliament. Sir George Bowyer, the leading Roman Catholic spokesman in the Commons, complained about the quality of Britain's police inspectors, using Whicher as his example. 'The recent investigation with regard to the Road murder afforded striking proof of the unfitness of some of the present officers,' he said. 'An inspector named Whicher was sent down to inquire into the matter. Upon the slightest possible grounds, merely because one of her nightgowns happened to be missing, that officer arrested a young lady who lived in the house where the murder was committed, and assured the magistrates that he would be prepared in a few days to produce evidence which would bring home the murder to her.' He accused Whicher of acting 'in a most objectionable manner. After all his boasting of the evidence he could produce, the young lady was discharged by the magistrates.' Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the Home Secretary, mildly defended the detective, arguing that 'the officer was justified in the course he adopted'.

The national mood, though, was with Bowyer. 'We can unhesitatingly state the public feeling,' claimed the
Frome Times.
'An officer who can play at hap-hazard with such an awful charge as that of wilful murder, and can promise that which he must have known he could not perform, cannot expect to be looked on otherwise than with distrust.' 'The Whicher theory has failed to throw any light whatever upon the thick darkness of this horrible mystery,' said the
Newcastle Daily Chronicle.
'A new clue must be discovered before justice can thread the mazes of the labyrinth of Road.' The
Morning Star
was dismissive of the 'frivolous, gossiping, and utterly vapid school-girl testimony' upon which Whicher had relied.

The
Bath Chronicle
criticised 'the slender speculations which were loosely strung together and adduced as evidence . . . the experiment made, has been a fearfully cruel one'. In an essay in the
Cornhill Magazine,
the distinguished lawyer Sir James Fitzjames Stephen argued that the cost of trying to solve a murder - the damage wrought by the exposure, the police intrusion - was sometimes too high: 'The circumstances of the Road murder are extremely curious, because they happen to afford an illustration of the amount of this price so exact that had it been committed on purpose it could hardly have been better arranged.' Since no other culprit could be found, Whicher was blamed for the muddle and mystery of Road. The 'Disciple of Edgar Allan Poe' played on the sinister associations of his name when he noted in his pamphlet that 'Constance is recognised as innocent, though metropolitan
witchery
once jeopardised her.'

One of the most damaging charges laid against Jack Whicher was that he was driven by greed. The early detectives were often presented as glamorous rogues, only a step away from the villains they sought. The French felon-turned-detective Eugene Vidocq, whose heavily fictionalised memoirs were translated into English in 1828 and dramatised for the London stage in 1852, had breezily swapped villainy for police work when it served his financial interests.

The rewards that detectives could earn were descendants of the eighteenth-century 'blood money' paid to thief-takers or informants. In August 1860 the
Western Daily Press
scornfully alluded to Whicher's 'zeal sharpened by the offer of a handsome reward'. A letter from 'Justice' in the
Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette
compared Whicher to Jack Ketch, a notoriously clumsy seventeenth-century hangman who inflicted great suffering on his victims: Whicher was 'utterly irresponsible', wrote 'Justice', 'tempted with the vision of PS200 reward, getting a young lady of 15 incarcerated in a common gaol for a week'. Like many correspondents, 'Justice' showed distaste for the working-class fellow who had meddled in middle-class affairs. The detectives were greedy and inept because they were not gentlemen. Perhaps Whicher was so vehemently condemned because he was doing in fact what the legions of new newspaper readers were doing in the mind's eye - peeping and prying, goggling and wondering at the sins and sufferings of others. The Victorians saw in the detective a picture of themselves, and in collective self-revulsion they cast him out.

A few voices were raised in Whicher's defence. The ever-loyal
Somerset and Wilts Journal
criticised Edlin's 'ingenious bamboozling', and the 'cunning trick' whereby he had distorted the theory about the nightgown. The
Daily Telegraph
agreed: 'We cannot concur with Mr Edlin in his fervid denunciations of the cruelty of arresting this young lady . . . To believe the
ad captandum
reasoning of this young lady's advocate, the important point of her garment not being forthcoming has been satisfactorily cleared up; but the contrary would seem to be the case. Where is the nightgown? . . .
Far different would it have been if a bedgown stained with blood had been discovered.
Some of our readers may remember the awful circumstance of the gory sheet in the story of Beatrice Cenci. That one link would complete a chain of evidence that would speedily change into a halter of hemp.' Beatrice Cenci was a sixteenth-century Roman noblewoman executed for killing her father; in the nineteenth century she had become something of a romantic heroine, the beautiful avenger of a violent, incestuous bully. A bloody bedsheet provided proof of her guilt. Shelley cast Beatrice as an impassioned rebel in his verse drama
The Cenci
(1819). A character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's
The Marble Faun
(1860) describes her as 'a fallen angel, fallen and yet sinless'.

The
Northern Daily Express
remarked that 'The nightdress of Constance Kent, with plain frills - the wearer not having reached the years of maturity and lace - bids fair to become as famous as the ruffs of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespere, the snuff-coloured suit of Dr Johnson, Cowper's nightcap as painted by Romney, or the striped waistcoat of Burns.'

Henry Ludlow, the chairman of the Wiltshire magistrates, continued to lend Whicher his support. 'Mr Inspector Whicher's conduct in regard to the Road Murder has been much blamed,' he wrote in a letter to Mayne. 'Mr Ludlow feels much pleasure in bearing testimony to his good judgment and ability in the case. I fully agree with Mr Whicher as to the perpetrator of that most mysterious murder . . . he was perfectly justified in acting as he did.' Perhaps Ludlow felt guilty for the part he had played in encouraging Whicher to arrest Constance. All the blame for the case had attached to the detective.

'I beg further to report,' began Whicher on Monday, 30 July, 'for the information of Sir R. Mayne in reference to the murder of "Francis Saville Kent" at Road Wilts on the night of the 29th June that the re-examination of "Constance Kent" took place at the Temperance Hall Road on Friday Last . . .'

Over sixteen pages, in a forward-thrusting hand, Whicher argued his case. He irritably discounted the various rival theories advanced by the letter-writers and the journalists. He expressed his frustrations with the local police investigation: the evidence against Constance 'would have been far more conclusive', he said, 'if the Police had ascertained as soon as they arrived,
how many night gowns she ought to have
had in her possession'. If Foley had only 'taken
the hint given
' by Parsons as to the nightdress on Constance's bed appearing very clean, and had 'interrogated her at once
as to how many
she had in her possession I believe the blood stained bed gown would have been
missed at once and possibly found
'. Constance's lawyer, Whicher complained, had 'said that the mystery respecting the missing night dress
had been cleared up,
but such is not the case, as one of her three which she brought home from school
is still missing
and I have possession for the present of the remaining two'. He suspected that a confession would come soon but 'would no doubt be made to some of the family, and then possibly not made known'.

Whicher signed but did not send the document. Shortly afterwards he scratched out his signature and continued: 'I beg further to report . . .' and wrote two more pages, expanding and clarifying his findings. And nine days after that, still unable to let the matter rest, he resumed: 'I beg to add the following remarks and explanations . . .' The report that he submitted to Mayne on 8 August - twenty-three pages in total - was strewn with inky underlinings, corrections, adjustments, insertions, asterisks, double asterisks and crossings-out.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A GENERAL PUTTING OF THIS AND THAT
TOGETHER BY THE WRONG END

August-October 1860

In early August, with the Home Secretary's permission, the Wiltshire police exhumed Saville Kent's body. They said they hoped to find his sister's nightdress hidden inside the coffin. It was as if the police, in their frustration, could do no more than return to where they began. The officers dug up and unscrewed the box, but were faced only with Saville's corpse in its death robes. The foul gases that emanated from the coffin were so powerful that Superintendent Wolfe fell ill, and did not recover for several days.

The constables watched Road Hill House around the clock. They yet again examined the sewer that ran from the house to the river. Their chiefs briefed the local press on their tireless efforts: 'The assertion that the local police did not render Mr Whicher that assistance they should have done in investigating the circumstances of this mysterious case, is totally unfounded,' reported the
Bath Chronicle,
'they having furnished him with all the information they had previously obtained, in addition to accompanying him on every occasion when necessary. There is no doubt that the late hasty steps taken by Inspector Whicher have, in a very great measure, impeded, if not increased, the difficulty which the County Police have to contend with in pursuing their enquiries.'

The police continued to receive letters from the public. A man in Queenstown, Ireland, informed them that Constance Kent had committed the murder; if they would send him the fare, he added, he would bring the missing nightdress to them. They turned down the offer.

At Wolverton railway station, Buckinghamshire, on Friday, 10 August - the day after Saville Kent would have turned four - a stumpy man with a round, red face approached Sergeant Roper of the North-Western Railway Police and confessed to the murder: 'It was I did it.' The man claimed to be a London bricklayer who had been promised a sovereign (about PS1) if he killed the boy. He refused to identify the person who had hired him, or to give his own name - he said he did not want his mother to know where he was. He had given himself up, he said, because he could picture the murdered child walking before him wherever he went. He had been about to lay his head on the track and let a train pass over him, but he had decided to surrender himself instead.

The next morning the police took him by train to Trowbridge. The news of his arrest was sent on by telegraph, and hundreds of people lined the track from Wolverton, via Oxford and Chippenham. At one stop a man put his head into the carriage and asked which was the murderer. The bricklayer shook his clenched, handcuffed fists and confided to the policeman next to him: 'I've a good mind to give him a rattle in the guts.' When they reached Trowbridge police station the magistrates remanded the prisoner until Monday. He had 'a florid complexion', said the
Somerset and Wilts Journal,
'and a large head, singularly flat at the crown. He complained of headache greatly, and refused any food.'

By Monday the bricklayer was protesting his innocence. He supplied an alibi for the night of 29 June - he had been at an inn in Portsmouth, he said, having a boil on his back bathed in sugar-water - and he wrote down his name for the magistrates: John Edmund Gagg. When he was asked what had driven him to confess to a murder he had not committed, he said, 'I confessed because I was hard up, and thought it better if I could be hung. I am sick and tired of my life.' He had a history of falls, carbuncles, fits, 'an overflow of blood to the head', but was apparently sane. The strain of an unsolved murder could tell on a fragile man already under pressure. Like many, Gagg was haunted by the crime. His decision to confess took the ambition of the amateur detective to an extreme: he solved the murder by claiming it as his own.

The magistrates sent a message to Jack Whicher at Scotland Yard, asking him to track down Gagg's wife in London. Whicher notified them that she was 'a most respectable woman living by her own industry, with her mother and children'. Gagg's alibis in Portsmouth proved solid. On Wednesday, 22 August he was discharged, and the magistrates paid his train fare to Paddington.

That week Elizabeth Gough told the Kents that she wished to leave their employ. The
Somerset and Wilts Journal
explained that she had 'been subject to a most disagreeable surveillance by the house-hold'. It was later reported by the Frome journalist Albert Groser in a letter to
The Times
that after Saville's murder the Kents had not let their little girls, Mary Amelia and Eveline, sleep in Gough's room. On Monday, 27 August she left Road Hill House with her father and returned with him to Isleworth, Surrey, to join her mother, her two younger sisters and two younger brothers in the family bakery.

On 29 August the case of the Reverend Bonwell, which Whicher had investigated in 1859, reached its conclusion: the Church of England defrocked Bonwell as punishment for his scandalous affair and his attempt to conceal the birth and death of his child. A week afterwards, on 5 September, more than twenty thousand Londoners gathered to see William Youngman, the Walworth murderer, executed outside Horsemonger Lane gaol. This was the largest gallows crowd since Frederick and Maria Manning had been hanged on the same spot in 1849. On the day of his death Youngman breakfasted on cocoa, bread and butter. Outside, boys played leapfrog beneath the gallows, and the public house facing the 'drop' did a roaring trade. When Young-man fell through the trapdoor, 'quivering and twisting in the air', reported the
News of the World,
'several persons of both sexes, who had been tippling all morning, burst out into unrestrained crying'. Just over a month had passed since the quadruple murder of Youngman's mother, brothers and sweetheart. In the final instalment of
The Woman in White,
on 25 August, Count Fosco's description of England as 'the land of domestic happiness' was unmistakably ironic.