Committal
Constance Kent was prosecuted for the murder five years later, in 1865. She made a statement confessing her guilt to a Anglo-Catholic clergyman, the Rev. Arthur Wagner, and she 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, the fact of the matter being that the prisoner was not defending the charge.
The substance of the confession was that she had waited until the family and servants were asleep, had gone down to the drawing-room and opened the shutters and window, had then taken the child from his room wrapped in a blanket that she had taken from between sheet and counterpane in his cot (leaving both these undisturbed or readjusted), left the house and killed him in the privy with a razor stolen from her father. Her movements before the killing had been conducted with the child in her arms. It had been necessary to hide matches in the privy beforehand for a light to see by during the act of murder. The murder was not a spontaneous act, it seems, but one of revenge - and it was even suggested that Constance had, at certain times, been mentally unbalanced.
There was much speculation at the time that Constance Kent's confession was false. Many supposed that her father Samuel Savill (or Saville) Kent, a known adulterer, was having an affair with the toddler's nursemaid, and in a fit of rage, murdered the child after coitus interruptus. It fitted a pattern with the senior Kent, who had romanced the family nanny Mary Drewe Pratt while his first wife Mary Ann Kent née Windus (Constance's mother) was dying, and subsequently married Mary Drewe Pratt (who was Francis' mother). Many were suspicious of Mr. Kent from the start, including the novelist Charles Dickens.
In her 2008 book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House, however, author Kate Summerscale comes to the conclusion that if Constance Kent's confession was indeed false and merely an act to shield another person, it was not for the benefit of her father but for the benefit of her brother, William Saville-Kent, with whom she shared a very close brother-sister relationship which was even deepened by the circumstances that her father Samuel Savill Kent turned his paternal attentions away from the children from his first marriage to Mary Ann Windus to the children he had with his second wife Mary Drewe Pratt. William Saville-Kent was indeed suspected during the investigations, but never charged. Summerscale states that if Saville-Kent wasn't the culprit solely responsible for Francis Saville Kent's death, he was at least an accomplice to Constance Kent.
Constance Kent never recanted her confession, neither after her father's nor her brother's death. She also kept her silence about the motive for the murder. In all of her statements she emphasized and insisted that she bore no hatred nor jealousy towards her murdered half-brother. As a result of her research, Summerscale comes to the conclusion that the murder of Francis Saville Kent was - no matter whether it was committed by Constance Kent or William Saville-Kent either alone or by both of them - an act of revenge to Samuel Saville Kent for turning his attention to the children of his second marriage, of whom Francis Saville Kent was his reported favourite.
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