Murder at Road Hill House: The Murder That Shook Victorian England
When Mrs. Kent learned of the grisly murder of her three year old son, she had only one thing to say. “Someone in the house has done it”
What would follow would be the biggest whodunit of the 19th century. The Kent family would have their dirty laundry hung out to dry as London’s top detective investigated them all for the murder of Saville Kent.
It was early morning when William Nutt was searching the grounds at Road Hill House, in Wiltshire, England. a beautiful estate owned by the kent family. He scoured the rose bushes, scraping up his forearms while desperately hunting for their missing son, and he had a bad feeling. Just a moment later William walked up to the servants outhouse and peered into the small slotted window. He could just faintly make out something dark and glistening on the ground. His heart sank when he realized what it was and he screamed for someone to come help him. There was blood on the outhouse floor.
Welcome to heart starts pounding, a podcast of terrifying tales. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore.
Be sure to follow the podcast on instagram @ heartstartspounding and rate and review wherever you listen. You can also support the podcast on patreon which is linked in the show description or make a one time donation on buy me a coffee, also linked. We release episodes every Thursday, though we are taking April off to premiere a new, fiction podcast called The Timekeeper that we’ll be releasing weekly in April. It stars Judah Lewis, Chandler Kinney, and Arjun Athalye, and it’s a really fun ride. We’ll be back on a weekly schedule in May.
On June 29th, 1860, The Kent family would be thrown into the spotlight when their family tragedy hit the tabloids. This is a lesser known case, yet it’s incredibly important in the history of crime solving.
This story is about hanging out the dirty laundry of a picture perfect family, clothespinned around a tale of murder. though this story has many twists and turns, it doesn’t have a firm conclusion. And now, over 160 years later, we’re still left with the question. Who killed Saville Kent?
At 4am on Friday, June 29th, 1860, Elizabeth Gogh awoke inside the Kent estate. She was the nanny to the Kent Family
Road Hill House was a beautiful, three story mansion in Wiltshire England. Mr. Kent, the father was a well off factory inspector, tasked with making sure local factories in the area were abiding by child labor laws.
The nanny shared a bedroom with the two youngest Kent children and when she awoke before the sun rose, she noticed that three year old Saville was not in his bed.
She assumed that he got up in the night and went to his mother, so she fell back asleep and reawoke about three hours later.
At Around 7:15, Elizabeth was out of bed and dressed, and she went to Mr and Mrs. Kent’s bedroom to ask for Saville so she could get him ready.
He’s in his bed, replied Mrs. Kent
No, you came and grabbed him in the night, replied Elizabeth.
Both women assumed the other had Saville. Mrs. Kent shot out of bed, as fast as she could for being in her third trimester. it wasn’t like Saville to not be in his bed or hers. She ran to the other children to see if they had seen Saville. None of them had. So she ran to the house staff who were starting to prep for the day, had they seen Saville? No,the cooks in the kitchen, the maids collecting laundry, and the gardners in the yard all hadn’t. But some of them did make an interesting observation. When they had arrived at the house that morning, they all found it strange that a window on the first floor in the front of the house was wide open.
The family went into full panic, and word quickly spread into town that the Kent’s were looking for the boy.
Mr. Kent left the family to take a horse an hour away and get a police officer. As he left, he could see a few people from the local community coming towards his house to help look for the boy. He looked at each of them suspiciously. it was no secret that Mr. Kent had enemies in town, and he was already going through the laundry list in his head of who could have taken his boy.
The women of the family were all inside checking every corner of the house, while the boys as well as the gardeners searched the bushes. Saville’s mother thought that he had maybe wandered off, but the gaping window in the front of the house felt like an omen. It was mid
morning when William Nutt, a local man who came over to help search, made his initial discovery of the blood in the outhouse. Mr, Kent hadn’t even made it back with a police officer yet.
A small group gathered to help William including the gardener's mother and a local priest. afraid of what he might find, he slowly opened the door of the outhouse and crept in, careful to not disturb the two tablespoons of blood he calculated were on the floor. Earlier, he had mentioned that he thought they might find the boy dead, and now he feared he was right.
It was dark inside of the outhouse. He opened the toilet lid and peered down, with only candlelight to help him look deep down the hole. And there, wrapped in a blood soaked blanket, was poor little Saville.
It’s hard to describe deaths, especially when they happen to children. But the way Saville died is an important clue in this story. You have to remember that in 1860, they didn’t have DNA, blood types, even fingerprints, so as I’m telling you clues, start trying to piece them together in your own head, because you’ll have as much information as the cops did at the time.
When Saville was pulled from the hole, William was able to get a better look at the boys condition. The first, most obvious wound was a long, deep cut across the boys neck going from right to left. But that wasn’t the only wound. Saville also had a stab wound on his rib cage that hadn’t produced much blood. And on top of all that, the sides of his mouth were black, suggesting that he was strangled or smothered as well.
Saville was brought out from the hole and his family was notified. Mrs. Kent was nearly inconsolable but his father was quiet and reserved, appearing to be more agitated than sad at times. Mr. Kent swore he'd do whatever it took to find the person who murdered his youngest son, and wrote a letter for a proper detective to be assigned to his case.
Part of Mr. Kent’s agitation may have been knowing that his family was about to be thrust into the spotlight. Local and regional tabloids ate stories like this up, and true crime news was entertainment for communities even back in the 19th century. People loved to uncover the dark stains on family legacies that lead members to commit heinous crimes, it was reality TV to them. The Kent’s were a house of cards. On the outside, they were a perfect, beautiful nuclear family, helmed by a successful businessman who remarried after the tragic passing of his first wife. But the Kent’s had skeletons in their closet, and Samuel knew they were at risk of spilling out. He wanted the crime to be solved as quickly and as quietly as possible for the privacy of his family.
But, little did Samuel know, that was going to be much harder to do than anyone anticipated, and that at certain points in the investigation HIS name would be on the suspect list.
But first, Let’s take a look at some of the clues surrounding that night and see what the police had to work with at the time.
So, according to the nanny Elizabeth Gogh, when she woke up to see Saville gone, she noticed the sheets on his bed were put back in place and smoothed out. She claims she never heard anyone enter the room, but from this we can assume someone came to get Saville out of bed, rather than Saville wandering downstairs and being met by an intruder.
The family had also not been robbed. The only crime that was committed that night was the murder of Saville. Why would someone just target a three year old boy?
Found in the outhouse along with Saville’s body were two pieces of evidence that would become integral to the investigation. First, there was Savilles blanket, taken from his bed, which he was wrapped in. This piece underscored the fact that he was probably removed from his bed. Investigators immediately started wondering how a toddler could have been taken from his bed without making a sound. Perhaps, he knew the person coming to collect him? However, I would also argue here that sometimes toddlers are so out of it when they’re asleep you can move them pretty far before they know what's happening.
Next there was a piece of newspaper with some blood on it by the door to the outhouse. It was from The Times, a paper that the Kents received weekly. It had two thick streaks of blood on it, as if someone had used it to wipe off the murder weapon. Because it was a paper delivered to the Kents, investigators filed that under evidence that the murder may have been orchestrated from within the kent residence. The kitchen had been checked though, no knives were missing when staff had gotten there in the morning, and none of the knives had any blood on them.
Then, and probably strangest of all, there was the piece of clothing found inside the hole of the outhouse with Saville. When William Nutt pulled the boy from the hole he noticed something that looked like a sock down at the bottom. As he fished it out, he realized it was a cushion insert for a woman’s corset, kind of like a bra. It had been unstitched from a corset and for some reason, dropped into the hole.
Jack Whicher was the detective assigned to this case. he had a penchant for closing cases quickly and had been assigned to some of the highest profile cases surrounding London. He made an interesting observation upon arriving to Road Hill House.
The only evidence that the killer had come from the outside was the window that was propped open, but this struck Detective Whicher as strange right away. That window opened from the inside, so it would be easy for someone to pop it open for fresh air, or as a diversion. The window was also on the complete opposite side of the house from the outhouse, so it wasn’t likely that someone snatched Seville and went out the front. On top of all that was the fact that the window opened into a room that had a door locked from the other side. So the intruder could have come inside through the window, but would have been completely locked inside the parlor.
Upon hearing the news of what was found near Saville’s body, Mrs. Kent only had one thing to say. “ Someone in the house has done it.” And at that point, Detective Whicher believed her.
The detective launched an official investigation into the kent estate residents to figure out who, of everyone in the house, the murderer was.
Let’s get into the suspects.
For Detective Whicher the First order of business in figuring out who the prime suspect was going to be, was figuring out who fit into the corset insert.
When the insert was pulled from the outhouse, it was covered in excrement and blood, so first it was washed thoroughly. Today, this crucial piece of evidence would have been sent in for blood and DNA analysis, but at the time, they were solving this like cinderella’s missing shoe. Except instead of a shoe, it was a bra.
The thing with bras is that some sizes fit a lot of people, and a lot of us own bras that dont even fit correctly. So a murder investigation that hinged on the perfect fit of a bra was going to be an uphill battle.
However, there was one woman who the bra seemed to fit best. Elizabeth Gogh, Savilles nanny.
That’s ridiculous, she exclaimed. This bra would fit half the county. But Detective Whicher wasn’t looking for anyone else in the county. They were looking for someone in the house. And Elizabeth fit the profile, or at least, the only profile they had.
Detective Whicher also felt that there were a few parts of Elizabeth’s story that weren’t adding up, like how did Elizabeth not hear an intruder come into the room, and why did she assume that Mrs. Kent came and got Seville when she was 7 months pregnant and couldn’t carry the boy?
Here’s a fun fact about detectives. They were actually made up in books before they were real jobs. Charles dickens had written about savant police officers that were specialized in solving homicides, and police thought it was such a good idea that they created the job. But, detectives in books were fictional superheroes that real cops could not live up to. So they would try to solve cases in reverse, and build investigations around theories. Detectives would then look for evidence that fit their theory, instead of holistically putting the pieces of an investigation, and that’s what they started doing with Elizabeth.
This is the theory detective whicher had for the murder.
Elizabeth and a secret lover were having a tryst in the night, when Saville woke to see them. Saville had a reputation for being a tattle tale. And it was believed that when he would wake early in the morning, he would go to his mothers room and gossip with her about everything everyone in the house was doing. It was no mystery to any of the other children that Saville was Mrs. Kent’s favorite child.
So to stop him from tattling to his mother, Elizabeth and her lover smothered the boy, accidentally or purposefully strangling him. And to confuse investigators, they stabbed him and slit his throat.
But who was Elizabeth’s lover? A gardener, a local man? He couldn’t remain anonymous because it could be integral to the investigation. Well, some of the staff had an opinion on who it was. Someone pulled Whicher aside and confessed they had a feeling they knew who Elizabeth’s lover was. Mr. Kent
What lead them to believe Mr. Kent and Elizabeth were engaged in a secret romance, you might ask? Well, the Kent’s had a nanny before Elizabeth, and after Samuels first wife died, he married her.
Oh yea, Saville’s mother, the current Mrs. Kent. She was the nanny
Detective Whicher learned that The first Mrs. Kent had passed away from an illness 8 years prior to Saville’s murder, while the young and spry nanny, who was 12 years her junior, helped out around the house. Less than a year after her passing, the nanny and Mr. Kent were wed. Mr. Kent would claim it had to do with how the nanny already knew and loved his children, however, a former aid had said she saw Mr. Kent sneak into her room while the first mrs. Kent was still alive. None of his children were fans of this marriage, and after they wed, he and the new Mrs. Kent had three more children, Saville being one of them.
Constance, Mr. Kent and the first Mrs. Kents third daughter, was devastated by the marriage. She ran away with her brother William after the wedding. The two children had been incredibly close with her mother, and Constance felt like she didn’t have time to mourn before another woman was telling her what to do.
So, Mr. Kent becomes a suspect because he was maybe having another affair with a nanny that he didn’t want discovered, as his track record would suggest. But there was also other suspicious behavior from Mr. Kent that the police were aware of.
Mr. Kent was an incredibly private person, but he was taking that to an extreme during the investigation. The night after Savilles death, two police officers arrived to monitor the estate and make sure if the murderer were an intruder, they didn’t come back. Upon their arrival, Samuel ushered them into the kitchen, where he promptly locked the doors from the outside. The police remained locked in the kitchen for the entire night, unable to search the premise at all. Some believed that this would have been the perfect opportunity for Mr. Kent to discard of any other evidence that it was he or his mistress who murdered Saville.
Mr. Kent also hindered the investigation by not providing the police with necessary documents. He wouldn’t hand over birth certificates, and when asked to provide a blueprint to the house, he scoffed.
Then there was the fact that Mr. Kent traveled an hour away to notify police, when there were other police officers much closer to Road Hill House. Was he using that opportunity to discard of the murder weapon?
Also, he had enemies. And this is a lead that was never fully explored, but I think is important. I have to say this, but he was kind of a NIMBY. A not in my backyard, type. When he purchased Road hill house, he privatized the river that was on his property, a river that many people in the community used both as a food source and for recreational fishing. The neighbors were incredibly upset by this, and it wasn’t uncommon to find people in the community sneaking on to the premise after hours to fish while the Kents were asleep.
And his job, which was to liberate children from factories violating child labor laws. By today’s standards, he was doing amazing work, but at the time, many people relied on their children as a source of income, and to lose that meant throwing families into poverty. Did someone see taking one of his children as retribution for what he was doing to their children?
Whicher thanked the staff for alerting him. The more he spoke with the staff though, the more he realized that Mr. Kent was not kind them, unless he was sleeping with them. Mr. Kent said something during the investigation that I find incredibly interesting, but was never followed up on. He told Detective Whicher that there was a servant who left the house swearing to enact revenge on the family earlier that year. And apparently, the servant said something specific about Saville, because she believed that Saville had told his parents something about her that lead to her firing. Saville’s dad was known for firing staff. He even once had his chef imprisoned over a payment dispute.
But Was Mr. Kent saying this to divert attention away from him and his secret affair? Or was there really a disgruntled staff member that could have enacted their revenge?
At this particular moment, however, Detective Whicher was hyper focused on Elizabeth Gogh, seemingly because of the bra. Elizabeth was hysterical while being questioned, even fainting at one point from crying so hard. She very dramatically proclaimed that she would never love another child again because of how much she loved Saville. Her delicate heart couldn’t bear to go through something like this again.
It was common at the time to really dial in on women’s emotions and use them as evidence. These days, we know that shock and grief look incredibly different on different people, but back then, it was believed that a woman’s emotional state could tell as much as a confession. Elizabeth’s hysteria wasn’t shocking to investigators. It was common for women to dramatically faint while crying, or even throw up. Sometimes it was the best tool a woman had to signal her seriousness of a matter.
And for Elizabeth, it worked. Detective Whicher decided that Elizabeth was too distraught to have killed the child. But, there was a girl in the house who did not seem overly devastated at Savilles disappearance, and her collected and cool concern was reading more like cold blooded and callused. After the nannies exoneration, detective whicher latched on to his next suspect, Constance, the 16 year old daughter of Samuel's first wife.
I think we can say that Constance was being kind of Amanda Knox-y about the whole situation. It doesn’t mean that she did it, but she did seem a little undisturbed about the murder. Like it was more of a hinderance to her other plans.
There was a prevailing thought at the time, that most girls, ages 14-20, wanted to commit murder. The theory was that girls sexual desire and romantic interest doesn’t begin until age 20, and until then, there’s a vacuum inside of young girls, a kind of heartlessness that prevails until romantic interest sets in. During this time, young girls are far more dangerous than young boys and must be handled with caution. A local paper claimed that constance did only what girls her age wished they could do.
What would Constance’s motive have been. For one, she had run away after her fathers marriage to her nanny. She clearly wasn’t a fan of the woman, and would have reason to want to inflict harm on her. Constance had complained to a schoolmate that the new mrs. kent favored her biological children over her step children, and had suggested that Saville was a tattle tale. But other than that, the motive would have been weak.
Detective whicher wanted to dig further into Constance’s psyche, so he sluthed around to learn more about her mothers death. He knew that she had died from an illness, but was there any more to it. Upon his investigation, he learned something quite interesting. Constance’s mother, had died of madness, something that was believed to be inherited by children.
There’s a few theories as to the origin of the first Mrs. Kent’s madness. For one, it first manifested after the birth of her first son, Edward. She would get lost while walking, and sometimes sit in the parlour in a catatonic state and rip pages out of Mr. Kent’s books. Then, she had two more daughters and then 5 miscarriages before Constance. After Constance was born, she started sleeping with a knife under he pillow. The first suggestion was that she had a particularly bad cast of post partum, aggravated by stress and the miscarriages.
But Detective Whicher had seen these symptoms before. Women going mad was not uncommon at the time, but he knew it was sometimes the byproduct of something else. Something that would often hint at a husband’s infidelity. The prevailing theory now is that Mr. Kent may have given his wife syphilis. In advanced stages, Syphilis can cause memory problems, mood changes and still births. Babies can be born with Syphilis, though the symptoms often manifest differently, so Whicher was incorrect in assuming the madness had been inherited by Constance.
Detective Whicher learned that Mr. Kent didn’t want the community to know what was happening to his wife, so he hid her away during the last years of her life, and began an affair with his children’s nanny.
Detective Whicher’s theory was now that Constance’s inherited madness, along with her murderous age of 16 and general distaste for Saville and his mother caused her to murder the boy. He believed he had the evidence to prove it. And would you believe it was also a piece of women’s clothing.
The Kent’s staff kept detailed notes of the laundry they did, and two days after Saville’s murder, one of constance's night gowns went missing in the wash. Constance had three night gowns, and according to laundry records, after the murder two went into the wash, and one was in Constance’s room. However, only one made it out of the wash.
Whicher theorized that Constance had committed the crime in a nightgown and it got soaked in the boys blood. So she must have thrown it away, and then put her two remaining nightgowns in the wash, pretending that she still had one. Making sure a maid made a note of both of them being in the wash. Then, when a maid wasn’t looking, she stole one of the nightgowns out of the wash to sleep in and blamed it’s disappearance on the maid. And i know what you’re thinking and I agree, I hope the detective didn’t hurt his back with that stretch
The judge and jury believed it was a stretch as well. Whicher had constance sent to trial based on his theory, but the case fell apart right in front of him. Constance’s school friend said she actually didn’t remember Constance complaining about her stepmother at school, and the judge found the night gown theory to be offensive and a waste of everyone's time. And so Constance was acquitted.
Sure there were other suspects. William Nutt even became a suspect because his father was prosecuted by Mr. Kent for stealing a few apples from the property. He had also said the strange thing about feeling like they would find Saville dead, which everyone at the time had thought was weird. but he was never investigated further.
Mr. Kent wasn’t investigated any further either, even after it was discovered that Mr. Kent was in a bit of financial distress when the murder happened. He had been living far outside of his means, and the bills were starting to catch up to him. Local gossips surmised that Mr. Kent figured one less child would save him some money.
But Whicher had a real affinity towards Samuel. He felt they were cut from the same cloth, two hard working men who built lives from nothing. Throughout the investigation, he assured Samuel that he wouldn’t be put on trial. This was the issue with the way Detective Whicher was building his cases. He was coming up with theories and trying to prove them right, rather than looking at the evidence that was right in front of him.
At this point, there was nowhere left to go with the case. Whicher thought for sure it was Constance, and felt like the prosecutor didn’t understand his night gown theory and botched the trial. The case was starting to go cold, but over the next few years, a few investigators would pick it up to see if they could find anything that was missed. Thomas Saunders was a barrister and magistrate that wanted to keep the case alive. One day he rang Whicher. He had some shocking news. Saunder had discovered that there was more evidence collected at Road house than anyone had been made aware of, evidence that was destroyed before the detective had made it to the house, but was noticed by one of the first police officers on the scene.
On June 29th, the day of the murder, at 5pm, a police officer found a woman’s shift, wrapped in newspaper, and covered in blood tucked away in the kitchen boiler hole. a boiler hole was where a fire was built in a kitchen for cooking purposes.
A shift was a linen dress women wore during the day under their regular dress. It usually fell to the knee, unlike nightgowns, which fell to the floor. However, Saunders asked the officer if this garment was a shift or a nightgown, as men would often get the two confused. He insisted it was a shift, but noted that it was very bloody so he took it directly to another officer on the scene who was so embarrassed by the garment, he insisted that it be hidden. It turns out, that officer assumed that the garment was covered in menstrual blood and hidden in shame, and therefore wanted nothing to do with it. He didn’t even tell the Kents that it had been found. The officer threw the garment back into the boiler hole and went to go check on something outside. when he returned, it had vanished.
Whicher was shocked, could his night gown theory be true? But the case couldn't be reopened. And nothing came of the shift. Constance was sent to boarding school, but was bullied so horribly that she left to go to a covenant. News of the case was spreading so far and wide, that even Charles Dickens wrote in his thoughts on the case. He believed the theory of the tryst between Mr. Kent and the nanny. Most of the talk of the case was amongst house holds- regular citizens who had been so caught up in the tabloid version of the case and couldn’t stop theorizing about what had happened. Other than that, the case was cold.
Detective Whicher’s career was nearly ruined. This should have been a solvable case, and he really believed that he had the murderer pinned down with Constance. His reputation was so tarnished that it was hard for him to find work after this case. He thought he may never work again.
But then, five years later, there was another major breakthrough.
On Tuesday, April 25th, 1865. Constance was now 21 years old. She went to bow street magistrates court dressed in all black and wearing the same calm and collected veneer she had throughout the initial investigation. She was ready to confess to Saville’s murder.
I’m now going to read to you how the crime happened, according to the account of the murder Constance gave
Constance was very close with her mother, and while her mother was alive, she could feel her fathers affection towards her cooling. She was young, but she could tell her father was in love with the nanny. It seemed like he was waiting for, if not orchestrating her mothers death so he could be with his mistress. It was then that Constance decided she wanted to inflict as much pain as she could upon her fathers lover. Sure, she could kill her, but was there something she could do that would cause life long suffering. When Saville was born, she had her answer.
The night of the murder, Constance lay awake upstairs in her room until she felt the whole house had fallen asleep. Then, she got out of bed, crept down to Savilles room, snuck in and pulled him from his cot, still wrapped in his blanket. She said the boy was sleeping the whole time. Next, Constance walked downstairs where she opened the drawing room window as a diversion. She took Saville out to the outhouse, lit a candle, and slit the sleeping boys throat. Before the murder she had stolen a razor from her father, and that’s what she used to kill Saville. According to Constance, when she slit his throat, he didn’t bleed, and that caused her to also stab him in the chest. Feeling she had done enough, she dropped Saville down the hole, and threw the bra insert down with him. The bra was from a garment she found in the trash that she had repurposed as a facecloth.
When she got back to her room, she saw that there were two spots of blood on the nightgown. She washed it in the basin that night, but when she examined it the next day, she decided it wasn’t clean enough and she burned it in her room. Constance said she did steal a night gown from the wash to make it look like the maid had lost her gown, but that the bloody garment in the boiler hole was not related to her crime. The next day, she cleaned the razor and put it back in her fathers possession.
Constance said that it was her time at the Monastery that convinced her to confess. She felt as though she had been under the influence of satan when she committed the crime, and now that she had made amends with God, it was time to confess
Detective Whicher read this confession in the paper and felt vindicated. His outlandish theory had proven to be true. After this, cases started being assigned to him again, and his reputation as a top detective was reinstated.
Constance was sentenced to death after a 20 minute trial, but the general public was so unconvinced that her story was true, that the begged for mercy. Her sentence was commuted to jail time.
Yes, the general public, who had been closely following this case like season one of Serial, didn’t believe it was Constance. Maybe it was because they all had five years to develop their own bullet proof theories, but you have to admit that her confession raises some questions. How could she have done all that she said she did that night while holding a nearly four year old boy? Even Detective Whicher could attest to the face that the drawing room window took a significant amount of strength to open, one arm of even the strongest groundsman wouldn’t cut it. Mr. Kents razor was also missing for 24 hours and no one, not even the police, took note? The house was turned completely upside down looking for the murder weapon and no one thought to check the razors? and How did she stab Saville in the chest with a razor? that seemed impossible and it was ruled in court by a doctor that the stab wound was almost certainly caused by a knife. And most importantly, HOW did Saville not bleed from having his throat cut that deeply? It was like Constance was taking the parts of the case she knew and piecing them together in a way that she thought made sense, but didn’t quite add up.
To Detective whicher, the police, and the court system who had spent 5 years searching for the boys murderer while being shamed by the public, they were just excited to have someone to put in jail. Constance was sentenced to life in prison, but was released in 1885. She was such a recognizable figure by the time she was sentenced, a wax figure was made of her for Madame Toussauds wax museum. She was placed next to another high profile murderer from the year of her trial, John Wilkes Booth.
Detective Whicher died in 1881, just a few years before the other officers in his unit would be assigned the high profile case of Jack The Ripper. Whicher died believing that he tied a perfect bow on this messy case. But today, historians are less sure than ever that his hunch was right.
The Kent’s were a disastrous bunch with secrets to hide and enemies lurking at the edge of their property. Maybe a 16 year old girl really was the reason for Savilles death, but there were many stones left unturned by Detective whicher.
When Mr Kent retired from his job, he told his employer that he could no longer work because he needed to take care of his ailing wife, who was an invalid after Savilles murder. He asked for a pension of $500 a year. When his job responded, they offered him $250 a year, a salary that his expensive life style could not be maintained on. He replied that he no longer wished to retire, he’d rather work and make his full salary, but his job felt that he needed to take care of his sick wife, as he mentioned in his letter. Miraculously, after Mr. Kent received that letter, his wife died and he no longer needed to take care of her. He was able to work again. To help raise his children in lew of a wife, he hired a young, australian governess.
This has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kaelyn Moore. Music by artlist. Make sure to follow the podcast on instagram and support the podcast if you’re feeling generous, a lot of work and research goes into these episodes. Have a heart pounding story you’d like to share on the podcast? Email heart starts pounding @ gmail,com. Until next time