The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale
Authors: Kate Summerscale
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective, Espionage, History, Biography & Autobiography, Literary Criticism, England, True Crime, London, Biography, Europe, Murder, Great Britain, Detectives, Murder - General, Murder - England - Wiltshire - History - 19th century, Mystery & Detective Fiction, Case studies, History: World, Wiltshire, Law Enforcement, Whicher; Jonathan, 19th century, Europe - Great Britain - General, Detectives - England - London, Expeditions & Discoveries
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what the Somerset and Wilts Journal described as a 'profoundly secret' inquiry at the Temperance Hall, to which they summoned several of the inhabitants of Road Hill House. Mrs Kent told them that she believed the murderer was an inmate of the house, 'some one who knew the premises'. 'I have no reason to blame nurse,' she added. 'The only thing I blame her for is not telling me the instant she missed the child.'
The police working on the case suspected Elizabeth Gough. They thought it almost impossible that the child had been abducted from the nursery without the nursemaid's knowledge. The scenario that had shaped itself out in their minds was that Saville had woken up and seen a man in Gough's bed. To silence the boy, the lovers stopped his mouth and - by accident or design - suffocated him. Gough herself had depicted Saville as a tell-tale: 'The little boy goes into his mamma's room and tells everything.' The couple then mutilated the body to disguise the cause of death, the police surmised. If the lover was Samuel Kent, he could have disposed of the evidence when he rode off to Trowbridge. In the fuss and hurry, and because the pair had to be careful not to be seen conferring, their stories had clashed and changed: notably, their accounts of when they missed the blanket. This scenario also accounted for Gough's inadequate explanation of why she failed to rouse her mistress when she noticed that Saville was missing.
At eight o'clock in the evening of Tuesday, 10 July - William Kent's fifteenth birthday - the magistrates directed the police to apprehend Elizabeth Gough.
'Previous to being informed of the decision of the magistrates,' reported the Bath Chronicle , 'the girl was apparently in the highest spirits, at the house where the several witnesses stopped, and talked in a very off-handed manner of how she should have enjoyed herself at the haymaking, had not this "business" occurred. She said she was so conscious of her innocence in the matter, that she should not be afraid to go before a hundred judges and be examined.'
Her bravado swiftly fell away. 'On being told that she would be detained for the present, she fell senseless to the ground.' The Somerset and Wilts Journal described her as having succumbed to a 'fit of hysterics'. She was 'unconscious for a few minutes'. When she had regained her senses Foley took her in a trap, a two-wheeled pony cart, to the police station in Stallard Street, Trow-bridge. The superintendent lived in the station house with his wife, his son (a lawyer's clerk) and a servant. The Dallimores - William, the constable, Eliza, the searcher, and their three children - also lived on the premises, and they were given custody of Gough. The nursemaid and the searcher shared a bed.
During her stay at the police station Gough told Foley and his wife that she was sure Constance was not the murderer.
'Was it you?' Foley asked.
'No,' she said.
She remarked to another policeman that she had decided 'never to love another child'. He asked her why. Because, she said, 'this is the second time that something has occurred to a child to which I was attached. In a former place where I lived two years there was a child I was very fond of, and it died.'
A rumour spread that she had confessed, naming Samuel as the murderer and herself as accessory. Several other rumours came into circulation during the week, all of them implicating Samuel: people said that Saville's life was insured, that the body of the first Mrs Kent was being exhumed for a post-mortem, that Samuel was seen in the grounds of his house at three o'clock on the morning of the murder.
On Friday Elizabeth Gough was taken back to Road to be examined. She waited at the house of Charles Stokes, a saddler who lived next to the Temperance Hall, while the magistrates went to Road Hill House. After a while the saddler's sister Ann, a maker of corsets and dresses, remarked on how long the magistrates had been gone: 'I suspect something has been
The police working on the case suspected Elizabeth Gough. They thought it almost impossible that the child had been abducted from the nursery without the nursemaid's knowledge. The scenario that had shaped itself out in their minds was that Saville had woken up and seen a man in Gough's bed. To silence the boy, the lovers stopped his mouth and - by accident or design - suffocated him. Gough herself had depicted Saville as a tell-tale: 'The little boy goes into his mamma's room and tells everything.' The couple then mutilated the body to disguise the cause of death, the police surmised. If the lover was Samuel Kent, he could have disposed of the evidence when he rode off to Trowbridge. In the fuss and hurry, and because the pair had to be careful not to be seen conferring, their stories had clashed and changed: notably, their accounts of when they missed the blanket. This scenario also accounted for Gough's inadequate explanation of why she failed to rouse her mistress when she noticed that Saville was missing.
At eight o'clock in the evening of Tuesday, 10 July - William Kent's fifteenth birthday - the magistrates directed the police to apprehend Elizabeth Gough.
'Previous to being informed of the decision of the magistrates,' reported the Bath Chronicle , 'the girl was apparently in the highest spirits, at the house where the several witnesses stopped, and talked in a very off-handed manner of how she should have enjoyed herself at the haymaking, had not this "business" occurred. She said she was so conscious of her innocence in the matter, that she should not be afraid to go before a hundred judges and be examined.'
Her bravado swiftly fell away. 'On being told that she would be detained for the present, she fell senseless to the ground.' The Somerset and Wilts Journal described her as having succumbed to a 'fit of hysterics'. She was 'unconscious for a few minutes'. When she had regained her senses Foley took her in a trap, a two-wheeled pony cart, to the police station in Stallard Street, Trow-bridge. The superintendent lived in the station house with his wife, his son (a lawyer's clerk) and a servant. The Dallimores - William, the constable, Eliza, the searcher, and their three children - also lived on the premises, and they were given custody of Gough. The nursemaid and the searcher shared a bed.
During her stay at the police station Gough told Foley and his wife that she was sure Constance was not the murderer.
'Was it you?' Foley asked.
'No,' she said.
She remarked to another policeman that she had decided 'never to love another child'. He asked her why. Because, she said, 'this is the second time that something has occurred to a child to which I was attached. In a former place where I lived two years there was a child I was very fond of, and it died.'
A rumour spread that she had confessed, naming Samuel as the murderer and herself as accessory. Several other rumours came into circulation during the week, all of them implicating Samuel: people said that Saville's life was insured, that the body of the first Mrs Kent was being exhumed for a post-mortem, that Samuel was seen in the grounds of his house at three o'clock on the morning of the murder.
On Friday Elizabeth Gough was taken back to Road to be examined. She waited at the house of Charles Stokes, a saddler who lived next to the Temperance Hall, while the magistrates went to Road Hill House. After a while the saddler's sister Ann, a maker of corsets and dresses, remarked on how long the magistrates had been gone: 'I suspect something has been
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