Feb. 3, 2026
Devizes: Constance Kent's Confession and Second Life
This is the fourth and final episode of our series examining the 1860 Road Hill House murder, the case that gave birth to modern detective fiction. Previous episodes covered the murder of three-year-old Francis Saville Kent, Detective Inspector Jonathan Whicher's groundbreaking investigation, and the five years of cold case torment that preceded Constance Kent's confession.
The gallery was packed to suffocation. July 21, 1865. Five years they'd waited for this moment. Five years since Francis Saville Kent was found with his throat cut in the family privy. Five years since Inspector Whicher accused Constance Kent of murdering her baby brother—and was destroyed for saying so. When the clerk asked how she pleaded, Constance spoke one word: "Guilty." No mitigation. No excuse. No insanity defense that might have saved her from prison.
When Constance Kent stood in the prisoner's dock at Devizes Assizes on July 21, 1865, she refused the insanity defense her counsel had carefully prepared. Instead, she pleaded guilty to murdering her three-year-old half-brother Francis—a single word that silenced the packed courtroom and condemned her to death.
But Queen Victoria's government commuted her sentence. At sixteen when she committed the murder, Constance had carried the secret for five years before confessing voluntarily. She served twenty years in Victorian prisons—first at Millbank, then Fulham Refuge—transforming from a troubled teenager into a model prisoner who educated herself and learned nursing skills.
In 1886, a woman named Ruth Emilie Kaye boarded the ship Carisbrooke Castle bound for Sydney. Constance Kent ceased to exist. For fifty-eight years, she built a new life in Australia, rising to Matron at several institutions, nursing the sick and elderly, living in quiet anonymity until her death at one hundred years old in 1944. No one in Australia knew they were burying England's most notorious Victorian murderess.
Key Case Details
Trial and Sentencing (July 1865):
- Thirty-minute trial at Devizes Assizes
- Justice Willes presiding, John Duke Coleridge defending
- Guilty plea rejected insanity defense
- Death sentence commuted to life imprisonment
Prison Years (1865-1885):
- Twenty years served at Millbank and Fulham prisons
- Model prisoner with no disciplinary incidents
- Self-educated in nursing skills
- Release conditional on leaving England
Australian Reinvention (1886-1944):
- Emigrated as Ruth Emilie Kaye aboard Carisbrooke Castle
- Nursing career spanning four decades
- Matron at Parramatta Industrial School for Girls
- Matron at Pierce Memorial Nurses' Home for twenty-one years
- Died April 10, 1944, at age 100, identity unknown
Literary Legacy:
- Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) directly inspired by the case
- Sergeant Cuff character modeled on Inspector Whicher
- Foundation for Sherlock Holmes and entire detective fiction genre
- Inspector Whicher died June 29, 1881—exactly twenty-one years after the murder night
Francis Saville Kent was three years and ten months old when he died. He was not a plot device or a mystery to be solved. He was a child with dark hair and bright eyes who ate his porridge at a small table by the window, who played in the June sunshine of a Wiltshire garden, whose small voice fell silent on a night that would echo through a century and a half of English history. He was not the mystery. He was the cost.
Historical Context & Sources
This series draws extensively from Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008), the definitive modern account based on extensive primary research. Original trial transcripts from the National Archives and contemporary newspaper coverage from The Times and Morning Post (1860-1865) provided additional verification. Bernard Taylor's Cruelly Murdered (1979) contributed alternative perspectives on William Saville-Kent's potential involvement—a mystery that remains unresolved.
Resources & Further Reading
Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detectiveremains the essential text for understanding this case. Readers interested in the literary legacy should explore Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868), widely considered the first modern English detective novel. The Victorian crime history section at the National Archives maintains original documents from the investigation and trial.
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WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_00]: The galley was packed to suffocation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: July 21, 1865.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Every seat in the devices a size court had been claimed hours before dawn.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Five years they'd waited for this moment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Five years since three-year-old Francis Seville Kid was found with his throat cut in the family privy.
00:28.465 --> 00:38.719
[SPEAKER_00]: Five years since Detective Inspector Jonathan Witcher accused Constance Kent of murdering her baby brother and was destroyed for saying so.
00:40.241 --> 00:42.664
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the gallery got what they came for.
00:44.166 --> 00:54.861
[SPEAKER_00]: Constance stood in the prisoner's dock, 21 years old, wearing deep morning black, her face pale and composed beneath the courtroom's gas lamps.
00:56.157 --> 01:03.588
[SPEAKER_00]: Her defense counsel, John Duke Coolridge, had prepared an elaborate argument, moral insanity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The kind that gripped young women under terrible strain, it would have spared her life, and asylum rather than the gallows, but Constance Kent had other plans.
01:20.963 --> 01:30.383
[SPEAKER_00]: When the clerk asked how she pleaded to the murder of Francis Seville Kent, Constance Emily Kent spoke one word, guilty.
01:32.135 --> 01:38.183
[SPEAKER_00]: No mitigation, no excuse, no insanity defense that might have saved her from the rope.
01:39.204 --> 01:42.588
[SPEAKER_00]: Just one word that silenced the entire gallery.
01:44.150 --> 01:48.817
[SPEAKER_00]: Justice wills a man known for both severity and surprising mercy.
01:48.877 --> 01:55.425
[SPEAKER_00]: Ask repeatedly if she understood what she was saying, she did.
01:55.405 --> 01:58.029
[SPEAKER_00]: asked if anyone had coerced her confession.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No one had.
02:00.772 --> 02:08.343
[SPEAKER_00]: He pressed her for her motive, offered jealousy as the obvious reason a girl might murder her favored younger brother.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And here constants interrupted him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thankfully, but clearly, not jealousy, then said nothing more.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hello friend, welcome to foul play.
02:23.418 --> 02:26.486
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the story of the trial that lasted 30 minutes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The death sentence that wasn't carried out, and the extraordinary second life of England's most notorious murderous.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Within days of the verdict, the home secretary acted.
02:42.217 --> 02:46.085
[SPEAKER_01]: Constant Kent's death sentence was committed to penal servitude for life.
02:47.127 --> 02:48.450
[SPEAKER_01]: The reasoning was straightforward.
02:49.271 --> 02:54.041
[SPEAKER_01]: He had been 16 years old at the time of the murder, legally still a child herself.
02:55.243 --> 02:58.690
[SPEAKER_01]: She had carried the secret for five years presumably in torment.
02:58.670 --> 03:05.280
[SPEAKER_01]: She had confessed voluntarily, surrendered herself to authorities when no one suspected her anymore.
03:06.482 --> 03:11.430
[SPEAKER_01]: These facts, combined with justice, wills recommendation, spared her the gallows.
03:12.491 --> 03:14.735
[SPEAKER_01]: But public opinion was far from unanimous.
03:15.917 --> 03:21.285
[SPEAKER_01]: Those who wanted execution made their case in letters to newspapers and sermons from pulpits.
03:22.278 --> 03:28.411
[SPEAKER_01]: A three-year-old child had been lifted from his bed in the night, carried to an outdoor privy and slaughtered.
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[SPEAKER_01]: His throat cut so deeply his head nearly separated from his body.
03:33.944 --> 03:36.128
[SPEAKER_01]: What clemency did such a crime deserve?
03:37.311 --> 03:39.035
[SPEAKER_01]: Francis Saval Kent was dead.
03:39.937 --> 03:41.400
[SPEAKER_01]: Why should his murderer live?
03:42.781 --> 03:44.623
[SPEAKER_01]: Others accepted the commutation.
03:45.985 --> 03:50.451
[SPEAKER_01]: Constance had been a girl of 16 traumatised by her own family's dysfunction.
03:51.272 --> 03:56.960
[SPEAKER_01]: She had confessed when she could have remained silent forever, free to live her life unburdened by suspicion.
03:58.062 --> 03:59.924
[SPEAKER_01]: Life imprisonment was hardly mercy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It could mean 40 years in Victorian prison conditions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Death by inches, rather than the quick drop of the gallows.
04:08.836 --> 04:13.143
[SPEAKER_01]: Inspector Jonathan Witcher, Bindication came wrapped in bitterness.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The newspapers that had called him vulgar and repatious in 1860.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now, quietly, acknowledged he had been right all along.
04:22.236 --> 04:29.848
[SPEAKER_01]: Every instinct, every deduction, every piece of circumstantial evidence he had assembled, all of it, correct.
04:29.828 --> 04:31.011
[SPEAKER_01]: the missing night gown.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Constance's opportunity, her motive rooted in family trauma, but which her head left Scotland yard the previous year, his career in ruins, is health broken by the scandal.
04:44.019 --> 04:49.491
[SPEAKER_01]: The vindication came five years too late to restore what the road hill house case had destroyed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: For 20 years, Constance Kent lived within prison walls.
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[SPEAKER_01]: First at Milbank, the forbidding riverside penitentiary in Westminster.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Later at Fullham Refuge, a somewhat less severe facility for women, showing signs of reform.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Victorian prisons operated on Prince Paul of Penitence and Labor.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Inmate spent their days in silence, speaking was forbidden at the except during specified hours, work was mandatory.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Constance, Labor, and Kitchen and Lawndries are same-menial tasks performed by servants in the household she had once inhabited as a daughter of the middle class.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Religious services were compulsory, continuing the Anglo-Catholic influence that had led to her confession.
05:37.714 --> 05:51.912
[SPEAKER_01]: She was, by every account, a model prisoner, no disciplinary reports, no incidents of violence or defiance, 20 years of silent compliance, religious observance and hard labour.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Prison officials described to her genuinely penitent, not merely performing reform for parole consideration, but apparently transformed by her time inside.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She educated herself extensively, reading what ever books the Prison Library provided.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She learned the principles of nursing, skills that would define her second life, and she waited,
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[SPEAKER_01]: In 1885, after two decades behind bars, the question of release arose.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Constance Kent was 41 years old.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She had entered prison as a young woman and would leave it in mid-Lage.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The home office approved her release on one condition.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She must leave England.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The road hillhouse murderous could not walk free in the country where Francis' several Kent's death still haunted public memory.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She chose Australia, her brother William Savorkent, had immigrated the previous year in 1884.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Whether this was coordination or coincidence remains unknown, but in early 1886, a woman named Ruth Amelia Kay, boarded the ship, Carisbert Castle, Bound for Sydney.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Constance Emily Kent had ceased to exist.
07:10.782 --> 07:21.674
[SPEAKER_00]: When Ruth Emily Kay stepped off the carriage-brook castle, onto Sydney's dock in February 1886, Constance Kent ceased to exist.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No one in Australia knew that this plain-faced middle-aged woman had spent the last 20 years in English prisons.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No one knew that she had, at 16, murdered a three-year-old boy, while he slapped
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[SPEAKER_00]: no one knew anything at all.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She would keep it that way for 58 years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Ruth Emily Kay sought nursing training, her respectable profession for a single woman in the wake of Florence Nightingale's reforms.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She proved capable, dedicated, and utterly unremarkable.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She worked on hospitals throughout Sydney and beyond, eventually rising to the position of matron at several institutions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She specialized in caring for the elderly and in firm.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The vulnerable populations that required patients and compassion her colleagues found her competent, but distant.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She never married.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She had no close friends.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She attended Anglican Services regularly, but revealed nothing of her spiritual history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: when asked about England, about her past, about why a well-spoken woman with traces of an English accent was nursing in the colonies.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She offered nothing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Her brother William had arrived in Australia a year before her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Whether this was coordination or coincidence has never been established,
08:59.727 --> 09:02.170
[SPEAKER_00]: Logan became a distinguished marine biologist.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His career taking him across Australia and beyond.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If the siblings who had once been so close, who had run away together as children, who may have shared knowledge of Francis' murder, ever reunited, no record survives.
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[SPEAKER_00]: William Seville can't die in 1908 at his home in Bournemouth, England.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He had returned to the country they both had fled.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Constance would have been 63 years old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There is no evidence she attended his funeral, mourned publicly, or acknowledged his passing in any way.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever bond had existed between them, whatever secrets they shared, went with William to his grave, and constants went on, nursing the sick and elderly of New South Wales, her identity protected by an ocean, and a half century of silence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: While Ruth Emily Kaye nursed the sick in Sydney, back in England, the roadhill house murder
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[SPEAKER_00]: What began as Victorian scandal was becoming something more enduring.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The foundation of an entire literary genre.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1868, three years after Consensus Trial, the novelist Wilkie Collins published the Moonstone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The poet T.S.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Eliot would later call it the first, the longest, and the best,
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was also a mistakenly the Rhode Hill House murder transformed into fiction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Collins detective Sergeant Cuff was Witcher in all but name, a working class investigator called to a country house, suspecting someone of higher social standing, brilliant and methodical, but ultimately thwarted by class prejudice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The missing night gown became a missing diamond.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The respectable family hiding secrets, the incompetent local police, the detective from London, piecing together what everyone else missed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: All of it, drawn from the case that had gripped England.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Collins established the template that would define detective fiction for the next century
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[SPEAKER_01]: Every trope we now take for granted in detective fiction traces back to road hillhouse.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The country house mystery, an affluent family, murder at home, everyone with motive, secrets within secrets, the detective and outsider he sees through social
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[SPEAKER_01]: The structure itself came from which is investigation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In competent local authorities, the brilliant specialist called in, red herrings and false leads, the unexpected culprit, the solution based on psychology and evidence rather than luck.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Arthur Conan Doyle, Red Collins, and Created Sherlock Holmes The detective, as intellectual, solving impossible crimes through observation and deduction.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Agatha Christie built a career on country house mysteries where respectable families hobbled murderers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Dorothy Sayers, 1926 novel Clouds of Witness, echoed elements of the Road Hill House case.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Every fictional detective who ever followed clues to an unexpected culprit, owes something to the case that made detection itself seem possible.
12:51.472 --> 12:56.841
[SPEAKER_00]: Inspector Witcher never lived to see the full flowering of the genre he had helped inspire.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He died on June 29, 1881, exactly 21 years after the night Francis Seville Kent was murdered.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The coincidence was remarkable enough that newspapers noted it,
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[SPEAKER_00]: which her head spent his final years in a quiet house and lavender hill, tending roses in his garden, just as sergeant cuff would do in the moonstone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He never married, he left no children.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His obituaries were respectful, but brief, mentioning that unfortunate road-hill house case, as if it had been a failure, rather than the investigation that proved correct
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was right about Constance Kent from the first day he arrived at Roadhill House.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It cost him everything.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Ruth Emily K. retired from nursing in 1932 at the age of 87.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She had served as matron at Paramata Industrial School for Girls, a juvenile detention facility for 11 years, and then at Pierce Memorial Nurses Home in East Maitland for 21 more.
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[SPEAKER_00]: over four decades of caring for others, building a career of service from the ashes of what she had destroyed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She settled in a rest home, in Stratfield, a quiet Sydney suburb.
14:31.523 --> 14:37.952
[SPEAKER_00]: The second world war raged across the Pacific, but Ruth Emily K was beyond such concerns.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She was approaching her centenary, and elderly woman with kind eyes who had once been a 16-year-old girl with a razor in her hand.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On April 10, 1944, Ruth Emily K died.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She was 100 years old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the next day she was cremated at Rookwood Cemetery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A brief notice appeared in the Sydney newspapers, Ruth Emily K. Nurse H. 100, formerly of England.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing more.
15:15.448 --> 15:19.293
[SPEAKER_00]: No one in Australia knew they were bearing Constance Kent.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The road hill house murderous, who had confessed
15:29.557 --> 15:39.092
[SPEAKER_00]: A hundred years of life, 84 years since the murder, 58 years in Australia as someone else entirely.
15:40.133 --> 15:49.067
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the end, just a name in a Sydney obituary, a life of service to the sick and secrets she took to her ashes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: More than a hundred and sixty years after that June 9, in 1860, the Roadhill House murder still haunts us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not because we don't know who did it, we do.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Constance Kent confessed, served her time, lived her second life, and died at a hundred years old on the far side of the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But what haunts us, are the questions we will never answer?
16:18.966 --> 16:21.952
[SPEAKER_00]: Did William help her that night?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Did the brother she loved so fiercely?
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[SPEAKER_00]: The only ally she had in that fractured household?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Share in the planning, the execution, the guilt?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Historian Kate Summerskill's research suggests he may have.
16:40.163 --> 16:44.790
[SPEAKER_00]: Constances repeated insistence that she acted alone and unadded.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sounds to modern ears, like someone protesting too much.
16:51.542 --> 16:56.250
[SPEAKER_00]: Both siblings ended up in Australia, both kept their distance from each other.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Both took their secrets to their graves,
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[SPEAKER_00]: What was her true motive?
17:04.405 --> 17:06.569
[SPEAKER_00]: Not jealousy, she insisted a trial.
17:07.632 --> 17:10.978
[SPEAKER_00]: But if not jealousy of Francis, then what?
17:12.261 --> 17:22.842
[SPEAKER_00]: Revenge against her father for the affair, remarriage, the favoritism, rage at a stepmother who had replaced her own mother and then denied her love,
17:24.307 --> 17:26.031
[SPEAKER_00]: Francis was not her enemy.
17:27.053 --> 17:32.425
[SPEAKER_00]: He was three years old, innocent of everything except the accident of his birth.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was assemble, and she destroyed him.
17:38.684 --> 17:39.786
[SPEAKER_00]: How did she live with it?
17:40.828 --> 17:42.772
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the mystery that may matter most.
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[SPEAKER_00]: 84 years from the murder to her death, 20 years in prison, then 58 years as Ruth Emily Kay, nursing the sick, caring for the elderly, living a useful, quiet life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Did religious transformation bring genuine peace?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Did service to others provide some kind of penance?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Or did she simply walk away a constant's can to some mental room?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And live as Ruth and the Leukea, a different woman entirely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We will never know.
18:19.503 --> 18:22.208
[SPEAKER_00]: Some mysteries, stay mysteries.
18:24.297 --> 18:32.910
[SPEAKER_00]: But we can't remember Francis Seville Kid, not as the victim, not as a plot device, in a Victorian murder mystery.
18:34.072 --> 18:43.386
[SPEAKER_00]: But as a three-year-old boy with dark hair and bright eyes, who woke each morning in his nursery to the sounds of his family, stirring around him.
18:44.834 --> 18:50.400
[SPEAKER_00]: who ate his porridge at a small table by the window, while watching the gardeners work below.
18:51.862 --> 18:58.269
[SPEAKER_00]: Who played in the June sunshine of a wheelchair garden, not knowing those would be his last days.
18:59.710 --> 19:13.305
[SPEAKER_00]: Who small voice calling for Elizabeth, reaching for his mother, asking for one more story before bed, fell silent on a night that would echo through a century and a half of English history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was not the mystery.
19:17.528 --> 19:18.308
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the cost.
19:20.591 --> 19:32.262
[SPEAKER_00]: And we can remember Inspector Jonathan Witcher, the first modern detective, the working class investigator who saw the truth when everyone else around him refused to see it.
19:33.784 --> 19:42.853
[SPEAKER_00]: He was right about Constance Kidd from the moment he had arrived at Roadhill House.
19:44.183 --> 20:03.144
[SPEAKER_00]: Vindication came five years too late, but every detective story ever written, from Sergeant Cough to Sherlock Holmes, to Herkue Poirot, owe something to the man who stood in that Wiltshire Garden, and knew a 16-year-old girl had murdered her brother.
20:04.966 --> 20:09.010
[SPEAKER_00]: Their stories deserve to be told, all of their stories
20:10.981 --> 20:19.893
[SPEAKER_00]: Until next time, remember, the roadhouse murder gave us modern detective fiction, but it took more than it gave.
20:21.334 --> 20:28.283
[SPEAKER_00]: A three-year-old boy who never grew up, a detective who was right to early to be believed.
20:29.705 --> 20:38.777
[SPEAKER_00]: A family shattered beyond repair, and a woman who lived a hundred years
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some crimes change the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This one changed how we tell stories about crime itself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening, friend.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The galley was packed to suffocation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: July 21, 1865.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Every seat in the devices a size court had been claimed hours before dawn.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Five years they'd waited for this moment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Five years since three-year-old Francis Seville Kid was found with his throat cut in the family privy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Five years since Detective Inspector Jonathan Witcher accused Constance Kent of murdering her baby brother and was destroyed for saying so.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now the gallery got what they came for.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Constance stood in the prisoner's dock, 21 years old, wearing deep morning black, her face pale and composed beneath the courtroom's gas lamps.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Her defense counsel, John Duke Coolridge, had prepared an elaborate argument, moral insanity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The kind that gripped young women under terrible strain, it would have spared her life, and asylum rather than the gallows, but Constance Kent had other plans.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When the clerk asked how she pleaded to the murder of Francis Seville Kent, Constance Emily Kent spoke one word, guilty.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No mitigation, no excuse, no insanity defense that might have saved her from the rope.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Just one word that silenced the entire gallery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Justice wills a man known for both severity and surprising mercy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Ask repeatedly if she understood what she was saying, she did.
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[SPEAKER_00]: asked if anyone had coerced her confession.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No one had.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He pressed her for her motive, offered jealousy as the obvious reason a girl might murder her favored younger brother.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And here constants interrupted him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thankfully, but clearly, not jealousy, then said nothing more.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hello friend, welcome to foul play.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is the story of the trial that lasted 30 minutes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The death sentence that wasn't carried out, and the extraordinary second life of England's most notorious murderous.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Within days of the verdict, the home secretary acted.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Constant Kent's death sentence was committed to penal servitude for life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The reasoning was straightforward.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He had been 16 years old at the time of the murder, legally still a child herself.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She had carried the secret for five years presumably in torment.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She had confessed voluntarily, surrendered herself to authorities when no one suspected her anymore.
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[SPEAKER_01]: These facts, combined with justice, wills recommendation, spared her the gallows.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But public opinion was far from unanimous.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Those who wanted execution made their case in letters to newspapers and sermons from pulpits.
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[SPEAKER_01]: A three-year-old child had been lifted from his bed in the night, carried to an outdoor privy and slaughtered.
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[SPEAKER_01]: His throat cut so deeply his head nearly separated from his body.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What clemency did such a crime deserve?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Francis Saval Kent was dead.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Why should his murderer live?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Others accepted the commutation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Constance had been a girl of 16 traumatised by her own family's dysfunction.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She had confessed when she could have remained silent forever, free to live her life unburdened by suspicion.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Life imprisonment was hardly mercy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It could mean 40 years in Victorian prison conditions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Death by inches, rather than the quick drop of the gallows.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Inspector Jonathan Witcher, Bindication came wrapped in bitterness.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The newspapers that had called him vulgar and repatious in 1860.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now, quietly, acknowledged he had been right all along.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Every instinct, every deduction, every piece of circumstantial evidence he had assembled, all of it, correct.
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[SPEAKER_01]: the missing night gown.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Constance's opportunity, her motive rooted in family trauma, but which her head left Scotland yard the previous year, his career in ruins, is health broken by the scandal.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The vindication came five years too late to restore what the road hill house case had destroyed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: For 20 years, Constance Kent lived within prison walls.
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[SPEAKER_01]: First at Milbank, the forbidding riverside penitentiary in Westminster.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Later at Fullham Refuge, a somewhat less severe facility for women, showing signs of reform.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Victorian prisons operated on Prince Paul of Penitence and Labor.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Inmate spent their days in silence, speaking was forbidden at the except during specified hours, work was mandatory.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Constance, Labor, and Kitchen and Lawndries are same-menial tasks performed by servants in the household she had once inhabited as a daughter of the middle class.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Religious services were compulsory, continuing the Anglo-Catholic influence that had led to her confession.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She was, by every account, a model prisoner, no disciplinary reports, no incidents of violence or defiance, 20 years of silent compliance, religious observance and hard labour.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Prison officials described to her genuinely penitent, not merely performing reform for parole consideration, but apparently transformed by her time inside.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She educated herself extensively, reading what ever books the Prison Library provided.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She learned the principles of nursing, skills that would define her second life, and she waited,
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[SPEAKER_01]: In 1885, after two decades behind bars, the question of release arose.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Constance Kent was 41 years old.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She had entered prison as a young woman and would leave it in mid-Lage.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The home office approved her release on one condition.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She must leave England.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The road hillhouse murderous could not walk free in the country where Francis' several Kent's death still haunted public memory.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She chose Australia, her brother William Savorkent, had immigrated the previous year in 1884.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Whether this was coordination or coincidence remains unknown, but in early 1886, a woman named Ruth Amelia Kay, boarded the ship, Carisbert Castle, Bound for Sydney.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Constance Emily Kent had ceased to exist.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When Ruth Emily Kay stepped off the carriage-brook castle, onto Sydney's dock in February 1886, Constance Kent ceased to exist.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No one in Australia knew that this plain-faced middle-aged woman had spent the last 20 years in English prisons.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No one knew that she had, at 16, murdered a three-year-old boy, while he slapped
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[SPEAKER_00]: no one knew anything at all.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She would keep it that way for 58 years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Ruth Emily Kay sought nursing training, her respectable profession for a single woman in the wake of Florence Nightingale's reforms.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She proved capable, dedicated, and utterly unremarkable.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She worked on hospitals throughout Sydney and beyond, eventually rising to the position of matron at several institutions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She specialized in caring for the elderly and in firm.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The vulnerable populations that required patients and compassion her colleagues found her competent, but distant.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She never married.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She had no close friends.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She attended Anglican Services regularly, but revealed nothing of her spiritual history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: when asked about England, about her past, about why a well-spoken woman with traces of an English accent was nursing in the colonies.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She offered nothing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Her brother William had arrived in Australia a year before her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Whether this was coordination or coincidence has never been established,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Logan became a distinguished marine biologist.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His career taking him across Australia and beyond.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If the siblings who had once been so close, who had run away together as children, who may have shared knowledge of Francis' murder, ever reunited, no record survives.
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[SPEAKER_00]: William Seville can't die in 1908 at his home in Bournemouth, England.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He had returned to the country they both had fled.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Constance would have been 63 years old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There is no evidence she attended his funeral, mourned publicly, or acknowledged his passing in any way.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever bond had existed between them, whatever secrets they shared, went with William to his grave, and constants went on, nursing the sick and elderly of New South Wales, her identity protected by an ocean, and a half century of silence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: While Ruth Emily Kaye nursed the sick in Sydney, back in England, the roadhill house murder
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[SPEAKER_00]: What began as Victorian scandal was becoming something more enduring.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The foundation of an entire literary genre.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1868, three years after Consensus Trial, the novelist Wilkie Collins published the Moonstone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The poet T.S.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Eliot would later call it the first, the longest, and the best,
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was also a mistakenly the Rhode Hill House murder transformed into fiction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Collins detective Sergeant Cuff was Witcher in all but name, a working class investigator called to a country house, suspecting someone of higher social standing, brilliant and methodical, but ultimately thwarted by class prejudice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The missing night gown became a missing diamond.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The respectable family hiding secrets, the incompetent local police, the detective from London, piecing together what everyone else missed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: All of it, drawn from the case that had gripped England.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Collins established the template that would define detective fiction for the next century
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[SPEAKER_01]: Every trope we now take for granted in detective fiction traces back to road hillhouse.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The country house mystery, an affluent family, murder at home, everyone with motive, secrets within secrets, the detective and outsider he sees through social
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[SPEAKER_01]: The structure itself came from which is investigation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In competent local authorities, the brilliant specialist called in, red herrings and false leads, the unexpected culprit, the solution based on psychology and evidence rather than luck.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Arthur Conan Doyle, Red Collins, and Created Sherlock Holmes The detective, as intellectual, solving impossible crimes through observation and deduction.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Agatha Christie built a career on country house mysteries where respectable families hobbled murderers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Dorothy Sayers, 1926 novel Clouds of Witness, echoed elements of the Road Hill House case.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Every fictional detective who ever followed clues to an unexpected culprit, owes something to the case that made detection itself seem possible.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Inspector Witcher never lived to see the full flowering of the genre he had helped inspire.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He died on June 29, 1881, exactly 21 years after the night Francis Seville Kent was murdered.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The coincidence was remarkable enough that newspapers noted it,
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[SPEAKER_00]: which her head spent his final years in a quiet house and lavender hill, tending roses in his garden, just as sergeant cuff would do in the moonstone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He never married, he left no children.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His obituaries were respectful, but brief, mentioning that unfortunate road-hill house case, as if it had been a failure, rather than the investigation that proved correct
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was right about Constance Kent from the first day he arrived at Roadhill House.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It cost him everything.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Ruth Emily K. retired from nursing in 1932 at the age of 87.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She had served as matron at Paramata Industrial School for Girls, a juvenile detention facility for 11 years, and then at Pierce Memorial Nurses Home in East Maitland for 21 more.
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[SPEAKER_00]: over four decades of caring for others, building a career of service from the ashes of what she had destroyed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She settled in a rest home, in Stratfield, a quiet Sydney suburb.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The second world war raged across the Pacific, but Ruth Emily K was beyond such concerns.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She was approaching her centenary, and elderly woman with kind eyes who had once been a 16-year-old girl with a razor in her hand.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On April 10, 1944, Ruth Emily K died.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She was 100 years old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the next day she was cremated at Rookwood Cemetery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A brief notice appeared in the Sydney newspapers, Ruth Emily K. Nurse H. 100, formerly of England.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing more.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No one in Australia knew they were bearing Constance Kent.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The road hill house murderous, who had confessed
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[SPEAKER_00]: A hundred years of life, 84 years since the murder, 58 years in Australia as someone else entirely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And in the end, just a name in a Sydney obituary, a life of service to the sick and secrets she took to her ashes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: More than a hundred and sixty years after that June 9, in 1860, the Roadhill House murder still haunts us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not because we don't know who did it, we do.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Constance Kent confessed, served her time, lived her second life, and died at a hundred years old on the far side of the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But what haunts us, are the questions we will never answer?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Did William help her that night?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Did the brother she loved so fiercely?
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[SPEAKER_00]: The only ally she had in that fractured household?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Share in the planning, the execution, the guilt?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Historian Kate Summerskill's research suggests he may have.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Constances repeated insistence that she acted alone and unadded.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sounds to modern ears, like someone protesting too much.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Both siblings ended up in Australia, both kept their distance from each other.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Both took their secrets to their graves,
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[SPEAKER_00]: What was her true motive?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not jealousy, she insisted a trial.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But if not jealousy of Francis, then what?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Revenge against her father for the affair, remarriage, the favoritism, rage at a stepmother who had replaced her own mother and then denied her love,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Francis was not her enemy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was three years old, innocent of everything except the accident of his birth.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was assemble, and she destroyed him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: How did she live with it?
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[SPEAKER_00]: That is the mystery that may matter most.
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[SPEAKER_00]: 84 years from the murder to her death, 20 years in prison, then 58 years as Ruth Emily Kay, nursing the sick, caring for the elderly, living a useful, quiet life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Did religious transformation bring genuine peace?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Did service to others provide some kind of penance?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Or did she simply walk away a constant's can to some mental room?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And live as Ruth and the Leukea, a different woman entirely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We will never know.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some mysteries, stay mysteries.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But we can't remember Francis Seville Kid, not as the victim, not as a plot device, in a Victorian murder mystery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But as a three-year-old boy with dark hair and bright eyes, who woke each morning in his nursery to the sounds of his family, stirring around him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: who ate his porridge at a small table by the window, while watching the gardeners work below.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Who played in the June sunshine of a wheelchair garden, not knowing those would be his last days.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Who small voice calling for Elizabeth, reaching for his mother, asking for one more story before bed, fell silent on a night that would echo through a century and a half of English history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was not the mystery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was the cost.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we can remember Inspector Jonathan Witcher, the first modern detective, the working class investigator who saw the truth when everyone else around him refused to see it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was right about Constance Kidd from the moment he had arrived at Roadhill House.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Vindication came five years too late, but every detective story ever written, from Sergeant Cough to Sherlock Holmes, to Herkue Poirot, owe something to the man who stood in that Wiltshire Garden, and knew a 16-year-old girl had murdered her brother.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Their stories deserve to be told, all of their stories
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[SPEAKER_00]: Until next time, remember, the roadhouse murder gave us modern detective fiction, but it took more than it gave.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A three-year-old boy who never grew up, a detective who was right to early to be believed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A family shattered beyond repair, and a woman who lived a hundred years
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some crimes change the world.
20:43.046 --> 20:46.492
[SPEAKER_00]: This one changed how we tell stories about crime itself.
20:48.075 --> 20:53.425
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening, friend.
