Jan. 13, 2026
Wiltshire: The Road Hill House Murder of 1860
Season 37, Episode 1 of 4
This is the first episode in Foul Play's four-part investigation into Victorian England's most notorious family murder and the case that birthed modern detective fiction.
Elizabeth Gough checked Francis Saville Kent's cot at five in the morning on June 30, 1860. The blankets were gone. The three-year-old was gone. And somewhere in Road Hill House, someone who knew exactly what had happened was waiting for the search to begin—
On the last night of June 1860, three-year-old Francis Saville Kent was lifted from his nursery bed in the family's Wiltshire mansion. Hours later, a servant discovered his small body in the outdoor privy, his throat cut nearly to the spine.
The killer came from inside the house. That much was immediately certain. But who among the nine people sleeping at Road Hill House that night would murder a child? And why?
This episode traces the fractured Kent family—a household divided between a tyrannical father's first marriage and second, where teenage Constance and her brother William existed as ghosts in their own home while their half-brother Francis received everything they'd been denied. We witness the horror of discovery morning, the bungled local investigation, and the arrival of Detective Inspector Jonathan "Jack" Whicher from Scotland Yard—a working-class detective about to walk into a class warfare trap that would destroy him.
Some walls don't protect families. They hide what families are capable of doing to themselves.
Key Case Details
Victim: Francis Saville Kent, age 3 years and 10 months, murdered June 29-30, 1860
Location: Road Hill House, village of Road (now Rode), Wiltshire, England
Crime: The boy was taken from his nursery bed between midnight and five in the morning, carried through the dark house, and murdered in the outdoor privy. His throat was slashed from ear to ear with a razor or knife, cutting nearly to the spine. His body was stuffed into the privy vault and hidden among waste.
Initial Investigation: Local police focused on servants and outsiders, refusing to suspect the respectable Kent family. Critical evidence—including a bloodstained nightgown belonging to sixteen-year-old half-sister Constance Kent—was destroyed by her father with police cooperation. The inquest returned "willful murder by person or persons unknown."
Scotland Yard Intervention: Detective Inspector Jonathan Whicher arrived July 16, 1860, and within five days identified Constance Kent as his primary suspect—the first time in English history a young lady from a respectable family faced formal murder charges.
Section 4: The Victim - Francis Saville Kent
Francis Saville Kent deserves to be remembered as more than a murder victim. He was three years and ten months old—dark-haired, curious, his father's favorite child. He collected smooth stones from the garden and named them after colors. He asked endless questions about where stars came from and why dogs didn't talk. He had a stuffed rabbit he couldn't sleep without and an imaginary pack of dogs that followed him everywhere.
He was learning to count but always skipped the number nine. He negotiated extra bedtime stories with remarkable persistence for a toddler. He called his half-sister Constance "Tannie" because he couldn't pronounce her name.
He was three years old. Someone murdered him anyway.
Section 5: Victorian True Crime Context
Victorian England in 1860 was obsessed with respectability. Gas lamps flickered in drawing rooms across the countryside while servants moved silently through service corridors. Behind heavy curtains and locked doors, families performed daily rituals of propriety—morning prayers, afternoon tea, church attendance every Sunday.
The outside world saw polished brass door knockers and manicured gardens. Inside, secrets festered.
The Road Hill House case shattered Victorian assumptions about where crime originated. Respectable families didn't produce murderers. Young ladies of good breeding didn't commit violence. Working-class detectives couldn't accuse gentlemen's daughters.
These assumptions would destroy Detective Inspector Whicher's career—and let a killer walk free for five more years.
Section 6: Historical Context & Sources
The Road Hill House Murder became Victorian England's most notorious domestic crime and directly inspired the birth of detective fiction. Wilkie Collins used case details when writing The Moonstone (1868), widely considered the first modern detective novel. Charles Dickens followed the investigation closely and incorporated elements into his final, unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Detective Inspector Jonathan Whicher's methods—systematic crime scene analysis, methodical witness interviews, evidence-based deduction regardless of social class—represented revolutionary policing. His destruction by class prejudice exposed how Victorian justice protected the respectable while prosecuting the poor.
Primary Source: Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008) provides the most comprehensive modern account, drawing on original trial transcripts, contemporary newspaper coverage, and National Archives documents.
Content Advisory: This episode contains clinical description of violence against a child, consistent with documented historical records.
Section 6A: Resources & Further Reading
- The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale (2008) - Definitive modern account of the case
- Cruelly Murdered by Bernard Taylor (1979) - Alternative analysis exploring brother William's potential involvement
- The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868) - Detective fiction directly inspired by the Road Hill House investigation
- The National Archives (UK) maintains original trial transcripts and investigation documents from 1860-1865
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WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_00]: England in 1860 was a nation obsessed with respectability, gas lamps flickered in drawing rooms across the countryside, casting long shadows on walls, paper, and floral prints, and family portraits.
00:18.077 --> 00:27.068
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind heavy curtains and locked doors, Victorian families performed their daily rituals of propriety, tea, and social hierarchy.
00:28.313 --> 00:32.942
[SPEAKER_00]: The outside world saw polished brass door knockers and manicure gardens.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Inside, secrets, festered in silence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Roadhill House stood three stories tall in the village of Road, Wiltshire, about a hundred miles west of London.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The mansion belonged to Samuel Seville Kent, a factory inspector for the home office, who earned roughly 400 pounds annually, inspecting compliance with child labor laws.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He lived there with his second wife, three young children, and two teenage children from his first marriage, who came home from boarding school for the summer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: high walls and locked gates surrounded the property, an outdoor privy, or outhouse, sat in the back garden, thirty yards from the house.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On June 30th, 1860, those walls couldn't keep a secret any longer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hello friend, welcome to foul play.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the early morning hours of that June day, someone entered the nursery on the second floor of Roadhill House, lifted three-year-old Francis Seville Kent from his cane caught, carried him down two flights of stairs across the garden and the dark, and killed him, and that outdoor privy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His small body was stuffed into that privy vault beneath the toilet seat, wrapped in a flannel blanket from his own nursery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Francis was called Savile by his family, his father's favorite child, a pleasant boy who went to bed around eight o'clock every evening and woke up smiling.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The killer came from inside the house that much was certain no one had broken in.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The doors were locked, the windows latched from the inside, one of the nine people sleeping in road hill house that night had committed murder.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it would take five years, a destroyed detective's career, in a confession born from
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[SPEAKER_01]: To understand how murder entered road hillhouse, you have to understand how the Kent family broken half long before that June night.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Samuel Saval Kent, married his first wife, Mary Ann Windows, on June 8, 1829.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She came from a prosperous London family, a father-owned successful coach-making business with money and connections in the city.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The marriage produced 10 children between 1829 and 1845, four died in infancy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Mary Anne endured pregnancy after pregnancy year after year until her body and her mind began failing.
03:46.011 --> 03:53.560
[SPEAKER_01]: By the early 1840s Mary Anne suffered from what Victorian doctors called bewilderment of intellect.
03:54.641 --> 03:57.424
[SPEAKER_01]: She experienced delusions couldn't care for her children.
03:58.606 --> 04:03.071
[SPEAKER_01]: Samuel hired a governess to manage the home and raise the surviving children.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Mary Anne, Alice, Elizabeth, Edward,
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[SPEAKER_01]: The governess was named Mary Drew Pratt, 24 years old, attractive, capable and younger than the exhausted old wife upstairs.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Mary Pratt became mistress of the house in every respect except name.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Neighbors in the wheelchair community gossiped about the arrangement, the scandal forced the family to move repeatedly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When Mary and Kent died in May 1852 at the age of 44, Samuel observed barely a year of mourning.
04:41.656 --> 04:51.111
[SPEAKER_01]: He married Mary Pratt in August 1853, 15 months after his first wife death, he made his children's former governess, their new mother.
04:52.103 --> 04:58.954
[SPEAKER_01]: Nine-year-old Constance Emily Kent served as Bridesmaider her father's wedding to the woman who had replaced her mother.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What followed was systematic erasure.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The second Mrs. Kent bore three children in quick succession, Mary Amelia in 1854, Francis Savall in August 1856,
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[SPEAKER_01]: and Evelyn in 1858.
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[SPEAKER_01]: These three children became the favored family.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They received their parents' attention, affection and resources.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The first wife surviving children became inconveniences to be hidden away.
05:29.621 --> 05:35.050
[SPEAKER_01]: Constances older siblings had left home by this point, escaping to marriages or other towns.
05:35.971 --> 05:41.820
[SPEAKER_01]: That left constants and her brother William, teenagers who spent most of
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[SPEAKER_01]: The household divided into two families living under one roof, the loved children and the discarded children, the mothers children and the ghost mothers children.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Constance watched her father lavish attention on Francis, they had never given her.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She watched her step-mom doubt on the boy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She slept in a different wing of the house than her half siblings.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She ate different food.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She wore hand-me-downs while Francis wore clothing commissioned from town.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When she came home from boarding school for some holidays, she was tolerated not welcomed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The Summer Constance turned 13, 1857, when William was 11, the two siblings ran away.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They cut their hair short and disguised themselves as boys, planning to reach Bristol port 40 miles away, and some else sail away to a new life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They made it nine miles to Bath, before being caught at a hotel.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Samuel Kent beat them both when they were returned home.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Constance was locked in the cell of a two days as punishment.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She hid the cut hair and boys closed in the outdoor privy, at the back of the garden.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The same privy where three years later she would hide something else entirely.
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[SPEAKER_01]: By June 1860, Constance was 16 years old.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Home from boarding school for the summer, watching her half-brother Francis, receiving the love she'd been denied her entire life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Living in a house where her stepmother had systematically erased her real mother's memory.
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[SPEAKER_01]: No portraits remained of Mary Ann Kent.
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[SPEAKER_01]: No mention of the first wife was permitted.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Womanhood born six children simply ceased to exist in the family narrative.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Constance endured a father who saw her as a disappointment.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Victorian England believed that respectable families didn't produce murderers, that young ladies of good breeding simply didn't commit violence, that the closed doors and high walls of homes like road hill house protected innocence and virtue.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But doors don't stop rage that's been building for 16 years, walls don't contain the kind of hatred that grows from systematic rejection.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The Kent family wasn't a family.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was a pressure cooker waiting to explode.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Before Francis becomes a case file, or a plot point in English criminal history, he deserves to be remembered as a child who existed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Francis' Saval Kent was born in August dating 56, the eldest son of Samuel Kent's second marriage, and the boy his father had always wanted from his first.
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[SPEAKER_01]: By June 1860, he was a healthy child who ran through the gardens of road hill or house, climbed on furniture when no one was watching, and asked constant questions the way children do at that age.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Elizabeth Gough, the family's 22 year old nurse made, dressed him in the day clothing that had been laid out the night before.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He wore a child's frog, boys at age still wore dresses in Victorian England,
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[SPEAKER_01]: Button boots that he was learning to fasten himself, though he needed help with the top buttons.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Breakfast was brought to the nursery at 8 o'clock.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Prances 8 porridge most mornings, sometimes bred with butter and jam.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He drank milk from a small cup he could hold himself.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He was learning to use cutlery properly, which meant meals could be messy and required patience from Elizabeth Gough.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He liked sweet things, jam, cake, anything was sugar.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He didn't like vegetables much, but children do.
09:20.573 --> 09:25.865
[SPEAKER_01]: Most mornings where the permitting Elizabeth took Francis and Evelyn outside to play in the garden.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Francis liked being outdoors, he collected stones and showed them to anyone who would look.
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[SPEAKER_01]: See this one, it's my favourite, no wait, no wait this one.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He chased butterflies without success, he talked to the family dog, though they didn't own a dog.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He simply decided that dogs existed somewhere and should be spoken to.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Three-year-olds operate on their own logic.
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[SPEAKER_01]: His mother visited the nursery several times each day, more the most upper-class Victorian mothers would.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Mary drew Kent, dought it on her eldest son, in ways she would never doubt on her stepchildren.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She held him, read to him, and sangler lobis.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Francis called her mummo without hesitation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He reached for her whenever she entered the room.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Asked her to stay longer when she prepared to leave.
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[SPEAKER_01]: His father visited less frequently.
10:17.623 --> 10:23.734
[SPEAKER_01]: Samuel Kent's work kept him away from home for days at a time, expecting factories across England.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But when Samuel was home, Francis was his clear favourite in ways that must have cut constants and William like knives every time they witnessed it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Samuel called him Savall, never Francis.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The boy would sit on his father's knee in the study.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Samuel taught him to count ten which Francis could do if he reminded him to skip nine.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He bought him small gifts from his travels, a wooden horse, a painted top, a small
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[SPEAKER_01]: The household staff liked Francis, he wasn't a difficult child, no worse than any three-year-old, which meant occasional tantrums when tired but nothing remarkable.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He said, please and thank you and reminded, he shared toys with his sister sometimes, though he had to be encouraged.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He cried when he fell down or felt sick, normal childhood responses.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Round four in the afternoon, Francis had had his tea, more bread sometimes cake milk again.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Then came his favourite part of the day, an evening walk around the gardens with Elizabeth Goff before sunset.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He held her hand.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He pointed at birds and clouds.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He picked flowers usually the ones Mary Kent is specifically asked him not to pick and brought them back to show his mother anyway.
11:42.149 --> 11:44.891
[SPEAKER_01]: his bedtime routine began around 7 o'clock.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Bath water was brought to the nursery in a large picture.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Elizabeth Gough washed Francis and Evelyn in a tiny tub by the fire.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She filled it just deep enough that Francis could sit without water going over his shoulders, warm but not too hot.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She washed his dark hair with soap that smelled of lavender.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She tried him with towels and dressed him in his night shirt, soft flannel that had been warmed near the fire, and combed his
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[SPEAKER_01]: Had a wicker cane caught with a thin mattress and several blankets, he slept with a small stuffed rabbit that had been given to him when he was younger, he couldn't sleep without it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: His mother came to kiss him good night.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She surprised with him.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The simple children's prayers Victorian households required.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Francis repeated the words without really understanding them the way children do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He asked for water, he asked to stay up longer, he negotiated like a three-year-old, no and the answer would be no, but trying anyway because sometimes trying worked.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Way to clock he was in his cot, Elizabeth Goss sat in the rocking chair nearby until he fell asleep, which usually took 15 or 20 minutes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He talked to himself quietly, told himself stories, asked questions to no one in particular, like, where the stars come from, why is night time dark, then his voice would slow, soften, and silence.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He slept in that nursery every night to his short life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The room was familiar, his blankets, his toys scattered on the floor, his stuffed rabbit, the small table where he took his meals, the window that looked out over the garden where he played.
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[SPEAKER_01]: On the night of June the 29th, 1860, Francis Savorkent went to bed at 8 o'clock as usual, Elizabeth got sat with him until he fell asleep.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She checked on him once more around 1030, before retiring to her own small room adjacent to the nursery.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The door between the rooms stood open, as it did every night, so she could hear if Francis or Evelyn woke.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Francis was sleeping
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[SPEAKER_01]: Sometime between midnight and five in the morning, someone entered that nursery.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Someone lifted Francis from his cot without him crying out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Someone carried him down two flights of stairs through the dark house, out into the June rain, across the garden to the outdoor privy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Someone held a small boy while slashing his throat so deeply he was nearly to capitated.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Someone wrapped his body in his own nursery blanket and stuffed him into the privy vault.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Francis Savorkent was three years and ten months old.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He existed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He had a personality, routines, favourite foods, a stuffed rabbit he couldn't sleep without, and people who cared for him.
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[SPEAKER_01]: His life mattered beyond the mystery of his death.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Someone murdered him anyway.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Friday night, June 29, 1860.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Rain had fallen throughout the week, turning the gardens around Roadhill House muddy and dark.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The village of Road had no streetlights.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the countryside, night meant absolute blackness, broken only by oil lamps and candles inside homes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By nine o'clock, most windows in the village showed no light at all.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Inside Roadhill House, the family followed their evening routine.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Samuel Kent read in his study.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His wife Mary attended to household matters.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The older children, Constance, age 16, and William, age 15, home from boarding school for summer holidays, or somewhere in the house.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The three young children from the second marriage have been put to bed hours earlier.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Elizabeth Gough, the nurse, prepared the nursery for the night.
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[SPEAKER_00]: baby Evelyn slept in her cot beside him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The two cot set together in the nursery room.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The door connecting the nursery to Mr. and Mrs. Kent's bedroom stood partially open as it did every night.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One by one the household went to bed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Candles were extinguished.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Lambs were turned down.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Servants retired to their quarters
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[SPEAKER_00]: The family disappeared into their separate rooms.
16:48.289 --> 16:53.797
[SPEAKER_00]: Separate because even in sleep, the first family and second family didn't mix.
16:55.379 --> 17:00.968
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometime between midnight and five o'clock in the morning, someone entered that nursery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They moved silently, no doors creaked, no footsteps alerted a lizard with golf, sleeping feet away.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They lifted Francis from his cot, without waking him or his sister.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They carried the boy, still and his nightclothes, possibly wrapped in the flannel blanket from his cot, through the nursery door.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Down the hallway, down the servant staircase, two flights, a ground floor.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They unlocked the drawing room door from the inside.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Unlatched the window.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Cross 30 yards of dark garden in the June rain to reach the outdoor privy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They had matches with them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Several were found later in the privy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Place there beforehand so the killer could see in the pitch darkness.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Inside that privy, they slid,
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[SPEAKER_00]: the cut went so deep, it nearly severed his head from his body.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Whether he woke, whether he cried out, whether he knew what was happening, these questions have no answers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What's certain is that he died quickly from that wound.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His blood spilled onto the privy floor.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The killer wrapped his body in the blanket and shoved it down into the vault beneath the toilet seat.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then they went back to the house.
18:35.158 --> 18:38.487
[SPEAKER_00]: We locked the door, climbed back upstairs.
18:39.670 --> 18:41.074
[SPEAKER_00]: We turned to their bed.
18:42.860 --> 19:05.249
[SPEAKER_00]: no one heard anything, not Elizabeth Gough sleeping in the nursery, not Mr. and Mrs. Kent sleeping in the connecting bedroom with the door partially open, not the other servants in the quarters, not Constance or William in their rooms elsewhere in the house.
19:05.269 --> 19:09.154
[SPEAKER_00]: The house full of people slept through a child's murder,
19:10.754 --> 19:18.705
[SPEAKER_00]: When Don broke on Saturday, June 30th, 1860, Road Hill House looked exactly as it always did.
19:18.725 --> 19:31.842
[SPEAKER_00]: Three stories of respectable Victorian architecture, locked gates, high walls, a factory inspectors family beginning another ordinary weekend.
19:33.043 --> 19:39.512
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the nursery, on the second floor,
19:41.568 --> 19:45.633
[SPEAKER_00]: Elizabeth Goff woke around 715 on Saturday morning.
19:46.954 --> 19:48.416
[SPEAKER_00]: Her routine was always the same.
19:49.216 --> 19:56.725
[SPEAKER_00]: Check on the children, prepare them for the day, maintain the orderly schedule that kept the nursery running smoothly.
19:58.186 --> 20:02.852
[SPEAKER_00]: She rose from her bed in the nursery, and looked at the two cats beside her.
20:04.694 --> 20:05.935
[SPEAKER_00]: Evelyn slept peacefully.
20:07.337 --> 20:09.499
[SPEAKER_00]: Francis' cot was empty.
20:10.762 --> 20:13.826
[SPEAKER_00]: Goth assumed someone had taken him downstairs early.
20:13.866 --> 20:18.954
[SPEAKER_00]: Mr. or Mrs. Kent sometimes brought Francis to their room in the morning.
20:20.396 --> 20:24.902
[SPEAKER_00]: She checked the connecting door to the parent's bedroom, the door was closed.
20:26.264 --> 20:29.669
[SPEAKER_00]: She remembered it being partially open when they'd gone to bed.
20:29.729 --> 20:34.035
[SPEAKER_00]: That was unusual, but not alarming.
20:35.247 --> 20:37.690
[SPEAKER_00]: She went downstairs to look for Francis.
20:38.792 --> 20:43.679
[SPEAKER_00]: He wasn't in the drawing room, not in the dining room, not with his parents.
20:45.141 --> 20:48.405
[SPEAKER_00]: Gough asked the household staff if they'd seen the boy.
20:49.467 --> 20:50.047
[SPEAKER_00]: No one had.
20:51.489 --> 20:56.696
[SPEAKER_00]: Ms. Kent came down, still in her nightclothes, where was Seville?
20:57.998 --> 20:59.901
[SPEAKER_00]: The confusion turned to concern.
21:00.802 --> 21:02.925
[SPEAKER_00]: The concern turned to panic.
21:04.036 --> 21:07.140
[SPEAKER_00]: By eight o'clock, the entire household was searching.
21:08.621 --> 21:09.703
[SPEAKER_00]: Every room checked.
21:10.504 --> 21:12.046
[SPEAKER_00]: Every closet opened.
21:13.167 --> 21:16.351
[SPEAKER_00]: Every space, a three-year-old boy, might hide or wander.
21:17.692 --> 21:18.733
[SPEAKER_00]: He wasn't in the house.
21:19.594 --> 21:24.220
[SPEAKER_00]: Samuel Kint searched the gardens, the grounds, the outbuildings.
21:25.702 --> 21:32.710
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone noticed the drawing room window was unlasted from the inside.
21:33.770 --> 21:39.519
[SPEAKER_00]: had someone taken him through that window, the possibility of kidnapping emerged.
21:40.861 --> 21:44.287
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps someone had broken in, though that made no sense.
21:45.389 --> 21:51.238
[SPEAKER_00]: The window was locked from the inside, meaning whoever opened it had been in the house.
21:52.585 --> 22:03.923
[SPEAKER_00]: Two and a half hours passed, servants, family members, neighbors, who'd been called to help, everyone searching, increasingly frantic.
22:05.505 --> 22:19.808
[SPEAKER_00]: At approximately a quarter to ten that morning, Thomas Banger, the husband to the house made, checked the outdoor privy at the back of the garden.
22:21.256 --> 22:29.047
[SPEAKER_00]: Francis Seville-Kin's body lay in the privy vault, wrapped in a flannel blanket, his small body was cold.
22:30.469 --> 22:31.891
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd been dead for hours.
22:33.413 --> 22:38.400
[SPEAKER_00]: Bangor would later testify to details that made the horror sound somehow worse.
22:40.042 --> 22:51.178
[SPEAKER_00]: The boy's face, he said, looked quite pleasant, his little eyes were shut as if they were sleeping, but the wound to his throat made clear what had happened
22:52.475 --> 23:08.430
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone had held Francis Seville Kent, a three-year-old boy who should have been waking up in his cot that morning, and cut his throat with a sharp blade, enough to go through the skin and muscle and windpipe, almost to the spine.
23:10.352 --> 23:16.198
[SPEAKER_00]: The household erupted into chaos, someone ran for the village constable.
23:17.639 --> 23:20.322
[SPEAKER_00]: Miss Kent became nearly inconsolable,
23:21.652 --> 23:27.398
[SPEAKER_00]: Samuel Kent stood quiet and reserved, appearing more agitated than sad.
23:28.940 --> 23:33.344
[SPEAKER_00]: According to witnesses, the servants clustered together, horrified.
23:34.706 --> 23:40.012
[SPEAKER_00]: Constance and William came down from their rooms to learn their half-brother have been murdered.
23:41.453 --> 23:45.077
[SPEAKER_00]: By late morning, constable urge arrived from the village.
23:46.238 --> 23:56.727
[SPEAKER_00]: by afternoon superintendent John Foley, from travel bridge, a taken charge of what would become one of Victorian England's most notorious murder investigations.
23:58.248 --> 24:06.035
[SPEAKER_00]: But in those first hours, one fact became increasingly clear to everyone standing in the garden of Roadhill House.
24:07.116 --> 24:15.283
[SPEAKER_00]: Looking at the outdoor privy, thirty yards from the house, where a child's body had just
24:16.445 --> 24:18.127
[SPEAKER_00]: The doors had been locked all night.
24:19.368 --> 24:22.691
[SPEAKER_00]: The drawing room window was unlapped from the inside.
24:23.832 --> 24:26.735
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously staged to suggest a break-in.
24:28.337 --> 24:38.267
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone had known exactly where Francis slept, how to move through the house without waking the servants, where to find matches to light the privy.
24:39.548 --> 24:44.713
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone had wrapped him in his own blanket and carried him silently through the dark
24:46.010 --> 24:48.574
[SPEAKER_00]: the killer, lived in Roadhill House.
24:50.917 --> 24:53.080
[SPEAKER_00]: Constable Urch had no forensic training.
24:54.142 --> 24:55.784
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody in 1860 did.
24:56.786 --> 24:59.790
[SPEAKER_00]: The science of crime seen investigation didn't exist yet.
25:01.112 --> 25:05.098
[SPEAKER_00]: Fingerprinting wouldn't become standard practice for another 40 years.
25:06.293 --> 25:08.536
[SPEAKER_00]: DNA analysis was a century away.
25:09.577 --> 25:11.599
[SPEAKER_00]: Blood typing wasn't understood.
25:13.041 --> 25:16.225
[SPEAKER_00]: Detectives were a new and somewhat suspect profession.
25:17.386 --> 25:23.594
[SPEAKER_00]: Scotland Yard had been founded only 18 years earlier, with just eight original detective officers.
25:25.155 --> 25:33.145
[SPEAKER_00]: Urch stood in the garden of Roteal House, looking at a murder child and had no idea how
25:34.373 --> 25:37.978
[SPEAKER_00]: He walked through the crime scene without preserving evidence.
25:39.340 --> 25:43.686
[SPEAKER_00]: Multiple people had already contaminated the privy where the body was found.
25:44.987 --> 25:50.735
[SPEAKER_00]: The nursery had been thoroughly searched before anyone thought to protect it as the scene of the abduction.
25:52.157 --> 25:59.487
[SPEAKER_00]: Footprints in the muddy garden, if they existed, were trampled by the dozens of people who'd searched the grounds that morning.
26:01.002 --> 26:06.171
[SPEAKER_00]: Superintendent John Foley arrived from travel bridge to take over the investigation.
26:07.593 --> 26:10.979
[SPEAKER_00]: He had more authority than urge, but no more training.
26:12.301 --> 26:13.744
[SPEAKER_00]: And Foley had another problem.
26:14.585 --> 26:20.395
[SPEAKER_00]: Samuel Kent was a government factory inspector, a member of the respectable middle class.
26:20.375 --> 26:34.478
[SPEAKER_00]: Foley would have to try carefully, accusing a man of Ken's position of murdering his own son, or protecting whoever did, which career suicide, unless the evidence was overwhelming.
26:36.221 --> 26:45.977
[SPEAKER_00]: So, Foley focused on the servants, the inquest opened within days, the coroner questioned household staff under oath,
26:47.223 --> 26:50.872
[SPEAKER_00]: Elizabeth Gough, the nurse, faced intense scrutiny.
26:51.875 --> 26:53.178
[SPEAKER_00]: She'd been sleeping in the nursery.
26:53.880 --> 26:55.123
[SPEAKER_00]: She'd put Francis to bed.
26:56.125 --> 26:57.830
[SPEAKER_00]: She should have heard something.
26:59.113 --> 27:03.223
[SPEAKER_00]: How could someone carry a child from the room without waking her?
27:04.553 --> 27:07.441
[SPEAKER_00]: Gough had no answers that satisfied anyone.
27:08.564 --> 27:11.772
[SPEAKER_00]: Her testimony was consistent, but unconvincing.
27:12.996 --> 27:15.041
[SPEAKER_00]: She'd slept through it all, she said.
27:16.425 --> 27:17.247
[SPEAKER_00]: She heard nothing.
27:18.779 --> 27:25.065
[SPEAKER_00]: The laundry Sarah Cox came forward with evidence that should have changed the investigation direction.
27:26.547 --> 27:30.010
[SPEAKER_00]: She reported that one of Constant Kent's night gowns was missing.
27:31.311 --> 27:36.777
[SPEAKER_00]: She counted three night gowns before the wash and found only two afterward.
27:38.098 --> 27:39.159
[SPEAKER_00]: One had disappeared.
27:41.101 --> 27:46.947
[SPEAKER_00]: Constable Urch had actually found a bloodstained night gown in the house during his initial search,
27:48.395 --> 27:55.642
[SPEAKER_00]: When he showed it to Superintendent Foley, Foley dismissed it as a minstrel blood, nothing to do with the murder.
27:57.084 --> 28:01.868
[SPEAKER_00]: The night gown vanished from evidence, no one could say what happened to it.
28:03.250 --> 28:10.117
[SPEAKER_00]: Samuel Kent's razor went missing, then turned up clean, no one investigated why.
28:10.137 --> 28:18.385
[SPEAKER_00]: The inquest dragged on through July.
28:19.698 --> 28:25.047
[SPEAKER_00]: Constance and William were interviewed informally, not under formal examination.
28:26.509 --> 28:36.787
[SPEAKER_00]: The focus remained on servants and the possibility of an intruder, despite mounting evidence that someone inside the family knew exactly what happened.
28:38.369 --> 28:44.119
[SPEAKER_00]: On July 27, 1860, the inquest jury delivered their verdict.
28:45.500 --> 28:53.751
[SPEAKER_00]: Francis Seville Kent had been willfully murdered by person or person's unknown, the verdict meant nothing.
28:55.293 --> 28:57.636
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone knew the killer was inside the house.
28:59.178 --> 29:04.926
[SPEAKER_00]: The jury just couldn't bring itself to name a member of a respectable family as a murderer.
29:06.307 --> 29:08.189
[SPEAKER_00]: public outrage, grew.
29:09.691 --> 29:12.575
[SPEAKER_00]: Newspapers across England demanded answers.
29:13.897 --> 29:19.644
[SPEAKER_00]: How could a child be murdered in a locked house full of people and no one face justice?
29:21.106 --> 29:25.632
[SPEAKER_00]: How could local police protect a family simply because they had social standing?
29:27.080 --> 29:29.646
[SPEAKER_00]: the pressure forced the homophist to act.
29:30.909 --> 29:36.922
[SPEAKER_00]: In mid-July, they sent someone from Scotland yard, who wouldn't worry about offending the local gentry.
29:38.286 --> 29:45.983
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone who'd follow the evidence or guardless of class, they sent detective inspector, Jack Witcher.
29:48.123 --> 29:53.894
[SPEAKER_00]: Detective Inspector Jack Witcher arrived at Roadhill House in mid-July, 1860.
29:54.355 --> 29:56.960
[SPEAKER_00]: He was 46 years old.
29:58.483 --> 30:06.739
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the eight original Scotland-yard detective officers appointed in 1842. colleagues called him Jack.
30:08.086 --> 30:10.810
[SPEAKER_00]: The newspapers called him Prince of Detectives.
30:12.252 --> 30:26.972
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd built his reputation, solving impossible cases through methodical observation, forensic attention to detail, in an understanding of criminal psychology that was decades ahead of its time.
30:26.952 --> 30:29.157
[SPEAKER_00]: Witcher came from a working-class origins.
30:30.400 --> 30:31.763
[SPEAKER_00]: His father had been a gardener.
30:33.226 --> 30:39.561
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd risen through the metropolitan police through scale and intelligence, not family connections,
30:40.790 --> 30:43.354
[SPEAKER_00]: that background made him brilliant at his job.
30:44.776 --> 30:50.464
[SPEAKER_00]: He understood how criminal thought because he'd grown up around people who struggled to survive.
30:51.846 --> 30:55.190
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew desperation and jealousy and rage.
30:56.252 --> 31:04.924
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the summer of 1860, investigating the Kent family murder, his working-class background
31:06.220 --> 31:14.629
[SPEAKER_00]: which are spent five days at Roadhill House examining the crime scene, interviewing servants, reviewing evidence.
31:15.870 --> 31:18.413
[SPEAKER_00]: He reconstructed the murder night timeline.
31:19.654 --> 31:21.056
[SPEAKER_00]: He noted the missing night gown.
31:22.037 --> 31:24.419
[SPEAKER_00]: He observed how the family interacted.
31:25.460 --> 31:33.949
[SPEAKER_00]: He paid attention to details that local police had
31:35.414 --> 31:37.678
[SPEAKER_00]: The crime required inside knowledge.
31:39.120 --> 31:49.396
[SPEAKER_00]: The killer knew where Francis slept, knew the house layout, knew when servants would be asleep, knew where to find matches to light the privy in the dark.
31:50.819 --> 31:55.446
[SPEAKER_00]: The missing night gown suggested someone who needed to hide blood stain clothing.
31:56.848 --> 32:03.058
[SPEAKER_00]: The careful staging of the drawing room window showed sophistication and trying to mislead investigators.
32:04.304 --> 32:06.667
[SPEAKER_00]: which are identified as prime suspect.
32:07.809 --> 32:14.739
[SPEAKER_00]: Constance Kent, 16 years old, the neglected daughter from the first marriage.
32:16.061 --> 32:24.793
[SPEAKER_00]: The girl who'd run away from home three years earlier, the one who'd been systematically rejected in favor of the second family.
32:26.022 --> 32:32.528
[SPEAKER_00]: The one who'd hidden cut hair, and boys clothing, and that same outdoor privy years before using it for murder.
32:33.970 --> 32:44.800
[SPEAKER_00]: She had motive, she had opportunity, she had the inside knowledge, and she'd shown capacity for deception during the 1857 runaway attempt.
32:46.522 --> 32:51.507
[SPEAKER_00]: Which are arrested, Constance Kent, on July 20, 1860,
32:52.837 --> 32:55.019
[SPEAKER_00]: The public erupted and fury.
32:56.040 --> 33:02.507
[SPEAKER_00]: How dare this working-class policemen accuse a young lady of good breeding of such a heinous crime.
33:04.308 --> 33:06.310
[SPEAKER_00]: Constance came from a respectable family.
33:07.171 --> 33:09.894
[SPEAKER_00]: She was educated, refined, proper.
33:10.695 --> 33:19.924
[SPEAKER_00]: The very idea that she could slit a three-year-olds throat was monstrous slander, from a man
33:21.170 --> 33:27.481
[SPEAKER_00]: The magistrate released Constance after questioning there wasn't enough evidence to hold her.
33:28.803 --> 33:30.526
[SPEAKER_00]: The missing night gown was lost.
33:31.808 --> 33:35.795
[SPEAKER_00]: The circumstantial case couldn't overcome Victorian-class prejudice.
33:37.258 --> 33:42.687
[SPEAKER_00]: The gentleman's daughter simply couldn't be a murderer regardless of what evidence suggested.
33:42.727 --> 33:45.692
[SPEAKER_00]: Which a return to London
33:46.938 --> 33:49.041
[SPEAKER_00]: the newspapers savaged him.
33:50.282 --> 33:52.826
[SPEAKER_00]: Local police celebrated his failure.
33:54.308 --> 33:58.814
[SPEAKER_00]: The Kent family retreated behind their walls and their respectability.
34:00.096 --> 34:01.257
[SPEAKER_00]: The case went cold.
34:02.499 --> 34:06.845
[SPEAKER_00]: Francis Seville, Kent's murder, remained technically unsolved.
34:08.327 --> 34:10.009
[SPEAKER_00]: Constance went back to her life.
34:11.170 --> 34:23.931
[SPEAKER_00]: five years would pass before the truth emerged, not through investigation, but through a confession born from religious torment that Witcher could never have predicted.
34:24.957 --> 34:27.301
[SPEAKER_00]: Jack Witcher had been right all along.
34:27.321 --> 34:30.806
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd solved the case in just five days.
34:32.148 --> 34:37.216
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd identified the killer, understood the motive, we constructed the crime.
34:38.257 --> 34:49.294
[SPEAKER_00]: But in 1860 Victorian England, a working-class detective couldn't accuse a young lady of murder and survive, and it would cost him everything.
34:52.531 --> 35:01.099
[SPEAKER_00]: until next time, remember, a house full of people slept through a child's murder, but the walls couldn't keep the secret forever.
35:02.220 --> 35:10.188
[SPEAKER_00]: Three-year-old Francis Seville Kent died in the dark of a June night, because hatred had festered too long in silence.
35:11.329 --> 35:15.493
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes the most dangerous monsters don't break in through windows.
35:16.474 --> 35:19.277
[SPEAKER_00]: They already live inside the house.
35:20.879 --> 35:22.200
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening, friend.
00:03.018 --> 00:17.056
[SPEAKER_00]: England in 1860 was a nation obsessed with respectability, gas lamps flickered in drawing rooms across the countryside, casting long shadows on walls, paper, and floral prints, and family portraits.
00:18.077 --> 00:27.068
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind heavy curtains and locked doors, Victorian families performed their daily rituals of propriety, tea, and social hierarchy.
00:28.313 --> 00:32.942
[SPEAKER_00]: The outside world saw polished brass door knockers and manicure gardens.
00:34.164 --> 00:38.333
[SPEAKER_00]: Inside, secrets, festered in silence.
00:38.353 --> 00:46.288
[SPEAKER_00]: Roadhill House stood three stories tall in the village of Road, Wiltshire, about a hundred miles west of London.
00:47.163 --> 00:59.219
[SPEAKER_00]: The mansion belonged to Samuel Seville Kent, a factory inspector for the home office, who earned roughly 400 pounds annually, inspecting compliance with child labor laws.
01:00.561 --> 01:14.419
[SPEAKER_00]: He lived there with his second wife, three young children, and two teenage children from his first marriage, who came home from boarding school for the summer.
01:15.800 --> 01:26.413
[SPEAKER_00]: high walls and locked gates surrounded the property, an outdoor privy, or outhouse, sat in the back garden, thirty yards from the house.
01:28.015 --> 01:34.403
[SPEAKER_00]: On June 30th, 1860, those walls couldn't keep a secret any longer.
01:34.443 --> 01:39.630
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello friend, welcome to foul play.
01:41.298 --> 02:06.867
[SPEAKER_00]: In the early morning hours of that June day, someone entered the nursery on the second floor of Roadhill House, lifted three-year-old Francis Seville Kent from his cane caught, carried him down two flights of stairs across the garden and the dark, and killed him, and that outdoor privy.
02:08.129 --> 02:16.085
[SPEAKER_00]: His small body was stuffed into that privy vault beneath the toilet seat, wrapped in a flannel blanket from his own nursery.
02:17.608 --> 02:29.732
[SPEAKER_00]: Francis was called Savile by his family, his father's favorite child, a pleasant boy who went to bed around eight o'clock every evening and woke up smiling.
02:31.265 --> 02:37.991
[SPEAKER_00]: The killer came from inside the house that much was certain no one had broken in.
02:38.972 --> 02:49.942
[SPEAKER_00]: The doors were locked, the windows latched from the inside, one of the nine people sleeping in road hill house that night had committed murder.
02:51.063 --> 03:01.052
[SPEAKER_00]: And it would take five years, a destroyed detective's career, in a confession born from
03:04.542 --> 03:12.932
[SPEAKER_01]: To understand how murder entered road hillhouse, you have to understand how the Kent family broken half long before that June night.
03:14.026 --> 03:20.819
[SPEAKER_01]: Samuel Saval Kent, married his first wife, Mary Ann Windows, on June 8, 1829.
03:22.803 --> 03:29.716
[SPEAKER_01]: She came from a prosperous London family, a father-owned successful coach-making business with money and connections in the city.
03:30.898 --> 03:37.350
[SPEAKER_01]: The marriage produced 10 children between 1829 and 1845, four died in infancy.
03:38.562 --> 03:45.951
[SPEAKER_01]: Mary Anne endured pregnancy after pregnancy year after year until her body and her mind began failing.
03:46.011 --> 03:53.560
[SPEAKER_01]: By the early 1840s Mary Anne suffered from what Victorian doctors called bewilderment of intellect.
03:54.641 --> 03:57.424
[SPEAKER_01]: She experienced delusions couldn't care for her children.
03:58.606 --> 04:03.071
[SPEAKER_01]: Samuel hired a governess to manage the home and raise the surviving children.
04:03.812 --> 04:08.417
[SPEAKER_01]: Mary Anne, Alice, Elizabeth, Edward,
04:08.397 --> 04:18.415
[SPEAKER_01]: The governess was named Mary Drew Pratt, 24 years old, attractive, capable and younger than the exhausted old wife upstairs.
04:19.598 --> 04:23.364
[SPEAKER_01]: Mary Pratt became mistress of the house in every respect except name.
04:24.747 --> 04:31.840
[SPEAKER_01]: Neighbors in the wheelchair community gossiped about the arrangement, the scandal forced the family to move repeatedly.
04:31.820 --> 04:40.454
[SPEAKER_01]: When Mary and Kent died in May 1852 at the age of 44, Samuel observed barely a year of mourning.
04:41.656 --> 04:51.111
[SPEAKER_01]: He married Mary Pratt in August 1853, 15 months after his first wife death, he made his children's former governess, their new mother.
04:52.103 --> 04:58.954
[SPEAKER_01]: Nine-year-old Constance Emily Kent served as Bridesmaider her father's wedding to the woman who had replaced her mother.
05:00.075 --> 05:01.978
[SPEAKER_01]: What followed was systematic erasure.
05:02.619 --> 05:13.977
[SPEAKER_01]: The second Mrs. Kent bore three children in quick succession, Mary Amelia in 1854, Francis Savall in August 1856,
05:13.957 --> 05:16.040
[SPEAKER_01]: and Evelyn in 1858.
05:16.120 --> 05:19.666
[SPEAKER_01]: These three children became the favored family.
05:20.347 --> 05:23.912
[SPEAKER_01]: They received their parents' attention, affection and resources.
05:24.894 --> 05:28.780
[SPEAKER_01]: The first wife surviving children became inconveniences to be hidden away.
05:29.621 --> 05:35.050
[SPEAKER_01]: Constances older siblings had left home by this point, escaping to marriages or other towns.
05:35.971 --> 05:41.820
[SPEAKER_01]: That left constants and her brother William, teenagers who spent most of
05:41.800 --> 05:51.692
[SPEAKER_01]: The household divided into two families living under one roof, the loved children and the discarded children, the mothers children and the ghost mothers children.
05:52.769 --> 05:57.578
[SPEAKER_01]: Constance watched her father lavish attention on Francis, they had never given her.
05:58.740 --> 06:00.663
[SPEAKER_01]: She watched her step-mom doubt on the boy.
06:01.425 --> 06:04.090
[SPEAKER_01]: She slept in a different wing of the house than her half siblings.
06:04.931 --> 06:05.993
[SPEAKER_01]: She ate different food.
06:06.795 --> 06:10.361
[SPEAKER_01]: She wore hand-me-downs while Francis wore clothing commissioned from town.
06:11.523 --> 06:16.853
[SPEAKER_01]: When she came home from boarding school for some holidays, she was tolerated not welcomed.
06:16.833 --> 06:23.990
[SPEAKER_01]: The Summer Constance turned 13, 1857, when William was 11, the two siblings ran away.
06:25.052 --> 06:33.171
[SPEAKER_01]: They cut their hair short and disguised themselves as boys, planning to reach Bristol port 40 miles away, and some else sail away to a new life.
06:34.703 --> 06:38.431
[SPEAKER_01]: They made it nine miles to Bath, before being caught at a hotel.
06:39.573 --> 06:42.078
[SPEAKER_01]: Samuel Kent beat them both when they were returned home.
06:42.880 --> 06:45.545
[SPEAKER_01]: Constance was locked in the cell of a two days as punishment.
06:46.087 --> 06:50.215
[SPEAKER_01]: She hid the cut hair and boys closed in the outdoor privy, at the back of the garden.
06:50.796 --> 06:54.484
[SPEAKER_01]: The same privy where three years later she would hide something else entirely.
06:55.578 --> 06:58.904
[SPEAKER_01]: By June 1860, Constance was 16 years old.
06:59.685 --> 07:06.556
[SPEAKER_01]: Home from boarding school for the summer, watching her half-brother Francis, receiving the love she'd been denied her entire life.
07:07.398 --> 07:11.665
[SPEAKER_01]: Living in a house where her stepmother had systematically erased her real mother's memory.
07:12.466 --> 07:14.650
[SPEAKER_01]: No portraits remained of Mary Ann Kent.
07:15.431 --> 07:17.755
[SPEAKER_01]: No mention of the first wife was permitted.
07:18.427 --> 07:22.654
[SPEAKER_01]: Womanhood born six children simply ceased to exist in the family narrative.
07:23.756 --> 07:26.680
[SPEAKER_01]: Constance endured a father who saw her as a disappointment.
07:27.742 --> 07:41.464
[SPEAKER_01]: Victorian England believed that respectable families didn't produce murderers, that young ladies of good breeding simply didn't commit violence, that the closed doors and high walls of homes like road hill house protected innocence and virtue.
07:41.444 --> 07:50.625
[SPEAKER_01]: But doors don't stop rage that's been building for 16 years, walls don't contain the kind of hatred that grows from systematic rejection.
07:52.048 --> 07:54.213
[SPEAKER_01]: The Kent family wasn't a family.
07:55.496 --> 07:58.002
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a pressure cooker waiting to explode.
08:00.766 --> 08:08.581
[SPEAKER_01]: Before Francis becomes a case file, or a plot point in English criminal history, he deserves to be remembered as a child who existed.
08:09.844 --> 08:20.665
[SPEAKER_01]: Francis' Saval Kent was born in August dating 56, the eldest son of Samuel Kent's second marriage, and the boy his father had always wanted from his first.
08:20.645 --> 08:32.683
[SPEAKER_01]: By June 1860, he was a healthy child who ran through the gardens of road hill or house, climbed on furniture when no one was watching, and asked constant questions the way children do at that age.
08:33.965 --> 08:40.235
[SPEAKER_01]: Elizabeth Gough, the family's 22 year old nurse made, dressed him in the day clothing that had been laid out the night before.
08:41.216 --> 08:48.407
[SPEAKER_01]: He wore a child's frog, boys at age still wore dresses in Victorian England,
08:48.387 --> 08:53.693
[SPEAKER_01]: Button boots that he was learning to fasten himself, though he needed help with the top buttons.
08:54.795 --> 08:57.057
[SPEAKER_01]: Breakfast was brought to the nursery at 8 o'clock.
08:57.758 --> 09:01.963
[SPEAKER_01]: Prances 8 porridge most mornings, sometimes bred with butter and jam.
09:02.584 --> 09:05.107
[SPEAKER_01]: He drank milk from a small cup he could hold himself.
09:05.888 --> 09:12.876
[SPEAKER_01]: He was learning to use cutlery properly, which meant meals could be messy and required patience from Elizabeth Gough.
09:12.856 --> 09:16.063
[SPEAKER_01]: He liked sweet things, jam, cake, anything was sugar.
09:16.845 --> 09:19.370
[SPEAKER_01]: He didn't like vegetables much, but children do.
09:20.573 --> 09:25.865
[SPEAKER_01]: Most mornings where the permitting Elizabeth took Francis and Evelyn outside to play in the garden.
09:26.807 --> 09:31.337
[SPEAKER_01]: Francis liked being outdoors, he collected stones and showed them to anyone who would look.
09:31.891 --> 09:35.096
[SPEAKER_01]: See this one, it's my favourite, no wait, no wait this one.
09:36.038 --> 09:40.965
[SPEAKER_01]: He chased butterflies without success, he talked to the family dog, though they didn't own a dog.
09:41.807 --> 09:45.072
[SPEAKER_01]: He simply decided that dogs existed somewhere and should be spoken to.
09:45.132 --> 09:48.938
[SPEAKER_01]: Three-year-olds operate on their own logic.
09:48.918 --> 09:54.850
[SPEAKER_01]: His mother visited the nursery several times each day, more the most upper-class Victorian mothers would.
09:55.832 --> 10:01.102
[SPEAKER_01]: Mary drew Kent, dought it on her eldest son, in ways she would never doubt on her stepchildren.
10:02.204 --> 10:05.070
[SPEAKER_01]: She held him, read to him, and sangler lobis.
10:06.063 --> 10:08.187
[SPEAKER_01]: Francis called her mummo without hesitation.
10:08.888 --> 10:10.791
[SPEAKER_01]: He reached for her whenever she entered the room.
10:11.733 --> 10:13.777
[SPEAKER_01]: Asked her to stay longer when she prepared to leave.
10:14.798 --> 10:16.481
[SPEAKER_01]: His father visited less frequently.
10:17.623 --> 10:23.734
[SPEAKER_01]: Samuel Kent's work kept him away from home for days at a time, expecting factories across England.
10:23.714 --> 10:32.462
[SPEAKER_01]: But when Samuel was home, Francis was his clear favourite in ways that must have cut constants and William like knives every time they witnessed it.
10:33.623 --> 10:36.165
[SPEAKER_01]: Samuel called him Savall, never Francis.
10:37.106 --> 10:39.168
[SPEAKER_01]: The boy would sit on his father's knee in the study.
10:40.209 --> 10:45.033
[SPEAKER_01]: Samuel taught him to count ten which Francis could do if he reminded him to skip nine.
10:46.414 --> 10:52.540
[SPEAKER_01]: He bought him small gifts from his travels, a wooden horse, a painted top, a small
10:53.785 --> 11:03.021
[SPEAKER_01]: The household staff liked Francis, he wasn't a difficult child, no worse than any three-year-old, which meant occasional tantrums when tired but nothing remarkable.
11:04.123 --> 11:10.674
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, please and thank you and reminded, he shared toys with his sister sometimes, though he had to be encouraged.
11:11.536 --> 11:15.743
[SPEAKER_01]: He cried when he fell down or felt sick, normal childhood responses.
11:15.723 --> 11:22.430
[SPEAKER_01]: Round four in the afternoon, Francis had had his tea, more bread sometimes cake milk again.
11:23.551 --> 11:29.396
[SPEAKER_01]: Then came his favourite part of the day, an evening walk around the gardens with Elizabeth Goff before sunset.
11:30.137 --> 11:30.998
[SPEAKER_01]: He held her hand.
11:31.679 --> 11:33.380
[SPEAKER_01]: He pointed at birds and clouds.
11:33.981 --> 11:42.169
[SPEAKER_01]: He picked flowers usually the ones Mary Kent is specifically asked him not to pick and brought them back to show his mother anyway.
11:42.149 --> 11:44.891
[SPEAKER_01]: his bedtime routine began around 7 o'clock.
11:45.632 --> 11:48.375
[SPEAKER_01]: Bath water was brought to the nursery in a large picture.
11:49.155 --> 11:53.499
[SPEAKER_01]: Elizabeth Gough washed Francis and Evelyn in a tiny tub by the fire.
11:54.200 --> 12:00.526
[SPEAKER_01]: She filled it just deep enough that Francis could sit without water going over his shoulders, warm but not too hot.
12:01.446 --> 12:04.069
[SPEAKER_01]: She washed his dark hair with soap that smelled of lavender.
12:05.270 --> 12:12.156
[SPEAKER_01]: She tried him with towels and dressed him in his night shirt, soft flannel that had been warmed near the fire, and combed his
12:12.136 --> 12:23.318
[SPEAKER_01]: Had a wicker cane caught with a thin mattress and several blankets, he slept with a small stuffed rabbit that had been given to him when he was younger, he couldn't sleep without it.
12:24.700 --> 12:26.304
[SPEAKER_01]: His mother came to kiss him good night.
12:27.065 --> 12:28.027
[SPEAKER_01]: She surprised with him.
12:28.648 --> 12:31.714
[SPEAKER_01]: The simple children's prayers Victorian households required.
12:32.993 --> 12:36.718
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
12:37.839 --> 12:41.584
[SPEAKER_01]: Francis repeated the words without really understanding them the way children do.
12:42.865 --> 12:52.858
[SPEAKER_01]: He asked for water, he asked to stay up longer, he negotiated like a three-year-old, no and the answer would be no, but trying anyway because sometimes trying worked.
12:52.838 --> 13:02.570
[SPEAKER_01]: Way to clock he was in his cot, Elizabeth Goss sat in the rocking chair nearby until he fell asleep, which usually took 15 or 20 minutes.
13:03.511 --> 13:19.251
[SPEAKER_01]: He talked to himself quietly, told himself stories, asked questions to no one in particular, like, where the stars come from, why is night time dark, then his voice would slow, soften, and silence.
13:20.648 --> 13:23.775
[SPEAKER_01]: He slept in that nursery every night to his short life.
13:24.356 --> 13:35.940
[SPEAKER_01]: The room was familiar, his blankets, his toys scattered on the floor, his stuffed rabbit, the small table where he took his meals, the window that looked out over the garden where he played.
13:37.304 --> 13:47.236
[SPEAKER_01]: On the night of June the 29th, 1860, Francis Savorkent went to bed at 8 o'clock as usual, Elizabeth got sat with him until he fell asleep.
13:48.437 --> 13:54.264
[SPEAKER_01]: She checked on him once more around 1030, before retiring to her own small room adjacent to the nursery.
13:55.525 --> 14:01.492
[SPEAKER_01]: The door between the rooms stood open, as it did every night, so she could hear if Francis or Evelyn woke.
14:02.694 --> 14:06.518
[SPEAKER_01]: Francis was sleeping
14:08.472 --> 14:12.541
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometime between midnight and five in the morning, someone entered that nursery.
14:13.583 --> 14:16.669
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone lifted Francis from his cot without him crying out.
14:18.012 --> 14:26.650
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone carried him down two flights of stairs through the dark house, out into the June rain, across the garden to the outdoor privy.
14:28.030 --> 14:33.395
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone held a small boy while slashing his throat so deeply he was nearly to capitated.
14:34.576 --> 14:39.400
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone wrapped his body in his own nursery blanket and stuffed him into the privy vault.
14:40.722 --> 14:44.065
[SPEAKER_01]: Francis Savorkent was three years and ten months old.
14:45.246 --> 14:45.927
[SPEAKER_01]: He existed.
14:46.647 --> 14:55.135
[SPEAKER_01]: He had a personality, routines, favourite foods, a stuffed rabbit he couldn't sleep without, and people who cared for him.
14:55.115 --> 14:59.160
[SPEAKER_01]: His life mattered beyond the mystery of his death.
15:00.722 --> 15:02.103
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone murdered him anyway.
15:05.668 --> 15:08.731
[SPEAKER_00]: Friday night, June 29, 1860.
15:10.593 --> 15:16.641
[SPEAKER_00]: Rain had fallen throughout the week, turning the gardens around Roadhill House muddy and dark.
15:18.082 --> 15:20.245
[SPEAKER_00]: The village of Road had no streetlights.
15:21.473 --> 15:28.922
[SPEAKER_00]: In the countryside, night meant absolute blackness, broken only by oil lamps and candles inside homes.
15:30.303 --> 15:34.468
[SPEAKER_00]: By nine o'clock, most windows in the village showed no light at all.
15:36.090 --> 15:40.255
[SPEAKER_00]: Inside Roadhill House, the family followed their evening routine.
15:41.657 --> 15:43.359
[SPEAKER_00]: Samuel Kent read in his study.
15:44.660 --> 15:47.143
[SPEAKER_00]: His wife Mary attended to household matters.
15:48.473 --> 15:59.203
[SPEAKER_00]: The older children, Constance, age 16, and William, age 15, home from boarding school for summer holidays, or somewhere in the house.
16:00.484 --> 16:05.368
[SPEAKER_00]: The three young children from the second marriage have been put to bed hours earlier.
16:05.408 --> 16:16.118
[SPEAKER_00]: Elizabeth Gough, the nurse, prepared the nursery for the night.
16:17.093 --> 16:19.817
[SPEAKER_00]: baby Evelyn slept in her cot beside him.
16:21.119 --> 16:23.623
[SPEAKER_00]: The two cot set together in the nursery room.
16:24.805 --> 16:31.316
[SPEAKER_00]: The door connecting the nursery to Mr. and Mrs. Kent's bedroom stood partially open as it did every night.
16:32.938 --> 16:35.482
[SPEAKER_00]: One by one the household went to bed.
16:36.504 --> 16:37.966
[SPEAKER_00]: Candles were extinguished.
16:38.948 --> 16:40.270
[SPEAKER_00]: Lambs were turned down.
16:41.412 --> 16:43.455
[SPEAKER_00]: Servants retired to their quarters
16:44.583 --> 16:47.227
[SPEAKER_00]: The family disappeared into their separate rooms.
16:48.289 --> 16:53.797
[SPEAKER_00]: Separate because even in sleep, the first family and second family didn't mix.
16:55.379 --> 17:00.968
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometime between midnight and five o'clock in the morning, someone entered that nursery.
17:02.470 --> 17:10.422
[SPEAKER_00]: They moved silently, no doors creaked, no footsteps alerted a lizard with golf, sleeping feet away.
17:11.212 --> 17:15.300
[SPEAKER_00]: They lifted Francis from his cot, without waking him or his sister.
17:15.360 --> 17:24.356
[SPEAKER_00]: They carried the boy, still and his nightclothes, possibly wrapped in the flannel blanket from his cot, through the nursery door.
17:24.417 --> 17:31.650
[SPEAKER_00]: Down the hallway, down the servant staircase, two flights, a ground floor.
17:33.031 --> 17:35.954
[SPEAKER_00]: They unlocked the drawing room door from the inside.
17:37.275 --> 17:38.296
[SPEAKER_00]: Unlatched the window.
17:39.457 --> 17:45.323
[SPEAKER_00]: Cross 30 yards of dark garden in the June rain to reach the outdoor privy.
17:46.804 --> 17:47.985
[SPEAKER_00]: They had matches with them.
17:48.826 --> 17:50.848
[SPEAKER_00]: Several were found later in the privy.
17:51.849 --> 17:56.133
[SPEAKER_00]: Place there beforehand so the killer could see in the pitch darkness.
17:57.714 --> 18:01.738
[SPEAKER_00]: Inside that privy, they slid,
18:03.119 --> 18:07.327
[SPEAKER_00]: the cut went so deep, it nearly severed his head from his body.
18:08.469 --> 18:15.522
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether he woke, whether he cried out, whether he knew what was happening, these questions have no answers.
18:17.045 --> 18:20.091
[SPEAKER_00]: What's certain is that he died quickly from that wound.
18:21.373 --> 18:23.878
[SPEAKER_00]: His blood spilled onto the privy floor.
18:25.192 --> 18:31.108
[SPEAKER_00]: The killer wrapped his body in the blanket and shoved it down into the vault beneath the toilet seat.
18:32.231 --> 18:33.975
[SPEAKER_00]: Then they went back to the house.
18:35.158 --> 18:38.487
[SPEAKER_00]: We locked the door, climbed back upstairs.
18:39.670 --> 18:41.074
[SPEAKER_00]: We turned to their bed.
18:42.860 --> 19:05.249
[SPEAKER_00]: no one heard anything, not Elizabeth Gough sleeping in the nursery, not Mr. and Mrs. Kent sleeping in the connecting bedroom with the door partially open, not the other servants in the quarters, not Constance or William in their rooms elsewhere in the house.
19:05.269 --> 19:09.154
[SPEAKER_00]: The house full of people slept through a child's murder,
19:10.754 --> 19:18.705
[SPEAKER_00]: When Don broke on Saturday, June 30th, 1860, Road Hill House looked exactly as it always did.
19:18.725 --> 19:31.842
[SPEAKER_00]: Three stories of respectable Victorian architecture, locked gates, high walls, a factory inspectors family beginning another ordinary weekend.
19:33.043 --> 19:39.512
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the nursery, on the second floor,
19:41.568 --> 19:45.633
[SPEAKER_00]: Elizabeth Goff woke around 715 on Saturday morning.
19:46.954 --> 19:48.416
[SPEAKER_00]: Her routine was always the same.
19:49.216 --> 19:56.725
[SPEAKER_00]: Check on the children, prepare them for the day, maintain the orderly schedule that kept the nursery running smoothly.
19:58.186 --> 20:02.852
[SPEAKER_00]: She rose from her bed in the nursery, and looked at the two cats beside her.
20:04.694 --> 20:05.935
[SPEAKER_00]: Evelyn slept peacefully.
20:07.337 --> 20:09.499
[SPEAKER_00]: Francis' cot was empty.
20:10.762 --> 20:13.826
[SPEAKER_00]: Goth assumed someone had taken him downstairs early.
20:13.866 --> 20:18.954
[SPEAKER_00]: Mr. or Mrs. Kent sometimes brought Francis to their room in the morning.
20:20.396 --> 20:24.902
[SPEAKER_00]: She checked the connecting door to the parent's bedroom, the door was closed.
20:26.264 --> 20:29.669
[SPEAKER_00]: She remembered it being partially open when they'd gone to bed.
20:29.729 --> 20:34.035
[SPEAKER_00]: That was unusual, but not alarming.
20:35.247 --> 20:37.690
[SPEAKER_00]: She went downstairs to look for Francis.
20:38.792 --> 20:43.679
[SPEAKER_00]: He wasn't in the drawing room, not in the dining room, not with his parents.
20:45.141 --> 20:48.405
[SPEAKER_00]: Gough asked the household staff if they'd seen the boy.
20:49.467 --> 20:50.047
[SPEAKER_00]: No one had.
20:51.489 --> 20:56.696
[SPEAKER_00]: Ms. Kent came down, still in her nightclothes, where was Seville?
20:57.998 --> 20:59.901
[SPEAKER_00]: The confusion turned to concern.
21:00.802 --> 21:02.925
[SPEAKER_00]: The concern turned to panic.
21:04.036 --> 21:07.140
[SPEAKER_00]: By eight o'clock, the entire household was searching.
21:08.621 --> 21:09.703
[SPEAKER_00]: Every room checked.
21:10.504 --> 21:12.046
[SPEAKER_00]: Every closet opened.
21:13.167 --> 21:16.351
[SPEAKER_00]: Every space, a three-year-old boy, might hide or wander.
21:17.692 --> 21:18.733
[SPEAKER_00]: He wasn't in the house.
21:19.594 --> 21:24.220
[SPEAKER_00]: Samuel Kint searched the gardens, the grounds, the outbuildings.
21:25.702 --> 21:32.710
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone noticed the drawing room window was unlasted from the inside.
21:33.770 --> 21:39.519
[SPEAKER_00]: had someone taken him through that window, the possibility of kidnapping emerged.
21:40.861 --> 21:44.287
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps someone had broken in, though that made no sense.
21:45.389 --> 21:51.238
[SPEAKER_00]: The window was locked from the inside, meaning whoever opened it had been in the house.
21:52.585 --> 22:03.923
[SPEAKER_00]: Two and a half hours passed, servants, family members, neighbors, who'd been called to help, everyone searching, increasingly frantic.
22:05.505 --> 22:19.808
[SPEAKER_00]: At approximately a quarter to ten that morning, Thomas Banger, the husband to the house made, checked the outdoor privy at the back of the garden.
22:21.256 --> 22:29.047
[SPEAKER_00]: Francis Seville-Kin's body lay in the privy vault, wrapped in a flannel blanket, his small body was cold.
22:30.469 --> 22:31.891
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd been dead for hours.
22:33.413 --> 22:38.400
[SPEAKER_00]: Bangor would later testify to details that made the horror sound somehow worse.
22:40.042 --> 22:51.178
[SPEAKER_00]: The boy's face, he said, looked quite pleasant, his little eyes were shut as if they were sleeping, but the wound to his throat made clear what had happened
22:52.475 --> 23:08.430
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone had held Francis Seville Kent, a three-year-old boy who should have been waking up in his cot that morning, and cut his throat with a sharp blade, enough to go through the skin and muscle and windpipe, almost to the spine.
23:10.352 --> 23:16.198
[SPEAKER_00]: The household erupted into chaos, someone ran for the village constable.
23:17.639 --> 23:20.322
[SPEAKER_00]: Miss Kent became nearly inconsolable,
23:21.652 --> 23:27.398
[SPEAKER_00]: Samuel Kent stood quiet and reserved, appearing more agitated than sad.
23:28.940 --> 23:33.344
[SPEAKER_00]: According to witnesses, the servants clustered together, horrified.
23:34.706 --> 23:40.012
[SPEAKER_00]: Constance and William came down from their rooms to learn their half-brother have been murdered.
23:41.453 --> 23:45.077
[SPEAKER_00]: By late morning, constable urge arrived from the village.
23:46.238 --> 23:56.727
[SPEAKER_00]: by afternoon superintendent John Foley, from travel bridge, a taken charge of what would become one of Victorian England's most notorious murder investigations.
23:58.248 --> 24:06.035
[SPEAKER_00]: But in those first hours, one fact became increasingly clear to everyone standing in the garden of Roadhill House.
24:07.116 --> 24:15.283
[SPEAKER_00]: Looking at the outdoor privy, thirty yards from the house, where a child's body had just
24:16.445 --> 24:18.127
[SPEAKER_00]: The doors had been locked all night.
24:19.368 --> 24:22.691
[SPEAKER_00]: The drawing room window was unlapped from the inside.
24:23.832 --> 24:26.735
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously staged to suggest a break-in.
24:28.337 --> 24:38.267
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone had known exactly where Francis slept, how to move through the house without waking the servants, where to find matches to light the privy.
24:39.548 --> 24:44.713
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone had wrapped him in his own blanket and carried him silently through the dark
24:46.010 --> 24:48.574
[SPEAKER_00]: the killer, lived in Roadhill House.
24:50.917 --> 24:53.080
[SPEAKER_00]: Constable Urch had no forensic training.
24:54.142 --> 24:55.784
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody in 1860 did.
24:56.786 --> 24:59.790
[SPEAKER_00]: The science of crime seen investigation didn't exist yet.
25:01.112 --> 25:05.098
[SPEAKER_00]: Fingerprinting wouldn't become standard practice for another 40 years.
25:06.293 --> 25:08.536
[SPEAKER_00]: DNA analysis was a century away.
25:09.577 --> 25:11.599
[SPEAKER_00]: Blood typing wasn't understood.
25:13.041 --> 25:16.225
[SPEAKER_00]: Detectives were a new and somewhat suspect profession.
25:17.386 --> 25:23.594
[SPEAKER_00]: Scotland Yard had been founded only 18 years earlier, with just eight original detective officers.
25:25.155 --> 25:33.145
[SPEAKER_00]: Urch stood in the garden of Roteal House, looking at a murder child and had no idea how
25:34.373 --> 25:37.978
[SPEAKER_00]: He walked through the crime scene without preserving evidence.
25:39.340 --> 25:43.686
[SPEAKER_00]: Multiple people had already contaminated the privy where the body was found.
25:44.987 --> 25:50.735
[SPEAKER_00]: The nursery had been thoroughly searched before anyone thought to protect it as the scene of the abduction.
25:52.157 --> 25:59.487
[SPEAKER_00]: Footprints in the muddy garden, if they existed, were trampled by the dozens of people who'd searched the grounds that morning.
26:01.002 --> 26:06.171
[SPEAKER_00]: Superintendent John Foley arrived from travel bridge to take over the investigation.
26:07.593 --> 26:10.979
[SPEAKER_00]: He had more authority than urge, but no more training.
26:12.301 --> 26:13.744
[SPEAKER_00]: And Foley had another problem.
26:14.585 --> 26:20.395
[SPEAKER_00]: Samuel Kent was a government factory inspector, a member of the respectable middle class.
26:20.375 --> 26:34.478
[SPEAKER_00]: Foley would have to try carefully, accusing a man of Ken's position of murdering his own son, or protecting whoever did, which career suicide, unless the evidence was overwhelming.
26:36.221 --> 26:45.977
[SPEAKER_00]: So, Foley focused on the servants, the inquest opened within days, the coroner questioned household staff under oath,
26:47.223 --> 26:50.872
[SPEAKER_00]: Elizabeth Gough, the nurse, faced intense scrutiny.
26:51.875 --> 26:53.178
[SPEAKER_00]: She'd been sleeping in the nursery.
26:53.880 --> 26:55.123
[SPEAKER_00]: She'd put Francis to bed.
26:56.125 --> 26:57.830
[SPEAKER_00]: She should have heard something.
26:59.113 --> 27:03.223
[SPEAKER_00]: How could someone carry a child from the room without waking her?
27:04.553 --> 27:07.441
[SPEAKER_00]: Gough had no answers that satisfied anyone.
27:08.564 --> 27:11.772
[SPEAKER_00]: Her testimony was consistent, but unconvincing.
27:12.996 --> 27:15.041
[SPEAKER_00]: She'd slept through it all, she said.
27:16.425 --> 27:17.247
[SPEAKER_00]: She heard nothing.
27:18.779 --> 27:25.065
[SPEAKER_00]: The laundry Sarah Cox came forward with evidence that should have changed the investigation direction.
27:26.547 --> 27:30.010
[SPEAKER_00]: She reported that one of Constant Kent's night gowns was missing.
27:31.311 --> 27:36.777
[SPEAKER_00]: She counted three night gowns before the wash and found only two afterward.
27:38.098 --> 27:39.159
[SPEAKER_00]: One had disappeared.
27:41.101 --> 27:46.947
[SPEAKER_00]: Constable Urch had actually found a bloodstained night gown in the house during his initial search,
27:48.395 --> 27:55.642
[SPEAKER_00]: When he showed it to Superintendent Foley, Foley dismissed it as a minstrel blood, nothing to do with the murder.
27:57.084 --> 28:01.868
[SPEAKER_00]: The night gown vanished from evidence, no one could say what happened to it.
28:03.250 --> 28:10.117
[SPEAKER_00]: Samuel Kent's razor went missing, then turned up clean, no one investigated why.
28:10.137 --> 28:18.385
[SPEAKER_00]: The inquest dragged on through July.
28:19.698 --> 28:25.047
[SPEAKER_00]: Constance and William were interviewed informally, not under formal examination.
28:26.509 --> 28:36.787
[SPEAKER_00]: The focus remained on servants and the possibility of an intruder, despite mounting evidence that someone inside the family knew exactly what happened.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On July 27, 1860, the inquest jury delivered their verdict.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Francis Seville Kent had been willfully murdered by person or person's unknown, the verdict meant nothing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone knew the killer was inside the house.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The jury just couldn't bring itself to name a member of a respectable family as a murderer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: public outrage, grew.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Newspapers across England demanded answers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: How could a child be murdered in a locked house full of people and no one face justice?
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[SPEAKER_00]: How could local police protect a family simply because they had social standing?
29:27.080 --> 29:29.646
[SPEAKER_00]: the pressure forced the homophist to act.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In mid-July, they sent someone from Scotland yard, who wouldn't worry about offending the local gentry.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Someone who'd follow the evidence or guardless of class, they sent detective inspector, Jack Witcher.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Detective Inspector Jack Witcher arrived at Roadhill House in mid-July, 1860.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was 46 years old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One of the eight original Scotland-yard detective officers appointed in 1842. colleagues called him Jack.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The newspapers called him Prince of Detectives.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He'd built his reputation, solving impossible cases through methodical observation, forensic attention to detail, in an understanding of criminal psychology that was decades ahead of its time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Witcher came from a working-class origins.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His father had been a gardener.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He'd risen through the metropolitan police through scale and intelligence, not family connections,
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[SPEAKER_00]: that background made him brilliant at his job.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He understood how criminal thought because he'd grown up around people who struggled to survive.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He knew desperation and jealousy and rage.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But in the summer of 1860, investigating the Kent family murder, his working-class background
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[SPEAKER_00]: which are spent five days at Roadhill House examining the crime scene, interviewing servants, reviewing evidence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He reconstructed the murder night timeline.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He noted the missing night gown.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He observed how the family interacted.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He paid attention to details that local police had
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[SPEAKER_00]: The crime required inside knowledge.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The killer knew where Francis slept, knew the house layout, knew when servants would be asleep, knew where to find matches to light the privy in the dark.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The missing night gown suggested someone who needed to hide blood stain clothing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The careful staging of the drawing room window showed sophistication and trying to mislead investigators.
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[SPEAKER_00]: which are identified as prime suspect.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Constance Kent, 16 years old, the neglected daughter from the first marriage.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The girl who'd run away from home three years earlier, the one who'd been systematically rejected in favor of the second family.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The one who'd hidden cut hair, and boys clothing, and that same outdoor privy years before using it for murder.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She had motive, she had opportunity, she had the inside knowledge, and she'd shown capacity for deception during the 1857 runaway attempt.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Which are arrested, Constance Kent, on July 20, 1860,
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[SPEAKER_00]: The public erupted and fury.
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[SPEAKER_00]: How dare this working-class policemen accuse a young lady of good breeding of such a heinous crime.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Constance came from a respectable family.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She was educated, refined, proper.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The very idea that she could slit a three-year-olds throat was monstrous slander, from a man
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[SPEAKER_00]: The magistrate released Constance after questioning there wasn't enough evidence to hold her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The missing night gown was lost.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The circumstantial case couldn't overcome Victorian-class prejudice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The gentleman's daughter simply couldn't be a murderer regardless of what evidence suggested.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Which a return to London
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[SPEAKER_00]: the newspapers savaged him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Local police celebrated his failure.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Kent family retreated behind their walls and their respectability.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The case went cold.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Francis Seville, Kent's murder, remained technically unsolved.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Constance went back to her life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: five years would pass before the truth emerged, not through investigation, but through a confession born from religious torment that Witcher could never have predicted.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jack Witcher had been right all along.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He'd solved the case in just five days.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He'd identified the killer, understood the motive, we constructed the crime.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But in 1860 Victorian England, a working-class detective couldn't accuse a young lady of murder and survive, and it would cost him everything.
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[SPEAKER_00]: until next time, remember, a house full of people slept through a child's murder, but the walls couldn't keep the secret forever.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Three-year-old Francis Seville Kent died in the dark of a June night, because hatred had festered too long in silence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes the most dangerous monsters don't break in through windows.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They already live inside the house.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening, friend.
