Constance Kent was born in Sidmouth, Devon, England, on 6 February 1844, the fifth daughter and ninth child of Samuel Saville (or Savill) Kent[1] (1801–1872), an Inspector of Factories for the Home Office, and his first wife, Mary Ann (1808–1852), daughter of prosperous coachmaker and expert on the Portland Vase, Thomas Windus of Stamford Hill, London.
[4] The child, still dressed in his nightshirt and wrapped in a blanket, had knife wounds on his chest and hands, and his throat was slashed so deeply that he was almost decapitated.
[6] However, Gough was released when the suspicions of Detective Inspector Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard moved to the boy's 16-year-old half-sister, Constance.
She was arrested on 16 July but released without trial owing to public opinion against the accusations of a working-class detective against a young lady of breeding.
She had made a statement confessing her guilt to an Anglo-Catholic clergyman, Arthur Wagner, and expressed to him her resolution to give herself up to justice.
Many supposed that her father, a known adulterer, was having an affair with Elizabeth Gough and murdered the child in a fit of rage after coitus interruptus.
[11] However, in her book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House (2008),[3] author Kate Summerscale concluded that if Constance's confession was indeed false and merely an act to shield another person, it was for the benefit of not her father but her brother, William Saville-Kent, with whom she shared a very close sibling relationship, which was further deepened by her father turning his paternal attentions away from the children of his first marriage to the children he had with his second wife.
As to this case, Lord Westmeath stated that, upon an application for the priest's release being made to the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, the latter had replied that if he were to remit the sentence without an admission of error on the part of the Catholic priest and without an assurance on his part that he would not again in a similar case adopt the same course, he (the Home Secretary) would be giving a sanction to the assumption of a privilege by ministers of every denomination which, he was advised, they could not claim.
The bishop argued that the canon law on the subject had been accepted without gainsaying or opposition from any temporal court, that it had been confirmed by the Book of Common Prayer in the service for the visitation of the sick, and, thus, had been sanctioned by the Act of Uniformity.
During her time in prison, Constance purportedly produced mosaics for a number of churches, including work for the crypt of St. Paul's cathedral.
[3]: 278 However, Noeline Kyle, in her book A Greater Guilt, discusses the work Constance was engaged in while incarcerated, including cooking, cleaning and laundry work, and what Kyle describes – in light of a lack of evidence of Kent's making of any mosaics and the fact that "none of the true crime writers on this topic ... say where this information is sourced from" – as the myth of the mosaics.
She lived in the New South Wales town of Mittagong for a year, and was then made matron of the Pierce Memorial Nurses' Home at East Maitland, serving there from 1911 until she retired in 1932.