Read Barbaric Murders - Child victims, lady-killers and bodies in boxes (Infamous Murderers) for Free Online

slept soundly because he been unable to sleep during the day; the chimneys had been swept that day. The Kents kept two dogs. One was allowed to roam about inside the house. The other was kept chained in the yard. As was his usual custom, Mr Kent went out into the yard at 10 p.m. to feed the outside dog. Constance and William went to bed at the same time, as did Mary Anne and Elizabeth their older sisters. Mr and Mrs Kent stayed up for about another hour talking before they too went to bed.
    Mr and Mrs Kent slept right through that night without being disturbed at all. Mrs Kent woke at dawn when she thought she heard a sound like a drawing room window being opened. During the night, a man fishing in the River Frome heard a dog barking. The village constable heard the dog bark too, and saw a light in a downstairs window and in the nursery window. Elizabeth Gough, the children’s nurse, woke up at 5 o’clock, to see that the baby Saville was not in his cot. She noticed that the sheets had been put back neatly, so she assumed Saville had been taken by his mother and that he was safely in his mother’s room. She fell asleep, not thinking anything was wrong.
    Mrs Kent was pregnant, so when Elizabeth Gough got up at 7 o’clock and went to Mrs Kent’s room and got no answer to her gentle knock she returned unconcerned to her own room and read her Bible. An hour later the assistant nurse arrived, and Elizabeth Gough went back to Mrs Kent’s room. Saville was not there, and Mrs Kent was angry with her for thinking that she was well enough to go wandering round the house at night looking for children. Miss Gough was now worried. She had no idea where the baby was. She went to the children and asked them if they knew what had happened to Saville. None of them knew anything. Miss Gough was getting frightened. She asked Sarah Cox, the parlour maid, if she had seen Saville. She had not seen Saville, but she had found the drawing room window open.
    At this point Elizabeth Gough raised the alarm. The boot boy was sent to the parish constable, then to the village constable, who always insisted that the parish constable should attend because the parish was in Wiltshire and the village in Somerset. The two policemen arrived and came to the conclusion that baby Saville Kent had been kidnapped. The policemen advised Mr Kent that the matter should be reported to the Wiltshire police; Mr Kent rode off at once to Southwick, a short distance along the Trowbridge road, to report the crime.
    Meanwhile, the villagers organized a search. They disliked the Kents, and freely admitted it. Samuel Kent was brusque and high-handed. He did not like the idea of being overlooked by the row of cottages near his house, and had had a high fence erected to block their view. He had also insisted on having sole fishing rights to a particularly rich stretch of the river. The Kents’ unpopularity was underlined by the behaviour of the village children, who jeered at the Kent children and openly taunted them. Even so, the plight of a lost baby touched the villagers and they set about trying to find it. Two of them, William Nutt and Thomas Benger, began searching the grounds of the Kents’ house. Constance had once run away dressed as a boy, first cutting her hair and leaving her locks in an old privy in the shrubbery. Nutt and Benger went there and found an ominous pool of blood on the floor, but no splashes on the seat. They could not see down into the cess-pit, so Nutt went off to get a lamp. Benger’s eyes gradually became accustomed to the dark and he saw something pale. He picked it up and found it was a blanket, heavily bloodstained. Nutt came back with a candle. By its light they saw the baby, resting on a splashboard under the seat; the blanket had been resting on the baby. The water was later drained from the cess-pit, revealing a bloodstained piece of flannel, a fragment of women’s clothing and a newspaper that had been used to wipe a knife.
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