Murder & the Modern Conscience
A Case Study of Two Murders, the Trials, and the Question of Moral Responsibility
by James Hitchcock
Early one summer morning in 1860 an English nurse woke to discover that her charge, the infant Francis Savill Kent, was missing from his crib. An increasingly frantic search of the spacious grounds of Road Hill House finally revealed the boy’s body in an unused outhouse. His throat was cut, but apparently he had died by suffocation.
The local Wiltshire police anticipated the Keystone Cops in their ineptitude, managing to get themselves locked in the kitchen one night while they were supposed to be keeping watch. They scattered suspicions in all directions, including toward the nurse and the victim’s father.
The detective division of Scotland Yard was still new, and the Yard’s most accomplished sleuth, Jonathan Whicher, was assigned to the case. He concluded that the murder had been committed by sixteen-year-old Constance Kent, Francis’s half-sister, and she was duly arraigned. However, the evidence against her was flimsy, local opinion was outraged that she should be suspected, and she was soon freed. Whicher shortly thereafter resigned from the police force.
Another Murder
On a spring morning in 1924 a laborer on his way to work saw a pair of human legs protruding from a culvert on waste ground on the south side of Chicago. Eventually the body was identified as that of 14-year-old Bobby Franks. He too had died of suffocation, although he also had been bludgeoned.
Police suspicions again scattered in all directions, including especially toward two of Bobby Franks’s teachers. However, a pair of eyeglasses found at the scene eventually led to Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, neighbors of the Franks family. When caught in several lies, the pair gave up and confessed to the crime.
The Road Hill House murder also was solved by a confession. After the murder Constance Kent traveled on the Continent for a time, then returned to England and took up residence in an Anglican convent. While being prepared for Confirmation she told her spiritual director that she indeed had committed the murder. She went before a magistrate and pleaded guilty and, without trial, was sentenced to death, which was then commuted to life in prison.
Constance’s spiritual director was Father Arthur Douglas Wagner, a leading “ritualist” in the Church of England. There was storm of public protest over his action, on the grounds that he had first led an emotionally vulnerable girl into the Catholic practice of confession, then violated his obligation of secrecy. But Wagner was careful to state that Constance’s revelation to him was made outside the confessional and that she had authorized him to speak on her behalf. His role in the case is credited with ultimately helping to gain acceptance of the practice of confession within the Anglican Communion.
Defending the Crimes
James Hitchcock is Professor emeritus of History at St. Louis University in St. Louis. He and his late wife Helen have four daughters. His most recent book is the two-volume work, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life (Princeton University Press, 2004). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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