18 Facts About Constance Kent

Constance Emily Kent was an English woman who confessed to the murder of her half-brother, Francis Saville Kent, in 1860, when she was aged 16 and he aged three.

Constance Kent was born in Sidmouth, Devon, England, on 6 February 1844, the fifth daughter and ninth child of Samuel Saville Kent, an Inspector of Factories for the Home Office, and his first wife, Mary Ann, daughter of prosperous coachmaker and expert on the Portland Vase, Thomas Windus of Stamford Hill, London.

Constance Kent was prosecuted for the murder five years later, in 1865.

Constance Kent 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.

Constance Kent was but lightly pressed by the magistrates, as the prisoner was not contesting the charge.

The substance of Constance Kent's confession was that, after waiting until the family and servants were asleep, she had opened the shutters and window in the drawing room, taken Francis from his room wrapped in a blanket that she had taken from between sheet and counterpane in his cot, left the residence and then killed him in the privy-house with a razor stolen from her father.

The murder was not a spontaneous act, it seems, but one of revenge, and it was suggested that Constance Kent had at certain times been mentally unbalanced.

The theory fitted a pattern with the senior Kent, who had romanced the family nanny, Mary Drewe Pratt, while his first wife Mary Ann Kent was dying, and subsequently married Pratt.

Constance Kent never recanted her confession, even after her father's and her brother's deaths.

Constance Kent kept her silence about the motive for the murder.

At Devizes Assize Court, Constance Kent pleaded guilty, and her plea was accepted, so that Wagner was not again called.

Constance Kent is compelled to answer such a question, and the law of England does not even extend the privilege of refusing to answer to Roman Catholic clergymen in dealing with a person of their own persuasion.

Constance Kent was sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life in prison owing to her youth at the time and her confession.

Constance Kent served twenty years in a number of gaols, including Millbank Prison, and was released in 1885, at the age of 41.

Constance Kent immigrated to Australia early in 1886 and joined her brother William in Tasmania, where he worked as a government adviser on fisheries.

Constance Kent changed her name to Ruth Emilie Kaye and trained as a nurse at The Alfred Hospital in Prahran, Melbourne, Victoria, before being appointed sister-in-charge of the Female Lazaret at the Coast Hospital, Little Bay, in Sydney, New South Wales.

Constance Kent 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.

Constance Kent died on 10 April 1944, aged 100, in a private hospital in the Sydney suburb of Strathfield.