I was thoroughly fascinated by Michelle Njihuis's piece published in The Atlantic on June 16, 2021, 'Detective Fiction Has Nothing on This Victorian-Science Murder Mystery'. The writer gave us a glimpse into the growing up years and the life of English biologist and pioneer coral photographer and advocate of sustainable fisheries, William Saville-Kent (1845-1908).
I know of the marine biologist's work and efforts in Australia documenting marine life and notably, The Great Barrier Reef. But I don't know about his personal life, childhood or family history. The writer referred a lot to William Saville-Kent's biographer Anthony J. Harrison's work 'Savant of the Australian Seas' (1997). She suggested that the esteemed biologist was also hiding a grisly secret. Born William Kent, he took on the hyphenated surname William Saville-Kent when he turned 21 years old and began his journey in science and marine biology in London 1886.
For William, science might have also represented a chance to break with his past, for around this time he began to use the hyphenated surname Saville-Kent. Saville, which was his own middle name as well as the name of his late half-brother, was also the family name of his paternal grandmother; he used it for the rest of his life.
There was a brutal murder in the family in 1860- the death of a three-year old half-brother, Francis Saville Kent who was birthed by their father's second wife. 15-year-old William Saville-Kent and his biological older sister Constance were suspected of murder. As investigations went on, Constance became the prime suspect. She was first arrested for it at 16 years old, then freed without the case going to trial. Almost five years later in 1865, at 21 years old, she confessed to the murder. She was put away in prison for two decades and released in 1885, at the age of 41. And her brother never wrote to her very much. Although she eventually went to Australia after that, she didn't seem to have establish relationships with her living brother and step-siblings. Constance Kent apparently changed her name, never recanted her confession and also stated she never bore any ill will toward her brother. She spent her later years in Tasmania, made a career as a nurse, and died there too. In contrast, William Saville-Kent seemed to be on good terms with his step-siblings.
As far as family hurt and murder mysteries go, we'll never know the exact terrible circumstances of Francis Saville Kent's death in June 1860. At three years old, he was such an innocent. "But only the perpetrator, or perpetrators, knew the full truth." There were so many books published about the murder, but nobody got closer to the truth. Family obituaries never mentioned anything about the murder that shadowed the siblings' early lives.
While Saville-Kent succeeded in distancing himself from the murder of his young half-brother, the case and its unanswered questions were not forgotten. The first of at least six full-length books about the murder was published by a friend of Samuel’s in 1861, and a stream of pamphlets and essays rehashed the evidence. In 1929, the London publishers of The Case of Constance Kent, which had been written under a pseudonym by the detective novelist John Street, received a lengthy letter from Australia. The letter writer reported that Constance had died, but that before her death she had related the details of her early life. The writer insisted that Constance’s mother had not been insane, as Street had claimed, and that despite Street’s skepticism, Constance’s confession of her “most callous and brutal crime” had been genuine.
Street suspected that Constance herself had written the letter, but not until the 1980s would another author, Bernard Taylor, confirm that Constance, living in Australia under the pseudonym Ruth Emilie Kaye, had trained as a nurse and become a respected hospital administrator, even spending several years in charge of a ward for patients suffering from Hansen’s disease, also known as leprosy. She died in 1944, shortly after her 100th birthday, and her obituaries, like her brother William’s, made no mention of the murder of Saville Kent.
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