On the morning of Saturday 30 June 1860, the mutilated body of three-year Savill Kent was discovered in an outside privy at Road House, Wiltshire. The circumstances suggested that the murderer was almost certainly a member of the boy’s family or one of their servants. The case became something of a national obsession because of the age of the victim, the violence with which he had been attacked and the apparently secure and comfortable setting of the crime.
The master of the house was Samuel Kent, a government sub-inspector of factories. Also present on the night of the murder were his second wife (formerly the governess), four children by his first marriage and three by his second, as well as the three live-in servants. The local police were baffled, and the authorities bowed to the pressure of public opinion and summoned an investigator from Scotland Yard’s newly created detective department (the first to exist in an English-speaking country).
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