'We understand she was perfectly calm and collected throughout the interview,' said the Bath Chronicle, 'as, indeed, she has continued to be since her incarceration, although the painfulness of her awfully critical position had, very naturally, wrought somewhat of a change in her features; still, her general demeanour has made such an impression upon the officials of the Gaol, that they do not hesitate to state that her appearance, at all events, bespeaks her innocence of this horrid transaction.'
CHAPTER TEN
TO LOOK AT A STAR BY GLANCES
23–26 July
At the time he was assigned the murder at Road, Whicher had twice before led investigations into the mysterious death of a small boy. One was the case of the Reverend Bonwell and his illegitimate son, which even now was being heard at the Court of Arches, the chief ecclesiastical court in London. The other took place a decade earlier, in December 1849, when a police superintendent from Nottinghamshire turned up at Scotland Yard and asked for the help of the London detectives in a suspected infanticide. Whicher was given the case.
A man in North Leverton, Nottinghamshire, had informed the police that he had received, by post, a box containing the corpse of a boy. The child was dressed in a frock, a straw hat, socks and boots, and wrapped in an apron marked 'S Drake'. The man told the police that his wife had a sister called Sarah Drake who worked as a cook and housekeeper in London.
Whicher and the Nottinghamshire superintendent went directly to the house in which Sarah Drake worked, 33 Upper Harley Street, and charged her with killing the child. 'How do you know that?' she asked. They told her about the apron marked with her name. She sat down and cried.
The same night at the police station Drake confessed to the 'searcher' employed to examine her clothes and belongings that she had killed the boy, whose name was Louis. He was her illegitimate son, Drake told the searcher, and for the first two years of his life she had managed to keep her job as a servant by paying another woman to look after him. When she had fallen behind with the payments, though, the foster mother angrily returned Louis to her. Terrified of losing her 'place' in Upper Harley Street, which paid about £50 a year, Sarah Drake had strangled her son with a handkerchief. She then packed him up in a box and sent him to her sister and brother-in-law in the country, hoping that they would bury him.
Whicher gathered the evidence to confirm Drake's confession. It was a pitifully easy task. In her bedroom he found three aprons identical to the one in the box, and a key that fitted the box's lock. He interviewed Mrs Johnston, the woman who had looked after Louis since he was three months old, for five shillings a week. She said that on 27 November she had returned Louis to his mother at Upper Harley Street. When Drake pleaded with her to keep him for another week, she refused. She was fond of the boy, she said, but his mother had too often defaulted on the payments and was now several months in arrears. Before leaving Louis at Upper Harley Street, Mrs Johnston urged Sarah Drake to take care of her son.
I told her that he was quite well, and had grown a hearty little fellow. I then told her she had better take his hat and pelisse [a fur-trimmed jacket] off, or he would take cold when he went out. She did so. There was a little handkerchief about his neck, and she said to me, 'This is yours, you had better take it.' I said, 'Yes, but keep it to put about him when he goes out to keep him warm.' I also told her he would soon want something to eat – to which she replied, 'Very well; will he eat anything?' I said, 'Yes', and left the house.
As she was going, Drake called out to ask exactly how much she owed. Mrs Johnston told her it was £9.10s., to which Drake said nothing.
Mrs Johnston told Whicher that when she called to see Louis the next Friday, Sarah Drake claimed that he was staying with a friend. 'I asked her to kiss the baby for me. She said, "Yes, I will." '
Whicher interviewed the staff at 33 Upper Harley Street. The kitchen maid recalled that on the evening of 27 November, Drake had asked her to carry a box from her bedroom to the butler's pantry: 'It was as much as I could lift.' The butler said that Drake asked him to address the box and to arrange for it to be taken the next morning to Euston Square station. The footman said that he took the box to the station, where it was weighted at thirty-eight pounds, and he paid eight shillings to send it to Nottinghamshire.
Mrs Johnston accompanied the police to North Leverton to identify the body. She confirmed that it was Louis. 'The handkerchief which I left on its neck, the pelisse, and the cape, were also there.' The surgeon who conducted the post-mortem said he was not sure that the handkerchief had been pulled tight enough to kill the boy; there was evidence that he had been beaten, and this was the more likely cause of death.
At her trial Sarah Drake stared at the ground and rocked her body to and fro, occasionally convulsing. She showed signs of great anguish. The judge told the jury that though she had no history of insanity, they might decide that the shock and terror of the child being suddenly left on her hands had unbalanced her reason. He warned that 'they must weigh well before they did so . . . it never could and never would be right or correct for juries to infer insanity merely from the atrocity of the crime'. The jurors found Sarah Drake not guilty, on the grounds of temporary insanity. She fainted.
Many illegitimate babies were killed by poor and desperate women in Victorian England: in 1860, child murders were reported in the newspapers almost daily. Usually the victims were newborns, and the assailants were their mothers. In the spring of 1860, in a weird reprisal of Sarah Drake's crime, Sarah Gough, a housekeeper and cook at Upper Seymour Street, a mile or so from Upper Harley Street, killed her illegitimate child, parcelled it up and sent it by train from Paddington to a convent near Windsor. She too was easily traced: in the package was a paper bearing the name of her employer.
Juries showed compassion to women such as Sarah Drake and Sarah Gough, preferring to find them deranged than depraved. They were helped in this by new legal and medical ideas. In the law courts the 'McNaghten rule' had since 1843 allowed 'temporary insanity' to be used as a defence. (In January 1843 a Scottish woodturner, Daniel McNaghten, had fatally shot Sir Robert Peel's secretary, mistaking him for the Prime Minister.) Alienists detailed the kinds of madness to which the apparently and usually sane could fall victim: a woman might suffer from puerperal mania just before or after giving birth; any woman might be overcome by hysteria; and anyone might be struck by monomania, a form of madness that left the intellect intact – the sufferer could be emotionally deranged yet show cold cunning. By these criteria, any unusually violent crime could be understood as evidence of insanity. The Times put the dilemma neatly in an editorial of 1853:
Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity . . . Make the definition too narrow, it becomes meaningless; make it too wide, and the whole human race becomes involved in the dragnet. In strictness we are all mad when we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, prejudiced and vain people were to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the key to the asylum?
The suspicion that Constance Kent or Elizabeth Gough was mad kept surfacing in the press. It was even suggested that Mrs Kent had killed her son during a fit of puerperal mania. While Constance waited in prison, a Mr J.J. Bird wrote to the Morning Star to suggest that the murder of Saville was the act of a somnambulist. 'Most people know with what precision and care sleepwalkers act,' he said. 'The parties suspected should be watched by night for some time.' He cited a case in which a hallucinating somnambulist, his eyes open and fixed, had stabbed an empty bed three times. If sleepwalkers could commit unconscious violence, he said, it was possible that Saville's murderer was unaware of his or her own guilt. Perhaps the killer had a double consciousness. The idea that madness could take this form, that several selves could inhabit one body, fascinated mid-century alienists and newspaper readers. Bird's letter was reprinted over the next week in several provincial papers.