During the sale a pickpocket stole a purse containing £4 from a woman in the crowd. Though Foley's men locked the doors to Road Hill House, conducted a search and arrested a suspect, the culprit was not found.*
Samuel and Mary Kent's last child, Florence Saville Kent, was born in their new home on the Somersetshire coast on 19 July 1861. Over the summer the factory commissioners discussed where they could send Samuel. Posts came up in Yorkshire and Ireland, but they feared that he would be unable to exercise his authority in these areas, where the hostility towards him was great. In October, though, a job fell vacant for a sub-inspector of factories in north Wales, and the Kent family moved to Llangollen in the Dee valley.
An Englishwoman who lived in Dinan in 1861 later wrote to the Devizes Gazette about Constance Kent: 'I never saw her, but everyone I know did, and all describe her as a flat-faced, reddish-haired ugly girl, neither stupid nor clever, lively nor morose, and only remarkable for one particular trait, viz, her extreme tenderness and kindness to very young children . . . In the whole school in which she was a pupil she was the one who would probably be the least remarked if all were seen together.' Constance did her best to become invisible, and was known at the school by her second name, Emily, but the other girls were aware of her identity. She was the object of gossip and bullying. By the end of the year Samuel had removed her to the care of the nuns of the Convent de la Sagesse, on a cliff above the town.
For several months Whicher withdrew from the public eye, working only on cases unlikely to attract attention. Just one was covered in any depth by the newspapers – his capture of a clergyman who had obtained £6,000 by forging his uncle's will. Whicher's young colleague Timothy Cavanagh, then a clerk in the Commissioner's office, claimed that the Road Hill murder had undone 'the best man the Detective Department ever possessed'. The case 'almost broke the heart of poor Whicher' – he 'returned to head-quarters thoroughly chapfallen. This was a great blow to him . . . the commissioner and others losing faith in him for the first time.' According to Cavanagh, the Road Hill case changed Dolly Williamson as well. When Williamson came back from Wiltshire, he put away his playfulness, his penchant for practical jokes and dangerous games. He became subdued, detached.
In the summer of 1861 Whicher was given charge of a murder investigation for the first time since Road Hill. It was an apparently straightforward case. On 10 June a fifty-five-year-old woman called Mary Halliday was found dead in a rectory at Kingswood, near Reigate, Surrey, where she had been keeping house while the vicar was away. Mrs Halliday seemed to have been the victim of a botched burglary – a sock stuffed into her mouth, probably to silence her, had suffocated her. The intruder or intruders had left clues: a beech cudgel, some lengths of unusual hemp cord tied around the victim's wrists and ankles, and a packet of papers. These papers included a letter from a famous German opera singer, a begging letter signed 'Adolphe Krohn', and identification documents in the name of Johann Karl Franz of Saxony.
The police had descriptions of two foreigners who had been in the area that day, one short and dark, the other taller and fairer; they had been seen in a pub, in fields near the rectory and in a Reigate shop, where they had bought the same kind of cord as that found at the murder scene. The descriptions of the taller of the two matched the details on the identification papers. A £200 reward was offered for the capture of the pair, presumed to be Krohn and Franz.
Whicher sent Detective-Sergeant Robinson to interview Mademoiselle Thérèse Tietjens, the celebrated opera singer whose letter had been found in the rectory, at her house in St John's Wood, near Paddington. She said that a young, tallish German with light-brown hair had turned up on her doorstep a week earlier, pleading poverty and asking for her help in returning to Hamburg. She had promised to pay his expenses, and had given him a letter to this effect. Whicher asked Dolly Williamson to check the sailings to Hamburg and to make enquiries at the Austrian, Prussian and Hanseatic embassies and consulates.
Extra constables were sent to the sugar-baking district of Whitechapel, in the East End, where many itinerant Germans took lodgings. Several German tramps were taken in for questioning. One by one, Whicher ruled them out. 'Altho' he somewhat answers the description of one of the men concerned in the murder of Mrs Halliday,' he reported of a suspect on 18 June, 'I do not think he is one of them.'
The next week, though, Whicher told Mayne he had found Johann Franz: a twenty-four-year-old German vagrant picked up in Whitechapel who claimed his name was Auguste Salzmann. At first, Whicher could find no eyewitnesses to confirm that this was one of the Kingswood Germans. On the contrary: 'He has been seen by three persons from Reigate and Kingswood who saw two foreigners in the neighbourhood the day before and on the day of the murder, but they are unable to identify him as one of them,' Whicher wrote to Mayne on 25 June. 'He has also been seen by PC Peck, P Division, who met the two men at Sutton on the morning of the murder, but he cannot recognise him. Altho' these persons have failed to identify him, I have no doubt but he is "Johann Carl Franz" the owner of the book left behind, and as there are other persons who saw the two foreigners in the neighbourhood, I beg to suggest that Serjeant Robinson should fetch them to London to see the prisoner.' Whicher's self-assurance – or his fixation – paid off. On 26 June witnesses from the pub and the string shop in Reigate agreed that this was the taller and fairer of the two Germans who had visited the town. Whicher declared himself 'thoroughly confident' of securing a conviction.
He sent photographs of the identification papers to officials in Saxony, who confirmed their authenticity, adding that their owner had a prison record. Whicher also discovered that two days after the murder the suspect had given his landlord a blue checked shirt for safekeeping. The shirt exactly matched the description of that worn by one of the men seen at Kingswood, and wrapped around it was a piece of cord just like that which had bound the murder victim's body. The detectives traced the maker of the cord, who confirmed that he had spun the string which was found round the shirt and round Mrs Halliday's ankles: 'They are all off the same ball. I am quite sure of it.' More eyewitnesses agreed that they had seen the prisoner in Surrey. Even PC Peck said he now believed the suspect was one of the men he met at Sutton. Whicher had put together a strong chain of circumstantial evidence. On 8 July the prisoner admitted he was Franz. He was committed for trial.
The story the German gave in his defence sounded trumped-up from beginning to end. After disembarking from a steamer at Hull in April, he said, he had fallen in with two other German vagrants, Wilhelm Gerstenberg and Adolphe Krohn. Gerstenberg, who in build and colouring resembled Franz, pestered him to hand over some of his identification papers. Franz refused. One night in May, while Franz was asleep behind a haystack near Leeds, his two companions robbed him, taking not only the papers but also his pack and his spare clothes, which were cut from the same cloth as those he was wearing. This explained the similarity between his shirt and that seen near Kingswood, while his resemblance to Gerstenberg explained why some of the eyewitnesses thought they had seen Franz in Surrey. The destitute Franz made his way to London alone. When he reached the city he heard that a German called Franz was wanted for murder, so he quickly adopted a new name. As for the cord in his room, he said he had found it on the pavement outside a tobacconist's shop near his lodgings. His defence, then, was that he had been robbed of his clothes and papers by a German tramp who looked very like him, had changed his name for fear he would be mistaken for a murderer, and had happened to pick up a piece of cord on a London street that exactly matched the distinctive twine at the murder scene.