The press greeted Constance's confession with astonishment. Several newspapers were reluctant to accept the validity of her statement. After all, some disturbed people committed crimes; others, like the troubled bricklayer who had claimed to have killed Saville Kent, pretended to have done so, perhaps in the hope that confession to a crime might bring relief from a morbid, unfocused sense of guilt and misery. Maybe Constance was 'mad instead of guilty', suggested the Daily Telegraph; the past five years of 'slow agony' could have deprived her of her senses, incited her to a false confession. 'Better a hundred times that she should prove a maniac than a murderess.' Yet the lucidity and 'terrible courage' of her words, the newspaper admitted, 'do not look at all like insanity'. The Morning Star suggested that Constance had murdered her half-brother out of 'passionate fondness' for William. Quasi-romantic friendships between brothers and sisters were familiar to a Victorian audience – in the cloistered, chaperoned middle-class family, a sibling might be a young man or woman's only close acquaintance of the opposite sex. The London Standard thought there was something fishy about Constance's statement, which she had supposedly penned herself: 'There is an attorney's stamp upon it.' The London Review, hinting that sinister papist forces were at work, found 'in the language of the document palpable indications of a foreign hand and a strange influence'.
The Time, though, took Constance at her word, and offered an explanation for the crime that assigned feelings of violent hatred to half of the English population. 'From twelve or fourteen to eighteen or twenty is that period of life in which the tide of natural affection runs the lowest, leaving the body and the intellect unfettered and unweakened in the work of development, and leaving the heart itself open for the strong passions and overwhelming preferences that will then seize it . . . sad to say, it is the softer sex especially which is said to go through a period of almost utter heartlessness.' Girls were 'harder and more selfish' than boys; in preparation for the sexual passion to come, their hearts were emptied of all tenderness. And when a girl happened also to have a 'peculiar brooding, imaginative, inventive tendency . . . the dream seems to grow and become an inner life, unchecked by social feeling and by outward occupation, till a mere idea, equally causeless and wicked, fills the soul'. The newspaper, in defiance of the idea of the middle-class Victorian woman as an 'angel in the house', was suggesting that most adolescent girls were given to murderous desires: 'Constance Kent, it is said, only did what myriads of her age and sex only wish should come to pass by other agency than their own.'
Some newspapers reported that Constance had already written to her father in Wales, to spare him the shock of first hearing of her confession through the pages of the press. But an anecdote recounted in the Somerset and Wilts Journal contradicted this. An acquaintance of Samuel Kent noticed that he was in good spirits when he visited the Welsh town of Oswestry, near his home in Llangollen, on the morning of Wednesday, 26 April. At about 2 p.m., he was seen buying a newspaper at the railway station. While reading the newspaper, which carried an account of his daughter's confession at Bow Street the previous afternoon, he became 'temporarily paralysed' before rushing up the main street to a hotel, from which he ordered a carriage and immediately started for home. He failed to keep an appointment he had made in Oswestry that afternoon.
Williamson, who had been given sole charge of the case, gathered several magistrates at the Trowbridge police court at eleven on Wednesday morning. The chairman, as before, was Henry Ludlow. The magistrates' clerk, Henry Clark, was also present, as were Captain Meredith, the Chief Constable of the Wiltshire police, Superintendent Harris, Joseph Stapleton and the two solicitors who had been employed by Samuel Kent in 1860, Rowland Rodway and William Dunn. The proceedings were delayed by the late arrival of a key witness, the Reverend Wagner. Hundreds of people who had not gained entry waited outside in the sun.
Wagner reached Trowbridge railway station at twelve o'clock, accompanied by Detective-Sergeant Thomas, and went straight into the court. The room was packed. He sat down, his eyes half-closed, his plump hands resting on top of his umbrella and his chin on his hands.
Constance walked 'calmly and firmly' into the courtroom, reported the Daily Telegraph. She was a stout girl of average height, according to this paper's reporter, and looked to be 'in robust health . . . her cheeks had a ruddy look which did not at all impress upon the spectators the idea that she had been a prey to an accusing conscience. For the first few minutes she looked like a person who felt herself placed in some unpleasant situation.' Miss Gream, who sat next to her, appeared rigid with nerves.
The clerk began by reading out Wagner's statement and then Ludlow, the chairman, asked Wagner: 'Is that true?' 'Yes,' he replied. Ludlow turned to Constance: 'Have you any question to ask this witness?' 'No, sir. I have not.' The magistrate turned back to Wagner: 'You may retire.'
Williamson took the stand and the clerk read out his deposition. As the confession was read to the court, Constance's composure gave way. At the word 'murdered' she burst into tears and half-fell to her knees, leaning against Miss Gream and sobbing bitterly. The Lady Superior wept alongside her. Though Constance was offered a vinaigrette – a box of smelling salts – by one woman sitting nearby and a glass of water by another, she was too agitated to accept either. When the Inspector stepped down, Ludlow told Constance that she was remanded for a week. She was taken to Devizes gaol that day.
Williamson posted a letter to Sir Richard Mayne, asking him to authorise a detective to find Elizabeth Gough, and the next day sent a telegraphic message direct to Dick Tanner, asking him to track the nursemaid down. Detective-Inspector Tanner, who had interviewed the Kents' former servant Harriet Gollop for Whicher in 1860, had become feêted for solving the North London Railway case of 1864, the first murder in England to take place on a train (he traced the killer, Franz Muller, by means of a hat found in the carriage, and chased him to New York by steamship). Though the press reported a rumour that Gough had married an Australian sheep farmer, Tanner found that she was at the family home in Isleworth, twelve miles from London. Jack Whicher, still living in Pimlico, was invited by Mayne to go with Tanner to interview the woman he had defended so fiercely, and fruitlessly, in 1860. The two discovered that she was earning a scant living as a dressmaker, occasionally employed to do needlework in gentlemen's houses for a week at a time.
Williamson, meanwhile, made inquiries in Road and in Frome, where he interviewed William Dunn and Joshua Parsons – the doctor had moved there from Beckington in 1862, and now ran a busy general practice. The Inspector returned to London on Saturday, and on Sunday visited Gough himself, taking Whicher with him.
The ex-detective and his one-time protégé worked together that week. Afterwards the younger man applied for his former boss to be refunded £5.7s.6d. for 'travelling and other expenses'. It was just over a year since Whicher had retired from the department, humiliated and disowned. A few newspapers referred to how unjustly he had been maligned. The Time published a letter from Lord Folkestone: 'Will you allow me to state, in justice to Detective Whicher . . . that the last words he said to a friend of mine at the time were, "Mark my words, Sir, nothing now will be known about the murder till Miss Constance Kent confesses." The Somerset and Wilts Journal reminded its readers of the 'merciless and almost universal . . . censure' to which this 'able and experienced' officer had been subjected. But the fact that Constance had confessed was not taken as a sign that the detective had triumphed; as the words on Saville's tombstone had promised, God had triumphed where man – and science, and detection – had failed.