Constance, Francis, and the Christmas Ghost Story
Sally Ann Howes' section of DEAD OF NIGHT is the only one that has a basis in fact. In her story, she is at a Christmas party in a friend's house, and the guests are playing hide and seek. While hiding from a passionate (and annoying) male friend, Ms Howes goes into a section of the house that is usually closed. She hears sobbing and comes across a little boy, dressed in 19th Century clothes. The boy explains that his sister Constance has been mean to him, and threatens him. His name is Francis Kent. Ms. Howes' character comforts the little boy, and when he is asleep, she goes back to the party. Later, she discovers she has been conversing with a ghost. Francis Kent was murdered by his sister Constance in 1860.
The murder of Francis Kent was one of the most horrifying in Victorian England.
It occurred in the town of Road, England. Francis was a four year old boy (a little younger than the child in the DEAD OF NIGHT sequence, but not the baby that some have suggested on this thread). His father Samuel Kent was a factory inspector for the government. Mr. Kent had been married twice. His first wife had several children including a girl (now a teenager) named Constance. But the first Mrs. Kent had become ill (actually insane). Mr. Kent had hired a nurse for his wife, and eventually had an affair with this nurse. His children did not look kindly to his behavior, and Constance and one of her brothers ran away (but were brought back). When the first Mrs. Kent died in the late 1850s, Mr. Kent married the nurse. They had several children, but Francis was the only boy.
Francis body was found with his throat cut in the privy of the garden of the house. It was a horribly sensation of 1860. There were few child murders in affluent, upper middle class households. The local constabulary was not up to snuff in this case, so Scotland Yard sent it's leading detective, Jonathan Whicher, to investigate. Whicher had to fight local hostility from the towns people and the authorities. However, he perservered, and found some clues (such as a missing nightgown) that suggested that Constance was the most likely party in killing her half-brother. But local pressures against Whicher's investigation and his allegations about Constance led to his being asked to leave the case. Angry, Whicher wrote his report, and within a year resigned.
Five years passed, and the case was considered an insoluable mystery. Then in March 1865, having had discussions with a religious counselor, Constance Kent made a public confession that she had killed her half-brother. She repeated it in court, and was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment (as she was a minor).
Whicher was vindicated by this confession, and would (in his later years) demonstrate his great detective abilities again when he helped unmask the fraud of Arthur Orton/Thomas Castro who claimed to be the Ticheborne Claimant (Sir Roger Ticheborne, who disappeared at sea in 1854). Constance served her 20 year sentence in prison, and on release she went to Australia to join her brother there (he was a prominent scientist and teacher). She became a nurse, and would live into the 1940s, dying at age 101 (after getting a congradulatory telegram from the King of England upon reaching her centenary mark).
Many have marvelled that Constance long survival after the prison sentence was so peaceful and law abiding after the horror of the 1860 murder of her half-brother. In recent years there has been considerable questioning about her guilt. Constance (like her full siblings) disliked the affair of her father and her step-mother, but she did love her father. In the 1860s, as the mystery entered public attention, many thought there might be another side to it. Charles Dickens, in one of his letters, suggested Mr. Kent was seen by young Francis having sex with the new nurse, and Mr. Kent had to silence his little son from telling his mother. It was discovered by Whicher that the nurse had a criminal record, so that for awhile (before the business about the nightgown) Whicher had concentrated on the nurse. Today, many have suggested that the nurse was more likely to have killed little Francis than Constance or her father. Constance, thinking her father guilty, may have confessed to protect him. In truth, at this point we just don't know.
The Road Murder has popped up in other guises. In 1868 William Wilkie Collins' classic detective novel, THE MOONSTONE, had clues and activities suggested by Constance's behavior and by Detective Whicher (immortalized in that book as "Sergeant Cuff"). On the screen there has been no film on Constance Kent, but the story is used (albeit changed) in THE CHALK GARDEN, where Deborah Kerr's interest in the troubled Hayley Mills stems from her own checkered past (when she was a juvenile who murdered a child).