Stockton Herald, South Durham and Cleveland Advertiser. — 1866-03-30 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

KENT AND THE ROAD MURDER.  Mr Robert Baker, one of her Majesty's inspectors of factories, in his last report to the Home Office, just pr seated to both Houses of Parliament, refers in the f illoAing terms to the father of Constance Kent:—Mr Snip-Inspector Kent has been at length enabled to resume those active exertions which his unhappy position in the public mind had so long rendered him incapable of. With respect to him, I venture now to advert for a few momen's to that which I can speak of, perhaps, better than anybody else, namely, the wrong which has been done him by the public for so long a period, in condemning him unheard, in a matter so vitally important to him in every way, and from which he is now I trust completely exonerated. It is a proverb almost too trite to repeat, and many have found it so in life, that they who have done a man an injury never forgive him. Yet there has been an exception to this axiom in Mr Kent's case ; for no less important a person than the mayor of a large manufacturing town was lately heard to declare that, so deeply did he feel the injury which he had himself committed upon Mr Kent, by condemning him unheard, if a national subscription was cornmonced on his behalf, he would be one of the first and largest contributors to it. lam sure I can say, if the tenor of Mr Kent's life for the last few years had been known to the world as I have been able to observe it, his anxiety to clear his name from unmerited condemnation, only rendered more intense by the agony of doubt as to the actual criminal; the threatened blind- ' ness of his wife, now unhappily terminated in paralysis; the isolation of all his children from society, added to the cares of an infant family almost dependent upon a comparatively small office held by one advanced in life, that public sympathy, always generous to suffering, and doubly so to injustice, might have probably replaced the sum he has been compelled to appropriate from his private resources partly in elucidating so mysterious a murder, and partly in the defence of his wretched child, who, as a Woman. has "done what she could to vindicate the reputation of her family, and to clear it from a participaiiiin in her crime. Soon after the Road murder first attracted public notice, I was obliged to ask for Mr Kent's removal from Wiltshire into a quiet district in Wales, whon that which he was in would not tolerate him; and when I would have sent him to another, that also threatened to rise in public array against him to avert my intention. Thus driven from district to district, a mark and a scoff for everybody, his distress of mind can only be faintly imagined, but cannot be pourtrayed. His name is, however, clear from that foul blot which it has so long sustained from the act of wild revenge of a child, who, to say the least of it, was born of a mother who for years lived and who died insane; and it seemed to me due to him that I should take this opportunity of referring to the circumstance, in the hope that there may be left to him many years of official service, now that so much of his past calamity is being forgotten.