Baby Farmer Murders Over 400 Innocent Babies for Profit
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For this true crime case, we need to go back in time to Southeast England in the 1800s. Penicillin wouldn't be invented until the following century, and diseases and infections that doctors today cure easily were often fatal. With their immune systems still developing, babies and young children were particularly vulnerable, and around 15% of children born in Victorian England died before their first birthday.

Life, especially for the poor, was tough. Men, women, and children who had no home or no income were sent to workhouses where they were given food and shelter in return for hard labor. Many of the children in England's workhouses were illegitimate, having been born outside of marriage. Their unmarried mothers were considered a disgrace to society. Even orphanages refused to take in their children.

This left unmarried pregnant women with few choices: keep their baby, but be scorned by society and have no way to support themselves or their child other than prostitution, surrender their baby to a workhouse, or give the infant to a baby farmer. Baby farmers were women who took in and fostered illegitimate babies and unwanted young children in return for a fee.

They advertised their services in local newspapers with the promise to care for the child until he or she was old enough to be sent to work, which was usually around the age of seven. Some baby farmers were kind and did their best to care for the children in their charge, but others viewed the babies and children as nothing more than a source of income. The Reading baby farmer was certainly the latter and is one of England's most prolific serial killers to this day.

On March 30th, 1896, someone working on a boat on the River Thames in the Southeast town of Reading, about 40 miles from London, spotted a parcel in the water. Whatever was inside had been wrapped in layers of newspaper and linen and weighed down with a brick. When the final layer was peeled back, it revealed the decomposing body of a baby girl.

It was immediately evident that the infant had died of natural causes because someone, presumably the killer, had wrapped white tape around the baby's neck and tied it below her left ear.

Whoever had killed the baby and dumped her in the river was either confident that no one would find her or incredibly careless because they left a big clue to their identity. Investigating officer, Detective Constable James Beattie, noticed that some of the packaging that had been used to swaddle the baby's body included a large envelope that still had an address written clearly on it.

The envelope had been addressed to a Mrs. Thomas at 26 Piggott's Road, Lower Caversham. Caversham is a suburb of Reading on the north bank of the River Thames. A postage stamp marked the envelope as being sent from Bristol train station on October 24th, the previous year. Detectives followed the lead but soon learned that Mrs. Thomas had left the Piggott's Road address.

However, a mail clerk told the detective that Mrs. Thomas had moved to Kensington Road, a couple of miles across the river. The detective constable also discovered that Mrs. Thomas now went by the name Amelia Dyer, and she earned her living as a baby farmer. Amelia Dyer was born Amelia Elizabeth Hobley in 1836 in a small village not far from the city of Bristol in southwest England.

Like most families at the time, the Hobleys were a large family, but her family was more fortunate than most. Amelia's father, Samuel Hobley, was a master shoemaker and could afford to send his children to school. Back then, only 25% of children in England attended school, and many families lived in extreme poverty. Amelia was one of seven children born to Samuel Hobley and his wife, Sarah.

Amelia had three older brothers and three sisters, but tragically, two of her sisters had died. Six-year-old Sarah Ann died when Amelia was around five years old, and her baby sister, who had also been named Sarah Ann, died when Amelia was around nine years old. Adding to the family's misfortune, Amelia's mother contracted typhus. The sometimes deadly disease causes fever, headaches, and delirium, and for Amelia's mother,

It triggered the onset of mental illness. Mrs. Hobley's mental health declined and she suffered violent fits, which would have been terrifying for her family and especially her youngest daughter, Amelia, to witness. Amelia's mother was unable to care for herself, let alone her daughter. With her father away at work, young Amelia became her mother's carer. When Amelia was 11 years old, her mother died.

Amelia stayed with her father and continued school until she was 14. Amelia then moved to the center of Bristol to become a corset maker's apprentice. Nothing is known about the next decade of her life until she marries a 59-year-old man named George Thomas at age 24. After her marriage, Amelia trained to become a nurse at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. Around this time, Amelia met a woman named Ellen Dane,

Ellen Dane was a trained midwife, but the services she offered pregnant women weren't limited to only delivering their babies. Ellen Dane ran a "lying-in" house. A "lying-in" house was an unofficial facility that provided a range of services for pregnant women. Ellen offered women a place to stay before they gave birth so that they could keep their pregnancies hidden.

She then helped the women give birth and offered to keep their babies so the women could continue their lives without having to bear the shame and stigma of being an unwed mother. All for a fee, of course. When Amelia completed her nursing training, she was hired as a nurse at the infirmary, but had to stop when she became pregnant. It was not the done thing for visibly pregnant women to work in the Victorian times. In 1864,

26-year-old Amelia gave birth to a baby girl who she named Ellen. Whether or not Amelia named her baby after Ellen Dane can't be said for sure, but Ellen Dane had certainly made an impression on Amelia. In 1869, when Amelia's daughter was around five years old, George Thomas passed away. Just a few years into her 30s and newly widowed, Amelia needed an income.

But rather than go back to the grueling and thankless work of nursing, she followed in Ellen Dane's footsteps and opened her own lying-in house and began her infamous career as a baby farmer. To Amelia, baby farming was more appealing than nursing. The only thing that was holding her back was the other Ellen.

She couldn't take in pregnant women, deliver their babies, and be a baby farmer with her five-year-old to care for. So, to solve this problem, Amelia farmed out her own child to someone else to care for. Now, free from the responsibilities of having a child, Amelia opened her home as a house of confinement for unwed mothers and started to take in illegitimate babies.

Like hundreds of other baby farmers, Amelia advertised her services in local newspapers, but she was anything but honest. One of her advertisements read, "Married couple with no family would adopt healthy child. Nice country home. 10 pounds." Instead of her own name, Amelia used an alias. In this advert, she used Harding,

Instead of her own address, she left the address of a local post office and collected any responses from there. And there were many responses. In 1834, England had passed the Poor Law Amendment Act, which removed any support, financial or not, for any abled-bodied poor person. The only help they could get would be in return for working in a workhouse.

Following the introduction of the Poor Law, workhouses sprang up across the UK and their conditions were deliberately made unpleasant to deter people from resorting to them. Men, women and children worked and were housed in separate areas so families who entered the workhouses were split up. The Poor Law didn't stop there. It contained a "Bastardy Clause" which cleared men of all responsibility for getting a woman pregnant outside of marriage.

Before this, men could be arrested and imprisoned if they didn't support their illegitimate children. But once the Poor Law was in place, they were off the hook. Women were now solely responsible for any illegitimate child they had until the child reached 16 years old. As well as being socially victimized, unmarried mothers were now financially burdened. The only way they could get support from the authorities was if they went to live in a workhouse.

This is what triggered the sudden increase of baby farmers. Baby farmers gave these women a way to have their babies and avoid having to resort to the workhouse or worse. By the mid-19th century, there were around 2,000 baby farmers in London alone, and each usually had multiple infants in their care at a time.

Newborns in their care were fed liquids such as cow's milk which lacked the nutrition of breast milk. Some baby farmers asked for regular payments from babies' mothers, but what they paid was often not enough to properly clothe and feed their children. Malnutrition was rife, and without the strength to fight off the many childhood diseases, infants handed even to well-intentioned baby farmers often died.

Many baby farmers used a popular opioid-based drug called laudanum to sedate the babies and young children in their care. The painkiller was so commonly used that it's often called the aspirin of the 19th century. Laudanum stopped the babies from crying due to hunger and neglect, which made the baby farmers' lives easier, but it had horrific effects on the infants.

Babies given laudanum over a period of time suffered from constipation-impacted bowels and a host of other health problems, although they were no longer crying for food. Countless opium-sedated babies ultimately died of malnourishment. Some baby farmers asked for a single payment when they took in a child and often, once the money was in their hands, the baby farmers had little incentive to care for the babies.

Many didn't even try to keep infants alive and left them to die slowly and painfully from disease or starvation. The public knew the horrors of baby farming, but the women who handed over their babies were desperate and had no other option. Amelia took advantage of these desperate women. In her first few years of baby farming, Amelia did as Ellen Dane had done and took in expectant mothers as well as infants.

Dyer also provided quiet births. As soon as a baby's head emerged during labor, she would place her hand over the child's mouth and nose, cutting off their air supply before they can even take their first breath. This made their death indistinguishable from stillborn babies. When live babies came into her care, Dyer gave them laudanum to keep them quiet and left them to slowly die of neglect and starvation.

At some point, Amelia began taking the drug herself, and was soon taking it almost every day. Amelia ran her baby farm for about a year until the end of 1870, when a baby farmer named Margaret Waters was arrested, convicted, and hanged for doing exactly what she was doing: drugging babies with opiates and leaving them to starve. On hearing of this, other baby farmers worried that they might also be arrested,

Ellen Dane fled to America and Amelia quit baby farming, for a while at least. She took up work as a nurse attendant in Bristol Lunatic Asylum, and in 1872, Amelia married William Dyer. When William lost his job, Amelia Dyer returned to baby farming.

when babies died, as they regularly did. The coroner came to record the deaths. Dyer would put on quite a show, faking grief at the baby's passing, and the doctor would record the deaths as due to natural causes. Amelia and William Dyer lived close to Amelia's place of birth in Bristol, and in 1873, they had a daughter who they named Mary Ann. Mary Ann, or Polly as she became known, was followed by a baby boy,

William Samuel in 1876. However, Amelia left her second husband not long after their son was born. Amelia Dyer continued baby farming, placing adverts in newspapers across the south of England until 1879, when the astonishing number of babies that died while in her care finally raised the coroner's suspicions. After four babies died in two weeks, there was an inquest into their deaths.

Perhaps trying to avoid the consequences, Dyer drank two bottles of laudanum. This would have been more than enough to kill most people, but Dyer survived, likely because she built up a tolerance to the drug. The authorities were sure that Dyer was responsible for the baby's deaths, but there was no way to prove that she had deliberately harmed them and not just been incredibly neglectful.

Dyer narrowly avoided being tried for murder and was instead arrested and charged for the offense of receiving children in an unregistered house. When her case was brought to trial, a jury found Dyer guilty and sentenced her to the maximum punishment they could of six months of labor. When her punishment was finished, Dyer found work in a corset factory, but in 1884, she returned to baby farming.

However, this time she couldn't risk having neglected looking infants around or raising doctors suspicions again. So, she took on a new, more callous approach to her business. Instead of leaving babies to die slowly, Dyer started to outright murder them. Her method of killing was strangulation.

and to make sure that her tiny victims were dead. She tied white dressmaker's tape tightly around their necks and left it there so there was no chance they'd survive if she at first failed to strangle them to death. To avoid raising suspicion, Dyer didn't stay in the same place very long and moved frequently to stay a step ahead of the law and anyone else who might notice the number of babies passing through her home. The general public was becoming more concerned about the welfare of children.

there were an estimated 30,000 homeless children in London in the mid to late 19th century. And Victorians were beginning to believe that these children should be protected. The growing pressure from the public about the care of children was a factor in creating the country's first child protection agencies. The Waifs and Strays Society was established in 1881, and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children

commonly known as the NSPCC, came in the years after. In 1890, a young governess gave her illegitimate baby to Dyer. Like the majority of young women who worked in Victorian England, she worked in domestic service and wasn't able to keep her job and her baby. Governesses, alongside servants and barmaids, made up the majority of the baby farmers' customers.

Since giving up her baby, the governess had married the child's father and wanted her baby back. So, she went back to the baby farmer. Dyer either didn't expect the governess to return or attempted a trick that she'd played before. When the governess arrived at her house and asked for her baby, Dyer invited her in. Dyer then disappeared and returned with a baby which she placed in the governess's arms.

The governess knew right away that the baby she was holding wasn't hers. Dyer tried to convince her that it was her child and emphasized how much babies change in just a few months. But the governess was adamant it wasn't her baby and began to strip the infant. As soon as she saw the baby's hip, she was sure. The baby she gave birth to had a birthmark on its hip. The baby Dyer had given her had no such mark.

The governess went to the police and told them what had happened, but they were of little help. When the police questioned Dyer, she told them that she had given the child to someone else and then she didn't know where it was. After this brush with the police, Dyer had a very conveniently timed mental breakdown, threatened suicide, and was sent to the Wells Mental Asylum in Bristol.

After a few months, Dyer was released from the asylum and wasted no time in setting up another baby farming operation at a new address. The governess was persistent and she again arrived at Dyer's door in search of her child. After this, Dyer had another mental breakdown. This time, she had taken an overdose of laudanum

Once again, Dyer was admitted to an asylum, this time in Somerset. And like before, she resumed baby farming when she was released. But again, the governess returned. Having gotten nowhere the last time, she had brought the police. Dyer went back to the Wells Asylum, but this time they refused to admit her. In response, Dyer attempted to take her own life again, and she was admitted to Bristol General Hospital.

When she got out of the hospital, she went back to baby farming, but it wasn't long before she was back in a mental asylum, this time in the city of Gloucester, around 35 miles northeast of Bristol. Upon her release from here, she was sent to the Bristol workhouse. While living in the workhouse, she noticed a woman named Jane Smith. As an older lady with no way of supporting herself, Jane didn't expect to ever leave the workhouse, but when Dyer saw her,

she saw her potential. Dyer set about selling Jane on the idea of leaving the workhouse and rescuing unwanted, illegitimate babies. Jane agreed to the idea and even to Dyer's unusual request to call her mother. Unbeknown to Jane, this was central to Dyer's plan.

Since Margaret Waters was executed in 1870, two more baby farmers had been hanged for murdering children. 40-year-old Annie Tooke in Exeter in August 1879 for the murder of six-month-old Reginald Hyde and 27-year-old Jesse King in Edinburgh in March 1889 for strangling Alexander Gunn to death and burying him in her cellar.

Not surprisingly, after hearing stories like these, women were more cautious of entrusting their babies to baby farmers. But a woman and her elderly mother? Surely they couldn't be up to any harm. So, with Jane by her side, Dyer returned to the baby farming business once more. Dyer's scheme worked.

women liked the idea that their babies would be cared for by the seemingly caring Dyer and her mother, who would be their child's Granny Smith. As she had done many times before, Dyer relocated before anyone got too suspicious. In the summer of 1895, Dyer moved to Reading and settled into 26 Bigots Road in Caversham, just a stone's throw from the ever-flowing River Thames.

Jane Smith moved with her, allowing Dyer to continue her murderous business under the facade of being a caring mother and daughter. Being so close to the banks of the river was very convenient for Dyer, who began to dispose of her victims' bodies in the Thames. By now, Dyer's daughter, Mary Ann, was in her early 20s and married to a man named Arthur Ernest Palmer. Dyer's son had joined the Marine Regiment and had left England to serve overseas.

Since marrying, Mary Ann and Arthur had lived in a few different places, and they soon joined Dyer and Jane at Bigotts Road. Dyer placed advertisements in Bristol newspapers offering to care for babies in exchange for an upfront fee and suitable baby clothing. In her many adverts, she wrote that she had wanted a child for a long time and had a caring home to offer.

Dyer corresponded with the unfortunate mothers by mail, offering further reassurance that she was a respectable woman and their babies would be in a safe and loving home. When the women decided to hand their babies over, Dyer met the women and collected babies from railway stations, along with the upfront fee and baby clothes. Once she had the money, she had no need for the babies and would kill them within days, sometimes even hours.

Dyer wrapped up their small bodies and kept them in her home until they had decomposed enough to be unidentifiable. Then Dyer would take the package and a brick and take the short walk down to the riverbank. Dyer trusted Jane Smith to go with her to meet the women who answered her newspaper advertisements, but she didn't bring Jane in on the murders. However, with so many babies moving through the home, it was only a matter of time before Jane got suspicious.

Babies disappeared as quickly as they arrived. When Jane's suspicions grew too large for her to ignore, she went to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and shared her concerns. NSPCC Inspector Charles Bennett followed up and paid Amelia Dyer a visit.

However, the Children's Society inspector seemed more worried about Dyer not having a license to care for children, rather than the many children that had seemingly vanished in her care. Bennett reported Dyer to the police for her lack of license and informed his supervisors, who advised him to make a record of Jane Smith's concerns. A few weeks after the NSPCC inspector had visited,

Jane noticed a foul smell in the kitchen and traced the source to an odd-shaped package in the cupboard. Perhaps due to fearing what she might find inside, she left it untouched. Dyer and Jane shared the property with a lodger who lived on a lower floor, and they also noticed the terrible stench. The morning after the lodger complained, Jane saw Dyer cleaning the cupboard that had held the strange package.

This was completely out of character for Dyer, who then left the house with a bundle that she claimed were clothes she was taking to the pawn shop. Likely to avoid another visit from the NSPCC or the police, Dyer left Bigotts Road and moved to Kensington Road in the center of Reading. This time, Mary Ann and Arthur didn't follow Dyer and moved to London.

In January, 1896, a barmaid named Evelina Marmon saw one of Dyer's newspaper advertisements. It read, "Couple with no child, want care of or would adopt one, terms 10 pounds." Evelina was pregnant and her baby's father wasn't in the picture. So she responded to the ad.

Using the alias Mrs. Ann Harding, Dyer replied writing, "In reference to your letter of adoption of a child, I beg to say, I shall be glad to have a little baby girl, one that I can bring up and call my own. First, I must tell you, we are plain, homely people in fairly good circumstances. We live in our house and have a good and comfortable home. We are out in the country and sometimes I am alone a great deal.

"I don't want the child for money's sake, but for company and home comfort. Myself and husband are dearly fond of children, none of my own. A child with me would have a good home and a mother's love and care." The women continued their correspondence, and when Evelina gave birth, she arranged to meet Mrs. Harding. In early March, Dyer traveled to Bristol Temple Meads Station, where she met another woman in a desperate situation.

Like Evelina, this woman believed that her baby girl, who she had named Helena, was going to a loving home. Instead, Dyer took baby Helena home and got a length of white dressmaker's tape from her sewing basket. Three weeks later, on March 30th, 1896, a man working on the river unwrapped a strange package and discovered Helena's body. The next day, Dyer left Reading to collect Evelina Marmon's baby.

Evelina cared so much about the wellbeing of her baby, who she named Doris, that she had prepared a contract regarding her care. Under the guise of Mrs. Harding, Dyer read the contract. I, Anne Harding, of 45 Kensington Road, Oxford Road, Reading,

in consideration of 10 pounds paid to me by E.E. Marmon, agreed to adopt the child and to bring up the same as my own without any further compensation over and above the 10 pounds. Dyer scrawled Anne Harding at the bottom of the contract and Evelina handed her baby over.

she could never have imagined that it would be the last time she would ever see her daughter alive. Later that day, Dyer arrived at her daughter and son-in-law's home in London with a baby wrapped in a shawl and carrying a carpet bag. According to Dyer, while Arthur was out of the house and without her daughter seeing, she wrapped a length of white tape around baby Doris' neck and she studied the baby's face, enjoying every second of her innocent victim's pain.

Then, she wrapped the shawl back around the new motionless baby and placed her on the sofa as if she were sleeping. That evening, Dyer, Mary Ann, and Arthur picked up another baby from Paddington Station. This child was probably 13-month-old Harry Simmons. As Redding Police continued their investigations into the baby girl pulled from the river, Dyer killed baby Harry.

The police had spoken to people who had encountered Dyer and their words revealed a disturbing picture of a ruthless and calculated killer. Knowing of Dyer's history of evading capture and not having strong enough evidence for an arrest, the police came up with a plan. The police got a young woman to contact Dyer, pretending that she needed someone to take her child. After two nights at her daughter's, Dyer returned to Reading carrying the carpet bag, but no infants.

She had no idea that one of her victims' bodies had been found and that the police were onto her. So when the police's decoy contacted her, she agreed to meet. On April 3rd, which was Good Friday, the police knocked on the door of 45 Kensington Road. Anticipating her new customer, Dyer opened the door and to her surprise, came face to face with the Redding police sergeant and a police detective.

She first pretended to be someone else, but the police weren't fooled and began a search of the premises. When asked about the contents of the parcel, Dyer replied, "I do not know anything about it. It's all a mystery to me." Before long, they found some similar looking white tape, tickets for baby clothing that Dyer had pawned, and letters from some of the women who had trusted her with their babies.

More than 30 years after she started baby farming, Dyer's unforgivable crimes had finally caught up with her and she was arrested and taken to Reading Jail. As soon as she was left in her cell, Dyer unlaced her boot, wrapped the lace around her neck and tied it in a knot below her ear, just like she had done to all the babies and tried to hang herself. But unlike the babies, Dyer survived.

The police seared the River Thames and on April 10th, they pulled a carpet bag from murky waters. Inside were the bodies of Evelina Marmon and Harry Simmons. When the police arrested Dyer, there was a boy living with her old enough to be a witness. When the police showed him the carpet bag, he recognized it and identified it as his bag. The police also arrested Dyer's daughter and her husband as accessories to the murders.

Despite giving her first child away and so callously murdering so many other children, Dyer was said to have doted on her daughter, Mary Ann. When Dyer heard of Mary Ann's arrest, she confessed and said that she alone was responsible for the murders. From her cell, she wrote,

Sir, will you kindly grant me the favor of presenting this to the magistrates? On Saturday the 18th, instant, I have made this statement out. For I may not have the opportunity then, I must relieve my mind I do now, and I feel my days are numbered on this earth.

Verse 1.

Neither of them had anything at all to do with it. They never knew nor contemplated doing such a wicked thing until it was too late. I am speaking the truth and nothing but the truth as I hope to be forgiven. I myself and I alone must stand before my maker in heaven to give an answer for it all. Witness my hand, Amelia Dyer. The police released Alfred, but not Marianne.

Their search of the river where witnesses had placed Dyer turned up six infants' bodies. Amelia Dyer told the officers, "You'll know all mine by the ribbons around their neck." On May 22nd, 1896, 59-year-old Amelia Dyer appeared at the Old Bailey. She was only tried for the murder of Helena Frye, but if found guilty, she would hang.

Dyer pleaded insanity. Mary Ann, who was still being charged as an accessory to murder, didn't hesitate to blame her mother. When asked about Dyer, Mary Ann told the court, "She said she heard voices and she had a delusion that I was going to murder her. She threatened my life on several occasions and once she attempted it. In less than two and a half hours, the trial was over."

The jury took just four and a half minutes to decide that Dyer wasn't insane, but much guilty of murder. The judge sentenced Dyer to death by hanging, describing her as treacherous and barbarous.

While awaiting her execution, Dyer filled five notebooks with her final confession. In this, she claimed that Mary Ann hadn't been involved in the murders and that she didn't know that Doris and Harry had been killed in her home. Dyer confessed that she often felt peaceful after dumping her victims' bodies in the water. She wrote to Mary Ann, "I have no soul. My soul was hammered out of me and glossed her asylum.

On June 10th, a large crowd gathered around Newgate Prison to witness Amelia Dyer's execution. The convicted murderer was brought onto the scaffold and the 1,000 strong crowd watched as a noose was placed around her neck. When asked if she had any final words, Dyer replied, "I have nothing to say." The executioner pulled the lever and the Redding baby farmer dropped to her death.

Soon after Dyer's execution, a wax figure of her joined the display of other infamous criminals in Madame Tussauds' Chamber of Horrors. If you were there at the time, you might have heard the Victorian singing the latest murder ballad. ♪ That old baby farmer, the wretch Mrs. Dyer ♪ ♪ At the Old Bailey her wages is paid ♪ ♪ In times long ago we'd have made a big fire ♪

In the months after Dyson's arrest and execution, around 50 babies were pulled from the stretch of river between Reading and London. It's thought that Dyer killed up to six children in a day at her worst, and it's estimated that she killed over 400 children during her time as a baby farmer.