Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Victorian Baby Farming Killer: Amelia Dyer

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

In Victorian Britain, there was no formalised state adoption. Instead, desperate mothers paid other families to take their newborns. This tragic system was known as baby farming.As we’ll find out in today’s episode, Amelia Dyer was a notorious serial killer who saw this as a money-making opportunity, cruelly deceiving mothers and killing infants over a 30 year period.How did she get away with it for so long? What was society’s reaction to these shocking revelations? Kate is joined by Angela Buckley, author of Amelia Dyer and the Baby Farm Murders, to take us back to Victorian Britain and find out.If you're enjoying Betwixt please vote for us at the British Podcast Awards here. It would mean the world to us!Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Kate Lister, Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code BETWIXT. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. This is my extra emphasised fair dues warning because we're talking about serial killer who murdered babies in the 19th century and if that doesn't offend you and upset you, then perhaps that's something that you want to work on. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults in an adulty way and you should be an adult too.

And if you want to hang around and keep listing after that little lot and if you happen to get offended, which, to be frank, I hope that you do, then really you can't blame anyone but yourself because fair do's you were warned. For the rest of you, let's do this. As the dust settles from a departing train on a quiet platform in Victorian England, two silhouettes emerge. One is a young woman carrying a newborn baby. Her story is all too familiar for the time.

She became pregnant out of wedlock, didn't have the financial means to support her child and had nowhere else to turn. And so she is forced to essentially give the child away, which was quite a common practice at the time. Specifically, she paid to have somebody bring up her child. A tragic and really desperate act. The other figure, the one who's greeting her, is Amelia Dyer. And this is the woman who has been trusted to raise this child, to be the recipient of the baby, and she is charging £10 for the pleasure of being so. And that was a lot of money back then.

What Amelia Dyer is doing was known at the time as baby farming. But Amelia, seeing that there was money to be made in this practice, does not plan to care for this baby, despite what she's told the mother. What she is going to do is take the money, kill the baby, and then go in search of another desperate mother who will pay her to take her baby away. Amelia Dyer is one of the most notorious baby farming serial killers of all time. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course.

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the fire. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel for damn. Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. And welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal and society. With me, Kate Lister. It is hard to imagine a time when our society's most vulnerable didn't have any kind of social security net around them. For example, it was just over 100 years ago that formalised state adoption was introduced,

and the practice was actually regulated. Before that, the practice of baby farming, a kind of legalised people trafficking, allowed for all sorts of evils to be carried out. In today's episode, we are talking to Angela Buckley, author of Amelia Dyer and the Baby Farm Murders, to explore one of the darkest cases in criminal history. How did Amelia get away with it? What was the social context that allowed her to get away with it?

And what impact did Amelia's case and others like it have on adoption law hereafter? But before we get into the episode, I have a little favour to ask you, oh lovely betwixters, listener of my witterings, if you are enjoying betwixt, would you possibly, could you maybe, please give us a vote for the Listeners' Choice Award at the British Podcast Awards. It'll take you just a couple of seconds. It'll make us ridiculously happy if you do it.

If you follow the link in the show notes, honestly, it would properly cheer us up. We were shortlisted last year and we just missed our. and with your help, gorgeous Betwixta, we could get it this time. It's so close. Thank you for indulging me. And now, back to the show. Welcome to Betwixta Sheets. It's only Angela Buckley. How are you doing? I'm very well, thank you. Enjoying the sunshine. It's great to be here. We're about to make everything not very sunny, though, aren't we? Indeed. Indeed. We're doing what we're talking about today. Absolutely. But this case, absolutely,

horrifies and fascinates me. I want to know more about it. So I'm so excited to talk to who today. But then I also feel like a bit guilty. I'm like, it's a horrible thing that happened, Kate. Like, why are you so fascinated? So maybe you could make me feel a little bit better. What drew you to the case we're talking about today, the case of Amelia Dyer, the notorious baby farmer and serial killer of 19th century Britain? Well, I came across Amelia Dyer by accident, really, because I moved out to the leafy suburbs of Reading from London. And I was just doing some local history and then discovered to my horror that in fact Amelia Dyer had disposed of many of her tiny victims in the river very close to where I lived. And the park where I used to

take my small children when they were young was really where her crimes were uncovered. She'd have been operating Bristol for 30 years by then, but she moved to Cavisham in 1895 and it was there that the police finally investigated her crimes and her heinous business in baby farming came to light. Wow. That's not the kind of local history that you think you're going to turn up, is it? No, I used to do crime walks along there. It was always a bit weird, you know, with people, you know, out with their kids and people on the boats, you know, because it was on the River Thames. And you'd be sort of walking around, you know, talking about horrible crimes, really. But the sites are all preserved. You can go past the houses where she lived. You can see the spot in the river where some of the victims were found. It really hasn't changed since 1895. So it's quite chilling. I suppose we should start with the question. What were. her crimes, for anyone listening to this, going, I've never heard of this person. What did

Amelia Dyer do? Well, essentially, she was a baby farmer, and we might talk about that in a minute, but the actual crimes, she was indicted for the murder of two babies, four months old, Doris Marmon, and 13 months old, Harry Simmons. And this was in 1896. So these children were found in the River Thames, their bodies were found in the River Thames, in a carpet bag. It's a horrible discovery. There was a wooden bridge across the Thames at that point. The bridge is still there. It's now a metal bridge, but the actual location is still there. And they were dragging the river because they'd already found one body a few days earlier. The police were dragging the river and they found this carpet bag. And when they pulled it up, they discovered the bodies of these two small babies in there.

Two of them in one bag. Two together in one bag, one underneath the other. And they've been weighed down with a brick and it was quite clear that certainly one of them had been strangled. And by a combination of luck and extraordinary policing in a nutshell, they managed to get the guardians of these two infants to come to Reading the day after and identify them because they hadn't been in the water very long. They'd only been in the water for 10 days. And therefore, that sealed a case against Amelia Dyer and it turned out that she was a baby farmer and that she'd been running this trade in human life for 30 years. But the actual crimes that she was convicted of was the murder, particularly of the baby Doris Marmon because her mother came to

Reading and identified her. Wow. So she was convicted as a murderer. Tell me what a baby farmer is. Yes, so baby farming is a former Victorian child care, essentially, and it first dates from around mid-19th century when some working women in the urban areas like Manchester farmed out. You've heard that phrase before. They farmed out their children to a baby farmer during the week while they worked in the factories for a fee. But then when we get to the end of the century, sort of around about 1870, it started to come to light that these baby farmers were carrying out much more nefarious practices. And in fact, in those days, you could have a child fostered or adopted for a fee. So it was completely legal to sell your children. There was no legislation against this practice at all. And what was happening was that the baby farmers were advertising in local newspapers to foster and adopt children. And particularly single mothers were using those services because obviously there was a huge stigma attached to having an illegitimate child in the 19th century. And they often had nowhere to go because their families would throw them out. You know, they would lose their employment. And so they would effectively

place their children for a feet in the hands of a baby farmer. There were some baby farmers who did look after them, but the vast majority of them, and this is the really horrible part, allowed them to starve to starve to starve and pocket the profits. And then some cases, starting with a very famous case in 1870, Margaret Waters and Sarah Ellis in London in Brixton, actually murdered the children, and that's when it starts in 1870.

And it does lead the seven really high-profile cases, Amelia Dyer being one of their main ones, And eventually you start to get legislation to protect children. And that's perhaps the positive side, if you can find one of these cases, is it did lead to the Children's Act in 1908, which finally ended these practices. So it's a sinister story, really, and lots of silent victims, you know. I guess you can sort of see how the social attitudes at the time, and even the law of the time, because it was in 1834 that the poor law was changed.

So the father no longer had to pay any money towards a child. So the full responsibility was put onto the mother. Is that right? Did that have an impact on this? That's exactly right. So what they were trying to do then is they were trying to reduce the costs of the parish because it was a parish that was supporting all kinds of people, vulnerable people essentially. And so they wanted to reduce that.

So it was partly economic and partly immoral. And so they thought that if they shifted the burden of that onto the women, then the single mothers, then it might deter them from, you know, behaving like that in the first place, so to speak. And so what they did was they reduced the support they gave to women, but they also stopped chasing the men for payments. Brilliant. So they just left the women to carry the can. What a masterstroke that is.

Absolutely. And of course, it plunged presumably hundreds and thousands of women into even more poverty than they already would have been in. So now we've got a situation where if any woman gets pregnant, which is very easily done. Indeed. Then the stigma around being pregnant and having a baby out of wedlock is huge anyway. the social shame of it.

But now there's no way for you to get any kind of financial support. Presumably, if you're rich, there are ways around this. You'll just disappear for a bit and then, you know, give the kid to somebody else and pay for them to look after it. But if you're not, you're going to lose your job if you're pregnant and a single woman. You're going to get chucked out, aren't you? Yeah, and a quite a high percentage of the women who use these services, and particularly the victims of these baby farming cases were domestic servants.

Right. So you've got a whole layer there because it's possible they were also victims of abuse. as you can imagine. And so they therefore, when they fell pregnant, perhaps by, you know, the master of the house or the master's son, they were thrown out of their employment, which would have provided them normally with a living. And of course, they couldn't go back to their families because of the shame. And not just the shame, perhaps also because of the cost. Yeah. You know, I think as well, there's always a financial element to this as well. And so they were just left. So they had a choice, really. They could either go to the workhouse. Well, that was the only choice. They could either go to workhouse. There were some charitable institutions, but they have such stringent rules for allowing, you know, to taking in babies. that that wasn't really a possibility. And in fact, I did some research into the period around Amelia Dyer case. And I was quite shocked to discover that in London, in 1895, so that was the year that Amelia Dyer moved to Reading, the Metropolitan Police found the bodies of 208 babies in the city.

Holy shit. Oh, my God. So presumably, some of these babies may have been still born, but presumably it gives you an indication of how desperate possibly some women or families were. I mean, that's, you know, extraordinary, isn't it? It was 77 cases that year of infanticide going through the courts, but that's only going to be a very small proportion of the actual number of children. Which is the ones you know about. Yeah, exactly.

Perhaps some mothers or parents were pushed to go to quite drastic lengths. I mean, it doesn't really be thinking about... I mean, obviously, like, you're not going to say, I understand that, but I do sort of understand, like, I mean, well, what are your options? Exactly. It's catastrophic, isn't it, having a baby? So, I guess the idea. that like if you said these baby farmers are placing adverts in the papers,

that if you're in that situation of like, oh, God, I've got on pregnant, what on earth this is all have to do something about this? And there's an advert there saying if you give us money, we'll look after this baby. I can totally see why that would be an option for a lot of people. Well, and the baby farmers are very clever. Not only did they do adverts, they then entered into correspondence with the mothers. So Evelyn Marman, the mother of Doris, you know,

the baby who was found in the river at Cavisham. She was an unmarried barmaid in Cheltenham. And she looked after Doris for three months and because her employer said that she could, you know, and she was able to look after in lodgings. And it all got too much. And then she saw this wonderful advert, you know, wanting a child to welcome into a loving home, you know, to be brought up in the Christian faith, a lovely house in the countryside in Reading. And then they would carry on a correspondence through letters.

So they used aliases, diacord de self, Mrs. Harding. And Evelyn Marman entered into quite a long correspondence, you know, where they discussed, you know, the future for Doris and that she'd be placed with a wonderful family and a family that couldn't have any children. So she, sadly, Evelyna, you know, when she handed over that baby at Gloucester Railway Station, they always did the transactions at railway stations along the line between Bristol.

Amelia Diya did between Bristol and London. When she handed that child over, she genuinely thought she was giving Doris a better life. And the last letter that Evelyna wrote to Amelia Dyer, once the baby had been handed over, which was what helped the police to link it back to Evelyna, was a note that after, you know, how was she doing after her vaccinations

and could she give Doris a kiss from her? So this wasn't a sort of hard, cold-blooded transaction. This was particularly in the Evelyn's case. This is a woman really trying to do the best for her young child and genuinely believing that she was being looked after. So it must have been unbelievably devastating when she got that knock on the door from the police to come and identify the baby.

What kind of money would Amelia Dyer slash Mrs. Harding be asking for in these situations? situation. You hand over the baby at a train station, presumably you'd give them money as well. What kind of money are we talking about here? So mostly it was £10 for a one-off adoption. So it would be five shillings for a foster weekly arrangement. And they did have foster children because they used them off and there's decoys, you know, to show that they were looking after them. They looked after the older ones, not the babies. And it was generally £10. Amelia Dias cost escalated actually throughout her trading and she ended up charging up to 80 pounds. But 10 pounds was roughly three quarters of the

annual wage of a domestic servant. Yeah, it's a lot. So it's a lot of money, isn't it, if you think about that. So we don't know where Evelyn and Amman, for example, got the money from. Maybe she borrowed it from somebody who knows. But yes, she was earning an awful lot of money. It was very lucrative. And they had networks of baby farmers by this time, by the late 19th century. So they had intermediaries and basically they would pass babies down the line through the intermediaries and each one would take a cut. I mean, it was human trafficking in its worst form. I suppose if you scaled that up to today's money,

we're talking thousands, aren't we? It would be thousands and thousands of pounds for each baby. Yes. Yeah, I can see how this very quickly becomes a horrendous market. Did people look after the babies? Were there any nice baby farmers? Or was it just wall-to-wall awfulness? The only ones that were reported on during this period

were the awful ones, because it became known. Certainly from reports I've seen from the mid-century from Manchester, there were baby farmers. You know, the ones that were serving the working population, yes, they were considered to be kinder. And also the whole point about drugging babies, that was commonplace anyway with parents.

So parents would use opiates to keep their babies quiet anyway. So whilst that's very shocking to us, that was quite commonplace back in the 19th century, a bit like using CalPol. They would use things like Godfrey's Cordial that you could buy in the chemists, which would have a certain amount of laudanum in and then some syrup or, you know, molasses or something to sweeten it. And they use that for teething babies. So whilst that is shocking in the context of

baby farmer, it's not that shocking in the context of wider society. So we've got a situation where this trade is completely unregulated. There's no laws. There's no governing body. There's nobody checking in. And per baby that is handed over, we're talking several thousand pounds in today's money, that's going to create the opportunity for an awful lot of crime, isn't it? Because presumably it's easier to kill the baby than attempt to look after it for a little bit, because then you can get another baby in the next day. Yes, I mean, they used to have sort of, I mean, six or seven or eight babies at a time, and most of them did not kill them directly.

Most of them allowed them to waste away. And there were several reasons why this went under the radar. Firstly, you weren't required to register a birth until 1875, which was because of baby farming, because of the first case in 1870. 70 and then they didn't enforce that. So the vast majority of babies in the UK at that time were not registered. So nobody knew they existed. So you didn't have a birth or death certificate. Secondly, the infant mortality rate was so high that many babies wasted away. And it was called, they often referred to as marasma. So for example, I was doing some family history. And around

about mid-century in London, there was a family that connected to our family where they had 14 children, eight of them died in infancy. And when you look at the death certificates, they do have death certificates actually. It said, wasted away and one of them died from want of breast milk. Wow. So you're again in a situation where infants are already extremely vulnerable and they just, you know, they die anyway. They, you know, they fail to thrive. So therefore, what the baby farmers were doing were just expediting that process by starving them, which is always a horrible thing to say, but that's exactly what they did. So they'd have a house, so the famous one in 1870, the first one, Margaret Waters and her sister Sarah Ellis in Brixton, where they first discovered this is what happened in baby farming.

I think when they arrested them, they had 11 babies in their house. And they did actually some of them survived. Some of them were adopted out or given back to their families, but not all of them. So that's the scale of it. So they weren't just waiting for one to go. They were just packing the house full of loads of them, really. How has this been recorded in other countries? Is it a uniquely British phenomenon?

Or was it going on in Australia or America or anywhere else? It was actually. And so there are reports of there are cases in Australia and also the cases in France. And it was all over the UK as well. I mean, these were the only seven cases that ended in a conviction. and execution. But it's an endemic because I come across

it all the time. I was doing some research in Liverpool. I came across a baby farming case there. Most of the time they got away with it, you know.

Let's talk about Amelia Dyer because I'm interested to hear you said there were other famous cases because Amelia Dyer is the most

well known of this particular crime. But let's talk about what it was that has made her notorious, even amongst a fairly horrendous group

of people, she stands out as being particularly awful. Where does she come from? What is her origin story? So she was born in 1837 in a village called Pile Marsh near Bristol. And actually, she comes from quite respectable, maybe lower middle class or upper working class family. Her father was a master shoemaker.

And she went to school. So obviously that was a good start. She was well provided for. She had quite a big family. The only tragedy really in her background is that her mother died from meningitis when Amelia was 11. Anyway, she stayed with a family to adulthood. And then she trained to be a nurse at Bristol Royal Infirmary. And it was there that she met a war.

woman called Ellen Daines who told her about the lucrative business of baby farming. And by this time, Amelia Dyer had married her first husband. She had her own family. I mean, that's kind of mad, isn't it? Like when, against the backdrop of this is like she was going home and tucking her own kids in. It's like, exactly that. Exactly that. She had her own family. She had two husbands. The first one died. I think it's a bit suspicious. He died of diarrhea. I'm not, you know, I'm a little suspicious about that. But anyway, there's no proof. And so that's when she set up. So in the 1860s, she set up her practice in Bristol. She ran a house. of confinement where particularly unmarried mothers could pay a fee to give birth and then she would

then provide the baby farming, you know, all the fostering services afterwards. So it was a quite convenient way really to solve all your problems. And she moved around lots of times within Bristol because sometimes, you know, the law would catch up on her or somebody would come to investigate a child, you know, that had gone missing. Three times she was admitted to lunatic asylums, so I want to a better word. But it's very hard to know whether that was whether she put that on or not because every time the kind of net tightened, she would have some sort of episode and try and kill herself, but they weren't very convincing attempts on her own life. She'd jump into a pond or scratch her neck, you know, with a knife.

And she would end up in an asylum or in the workhouse for a while. And then she'd come out and she'd start baby farming again. She was investigated in 1879 for the suspicious deaths of four children in her care. But in the end, they only charged her with falsifying a death certificate. And she was incarcerated for six months. Each time she came back and she carried on. Who did she marry? Is there any sense that the husband knew what the hell was going on? I mean, I know that there's like an ongoing joke that husbands never notice anything about their wives.

But like mass infanticide, I would have thought, surely somebody would have noticed that. Is there any sense that people who lived with her knew what the hell was going on? Well, a first husband died relatively soon after she started. So he could be ruled out. The second husband, he was a labourer, worked in a vinegar factory, and they separated quite quickly. So while she was at the height of her trade, he was not on the seat. But really interesting and the thing that intrigues many people is that one of her daughters, the daughter that we know about Marianne Dyer, who was later Palmer, she and her husband,

Arthur and his Palmer, they ran baby farming as well. And they were also investigated. So you're right, you know, whilst Amelia Dyer's husbands don't seem to have been involved, certainly her son-in-law was very much involved. They ran a baby farm in North London. And some of the time they lived with Amelia Dyer. They lived together in Reading for a short while and then Palmer's went back to North London. They've got a very murky.

passed and quite a murky trail. And they were convicted once or twice for short fences, but they disappear. And that's one of the mysteries is that after Amelia Dyer is executed, the Palmas completely disappear and there's no trace of them again because they presumably changed their names. So we don't actually know what happened to Mary Ann and her husband. I'll be back with Angela and Amelia after this short break. I'm James Patton Rogers, a war historian, advisor to the UN and NATO and host of the warfare podcast from History Hit. Join me twice a week every week as we look at the conflicts that have defined our past and the ones shaping our future. We talked to award-winning journalists.

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of when Amelia Dyer started killing babies. I don't know if she ever wrote or confessed anything or gave us a date or like what was the start of this? We don't really. The only thing she ever wrote was she wrote a letter exonerating her daughter when she'd been convicted. And she describes the events around the deaths of these two babies, Doris and Harry, but she doesn't exactly admit it. But she talks a bit more about them. I feel that she probably didn't start killing directly until she came to Reading because by this time she'd been pursued by a former governess who she'd given her baby over. to Amelia Dyer in Bristol years before. And she kept coming back because she ended up marrying. She was a governess and she ended up marrying the member of the family with whom she

had the child. And so they came back to look for the baby. And this led to quite repeated visits from the police, which was what forced her out of Bristol really. So I think the net was closing by the time she got to Reading. She was also reputedly or possibly a laudanum addict. So she was losing control, I think, of her business by the time she got to Reading. So I think probably the only ones that she actually actually.

actually strangled because unfortunately that's how she killed them. The only evidence is really for that last period when she was in Reading. What on earth did she tell the parents? Like you're just saying there about a governess who kept getting back in contact. Did she write to them and go, like, oh, I'm really sorry, the baby's dead? Or did she just forget to do that part? Or like, what was that bit of this? She just tell them that they'd been fostered out or that they were adopted.

And she had quite famously as well, she had an elderly lady that she met in the workhouse in one point, who she moved in with her into Redding, who was called Granny Smith, and she was very sweet, and she loved looking after the babies, and she didn't know that the babies were being killed. And afterwards, when it comes to light, she's devastated.

Amelia Dye used to tell Granny Smith that the parents had just come and collected the babies or that she'd taken them because she was using the trains all the time, as well, she was, you know, fetching and carrying on the trains and delivering and collecting. So she would just go off for a couple of days on the train lines

and come back and say, oh, yeah, I just delivered that child off to her parents in London or I just took them there. So no, no, she just put them off, really. That's why she ended up in these asylums. You know, when it got too much, she would have some sort of episode. Do you have any sense of why she was doing this? I mean, I know that that probably question, like, how long is a piece of string?

But for your money, was this entirely financially motivated? Or was there something else going on here? Well, it definitely was for profit. I mean, she's a fascinating character. And nobody really understands her. At her trial, there was huge controversy over whether she was mentally well or she mad or bad. Half the doctors thought that she was insane and the other half thought that she knew exactly what she was doing. She also did form attachments to people.

She formed attachments to her family. She particularly formed a very close bond with a little boy that she fostered in Reading, who he was called Willie. He was 10 years old, nine or 10 years old, Willie Thornton, and she had him as a sort of decoy. And he was very attached to her. You know, when she was in prison, he wanted to see her. He remembered her very fondly because he spoke at the trial. So it wasn't there. She was a sociopath.

No. You know, she could form attachments. So it can only really leaves the possibility of it being entirely for money, but it's very hard to get ahead around that, isn't it? It is. Yeah, just the psychology of it. I mean, is it a case of like once you've started doing it? It kind of gets easier every time you do it.

And then I've got no idea. Because the other thing we should talk about is the sheer scale of this, because she was convicted for two, wasn't she? But the estimates of how many she actually murdered are significantly more than that. Well, nobody's ever worked it out. And I've started a new project to try and work that. to look back at Bristol, you know, to see whether I could find some of the victims. Because I think sometimes the victims get lost in this story, really.

We focus on Dyer and actually, you know, there's a lot of people whose lives were destroyed. And also I've been looking at what happened to the victims, the mothers afterwards and, you know, finding out what happened to Evelina Marman, for example. The only thing is, I think, is it's estimated on is the fact she was doing it for 30 years. So the estimates sort of between 250 to 400 babies. During the time she was in Reading, there were at least seven babies, bodies of whom were pulled out of the Thames. They weren't all attributed to Amelia Dyer,

but they could have been. So it was all around that period because unfortunately, the police did find, you know, bodies in the Thames quite often, but there were around about seven at that time. Wow.

You'd find more, actually. So I also found a child that had been adopted by the Palmer's while they were in Reading. So Amelia Dyer's daughter and son-in-law, and she, her body is buried actually in a little tiny cemetery.

Not far from the next house that I moved to while I was there. And she was buried as their daughter, Clara Palmer, and her death certificate says that she wasted away, but she was not their daughter. They didn't have any children. She's just in an unmarked grave in a tiny, tiny cemetery just in North Reading. So doesn't it just seem like bizarrely easy to get away with crimes in the 19th century? I know police work and detective work was kind of in its infancy, but like even so, it's so ridiculously easy to just go, yeah, all of those babies wasted away. And everyone goes,

yeah, that sounds about right, actually. And that's kind of it. Yeah, and the neighbours really liked her in Kavisham, you know. The only suspicious behaviour they mentioned was the fact that she'd left a baby out in a pram in the rain one day, you know, but they thought she was respectable. They used to spend these great stories, her and her family, you know, about where they were from and what they did. And, you know, she was seen to be kindly, you know, and matronly. Yes, exactly. When the mothers met them, like when Nevelina Marma met her, you know, she thought that she was just maternal.

I suppose that makes sense her, doesn't it? Like, one of the things that she was named like the Ogress of Reading or something like that. You wouldn't leave your baby with an ogre. She'd have to be very good at putting on this face of, I'm somebody that you want to leave a baby with. Otherwise, nobody would have done it. Yes, exactly, exactly. No, that's right.

So by the time we get to poor little, is it Doris, who she's convicted of, this is maybe at the height, certainly at the end of her killing spree. What is her modus operandi? What's she doing at this point? Is she just letting the children waste away? sounds like you mentioned strangling. It's like, what is she doing here? So I think a good example is

the first baby that they found in Reading. It was actually named later as Helena Fry. Well, she wasn't convicted on the basis of her because the identification wasn't secure. She was found on 30th of March in the river and some bargemen and found a package in the river. And they found a brown paper parcel in the river and they obviously opened it. They collected it, retrieved it as people did and they opened it. And this baby who was between six and 12 months old wasn't wearing any clothes. She'd been wrapped in linen and newspaper and then wrapped in a brown paper parcel and she had a piece of white tape around her neck which was tied under her left ear. That was a modus operandi essentially. And then she'd been wrapped in the newspaper and the linen and then weighted down with a

brick and wrapped in brown paper. And that really sums up what she did to the children. So that's what she's doing by this point. She gets the baby, she strangles the baby, wraps the baby in something and throws it in the river. That's exactly right. Do we have any sense of how long she was keeping these children for before she did that? It varies. Some of them for a few months. Obviously, Doris and Harry only for 10 days. So she's obviously starting to kind of speed up really. The first baby, Helena, only been since she'd been in Reading. So it was only a few months. And in fact, the little boy, Willie, who I said that she formed the attachment to, he recalled seeing a package in the larder, in a brown paper package in the house they were living at, which had a kind of funny smell.

So I don't think she was keeping them very long by this stage. A few weeks at the most, I would say. Tell me about Doris and her poor mother, because this was the case that brought it all down, wasn't it? You said that the mother was at a barmaid, that she tried to look after the baby, but it was just too much. Pays Amelia died to take the baby away.

What happens to bring this all down? In summary, when the first baby was found in the river at Kavisham on the 30th of March, the brown paper parcel that she was wrapped in actually had a name and a dress on, which is quite extraordinary. That's just clumsy. I know, I know. And it said, Mrs. Thomas, 26, Piggots Road.

And Piggott's Road is very close to the river there at Cavisham. And it was full of workers' cottages from the biscuit factory in the 19th century. Still little cottages are still there. The police obviously had this. And they went to Piggots Road and there was nobody there of that name. So a detective that didn't have very many in Reading at the time, Detective Constable James Anderson, he had the bright idea to go to Reading Railway Station and see if they could give them any information. And so they also had on the package a Midlands railway stamp and a date.

I think it was 25th of October 1895. So obviously the package had been used for something else. They got to the railway station and a ledger looked through his book and he informed them that she was actually called Mrs. Dyer and she'd moved to the other side of Reading to 45 Kensington Road. So they went over there. She was actually away, but they set up a decoy. So they got presumably one of the police officers' wives

because they tended to do that sort of thing. they got a decoy to arrange an interview or a meeting with Amelia Dyer at the house on the 3rd of April, which happened to be Easter Sunday, slightly bizarre side, and to arrange a transaction for an unwanted baby. So she arranged that. And then when Amelia Dyer opened the door to the woman that evening, she actually found the police on a doorstep. And when they did a search of the house at Kensington Road, they found all sorts of things connected with baby farming. So they found vaccination certificates, pawn tickets, you know, for baby's clothing, letters from parents, which in included a letter from Evelyn Marmon, and they also found some white tape in a workbox.

So they were able to then contact Evelyna. Ten days later, they found Doris's body in the carpet bag. But by that time, they'd already started investigating the parents in these letters, and that's when they were able to connect Evellina with Doris. So the evidence is quite damning then? Yes, yes. There's not much getting away with that. So when was she arrested?

So she's arrested on the 3rd of April, 1896. She went to trial in May. Did she admit any kind of confession? Yeah, no, she didn't. She didn't really. There's no surviving police records. And no, the only vague confession she had is that letter that she wrote from prison, exonerating her daughter. That's the only thing, really.

She just said she did know nothing about it, essentially. And then she was ex-was she the last baby farmer to be executed in the UK? No, no, there were two or three more after that. So the last one wasn't executed in 1907. So she was about the seven. She's about the third or fourth. How long she got away with it for? 30 years of doing this.

And I know that police, criminology and everything was in its infancy, but how did she get away with this for 30 years? 400 possibly babies. Well, yes, I guess there was no registration when she started. And she moved addresses all the time. I mean, I haven't traced her addresses around Bristol, but it's very complicated. She changed her name all the time.

So I guess, you know, that's how she did it really. This case changed the law around child protection in the UK. Because you were saying earlier that this is completely unregulated. There are no laws against this. You can just pay anyone at a train station to go and look after your baby. Did this case change laws in the UK? Indirectly. So the first Infant Protection Act came out in 1870 after the Brixton baby farmers.

And all that did really was require there to be, there were some rules around how many children you could look after at any time. It required baby farms to be registered. but this was not enforced. So in 1896 after the conviction of Amelia Dyer, they looked at this again in Parliament and they then required the police or the local authorities to enforce the original act,

but still it didn't stop. And so it doesn't stop really until 1908. And in fact, that's when they formalised fostering and adoption wasn't regulated until 1926. That's crazy, isn't it? I know, so not even, yeah, not even 100 years ago. So the law's taken a while to catch up. here. You said that you've been doing some research into what happened after the case,

especially with Evelyn. What did happen to her after this? I mean, the trauma of that poor woman and what she went through. She actually had another child two years later. Again, I think as a single mother, she, in the paper trail, it looks like she's married at some point because she uses a surname, but most of the time she doesn't seem to be with anybody. So I think maybe she got bit wiser this time. And she kept this child. And actually, when I looked on the 1939 register. But obviously by this time, Evelyn is quite a lot older. You know, she's obviously a midlife. She's actually living

with her daughter and a daughter's husband in Birmingham. She didn't die to the 1950s, which really shocking because it does show how close this is to us, you know, the fact she was still. I mean, I wasn't alive in the 1950s, but even so, it's not, it doesn't seem very far away, does it? So she, in the end, she set up a business. I think she was a manageress in a sweet shop in Birmingham. And she got her life back together.

And at least she had another child that she was able to, keep and she was able to live with her when she grew older. So that at least is something. That is something. I'm glad that she had, I don't you can call that a happy ending, but rebuilt her life. A better end. Yes. Perhaps she could have had. What is the legacy of Amelia Dyer? What does this horrendous case left us with? Yeah, it's a strange case actually. I mean, I don't love talking about it, although I do quite a lot. You know, you were absolutely right at the beginning when you said it's, you know, it's gruesome and it's fascinating. People are endlessly interested in case. I think maybe because she was a woman and, you know, I think we haven't moved far away from

the Victorian ideal, have we, where, you know, where they were obviously shocked that women could do this because they were meant to be ideal mothers. I don't think we've actually moved that far away from it, it seems. I mean, it does shed a light on human trafficking, I think. I haven't explored this as much, but the psychology of trafficking, you know, when people say, well, how does you do it? Well, you can say the same, can't you, about the trafficking that goes on today, you know, it's why do people do it? How can people do it? So I think those are the sort legacies. Interestingly in Reading, because I'm not obviously

from Reading, when I started talking about this case, I found lots of people locally whose mothers and grandmothers used to say to them, you know, if you misbehave, Mrs. Dyer will come and kill you. Which was quite extraordinary. And it's really woven into Reading's history. So apparently the ghost of

Granny Smith, you know, walks from the workhouse or the site of the old workhouse there looking for a lost baby. So locally, actually, she's become quite mythical and everybody, you know, lots of people know about it. Oh my God. Angela, you have been fascinating and horrifying to talk to. No, no, don't apologise. The research that you've done on this case and your book is just absolutely fantastic. Do you want to give the book a full shout-out so people can go and get it if they want to know more?

So it's called Amelia Dyer and the Baby Farm murders and it really just focuses on when she, when her crimes were uncovered in Reading. It's quite a short book. It's available on Amazon, all the usual places. But, yeah, so it's just tells us. the story of the discovery of her crimes in Reading and the reactions of the local people and the police, you know, how the police uncovered the crimes. Angela, you have been amazing to talk to. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you. It's been my pleasure. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Angela for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts.

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