Doomed to Fail - Ep 52: Baby Farms in Oz - The horrors of John and Sarah Makin

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

We're going down to Australia to check in on the child killers John and Sarah Makin. The Makins ran a 'Baby Farm', which sounds charming but is not even close. These two would procure a baby, and then... well you'll just have to learn more about the procurement and the bad things in the episode!Make sure to share and tell a friend!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail]  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In the matter of the people of the state of California, first is Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Hey, we're back. It is Wednesday. Happy Wednesday, everyone. I hope you all are having a great week so far. It is almost a weekend, sort of. We are back, and we are doing another episode of Doom to Fail. This time we're going to go into the true crime section of this, which is also kind of historical. this time because if you remember from Monday, my timeline of my story and the timeline of Taylor's story of Cracketo erupting are pretty much completely in sync with one another. So here we are. Taylor. I still don't believe you. I can't wait to hear exactly what it says. How could it possibly have it on the same day?

This is a long con. Let's see. Okay. So I'm still drinking my big old glass of milk because we're going to be covering in not a great way babies and milk is a little. a critical part of their development or so I'm told okay um so we'll we'll dive right in so first time I want to say that this story came from a friend and listener Daniel Shepard Dan thank you for making this suggestion um he shot me a text last week and said hey you should look into this thing I just stumbled on it and it's pretty crazy and I was like yep that is absolutely crazy so i'm going to start by discussing this cultural curiosity and the crime that it ultimately ended up spraying that we're going to be going deeper into the cultural curiosity is a

thing called baby farming you know what that is taylor okay i don't know having much of babies and selling them to people i mean the spirit of what you're saying is accurate it's all horrible maladjusted behavior but yes uh sort of like that what baby farming really is is basically a completely unsanctioned unregulated version of like foster care for children so basically if you were a rich family and your 16 year old daughter got pregnant you would put an ad in the paper saying we got to get rid of this thing here's 10 bucks to take it and then it would just go somewhere else and that's where it would be there's two versions of this And I'll bring up the first version, the more common version of it first, which is basically paying a weekly stipend to another person to just care for your baby.

So every week you give them like five pence and they care for your baby. And then whenever you decide that you want your baby back, you can go back. And it's like a pawn shop for babies. It's like pawning your child. Like, yeah, like a super intense daycare. It's an interest-free loan on an infant. That sounds so long. But there's another version of this that is actually way worse. And it'll be obvious why it's way worse as I get into the story.

Another version of it is you pay a lump sum and the kid just goes away. So in that version, you just say, hey, I don't want this thing at all anymore. Here's like a couple of bucks, take this baby. And typically, a baby farm would just take it. And that'll be the kind of the end of it. Obviously, the unintended consequence of a lump sum payment on a human being is that the money runs out before the kid is big enough to support itself. And so what do you do when it happens? What do you know, what happens when, you know, you gave me 50 bucks to take care of your baby for 18 years and it's the second month and I'm out of the $50.

I sell it to someone else. If you, so if you were a very moral. upstanding citizen yes you would transact that baby to another person that wanted to acquire a baby but if you're a little bit more unsrupulous you kill the baby oh no yeah so the good news the good news for us taylor is that despite america's history with transacting humans this really didn't take on in the the U.S. the way it did in Australia and the U.K. It was a bigger thing there than ever was here. It was still a thing here, but not as big as it was there. But I will stress the caveat that these were not real businesses. So there was no like, these were like SORP being filed.

Yeah, these are not like Delaware corporations that are being created in, in on the with the NASDAQ happening. I don't know what what I need of says, but like these are just like business business business. Business filing cabinet. official. These are just private homes that people are bringing unwanted children into. And so we don't know how prevalent it was, but we know that it was super prevalent in Australia in the UK. So that's the cultural curiosity part we're going to talk about. The actual story of the main antagonists of who we're going to talk about are two Aussies in New South Wales, where Sydney is. And their names are John Sidney Macon and his wife, Sarah.

Jane Sutcliffe and you know what I sort of told a half-truth about our dates okay because these people get sentenced and brought to justice in 1883 they got married on August 27th my birthday 1871 so like it's pretty damn close I think that's pretty close I mean definitely felt crack krakatoa especially you know they definitely heard it 100% so john and sarah they're in new south wills and they ended up having 10 kids of their own so five boys five girls i don't know what it is in human DNA where like the least able to take care of children are the ones who have like fucking all of them but like these were definitely in that category of like they should have probably stopped their one or two and not carried on with 10 more children because john was basically a giant

up like he couldn't hold down a job like he was just obviously this is 1800s women didn't work and so like he was just like this dipshit we just worked somewhere for a month get fired and then lounge around the house and get fired at the next like he did not have the facilities to care for a 12-person family basically right on or about 1881 john suffered an injury that basically prevented him from working completely even these stupid odd jobs that he would have and according to neighbors he basically just launched around the house he hung on on the front porch he was just useless he was a useless human you know what's funny is like if you're going to be like that kind of useless at least be fun at least be like a drug addict at least be a drunk like have a good

reason for why you're that useless like you can't just fucking like not have any substance to use problems you just like sit at home and just like chill you agree like there's no good reason I mean, I don't know if I agree, agree, agree, but that's like, be fun, but like, yeah, I mean, who knows? I mean, he wasn't even doing anything cool with it. He wasn't just like, he wasn't like, going to the pool hall and, like, hanging out with his boys. Like, he was just sitting at home. Yeah. That's fair.

We were at our neighbor's house today, and she's retired. And Florence was like, she's retired. I was like, yep, she doesn't have a job. And Florence goes, does that mean she's free? And I was like, it does. And she goes, I can't wait for you to be free. I know, I know, me too. Florence, we all.

none of us can wait to retire we all feel this way universally so the so basically john can't work at this time and because there's no supervision or regulation on any of this stuff him and his wife sarah decided they wanted to be baby farming baby farmers so weird and the way this would the way this typically would work in australia was that a mother would put an advertisement in the paper and saying hey Hey, I got a baby I don't want. Whoever wants it, this one's yours. And I'll give you a couple of bucks to take it off my hands.

And so this is the lump. It should be the opposite. What do you mean? I just feel like, like I feel like people should pay you to take your baby. But that's what happens now. Like, it costs a lot of money to get a baby. Like if you're adopting one, you have to go through a bunch of stuff. Like the person giving away the baby doesn't pay to have their baby adopted.

People pay to adopt the baby. That's oversimplifying it. but like, it feels like people who want babies. I mean, the incentive, but then you have a baby, if they care of a baby. The incentive structure here's really seem mostly aligned with getting rid of unwanted children, not supplying willing families with children. But where do they think that they're going to, okay, I know you're going to answer these questions. I just, that's very confusing to me. Continue.

I mean, a lot of good came out of this case, actually, at the end of it, because like this type of business completely became illegal as a result of this case. Good because it doesn't make any sense. So great. I feel like, okay, that makes me feel better. But like I mentioned before, the latter version of the payment model is what we discussed earlier. That's what this is. It's I'm going to put an advertisement in the paper. Come take this kid off my hands. There's five bucks in it for you if you do. And that's kind of the slump sum model, right? And so for this story, we're going to kind of begin at the ending. Actually, before we do that, Let me do some real quick math.

Let me, let me do some, some Australian math. How much is, upside down math? A British pound worth in 1880. Wow, that is not a lot of money. Okay, right, where you keep going. You can tell me or just like, no? Because, because this is, oh my God, that's so not enough money for a baby. So, okay. So, no, no, no, wait, that's not right. Is that right? Wait, value of 1880 British

pound today, hold on. A value, okay, 100 pounds in 1880 is worth $15,390. So one pound is worth $1,500. Okay, so that means Taylor. that means okay so generally the payment you would get for taking this baby off someone's hands was about three pounds it varied it was between two and five pounds but the what the story I'm too we're going to talk about it was about three pounds that's forty five hundred dollars to take care of a baby for the rest of its life is that crazy that's crazy I'm trying to think like it's so it's this is not here or there but it's so interesting to me how you can break down a pound to like a half penny,

like a quarter penny, because you'd like have to. If like a pound is like worth $1,500, like how much is a piece of bread? Yeah, it was pences. Like one pence is like a tenth of a penny. It has to be like really, really, really small. Yeah, it's going to be super, super small. Like how low.

Um, so again, we're going to start at the end of the story here. So the end of the story, we're going to fast forward. So we're like the, we're at 1880, that's where the farming business began, the farming business. I'm acting like they're like professionals here. And we're going to go to 1892 instead. So on October 11th of 1892, two contractors were digging a trench behind a home on what's called Burren Street. I'm going to refer to the streets here because there's multiple homes that all this shit happened in and the streets are the only way to keep them straight in my head. So when I'm Burren Street, this is all in Sydney. We're in Burren Street. Can you spell that word? What are you saying? B-U-R-R-E-N. Right, okay, got it. And these two contractors, they're digging a ditch. They're trying to connect the sewage pipe from the house, the sewage pipe to the city, the city line.

And they come across a badly decomposed body of something. They assume it's a cat. They don't know what it is. They're like, oh, whatever. This is a normal day in Sydney, I guess. And they just keep digging. They go a little further. And that's what they find what is very obvious and clearly the dead body of a body of a

a female infant. And seeing this, they're like, let's go back to the original, let's go up the dead cat and see what that was all about. I'm like, oh, that's also a baby. And so they obviously call the police and they run these bodies down to the coroner's office, the medical examination has done, and they start questioning the residents of this house. And they discover that the residence in that house had only moved in three weeks ago. The coroner determined that the badly decomposed body had been there for three months and the other one had been there for six weeks roughly so no matter what it could not have been the current residents that had done this the police inquired as to who the previous residents were and the makins name came up they had

since moved to a house on well street which is like a mile away from the burn street house basically so burn street is where the original two bodies were found well street is where they had moved to after burn street so three days later and about a mile away from the burn street house police find the body of another male infant and what ended up happening was they go to macken's well street house because at this point it was news right like they found two infant bodies in the middle of sydney so it was news the makins had apparently dug up a grave that was in the front yard of their wells street house and placed that body somewhere else so that it would like not be it wouldn't be suspicious for them basically but at this point

the police knew they had three and with the front yards yeah yeah i just never i would never bury you one in my front yard i looked at the house and it doesn't look like it would have well if the house probably demolished right so like i don't know what it looked like back then but i mean it's 1800s things were these are easy going back then but it's not like they have like a big beautiful front yard i can imagine i don't know maybe it's where to bear someone in your front yard or just anywhere that's not a graveyard probably right that's fair i mean it's also weird to bury someone in your background personally so so police go back to the making home they they're sorry the making home on well street they find this recently dug up

grave like oh the body we found elsewhere that had to be the body that was in this well street house that was being moved over to this other location when they found out that we found the two bodies of the burrne street house so at this point there's not really a ton of direct evidence that really a crime had been committed other than the unlawful disposal of a body much less the makings were the culprit all we knew is that some for some reason there's bodies that are showing up wherever these people live and like this is the 1800s they don't know why people die or how they're how they're being killed they just know there's dead bodies that's kind of true like what do you i feel like it's i think it's something like it's a

good question for later is like when did you have to start telling people that someone died when did you have to write the down like probably like has to do with like taxes so you probably would like tell be like tax me less because i have less people here but like i don't know when that was taking the law i think the problem is that you're running an unlawful like graveyard or an unlawful cemetery basically at this point right we don't know exactly what ailments these children end up having exactly so like there's not a lot of evidence there's just a lot of there's a lot of like dead bodies and for some reason the makins are costly around these dead bodies So they were questioned and they basically denied having taken in any children during the time they were at that Byrne Street house, but everybody was still kind of suspicious. So two weeks after the initial three bodies were found, the police started digging up that Byron Street house again, and they find five more dead babies. Just a lot of dead babies. Oh, my God. Five too many. It was, I would argue it's eight too many because now we're at eight.

sure sure yeah yeah eight too many uh-huh so it was basically at this point that the makins were formally arrested sarah john and their daughter blanche they were taken into custody in question blanche was the first one to basically break and say hey yeah are my parents were baby farming and she knew enough that like that wasn't a very well-looked-upon profession so that she was going to lie about it and then she realized like okay it's over i have to tell the truth yes my parents were taking them babies but at this point all they were saying they were doing was being midwives. So they would say that, for example, that Sarah was a wet nurse, which is like, I guess it's a woman that can nurse when she's not pregnant. Is that right? Is that my?

Yeah, yeah. Technically, like, you could nurse forever. Like, they have things now where you can nurse the baby if you have not even have the baby. You just have like adjust your hormones. Oh, okay. Well, yeah. So I guess, so that's what she was arguing is like, a midwife, I'm a wet nurse. Like, we're not baby farm. We're not like going to creeps to baby farm. But Blanche gave it up. Blanche, the daughter was like, yeah, we just taking these babies, basically. So in total, 15 babies were found buried at homes lived in by the Macon's after it was kind of all done. I mentioned earlier that a lot of times the horrible shit that would happen to kids giving

up to baby farms were an outcome of a lump sum payment, but that's really, sorry, it's based on the lump sum concept of like running out of money. But that doesn't actually seem to be the case here because in most of these cases, these kids were killed like a week or so after they were handed over to the Macon's like they weren't taking them in knowing for sure we're going to kill them it wasn't like they ran out of money then they killed them they literally got them to kill them right because they were going to get paid this 45 right doesn't mean like why bother right yeah yeah just you're gonna kill them anyway yeah so yeah it doesn't make it it doesn't make it better necessarily that they didn't

wait three or six years to kill the baby but still it does seem like more nefarious in some way one of the kids that was found on the property was positively identified as horace amber murray who had been born to an 18 year old named amber murray again a lot of these kids weren't like nobody give fuck like nobody gave a shit like their parents sold them and so nobody was really looking for them after the fact but this this girl was so amber had placed an advertisement asking for someone to adopt her baby for three pounds the makings replied saying if she was in interested that she could bring the baby to their home, and that's what Amber ended up doing.

One thing I noted here was, again, showing how nefarious their intent was, the makins would use fake identities to transact babies. They would use, like, they wouldn't usually sign their own name. They would present themselves as different people because they would also move constantly. And the idea was that they knew they were going to kill the babies. They didn't want the parents to come back and say, hey, I want to see my kid again. If they did, they wouldn't find them because they had the wrong information or the wrong. wrong address the wrong name and so that's what ended up happening here when when john signed the adoption papers this hilarious he signed his actual name then he scribbled it out and then signed a fake

name beneath it like he forgot he forgot as he's purchasing a child who am i today in the scheme so ridiculous so yeah basically amber takes her son horse this house signs off with the adoption papers and the kid is basically theirs. This is the one that was possibly identified in the pile. Yeah. The reason it was identified was because Amber hand-knit a sweater or a shirt or something for the kid. And so they literally took the kid and just killed it, like, immediately.

And then, like, threw the body into, like, a drainage ditch. And so when they found the body, it was wrapped up in this thing that Amber knitted. They presented the knitted thing. It was like, yeah, that's forces. I made that for him when he was born. So not great. That's terrible for everyone, especially horists. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Yeah, I mentioned, you know, again, like cases like this are like super hard to prove because, A, the technology isn't there to verify cause of death. All you have is like dead bodies. But again, like the suspicious part of it is that like most people like go their entire lives without having a single dead baby on their property. So they have like one family have 15 dead bodies on babies on. their property that's like a lot of dead babies like one or two you can probably get away with right i mean if you get up to like i don't know where that baby came from it was people who came here

before me it was a guy before me yeah yeah yeah sure so actually like before forensics and dna and such or whatever you'd be like i don't know you know it's just like maybe it's a maybe it's an ancient baby you're like who for goes you as a reasonable sensible human adult how many dead babies would have to be like on someone's property before you're like this is raising some red flags for me two i'll give you one so you so one you can get away with the second one is when you're like most people have zero now you have two we're we're we're crossing the divide of normal volume of dead babies on your property i'd also want to ask some other questions i wouldn't just be like i believe you i'd be like

you know have you been in contact with a baby that's gone missing recently have you bought a baby recently as someone sold you a baby recently like some general you have a contract that it shows that you've been transacting infants yeah yeah people call this the disappearing baby house like i don't know i want to see receipts that could be happening any receipts um so they go to trial the trial is literally just for Horace's death because that's only one they could identify and nobody else gave a fuck by these kids to look for them afterwards anyways. So the Macon's were both sentenced to death, but there was a plea of clemency given to Sarah, which I don't really get because

in my mind, the woman is the most appealing part of the deal. Like, nobody's giving John a baby to take home with him on his own. It's like you need the woman to sell, the man like i believe that that i believe yeah but they're both sentenced to death sarah was asked for clemency she got clemency on appeal uh she ended up getting a life sentence instead of the death penalty and john's execution sentence was reaffirmed on appeal john was executed by hanging about five months after his conviction they did it super quick he made no statement he basically what they were saying was he looked like a man who was like resolved to his fate fate basically uh he did write two letters one in which he proclaimed his innocence he

proclaimed that his wife did all this and he had nothing to do with it i hearing everything that everybody said about what a lazy useless piece of shit he was like maybe that's true i don't know maybe he didn't have like the gumption to do it he like he made it sound that like i'm like my wife is overburnton very overpowers me and i don't have the wherewithal to like stand up to her which is like yeah that could be true he did seem like a fucking dipshit loser you know i'm sure having 10 kids wasn't his idea i mean it isn't isn't again people need to know understand how babies are made and then perhaps true true that was he's definitely part of it he wasn't not there as

far as far as you know he was there you imagine what what's birth control looked like in the 1880s and me like good i mean i haven't said no i mean we're very lucky we're very lucky uh so john john made no statement he wrote two letters one saying he was innocent it was all his wife's doing the other one was a loving letter he wrote to his children sarah started her life sentence prison term and her health like declined pretty quickly it was implied that she had like that version of syphilis that Al Capone had that just like eats your brain alive, you know? Yeah. I think there's a sephilis.

She's advanced stage syphilis. And so her children like still seemingly loved her. And they wrote to the judges and they asked for clemency saying, hey, it's her last moments on this earth, let her come home. And so 18 years after she first went to prison for being involved in somehow having 15 baby corpses on her property. we don't know how she was a suspicious number of baby corpses yes and yeah yeah an abnormal volume of baby corpses she basically served 18 years in prison she got released to her kids and she lived

with her kids and she died about a year after she was released and that was her shitty horrible horrible life if you look at pictures of these two like she looks like a really really severe woman i don't know what it is about her i would imagine being married to just probably wasn't a treat yeah they both look kind of miserable but i think that she i mean women i don't during that time looked terrible like i was looking at a picture of like queen victoria came up and queen victoria looked awful maybe it's like the harsh center part and all of the black you know they just like no one looks great could be they could use some like highlighter

man there's an economist there's an economist who shares the name with John Macon that's unfortunate there's a lot of Sarah Macon's on the internet that are not this one I'm looking at pictures and it's like

young women and then this one God that is a mustache on John though isn't it that is one drop duster that is a lot that is a lot but yeah that's that's so sad

I'm not going to say like I thought I would understand this like it would be something I understand but like I really don't understand like I don't understand it from top to bottom I don't understand paying someone to take your baby with what intentions

I don't understand I don't understand so many things about this 4500 bucks like I understand I get that but like Why would someone give you that much money to take their baby? Wait, $4,500. It's the opposite right now.

And they did it for 15 kids. So that's like nearly $70,000. I mean, that's a decent amount of money, but I don't know if I'd kill a baby over that. Like I feel like I need a lot more money than $70,000 to kill a baby. Absolutely. I think we can definitely agree on that. Because actually, that's how much it costs. Five.

thousand overall he says in california the average adoption costs between 40,000 and seventy thousand dollars for domestic infant adoption what so if you get an international one they're more exotic so they charge you more i think they're cheaper oh they are i'm going to get like a swedish one they can teach yeah it's cheaper internationally it's 20 000 to 45 either way no one's paying you to take their baby I guess it's like foster care they give you like money to like have the babies, but like you don't keep them. I don't and the mom doesn't give you that. Like the parents of the baby aren't giving you that, like the state is giving you that.

Yeah. Anyway, I'm glad I don't understand this because it's a, it's a bad thing to want to understand. If I was like, no, I totally get it, then I'd have a problem with myself. Yeah, yeah. It's not a good model. It's not a good model. I mean, just generally, if anybody tries to sell a baby to you, just tell them, tell yourself no. I just thought that happens every once in a parking lot, you know, and then the you call the police that turns out the mom was like on a lot of meth, you know, like that's bad, but it's like, give you money. That's funny. It's give you money.

Didn't Charles Manson? I'm pretty sure Charles Manson's mom traded him for a pitcher of beer when he was like two years old. I think so. I think something like that happened, which kind of makes sense when you see how it all worked out. I hadn't heard about that. That was terrible. Yeah, thanks, Dan. Those poor babies. Thanks, Dan. That was awful. I mean, in the end, if nobody wanted. Crazy that they, that's the exact same. Well, you could, wait, go ahead. No, if nobody wanted them, though, like, right?

I mean. I guess they still do want to be alive, probably. They probably choose that over being thrown into a sewage ditch. Yeah. I mean, once the, yeah, like, that's why we should, you know, help people who have babies right to help them continue to take care of the babies because it's not the baby's false you know right like i don't know um boo yeah i wonder i wonder how many babies are buried on my property um yeah yeah i think it's one of those things that like it's just better not to know you know i have two and a half acres it could be any number of babies

and i just have no idea yeah your place is probably riddled with corpses probably yeah um yeah one one and florence did a desert cleanup this week this weekend and they used a metal detector because people which we just learned they burn pallets at campsites instead of like firewood and it leaves behind like thousands of nails so they used a metal detector and they got like thousands of nails out of the desert ground which was cool and we were like we should get one and see what we can metal detect in our backyard because i've also been watching this thing that i think is not true it can't be true this instagram of this like women who goes to like little rivers around London and is always pulling things out of the river

like a beautiful old ink bottle like a beautiful old pin like a beautiful old something and I'm like how can you keep pulling cool stuff out of this river? Anyway, I want a metal detector

I'm going to look that up. I support you buying one. They won't help me find the dead babies but like I do I think I'm having a cheaper metal detector. Man, can imagine if we started a Kickstarter for like

a detector to find dead babies like how many questions would the fbi be asking us about that i don't even know unless the babies were like wearing a metal i don't know how you'd find them i don't know you'd have to invent some new technology you know a decent metal detector for like 79 okay that's not bad that's worth it that sounds like a fun activity with with the kids yeah that sounds super fun so that is my very fun and hilarious and you know, hopefully I already feels good after hearing that story. Feels relaxed, feels happy. It's pretty crazy.

It's the exact same time as Cracketto. That's what I was going to say. That's wild. That's wild. Yeah. Look at you and me. Cool. Sweet.

Well, is there anything that you want to read out? Nope. I have nothing to read, but I do want to say, find us on social media at Jim to Fail Pott. Anywhere to listen to podcasts. Like and subscribe. Tell your friends. We have an email that goes out every Friday with what we have from the week if you don't get like those push notifications, but you want to know what we're up to. It's on substack. All that's linked in our Instagram. If you just don't know where to go to find it, email us. Doofelpot at gmail.com.

We need your support. I'll sign you up. Jerry signed up for our email. Thank you, Jerry, a friend of ours from an old job. Oh, Jerry. Yeah. Awesome. Very cool. Yes, please all over do you know. We're trying to become famous. And we will. appreciate you if we've become famous one then yeah thank you high five it's all around we'll buy you a metal detector there you go or a baby detector um sweet well thanks seller have a great sunday and yeah we're already cut it off