‘Highly respectable married couple wish to adopt a child; good country home; premium required, very small.’
When Amelia Dyer placed the above newspaper advert, she was indeed searching for a young baby. But the young woman had no husband, no vast home, and was anything but respectable. In fact, she planned to kill any child she could get her hands on.
Dyer was a ‘baby farmer,’ a role which existed in the Victorian times when women could be ostracized for having a baby outside of wedlock. Dyer would place adverts in local newspapers and meet new mothers at mainline train stations. Each ‘client’ paid £10 – around £650 in today’s money – to the older woman to have her look after their baby. Dyer, a former nurse, would then pocket the money and brutally murder the infant.
‘Amelia Dyer had a 25 year career of killing children,’ Joel Briggs, curator of the True Crime museum, tells Metro. His eclectic museum in Hastings, East Sussex, houses Dyer’s bodice, which was bought at auction by Joel’s father in the early sixties.
‘At the start, for a fee, she would kill a child before it took its first breath, strangling the baby before it emerged fully from the womb. This was when she was in her twenties. Dyer was eventually found out [in 1879 after a doctor became suspicious about the number of babies who died in her care] and sentenced to hard labour. But she then feigned insanity and was sent to an asylum instead of prison.
‘Once she was dismissed from the asylum, she lived under various different names in cities close to the Thames like London, Gloucester, Bristol and Oxford. She liked to keep moving.’
Upon her release, Dyer changed tack and began her fake ‘adoption services.’ She’d meet with a new mother who answered her newspaper advert and promise their son or daughter would be cared for. But it was all a lie.
‘Amelia Dyer would take the baby home,’ Joel explains. ‘And look after it for a couple weeks, just in case the mother changed her mind.
‘Once enough time had passed, she’d fetch a ribbon and tighten it around the baby’s neck until they were asphyxiated. She then wrapped the poor child up, in brown paper or wax paper, and add a brick or stone on top of the baby. She’d tie the whole thing up and throw the body into the Thames or Avon, whichever one she lived nearest to at the time.’
Dyer got away with this evil practice for years as adoption services were not regulated at the time, making it easy for her to escape suspicion. Sometimes she would administer copious amounts of Godfrey’s Cordial – a medicine laced with opiates which was also known as ‘Mother’s Friend’ – to kill the baby if strangulation wasn’t possible or if she’d run out of ribbons.
The baby farmers who ‘took care’ of unwanted children
Baby farming was a Victorian practice which took advantage of mothers unable to care for their children. If a woman had a baby outside of marriage, she could be shunned from society. At the time, abortion was illegal and illegitimate children were looked down upon in society.
If a mother murdered an unwanted child – and got caught – then they typically faced the death penalty. As a result, these women paid ‘baby farmers’ for help. Sometimes, baby farmers would genuinely care for the child but, in the majority of cases, they would abuse or neglect the baby until it died.
The last baby farmer to be executed in Britain was Rhoda Willis, who was hanged in Wales in 1907.
Eventually, her evil exploits were revealed on March 30, 1896 when a bargeman found the small body of baby Helena Fry in the Thames. The baby’s mother was Mary Fry, a domestic servant, who had paid to have Dyer ‘care’ for her daughter.
Police discovered the connection because the killer ‘got cocky’, says Joel.
‘Dyer had become so blasé that she wrapped one baby in brown paper from a parcel which had been sent to her. The corpse of this baby didn’t sink and it rose to the surface. Bargeman hooked it out and found the body of the child tied up with the brick and took it to Reading Borough Police. The police saw the address on the side of the paper and got to work.’
The smudged writing on the parcel read ‘26 Piggott’s Road, Caversham.’ Detectives visited the address where they were told Dyer, in her fifties by this point, had moved to Kensington Road in Reading. Police then sent a young woman to Dyer’s home to request her ‘services.’
This clearly linked the murderer to the business of baby farming and an arrest was made. The clear evidence against her gave Dyer little wriggle room to deny the crimes at her Old Bailey trial when it began on May 22, 1896. It emerged that baby Helena Fry, who had been found by the bargeman, was given to Dyer at Bristol Temple Meads station on March 5.
Joel recalls a ‘painful part’ of the case which came shortly after her arrest, which proves Dyer was by no means alone in being a child killer.
He continues: ‘Dyer told police which part of the Thames she had killed and dumped the babies. She also explained it would be possible to tell which ones were “hers” due to the ribbon round their necks. Heartbreakingly, the police went to the location and pulled out 10 dead babies, only six of which were Dyer’s. This shows how killing an unwanted baby was not an uncommon crime during this period.’
During the trial, the prosecution gave insight into the killer’s early life; a difficult upbringing in the village of Pyle Marsh near Bristol. The young Amelia Dyer showed a talent at reading and the arts, but was confined to her home to care for her typhus-afflicted mother who was mentally ill and had violent fits.
In 1861, at the age of 24, Dyer moved to Bristol where she met and married George Thomas, who was 59 and died in 1869. It was while working as a nurse that she found out about baby farming. Dyer also had three children of her own; Ellen, Mary Ann and William. Joel suspects Mary Ann and her partner Arthur were ‘in on the killings’ as they lived with Dyer and Mary Ann sometimes met with new mothers.
But Dyer, who wore a blue cloak and a feather boa during proceedings, claimed sole responsibility when her case reached court. She also pleaded insanity to try to escape punishment. However, the jury saw through the ‘play acting’ and, after just a few minutes of deliberation, found 57-year-old Dyer guilty of murder and her plea of insanity not proven.
Dyer was sentenced to death and hanged at Newgate prison on 10 June 1896 at 9am. The killer responded ‘I have nothing to say’ when asked for any final words.
The case was heavily reported on in the press and Dyer was branded the ‘Ogress of Reading.’ The murky world of baby farming was brought to light and, crucially, to Parliament. The Infant Life Protection Act (1897) and the Children’s Act (1908) were passed to better protect new-borns. Stricter regulations were introduced for adoption and fostering services and, as a result, baby farming ultimately became a thing of the past.
Today, some visitors to Joel’s True Crime Museum in Hastings have expressed sympathy for Dyer. Several feel the Victorian killer was ‘forced’ to carry out atrocities due to abortion being illegal. Joel doesn’t go as far as to clear Dyer of her crimes, but does acknowledge the murky backdrop to her deadly actions.
‘I don’t think you can ever forgive what Dyer did,’ the curator says.
‘But the more I read about the Victorian era, the more disdain I have for it. You can’t look at the case without looking at the social context of the time. The double standards, the hypocrisy, the status and hierarchy, the dreadful treatment of the poor and of women sticks out. If you could “pretend” to be godly and righteous then that was kind of “job done” as far as some members of society were concerned.’
At her trial, Dyer told the courts that she was killing three children a week at the height of her murderous spree. Joel and his team at the True Crime Museum have crunched the numbers and, if she’d been doing this for 25 years then that would result in 39,000 victims and £39,000 in profit. [£5 million in today’s money]
But despite Dyer’s horrific number of victims, her story has been somewhat forgotten. Meanwhile other British serial killers such as Harold Shipman, who worked in England as a doctor and killed 200 of his patients, remain household names among true crime fans.
Joel suggests the reason behind this could be the motive behind her gruesome killings.
‘Harold Shipman was a lust killer. He did kill for money, but also out of arousal. That motive is almost impossible for us to understand,’ Joel says.
‘Then you look at the Moors murderers, or the killings by Fred and Rose West. They had nothing to gain financially out of their crimes. Instead, they clearly got some perverted joy out of what they were doing. If we go further back in time, there was the Yorkshire Ripper who got sexual satisfaction from hammering women’s heads. I think that’s why these cases are still so talked about today, as they still kind of ignite people’s imagination.
‘Amelia Dyer undoubtedly killed hundred of babies, but was in it for financial gain. I think people can wrap their head around people killing for money and, in a way, maybe even understand it.’
‘Mrs Dyer the Baby Farmer’
In Victorian times, ballads would be sung on streets and in bars on popular subject matter such as love, sex, marriage, politics, religion, fantastic tales, humorous anecdotes, social reform, and crime. Similar to a bard in medieval times, these songs would be a way to inform as well as entertain.
‘Mrs Dyer the Baby Farmer’ was sung in the years following the killer’s death, with a version by Elsa Lanchester and Ray Henderson appearing on the album Cockney London, Verve in 1960. A more recent cover can be found by Eliza Carthy and The Wayward Band.
The lyrics can be found below:
The old baby farmer has been executed,
It’s quite time that she was put out of the way,
She was a bad woman, it is not disputed,
Not a word in her favour can anyone say.
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,
And roasted so nicely that wicked old jade.
It seems rather hard to run down a woman,
But this one was hardly a woman at all,
To make a fine living in ways so inhuman,
Carousing in comfort on poor girls’ downfall.
Poor girls who fell down from the straight path of virtue,
What could they do with a child in their arms?
The fault they committed they could not undo,
So the baby was sent to the cruel baby farm.
To all these sad crimes there must be an ending,
Secrets like these forever can’t last,
Say as you like, there is no defending,
The horrible tales we have heard in the past.
What did she think as she stood on the gallows?
Poor little victims in front of her eyes,
Her heart, if she had one, must have been callous,
The rope round her neck – how quickly time flies.
Down through the trapdoor quick disappearing,
The old baby farmer has come to her harm,
The sound of her own death bell’s toll she was hearing,
Maybe she went to the cruel baby farm.
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