Amelia Dyer: the woman who murdered 300 babies

Amelia Dyer: the woman who murdered 300 babies

[link to www.independent.co.uk]


Harold Shipman is generally considered to be Britain’s worst serial killer, with more than 250 murders ascribed to his name. But hidden among the tales of habitual drunks, petty thieves and small-time fraudsters published online last week sits the file of a little-known Bristol-born woman who may well have killed more.


While largely forgotten today, Amelia Dyer’s crimes paved the way for one of the most sensational trials of the Victorian era – and spotlighted the pandemic problem of infanticide in 19th century Britain. Her Prison Commission file, now visible online, logs Dyer’s final moments on the scaffold at Newgate Gaol on June 10, 1896, and records her hanging with characteristic Victorian efficiency: “On account of her weight and the softness of the textures, rather a short drop was given. It proved to be quite sufficient.”

Three weeks earlier, Dyer had been convicted at the Old Bailey of the murder of two babies. They had been strangled with white tape, wrapped in parcel paper and dumped in a carpet bag in the River Thames at Reading. She became a household name, ballad-mongers even wrote songs about her; her case raised the profile of the fledgling NSPCC and even firmed up our adoption and child protection laws. Yet within a few decades, her criminal career was all but forgotten.

Reading police had been alerted to Dyer back in April by the discovery of another tiny infant in the reeds of the Thames. An address on the parcel paper led the police to a stout midwife described variously as “motherly” and “homely”. What they discovered inside Dyer’s two-up-two-down, rented terraced house on Kensington Road was damning.

Her home was crammed with evidence of a hefty trade in infant life – dozens of vaccination papers, vast quantities of tiny clothes and countless pawn tickets for baby clothes. Letters and receipts for newspaper advertisements arranging adoptions were also recovered, indicating that Dyer was operating under several aliases, including Harding and Smith. The most gruesome evidence was the heavy stench of rotting flesh coming from the kitchen pantry and from a trunk under her bed. The police were in little doubt that they had uncovered a baby farm. They ordered an immediate dragging operation, watched by crowds of onlookers lining the river banks, drawn by lurid press coverage. When the body count rose to 50, Amelia told police: “You’ll know all mine by the tape around their necks”.