Dark Cradle: The Chilling Case Of Amelia Dyer The Victorian Baby Farm Killer

Michelle: Before we dive into the eerie tales of the past, I have some electrifying news to share with you. I'm excited to announce that the Haunted History Chronicles podcast now has its very own small shop of the macabre and mysterious. Picture this exclusive merchandise, hauntingly beautiful artwork, spy tingling stickers, mugs that will make your morning coffee seem positively paranormal, and prints that capture the ghostly essence of days gone by. Whether you're a longtime listener of the show or a newcomer drawn to the enigmatic allure of Haunted history, the shop is your gateway to the supernatural. Imagine decorating your space with a piece of history, a connection to the spectral past. The merchandise is designed to evoke the very essence of the stories I share, making it an essential addition to your collection of all things eerie. You can find all these hair raising treasures on the website, or simply follow the links conveniently placed in the podcast. Description Notes it's so easy, even a ghost could do it. So whether you're searching for the perfect addition to your Haunted memorabilia collection or just wanting to immerse yourself in the world of the supernatural, the shop is here to provide. Dive into the past, embrace the spook, and let the stories of history's ghosts haunt your space. So why not visit the shop today and remember, the spirits of the past are waiting for you. The Haunted History chronicles exclusive merchandise is just a click away. Happy shopping, and may the spirits be with you. Hi Everyone, and welcome back to Haunted History Chronicles. First of all, thank you for taking a listen to this episode. Before we begin, I just want to throw out a few ways you can.

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Michelle: This episode, we delve into one of the darkest and most chilling moments of our past as we peer into the harrowing world of baby farming, a sinister practice that thrived during the late Victorian era. The absence of effective contraception, combined with the societal shame surrounding unwed motherhood, created a fertile ground for unscrupulous individuals to exploit desperate mothers. In the absence of formal adoption agencies and social services, women offered seemingly legitimate fostering and adoption services, promising a new home for unwanted infants in exchange for a significant sum of money. During this era, unmarried mothers were constrained by limited options. Abortion was illegal and back alley procedures were dangerous and often fatal. Abandonment was met with little sympathy from the authorities, while the murder of a child could result in the harshest of penalties. In this climate of desperation, many vulnerable mothers turn to these so called caregivers, unaware of the horrors that awaited their innocent infants. Join me as we examine the chilling cases of notorious baby farmer Amelia Dyer, known as the Ogres of Reading and one of England's most horrific murderers. With my special guest today, Angela Buckley, a distinguished crime historian and author, renowned for her captivating narratives, including that of Amelia Dyer and the Baby farm murders, Angela will provide us with a profound insight into the case, the mindset of these callous individuals, and shed light on the eerie legacy that continues to haunt these dark chapters of our history. Amelia Elizabeth Dyer was perhaps the best known and most prolific, murderous baby farmer who was sentenced to death for her crimes by Mr. Justice Hawkins. During her three weeks in the condemned cell, she filled five exercise books with her last true and only confession. The chaplain visited her on the evening of the 9 June 1896, on the eve of her execution, and asked her if she had anything to confess. She offered him her exercise book, saying, isn't this enough? She was hanged the following morning on the 10 June by James Billington, assisted by William Wilkinson, becoming, at 57, the oldest woman to be executed since 1843. Given her age and weight of 213 pounds, she was given a drop of 3ft six inches. No one will ever know the exact number of her victims. Her ghost was said to haunt Newgate Prison. Join us as we unravel the unsettling truths of an era marred by betrayal, deceit and the heart wrenching plight of innocent infants. Let us embark on a journey through the chilling corridors of the past as we uncover the hidden secrets of the sinister world of baby farming.

Michelle : Hi, Angela. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Angela Buckley : Thank you for having me.

Michelle : Do you want to start by just telling us a little bit about yourself and your research and your writing?

Angela Buckley : Yeah. So I'm a crime historian and I started researching history through my own family history because I didn't do history at school and I did languages at university, so I was on a career break. I was a modern languages teacher and I got into history by researching my family history. And then I started looking at local history and at crime history, partly through some family links. And I started writing articles. And this led to books and I'm just finishing a PhD, actually, on detective history. So I tend to focus on Victorian crime and the history of Victorian and Edwardian police detectives. And most of my work is around those two areas.

Michelle : I mean, it's a fascinating part of history to look at, I think, because there's so many different avenues and perspectives that you can draw upon in terms of development of forensics, police investigating, just in general, but then very specific people and cases and the evolution of the police force, there's just so much to it. And, of course, the backdrop of the Victorian period and that surrounding history in itself is interesting, I think.

Angela Buckley : Yeah, well, I came through it through Detective Jerome Caminada, who was a Manchester police officer and detective in the Victorian period. And he was known to my family because my family were Italian immigrants in the city, it's my home city, and he was, too. So he would have known them. And it was when I was looking at their history, my family's history, that I discovered Caminada. And he was an extraordinary detective. He's still known as one of the finest detectives in the city and his history of the city, but not a lot of people outside of Manchester know about him. And he was called Manchester Sherlock Holmes. So I started writing his biography, which I published in, I think it was 2014, the Real Sherlock Holmes. And then I wanted to know more about regional policing, policing, not London and Scotland Yard, but the policing in places like Manchester. So my PhD is on how the police detectives in Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham developed their sleuthing skills, which is fascinating.

Michelle : And one of the things that I will absolutely make sure to include on the website and in the podcast description notes are links to your website and to where they can access your books, because you've got some incredible books. Not just one, you've got four now, I think. And they really are incredible pieces of work, really diving into maybe some people that are unfamiliar, cases that are really intriguing and like we've kind of been talking about already, just really interesting aspects of crime history. It has a place, and being able to read some of that is really worthy. I think it's a fascinating read.

Angela Buckley : Thank you. Thank you. That's really kind. I mean, I just love the investigation. I think I probably should have been a detective. I just love following the detectives to see how they piece together the clues and how they get to where they get. Obviously, it's not always successful, but that's what I love to do. I love to follow them through the dark streets.

Michelle : But it is so fascinating. And I think, in some ways, more so because there wasn't a lot of the tools and the things that we have at our fingertips at our disposal so easily now. And so it very much is kind of going down these winding paths in some cases. And, yeah, it's really intriguing to see that sleuthing is precisely the right word for, I think, to really see true detective analysis of circumstances without kind of the backup tools to help much of.

Angela Buckley : It completely is much stranger than fiction. Some of it, when I write about it, if I was writing as a fictional author, people would say, oh, no, that's completely ridiculous, because there's luck and there's all sorts of strange twists and turns and coincidences and unexpected events which happen, of course, in real life, which is quite hard to somehow fabricate, perhaps sometimes in fiction, without being criticized, or when you're trying to tend to plot and all the rest of it. So that's what I love about true crime, really, is that you never know where it's going to take you. It really can be quite shocking and quite surprising, every twist and turn.

Michelle : And I'm really looking forward to the chat that we're going to have today about one of your books, which is Amelia Dyer and the baby farm murders. I mean, it's a fascinating case. Do you want to just help set the scene and maybe describe the circumstances surrounding the initial discoveries made that pointed to her crimes?

Angela Buckley : Yes. Well, I lived in reading for 25 years. In fact, I've just left reading. And these scenes take place in Reading in 1896. And interestingly, I'm sure we'll discuss. This is the local area where all these crimes came to light. Has not changed in all that time, in over 100 years. It's still very much, very much like it was when this case came to the attention of the local Victorian public. So the drama sort of starts on the 31 March, 1896, and there's two bargemen coming down the river. They come down the River Kennett and into the River Thames, and it was a very busy waterway. So this is in Caversham in NorTh Redding. There's a lock and there used to be a mill there, and there's lots of workers'cottages and there were lots of businesses along the riverside, which obviously isn't quite the same today, but that's what was happening. So they would bring in this barge from London up towards the sort of home counties, and they spotted a parcel near the towpath. And it was quite customary for barge people at the time to take these packages out of the water so that to find his keeper thing. So they drew the barge over there and they got a hook and they leaned over the edge of the barge and they drew this brown paper parcel through the water and picked it out of the river. And one of them, it was wrapped in string and one of them cut through the string and the brown paper parcel. And to their horror, when they opened the parcel, they found a tiny baby's leg and a foot and essentially a corpse. And that's where the drama begins, is finding this horrific contents of this parcel, the horrific contents of this parcel in the river on that day. And then they go off to the police station and the body goes to the mortuary and the police discover that this baby is roughly six to twelve months old. She's a girl, she's not wearing any clothes. She's been wrapped in newspaper and brown paper and weighed down with a brick. And then there's a piece of white tape. It's really sinister and very sad around her neck, which is tied under her left ear. And it's quite obvious that she's been strangled. And so the hunt then for a murderer commences.

Michelle : And it is a really sinister crime. And it's one that unfolded that really did bring to light not just this one tragic murder. It was a series of revelations and discoveries. And the process of tracking down the suspect, the murderer that the authorities went down, is, again, it's quite a complicated path. It wasn't an easy route to finding the person involved, the person responsible. Do you want to just kind of take us through some of those next key steps of what the authorities did? What happened next? What transpired after that initial discovery?

Angela Buckley : Well, when they got this parcel out of the water eventually, and they dried it out, a very sharp eyed Detective Constable. There weren't many detectives in reading at the time and they weren't used to dealing with murder either. They were mostly dealing with kind of theft and those kind of things. He noticed that it had a faint writing on the parcel and it had a name and address and it said Mrs. Thomas, 26 Piggots Road, Reading, or Cavisham in Reading. Now, that road, piggots Road, borders onto the River Thames at Caversham. It still is. The house is still there, terrace houses. So originally they were workers cottages from the Huntley and Palmer Biscuit Factory, which is over the other side of the Thames. Or it was. And so they go to this premises, number 26, and they can't find her. There's nobody there. She doesn't live there anymore. So he has this extraordinarily bright idea to go to Breading railway station, and to see if he can find out from a clerk there if the parcel has gone through the office, the railway office, and an extraordinary piece of luck and ingenuity on part of the detective, and I guess on part of the clerk as well, is that the clerk reveals that he discovers that the parcel came through his station in October 1895 from Bristol, because it has a stamp on it and a date. And he also tells the police that in fact, the person who was Mrs. Thomas, her real name was Mrs. Dyer, and she'd moved from 26 Piggots Road to 45 Kensington Road, which is on the other side of the town, so it's more in central Reading. And that gave them the lead, because then they could go and they could actually investigate her because that's where she was still living.

Michelle : What was the kind of the response from the local community when this crime started to become known to the public? Were they involved at any level during that process?

Angela Buckley : Yes, they did get involved. So it starts off just with that murder, with that discovery. And in fact, I had a look at the coroner's records in the Berkshire record office for that period, and there were six or seven unnamed babies who were bodies of babies that were taken from the river. Not all strangled by any stretch of the imagination, but they didn't know very much about them. They possibly were victims of dire as well, but it wasn't that uncommon at the time. And in fact, I did some research into London, so that the year before, in London, the Metropolitan Police, on their records, found 208 bodies of babies. So we can talk about the reasons for that later. So it wasn't totally shocking to the local, I imagine, to the local residents immediately. But as the time goes on, there are more discoveries and there's a particularly shocking discovery that takes place ten days later, when the police are starting to dredge the area around the Clappers Bridge, which is just near the lock there, and underneath clappers bridge, they pull up a carpet bag, and in the carpet bag there are two bodies. There's a four month old baby girl and a 13 month old baby boy. And they've both been strangled, they've both been waited down the bricks. And at this point the story completely explodes and it becomes national news, but also the local news becomes, it all becomes, by this stage, really sensationalized. And everybody's starting to get involved. And in terms of local people, there were lots of the press and the police interviewed the neighbors, particularly those at Picketts Road initially, and people were starting to come forward as witnesses. So at this point, the case really takes off and everybody becomes quite obsessed with it, really, to be honest.

Michelle : What were some of the challenges that the police faced in trying to build this case and to go down the paths of investigation that they went down, obviously, given some of that limited forensic resources and technology at the time, were there other challenges that they faced also?

Angela Buckley : Well, you're absolutely right. The limitation of no forensic tools at all, that was very difficult. So when they took a body out of the river, like, so, for example, the first baby, who they kind of identified as Helena Fry, I mean, we'd no evidence to know it really was her. You haven't got anything beyond possible distinguishing marks, and also, depending on how long that body has been in the water. So whether it looks like it perhaps should look. So the breakthrough, really, in this case is that because when they went to 45 Kensington Road and they eventually arrested Amelia Dyer, and they did a search of the house, one of the key pieces of evidence, well, they found lots of evidence in the house of baby farming. So they found vaccination certificates of babies that had come into her care. They found lots of baby clothes. They found lots of pawn tickets for baby clothes that they'd pawned, that she and her household had pawned for money. But one of the key things they found in there were letters, and these were letters from parents who'd given their children into Amelia Dyer's care for fostering or adoption. And then they had a race against time, because what they had to do was to try to connect up these parents and guardians with the discoveries in the river. And they had this extraordinary stroke of luck that they found the letter that belonged to the mother of the four month old baby, who was called Doris Marmon. And so the day after that child was taken out of the river and put in the mortuary, she was in Cheltenham. They contacted the police in Cheltenham, and they brought Doris's mother to reading to identify her. And the child had only been in the river for just over a week. So sadly, tragically, of course, for Evelina Marmond, the mother, she was able to positively identify the child. And in all the cases in reading, there were about six or seven, maybe eight babies taken out the river. That was the only positive identification that they had. And that's what they used to build the case against Daya.

Michelle : I mean, it's such a tragic revelation and process, and, I mean, you can't imagine the grief that that mother must have felt in that moment identifying her child, because we have to understand the circumstances of why these families, these women, were handing their children over to her in the first place. Life wasn't easy. It wasn't comfortable having children, having lots of children, if you were unwed. I mean, there were so many reasons, poverty, so many reasons for why life could be difficult and challenging if you had another child or had a child. And so then you do this thing of handing over your child to someone else for fostering or for adoption, with that hope that they're going to have something better, and then to have this be the end product. And that realization when you're having to identify your child must just be. Yeah. Words can't describe that. It must be agonizing.

Angela Buckley : Yeah. And Evelina Marmon, I mean, she is the most tragic figure in this case, really. So she, like you say, life was very difficult for particularly unmarried women, unmarried mothers at that time, the great stigma against illegitimacy. She worked in a bar, but many of them were domestic servants, so if they got pregnant, they were thrown out of their employment and their families wouldn't take them back. They could go into the workhouse, but that was pretty awful, as we know. So Doris, Evelina, mom, and she'd had her baby just before Christmas in 1895, and she lived in Cheltenham and her landlady was quite accommodating initially. And so Evelina was able to keep baby Doris for about three or four months. And then it just became too difficult, as you say, it was just too difficult for her to keep on working. There's no help from the father, there's no help, there's no welfare state, there's no help from anyone. And she saw a newspaper advert which offered a kind and loving home to a baby. And then she entered in correspondence with this woman who was known as Mrs. Willis. Obviously, it was Amelia Dyer, and she was writing letters to Evelina and saying how they lived just outside of reading, and it was a wonderful countryside home. And she and her husband couldn't have any children, and they wanted a child to love that they could bring up in the church and give them a wonderful life. And she agreed to hand over baby Doris for a fee of five pounds for an adoption. And this was completely legal because there were no laws against basically selling your child at the time. That comes in later. And when she met Mrs. Dyer or Mrs. Willis, she appears to be very matronly. She was very kind to the child. And the saddest thing about this is that once she'd passed baby Doris into Amelia Dyer's care and she'd taken her to reading, there were letters from the letters that were from Evelina that were found at 45 Kensington Road say things like, she's checking up whether Doris has had any reaction to her recent vaccinations. And she says, she asks Amelia, could she give Doris a kiss from her? And then the next thing she knows, there's a knock on the police. The police are knocking on her door and she has to go and identify her body. So, as you say, it's utterly tragic and it's unimaginable.

Michelle : So to kind of help us understand the case a little bit more, do you want to go into some of that deeper understanding of Amelia herself? Some of the insights, maybe from her background and her upbringing, those early life experiences that kind of led her to where she was really, and was doing this at this time of her life?

Angela Buckley : Oh, this is a very difficult issue because there aren't any obvious reasons for this sort of behavior, and it's the perennial question, really. So, Amelia Dyer was born in 1837 in a tiny hamlet near Bristol called Powell Marsh. And she came from a very respectable family. Her father was a master shoemaker and she had six siblings. I think she was about number five. And they all went to school, she was educated and it was all pretty good until she was eleven. And then her mother died from meningitis. And also by this time, I think, one of her sisters has also died. But whilst that, of course, was completely traumatic for the young family, it didn't have any physical impact on AmelIA. She carried on living with her family, so she was able. Her family, her childhood was stable enough to kind of deal with that. And then she goes off and she goes and stays with a relative in Bristol and she does apprenticeship for a dressmaker. And eventually she goes to Bristol Royal Infirmary and she trains to be a nurse. And it's while she's nursing that she meets a baby farmer called Ellen Dane. We don't know very much about. We haven't been able to find very much about her. And she tells Amelia that actually a good way to earn money, and this was quite common in the later part of the Victorian period, was to run a house of confinement. So any women that for some reason or another can't give birth in normal places, so perhaps they're not married, could pay to have their baby in Amelia Dyer's home, and then she would then offer to have the child adopted. And so it really is, and it does seem to be about money. At the end of the day, there's no real psychological reason why she should behave like that.

Michelle : But it's fascinating that she does kind of go from one extreme to the other, having this career nursing, to then going down this path that I think you're right, is more than likely for financial gain. But then to go that extra step, and it's not just about the financial gain, the murder then gets brought into it. It's fascinating to see that evolution. And again, it poses so many questions that I think are hard to find the exact answer to. We can only make assumptions and educated guesses as to motivations for that. I mean, it's fascinating to me that she could maintain this facade of normalcy in her community while carrying out those crimes, that she could present herself in the way that she did to these mothers. I mean, it's just staggering that someone could do that. But she did. With success, sadly.

Angela Buckley : Well, it's also important to note the context, and this was not uncommon. So in the latter part of the Victorian period, when people were giving their children to baby farmers, in fact, the most unscrupulous practitioners, and probably more of them were unscrupulous than not, were actually allowing the children to starve to death. And this is a really sad, harsh reality of baby farming. So they would take the money, they would say they were going to have the children adopted, and they would literally drug them, so they didn't make any noise, and they would starve them and they would just die of what they would be, at the time, considered to be natural causes. Because the infant mortality rate was so high, and because children weren't required to be registered, they were actually, by Amelia Dyer's time. But people just avoided that. There was basically small children, small, vulnerable children, who just went under the radar. And also because there were no antibiotics and all the rest of it, children did just die. Children did fail to thrive, which you often see on death certificates. Or they have something which was called Mirasmus, which is essentially that what it is, they fade away. So this was actually relatively common practice, sadly, amongst baby farmers. And it didn't come to light till 1870 with the case of the Brixton Baby farmers, Margaret Waters and Sarah Ellis, when the Victorians actually discovered this was going on. But with Amelia Dyer's case, what's really interesting is the strangulation, in a morbid sort of way. But I feel that she didn't start doing that until later. So I think when she started her baby farming trade in the 1860s, she was doing what they all did and just allowing them to die of natural causes, say justice, obviously terrible. And then you talk about her facade. Well, she tries to maintain this facade. But by the time she gets to reading, the cracks are starting to appear. And I think that's what then pushed her to actually take more of a direct approach, if you like, and actually go ahead and strangle these babies.

Michelle : And again, that's the kind of the really dark evolution of her story. I think that it does become that. I mean, it's tragic in itself, because, again, I just think it really highlights what we've already spoken about, which is this backdrop of poverty. Very little support for those living on the breadline on that kind of threshold. What to do if you were unmarried, if you were poor, there's no support from the state. You might have no family support. There was very few options. And so here you have people basically stepping into that gap and providing something, providing a service, because there's a need, there's an absolute need for it for these mothers, for these children, for these babies. But then the mist comes down. It's what's actually involved in them that's the really stark bit of the tale, if you like, because it was this underground thing that was very much happening and these atrocities were absolutely happening, but there was nothing else. There were very few options available.

Angela Buckley : Well, that's right. And there are many cases of women, unfortunately, killing their own children or leaving them somewhere. Women were driven to infanticide. There are many cases in that period where women were driven to infanticide. Actually, I did note that in the year, in 1896 in England and Wales, there were 77 cases of infanticide that went through the courts, and 38th of them were in London. And these mostly were women, desperate women. I mean, I'm not saying they all killed their children, but they were certainly investigated and tried for it, shall we say. So it is a really desperate situation. It all dates back to the 1834 Poor Law Amendment act, when they reduced the parish relief for unmarried mothers and they stopped requiring fathers to support them. And this was meant to be a deterrent. So they said that they thought that if they put more pressure on women to take responsibility for illegitimate children, then they'd stop sleeping with people before they got married. Clearly wasn't going to happen, but that placed an enormous burden then on women for the rest of the century. And at the end of the century, when we get the baby farmers, this is when you start to see the really terrible repercussions of that decision.

Michelle : I spoke to a previous guest not so long ago, and we were talking about execution ballads, and she was really very clear that when you look at the different types of singing of the news, that existed that the ballads around women who committed infanticide were so very different to any other type of ballad because there was real sympathy. And so very few of them survived, simply because they didn't have that public consumption that the rest of the ballads would have had. Even though they might have been notable cases, because the community tended to support the mothers, they understood the motivations, because in many cases they were struggling, too. Life was difficult for them, too. So they could understand how some of these women who might be very young girls being thrown out on the streets, life being very difficult, they could understand how someone could end up in that position. And so, like I said, it's fascinating, when you look at that aspect of history, to really understand it on the very simple ground level of what life was like for certain parts of the population. That really drove certain types of trade. Like baby farming, sadly, but also what life was like for some people day to day. That hand to mouth existence.

Angela Buckley : It's really interesting, isn't it? And certainly in the other urban areas outside of London, there's certainly plenty of evidence of baby farming right from earlier in the century. Actually, in Manchester, in my home city, I did a little bit of research, and women who were forced to go, just married women, too, mothers of families in a marriage situation. They also used baby farmers because they had to work. So they had to go to the factories and the textile mills. And so they used to just put them in for the weeks. It was like, effectively a form of Victorian childcare at that point. But as you say, this would have been well known in communities. Everybody may have known somebody, or certainly everybody would have known a woman, a young woman, pErhaps, who'd fallen pregnant. And actually, I've done some further research into some of the other big baby farming cases. I haven't really done very much, but I've started. And what I've noticed, actually, is that they're not all young and they're not all working class. I also found one or two more wealthy women. They were all unmarried, to be fair. And that was very interesting because that slightly changed it slightly challenged also my preconceived ideas that they were young working class women who were working as domestic servants. There's certainly one case where in the 1870s, where it was a woman who's about 35, and she was single, and it was a family that pressurized her to put her child with a baby farmer. And presumably that was because of shame and loss of reputation. But that's quite interesting that they actually do come from different backgrounds.

Michelle : And Amelia's crime spanned quite a large amount of time, didn't it? Do you want to just kind of explore some of that in terms of how widespread these crimes were and the length to which she was operating before she was finally arrested?

Angela Buckley : Sure. It's quite difficult to pinpoint, and I've been doing some work on that, trying to work out how many victims that she might have had and where they were from. And it's really difficult, as you can imagine, because they used to falsify records and so much goes under the radar. But she started a baby farm trade in. Trade in baby farming in the late 1860s in Bristol. And she was in Bristol, I suppose, for almost certainly a good 25 years or so doing that. But she moved around all the time. So she moves around to lots of different places in Bristol, lots of different addresses, and she uses lots of aliases. And this is a really important feature of criminality in the Victorian period, so she's constantly reinventing herself as somebody else, so that doesn't help. And the only time she comes into the gaze of the authorities is in 1879, when four babies die in quick succession in her home. And they essentially die of things like diarrhea. They've not been murdered, per se, but they're not homicides, but they die in suspicious circumstances. So a coroner decides to investigate this further. And, in fact, they can't pin anything on Dyer. And the only thing she gets convicted of is falsifying a death certificate, because what she used to do, and it was quite common practice, is she used to pretend that these children were hers. So if she did have them certificated, their birth or death certificates recorded, she'd do it in her own name or in one of her aliases, so that people wouldn't think she was baby farming. And she did have. She served a six month sentence for that. But then as soon as she got out, she carried on. And that's the funny thing with dial, the interesting thing with Dyer is that every time the law got close, she managed to get herself out of the way again. And she ended up going into asylums three times while she was in Bristol, and she was in Bristol, the area, and every time a police officer came, she'd have a sort of mental breakdown, and then she'd be carted off to the asylum then, where she would be released again a few weeks later, cured in inverted commas, and then she would go back to it. And there was one very persistent case of a governess. We don't know anything about her. We don't know her name. She gave her baby over to Dyer in the 1870s, and she'd had a relationship, an illegitimate relationship, with the. She was a domestic servant and she'd had a sexual relationship with the son of the house, and that's why she'd given the baby away. But in fact, they were reconciled and the family were reconciled later and she was allowed to go and collect her baby. And so she got back together with the father of the child. They went to Bristol to try and recover the child together. And of course, the child had gone and she went back several times, and every time she went back, Dia ended up in an asylum and she tried to commit suicide, although not very convincingly. Once she threw herself into a pond, another time she tried to slit her throat, but it was just a scratch. So that's what she was doing until the point where she's forced to move out of Bristol altogether.

Michelle : It really does suggest some quite calculated strategic thinking, doesn't it? This ability to abuse the system, to know how to play the system, to evade further investigation, and to obviously also play the system in terms of knowing how she could falsify records and make the kinds of claims that she did. But then also, like, we've already touched upon the constant changing of her name, using these aliases, moving around, not staying put in one place too long. It's all very, very clever and probably would have meant that people weren't noticing so much what she was doing, because she would move on to somewhere else, if you like.

Angela Buckley : Yes, exactly. She was educated. I think she'd also worked in an asylum for a while, so she knew the symptoms of any medical kind of mental illness. As such, I think she was very clever indeed. And she came across very well. The neighbours, when they questioned the neighbors in Caversham, in Reading, at Piggots Road, they said she was perfectly charming. And the only complaint they had is that I think one afternoon she'd left one of the babies out in a know in the rain. So she came across as very motherly. So people were convinced by her. And presumably it didn't happen in Reading, but in Bristol, when she had those women into her home to give birth, presumably she did care for them. Presumably she was good to them and that she managed that situation very effectively, so therefore they were quite happy to give their children over because she came across so well. So she was very good at all that. And I don't think there was ever really any proper suspicions while she was moving around Bristol. Certainly not enough to bring us the attention of the law.

Michelle: To celebrate heading into the spookier season autumn nights, howling wind and freezing rain. Halloween spookiness in the dark depths of winter. Haunted history chronicles will be posting daily podcasts on Patreon on all tiers over there, as well as the usual additional items offered. Signing up now will gain you access to these as well as all previous archived content. For as little as one pound, you could be getting hundreds of podcasts to enjoy writing source material and more, and know that you are contributing and helping the podcast to continue to put out more content. You can find the link in the episode description notes as well as on the Haunted History Chronicles website or social media. So why not come along to enjoy a rich web of accounts perfect for this season? Dark tales of corpses, ghosts, folklore, Christmas and Halloween, macarb traditions and connections, and a whole lot more. And now let's head back to the podcast.

Michelle : It is so fascinating to see how somebody like we've talked about how they could really live that type of a life for the length of time that she did. But I suppose it just became quite commonplace for her. Part of her routine. It was something that she just really understood. And when there's, I suppose there's the motivation of money, it's a significant factor to contribute to continuing to do that.

Angela Buckley : It was a big business. She spent a lot of time writing letters to people and receiving letters, putting adverts in newspapers. She used the railway system, which is quite key. So from Bristol to Reading and to London, she was up and down the railway network, collecting babies from meeting parents and collecting babies. So it was pretty much a full time job, if you like.

Michelle : So do you want to just talk us through her arrest and that subsequent trial? Because that in itself, I think, is also interesting. I mean, we've already kind of said it's not an easy thing to maybe tie her to all of not tie her, but to make connections with victims and other families and naming the victims and so on. But to bring all of that evidence together to help put her away and to sentence her and have the verdict that they did, that they reached, is a lengthy, involved process in itself.

Angela Buckley : Yes. WelL, she was arrested on the 3 April, which was just a few days after the first baby's body had been discovered, and the police set up a decoy. Initially. They initially tried to arrest her on the first, which was the day after the child had been recovered. Child's body had been recovered and they sent a female. It wouldn't have been a female police officer because there weren't any at the time. It was probably one of the police officer's wives, they sent her around to 45 Kensington Road to arrange an appointment with Amelia Dyer to have her baby adopted. And so they got there and discovered that she wasn't there, she was away. So they eventually arranged this meeting for the 3 April, which was actually Good Friday, and it's not really important, but I like the quirky detail. And so when Amelia Dyer opens the door on that evening of the 3 April, instead of finding this woman on her doorstep, she finds the two police officers, and that's when she's arrested. So she's taken off and kept in reading jail for a while. And there are several hearings, I think the four or five hearings, at the local magistrates Court in Reading, before the case is transferred over to the Old Bailey, and her trial at the Old Bailey takes place in May. I think it was the 18 May, I can't remember. Anyway, in May. And it was really interesting how the police built up the case. So this, to bear in mind, this was really for the murder of Doris Marmon and Harry Simmons, to a certain extent. Harry Simmons was a 13 month old boy who was found in the carpet bag with Doris. He was actually in the care of a guardian, not his actual parent, by this time. So that wasn't quite so clear. So it's really focused on Doris Marmon. So, obviously, they have the witnesses. They have Evelina Marmon comes to testify, as does the guardian of the little boy. But by this time, they've also found witnesses in the local area who'd seen Amelia Dyer on the tow path near the River Thames at around the time that the bodies were placed in the water. So they had one worker who'd come through and seen her with a carpet bag under her arm near the towpath. So they had those sorts of witnesses who basically put her in the right place at the right time. And then the most extraordinary. It gets a bit complicated, but the most extraordinary witness that they had, which they managed to pull out of the bag at the Old Bailey trial, was her daughter. And this is Mary Anne Karma. She was married, and she also ran a baby farm. And there's a whole story to that as well. And so the crux of this is that when Amelia Dyer collected baby Doris from her mother, Evelina, in Cheltenham, round about the. I don't know when it was. It was late in March. Basically, she took the child straight to London to visit her daughter. They lived in Wilsden, and her daughter and her husband. And so the child was there that weekend, and at the same time, that weekend, she went to Paddington station. A diadid and collected the baby, Harry Simmons, the 13 month old baby. So those two children were in that property that weekend, and this is the weekend before they're discovered in the river. Now, Marianne, or Polly, as she was known, Polly doesn't actually see her mother kill these children, but what she notices is that the children sort of disappear. So 1 minute they're there and 1 minute they're not. It's quite mysterious, because you think Polly would have asked her mother quite a lot of questions, but for some reason, she doesn't seem to have done. And there's a package underneath the sofa, which is in the shape of. Essentially the shape of a body. And also at one point, Polly goes into the living room and Harry, I think it's the baby boy. He's under a blanket, but he's not moving. And they'd left him there all evening, and he's not rolled off. So, although she doesn't know, she didn't actually see her mother. But her testimony is absolutely crucial to the trial. And also, whilst Dyer was in prison, she wrote letters to the prison governor, which were delayed by the police, actually, interestingly. And she exonerates her daughter because her daughter and her son in law were implicated in baby farming. Dyer exonerates her by not exactly a confession, but basically saying that they had nothing to do with it and it was all to do with her. So they're pretty sure by this time that Daya had committed those murders. And there is the other side of the trial, is they tried to assess her mental health, and they have quite a lot of medical experts who testify, some who were working with her when she was in reading jail, and then some from Newgate, where she was later imprisoned, and also some that came from Bristol, and they can't agree at all. Some of them think that she has delusions and that she suffers from hallucinations and that she has what they call homicide. She suffers from what they call homicidal mania. And others thinks that she's completely sane and that she's making it all up. So that's the crux of the trial, really. And it's not surprising that she was convicted within five minutes. It took the jury five minutes to find her guilty.

Michelle : I was going to say, it was a very quick verdict, wasn't it, in terms of coming back with that sentence? Yeah, it's a harrowing, harrowing story. And I can't imagine what it would have been like to be inside the courtroom during that whole process. But at the moment, where she is also then sentenced, where she's found guilty and then sentenced. I mean, the public reaction, given the press scrutiny, the widespread nature of how this had gone nationwide, the attention that it had garnered, I mean, it must have been a very packed courtroom hearing that sentence.

Angela Buckley : Yes. And that was the case. In reading. In reading, every time she was transferred from the jail, which is very close to the court, I mean, it's literally, you can walk in ten minutes. So every time there was movement between either police station or the prison and then the court, there was increasingly thousands of people trying to get a glimpse of her. People were obviously avidly reading the newspapers. People were talking to reporters. And then when she was transferred to London by train, again, people were waiting on the platform for her. So, yes, the courtroom would have been packed and also there would have been lots of people outside as well, waiting for the verdict.

Michelle : I think one of the things that I think is also really interesting to kind of touch on, if we can, is obviously the back of this trial in this case. Obviously, there were later developments in terms of stricter adoption laws that were introduced and so on. Do you want to just kind of share some of that historical backdrop of what happened after this case really blew up in the press in terms of some of the changes to legal law?

Angela Buckley : Sure. Now, this all started with an earlier case. This started with the Brixton baby farmers, Margaret Waters and Sarah Ellis, who nobody really knew that much about baby farming until that case came to light. And it was all down to one police officer, one Scotland Yard Metropolitan Police officer, who wanted to investigate, decided to investigate these stories in Brixton. Basically, there were eleven children in their house when they uncovered the reality, and they were all starving and they were taken off by the authorities and they were convicted. One of them was convicted, particularly, they're both convicted, but anyone was hanged. So Margaret Waters was convicted of the murder of a child, John Walter Cohen, who was just a few weeks old, who died in her care, and she was executed November 1870. So this was the first time it really exploded into the public domain. And at the same time, the police really started to investigate this, starting with the Metropolitan Police, they started to investigate other rumors, if you like, of baby farmers. So they did lots of surveillance and they did lots of checking the newspapers for adverts and writing fake newspapers, letters to newspapers, to try and engage in conversation with the potential baby farmers. And so this led two years later, in 1872, to the Infant Life Protection act. And basically, this limited how many children you could look after in your home. So sort of like as a childminder. So I can't remember the details now, but it was something like six children of certain ages that you could have. And so they put that into place to try and protect children. And maybe that's because there were eleven children found in the Brixton baby farming case. Maybe that's why they focused on that. So they had these registers as well. Then you had to register as a baby farmer. Now, the problem with this is that it was not enforced at all. It was not enforced by the police, and it was not enforced by any local authorities. So it made absolutely no difference whatsoever. So there were a couple more. But when the Mila Dyer case came to light in 1896, they then amended this law in 1897, and they then introduced inspections into these premises. They were called nurse children. So these places where they had nurse children, and that helped a little bit, but it still didn't help. And there were still more cases. And the final case was actually in Wales in 1907. And after that, they brought about the Children's act, and this actually brought in the first ever proper child protection laws. But what's really interesting is that they didn't have. Adoption wasn't formalized until 1926. So it's slow, isn't it? And it's always shocking to realize that before these laws came into place, you could sell your children, essentially, without anybody worrying about it. And then how ineffective the early laws are. And then eventually, you start to get proper laws in place and reasonable protection.

Michelle : You're absolutely right when you say it's fascinating to see how slowly things could move. But at the same time, it kind of makes sense, because when these are the precedent, they're the beginnings of something. It's really hard to know how it's going to work, how it's going to work in practice, how it's going to be policed and enforced, whether it can be policed and enforced, how you actually make these things work off of the paper it's been written on, is a challenge. And we see that in modern society, when things get put into place, and it's like, well, how's that going to happen? It takes kind of time, doesn't it, to work those problems and those teething problems out. But in this case, it's such an important thing to try and get right. And so to see that it took decades, really, before you started to see this being eradicated as a practice is the shocking part. And it's hard to understand why there wasn't more pressure to really do more, to do the utmost possible to eradicate it. And again, I think there's probably lots and lots of different reasons of why that was so slow.

Angela Buckley : And it's interesting because it's not just the big cases. There were seven cases where baby farmers were hanged for their crimes. But across that period, there were probably thousands of people baby farming, and plenty of them committed criminal acts. In my own research into detective policing in Liverpool, which I wasn't actually looking for baby farmers, but I came across quite a number of baby farmers in the crime records. I was looking at homicide records to see how the police investigated homicide, and there are quite a few baby farming cases there. They didn't hit the big headlines and they weren't hanged, they were given sentences, so it wasn't quite so serious. But there was one terribly sad story of a baby being placed in. It's awful, being placed in the box and nobody realizing they'd been killed until they arrived. They were just posted somewhere. I mean, there's just some heartbreaking stories. And that's just Liverpool in one decade. It was absolutely immense. I mean, I always think that in these things that the laws are reactive, aren't they? You don't know. And we get that today, don't we? A crime is always innovative and ever changing, isn't it? And then as soon as you get a new type of crime, then you have to legislate against it. It seems like the law is always one step behind, but I guess that's how it has to be, doesn't it? Because you don't know those crimes exist until they happen.

Michelle : Absolutely. But it's true. You're playing catch up, and we see that in every aspect of crime today. But I think if you just consider things like cybercrime and fraud, it's ten steps ahead of things that are happening because it's such a quick changing technology or process, the people involved behind it a machine, and that's really hard to police. And I can fully understand why that might have played out in this case, that you're trying to understand something that you haven't really seen and understood and do something about that, and to have the manpower to do that and all of the legalities of how you enforce it and check. Not an easy process to understand without really taking that time to consider it and try it and try different things and see what's necessary to understand that. Well, actually, this isn't enough, what we've done so far. We obviously need to make amendments and changes.

Angela Buckley : Yes. And of course, the police, as they always are, we're dealing with all sorts of crimes all the time and incidents and events. And it's possible that babies dying probably wasn't at the top of their agenda because at that time, because know babies were very low profile because otherwise these practices would never have crept up in the first place. So I suspect it probably wasn't a top priority. It probably took individuals like Sergeant Richard Ralph who really pushed the investigations into baby farming. It probably took individuals to really push those changes through.

Michelle : And you also have to wonder if there was an element of. Well, in the vast majority of cases, these were accounts really to do with members of the poor unwed mothers and again, not someone's priority.

Angela Buckley : Totally.

Michelle : And so, yeah, just lots and lots of different things at play, I think, which again just is another one of those aspects of the case that makes it such an interesting piece of history to look at and examine from all different sides.

Angela Buckley : Yes, no, I agree. It's a perfect storm of crime, really isn't, it's everything coming together and it's one of the things that I really appreciate, shall I say, rather enjoy, about crime history, is that it does give you a real insight into the social history and the environment and how people are living at the time and into perhaps, as you say, sectors of society that don't normally get much attention. So I think that is really important. And whilst I don't love talking about this or even writing about it, but I do feel quite compelled because I think it is important to bring these stories to life. And what I've tried to do, I've got some ongoing research which I've got a bit parked at the moment. I'm trying to look more at the victims because, know we all talk about Amelia Dyer, but actually trying to piece together the lives of the victims, I had to look into Evelina Marmon to find out what happened to her afterwards and that was quite interesting. So she had another child two years later, also illegitimate, as far as I can tell. Then she seems to have been living with a man and it seems at some point she may have perhaps pretended to be married because there's no records, but she does assume a married name. And I went forward into. I mean, it's getting a bit close to our lives now, but I went to the 1939 register that was done by the, before the war for the ID cards and I found her in Birmingham living with her daughter and her son in law. So she stayed, she didn't die till the 1950s, but she'd stayed with her daughter, her surviving daughter, and she lived with her and that's where she died when she was elderly. And I thought that at least was a bit of a happier ending, because I think otherwise we just focus too much on the perpetrators.

Michelle : And again, this is what I think is so beautiful about research. When you do get to follow through those threads of the others involved and, like you say, have their name understood, that their story, their history understood, and to see it through instead of always focusing on someone like Amelia, but to remember the children's names or the surrounding victims who've been impacted by the crimes, like you say, there's something really quite rewarding, I think, when you see their story come to an end and it's a little bit more positive instead of just this one moment of a long life.

Angela Buckley : Yes, I noticed on the 1911 census as well, that I'm sure you know this, but on the 1911 census, women usually put how many children they've had and whether they're alive and whether they're dead. And I noticed that she'd noted that she'd had two children and one had died on the census. And I thought, gosh, that didn't name Doris or anything. But I thought, gosh, that's quite a statement, isn't it, that she put her there, even if it's just a statistic. But she was marked there in some way, which I thought she wasn't entirely forgotten. I did also look into what had happened to Doris Marmon and Harry Simmons. And I discovered that they'd been buried in Reading old cemetery in an unmarked grave, but they were buried, at least together, but I wasn't able to find them because, obviously, there's no gravestone. But, yeah, I think it is good to follow the threads through, I think. Absolutely right.

Michelle : And one of the really interesting aspects of this kind of coming full circle is the impact that it still has on people today and the interest. And I think part of that is this folklore that has kind of cropped up with accounts and reports of potential sightings of Amelia post her execution, and others involved in the case. And I've had this conversation with other people before. It's hard to know if they're accurate or not, because obviously some things aren't substantiated. They are just things documented very scant in detail. But it is really interesting when you look at some of the types of reports that exist around cases like this or similar, where you have something tragic happen, and these ghostly sightings and reports come in almost to fill the gap. It's a story that's unsatisfying in some way or unpleasant, unpalatable. And you have something else come in that keeps the story alive for people in the community. And that in itself is a really interesting kind of area to think about, because why is it that people do that? Why is it that we do that? And I think it's the nature of those involved. Maybe the tragic nature of something. If it's a life lost very young, very early, or something sinister that people just don't want to forget, because it's a story that they don't want to have happen again. Do you want to just kind of share some of the accounts and what you know of some of these sightings of Amelia and others in the.

Angela Buckley : Know? Really, there's nothing really substantial, but it feels like the case has really left an imprint on the place. And just switching back first to 1896, after the case was tried, it was really quite moving, that the bridge that I said that, underneath which Doris Marmon and Harry Simmons were found, the local residents had carved crosses in the handrail, which I thought was quite moving, in an attempt to sort of, as you say, try and come to terms with the tragedy in that area. And also, interestingly so, also in reading, and I'm not obviously from reading, every time I mentioned Amelia Dyer, quite a lot of people said that they remember their mothers and their grandmothers saying that if they didn't behave when they were children, that old mother Dyer would come and see to them. So she kind of came a sort of bogey person. And then there have been these sightings. So there are reports of sightings of Amelia Dyer down by the river on the paths, wearing her customary long black cloak with a hood. And I did some mapping of the area and discovered that the paths are absolutely the same now as they were back then. They're probably quieter now, actually, than they were back then, even when yourself. When you walk along the path. I used to take my children down there when they were small, before I knew about the case. It's quite a big family place, but you can walk through from Pickett's Road and you can see that. You can see the houses where she lived, and then you can walk through these paths down to the river. And they're quite creepy anyway, I suppose, particularly after dark. But you can walk across the bridge where the babies were found. Obviously, it's a new bridge now, but you can still walk across the spot. You can still go to the pit where they brought the body out of the river. So all that is still there. So it's very, very atmospheric and evocative and so there have been reports of people citing a figure, as I say, in the cloak. And then the other person we haven't mentioned, actually, is Granny Smith. Granny Smith was like a helper. And she was a very elderly lady that Diane met in Barton Regis workhouse. When she was in the workhouse for a while, she became a bit destitute, and she met this old lady called Jane Smith, who she called Granny. Granny Smith, funnily enough. And she came to live with Amelia Dyer. And when she came to Reading and she helped out with the babies, basically, she looked after them. And when these crimes came to light, there were some interviews with Granny Smith in the press, and she was absolutely devastated at what happened, because she believed that the babies had gone to new foster homes or they'd gone back to their parents, because that's what Amelia had told her. She said, oh, I'm taking this baby. Know it's going back to their parents. And so she was devastated. And there was a picture of her in the press with her holding babies. I mean, it's quite distressing. And there's also been reported sightings of her walking from Reading workhouse, which is very near Kensington. This site is. It's no longer there, but the site is very near the house in 45 Kensington Road. And people have reported sites of seeing her running from the workhouse down Kensington Road, crying about the babies. So that's also quite spooky, really. But it's interesting, isn't it, how these things do leave an imprint, shall we say, on an area?

Michelle : But I do think it's a perfect way of explaining it, that people want to have some kind of mark, whether it's to remember those lost in simple etchings on the side of a bridge or some other type of monument like that, that someone can leave behind. But then, in the stories that people tell, whether it's to create that warning, that tone of, behave, don't live your life like this, or this might happen to you. The storytelling aspect of it is so commonplace because obviously most people weren't literate. And so these were stories continued and passed down from generation to generation in various ways, whether it's folklore of the sinister bogeyman type figure coming back that can do harm, or sightings of the ghost as a constant warning and as a way of remembering this account, really.

Angela Buckley : Now, I did have a day out with ghost hunters in the area, actually, which was quite interesting, and they basically wanted to do an interview and to see the area. And I used to do crime walks around there as well, sometimes. When I was still in reading and we walked around and I don't know very much about this, but they had all their different bits of kit with them. And when we walked over the bridge, it was quite interesting because they stopped and they kept getting names through the gadgetry that they use different children's names, which was really interesting. And it was a really fascinating day and they were going to come back at night, but obviously it's an outdoor location. I don't know quite how you would do that. But then the pandemic came, and unfortunately, as far as I know, that it didn't actually happen. But even then, they seemed to be able to pick up some resonance, shall we say?

Michelle : Yeah, fascinating. But it is so fascinating to talk to you. It's such an interesting aspect of history, and I just love history. I love the parts of history that maybe just don't have the same kind of attention that other parts of history do. And crime history is so intriguing and tragic and sad. I mean, it's every emotion, it touches on every aspect, doesn't it, in terms of life and. Yeah, really, really interesting. So thank you so much for coming and talking so passionately and knowledgeably about not only this case in itself, but obviously the wider aspects of crime and investigation and baby farming and all the rest. It's been so interesting. So thank you.

Angela Buckley : Oh, you're very welcome. It was a great pleasure to chat to you. Thank you.

Michelle : And like I said at the very beginning, I will make sure to include in all the podcast description notes and on the website links to your website so that people can easily find you as well as where they can go to find your books, because they are incredible.

Angela Buckley : Thank you. That's very kind.

Michelle : Do you want to just finish by just telling us the names of the four titles of your book so people can kind of have that little teaser?

Angela Buckley : Okay, sure. So my first book is the biography of the Victorian detective in Manchester, and that's called the Real Sherlock Holmes, the Hidden Story of Jerome Caminada. And then that's followed by the Amelia Dyer Book, which is Amelia Dyer and the Baby Farm Murders, which is obviously about the story we've been talking about today. And then I did a book about the murder of a police officer. This is in my home, just near my house, my family home in Manchester, actually. It's called who Killed PC Cock? And that's quite an intriguing story. It's a police officer who shot in the middle of the night in the 1870s, and the local police officer knows exactly who done it, and he rounds up these local lads and he takes them through to trial. And then there's a really extraordinary twist in that particular story. And then there's a compilation, going back to Detective Caminada, there's a compilation of his memoirs, because he wrote his memoirs at the late 19th century, which are quite hard to read. So I've published a sort of compilation of some of the best bits, if you like, and that's called Detective Caminada's Case book, the Memoirs of Manchester, Sherlock Holmes. And then I've got a new book, actually, while I've mentioned it, coming out next year, which is called the Burmansey Murders. And this is a case set in 1849 in London, in Burmansey, obviously. And this is about Maria and Frederick Manning, who are quite well known at the time, a husband and wife who were convicted of the murder of a friend of theirs, Patrick O'Connor. And that story is quite important because it's the first big challenge that Scotland, the new detective department at Scotland Yard, faced. And it was also inspiration for Charles Dickens.

Michelle : You stole my thunder. I was going to ask if you had any in the mean. I can't wait. It already sounds intriguing. So, yeah, another one to add to my own library.

Angela Buckley : Thank you.

Michelle : Honestly, thank you so much for coming and chatting, and you are welcome anytime to talk Victorian crime sleuthing, anything at all. You've been an absolutely wonderful guest to chat to. So thank you so much.

Angela Buckley : Thank you. And thank you for having me. No, it's been really enjoyable. Thank you.

Michelle : And I will say goodbye to everybody listening. Bye, everyone.