Amelia Dyer

Posted on October 27, 2022 Posted in UncategorizedLeave a comment

In this week’s blog, I will be discussing Amelia Dyer.

Also known as “The Reading Baby Farmer,” Amelia Dyer would brutally murder babies and use their deaths for personal financial gain for herself. Starting with her childhood, unlike most of the other serial killers that I have covered in this blog, Amelia Dyer grew up in a big, stable family outside of Bristol. She was a natural caretaker and very well-educated. Dyer would spend most of her time reading poetry or literature. When Amelia was 11 years old, her mother passed away due to typhus, and she lost connections with most of her family. She married an older man named George Thomas and had one child with him. Thomas passed away when the baby was only a newborn and Dyer was left to fend for herself. During her marriage with Thomas, Dyer was a midwife and nurse, where she first learned about baby farming. After her husband’s death, she became so desperate for money, she started to display posters around town and in newspapers claiming to be a baby farmer.

Baby farming was extremely popular in 1860s Victorian England. Single mothers who were unable to care for their children could place their babies in the care of a midwife or someone well-off in exchange for money. Most of these baby farmers would find caring homes for the babies or return them to their biological mothers once they were better off. Amelia Dyer had other plans. When mothers would place their children in Amelia’s care, instead of using the payment to feed or take care of the baby, she would kill them and then pocket the money.

In the 1800s, mothers would often use an opium solution to calm down crying children, but Dyer would overdose the infants with this solution. She would call the coroner and report the deaths, pretending to grieve over their passings. As more deaths started being reported, a doctor became suspicious of the number of deaths happening. He reported her to authorities and she was sentenced to six months in a labor camp, with no murder or manslaughter charges.

When she was released from the labor camp, she started her baby farming act once again. However, instead of calling the coroner to dispose of the bodies, she started disposing of them herself. Throwing them in a river, hiding them around the town, or burying the bodies, got authority’s attention away from her. If there was a case where the mother wanted her child back and she had already killed the child, she would simply give the mother a different baby. She started becoming more confident and killed the babies in various ways; by strangling or other means of killing. Dyer would move houses and change her name and identity, so the authorities would not target her.

She was baby farming for almost 30 years. In March of 1896, a man spotted something floating in the Thames River. He found the body of a baby girl wrapped in paper and he notified the police immediately. One of the police officers noticed a name on the corner of the paper. It read Mrs. Thomas, and had an address. The address was Amelia Dyers. However, the address alone could not link her to the crime. The police had set her up. The police had posted an ad claiming to be a young woman looking for a home for her baby. She responded and ended up being ambushed. Her house was searched and they found dressmaker tape that was used to wrap around the infants’ necks, advertisements, letters from mothers asking about their children, and a stench of decomposing bodies.

Dyer was then arrested and admitted to committing only six murders. During her trial, she only pleaded guilty to the baby girl’s death and claimed insanity. On June 10, 1896, Amelia Dyer was executed. Historians estimate that Amelia Dyer committed over 400 infant murders.

Sources:

https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/serial-killers/amelia-dyer/

https://www.thamesvalley.police.uk/police-forces/thames-valley-police/areas/au/about-us/thames-valley-police-museum/the-baby-farmer/

https://murderpedia.org/female.D/d/dyer-amelia.htm

Photo Sources in Order:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.listennotes.com%2Fpodcasts%2Fon-the-night-of%2Famelia-dyer-misadventures-in-T8ufJZVorHG%2F&psig=AOvVaw1A6YNIJlkOVmXjZM8QTwHb&ust=1666831734155000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CA0QjhxqFwoTCJDt_JzW_PoCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAE

https://www.ranker.com/list/the-deadliest-baby-farmers-in-history/cat-mcauliffe

https://victorian-supersleuth.com/the-detectives-who-caught-amelia-dyer/

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Amelia-Dyer-Victorian-Baby-Killer

https://awnaves.medium.com/victorian-angel-maker-amelia-dyer-murdered-400-children-ca3fb484d184

Jane Toppan

Posted on October 20, 2022 Posted in Uncategorized3 Comments

The next serial killer that I will be covering is Jane Toppan.

Jane Toppan was born on March 31, 1854, in Boston Massachusetts. Her name given at birth was Honora Kelley. She was the youngest of four children in an unstable Irish Immigrant family. Her mother died when Honora was only one year old. Her father, Peter Kelley tried to raise the children but he was said to have lost his mind and sewed his eyelids shut. It was also reported that he may have abused the kids. After this, she and her sisters Delia and Nellie were sent to Boston’s Female Asylum. This was an orphanage that put little girl’s into adopted homes by the age of 10. They were raised with over one hundred other children. Delia turned to alcoholism and prostitution and Nellie ended up in an insane asylum. Honora on the other hand became an indentured servant for a widow named Ann Toppan.

At the time, there was a stigma around Irish people, so Ann changed Nora’s name to Jane Toppan and passed her off as a young Italian girl. She went to school and received good grades, but she showed signs of being a sociopath around this time. Jane would make up unbelievable lies about her family. At age 18, the Toppan’s freed her and her service, but she continued to work for the family until Ann passed away in 1876. At age 33, Jane started working in the Cambridge Hospital to train to be a nurse.

While working as a nursing student she adopted the nickname “Jolly Jane” because of her friendly and outgoing personality. She did not particularly like elderly patients. Toppan thought that they were ultimately useless and killed at least 12 people in her time as a student nurse. She would experiment on the elderly patients with morphine and atropine. After being trained, she got a job at the Massachusetts General Hospital but lost it because the doctors figured out that she was giving out opiates to patients. They thought that it was better if she became a private nurse for wealthy families instead.

Many of her patients were happy with the care that she provided them, but there were some reports of small items being stolen. Jane became close with her landlord and his wife, but she ended up poisoning them because they had grown old and cranky. Another elderly woman named Mary Mclear was poisoned by Toppan in 1889. Jane even murdered her former foster sister and their housekeeper. There was no suspicion towards Jane until 1901 when she killed the Davis family. Authorities thought it was weird that three members of this family died around the same time, so they performed an autopsy and gathered evidence that Jane committed these murders.

On October 29, 190, Jane Toppan was arrested. In 1903 she was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was admitted to the Taunton Insane Hospital. Toppan confessed to killing over 30 people, but only 11 were actually confirmed. However, with the timeline and the number of patients that Toppan cared for, it is suspected that she committed over 100 murders. Toppan eventually died in the Insane Asylum at age 84 on August 17, 1938.

Sources:

https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/serial-killers/jane-toppan/

https://awnaves.medium.com/jolly-jane-the-story-of-serial-killer-jane-toppan-a582737941c7

https://murderpedia.org/female.T/t/toppan-jane.htm

Photo Sources in Order:

https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/jolly-jane-toppan-killer-nurse-obsessed-death/

https://www.ranker.com/list/disturbing-facts-about-jane-toppan/amandasedlakhevener

http://www.hubhistory.com/episodes/episode-7-jane-toppan-nightmare-nurse/

https://wbsm.com/taunton-state-jolly-jane-female-serial-killer/

Lizzie Borden

Posted on October 13, 2022 Posted in UncategorizedLeave a comment

I’m sure that most of you at some point have heard the rhyme: Lizzie Borden took an ax, and gave her mother forty whacks; When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one. This week my passion blog will be about Lizzie Borden.

Lizzie Andrew Borden was born on July 19, 1860, in Fall River, Massachusetts. She had two older siblings. Lizzie’s middle sibling, Alice, passed away at two years old and her mother, Sarah, passed when Lizzie was very young. Three years after her mother’s death, Lizzie’s father, Andrew, remarried a woman named Abby Durfee Gray.

Andrew directed several textile mills and owned many properties. Growing up, the oldest Borden sister, Emma, raised Lizzie. The two girls grew up in a very religious household, and her father was very modest about money. Lizzie did not like the way that she was brought up. She was forced to only participate in Church or religious socials and was forced to save up money to sew her own dresses. Money was not an issue in the family, but Andrew did not see the point in living a luxurious life when he had all he could ever want. This drove a wedge between the family.

Andrew gifted properties to his wife’s family, but not to his daughters. Emma and Lizzie saw this as wrong on their father’s part. Lizzie’s relationship with Abby became strained and she started only referring to her as Mrs. Borden.

Leading up to the murders, The Borden household was robbed. Many of Abby’s sentimental and expensive items were missing and despite Emma and Lizzie being in the house at the time of the robbery, no one heard anything. Many fights between Lizzie and her father broke out, leading her to resent him.

On August 4, 1892, the day started just like any other. The family had morning breakfast, and Lizzie did not go. Abby had spent the morning cleaning up the house and between the hours of 9:00 and 10:00am, she was killed. Lizzie’s father returned from his morning walk and Lizzie was heard laughing at the top of the staircase. From where Lizzie was located, she should have been able to see the body of Abby Borden. At 11:00am, Lizzie screamed downstairs to the maid that her father had been killed.

After the police came to investigate, Lizzie’s story contradicted itself but there was not a lot of clear-cut evidence that she committed the murders. Her story was not lining up, and there was extremely suspicious behavior from her. After the funerals of Abby and Andrew, Lizzie was charged with double homicide and was brought to jail. During her testimony and trial, Lizzie’s stories were still contradicting each other. In the jury, the evidence brought was not enough to make a decision that Lizzie had actually committed the murders, so she was acquitted and free to go. It is still a mystery who actually killed Abby and Andrew Borden, but after researching and learning about this case, I believe that Lizzie did murder them.

Sources: