Amelia Dyer – Gianna Gullace : Passion Blog

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.