The Reading Baby Farmer

The case

On 30 March 1896 a bargeman on the Thames at Reading pulled a parcel out of the water. Inside was the body of a baby girl, later identified as Helena Fry. The wrapping paper carried a faint name and address, and a label from Bristol Temple Meads station. Detective Constable James Anderson of the Reading Borough Police worked out the writing: a Mrs Thomas, of an address in Reading. The woman who lived there called herself Mrs Harding when she answered newspaper advertisements, and her real name was Amelia Dyer.

Dyer was born Amelia Hobley in 1837 at Pyle Marsh, near Bristol, the daughter of a shoemaker. She trained as a nurse, and after her first husband died she turned to baby farming, the Victorian trade of taking in children born outside marriage in return for a fee. Since 1834 the Poor Law had made it very hard for unmarried mothers to claim support from the fathers, and many could keep their jobs, and their names, only by giving their babies up. Some baby farmers cared for the children. Many did not. In 1879 Dyer served six months' hard labour after a doctor grew suspicious of how many children in her care had died.

She spent the following years moving between Bristol lodgings, workhouses and asylums, where she was admitted at least three times, after suicide attempts and violent episodes. Her daughter later testified that some of these crises followed visits from parents asking for their children back. Each time she returned to the trade, under a succession of names, advertising in the papers as a respectable married woman who would adopt a child for a single payment.

Evelina Marmon, a 25-year-old barmaid in Cheltenham, had a daughter, Doris, in January 1896. In March she answered an advertisement in the Bristol Times and Mirror and received warm letters from 'Mrs Harding' of 45 Kensington Road, Reading, who wrote that she and her husband were plain, homely people who longed for a little girl. Marmon wanted to pay weekly so that she could stay in touch; Harding insisted on £10 in advance. On 31 March Dyer collected the ten-week-old baby in Cheltenham. That night she arrived at her daughter's lodgings at 76 Mayo Road, Willesden, carrying a heavy carpet bag. The next day she collected a second child, 13-month-old Harry Simmons, at Paddington station. Neither baby left the house alive. On 2 April she took the carpet bag back to Reading.

Police, now watching the Kensington Road house, used a young woman as a decoy client, and Dyer was arrested in the first days of April. Inside they found baby clothes, pawn tickets for children's clothing, white edging tape, telegrams about adoptions and letters from mothers asking how their children were. When the Thames was dragged, a labourer brought up the carpet bag on 10 April near the footbridge at Caversham; it held the bodies of Doris Marmon and Harry Simmons. Other infants were recovered from the river in the weeks that followed. On 11 April Evelina Marmon identified her daughter.

Dyer was tried at the Old Bailey in May 1896 for the murder of Doris Marmon. Her defence was insanity, pointing to her asylum committals; the prosecution argued that her breakdowns had tended to arrive when discovery threatened. The jury took minutes to convict, and she was sentenced to death. In the condemned cell she wrote a long confession and insisted that her daughter and son-in-law had known nothing. She was hanged at Newgate by James Billington on 10 June 1896.