#Serial stories lady swings baby serial#

Ten years later, having completed a six-month prison sentence for infant neglect, Dyer changed her modus operandi. Some asked for their infants to be stifled at the moment of birth, since Victorian coroners were unable to distinguish between suffocation and still-birth.Дyer also fostered infants for a weekly fee, maximizing her profits by slowly starving her little charges, muting them with daily doses of the liquid opiate, laudanum, known colloquially as вЂњthe quietnessвЂќ because it stifled both a babyвЂ™s appetite and its cries. It became clear that Dyer had profited from her trade for almost 30 years, travelling as far afield as Liverpool and Plymouth.Дyer first opened a house of confinement in the Bristol suburb of Totterdown in the late 1860s, and charged a fee to take in unmarried women when they could no longer hide their pregnancies. When the body count rose to 50, Amelia told police: вЂњYouвЂ™ll know all mine by the tape around their necksвЂќ.ДЄs the police investigation grew, so did the efforts of investigative journalists. They ordered an immediate dragging operation, watched by crowds of onlookers lining the river banks, drawn by lurid press coverage. The police were in little doubt that they had uncovered a baby farm.

The most gruesome evidence was the heavy stench of rotting flesh coming from the kitchen pantry and from a trunk under her bed.

Letters and receipts for newspaper advertisements arranging adoptions were also recovered, indicating that Dyer was operating under several aliases, including Harding and Smith. Her home was crammed with evidence of a hefty trade in infant life вЂ“ dozens of vaccination papers, vast quantities of tiny clothes and countless pawn tickets for baby clothes. What they discovered inside DyerвЂ™s two-up-two-down, rented terraced house on Kensington Road was damning. An address on the parcel paper led the police to a stout midwife described variously as вЂњmotherlyвЂќ and вЂњhomelyвЂќ. Reading police had been alerted to Dyer back in April by the discovery of another tiny infant in the reeds of the Thames. Yet within a few decades, her criminal career was all but forgotten. 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. They had been strangled with white tape, wrapped in parcel paper and dumped in a carpet bag in the River Thames at Reading. Three weeks earlier, Dyer had been convicted at the Old Bailey of the murder of two babies.

Her Prison Commission file, now visible online, logs DyerвЂ™s final moments on the scaffold at Newgate Gaol on June 10, 1896, and records her hanging with characteristic Victorian efficiency: вЂњOn account of her weight and the softness of the textures, rather a short drop was given.

While largely forgotten today, Amelia DyerвЂ™s crimes paved the way for one of the most sensational trials of the Victorian era вЂ“ and spotlighted the pandemic problem of infanticide in 19th century Britain. 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.

#Serial stories lady swings baby serial#

Harold Shipman is generally considered to be BritainвЂ™s worst serial killer, with more than 250 murders ascribed to his name.