By Judith A. Yates
Some female serial killers emerged throughout history in the guise of social service before the title “serial killer” was considered. Sometimes their crimes resulted from tradition, indiscretions to protect secrets or preserve the bloodlines. Society referred to these killers in hushed tones. These serial killers assisted the poor and were patronized by the wealthy. They assisted the destitute, unmarried pregnant woman; they allowed aristocrats to sneak in and out the side door for services rendered. Some were called “midwives.” Many times, these midwives became “angel makers.” They were women who purposely killed unwanted children.
A pregnant, unmarried woman brought shame to their family and community. A destitute family with many children could not stretch the limits of an overextended home. Wealthy aristocrats who married outside the bloodline or had discreet dalliances resulting in a child could lose everything. Thus, many of these hapless souls called a midwife to take away the problem.
Should an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy occur, the expectant mother sought out a midwife. Often it was the child’s grandmother who paid the midwife to take the child. After determining a sum, the midwife would sell the child to a “suitable” home: a childless family, a woman unable to give birth, or people with evil intentions. Money was paid, and the baby handed off.
Birth control did not exist sans abstinence, abortions were illegal, and many marriages were arranged, sometimes a young girl to a much older man, and survival in a war-torn, impoverished country was harsh. Women had little personal power in their lives; many were chattel to be raised and trained by a husband. A child had even fewer rights. Furthermore, buying and selling children was legal.
But not murder. Murder was for fiends and cutthroats, society’s lowest.
Women sought midwives who lived at a distance. The midwife’s names were spread by word of mouth. They never gave actual names; the less one knew about the other, the better. Moreover, when the pregnant woman had an unwanted baby that would not sell, the midwife often became an “angel maker;” this meant the child would be killed and disposed of. Sometimes the pregnant woman knew the child’s fate. It was a crime where everyone knew, but no one told.
It was a lucrative business for a woman with no job and no provider, this selling and killing of babies.
The murdered children died by various methods. Many starved to death. Police caught Anna Kowal from Lviv (now Ukraine) with her healthy child and four unrelated children who resembled skeletons. Mariam Blum from Lemberg forced naked children into the cold to freeze. In Poland, Paranka Maksymyshyn of Wielkopolie hung in 1890 for the crime she practiced for many years. She would wrap straw into a cloth and stuff it into the child’s mouth, tossing the deceased into a river.
“Angel making” was a crime challenging to prove. A tipster usually revealed the guilty. In some instances, angel makers targeted adults for death. Most of the angel makers went undiscovered. Many became legends, cautionary tales. Some continue to make headlines.
1633 Italy: women were powerless in law and at home. Society’s station for a woman was matrimony, widowhood, or prostitution. Females were property, and so many led miserable lives. Enter a solution: Giulia Tofana.
She was born in 1620 in Palermo, Italy, and already bore a notorious reputation. She was the daughter of Thofania d’Amado and a murdered father, Thofania being the culprit. Giulia was a chip off the arsenic block. Men dropped dead from Sicily to Naples to Rome as she worked from her apothecary shop, assisted by a growing gang of thugs. She sold beauty products to wealthy women, including Aqua Tofana, “Manna of St Nicholas of Bari.” It was a mix of arsenic, belladonna, and lead. Many beauty products of the day included these same elements, so they appeared reasonable. A few drops of this particular product in liquid, administered over time, sent the victim from a case of exhaustion to a painful death with a roiling stomach.
Giulia Tofana reeled in cash as victims were rolled into graves. Until one customer changed her murderous mind and confessed all just before her husband unknowingly drank the poison. The husband notified the police, the police drew up a warrant, and Giulia hid behind church walls. The government scooped her up and, under horrific torture, she confessed that at least 600 men fell to their deaths in about 20 years via Aqua Tofana.
Giulia, a few of her assistants, and many lower-class female customers hung from the gallows. The wealthier clients who had used the poison were either banished or imprisoned. Today, Tofana’s former “office” in Rome is now an apartment building.
It was the late 1800s in Warsaw, Russia (now Poland); Marianna Skublinska had worked as an “angel-maker” (faiseuses d’anges). New parents knew they were selling their unwanted babies to Marianna for “disposal.” For fifteen rubles, she guaranteed the baby would die within a few weeks; at twenty rubles, death came within 48 hours. After being systematically starved to death, the tiny bodies were buried or tossed to pigs for devouring. At least 75 babies entered her home; none came out breathing.
Marianna’s secret began to unravel the night of a house fire. As firefighters worked to extinguish a blaze at 56 Sennaia Street, they noted tiny bodies began to appear in the white-hot rubble. “I take on the children to nurse,” she told the firemen. She and her family had moved into the house only four months prior. “Are the babies with you now?” A firefighter asked. “They are no longer with me,” she answered honestly. Further investigation led to multiple baby corpses in the walls, floors, and behind heavy furniture. As the corpses lined up, Marianna and her “assistants” lined up in front of the police.
Marianna initially worked as a midwife in a small village outside of Warsaw. It was common knowledge that “illegitimate” children could be taken to her. She held a legal license to work as a midwife and charged accordingly. Marianna would charge a sum to care for and assist the newborn in finding a home. Thinking their child to be in better hands, the parent paid the fee, kissed the baby goodbye, and departed.
Nevertheless, the babies did not always go to homes. If they were difficult to place, sickly, or hard to care for in general, Marianna found a quick and straightforward answer to these perceived burdens; her charges met either a prolonged death or a brutal one. “I have the fattest pigs in the district!” Marianna Skublinska would brag. She did not reveal what she was feeding them.
Law enforcement caught on to her “baby farming” scheme. They suspected her of murder. They arrested Marianna Skublinska for infanticide, but the courts acquitted her for lack of sufficient evidence. This brought her move to 56 Sennaia Street in Warsaw.
Warsaw’s law enforcement knew her reputation and caught her working as a midwife without a license. She explained to the officers that she would obtain such a license soon. However, the next night her house was ablaze. And then the truth fell out of the walls, ceilings, and floors. A doctor declared none of these children had died from the fire; they bore bludgeoning, strangulation, and starvation marks. The police charged Marianna with murder, but again a lack of evidence set her free. Instead, she spent three years in prison for arson. And then Marianna Skublinska disappeared into history.
In 1911, Zsuzsanna Fazekas appeared in Nagyrév, near central Hungary and southeast of Budapest; this was a small farming community with 700-1,000 people. Thus, word spread quickly about Fazekas: she was unmarried, never explaining what happened to her husband, she never shared her background. However, Zsuzsanna Fazekas was a midwife: assisting in delivery, abortions, and acting as a sounding board for women regarding children and family. She was in demand in a village with no real doctor, despite “midwife” being synonymous with “witchery” during these times. She was charged ten times for performing illegal abortions from her arrival to death but never brought to trial. Some judges supported abortion.
The first world war had significantly altered the face of Hungary. Nine million men had been drafted and left their villages and cities to fight; many never came home. Those who did return were often overcome by PTSD, an affliction undiagnosed during this time. Nagyrév had been a place to hold prisoners of war. Many relationships evolved between the prisoners forced to work and the lonely women who waited for their men. In Nagyrév, culture demanded arranged marriages. Divorces were illegal. Domestic violence was the norm. Zsuzsanna Fazekas had the perfect answer for the women of Nagyrév. She introduced her “simple solution”: boiling flypaper in water to create arsenic. The symptoms were akin to cholera, Nagyrév’s tainted water could produce poison, and many returning soldiers had been subjected to gas in battle. The “simple solution” symptoms mirrored all these ailments.
Then came Zsuzsanna’s cousin Susi Oláh, hired by Fazekas to file altered death certificates for the victims of women purchasing this boiled flypaper. Oláh knew her business: at 18, she had poisoned and covered up the murder of her own older husband. Fazekas created and sold the poison. Oláh created the death certificates. And the men of Nagyrév began dropping dead, followed by unwanted children and undesired relatives. For 18 years, a known 40-55 people died. Some people believed there were at least 300 possible victims. Then someone snitched, and law enforcement arrived at Zsuzsanna Fazekas’s home. They found her dead from her own dose of arsenic. The police eventually arrested 26 women, who stood trial for the town cemetery’s 45 of 50 arsenic-laden dead bodies. Reports reveal how the women were nonchalant during the trial. They did what they had to do to survive, they claimed. Eight of them received death sentences. Only two were executed. The rest received prison.
“The angel maker on Bruks Street” of Helsingborg, Sweden, began her craft because of financial turmoil. She and her husband had far more debt than income. Hilda had a solution. She became a “baby farmer,” taking in unwanted and unplanned children in exchange for tidy sums and no questions asked. In the early 1900s, European baby farming was not a crime, and such “midwives” were commonplace. From her clean, efficient household, she assured the mothers, these babies would find wonderful homes soon. However, between care of the children and expenses of finding them homes, Hilda was spending more than the payments that clandestinely fell into her purse. To cut her costs, Hilda Nilsson would murder the baby as soon as the mother departed. She would drown the infant by placing it in a washtub of water and then set a heavy washboard and bucket of coal atop the body. Hilda burned the remains. Because these babies were not legalized members of society, they did not exist. At least eight children, and probably many more, met their fate when handed over to Hilda Nilsson. One woman, named Blenda Henricsson, handed over her child. Later, she had a change of heart and wanted to see the baby. After Hilda’s constant refusals, Blenda contacted authorities who discovered evidence of murder. Hilda was imprisoned in 1917 for eight counts of child murder until she went to trial.
Hilda Nilsson received a death sentence. She beat the executioner by hanging herself in her cell in 1917.
After a troubled childhood fraught with death and mental illness, England’s Amelia Dyer moved to Bristol. She married and trained as a nurse. Struggling through her husband’s death and raising her child in 1869, Amelia listened to a midwife who suggested a faster, easier way to make a comfortable living. Soon, Amelia followed in this nurse’s shoes by taking in pregnant single mothers, helping to deliver the baby, and then maintaining her baby farm.
For babies challenging to place, starvation and neglect awaited them. Amelia’s mentor nurse escaped to America to avoid arrest, but Amelia Dyer kept a steady business for thirty years. Like those before her, Amelia learned what babies would sell; she strangled the fussy ones, those who were ill or stayed too long at the farm.
In 1872, Amelia Dyer married a second time, had two more children, then left her husband. Adding up the income versus expense, she determined it was easier and improved finances to kill all the children as soon as the parent was gone. She became a full-time angel maker.
Authorities caught up with Amelia Dyer in 1879. She spent time in a hard labor camp, which affected her mental stability. She was hospitalized several times for suicidal attempts and mental illness, though some believed she feigned both. She became an addict. And then she returned to baby farming and angel making, disposing of the bodies that she could not or would not sell. She often moved, avoiding law enforcement, and used many aliases.
In 1896, two tiny bodies were found floating in a case and wrapped in paper in the river. A careful perusal of the paper revealed a name, and police followed the evidence to Amelia Dyer. When police raided her home, there was more than enough evidence: advertisements she placed in local papers seeking to adopt, baby clothing, pawn tickets for baby items, and the putrid stench of rotting flesh.
It is impossible to know how many murders to attribute to Amelia Dyer. She received a sentence of death for one murder. On June 10, 1896, the executioner led her up the scaffold; a rope was placed, a lever pulled, and the “angel maker” dropped to her death. She was fifty-three years old.
“A Diabolical Crime.” Supplement to Evening Post (Wellington, New Zealand), May 17, 1890, p. 1.
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Bolmstedt, A. (2015). “The Angel Maker.” LRF Media.
Donaldson, K. (2020). The Angel Makers of Nagyrév and the Truth Around Murderous Women of Myth. https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/the-angel-makers-of-nagyrev-and-the-truth-around-murderous-women-of-myth
“Horrible Crimes At Warsaw: Fifty Murdered Babies Found.” The Echo (London, England), Feb. 24, 1890, p. 3.
The Crimes of Our Ancestors: Angel Makers. (2019). Dorosh Heritage Tours. https://doroshheritagetours.com/the-crimes-of-our-ancestors-angel-makers/
“The Polish Baby Murderer Sentenced,” The Nelson Evening Mail (New Zealand), May 27, 1890, p. 4.
The Unknown history of misandry (2016). Marianne Skoublinska, Polish Midwife & Serial Killer, 1890. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com
Toomer, J. (2020). Giulia Tofana, the Italian Serial Poisoner Who Became a Legend. https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/giulia-tofana-the-italian-serial-poisoner-who-became-a-legend
“Unwelcome Babies,” St. Paul Daily Globe (MN.), Jul. 14, 1890, p. 5.
Rattle, A. & Vale, A. (2007). Amelia Dyer Angel Maker: The Woman Who Murdered Babies. ReadHowYouWant: Creative Commons License
Rose, L. (1986). The Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Britain. Routledge & Kegan Paul
This feature is reproduced as Judith A. Yates wrote it for the magazine. Her references are printed in full; the photo credits and author biography that closed the print version are omitted. Three points of record. Giulia Tofana’s life is documented only in later and often contradictory sources, and the figure of 600 victims comes from accounts of her confession under torture rather than from any court record. The midwife of Nagyrév is given in this archive’s roster, and in THE KILLER ABCS, as Júlia Fazekas; the author’s Zsuzsanna is the Hungarian form of her given name, Susanna, and both refer to the same woman. Hilda Nilsson and Amelia Dyer each have entries in the roster, and Dyer’s execution on June 10, 1896 is recorded there.