Amelia Dyer was hanged at Newgate prison in London on June 10, 1896, for the wilful murder of Doris Marmon, a baby about ten weeks old. Dyer was 57. For years she had taken in the babies of unmarried mothers for a fee, promising each one a good home. Doris's mother handed her over at Cheltenham on March 31, 1896, after answering an advertisement. Within two days the child was dead. Her body was found in the Thames at Caversham, Reading, on April 10, in a carpet bag weighted with bricks, together with the body of a 13-month-old boy, Harry Simmons. The surgeon who examined them told the court that both had been strangled with tape.
The police had reached her through another child. On March 30, 1896, a bargeman lifted a parcel from the river at Reading. It held the body of an infant girl, later believed to be Helena Fry, and its wrapping carried a railway label with a name and address that led detectives to Dyer. At her trial at the Central Criminal Court in May 1896 she pleaded, through her counsel and doctors, that she was insane. The jury did not accept it. How many children died in her care over the years has never been established; the one killing for which she was tried and convicted was Doris Marmon's.
Dyer was born Amelia Hobley at Pyle Marsh, a village just east of Bristol. Wells Nub News gives the year as 1837; the historian Joanna Bourke, in a 2021 Gresham College lecture, says only that she was born in the 1830s, and the Digital Panopticon's record of her trial, working from the age given in court, gives 1839. Her father was a master shoemaker, according to Bourke, and she received a good education, read widely and was fond of poetry. Her mother was left insane by typhus, attempted suicide, and died in an asylum, Bourke says. Wells Nub News describes Amelia as having cared for her mother until her death.
She worked first as a corset maker and then trained as a nurse. She married George Thomas, who was 35 years older than she was, Bourke says, and after his death married William Dyer, whom the lecture describes as an illiterate man who worked at a vinegar factory. She had a daughter, M. A. P., who was a witness at her trial in 1896.
Her brother James Hobley gave evidence at the trial that, as far as he knew, there had never been a case of insanity in the family. He also said he had not seen her for 35 or 36 years and that she was "a total stranger" to him. He asked that his name not be published; the court record names him all the same.
The trade Dyer followed came to be called baby farming. Mothers who could not keep a child, most often because it had been born outside marriage, paid a woman to nurse it or to find it a home, either by a weekly fee or with a single lump sum. Bourke calls it a fairly unregulated business. Parliament had passed the Infant Life Protection Act in 1872, which required people who took in infants for payment to register; the law covered only children under one year old, and the London County Council was pressing in 1896 for it to be widened. Speaking in the House of Lords on March 9, 1896, three weeks before the first body was found at Reading, the Earl of Denbigh said the existing act was in danger of remaining "a dead-letter."
Bourke gives some of the figures of the time. The Metropolitan Police divisional returns recorded 225 infant corpses in the year to the end of April 1896, and more than 60 percent of the murder cases that came before coroners involved infants under a year old. Illegitimate children were reported to die at three times the rate of legitimate children.
Dyer's own business began in Bristol. Bourke says she ran a "house of confinement" in Totterdown, Bristol, where unmarried pregnant women came to give birth, and that she then took in and farmed their babies in Bristol, Reading, Cardiff and London.
In 1879 Dyer was convicted of an offense under the 1872 act and sentenced to six months' imprisonment with hard labour. Bourke describes the offense as child neglect under the Infant Life Protection Act. Wells Nub News, citing newspaper reports of the time, says she was first brought before the court at Long Ashton, near Bristol, charged with failing to obtain the licence required to keep children and with attempted suicide; she was acquitted of attempted suicide and served the six months at Shepton Mallet gaol. The exact wording of the 1879 offense was not reported. Bourke suggests that the experience led Dyer to demand a single payment for each child rather than a weekly fee.
From 1891 Dyer spent several short periods in asylums and hospitals. The dates come from her daughter's and the doctors' evidence at her trial, and from Bourke.
Her daughter told the court that Dyer was confined at the Gloucester County Asylum in 1891. Bourke dates that admission to November 1891 and says it followed an attempt to cut her throat.
On December 24, 1893, Dr. Frederick Logan examined Dyer at 114 Wells Road, Bristol, in lunacy proceedings. He found her violent and deluded. She picked up a poker and rushed at him, and she told him she heard voices and birds telling her to destroy herself. He signed a certificate that she was of unsound mind. He also said she showed no symptoms of drink. She was taken to the asylum at Wells, in Somerset, from December 26 to about the end of January, her daughter said. Bourke describes that institution as the County Asylum for Pauper Lunatics at Wells. Wells Nub News, which calls it the Somerset and Bath Lunatic Asylum, reports that she later said the stay at Wells was the worst of all.
In April 1894 she was admitted to the Bristol General Hospital after what was reported as an attempt to drown herself. Dr. J. Lacy Firth, who treated her for 13 days, said she was cold, low-spirited and hard to feed. She told him repeatedly that she had something on her mind. Under cross-examination he said she had partly admitted having had a child and "obviously knew something" about a missing child. He did not consider her insane, and she was discharged.
On December 14, 1894, Dr. William Frederick Bailey Eden examined her at Grove Cottage, Grove Road, Fishponds, on an order from the relieving officer. She was very excited, threatened to throw him out, and said God had forsaken her. Her daughter told him she was suicidal and had run after her with a knife. He certified her as of unsound mind, and she spent about a month in the Gloucester asylum before being discharged as recovered in January 1895. Bourke gives a further admission to the Gloucester asylum in August 1895; the trial evidence does not mention it, and on the evidence of her companion Jane Smith, Dyer was living in Reading by August 1895.
After the asylum Dyer went into the Barton Regis workhouse near Bristol and left it in June 1895, according to her daughter and Jane Smith.
Jane Smith, a widow, was an inmate of the Barton Regis workhouse when she met Dyer. Dyer invited her to come and live with her and said she meant to take in babies to nurse again. Smith moved with her to Bristol, then to Cardiff, and in August 1895 to Reading. There they lived first at Piggott's Road, then at Elm Villas, both in Caversham, and finally at 45 Kensington Road. Smith called Dyer "mother."
Other children passed through the house. A nine-year-old boy, Willie Thornton, had been fetched by Dyer from London in answer to an advertisement; he was alive at the time of the trial. A girl of six called Nellie had been with her about three months. At the time of the arrest another girl was in the house, and her mother came and took her away herself.
Dyer's daughter, M. A. P., told the court that her mother took in children for money and advertised for them, and she described adoptions in Bristol, Cardiff, Devonport, Caversham and Warminster, several of which ended in disputes with parents. When Dyer was sent to an asylum, three children in her care went to the workhouse; for two of them, the daughter believed, Dyer had received about 30 pounds and 40 pounds. One of the three had been born at Dyer's house in Fishponds, and its mother had paid her 80 pounds to raise it as her own. A girl of five or six whom the daughter had adopted in Bristol and handed to Dyer at Devonport was later said by Dyer to have gone to a Mrs. Johnson who was going abroad. The daughter never received an address.
In March 1896 Evalina Edith Marmon, as the trial record spells her name, was living in Cheltenham with her baby daughter, Doris. She was 25 and unmarried, and she had worked as a barmaid at the Plough Hotel, according to the Reading Old Cemetery history group. She answered an advertisement in the Bristol Times. The paper's chief clerk, Charles Jeffrey, told the court it had received an order for six insertions around March 11. The wording, as read in Marmon's evidence, offered a couple with no child who wanted the care of one or would adopt one, on terms of ten pounds, with replies to the Ship Exchange, Bristol.
Letters followed, signed "Mary Harding" and giving an address on Kensington Road, Reading. The letters of March 22 and 24 invited Marmon to visit, promised to "do a mother's duty," and set the price at ten pounds. A later letter said the writer would come on Monday; a letter dated Sunday, March 29, put it off to Tuesday. The writer also asked for a written agreement.
At about midday on Tuesday, March 31, a woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Harding arrived at Marmon's lodgings in Cheltenham. Marmon had drawn up an agreement. The visitor read it and signed it "Ann Harding," and Marmon's landlady witnessed it. Marmon paid ten pounds, and the visitor signed a receipt on the back.
They left Cheltenham together on the 5.20 train. Marmon went as far as Gloucester and gave her a cardboard box of baby clothes. Doris was wearing a fawn pelisse and a white bonnet. The woman carried a carpet bag and said she was going to Reading.
Under cross-examination Marmon admitted that she had made no inquiries about the woman, asked for no references and checked nothing in the letters. She had found her calm and sensible. A few days earlier, she said, the woman had mentioned a sister-in-law in the Gloucester asylum.
Mrs. Harding did not go to Reading. That night, about 10 p.m., a woman named Mary Ann Beattie saw her on an omnibus with a bag, a parcel and a child. When she got off at Mayo Road in Willesden, northwest London, Beattie carried the bag to number 76 for her. It was heavy, Beattie said, "a solid substance," and the older woman did not seem flurried.
Number 76 Mayo Road was the home of Dyer's daughter and her husband, A. E. P. The daughter told the court that her mother arrived at about 10.30 p.m. with a child under a shawl. Dyer would not come in at first and said she was waiting for someone. She brought a box of baby clothes, a fawn pelisse and a piece of bacon, and put the carpet bag under the couch. A neighbor, Charlotte Cullum, said Dyer told her the next morning that she had slept in a chair at her daughter's house.
In a letter to Marmon dated April 2, written from an address in Kensal Rise, Dyer said that a telegram had called her away because her sister was dangerously ill. The child, she wrote, had "slept all the way."
Amelia Hannah Sargeant was the wife of Alfred Sargeant and lived in Ealing. She had been looking after a baby boy, Harry, whose mother had left him with her when he was about a month old. The mother, she said, was "in trouble" and wanted to find a home for the child. The Reading Old Cemetery history group, drawing on the Berkshire Chronicle of April 1896, says Sargeant had paid for his care out of her own pocket because the mother's promised payments never came.
Sargeant answered an advertisement in the Weekly Dispatch of March 15, wrote to Mrs. Harding at 45 Kensington Road, Reading, and went there on March 25. The woman told her she only rarely took nursing children, that her real name was Thomas, and that she used the name Harding to protect her respectable standing in Reading. They agreed on ten pounds.
On April 1 they met at Paddington station. Dyer's daughter went too, and Dyer introduced her as her niece. In the refreshment room Sargeant paid five pounds in cash and gave an IOU for the rest, and the woman signed a receipt as "Annie Thomas." Sargeant handed over the boy, Harry, 13 months old. The trial record spells his surname Simmonds; Bourke and the Reading Old Cemetery group spell it Simmons.
Back at Mayo Road, the daughter said, the little boy cried and was fretful, and her mother shook him and said she would not keep him. Around six in the evening Dyer told her daughter to go and put her own son to bed. When the daughter came back, the child was lying on the couch under the shawl, and her mother pushed her away and told her not to touch it. She thought that unusual but was not alarmed. That night the child was still on the couch, and her mother said it was asleep.
The next day, April 2, the daughter could not see the child and was told it was "all right." She later noticed a parcel under the couch. Her mother asked for a brick. Next door, Albert Cullum had stacked loose bricks under a rabbit hutch in the back garden; he told the court that the bricks the police showed him were similar, though he could not say they were the same. Dyer packed the carpet bag so full that it would not close, and tied it with string over brown paper.
At about 7.20 p.m. Dyer left with her daughter and son-in-law, carrying the bag, and they took an omnibus to Paddington. The daughter put her on the 9.15 train to Reading. When the daughter got home, the parcel and the brick were gone.
A neighbor on Mayo Road, Clara Barber, saw an elderly woman with a heavy carpet bag pass her garden that day, according to an article by her granddaughter, Barbara Butcher, in History Today.
John Toller, an engineer at Reading prison, said that at about 10.55 that night he passed a woman near the railway arch by the Rising Sun public house in Reading. He said good night, and she did not answer. She was coming from the direction of the river, he said, not from the station. Under cross-examination he admitted that he had only connected the woman with Dyer on April 11, nine days later, and that he might have passed others that night.
Jane Smith said Dyer came home to Kensington Road at about 11.30 that Thursday night without the bag. Dyer told her she had left it so that her daughter could pack, because they were all going to Bridgwater for about a fortnight, and blamed missed trains for coming home late.
By then the Reading police were already looking for her. According to the crime historian Angela Buckley, speaking to the History of Reading Society in 2018 as reported in the Henley Standard, a bargeman, Charles Humphreys, and a colleague noticed something in the Thames near the footbridge at Clappers weir, by Caversham Lock, on March 30, 1896. It was a brown paper parcel holding a brick and the body of a baby girl. The mortuary surgeon confirmed that she had been strangled.
Superintendent George Tewsley of the Reading Borough Police led the inquiry, with Detective Constable James Anderson and Sergeant Harry James. The wrapping bore a faded Midland Railway stamp from Bristol Temple Meads, dated October 24, 1895, addressed to a Mrs. Thomas at Piggott's Road, Caversham. A clerk at Reading station recognized the parcel and named the recipient as Mrs. Dyer of Kensington Road, Buckley said. Bourke, in her lecture, also traces the arrest to a railway label and the address of a Mrs. Thomas. Detectives concluded that the child was probably Helena Fry. Bourke describes her as the daughter of Mary Fry, an unmarried servant.
The police arrested Dyer at Kensington Road on April 3, 1896, Buckley said. Inside they found string that matched the cord on the parcel, letters from parents who had placed children with her, and other evidence of the trade. Bourke lists children's possessions, pawn tickets for baby clothes and newspaper adoption advertisements, and she says that in the two months before her arrest Dyer had been given twenty children.
Detective Constable Anderson told the court that on April 6 he found ten pawn tickets, mostly for children's clothing, at 76 Mayo Road. On April 15, at 45 Kensington Road, he found fifteen more, also mostly for children's clothing, and a brown paper parcel of twelve diapers that Marmon later identified, among dirty clothing that Dyer said she had brought from London.
The river was dragged. On April 10 a Reading laborer, Henry Smithwaite, was halfway across the footbridge over the Clappers at Caversham when he found a carpet bag in about twelve feet of water. He brought it to the back of the lock house and called Sergeant James, who cut the string. The bag held the bodies of two children and bricks. (The Reading Old Cemetery group, from newspaper reports, dates the find to April 9.)
At the mortuary Sergeant James unpacked the bag. Marmon identified the girl as her daughter, and Sargeant identified the boy as Harry. Willie Thornton, according to the Reading Old Cemetery account, identified the bag as Dyer's; Jane Smith told the court the bag Dyer took to London on March 31 was his.
The surgeon who examined the two bodies on April 11 is named William James Morris in the Old Bailey record and Dr. W. J. Maurice in the cemetery group's newspaper sources and in Buckley's account. He told the court that strangulation by a tape was the cause of death in each case and that both children had been dead about ten days.
The Reading coroner, Mr. Weedon, opened the inquest on the two children at the St Giles Coffee House on Saturday, April 11, 1896, the Reading Old Cemetery group records from the Berkshire Chronicle. A Mr. S. Brain attended for the Treasury. The coroner questioned Sargeant's judgement in accepting the boy without seeing his mother's marriage certificate. The cemetery group says that three inquests were raised at the trial: on the unnamed baby found on March 30, on Doris Marmon and on Harry Simmons.
The verdicts of the Reading inquests were not reported.
Doris Marmon and Harry Simmons were buried on April 14, 1896, at 1 p.m., in the unconsecrated part of Reading Old Cemetery, the cemetery history group says. The service was taken by the cemetery superintendent, A. Gibbs, before a large crowd. They lie in an unmarked common grave, Division 9, plot 11521, which also holds two other unidentified babies. On April 14, 2024, the group held a commemoration there for the four babies and for other children who died in the care of Victorian baby farmers.
In Reading prison Dyer asked the matron, Ellen Gibbs, to send a letter to the police. "Now I have eased my mind," she said. When Gibbs warned that it amounted to pleading guilty to everything, Dyer said she wished to, because "they can't charge me with anything worse than I have done."
The first letter, dated April 16, 1896, was addressed to the chief superintendent of police and was to be put before the magistrates on April 18. Dyer wrote that she knew her days were numbered and that she would have to answer before her Maker for the awful crimes she had committed. She declared that neither her daughter nor her son-in-law had had anything to do with it and that they had not known what she meant to do until it was too late. The same day she wrote to her son-in-law, who was then in custody charged as an accessory after the fact. She told him that she dared not go into God's presence with a lie, that she had done "this dreadful crime," and that she alone would answer for it.
Gibbs said that at the time Dyer was charged with murdering a child, though Gibbs did not know which child. In prison, Gibbs said, Dyer talked to herself and was low-spirited about her son-in-law's arrest. Bourke says Dyer tried to kill herself in custody, using her bootlaces.
Dyer's son-in-law, A. E. P., was charged as an accessory after the fact and was in custody in April 1896, the matron testified at the trial. How that charge ended was not reported. Dyer's daughter, M. A. P., gave evidence for the prosecution at the trial.
Dyer was tried at the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in the session that opened on May 18, 1896. The indictment was for the wilful murder of Doris Marmon, and it was the only charge tried. The judge was Henry Hawkins, and the prosecution was led by Horace Avory, according to Bourke. The Old Bailey Proceedings record Mr. Kapadia examining the defence witnesses and Mr. Lawrence cross-examining them.
The Crown's case followed the child from Cheltenham to Willesden to the river: Marmon and the newspaper clerk; Beattie, the Cullums and Dyer's daughter; Sargeant; Toller; Jane Smith; Smithwaite and Sergeant James; the surgeon; Detective Constable Anderson; and the prison matron with the letters. Bourke says the prosecution argued that Dyer's motive was money.
The defence did not dispute what had happened. It argued that Dyer was insane. Bourke describes the plea as homicidal mania.
Dr. Logan, Dr. Firth and Dr. Eden described the episodes of 1893 and 1894. Dr. Forbes Winslow had seen her twice in Holloway prison, on May 15 and 19, 1896, for about 75 and 50 minutes. He found melancholia with delusions and hallucinations and said she was "not shamming." She told him that voices told her to take her own life, that she had made several attempts, that she saw visions of her mother and heard voices every night, and that she had been cruelly treated in the Gloucester asylum. She could not recall the children's names. Her memory of the distant past was good and her memory of recent events poor, which he regarded as a sign of possible organic disease. When he said she was not responsible for her actions, the court reproved him, because that was a question for the jury.
The prosecution answered with two doctors. Dr. James Scott, the medical officer at Holloway, had seen her daily since May 7. He found nothing inconsistent with sanity apart from a constant wish to commit suicide and a "total blank" about recent events, and he said she had not been insane while he observed her. Cross-examined, he admitted he had been inclined to think she was simulating insanity. Dr. George Henry Savage, physician at St Bartholomew's Hospital, examined her for about an hour and concluded she was not mentally unsound. She told him she had been an asylum attendant, and Dr. Scott said she told him the same, naming the Stapleton or Fishponds asylum near Bristol. To Savage she said that she remembered nothing of the crimes, and that if she had done it she must have been mad.
The jury found Dyer guilty. Bourke, Buckley and Wells Nub News all say the jury took about five minutes. The Old Bailey Proceedings record the verdict as guilty, and the Digital Panopticon and the National Archives give the sentence as death. In his summing up, as Bourke quotes it, Hawkins said that the prisoner had been treacherous to more than one mother and barbarous to more than one child, and in every case for the same sordid motive.
Two women's papers commented the day after the execution, Bourke says. The Woman's Signal compared Dyer favorably with baby farmers who let children starve slowly. The Women's Penny Paper, under the heading "The Baby Farming Murders," called the killings repulsive but put the blame on fathers who took no responsibility and on women's lack of rights.
In the three weeks before her execution Dyer filled five exercise books with what she called her last and only confession, Wells Nub News reports.
Dyer was hanged at Newgate on June 10, 1896. The executioner was James Billington. Bourke records his report that death was instantaneous, and that the crowd outside waited until the black flag was raised before going home. The National Archives holds the coroner's and jurors' declaration of her death, dated June 10, 1896, in the Home Office file on the case (HO 144/267/A57858B).
No one knows how many children died in Dyer's care. The court tried one death and heard evidence of another. Bourke, noting witnesses' claims that Dyer sometimes collected several babies in a day, suggests that even ten a year over some thirty years would amount to around 300, and she calls that an underestimate. It is an illustration, not a count. No contemporary record is cited for the figures of 200 to 400 often repeated elsewhere.
The Reading Old Cemetery group says four babies taken from the river were buried in the common grave in April 1896: Doris Marmon, Harry Simmons and two who were never identified. Buckley said more bodies were later found in the river at Caversham. None of these other deaths was the subject of a trial.
Dyer's case came while Parliament was already considering how to widen the 1872 act. The London County Council's Infant Life Protection Bill went to a Lords select committee on March 9, 1896, and on May 4, 1896, Lord Herschell moved the second reading of the Safety of Nurse Children Bill, promoted by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, so that the same committee could consider it. Bourke says the NSPCC's Benjamin Waugh gave evidence on the bills. An Infant Life Protection Bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons on July 28, 1897, as a Government measure. The Hansard records of these debates do not mention Dyer or Reading by name.
Proven by the verdict: the wilful murder of Doris Marmon, about ten weeks old, between March 31 and April 2, 1896, at 76 Mayo Road, Willesden.
Attributed but never tried: the death of Harry Simmons, whose cause of death the trial surgeon gave as strangulation by a tape and whose body was found with Doris's; the death of the infant found on March 30, 1896, believed to be Helena Fry; and the deaths of other infants recovered from the Thames in 1896.
Suspected: the deaths of other children placed with Dyer over many years. No reliable count exists, and estimates in the hundreds are guesses.
Points on which sources differ: her year of birth (1837, 1839 or "the 1830s"); the date the carpet bag was found (April 9 or 10); the surgeon's name (Morris or Maurice); Harry's surname (Simmonds or Simmons); the spelling of Marmon's first names (Evalina Edith or Edith Evelina); the nature of the 1879 offense (neglect, or failure to obtain the licence required by the 1872 act); and whether there was a further asylum stay in August 1895. Several published accounts say she was tried for the murders of three children; the trial record shows a single indictment, for Doris Marmon.
1830s: Amelia Hobley is born at Pyle Marsh, east of Bristol (1837 in Wells Nub News).
Before 1879: works as a corset maker and trains as a nurse; marries George Thomas and, after his death, William Dyer.
1879: convicted under the Infant Life Protection Act 1872 and sentenced to six months' hard labour.
November 1891: admitted to the Gloucester asylum.
December 24, 1893: certified of unsound mind in Bristol; held at the Wells asylum until about the end of January 1894.
April 1894: 13 days in the Bristol General Hospital.
December 14, 1894: certified at Fishponds; about a month in the Gloucester asylum, discharged January 1895.
June 1895: leaves the Barton Regis workhouse with Jane Smith.
August 1895: moves to Reading (Piggott's Road, then Elm Villas, Caversham, then 45 Kensington Road).
March 11, 1896: advertisement ordered in the Bristol Times.
March 30, 1896: a bargeman finds a parcel in the Thames at Caversham holding an infant's body, believed to be Helena Fry.
March 31, 1896: Dyer collects Doris Marmon at Cheltenham and takes her to 76 Mayo Road, Willesden.
April 1, 1896: collects Harry Simmons at Paddington.
April 2, 1896: takes the 9.15 train to Reading with the carpet bag.
April 3, 1896: arrested at Kensington Road (Buckley's date).
April 10, 1896: the carpet bag is recovered at the Clappers footbridge, Caversham.
April 11, 1896: the bodies are identified; the inquest opens.
April 14, 1896: Doris Marmon and Harry Simmons are buried at Reading Old Cemetery.
April 16, 1896: Dyer writes her letters of confession from Reading prison.
May 18, 1896: her trial opens at the Central Criminal Court; she is found guilty and sentenced to death.
June 10, 1896: hanged at Newgate by James Billington.
July 28, 1897: an Infant Life Protection Bill passes the House of Commons.
April 14, 2024: commemoration at Reading Old Cemetery.