Amelia Elizabeth Hobley was born at Pyle Marsh, outside Bristol, in 1839. She trained as a nurse, was widowed young, and turned to baby farming, an entirely legal trade in Victorian England in which a woman took in the illegitimate child of an unmarried mother for a lump sum, or a weekly payment, and undertook to see it raised or adopted. The mothers had no other option: there was no welfare, illegitimacy was ruinous, and the newspapers carried columns of advertisements offering a good home, comfortable, kind, terms moderate.
For a long time she let the infants die rather than killing them, dosing them with opiate syrups sold as Mother's Friend, which quieted them and stopped them feeding.
She was convicted in 1879 of neglect, on a doctor's complaint about the number of death certificates he was signing for her, and served six months' hard labour. After that she stopped calling doctors and stopped registering deaths, and moved constantly between Bristol, Reading and elsewhere under a succession of names, spending periods in asylums when suspicion built. She was called the Reading Baby Farmer.
On March 30, 1896 a bargeman working the Thames at Reading pulled a brown paper parcel out of the water. Inside was the body of an infant girl, Helena Fry, strangled with white dressmaking tape.
The wrapping carried a faint label with a name and an address, and the police recovered it under the microscope. Detective Constable Anderson set a decoy advertisement, and Dyer was arrested on April 4.
Six more infants were dragged from that stretch of river over the following weeks, all with the tape still around their necks. Of the tape she said it was how you could tell which ones were hers.
She was tried at the Old Bailey on May 21 and 22, 1896 for the murder of Doris Marmon, a four-month-old whose mother had paid her ten pounds. She pleaded insanity. The jury took four and a half minutes. She was hanged at Newgate by James Billington on June 10, 1896.
How many she killed is unknowable. She had been taking infants for something close to thirty years, and estimates run from several dozen to more than three hundred.
The scandal forced the Infant Life Protection Act of 1897, which gave local authorities the power to inspect. It did not end the trade.