On Monday, March 30, 1896, a bargeman on the Thames at Reading hooked a brown paper parcel out of the water. It had not been weighted well enough to sink. Inside was the body of a baby girl, later identified as Helena Fry. The wrapping was sodden, but Detective Constable Anderson of the Reading Borough Police found on it a label from Bristol Temple Meads railway station, and under a microscope he could make out a name and an address: Mrs. Thomas, Piggott's Road, Lower Caversham. By the time the police went there, Mrs. Thomas had moved on.
The day after the bargeman's find, in Cheltenham, a young unmarried barmaid named Evelina Marmon, twenty-five, handed her daughter, Doris, born in a Cheltenham boarding house that January, to a matronly woman who called herself Mrs. Harding. Marmon had advertised in the miscellaneous column of the Bristol Times and Mirror, "Wanted, respectable woman to take a young child," so she could go back to work and one day reclaim the baby. Next to her notice was another: "Married couple with no family would adopt a healthy child, nice country home. Terms, £10." Mrs. Harding had written to her that they were plain, homely people, dearly fond of children and with none of their own, and that she was not doing it for the money. "A child with me will have a good home and a mother's love." Marmon had wanted to pay by the week. Mrs. Harding insisted on the ten pounds in advance. "She appeared to be an affectionate woman," Marmon told the court later. "I was satisfied with her looks." She handed over the baby, a cardboard box of clothes and the ten pounds, rode with her to Cheltenham station and on to Gloucester, and went home. A few days later a letter came saying all was well. Marmon wrote back and never heard again.
Mrs. Harding and Mrs. Thomas were the same woman, Amelia Dyer, fifty-eight years old. She did not take Doris to Reading as she had said. She took her to the lodgings of her daughter Polly, twenty-three, at 76 Mayo Road in Willesden, found some white edging tape of the kind used in dressmaking, wound it twice around the baby's neck and tied it. The death would not have been quick. The two women wrapped the body in a napkin, kept some of the clothes Marmon had packed and set the rest aside for the pawnbroker. "I used to like to watch them with the tape around their neck," she said afterward, "but it was soon all over with them." The next day, April 1, she took in another child, Harry Simmons, thirteen months old, and since there was no more tape in the house she untied the length from Doris's body and used it again. On April 2 she packed both bodies into a carpet bag, weighted it with bricks, took the train to Reading and, at a secluded spot she knew by the weir at Caversham Lock, pushed the bag through the railings into the river.
By then Anderson and Sergeant James had her under watch. Inquiries in Bristol had made them more uneasy, and they had reason to think she would disappear if she knew. So they sent a young woman to her house as a decoy, a prospective client wanting to discuss an adoption. On April 3 Dyer opened the door to find detectives. No body was in the house, but the smell of one was, and so were the remains of a business: white edging tape, telegrams about adoptions, receipts for newspaper advertisements, pawn tickets for children's clothing, and letters from mothers asking how their babies were. The police worked out that in the previous few months alone at least twenty children had been handed to Mrs. Thomas. She was arrested on April 4, and her son-in-law, Arthur Palmer, was charged as an accessory.
Dredging the Thames that month brought up six more small bodies. A laborer working the river near the footbridge found the carpet bag about twelve feet down, and Sergeant James cut the string. Doris Marmon was on top. At the mortuary, under a brick, was Harry Simmons. Both still had the white tape around their necks, which, Dyer told the police, was how you could tell it was one of hers. Eleven days after she had given her daughter away, Evelina Marmon identified the body at the Reading police station. The bricks were matched to the Palmers' yard.
The trade Dyer worked in was legal. Unmarried mothers in Victorian England had almost nowhere to turn; illegitimacy could cost a woman her work and her lodging. So there were women, baby farmers, who took the children in for a weekly fee or, far more profitably, a single payment, and promised to raise them or find them a home. A child that died early was pure profit. Dyer had been in the business for more than twenty-five years.
She was born Amelia Elizabeth Hobley on November 27, 1837, at Pyle Marsh, just east of Bristol, the fifth of six children of Samuel Hobley, a shoemaker, and his wife, Sarah, born Weymouth. Two sisters, both named Sarah Ann, died young, one at six in 1841 and one a few months old in 1845. Her mother was left mentally ill by typhus and had violent fits, and Amelia nursed her until she died in 1848. She lived for a time with an aunt in Bristol and was apprenticed to a corset maker. Her father died in 1859, the shoe business went to her eldest brother, Thomas, and by 1861 she had broken for good with at least one other brother, James, and taken lodgings on Trinity Street in Bristol. There she married George Thomas, who was fifty-nine; on the marriage certificate he took eleven years off his age and she added six to hers. She trained as a nurse and gave it up when she had a daughter. When George died in 1869 she needed an income, and she began taking in pregnant unmarried women and their babies, advertising to nurse or adopt a child for a substantial single payment and a supply of clothes, and assuring the mothers that she was a respectable married woman who would give the child a loving home. At first she let the infants die of neglect and hunger, and a doctor signed the certificates. In 1872 she married William Dyer, a brewery laborer from Bristol; they had two children, and she later left him. In 1879 a doctor who had grown suspicious of how many death certificates he was signing for children in her care went to the police. She was convicted of neglect, not murder, and served six months of hard labor.
She learned from it. When she came out she tried to go back to nursing, and she seems to have begun drinking heavily and taking opium-based drugs. She stopped calling doctors and got rid of the bodies herself, and she moved constantly with her family, from town to town and name to name, whenever parents came looking or the police took an interest. She was committed to lunatic asylums several times, always, it was noticed later, when it was convenient to disappear, and as a former asylum nurse she knew how to behave inside one. In 1890 a governess came back to see her baby, stripped the child to look for a birthmark on its hip, and found none. Dyer had, or performed, a breakdown and drank two bottles of laudanum, and survived because years of opiate use had given her a tolerance. She was discharged from her last committal, at the Somerset and Bath asylum, in 1893. In 1895 she moved to Caversham and then to 45 Kensington Road, Reading, with Polly and Arthur Palmer and an old woman recruited from a workhouse, Jane Smith, whom she had clients call Mother.
From Reading Gaol on April 16, 1896, Dyer wrote to the magistrates to clear her daughter and son-in-law. "I do know I should have to answer before my Maker in Heaven for the awful crimes I have committed," she wrote, "but as God Almighty is my judge in Heaven an on Hearth neither my daughter Mary Ann Palmer nor her husband Alfred Ernest Palmer I do most solemnly declare neither of them had anything at all to do with it." The inquest found no evidence that the Palmers had been accomplices, and Arthur was discharged.
At the Old Bailey on May 22, 1896, she faced the single count of murdering Doris Marmon; accounts of the day differ on how she pleaded, but it was a jury that decided her case. Her family and associates testified that they had grown uneasy about her, a man who had seen and spoken to her at Caversham Lock on the day she disposed of the bag gave evidence, and Polly's testimony was the most damaging of all. Dyer's only defense was insanity, resting on two committals to asylums in Bristol. The prosecution answered that both had come when she feared discovery. The jury took four and a half minutes.
In three weeks in the condemned cell she filled five exercise books with what she called her last true and only confession. When the chaplain came the night before and asked whether she had anything to confess, she held out the books and asked him whether that wasn't enough. She was hanged at Newgate by James Billington at nine o'clock on the morning of June 10, 1896. Asked on the scaffold whether she had anything to say, she said, "I have nothing to say." Polly herself was due to be tried for murder a week after the execution date, and her mother had been subpoenaed as a witness; the court ruled that a woman under sentence of death was already dead in law and her evidence would be inadmissible, so the hanging went ahead. The night before, she had been told that the charge against Polly had been dropped.
How many children she killed cannot be known. The letters, the clothes and the mothers who came forward pointed to many more than the seven in the river, and estimates run from two hundred to four hundred or more, which would make her one of the most prolific killers on record. The newspapers called her the Ogress of Reading, and a street ballad sang of the old baby farmer paid her wages at the Old Bailey. The case pushed Parliament to toughen the laws on paid nursing and adoption and to let local authorities inspect the women doing it, and it raised the profile of the young National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, founded in 1884. A writer in 1939, William Stewart, even floated her as a Jack the Ripper suspect before settling on someone else; nothing connects her to those killings. The laws did not end the trade. Two years after Dyer was hanged, railway workers inspecting carriages at Newton Abbot in Devon found a parcel, cold and wet. Inside was a three-week-old girl, alive. Her widowed mother, Jane Hill, had paid a Mrs. Stewart twelve pounds to take her; the woman had collected the baby at Plymouth and put her off on the next train.