On a morning in November 1902 Annie Walters left her lodgings at 11 Danbury Street, Islington, carrying what looked like a baby. Little more than an hour later she was arrested with a dead infant in her arms. Her landlord was a police officer, and she had already made him suspicious. The child had come from Claymore House, a semi-detached red-brick villa on Hertford Road in East Finchley, where Amelia Sach ran a lying-in home for women who needed to give birth quietly. Within weeks both women were in the dock at the Old Bailey, and on February 3, 1903, they were hanged together at Holloway.
The woman who appeared at trial as Amelia Sach, aged twenty-nine, had been baptized Frances Amelia Thorne at Hampreston in Dorset on May 5, 1867, the fourth of ten children. That record would have made her thirty-five in 1902; another account puts her real age at thirty-two, and the year of birth usually given for her, 1873, rests only on the age she gave the court. In 1896 she married a builder, Jeffrey Sach, and the 1901 census records a daughter, Lilian, born in Clapham. She was a qualified midwife. She ran her home first in Stanley Road and later at Claymore House, both in East Finchley, and she advertised under the name Nurse Thorne. From about 1900 the advertisements added that the baby could remain: a woman could come in, give birth and leave without the child.
Most of her clients, to judge from the witnesses, were domestic servants from the big local houses who had become pregnant and whose employers wanted the matter settled discreetly. Sach charged once for the lying-in and again for the adoption, a "present" for the child's new parents of twenty-five to thirty pounds. There were no new parents. After the birth Annie Walters collected the baby and killed it, most accounts say with chlorodyne, a patent medicine containing morphine; the cause of death given for the child in the case was asphyxia.
Little is known of Walters. She was a widow, given as fifty-four at the trial and fifty-one in one newspaper report, who drank and periodically advertised herself as a sick nurse. When she was arrested she was found to be "feeble," feeble-minded in the language of the day. Witnesses described her movements in the fall of 1902: a telegram from Finchley reading "Five o'clock to-night. Sach, Finchley," sent on the morning a young woman named Pardoe gave birth at Claymore House; Walters telling another lodger, Miss Jones, that the bundle she carried was "a baby under chloroform" just back from an operation; and Walters coming home at eight in the evening the worse for drink and tossing a set of baby clothes across the table to her landlady, Mrs. Seal. The prosecution said the child had been strong and healthy at nine that morning. Accounts differ on the age of the baby in the murder charge: one gives about a week, another three months.
The trial opened at the Old Bailey in January 1903 before Mr. Justice Darling. Walters was charged with the wilful murder of the child and Sach with being an accessory. Both pleaded not guilty, and neither gave evidence. The prosecution put before the jury the quantity of baby clothes found at Claymore House as a measure of how many children had passed through it. Both women were convicted and sentenced to death, and the verdict was reported abroad by January 18. How many babies they killed was never established; the usual estimate is more than a dozen, and some writers have suggested dozens. It has also been suggested, on no firmer ground than a resemblance, that they were the two women to whom Louise Masset said she had handed her son Manfred in 1899, before she was hanged for his murder in January 1900.
A local campaign to have the sentences commuted to life imprisonment failed. On February 3, 1903, William Billington hanged Sach and Walters side by side at Holloway. They were the first women executed there, and it was the only double hanging of women in modern British history. They were buried in unmarked graves inside the prison walls. When Holloway was rebuilt in 1971 the remains of the women executed there were exhumed, and Sach and Walters were reburied with Edith Thompson and Styllou Christofi in a single grave, plot 117, at Brookwood Cemetery, under a granite slab bearing all their names. At some point after the trial the name Claymore House was chiseled off the stone plaque above its window.