Amelia Sach ran a lying-in home in East Finchley, in north London, where unmarried women could give birth in private and, for a fee, leave their babies behind to be adopted. In November 1902 her associate, Annie Walters, was arrested holding one of those babies, a boy only a few days old, who was dead. Walters admitted giving him chlorodyne, a narcotic medicine. Both women were charged with murder, Sach as an accessory, and both were convicted of killing the one child. They were suspected of killing many more, but no other death was ever tried. On February 3, 1903, they were hanged together at Holloway Prison, the first women executed there.
The case belongs to a practice that the press of the time called baby farming. In Victorian and Edwardian Britain, a woman who could not keep a child could pay someone else to look after it, either a few shillings a week or a single lump sum for an "adoption," as the journalist and author Caitlin Davies described the system in the Camden New Journal in 2009. Many of the children were the babies of servants, who had to give them up to keep their jobs. Some of the women who took the children in cared for them properly. Others took the money and then abandoned the babies, or killed them.
The 2009 article noted that baby farming had almost disappeared by the 1920s.
The Camden New Journal gives her age as 29 in the summer of 1902, and the writer Laura Thompson, in a 2018 excerpt from her book on hanged women published by CrimeReads, describes her as about twenty years younger than Annie Walters.
By 1902 Sach was running a lying-in home in East Finchley. She advertised in the miscellaneous columns of local newspapers. The advertisement, as Davies summarized it, offered accouchement, skilled nursing and home comforts, and added that the baby "can remain." That phrase told a reader that she would not have to take the child home: Sach would arrange an adoption.
Annie Walters was the older of the two women. Thompson places her in her fifties. The Camden New Journal described her as a midwife who worked for Sach. A few months before the arrest she moved into lodgings in Islington, where she told the household that she was a midwife and that she was expecting a baby that was to be adopted. Davies wrote that chlorodyne, the drug Walters later admitted giving the boy, may have been one she was addicted to herself.
Her landlady's husband was a police constable. That fact, more than any other, brought the case to light.
The child at the center of the trial was the son of a young servant who answered Sach's advertisement and moved into the East Finchley home before the birth. On November 15, 1902, she gave birth there to a healthy boy. Sach persuaded her to give him up for adoption for a fee of 25 pounds, promising that he would be brought up by a titled lady, according to the Camden New Journal.
There was no titled lady. Within days the baby had been handed to Walters, and four days after his birth, the paper reported, he was found dead in her arms.
The household where Walters lodged had been watching her. On November 12, 1902, she received a telegram from Sach's home, and she later came back to her lodgings with a baby. Two days later that baby was gone.
On November 15 another telegram arrived. That evening, the paper reported, the landlady's son followed Walters to a public house, where she met a stylishly dressed woman. Davies's account of that meeting says Sach had sent Walters to see a woman about a baby, that the woman arrived by hansom cab, and that she asked for a baby to be brought to her in Kensington the following week so that it could be taken to a coastguard's wife in Eastbourne. Walters was to be paid ten shillings for her part. She came home that night with another baby.
Three days after the second telegram, Walters left her lodgings carrying a bundle. A detective followed her. When he stopped her, she was holding the boy born at Sach's home four days earlier, and the child was dead. Walters admitted that she had given him chlorodyne.
Both women were then arrested for murder. Sach was charged as an accessory, the Camden New Journal reported.
The two women were tried together and convicted of murdering the one child.
The case drew wide attention. A pen drawing of Sach and Walters appeared in the News of the World on January 18, 1903, according to the Camden New Journal.
Thompson wrote that despite poverty, the usual mitigating circumstance in cases involving women and infants, there was never any chance of a reprieve for Walters and Sach. Baby farmers, she noted, could hope for no mercy.
Holloway had become a prison for women only in 1902, according to Thompson. Sach and Walters were hanged there together on February 3, 1903. Theirs was the first of five hangings at Holloway, and the Camden New Journal described the execution as the first hanging of women at the prison and the last double hanging of women in Britain. The Finchley Society, the local amenity and history group in Finchley, has also recorded them as the first women hanged at Holloway. Executions in England had taken place in private since 1868, Thompson noted.
Thompson quotes the hangman Henry Pierrepoint, who took part in making the arrangements, calling them "baby farmers of the worst kind." By the accounts she cites, which she treats with caution ("we are told"), the two women faced death very differently. Walters went to the scaffold with bravado and called out a farewell to Sach. Sach could not control her emotions.
The execution of Sach and Walters played a part, Davies wrote, in the pressure that led to the Children Act of 1908. The case was revisited in 2009 in an exhibition on crime and punishment at the Islington Museum, and Davies later used it as the starting point for a novel, The Ghost of Lily Painter. In November 2017 she gave the Finchley Society's Jean Scott Memorial Lecture on the two East Finchley baby farmers.
How many babies passed through Sach's home and did not survive is not known. The Camden New Journal states only that the two women were suspected of killing many more children than the one boy whose death was tried. No other death was ever tried, and no count of other victims rests on a court finding.
The Camden New Journal reported that the baby Walters brought home after the telegram of November 12, 1902, was gone two days later. The paper does not say what became of that child, or of the second baby she brought home on November 15.
Sach did not carry the boy away herself. On the account in the Camden New Journal, she ran the home, persuaded the mother to part with him for a fee and sent Walters to meet a woman about another baby. She was charged as an accessory.
1902: Holloway becomes a prison for women only.
Summer 1902: Amelia Sach, aged 29, runs a lying-in home in East Finchley and advertises that a mother's baby "can remain."
A few months before November 1902: Annie Walters moves into lodgings in Islington, telling the household she is a midwife expecting a baby to be adopted.
November 12, 1902: Walters receives a telegram from Sach's home and later brings a baby back to her lodgings; two days later it is gone.
November 15, 1902: A servant gives birth to a healthy boy at Sach's home; Sach persuades her to give him up for 25 pounds. Walters receives another telegram, meets a woman at a public house and comes home with another baby.
November 1902: A detective stops Walters in London holding the boy, four days old, who is dead; Walters admits giving him chlorodyne. Both women are arrested for murder, Sach as an accessory.
January 18, 1903: A drawing of the two women appears in the News of the World.
Before February 3, 1903: Sach and Walters are convicted of the boy's murder.
February 3, 1903: Sach and Walters are hanged together at Holloway Prison, the first women hanged there.
1908: The Children Act is passed; Davies links the case in part to it.
2009: The Islington Museum includes the case in an exhibition on crime and punishment.