Annie Walters was the second half of a business. Amelia Sach ran a lying-in home at East Finchley that took in the babies of unmarried women for a fee, and offered for a further fee to have the child placed with a family. Sach handed the newborns to Walters, who took them away and killed them.
Walters was lodging in South Kensington, in the house of a police officer. He noticed that the infants she carried in did not leave again.
Both women were tried at the Old Bailey in January 1903 for the death of one child, the newborn son of Ada Galley, and both were convicted of his murder. Dozens of further infant deaths were suspected across the business. Not one of them was ever identified or charged, and no court has ever considered them.
They were hanged side by side at Holloway Prison on the morning of February 3, 1903, the first women to be executed there. Two convictions, one death, and a business whose actual scale was never established by anybody, which is the arithmetic the archive is able to record and the limit of it.