At nine on the morning of November 18, 1902, Annie Walters left her lodgings at 11 Danbury Street in Islington carrying a bundle and went by train to South Kensington. She had told a fellow lodger that the baby she was looking after was going to a coastguard's wife there. The house she lodged in belonged to a police officer, and he and his household had begun to notice that the infants Walters brought home did not stay long. This time the police were watching. The bundle held a baby boy, the child of a young unmarried woman named Galley, and he was dead.
The baby had come from Claymore House, a semi-detached red-brick villa in Hertford Road, East Finchley, where a qualified midwife, Amelia Sach, ran a lying-in home. It advertised a comfortable home, skilled nurses and every care; many of its clients were servants who needed a pregnancy kept from their employers. For a fee Sach would see a woman through her confinement, and for a further fee, reported in some accounts as twenty-five pounds, she promised to place the child with a well-to-do family. Sach had been in the business before she took on Walters. Once a baby was born, she sent for Walters, who collected it and killed it.
The method was chlorodyne, a widely sold patent remedy of chloroform, cannabis and opium; Walters admitted giving it to the Galley baby, and the cause of death was recorded as asphyxia. At the trial a lodger described Walters sending her out with a pound to buy chlorodyne and carbolic acid, and another described choking noises that a doctor said a child in convulsions from the drug would make. Walters had told one lodger a bundled baby was under chloroform after a hospital operation. Walters was arrested and charged that day, and Sach was arrested the same night.
Little is known about Walters herself. She was a widow; contemporary reports gave her age as fifty-one or fifty-four in 1903, while a later reference work puts her birth in 1869. Sach was about twenty years younger. The two were tried together at the Central Criminal Court on January 15 and 16, 1903, before Mr. Justice Darling, prosecuted by Charles Mathews and Archibald Bodkin, and charged with the murder of the Galley child. Both pleaded not guilty and neither gave evidence. The quantity of baby clothes found at Claymore House was put before the jury as a measure of how many children had passed through. Both were convicted and sentenced to death.
They were hanged side by side at Holloway Prison on the morning of February 3, 1903, by Henry Pierrepoint, the first women executed there. How many infants died at their hands was never established; no other death was charged, and estimates of their victims range from a dozen to dozens. Two weeks after their arrest, nine starving children were found in a house not far away in Wood Green, two babies among them lying in the lid of an old rush basket.