When the police searched Dagmar Overbye's apartment on Enghavevej in Copenhagen in September 1920, they found a baby's clothes first. Then, in the ashes of the stove, they found the bones and skull of an infant. One of the officers, Paul Fjeldgard, still remembered eighty-six years later opening a cupboard and finding tiny burnt bone fragments. Overbye had been taking in unwanted babies for a fee, telling their mothers she would find them good homes, and killing them.
The search began because of one mother. Karoline Aagesen had placed a small classified advertisement in a newspaper looking for a family to adopt her newborn daughter, and it brought her to Overbye. Aagesen then tried to get her child back, and Overbye could not produce her. Overbye was arrested on September 12, 1920.
She had been born Dagmar Johanne Amalie Overbye on April 23, 1887, in Skanderborg, and had three children of her own. Between 1913 and 1920 she took in the infants of women with no money, no husband and nowhere else to turn, pocketed the payment, and strangled, drowned or burned the children. She burned the bodies in her stove, buried them or hid them in the loft. One of the children she killed was her own. After her arrest she confessed to sixteen killings, and the police suspected as many as twenty-five. Evidence could be found for nine.
Her trial in 1921 held the whole country's attention. Investigators described the charred skull, the bone fragments and the stained clothing. Her defense lawyer argued that she had been abused as a child and that the killings were the acts of a damaged person, and the court was not persuaded. On March 3, 1921, she was convicted of nine murders and sentenced to death, the first woman sentenced to death in Denmark since 1861. King Christian X commuted the sentence to life imprisonment on May 25, 1921, reportedly holding that an enlightened Denmark did not execute its women.
She spent the rest of her life in Vestre Fængsel in Copenhagen and died there on May 6, 1929, at forty-two. The case led to changes in Danish law on the care of children placed outside their families. Notes from the investigation are held by the Police History Museum in Nørrebro. Karen Søndergaard Koldste based a novel, Englemagersken, on her, and Magnus von Horn's 2024 film The Girl with the Needle, Denmark's submission to the Academy Awards, drew on the case. Accounts of the numbers vary: at least one recent account gives eight convictions and up to twenty-six suspected deaths.