Dorothea Nancy Waddingham was born at Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, in 1899. She had a conviction for theft and no nursing qualification of any kind, but in 1935 she was running a house at 32 Devon Drive in Nottingham as a nursing home for the elderly and chronically ill, with her partner Ronald Sullivan.
In January 1935 the County Nursing Association placed two residents with her: Louisa Baguley, eighty-nine, and her daughter Ada, fifty, who had disseminated sclerosis. In May, Ada Baguley made a new will leaving the whole of the family estate, some sixteen hundred pounds, to Waddingham and Sullivan, on the understanding that they would care for both women for life.
Louisa Baguley died on May 12, 1935, and Ada on September 12. The doctor certified cerebral haemorrhage for Ada, but a letter was produced, purportedly from Ada, asking that she be cremated and her relatives not informed, which the medical referee at the crematorium refused to accept. A post-mortem found morphine, and both bodies were examined.
She was tried at Nottingham in February 1936 for Ada Baguley's murder alone, convicted, and hanged at Winson Green in Birmingham on April 16, 1936, aged thirty-six. The jury added a strong recommendation to mercy, which was not acted on. Sullivan was discharged. She is one of only a handful of women hanged in England in the twentieth century.