Margaret Waters was a widow living in Brixton in south London who advertised in newspapers offering to adopt infants for a single payment.
Between roughly 1866 and 1870 she took in a large number of children, most of them the illegitimate babies of unmarried women who had no means and no legal alternative. She gave them Godfrey's Cordial, a proprietary opiate syrup sold openly, which suppressed their appetite. They stopped feeding and starved to death over days or weeks. It was not violent and it did not look like murder; the death of an underfed infant in a Brixton back room in 1870 required no explanation at all. She was called the Brixton Baby Farmer.
The number is not known. Nineteen infants were traced to her care and it was very likely more.
She was caught in June 1870 when a young man tracing his sister's baby went to the police and an officer, Sergeant Richard Relf, followed the advertisements to the house, where he found eleven infants, five of them dying.
She was convicted of the murder of one child, John Walter Cowen, and hanged at Horsemonger Lane Gaol on October 11, 1870. Her sister, who lived with her, was given eighteen months.
The case produced the Infant Life Protection Act of 1872, the first British attempt to regulate baby farming, which was largely ineffective and was still being argued over when Amelia Dyer was hanged twenty-six years later.