Amber Murray was eighteen and unmarried when her son Horace was born on May 30, 1892. She put an advertisement in the paper asking for someone to adopt him, and John Makin answered it. He took three pounds, and on June 27 his daughter Blanche came to collect the baby. Two days later the whole family left their house at 109 George Street, Redfern, suddenly, for a cottage on Burren Street in Macdonaldtown. For weeks afterward Makin kept calling on Amber Murray to collect ten shillings for the boy's keep.
In October 1892 workmen digging to lay a drain in the yard at 25 Burren Street turned up the bodies of two infants. John and Sarah Makin and their teenage daughters swore that they had had only one baby in their care at that house, and that it had been returned to its parents, and the coroner's jury returned open verdicts. Then four more bodies were found in the same yard. The police traced the family back through every house they had rented since 1890 and dug in eleven backyards across Macdonaldtown, Redfern and Chippendale. The Australian Dictionary of Biography gives the total recovered as thirteen; other accounts, counting house by house, reach fifteen.
Sarah Jane Makin was born Sarah Sutcliffe in Sydney on December 20, 1845, the daughter of a former convict who worked as a miller. At nineteen she married a mariner, Charles Edwards, and had a daughter; in 1871 she married John Makin, a brewery drayman, giving her status as spinster. They had ten children. She worked as a midwife. After John was hurt in an accident, the family lived on what they could make taking in illegitimate babies, usually for a lump sum of three to five pounds, with John signing papers that released the father from any further responsibility. Babies separated from their mothers died at such a rate that public institutions were reluctant to take them in. The Makins, the dictionary's biographer wrote, either from fear of destitution or recklessly, accepted babies other carers turned away, and the family moved often, sometimes owing rent.
The inquests of November and December 1892 were held in a blaze of publicity. The coroner could identify few of the bodies and establish no cause of death; there was no evidence of violence or poison. On November 28 a jury returned open verdicts in four cases but identified one body as the child of Minnie Davis and Horace Bottamley and recommended a manslaughter charge. That couple, unusually, had paid every week and visited every Saturday night, had been satisfied with the care, had been sent a telegram when the baby fell ill, and had seen the small body beautifully laid out before accepting Makin's offer to arrange the burial. In December another inquest took up the case of Horace Murray. A fellow prisoner testified that John Makin had told him no doctor could find poison, but "they will have me for perjury and illegally burying." On December 21 the jury returned a verdict of murder in the death of Amber Murray's child.
John and Sarah Makin were tried together in March 1893 for the murder of Horace Murray or, if the identification failed, of an unknown infant at 109 George Street on June 29, 1892. Neither gave evidence. The prosecution called other mothers who had handed over babies to the Makins, testimony that established the couple as baby farmers and set the child in the George Street yard among a dozen others. In his charge to the jury, the judge spoke of a healthy infant dead within two days, passing over testimony that the baby had disfiguring sores. The jury found both guilty of murdering an unknown infant and recommended mercy for Sarah.
The appeal turned on that testimony from the other mothers. The New South Wales court held it could not have influenced the verdict. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, in Makin v Attorney-General for New South Wales, dismissed a further appeal in 1893, declining to disturb a verdict reached by a jury that had seen and heard the witnesses. The judgment set out the conditions under which evidence of other acts can be admitted to prove a charge, and it became the foundation of the modern common-law rule on similar fact evidence.
The government of Sir George Dibbs refused clemency for John. He then signed a statement that the body in the George Street yard was not Amber Murray's son; it "was buried in the yard four to five weeks before we got her child." He was hanged at the Sydney jail at Darlinghurst on August 15, 1893, the date in the dictionary and most accounts; some sources give August 16.
Sarah's sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life. She served it at Bathurst and in Sydney. Her daughters petitioned for her release in 1907 and again in 1911, and on April 29, 1911, she was discharged from the State Reformatory for Women at Long Bay into the care of her daughter Florence, on the grounds of her great age and failing health. She nursed her eldest daughter through a fatal illness and then lived with a son-in-law. Mother Makin, as the papers had called her, died at Marrickville on September 13, 1918, aged seventy-two, and was buried with Anglican rites at Rookwood. Three sons and four daughters survived her. None of the other babies' deaths was ever charged.