Sarah Jane Makin and her husband John lived in Sydney in the early 1890s and advertised as baby farmers, taking in the infants of unmarried mothers for a single payment or a small weekly sum.
In October 1892 a plumber working on a drain at a house in Macdonaldtown found the remains of two infants in the back garden. Police then dug the gardens of every house the Makins had rented in the previous two years, and recovered thirteen bodies in all.
The trade existed because there was no alternative. New South Wales in 1892 had no state provision for illegitimate children and no realistic prospect of employment for an unmarried mother who kept one. Women handed over their babies and a pound or two and were told a good home would be found.
The couple were tried for the murder of Horace Murray, an infant whose mother, Amber Murray, had answered their advertisement. The prosecution led evidence of the other twelve bodies as proof of system, and the ruling on that point, Makin v Attorney-General for New South Wales, went to the Privy Council in 1893 and became one of the foundational authorities on similar fact evidence in the common law world. It is still cited.
Both were convicted and sentenced to death. John Makin was hanged in August 1893. Sarah's sentence was commuted to life; she was released on parole on April 29, 1911 after nineteen years and died in 1918.
She is a different woman from Sarah Jane Whiteling of Philadelphia, who also appears in this archive and with whom she has been confused before.