Amelia Dyer, the most cruel of babysitter that killed nearly 400 infants during the 19th century

News24xx.com -  The story of child murderer named Amelia Dyer made the world very shocked. And she was a rare group of female serial killers. 

From the investigation, she is suspected of having killed nearly 400 infants over a 20-years. She was a baby farmer for around 30 years, and with estimates numbering ten to fifteen victims a year, her body count could be somewhere near 400. This makes her one of the most prolific killers of the time period. 

Dyer was born in 1837 in Pyle Marsh, England, and she worked as baby farmer or someone who cared for unwanted infants. 

In the 1800s, it was very taboo to have a child out of wedlock. Women who did so were met with scorn and mistreatment.  In order to help the situation, baby farming became a common practice. These "farmers" would volunteer to foster or adopt unwanted babies for a fee.

And at that time, so many mothers needed to leave their babies in the care of strangers (a service that they paid for) because they must go to work. 

And Dyer became a baby farmer. Dyer took these children in, but not with benevolent intentions. She took the cash but she have evil plan for these infants.

She poisoned and killed the babies. She then threw the bodies of the infants in the Thames. After Dyer was arrested, she wound up confessing to her crimes. 

She told authorities where to look along the Thames and six other deceased infants were discovered. Dyers admitted that the corpses with white dressmakers tape around their necks were the ones that she did away with.  

When she was eventually caught, Dyers was convicted of murder and hanged to death in London in 1896.  

When the authorities finally cracked down on Dyer's baby farming enterprise, they searched her house for evidence and found plenty of it. The house was filled with the smell of rotting flesh, vaccination certificates, and baby clothes.

Before caught, she placed ads in local newspapers in order to spread the word about her business. Women came to her with their babies, offering money for their care. Dyer would accept, pocketing the money before killing the infant at her leisure.

Dyer was a trained nurse and midwife, two of the few respectable occupations for women at the time. 

While she was embarking on her nursing career, she met a woman named Ellen Dane. Dane worked as a midwife and saw the issues that unwed mothers had to face. She was the one who gave Dyer the idea to start up a baby farm. Dyer worked as a nurse for as long as she could, while baby farming in her spare time. 

When Dyer first began her baby farming career, she let the infants die of neglect. She simply wouldn't feed them and left them alone in a corner where they'd quietly go to sleep and not wake up. However, Dyer found this process to be too slow. Because she think, the faster the infants died, the more she could take in, thus increasing the amount of money she made.

So, to speed up the killings, Dyer started feeding the children a syrup laced with opium. This quieted the babies and poisoned them to death. And she also killed the infants by wrapping tape around their necks to kill them immediately. 

In 1879, Dyer letting the infants to starve to death after she accepted money from the infants' parents. But, the authorities caught of her actions and prosecuted her for neglect. After released, she went right back to baby farming.  

Dyer gave birth to three children who all lived to adulthood. The first, Ellen, was born during Dyer's marriage to a man named George Thomas. He was her first husband. After Thomas death, she remarried to a William Dyer. 

They had two children together, Mary Ann (called Polly), who was born in 1873, and William, who was born in 1880. Their home life was chaotic, with various infants and adults wandering around the house.

Dyer had a rocky childhood. She was the youngest of five children. Her father was a shoemaker and her mother was mentally ill. However, not much was known about mental illnesses in the 19th century, so her mother could have had schizophrenia.  Dyer had bouts of unexplainable violence.

It seemed the madness touched the daugher of Dyer too. Her daughter, Mary Ann, recalls Dyer who being forced her into an insane asylum during her childhood.

Amelia Dyer's daughter, Mary Ann, grew up around her mother's twisted habits of killing infants. 

After her mother was hanged for murder, she took on the "family business".

In 1898, Mary Ann and her husband were both accused and convicted of abandoning a three-week-old baby when one was found death wrapped in brown paper under the seat of a carriage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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