Amelia Dyer: The Serial Killer And Baby Farmer.
- U I Team
- Jun 10, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 10
The history of Victorian crime is filled with grim stories, but few are as disturbing as that of Amelia Dyer. Her case serves as a haunting reminder of the darkest aspects of human behaviour. Dyer’s life and actions reflect a turbulent era in British society, one in which the most vulnerable were all too often preyed upon with tragic results.
From Shoemaker’s Daughter to Baby Farmer
Amelia Dyer was born Amelia Elizabeth Hobley in 1836 in the village of Pyle Marsh near Bristol. Her early life was unremarkable: she was the daughter of a master shoemaker, and for the time, she had a somewhat privileged upbringing. She could read and write—a rare asset for working-class Victorian women—which would later serve her in ways that no schoolmaster could have imagined.
Her life took several turns, including marriage to a man named William Dyer in 1872, a brewer’s labourer. They had two children—Mary Ann (Polly) and William Samuel—but the marriage didn’t last. Amelia eventually left her husband and began to carve out an income of her own. That income came from baby farming—a practice that emerged from the strict moral codes and widespread poverty of the time.
The Business of Baby Farming
In Victorian England, being an unwed mother could ruin a woman’s life. With no social safety nets, some women turned to baby farmers—people who, for a fee, would take a child and promise to care for it or arrange for adoption. It was a system ripe for abuse, and many so-called baby farmers had little intention of providing any real care. But Amelia Dyer took things several steps further.
Initially, she may have begun as a typical baby farmer, but at some point she stopped waiting for the children to die of neglect. Instead, she began actively murdering them. It was simpler, cleaner—at least in her own cold logic—and allowed her to pocket the full fee without the cost of food, clothing, or care.
Her methods were calculated. She often drugged the infants with laudanum (an opium-based medicine), then used a length of white tape to strangle them. Rather than rely on doctors, who might start asking questions, she began disposing of the bodies herself—usually by throwing them into rivers.
A Woman on the Run
Despite being caught in 1879 when a doctor raised concerns about the high number of infant deaths in her care, Dyer wasn’t charged with murder. Instead, she received six months of hard labour—a sentence that left her mentally frayed, or so she claimed. During later periods of scrutiny, she would feign mental breakdowns to avoid police attention, sometimes checking herself into asylums. She was, after all, once trained as a nurse and understood exactly how to mimic symptoms convincingly.
Over the years, Dyer moved frequently, changing names and locations to avoid suspicion. Her daughter Polly became an accomplice, either willingly or out of complicity born from familiarity and dependence. Together, they carried on a morbid enterprise that is believed to have claimed the lives of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of infants.
The Trap Is Set
Her downfall came in 1896, with the tragic case of Evelina Marmon, a 25-year-old barmaid who had given birth to a daughter named Doris. Desperate to return to work, Marmon placed an ad looking for someone to adopt the child. Amelia Dyer, posing as “Mrs. Harding,” responded with false warmth and a false name, assuring Evelina she wanted the baby girl not for money but for companionship.
Marmon agreed to hand over Doris and £10. Though she was initially wary of Dyer’s appearance—older, stockier, and not what she expected—she was reassured by her seemingly affectionate manner with the baby. A few days later, Marmon received a letter saying Doris was well. When she wrote back, she never got a reply.
Instead of taking Doris to the pleasant country home she had promised, Dyer went to her daughter’s lodgings in Willesden, London. There, using her trademark white edging tape, she strangled the infant. The tape was tied twice around the baby’s neck. Dyer would later admit chillingly,
“I used to like to watch them with the tape around their neck, but it was soon all over with them.”
The following day, Dyer reused the same tape to murder another child—13-month-old Harry Simmons. She placed both bodies in a carpet bag weighed down with bricks and tossed them into the Thames at Caversham Lock in Reading.
The Investigation and Arrest
But Dyer had made a fatal error. One of the bodies recovered from the Thames carried an item with a name and address still faintly visible. That clue led police directly to her. The investigators, headed by Detective Constable James Anderson, didn’t rush in immediately. Instead, they laid a trap. An undercover officer, posing as a desperate mother, contacted Dyer and arranged a baby handover. As soon as Dyer accepted the child and the payment, police swooped in.
A search of her home revealed a horrific scene—baby clothes in abundance, letters from anxious mothers, and an overwhelming stench of death. It was clear Dyer’s crimes extended far beyond Doris and Harry. She had kept the letters, perhaps as a grotesque trophy or simply as paperwork for her deadly business. Either way, the evidence was damning.
Trial and Execution
Her trial at the Old Bailey in May 1896 lasted just four and a half minutes. Despite her efforts to claim insanity, the jury saw through it. In prison, she filled five notebooks with a written confession. When asked by the prison chaplain if she had anything to add, she simply handed over the notebooks, saying, “Isn’t this enough?”
Amelia Dyer was hanged at Newgate Prison on 10 June 1896, her execution carried out by the famed hangman James Billington. When asked on the scaffold if she had anything to say, she replied, “I have nothing to say.” She was dropped at exactly 9 a.m., ending one of the darkest chapters in Victorian criminal history.
A Forgotten Bag, A Renewed Spotlight
In 2023, during the renovation of a Victorian house in Reading, a long-forgotten leather bag was discovered in the attic. Inside were baby clothes, press clippings from Dyer’s trial, and fragments of letters from mothers—some of whom may never have known what became of their children. The bag is believed to have been hidden away by a descendant of one of the original investigators, giving the story a renewed, eerie intimacy.
Its discovery reignited public interest in the Dyer case and served as a poignant, physical reminder of the lives lost and the pain endured. The exact number of her victims remains unknown. Some say it was dozens, others argue it may have been hundreds. But the scars left by her actions are etched deeply into British criminal history.
A Folk Villain Immortalised
In the aftermath, the newspapers dubbed her “The Ogress of Reading.” Her story passed into folklore, even spawning a grim nursery rhyme:
The old baby farmer, the wretched Miss DyerAt the Old Bailey her wages is paid. In times long ago, we’d ‘a’ made a big fy-erAnd roasted so nicely that wicked old jade.
Amelia Dyer’s name has come to symbolise the worst of the Victorian underworld. She operated in an era when shame, secrecy, and social constraint made desperate mothers vulnerable to predators. And in the shadows of that age, she found opportunity—not to care, but to kill.
Though the Thames has long washed away the traces of her crimes, and the prisons that held her are now gone, her legacy endures as a cautionary tale of unchecked cruelty in an age ill-equipped to confront it.
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