Bloody London: Shocking Tales from London’s Gruesome Past and Present by Declan McHugh Page A
Authors: Declan McHugh
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paid the weekly amount were barely fed so that most of them languished and died fairly quickly. An unobservant doctor could usually be found to state on a death certificate that the child had died of ‘convulsions’.
Then there were those babies whose parent had chosen to pay the one-off payment. This was a higher amount, typically £25–40, but it can easily be seen that there was a strange discrepancy between even £25–40 and the real cost of looking after a child for, say, 15 or 16 years until he or she was an independent adult. This strange discrepancy seemed to go unexamined by those who felt their lives were burdened by the existence of a child.
The idea of a one-off payment was appealing to some people for the obvious financial reason – the total outgoing expense was less – but sometimes it was appealing for another reason and a deadly understanding was being played out in public. A fee was effectively being paid by people, who could not bear to do it themselves, for others to terminate the life of an unwanted infant and keep it quiet.
In the case of those babies for whom a premium had been paid, the psychopathic baby-farmers would usually just murder their charges and then dump the bodies in such places as hedges and rivers. Baby-farmers would sometimes justify their actions by claiming that they were ‘angel makers’, doing poor mites a favour by putting them out of a miserable existence.
Many women took up Sach on her offer of looking after their baby for them. Of course Sach would charge at least £15 as a one-off payment for long-term care.
Once the baby was handed over to her, Sach would get in touch with her older accomplice Annie Walters who would dose the babies up with chlorodyne until they died. Chlorodyne was a powerful medicine which included both opium and cannabis and was used to treat insomnia in adults. If they were too long a’ dying they could always be smothered.
Walters was unintelligent and her last address was in a house whose landlord was a policeman. The policeman and his wife knew she was a foster parent and the policeman’s wife even helped Waters with the nappy of one child but couldn’t help noticing that the child disappeared to be replaced very shortly thereafter by a different child, and so on. When Walters asked a lodger in the house to buy chlorodyne for her it was time for the police to be informed and both Walters and Sach were placed under surveillance. When Walters was stopped at South Kensington station in November 1902 she had a dead 3-month-old baby (surnamed Galley) with her. The baby had a noticeably bruised head but Walters claimed she had not known the child was dead until she had been stopped. A police doctor observed however that the dead baby’s ‘jaws were clenched, toes turned inward, hands tightly clenched’.
The jury took just 40 minutes to sentence the pair to death and here at Holloway Road prison on Tuesday 3 February 1903 an unprecedented event (in modern times) took place: the double hanging of two women, Amelia Sach (age 29) and Annie Walters (age 54).
Henry Pierrepoint and Billington performed the execution, the first at Holloway. Henry recorded in his diary the following remark, ‘These two women were baby-farmers of the worst kind and they were both repulsive in type’. His executioner son, Albert, reveals in his own autobiography that it was a distressing scene with ‘one of the women in an almost continuous faint having to be propped up by my father on the drop’.
Some of Britain’s worst serial killers, in terms of sheer numbers of victims, have been female baby-farmers of the Victorian era. Once a baby-farmer murdered their first child (usually by strangulation but in the case of Walters and Sach by poisoning) there was every chance they would murder a second, third and on and on and on. Even after the 1872 Infant Life Protection Act was introduced to try to bring some regulation into child-minding, six more female
Then there were those babies whose parent had chosen to pay the one-off payment. This was a higher amount, typically £25–40, but it can easily be seen that there was a strange discrepancy between even £25–40 and the real cost of looking after a child for, say, 15 or 16 years until he or she was an independent adult. This strange discrepancy seemed to go unexamined by those who felt their lives were burdened by the existence of a child.
The idea of a one-off payment was appealing to some people for the obvious financial reason – the total outgoing expense was less – but sometimes it was appealing for another reason and a deadly understanding was being played out in public. A fee was effectively being paid by people, who could not bear to do it themselves, for others to terminate the life of an unwanted infant and keep it quiet.
In the case of those babies for whom a premium had been paid, the psychopathic baby-farmers would usually just murder their charges and then dump the bodies in such places as hedges and rivers. Baby-farmers would sometimes justify their actions by claiming that they were ‘angel makers’, doing poor mites a favour by putting them out of a miserable existence.
Many women took up Sach on her offer of looking after their baby for them. Of course Sach would charge at least £15 as a one-off payment for long-term care.
Once the baby was handed over to her, Sach would get in touch with her older accomplice Annie Walters who would dose the babies up with chlorodyne until they died. Chlorodyne was a powerful medicine which included both opium and cannabis and was used to treat insomnia in adults. If they were too long a’ dying they could always be smothered.
Walters was unintelligent and her last address was in a house whose landlord was a policeman. The policeman and his wife knew she was a foster parent and the policeman’s wife even helped Waters with the nappy of one child but couldn’t help noticing that the child disappeared to be replaced very shortly thereafter by a different child, and so on. When Walters asked a lodger in the house to buy chlorodyne for her it was time for the police to be informed and both Walters and Sach were placed under surveillance. When Walters was stopped at South Kensington station in November 1902 she had a dead 3-month-old baby (surnamed Galley) with her. The baby had a noticeably bruised head but Walters claimed she had not known the child was dead until she had been stopped. A police doctor observed however that the dead baby’s ‘jaws were clenched, toes turned inward, hands tightly clenched’.
The jury took just 40 minutes to sentence the pair to death and here at Holloway Road prison on Tuesday 3 February 1903 an unprecedented event (in modern times) took place: the double hanging of two women, Amelia Sach (age 29) and Annie Walters (age 54).
Henry Pierrepoint and Billington performed the execution, the first at Holloway. Henry recorded in his diary the following remark, ‘These two women were baby-farmers of the worst kind and they were both repulsive in type’. His executioner son, Albert, reveals in his own autobiography that it was a distressing scene with ‘one of the women in an almost continuous faint having to be propped up by my father on the drop’.
Some of Britain’s worst serial killers, in terms of sheer numbers of victims, have been female baby-farmers of the Victorian era. Once a baby-farmer murdered their first child (usually by strangulation but in the case of Walters and Sach by poisoning) there was every chance they would murder a second, third and on and on and on. Even after the 1872 Infant Life Protection Act was introduced to try to bring some regulation into child-minding, six more female
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