This series sheds light on the serial killers who left their mark on the History of Britain.
Amelia Dyer
Amelia Elizabeth Dyer was an English serial killer. She is believed to have murdered infants in her care for over thirty years during the Victorian period in the United Kingdom.
Amelia Elizabeth Dyer was born in 1837 in a small village in Bristol. She was the youngest of five, with three brothers and a sister. She was said to have suffered a tough childhood as her father was a shoemaker and her mother was mentally ill. She cared for her mother till she died in 1848. After her mother’s death, Amelia lived with her aunt in Bristol for a time before serving an apprenticeship with a garment maker.
It was said that Amelia learned to read and write, and she also developed a love for literature and poetry. She married George Thomas, a man thirty-five years older than her, and they had a baby together before he died in 1869. During her marriage, she trained as a nurse with a midwife who had taught her about baby farming.
She turned to baby farming, the practice of adopting unwanted infants in exchange for money. Not long after, to support herself, Dyer began placing advertisements in local papers, claiming to be a respectable, married woman who would provide a safe and loving home for the children. She would then demand a sizeable one-time payment in exchange for her services of baby caring.
She initially cared for the children legitimately, in addition to having her own, but whether intentionally or not, a number of them died in her care, leading to a conviction for neglect and six months’ hard labour. She then began directly murdering the babies and fleeing various cities after making money from the children she “adopted”, strangling at least some of them, and disposing of the bodies to avoid attention. Claiming to be mentally unstable to evade arrest, she was committed to several mental asylums throughout her life, despite suspicions of feigning, and survived at least one serious suicide attempt.
However, On 30 March 1896, a parcel weighted down with a brick was fished out of the River Thames. Her downfall had approached, and karma had caught up with her. Inside, swaddled in layers of linen, newspaper and brown paper, was the partially decomposed body of baby Helena Fry with evidence containing her name and house address. She was arrested on 4 April 1896.
She was tried and found guilty of the murdered infant, Doris Marmon, alongside a handful of murders were also associated with Dyer, and on 10 June 1896, she was hanged.
