Original subtitles

The streets hold many secrets.

From alley waves in the heart of London to the quietest country lane, they've all witnessed cruelty and violence, jealousy and despair.

They've seen crimes of passion and cold-hearted murder.

They've seen killers escape, killers brought to justice.

In this series, we'll be investigating the most notorious crimes and intriguing mysteries.

Stories of men and women who killed, of the police who hunted them, and the victims who were left behind,

from the files of Scotland Yard and far beyond.

This is the dark history of our streets.

She called herself Mrs. Scott in the adverb.

It wasn't her real name, but Mrs. Scott sounded respectable.

It sounded proper. That was the name the newspaper printed.

But her real name was Evelina Marmon.

She was 25 years old and a bar maid living in the town of Cheltenham.

In January 1896, she'd given birth to a baby girl.

Doris was healthy, she was beautiful, and she was illegitimate.

The family and home were central to a Victorian society.

So having a baby outside of wedlock was one of the worst things that a woman could do,

because it was going totally against all the ethics and morals of the day.

Until 1834, an unmarried mother had a certain amount of protection from the law.

If the father of the child refused to marry her, then the local parish had to provide for her and the child.

But in 1834, this right was abolished.

They admitted the poor laws to make sure that fathers of illegitimate children were no longer responsible for maintaining their offspring.

Essentially, what that legislation did was put all the responsibility, moral, economic and legal on the woman.

You no longer had a claim on the parish to support you, except through the workhouse.

And what were you going to do if you had an infant to support?

Where were you going to turn?

It was a short advert to Evolina placed. It had not been expensive, but it would cost her everything.

For it would lead Evolina and her daughter Doris to one of the most notorious baby farmers of the Victorian age.

It was a time of great poverty. Children were very often unwanted and they came along in greater numbers than people would cope for.

Baby farming was, I suppose you could describe it as unregulated adoption.

Unmarried women could put an advertisement in a newspaper, basically putting her child up for adoption.

And then there were women who operated as baby farmers who would also advertise in newspapers looking to adopt babies.

And so obviously they would then form a meeting, an agreement would be made, money would change hands.

At least baby farming, that system offered an opportunity for the child to be looked after, or at least dealt with.

So for young women, married, unmarried widows, if you needed to work, you needed the baby farming system.

Sometimes women would pay, say, five shillings a week, that's 25p a week, to another woman to look after their child.

Others were in a situation where they wanted the problem to disappear, so they would find women who would look after the children and adopt them in effect for a lump sum.

It could be as little as five or ten pounds plus a few clones in a cardboard box and then the mother would not expect to see the child again.

And this of course created the situation where rather than provide proper adoption for the child, giving it a home and bringing it up, it was simpler just to kill the child and get rid of it and just keep the money up front.

Amelia Dyer was in the business most of her adult life.

She had stints of honest work as nurse at a hospital attendant at an asylum.

But few jobs were as easy or as lucrative as baby farming.

In 1869 when Dyer was 31, she placed her first adverts in the press.

She offered a discreet lodging house for pregnant women.

For a fee, they could stay at Dyer's house until the birth.

The newborn baby is unwanted by their mothers.

We then passed through a grim network of neglect.

She kind of started off training as a nurse actually, so she had a very legitimate career to begin with.

She met a woman called Ellen Dane, who was actually a midwife.

And she learned that Ellen Dane had a laying in house, a house of confinement, where she would take in women who were pregnant and wanted to give birth.

She was out of the public eye because obviously they weren't married.

So to Amelia, she suddenly learned of this really easy way of earning an income.

Some of the babies died delivered to the London home of a woman named Margaret Waters.

There, the babies wasted away.

Their cries of hunger were suppressed with drugs.

They lay on sofas or were stuffed into filthy cribs until finally starvation carried them off.

Police discovered this baby farm in 1870 and Waters was arrested, tried and executed.

That's a tip of the iceberg. It really is a tip of the iceberg.

There was suddenly this spotlight shone on the industry for a while, and a lot of the people that Amelia dealt with were going into hiding, or their names were being published in newspapers.

So Amelia does her best to evade attention.

She certainly reduced her visibility as a baby farmer to escape too much scrutiny by the authorities.

She had used a false name to protect herself, but she knew police could still track her down.

She had to move fast.

She shut down her business, stopped the adverts in the papers and even for a time took up an honest living.

But it was not to last.

In 1877 her husband William lost his job.

To support the family, Dyer returned to her old trade.

Once again, the house was filled with visitors with the sound of the house.

Of women in labor with the newborn cries of those that lived and the silence of those that did not.

There were letters to answer, adverts to place. Dyer was always coming and going, taking away babies returning with others.

Business was good. But the authorities were beginning to ask questions.

Some of her children died, whether it's through natural causes or not we don't know.

But gradually as she took on more and more children, more and more of them seemed to die.

She would pass them on to other women. The heinous thing was that the babies were passed on to the other women.

Really at the point they were failing and they were kind of on the point of death anyway.

One of the women that had taken on, one of her babies actually went to the local coroner and reported her.

So the police actually came to her door and investigated her.

It was very clear that she was running a baby farm.

By this time, under the terms of the Infant Life Protection Act 1872, she is in breach of the law because she has not registered herself as a care giver, somebody in charge of nurse children.

On the 26th of August 1879, the police came for Amelia Dyer.

They couldn't prove the children had died through a direct or deliberate act, but there was enough evidence to convict Dyer of gross negligence.

She was sentenced to six months' hard labor.

She would have had no home comforts whatsoever. She would have slept on a hard wooden bench. She would have been made to do cleaning chores and cooking chores.

But the vast majority of her day would have been spent in what they would call picking oakum.

This was a tired rope which the strands had to be unpicked and this was very painful on the hands and on the fingers.

Bearing in mind, they weren't allowed to use tools to pick apart the rope within a matter of hours.

Your fingers would be bleeding, your nails torn and this was day after day after day.

Dyer returned home in February 1880. Prison had changed her. It had aged her. It had broken her.

For the rest of her life, she would do anything to avoid going back.

The police were not able to do anything to avoid going back.

Evelyna Marman had grown up in the countryside, but she wanted more than the endless drudgery of chicken farming. She found it in Chelten.

In 1895, the pretty young bar maid fell pregnant.

What we know about her is that she was typical of many a young woman who was seduced or willingly went into a sexual relationship, found herself pregnant for practical relationship.

The moral reasons could not or did not abort the child, did not manage to lose the child during pregnancy, gave birth and needed to work.

Unmarried mothers were virtually unemployable. There was a reluctance, an unwillingness to give work to an unmarried mother. There was obviously a child to consider.

So she couldn't get workers a servant, she couldn't get workers in a factory, she couldn't get workers a governess. There were all sorts of openings denied to her.

What Evelyna needed was somebody to look after Doris. Just temporarily she thought until her situation improved. So she placed her advert in the Bristol Times and Mirror.

Nurse child wanted respectable woman to take young child at home. State terms to Mrs. Scott, 23 Manchester Street, Cheltenham.

On the 18th of March 1896, Evelyna bought the paper and scanned through the advertisements. It seemed like fate.

Alongside her own carefully composed words was another advert. A married couple were looking to adopt.

Evelyna quickly dashed off a letter hoping against hope the couple had not found somebody else. The reply from Mrs. Harding came quickly.

She had this completely different persona, if you like, in the course of correspondence by post.

She would write saying, oh, you got a little child for adoption. Well, my husband and I, we would love to have a child of her own. We would love to bring it up and give it a home.

She would describe a healthy home in the country with an orchard outside the front door. Very, very persuasive indeed.

It would give the mother confidence that she would look after their child properly and that's what the mothers wanted, of course.

Mrs. Harding was unwilling to take the child for a weekly fee as Evelyna had hoped, but for a one-off payment of ten pounds, she would adopt Doris permanent.

The baby would have a loving home and of course, Evelyna could visit whenever she liked.

Reluctantly, the young mother agreed.

On the 31st of March, Evelyna met Mrs. Harding for the first time to sign the contract.

Evelyna handed over the agreed payment and then she wrapped Doris up against the chill of the evening and walked with Mrs. Harding to the railway station.

You actually do find very clear evidence that she was a good actress, that she could appear genuinely enthusiastic, genuinely happy to take the infants entrusted to her care.

She was surprised when she actually met her because she was not the sort of motherly looking person that she'd imagined.

She convinced Evelyna Marman that she was doing the best thing she could for her daughter's health and happiness, that she could hope to be in contact, to see her daughter possibly on days out as her daughter grew older, come back into her life in some way.

The 520 Reading Train was waiting to depart.

Evelyna clung onto her daughter for just one more important hug, just one more embrace.

And finally, she handed her over into the course inpatient hands of Mrs. Harding.

Whistles screamed, steam billowed and Doris was carried away.

To Amelia, a little Doris Marman was nothing special.

By 1896, she'd lost count of the babies she'd taken into her care.

On her release from prison in 1880, Dyer had tried once again to go straight, but once again, a few years was all she could manage.

The work was too hard, the pay too poor.

The temptation to return to her old line of work proved impossible to resist.

Baby farming was easy, the money poured in.

But Dyer was not the woman she once was.

Her fear of discovery, a horror of going back to prison, all took its toll.

And more and more, she relied on Lordinum to get through the day.

She suffered a lot from bad teeth and tooth aches, so she used it for a painkiller.

But it was a very addictive solution.

Lordinum is a mix of opium and alcohol.

It was easily bought out of the counter. There were no restrictions on it.

And Lordinum was so cheap, the price was lower than wine or spirits.

This was before the invention of aspirin or anything like that.

So Lordinum was used for lots of different purposes as a painkiller, as a sedative, as a sleeping aid.

Above all, from the role that Amelia had as a baby farmer, she was known to be a great user of the great standby for mothers of all classes at that age, Godfrey's cordial.

Which was essentially Lordinum, sweetened with sugar syrup, spices and things like that to make it more palatable.

It was called mother's friend because it helps suppress the child's appetite and help to keep it quiet.

But it can become very addictive. In fact, Amelia became so addicted to Lordinum that later on, the build-up over the decades was so great that drinking two bottles of Lordinum, a little or no effect on her at all.

Dyer's fear of discovery was real. There were close calls. Women who changed their minds wanted their babies back.

But when her denials and excuses were out, Dyer had a plan.

If you were in somebody's situation like Amelia Dyer, the workhouse is the absolute bottom of the pile.

If you were admitted to an asylum, then conditions and living conditions would be very much better.

Asylums were at one stage, a very enlightened way of treating them mentally ill. It would give them peace and quiet and rest, which calmed their mind.

There's no doubt that she did suffer from big bouts of anxiety and stress, but as to whether she had actually any mental illness, I would err on the side that she didn't, that she totally feigned these episodes.

Very much she'd worked in an asylum, so she kind of knew the symptoms and what the doctors would be looking at.

Amelia Dyer was an intelligent and shrewd woman who was perfectly capable of learning from observation and experience ways of eluding useful attention.

She would have learned not only how mental patients behaved, the various manifestations of mental imbalance of what was considered the insanity, but also she will have learned how doctors reacted to that, and particularly and usefully, when they would consider a patient cured.

Dyer would stay in the asylum long enough for the trail to go cold for the questions to die down. Then she would make a remarkable recovery. Once released, she would relocate her family and her business would start all over again.

For 12 years, she avoided detection, moving from house to house area to area, in Bristol, in Reading, in London. But her luck couldn't last forever.

She had been able to do it.

Mrs. Harding had promised Evelyna a letter as soon as she got home with Doris. And Evelyna believed her. She had to tell herself she'd done the right thing, that she could trust the woman she'd handed her baby to. So Evelyna waited. And two days later, the letter arrived. It was a brief note.

It assured Evelyna they had arrived safely, and that Doris was doing well. It promised a longer letter at the weekend.

A relieved Evelyna wrote back at once anxious for more details, but the weekend came and went. With no letter from Mrs. Harding, Evelyna would never hear from her again.

We don't know how long Evelyna's daughter lived. Once Amelia Dyer got her through the front door, she had no reason to keep the baby alive.

May have been a matter of minutes. By 1896, Dyer was well-practiced at slipping tape around a child's soft neck, tightening it into a knot and waiting.

The baby didn't die straight away. She liked to see the look on its face before it passed away.

As she was bringing more and more babies into her home, she wanted to get rid of them quicker. So she would just outright murder them.

She used dressmaker's tape. You used it to line the fronts of blouses for buttons. You used it in skirts. You used it in so many ways.

So having a large quantity of dressmaker's tape around and getting through it was something that would, in and of itself, raise virtually no questions.

Over the years, Dyer's operation had grown bigger, but by 1895, Dyer was sinking deeper into her lord in a addiction.

The babies she didn't kill immediately needed someone to care for them, someone to keep them quiet.

At the local workhouse, she found what she thought was the perfect candidate.

Her name was Jane Smith, and Dyer apparently met her for a short time. She was in the workhouse.

Jane Smith or Granny, as Amelia eventually started to call her, was a 70-year-old widowed lady.

She'd already lost her three children years before. When her husband died, she lost her home as well, hence that was why she ended up in the workhouse.

So she was a very vulnerable, very naive old lady.

Nobody wants to be in the workhouse. The social stigma is bad enough, but it's also the rules or regulations.

You only stopped working in a workhouse when you were so physically incapacitated that you had to go to the infirmary.

So you might be in your 70s, your 80s, your 90s, and if you were in the workhouse and physically fit enough to work, you would be working.

Amelia Dyer said that if she was to come out of the workhouse with her and go and live with her, they could live as sisters.

They would stave off the loneliness of old age. She could help her to nurse babies.

I should be cared for and fed. And to Jane Smith, this sounded wonderful.

She'd imagine she would live out of her days in the workhouse and suddenly she was being offered this amazing new life.

Again, the reality did not match Dyer's honeyed words.

Like all the desperate women before her, Granny Smith was duped.

But like those women, she had few options. It was take Dyer's offer or go back to the workhouse.

Granny Smith tried her best to care for the babies Dyer took in, but there were too many mouths to feed and too little food to give them.

Often, the infants had scarcely arrived in the house before they disappeared again.

She was very, very fond of all the babies that came into the house and she genuinely cared for them and looked after them.

So it was a mystery to her that sometimes she would wake up in the morning and the baby that had been there the night before had gone.

How much she knew, I think it's difficult to say.

I think she was a relatively simple woman, somebody who was substantially oblivious of the deliberate nature of Amelia's activities.

But I think she was also to an extent willfully so because to become too aware of what she was up to meant that she would have no alternative but returning to the workhouse.

Amelia would tell her that she had taken it back to the mother, that she had met the mother at a train station because the mother wanted to have the baby back or that she had found somebody else that would look after the baby.

Dyer held absolute power in the household. She had a temper that could turn on a six-pence.

But even the trusting granny Smith was starting to ask questions about the children who disappeared, about the bundles of unworn clothing they left behind and about the rotting smell coming from the cupboard in the kitchen.

In January 1896, the timid and cow-ed old woman decided to do something.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was then still a new organization that had been founded in 1889 and six years later had branches in towns across the country, including Reading.

It was there that granny Smith took herself that January morning.

The local NSPCC officer in Reading soon made a visit to Dyer's house at 45 Kensington Road.

He found the home clean if sparsely furnished, but the one child he saw concerned him.

The six-month-old baby seemed weak and malnourished. More regular inspections were clearly needed.

The officer informed the seething Mrs. Dyer to expect another visit from him soon.

Granny Smith said nothing. She knew better than to admit any part in this, but she hoped her employer would be frightened into changing her behavior.

Soon enough, within a few weeks, Dyer's long career as a baby farmer and murderer would be at an end.

The police came on the 11th of April 1896. They had news for Evelina Marman. She was taken to Reading Workhouse.

And that was where she was reunited with her missing baby daughter in the mortuary.

Evelina was contacted by the police and was told by the police that she had put her daughter into the care of a woman who couldn't be trusted to look after her.

So Evelina was under the assumption that she was going to get her daughter back.

But in fact, she was taken straight to the police mortuary and there was her daughter lying on the mortuary slab.

And she had no idea up until that point that her daughter had actually died.

There was only 11 days between Evelina seeing her baby alive and seeing it dead. There was only 11 days between the two dates.

She was very confused actually because she was saying that she was in perfect health when I gave her over.

So it took some time for her to think that her daughter had actually been murdered.

Another baby, a boy, was laid out beside Doris. His name was Harry Simmons. They had both been discovered in the River Thames.

They had been soft one on top of another inside a large carpet bag. A piece of paper had been wrapped around them and tied with string.

Bricks were used to wait the package down. Somebody had then tossed it into the river.

Doris and Harry were not the first babies to be fished from the Thames that spring.

First body had been found on the 30th of March. A barge man working his way upstream had spotted a brown paper parcel in the shallows near the riverbank.

And when he tried to retrieve it, the sodden package split. The remains of a baby girl spilled out.

The river was searched and more grim secrets revealed.

A baby boy was found on the 8th of April. He was just a few weeks old. Another was brought up on the morning of the 10th.

And then that afternoon, Doris and Harry in the old carpet bag.

Police quickly realized what they were dealing with. They sat about finding the baby farmer responsible. They had one clue to go on.

It was by chance a good detective work by Detective Constable Anderson, read in, but actually broke the case.

On closer examination, one of the pieces of brown paper that the body of the baby had been wrapped in had a faint address on it, which was Pigot's road in Cavisham. It was for Mrs Thomas.

Dyer had moved house every few months to avoid detection. Their dress on the piece of paper was an old one, but a mail clerk was able to point police to the woman's new home in Reading.

The investigators were eager not to spook their prey. They moved carefully.

They knew that she would be moving on if she was alerted to their interest,

but they kept surveillance on the property to see whether she was bringing children to the house or not.

They didn't have enough evidence on the wrapping paper to get habits.

They set up a sting operation and a young woman got in touch with the dire

and said she had a baby to her doctor and made an appointment to see her.

In the lack of the kind of forensic evidence that we would look to today,

you had to indulge in something like a sting.

You had to show for the use of the course a chain of evidence.

They agreed on the sum of £50 and then it was agreed that two days later the baby would be brought to the house,

but Amelia stressed that it was to be under cover of darkness,

so it was immediately clear the sort of operation she was running,

and this gave the police the opportunity to then raid the house.

The police had all the evidence they needed.

On Good Friday they marched into the house on Kensington Road and arrested Amelia dire.

No fits of madness were saved her this time.

When the police officers raided her home, they found cupboards full of baby's clothes and belongings.

With just one relatively healthy infant there,

why would you have so much on the premises?

Particularly things like the nappies, the diapers, the other evidence of very young children.

It's simply not normal.

There was no dead bodies there, but they did find plenty of evidence with letters that Amelia dire had written to and from young mothers,

and they found receipts from the pawnbrokers for children's clothing.

They found baby clothes, they found letters, newspaper adverts, hiss,

all sorts of evidence relating to the baby farming, and this was enough to take dire to court.

I think one of the things that all the illegal baby farmers, including Amelia dire,

capitalised on was that if you took in an illegitimate child,

then the mother would be too afraid of the consequences to her to come forward.

One of the things that really enables this case to go to trial up the size is the willingness of Miss Marman,

at the cost to herself in terms of her respectability to come forward to say,

yes, this is my murdered child.

The trial began on the 21st of May. It would last just two days.

Amelia dire had already made a full confession, but she hoped to avoid the death penalty by pleading insanity.

It would be up to a jury to decide.

The use testimony from her own daughter about her fits of insanity, her periods of incarceration in various

silences. And I think Amelia expected that it would start a very real chance of success.

While she was in prison, she was acting very strangely, she was suffering from delusions,

but again, was that feigned or was that because she didn't have access to law and she was coming down from it?

The death penalty was not a real challenge.

Diaries of claim for insanity didn't really have any chance.

It was quite clear from her movements in and out of the asylum that she was actually used in this as a cover

when police attention got too much.

Amelia actually tried to say that her mother had suffered from madness and that she had inherited it,

but that just didn't stand up. In fact, her brother gave evidence against her in court to say that

her mother had never suffered from madness.

There were a number of doctors that were called to give evidence at the old Bailey,

and they did say, yes, she had some mental problems, but they generally concluded that she wasn't sufficiently

mentally ill as to be anything other than responsible for her crimes.

The jury deliberated for just four and a half minutes before delivering their verdict.

Amelia Diarr was guilty.

On the 10th of June, Diarr was led from the condemned cell at Newgate Prison.

Her last night had been a fitful, sleepless one.

Unlike the babies she dispatched, Amelia Diarr knew what was coming.

Baby farming still carried on even after Diarr's death.

What did happen was that local councils were given a greater power to inspect Baby Farm

by the registering of a doctrine, and this was one way of trying to bring it under control.

The law was changed to make sure that there was a legal obligation on

people responsible for children to make sure they had proper food, proper clothing,

proper shelter, proper medical attention, and the old board of guardians who had been

established under the poor law, their responsibilities were transferred to local authorities.

It didn't in itself cure all the problems, but the worst cases seem to have been over

because of better supervision that was introduced.

In a really macabre twist, two years after Amelia Diarr was hanged for her crimes,

her own daughter and husband were arrested for abandoning a baby in a carriageway in Newton,

but it was actually wrapped up in brown paper.

I think they'd left it for dead, but luckily the railway port had found it and it was still alive.

So the family business carried on.

The full extent of Diarr's crimes is now impossible to know.

There were probably hundreds of victims. Many of their births went unrecorded, their deaths, unnoticed.

But some babies were not even given the chance to draw breath before she ended their lives.

Others were older when she tied the white tape around their necks or drug them into a silent, starving stupor.

But responsibility for those babies' faiths did not lie with Amelia Diarr alone.

This was a society that chose to condemn unmarried mothers like Evelyn Amarmon,

a society that denied them the choices and freedom to raise children themselves.

Society that created the perfect conditions for a monster.