Amelia Dyer

Amelia Dyer was born Amelia Elizabeth Hobley, in 1836, in Bristol, England. Her father, Samuel Hobley, was a shoemaker, and her mother, Sarah Hobley, was a homemaker. The family was not the richest in the little village of Pyle Marsh, but they earned a decent income, owing to her father’s well established reputation as a master shoemaker even outside the boundaries of the village.

Records state that she grew up in a huge family with four older siblings. The family lived a mundane life, with all the children studying in good schools. Amelia was fairly good in academics and was especially inclined toward literature. As a kid, she wrote quite a few poems and short stories, and this impressed her teachers in school.

Unfortunately, her mother’s mental health was affected by typhus. This became the prime cause of concern for the entire family. As the fever reached her brain, she became increasingly violent, and as a result, the children started getting beaten up almost every day. Historians claim that this gave rise to extreme hatred in Amelia’s subconscious mind, and this hatred remained repressed within her.

Slowly, she started drifting toward depression and this was further amplified by the deaths of two of her sisters. Subsequently, her mother’s death brought Amelia to Bristol, where she lived with her aunt for a while. This helped her get over her mother’s death. She started an internship with a corset maker and learned the tricks of the trade, hoping to make a career out of it.

Following her father’s demise in 1859, the flourishing family business was completely taken over by her elder brother James. Right after a feud with her brother, she moved permanently into a lodge in Bristol. There, she met a man named George Thomas and got married to him at the age of 24.

Her husband helped her join a nursing school to train as a nurse. Amelia seemed happy and subsequently, became a successful entity in the local ‘baby farming’ industry.

During that period, illegitimate pregnancies were highly stigmatized and babies born out of such pregnancies were not accepted by their families. The mothers of such babies often had to elope with or without their lovers and face banishment from their families and from society.

This led to a surge in a practice known as ‘baby farming.’ Thus, several businesses indulged in taking care of such illegitimate babies exchange for a sum of money. Amelia’s nursing background helped her make good money out of this practice.

She put up advertisements, met potential clients, and assured them that she was a well-trained nurse and a respectable married woman. She appeared to be a well-mannered, well-spoken, and refined woman. This led to people putting a growing number of infants under her care.

She started taking weekly payments, but out of greed for more money, she took in more infants than she could manage. This led to her plan of getting rid of the children, and with time, a large number of children started dying under her care.

While in prison, Amelia became mentally unstable and showed signs of suicidal tendencies. It is said that she attempted suicide twice, when she was forced to do extremely hard physical work in prison. Upon her release from prison, she was depressed for a long time and was even sent to several mental asylums, owing to her diminishing mental health.

Soon, she returned to her destructive ‘baby farming’ practices, and this time, she was more careful due to the suspicions regarding her activities, following her stint in prison. She changed towns frequently.

However, many things had changed by this time. For instance, she was now deliberately planning to get rid of the dead bodies of the children. She did this delicately and even hired a young woman named Jane Smith to help her. Being very careful, Amelia did not let Jane know about her deeds and pretended to be a loving ‘mother figure’ to shrug off any suspicion.

She killed the babies in her care by strangling them to death with white tapes and then threw the corpses into the ‘Thames’. It was difficult for the doctors at the time to ascertain whether the babies were still-born or were murdered. This led to no serious action against her and the number of dead infants grew by the day. The local police started an investigation, but it was half-cooked, as there were no solid evidences against anyone.

Owing to the fact that she had been arrested before, Amelia used different aliases to keep herself anonymous. Years of heavy alcohol consumption had further changed her face to a large extent and it was very difficult to recognize her.