Amelia Dyer

Do you wanna come up and see the house with me? Like, we could live it- there and, like, run it together." She's also telling Martin, like, "Oh, you could run a baby farm with me, and you can have a barber shop/baby farms." Anyway, she's, like, playing them off.

And Cat, just for our listeners who haven't heard our episode on Amelia Dyer and baby farms, can you just tell us briefly what a baby farm is in the 19th century?

So it's basically somewhere where if you couldn't afford to take care of your child, you would pay a wom- usually a woman running a, quote, "baby farm" to take care of that child, maybe ongoing or maybe just you'd give the child totally to them for a lump sum of money.

And obviously a lot of people running these farms had no incentive to take care of the children, and they would just take the money, and so let the children die, or in some cases murder them.

The address they deciphered led them here to number 45 Kensington Road.

It was the home of Amelia Dyer.

She was what the Victorians called a baby farmer.

For a price, baby farmers adopted children from desperate parents with the promise of a better life.

But in the case of Amelia Dyer, it was a promise never kept.

Over the space of 30 years, she took in more than 50 babies, and she killed them all.

The records of her case are kept here in the Thames Valley Police Museum.

How would a baby farmer like Amelia Dyer have got access to children?

So I think, you know, Martha was quite, um, I don't think she was being delusional when she thought no one would ever miss these children.

The biggest case of baby farmers in the UK was Amelia Dyer, I think.

Yes.

Was that she got caught doing exactly what it is that you're saying and, and she was in the 19th century, was that she'd been taking in babies.

She's paid to take care of the babies, but then the babies die or, or they're neglected, or in some cases she, she just outright killed them because then she's made more room for more babies.

Yeah.

Amelia Dyer is the most famous case.

I mean, she probably is the worst mass murderer in history outside of wartime.