Female Serial Killers and the Practice of Baby Farming

     
I continue my rabbit hole about Victorian serial killers by examining famous serial killers from this era. The one that stood out the most to me is Jane Toppan. Born in 1854 to Irish immigrants, Jane grew up amongst the tragedy of her mother’s death and the poverty that came from her father’s alcoholism. Her father, Peter Kelley, (or as many around town call, Kelley the Crackpot) had a reputation around town as a mentally insane drunk and was the subject of all kinds of rumors. It was said that in a particular bad episode of insanity that Kelley sewed his own eyes shut (probably not true). Kelley was extremely abusive towards Jane and her older sister, but the abuse extended to how the rest of the town treated her as well. People whispered that Jane suffered from the same insanity as her father; a rumor that wasn’t helped by the fact that Jane got a reputation as a problem child. When she was six, Jane and her sister were taken to the Boston Female Asylum.
No records exists of what their life as like at the asylum, but it is known that her sister would stay there a number of years while Jane went on to become a sex worker. She worked the job until she became an indentured servant to a rich heiress named Mrs. Ann Toppan in Massachusetts. There, she studied to be a nurse which would act as the prelude to her murders. At first, Jane thrived in her new line of work. She studied at Cambridge (yes, that Cambridge) and she would become well known to patients because of her exceptional beside manners. People around the hospital would call her “Jolly Jane”, a reference to her warm smile and willingness to help anyone. At first, it started as simple experiments with her patients - a little more morphine here, an extra pill slipped into a patient’s food when doctors weren’t looking, etc. Jane’s satisfaction for her work soon turned to something darker, however.
Newspapers and police confessionals recorded after Jane was caught would describe what she would do to her patients. She would start by poisoning them with a mixture of arsenic, morphine, and tonic water; enough to put someone in bed but not enough to kill them outright. Jane, being her normal and helpful self, would then rush to her victim’s side and nurse them to the edge of health before poisoning them fatally. She said that in her victim’s last moments, she would crawl into bed with them and watch them die. At first, she said it was to see if she could see a soul leaving the body. After enough killings, however, Jane admitted that she got a sexual thrill out of it, often fondling her victim’s bodies while they convulsed before going totally limp.
While the increase in patient deaths seemed suspicious to the doctor’s at Cambridge, it was chalked up to incompetence rather than a purposeful intent to murder. Most of Jane’s patients were either very old or very sick, making their deaths hard to prove as a murder. She eventually found work again as a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital but was fired a year later due to giving out medication too liberally. She would then return to Cambridge before being fired again due to the increase in patient deaths.
With no means of supporting herself, she began using murder as a tool to advance herself economically. First, she poisoned her landlord Israel Dunham and his wife in 1895. She then killed her youngest sister and collected alife insurance policy in 1899 under her name. She then murdered her master Ann Toppan, her husband, her husband’s sister, and Ann’s six children.
Jane also took out personal ads that invited gentlemen callers to her house. She would invited them over under the guise that she was looking for a husband to 'merge their wealth' together. Each would, at some point, fall mysteriously ill before dying under Jane's care.
After a string of 30 confirmed murders, Jane was finally caught. The press exploded with shocking details of her murder and a quote that she said in response to being asked why she did it:
“That is my ambition to have killed more people – more helpless people – that any man or woman who ever lived.”
Jane confessed to 36 murders in total and insisted she was sane – an attempt to avoid being committed to an insane asylum. 

She was committed to the Taunton Insane Hospital in 1901, where she would eventually die.



 The 1800’s gave women in desperate and tragic situations very few options to for survival and made facing a crisis even more insurmountable. This combined with the hypocritical standards often placed on women in terms of their sexuality meant that unwanted pregnancies out of wedlock could quickly make a bad situation worse. There were no formal adoption centers or a centralized system for placing children in foster care, leading to the practice of baby farming.
Baby farming was actually the derogatory term for paying someone to adopt your child. Women who would have babies out of wedlock would often pay other women in far away towns to take care of their children. While some of these deals were done through institution like churches, charities, or wealthy philanthropists, there were also darker forces at work.
Amelia Dyer was born in 1836 in England to a shoemaker. Her early life was spent taking care of her mother who had, quite literally, become stark raving mad after having never fully recovered from a bout of typhus. Her two youngest sisters would also die early in her life – one when she was six and the other when she was only a few months old. When her father died in 1861, her two brothers took over the business. It’s not clear as to exactly why, but Amelia got into a fight with one of her brothers and was told to never come back. She eventually married and settled into a life as a nurse.
Through her work as a midwife, Amelia heard about the practice of baby farming. Many of the women she took care of were destitute women who had been assaulted or left by someone after finding out they were pregnant. Others were wealthy wives to important people who had become pregnant as the result of an affair taken too far. Amelia began offering her services, promising to quietly ship the child to a series of orphanages discreetly and without any questions.
She would then kill the children in a number of different ways. Opium and alcohol were used to sedate unruly children while also being an effective method of killing someone without leaving a trace. Often, she would simply refuse to feed them and wait for nature to take its course. Amelia manage to make a good living until bodies were discovered in a river behind her home. Witnesses also testified that they would almost never see Amelia outside of her home and when they did, it was always at strange hours of the day. She would walk to the train station with large hatboxes which would be noticeably absent upon her return. At her trial, hatboxes with baby dolls inside of them were sold outside the courthouse. She would only be convicted of a single murder: that of Doris Mason. Her body was discovered in a box floating down the Thames river by a bargeman and it didn’t take long for a police investigations to reveal she had been murdering children years. The exact number is unclear, but this is largely due to the sheer number of children murdered. Police couldn't possibly keep track and Amelia didn't remember. Some put the estimates as low as 30, others as high as 400. The conviction of a single murder, however, was enough to find her guilty. The jury took only four and half minutes to decide her verdict and sentence: guilty and death by hanging. She was hung by James Billington at Newgate Prison on Wednesday, 10 June 1896. When asked if she had any last words she simply said: “I have nothing to say.”