The Baby Farmers

by Annie Cossins

  The Coroner thought that the estimated age of Baby 5, 6–14 days, meant she was too young to have been Mignonette. However, Dr Milford’s age estimation of Baby 5 may have been inaccurate. He could not have known that some of the babies died from starvation when he examined them. Because she had ‘wasted away’, Mignonette would not have been the normal size of a two-month-old baby (in the 1890s) when she died.

  The cause of death of Baby 4 was harder to ascertain and came down to whether the baby died from deliberate or accidental starvation—‘through ignorance, or by wilful and foul means’. Both Dr Milford and Dr Agassiz had been asked about the likelihood of a very young child, separated from its mother, dying from starvation. Both considered it unlikely unless the baby was given unsuitable food by an inexperienced carer.

  The Coroner reminded the jury that Mignonette had been strong at birth, thrived on infant formula and ‘was by no means a peevish child’. Yet the neighbours in Burren Street heard the child crying constantly. John Makin had told Mr Hill the baby kept him awake all night, using such foul language that the newspapers could not print his words. So awful were his comments, the Coroner remarked, ‘no man with a spark of manliness in him would use such language in reference to a little child. It indicated a brutal and cruel nature’.

  The Coroner was satisfied that the baby seen by Dr Agassiz was the child of Minnie Davies and that she was suffering from dysenteric diarrhoea and marasmus. So severe was the malnutrition that Dr Agassiz had described the child as ‘a mere bag of bones’. Dr Milford had said that if a child ‘in the last stage of emaciation suffering from dysenteric diarrhoea’ subsequently died, he would conclude it died from starvation. If the jurymen believed this evidence, said the Coroner, they had to decide if the Makins had deliberately starved the child, particularly since they had brought up a family of their own and ‘could not possibly be ignorant’ about how to care for a young baby.

  Suddenly, an unforeseen legal door opened—a possibility the Makins could not have imagined. If they had known about this law they would never have agreed to take in a baby to nurse for a weekly fee. Because the Makins had signed a contract with Minnie Davies to care for her child for ten shillings per week, the Coroner said they had a duty to protect the life imposed by the contract, according to the Coroners Act. Failure to do so amounted to either murder or manslaughter. Under such a contract, any person taking custody of someone who is helpless and who is not provided with food, or is provided with insufficient amounts of food, was guilty of murder.

  The Coroner was also concerned by the number of lies told by the Makins: if they had not ‘wilfully cause[d] the child’s death, why did they tell so many lies about it, and cause their children . . . to lie about it?’ The Coroner listed the Makins’ many lies—they had acquired Baby Mignonette the day after they moved to Burren Street (rather than in George Street); the parents had collected the child before moving to Melbourne; the Makins said they would register the death of Mignonette and pay for her burial; that an undertaker had taken the child away; and the Makins’ use of false names when presenting themselves to Minnie and Horace. Added to this long list was the Makins’ hurried departure from that residence, all of which combined to show they had something to hide, especially when an innocent person would not ‘jeopardise their liberty . . . by withholding evidence that would clear them’. Their motive for starving Baby Mignonette, said the Coroner, was to obtain the payment of ten shillings for long enough to concoct the child’s illness and to acquire a sum of money for its burial with further monies obtained from pawning the baby’s clothing.

  The Coroner also wondered whether Baby Mignonette, kept clean and apparently cared for, was used to allay any suspicions the neighbours would have had from hearing babies cry or seeing baby clothes drying in the backyard—as if this baby had been used ‘as a kind of stalking-horse’ to hide the Makins’ real business.

  He reminded the jury that if they were satisfied the death of Baby 4 had been wilfully caused by Sarah and John, they could return a verdict of wilful murder. As to Florence and Blanche, the Coroner decided the case against them was different, ‘[p]ossibly [because] their mouths had been shut by their parents’.

  Just before the jury retired, the Coroner’s outrage increased as he announced that these inquests had revealed ‘crimes of the deepest dye’ which were ‘a scandalous disgrace to a civilized community and would be an enduring blot on the fair fame of this city’. Pointedly, he told the jury that if there was a failure of justice in this case it ‘would be a national calamity’ but he ‘trusted justice would be done’. He hoped this case ‘would put a stop to the chances of any further ghastly discoveries, and that it would increase the vigilance of the police’ as well as ‘every man, woman and child in this country’.

  With these final pleas, the Coroner had lost his impartiality. When Mr Williamson rose to make a request, the Coroner interrupted:

  Mr Williamson: Well, your Worship, before the jury retires direct—

  Coroner: I will say no more.

  Mr Williamson: I was going to say—

  Coroner: Will you sit down, sir.

  Mr Williamson: Perhaps your Worship will listen to me first.

  Coroner: Sit down, sir! Sit down, sir!

  Mr Williamson: Surely your Worship will not manifest an autocratic position?

  Coroner: Will you sit down, sir?

  Mr Williamson: Oh well, if you will not listen to me, it can't be helped.

  Armed with 333 foolscap pages of evidence and a book of Coroner’s Instructions, the jury retired to consider their verdict at 10.41 a.m. on the morning of Monday 28 November 1892. Quick and efficient, 65 minutes later they sent word they had reached a verdict, an ominous sign. As the jurymen filed into the court, Sarah moaned, quite agitated. When the foreman stood, the Coroner asked:

  Coroner: Have the jury agreed upon a verdict, Mr Foreman?

  Foreman: Yes, Your Worship.

  Coroner: What is the verdict in inquest number 1252/92?

  Foreman: We find that the infant No 4 is identical with the child of Minnie Davies and Horace Bothamley; we further find John and Sarah Makin guilty of manslaughter. We find that there is not sufficient evidence before us to connect Blanche and Florence Makin with a guilty knowledge.

  The Coroner had pushed for a verdict of murder. The jury had baulked. Manslaugher as a result of neglect was a more cautious verdict. Mr Williamson regained his feet and, like a bothersome child, pleaded with the Coroner about the jury’s failure to refer to marasmus as the cause of death. But the Coroner, like a father pushed to his limits, shouted him down:

  Coroner: Will you sit down, sir?

  Mr Williamson: But, your Worship, I would like to point out to the jury—

  Coroner: Sit down, sir; will you sit down when I tell you.

  Mr Williamson: But, I am in duty bound—

  Coroner: You are not in duty bound at all.

  Mr Williamson: I am in duty bound—

  Coroner: Sit down, sir! Sit down!

  Mr Williamson: To point out that the jury never said anything about marasmus . . .

  Coroner: Will you sit down, sir, or will you drive me to extremes?

  While Mr Williamson collected himself, humiliated but defiant, the Coroner asked the jury whether they wanted to have their verdict altered, to which the foreman replied no.9 Satisfied that he had won the day, the Coroner ordered John and Sarah to rise as he committed them to stand trial at the Criminal Court in Darlinghurst for the manslaughter of Miss Davies’ child.

  Blanche and Florence were now free. Blanche cried out and hugged her sister, the emotion of it all overwhelming poor Florence, who fainted. Sarah slumped in her seat, raising her hands and announcing, ‘Heaven forfend this day!’ The constables rushed to assist Florence while Blanche moaned ‘piteously’. As Blanche escorted Florence out of court, she cried out, ‘God help my poor mother’ but Sarah declared:

  Don’t cry my child. There’s a God in heaven and I will g
et justice in a higher court. I will get justice . . . Oh, why didn’t they tell the truth? Oh, oh, God forgive them. God forgive them. Oh, they will kill me.

  With outstretched arms, she stood and fell to the floor in a faint, although she was rapidly revived with a bit of sprinkled water. Was Sarah’s statement the product of real distress or make-believe? Out of all the witnesses, who had not told the truth? Minnie or Horace? Clarice? Agnes Todd?

  John was the only family member to remain unaffected by the verdict. He continued his ‘air of nonchalance’ and talked and joked with the police constables in court ‘as if he had not the slightest trouble on his mind’. He may even have found it amusing when Mr Williamson attempted to enter the lion’s den one more time:

  Mr Williamson: At this stage, Mr. Coroner I will ask for bail.

  Coroner: Certainly not . . .

  Mr Williamson: [T]hey are entitled—

  Coroner: I have a discretion and I intend to use it. I distinctly refuse bail.

  But there were more surprises in store. When the Makins were returned to Central police station, fresh charges were laid by Captain Fisher, who charged Sarah and John with having caused the death of the illegitimate child of a Miss Amber Murray on or about 27 June last. Even more surprisingly, Blanche and Florence, who thought they were free, were charged ‘on suspicion with having been concerned in causing the death of’ that child and rearrested.10 Bail was not allowed and they returned, a distressed family, to Darlinghurst Gaol.

  Constable Joyce’s obsessions had more than paid off. But who was Miss Amber Murray?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The obsessions of James Joyce: digging, redigging and more digging

  9–14 November 1892

  On Tuesday 9 November 1892 there ‘were some fresh and sensational developments’ in relation to the ‘mysterious MacDonaldtown discoveries’ when Senior Constable Joyce ordered his constables to take their picks and shovels to Redfern. He had continued his obsessive investigations during the Burren Street inquests, ‘not sparing either time or labour’ to gather more evidence to prosecute the Makins. As he began to realise that the Makins had been baby farming for much longer than he originally thought, he tracked down all the previous addresses of the Makins for the past two years. Because this particular Tuesday in November was a public holiday, it was ‘considered a good day to re-commence digging operations’ since the police hoped there would be enough locals ‘holiday-making’ so they could dig in peace. Joyce selected the two addresses that had been most recently occupied by the Makins.1

  The house at 55 Botany Street was the first in a terrace of eight houses known as Smith’s Terrace about two minutes’ walk from Redfern police station. The Makins had relocated there on 16 August after their hurried departure from Burren Street. Oddly enough, they left about ten days later after the landlord gave the Makins notice to quit.

  When Constables Brown and Griffin arrived at 55 Botany Street, they found the backyard had been recently bricked over and decided if there had been any buried babies, their remains would have been discovered by the workmen. Upon hearing this news, Joyce sent his men to the house the Makins had lived in just before moving to Burren Street. Number 109 George Street, Redfern was a roomy, ‘pleasant-looking cottage of a kind suited for a workman in receipt of good wages’. Located next to the post office which backed onto Redfern Court, it was just one door up from the Redfern police station. At the time, the cottage was owned by Mr Jacob Fischer, although it no longer exists today.

  Joyce and the Redfern police had previously inspected the backyard, with the permission of the new tenant, Mr Ralph, who, coincidentally, was the assistant stationmaster at Macdonaldtown. Mrs Ralph told the police that when she and her family moved in she had ‘noticed almost immediately . . . a most offensive odour proceeding from the back yard’ which she put down to bad drainage.

  The backyard was divided ‘into two unequal parts by a substantial iron-railed fence’. As soon as Joyce entered the backyard he pointed to the section closest to the house, which had once been a garden enclosed by the wall of the kitchen, the fence of the next door neighbour and the iron-railed fence, and declared: ‘If we find anything it will be there’. He reckoned that if there were any bodies they would be found here because it was the most concealed spot from the neighbours and the earth was soft enough for digging.

  Not long after the digging started on this wet November day, the first body was found, a badly decomposed baby wrapped in a red and black shawl with a small slit on the side of its skull. Despite the public holiday, a crowd of about 200 people had gathered to see the baby extracted from a grave about eighteen inches deep. The clamour and chatter were deafening as more digging in a corner of the garden uncovered two more bodies, well wrapped together in a piece of black shawl with square patterns on it.

  While these three bodies were transported to the South Sydney morgue, the police continued to dig in the heat and the ‘indescribable’ stench as they tried to keep the sightseers from overrunning the yard. They found nothing else in the enclosed garden. Perhaps it was the tenant of the house, Mrs Ralph, who then produced a bottle of disinfectant which was liberally splashed around to ‘keep down the smell’. As the police paused, sweating in their heavy woollen uniforms, ‘the idea occurred to . . . Joyce to dig up the beaten path which ran along the side of the back kitchen’, which was the most concealed spot from the neighbours. Without knowing it, Joyce had made a momentous decision that would cement the fate of the Makins and change the course of legal history.

  It was just underneath the kitchen window that he found a fourth body wrapped in ‘some gray stuff and white calico’. Although the digging continued until five o’clock no more bodies were found, while the Ralphs had to deal with the excited sightseers who did not disperse until well into the evening.

  These discoveries meant that 11 dead babies had been found in the backyards of two houses lived in by the Makins. Joyce was struck by the fact that the bodies found in Burren and George streets had all been wrapped ‘in the same manner and buried at about the same depth, something under 2ft’. Although the backyard at 109 George Street had a rear entrance, Joyce supposed that ‘if persons living elsewhere buried the infants . . . they would not choose the spot nearest the house’.

  The dig at George Street gave Joyce renewed impetus. On the morning of 10 November, Constables Brown and Griffin were ordered by Joyce to return to 55 Botany Street. Although they dug up the brick paving in that backyard for over an hour with a growing crowd pushing into the yard, no bodies were found. Joyce was undeterred. He ordered his constables to visit 2 Kettle Street, where the Makins had lived for about three months from January to May 1892. They found ‘most of the yard had been asphalted’ and was ‘hard as adamant’. Instead, the constables dug up a piece of adjacent land where the Makins had been in the habit of depositing their rubbish. No bodies were found there or in a nearby house at 16 East Street.

  Dissatisfied with his constables’ work, Joyce decided to go over old ground. In East Street he ‘turned out the contents of a woodshed and tore up the ground’ and ordered his constables to drive ‘their picks into nearly every inch of the hard footpaths’. When nothing was found, they trooped back to 55 Botany Street, under the obsessive eye of Joyce, who ordered them to search outside the backyard in a right of way and a deserted stable. Still there was no sign of dead babies.

  Like a starving man, Joyce was unfulfilled but he had to call it quits. He was now required at the South Sydney morgue where the post-mortems on the George Street babies were about to be held. But the one place Joyce had not thought to dig was the nearby Redfern Park, an obvious place for late night burials.

  Hunches and dividends: the excitement in Levey Street

  Digging resumed the next morning, on Thursday 11 November, at 11 Alderson Street, a narrow thoroughfare off Kettle Street close to Redfern Park. The street consisted of a row of single-storey cottages, ‘chiefly occupied by Assyrians and other coloured
people’.2 The Makins had lived in a three-roomed cottage at number 11 for less than two months from 7 December 1891 to 28 January 1892 according to Mr Illsley of 59 Alderson Street, who let the house to the Makins. Although the yard at number 11 ‘was almost completely open to the view’ of neighbours, Constable Griffin discovered the body of an infant wrapped in a piece of black cloth at a depth of two or three feet. Joyce’s hunches were paying dividends.

  When the body was examined by Dr Milford, it was covered in adipocere which, mixed with soil, had the consistency of mortar. After an examination of the skeleton, Dr Milford estimated that the child, called Baby E, was between two and six weeks old when it died, but was unable to give a cause of death or determine its sex.3 The presence of grave wax that is hard and crumbly indicates that Baby E had undergone rapid decomposition—something that is more likely to occur if it was buried in summer. This supposition coincides with the time the Makins were living in Alderson Street—the summer of 1891–92—and is supported by Dr Milford’s estimation that the child had been dead 6–12 months.

  Never before had the newspapers had so many gruesome details to report since ‘[a]lmost every day some new development of a horrifying character is brought to light by the efforts of the police in connection with the great baby-farming case’. The next new development was the dig at 28 Levey Street, Chippendale two days later, on 13 November.4

  After re-examining the backyard of Burren Street, where they failed to find the eighth body John Makin had confessed to Edward Jordan, Constables Joyce and Brown made their way to Levey Street, undeterred by the overcast and muggy weather. The Makins had lived in Levey Street for about six or seven weeks in the second half of 1891. The house was a two-storey terrace with about five rooms, standing in a row of other similar houses next door to the Appin Hotel. It still stands today. Like most of the streets in which the Makins lived, Levey Street was ‘occupied by houses of an inferior class, which are let to persons of humble means’. Named ‘Redfern’ and ‘Chippendale’ after the original landholders,5 these inner city suburbs had developed to provide housing for workers in the railway workshops and other local industries.6 By 1858, the housing was described as ‘a shocking sight’, consisting of ‘two long continuous rows of weatherboard cottages’ which were ‘filthy’ and ‘uniformly abominable throughout’.7