The Baby Farmers

by Annie Cossins

  The street in which the Makins had lived was named after Solomon Levey, an ex-convict who had been transported to Sydney in 1815 to serve a seven year sentence as an accessory to the theft of 90 pounds of tea and a wooden chest. His transportation was the making of him, since Levey prospered as a storekeeper, shipbroker and agent so that by 1825 he claimed a turnover of £60,000 a year.8 As one of Sydney’s early and successful entrepreneurs with a shrewd economic mind, Levey would have understood the market economy the Makins were engaged in but possibly not the cruelty of the baby trade.

  The new tenant of 28 Levey Street, Mr Rivers, had approached the police after reading about the ‘Mysterious Discoveries’ in Burren Street and because he had noticed unpleasant odours coming from his backyard for some time. This was something neighbours had also noticed when the Makins were in residence: ‘horrible odors were always noticed about the place, and anyone who went into [the] house was in the habit of remarking on the disagreeable smell in the kitchen’.

  Constables Joyce and Brown arrived in a police van from Burren Street shortly before four o’clock in light, drizzling rain. They found a backyard that was surrounded by ‘an ordinary paling fence’ and ‘open to observation, except near the kitchen wall’ where it was more concealed. Experience had shown Joyce that the best place to find a body was in an area of soft ground hidden from the view of neighbours.

  Despite the rain, ‘as soon as the news spread that the police were digging’, a large crowd ‘flocked to the scene’, climbing fences and neighbours’ vegetables gardens, ‘determined to obtain a glimpse of what was going on’:

  [t]he fences and outhouses were literally black with people, and many climbed on to the roofs of houses which overlooked the yard in their endeavours to see what was going on.

  Supplied with the ‘necessary implements’ by the tenant of 28 Levey Street, the two constables ‘set to work’ in the midst of the chattering crowd as theories and opinions were swapped and crucial information, such as the fact that two babies had been in the care of the Makins during their stay in Levey Street, was shared.

  At about 5 p.m. ‘[s]uddenly a halt was made’. The onlookers craned forward. After digging near the kitchen wall, Joyce removed something from the ground. When the crowd realised the police had unearthed the bones of an infant the excitement intensified with ‘men and boys nearly tumbl[ing] off the roofs in their eagerness’ to see. But ‘hardly had the spade been put into the ground again when, at the same spot, immediately underneath, another parcel of bones was found’. By the time the bodies were discovered, the crowd had broken down the paling fence. As they surged through, the shouts of surprise and revenge probably drowned out the stentorian voices of the police, with the noise and the rain and the awful discoveries turning the afternoon into an unpleasant suburban rabble.

  Both bodies had been buried together at a depth of two feet and were the most decomposed found so far, consisting of skeletal remains only, although one still had hair attached to the skull. While bodies buried at a depth of two feet or more generally decompose slowly because of low temperatures, lack of oxygen and insect activity, a burial during the summer of December 1891, when the Makins were in residence in Levey Street, would have speeded up the decomposition process. The bodies were wrapped in badly degraded cloth which ‘fell to pieces when handled’. While the police went on to dig the whole of the backyard to a depth of two feet no other bodies were found. One newspaper reported that this depth was greater than any of the other burials found so far so that ‘it is probable that had any of the infants been placed at that depth in the ground at [any] other house’ they may have been missed by the police.9 When Dr Milford examined the remains at the morgue, he found a box containing ‘greyish sandy soil, debris of wood, stone and glass, with bones’ and a piece of rotting blanket. He separated out the bones of a sheep and pieced together ‘portions of two skeletons’ which were called G and H. Baby G had a clean cut fracture to one of the skull bones, although this could have been the result of the police digging.

  The depth of burial and the fact that only skeletal remains were discovered fitted Dr Milford’s estimated time of burial of 9–14 months. The femurs of Baby G were measured at 33 .8 of an inch while those of Baby H were three inches in length. These measurements allowed Dr Milford to estimate that Baby G was aged about six months and Baby H from three to ten weeks at the time of their deaths, although he could not determine their sex.10

  After the constables had finished digging the backyard of 28 Levey Street, neighbours told them they were confident that ‘if the floorboards were removed more bodies would be found’. They also revealed that the day after the Makins left 28 Levey Street, children broke in and wandered through the empty house. In an upstairs bedroom they found a little parcel. One of them took it home to her mother who unwrapped the bloodstained calico to find five long, very fine, rusty needles which were too long and fine for sewing. Because the neighbour saw nothing sinister in the package, she put the needles aside and they were eventually lost. This discovery would later form the basis of Joyce’s theory about how the Makins murdered their baby-farmed children.

  When Constable Joyce raised some of the floorboards of the kitchen of the Levey Street house, he found nothing but dead rats along with bones and rubbish collected by the rats, all of which accounted for the smell coming from the house. No more babies’ bodies were found in Levey Street, or during another dig at 113 Bullanaming Street, Redfern where the Makins had lived for five or six weeks some time in 1889.11 Although Constable Joyce also dug up the backyard of 6 Wells Street, where he had first interviewed the Makins, he made no additional discoveries.

  An awkward number

  At the end of Joyce’s obsessive, six days of digging, including Burren Street, a total of 12 bodies had been discovered, although one body was later found to be sheep bones. Together with the two babies who had been dug up by the drain-layers in Burren Street, 13 dead babies had been discovered since that October day in Macdonaldtown when the Makins’ lives began to unravel. All up, the discoveries represented ‘the biggest system . . . of baby-murdering operations that had ever been carried on in the colony’.12

  This total does not include another decomposed baby found by a passer-by in a vacant allotment in Zamia Street, Redfern. The male child, who was about two weeks old and had been dead for some days, was suspected to ‘have been disinterred from the backyard of the Makins’ house in Wells street’.13 If this was the case, the disinterment occurred just after Joyce’s first visit to the Makins on 12 October. Joyce had taken a look around 6 Wells Street the day he returned to interview Sarah and found a hole in the backyard. Although empty, he was struck by the smell of death emanating from it. The neighbours had seen him ‘taking up handfuls of earth . . . and smelling the earth, and much amusement was created’ at the sight of Joyce’s strange behaviour. When questioned, Makin gave the excuse that he had buried something which ‘the dogs must have uprooted’.14

  Joyce was convinced the Zamia Street baby was associated with the Makins, since he had been ‘wrapped up in a manner’ similar to Babies A and B (of Burren Street). Agnes Todd and Mrs Sutherland were able to identify some of the clothing on the baby as that worn by Baby Elsie when she was adopted by the Makins.

  It is a short walk from Wells Street to Zamia Street, Redfern. Shorter at night, when a person is in a hurry with a small bundle under his arm, carrying a shovel. Perhaps it was before Constable Joyce had interviewed her that Sarah, in a panic, had ordered John to get rid of the baby buried in the backyard. Sometime on the evening of 12 October 1892, John dug up the dead infant in the backyard of Wells Street, breathing through his mouth as the smell of death deepened. He was in a hurry, guilt-edged with Sarah’s panic. Not thinking clearly, he forgot to fill in the burial hole as Sarah worried about where to hide the body.

  John walked to the end of Wells Street with his smelly parcel, turned right into Chalmers then left into Redfern Street. With few gas lights, he was
well camouflaged by the shadows. He stopped as he turned right into Zamia Street, where not even a rat hissed. He quickly scraped a shallow grave in a vacant lot with the shovel, unlike the deep graves he had previously dug. Close to the surface, the grave sent a strong, odorous invitation to local dogs, since the discovery was reported to the police the day after Joyce interviewed Sarah.15

  It is very likely there were other babies who were never discovered by the police. Although Constable Joyce thought he knew the Makins’ pattern of disposal, the Makins are likely to have used a variety of places. While Joyce had lifted floorboards in the Levey Street house, the canny Makins appear to have dug graves under other floorboards when they ran out of space in a particular backyard, as another inquest would later reveal.

  Although Joyce told newspaper reporters he intended to visit all the Makins’ former houses going back five or six years, no more digging took place because Joyce thought it was only in the last twelve months that they had engaged in ‘suspicious operations’. What Joyce did not know was that the peripatetic Makins had relocated frequently between 1884 and 1888, suggesting a family who was either evading rent or anxious mothers.

  Snapshot of a baby farmer

  The bodies discovered in Burren and George streets provide a snapshot of the Makins’ activities over a twelve week period. During this time they had at least ten babies in their care. If they were adopting about one baby per week this could mean they were adopting about 50 children per year. Some weeks may have been more lucrative than others. From 23 to 27 June they adopted four babies (for a total of £7 10s) which allowed them to pay four weeks’ rent in advance when they leased 25 Burren Street.

  The Makins had been baby farming since at least 1889. A former neighbour told police that when the Makins ‘cleared out of a house in Redfern’ in 1889, they left a baby behind whom the neighbour took to the Benevolent Asylum.16 Because the Makins’ house-moving increased in frequency from 1889 to 1892, it is likely they were constantly avoiding inquisitive mothers rather than avoiding the payment of rent. If so, they could have adopted at least 150 babies during this three year period. But how did the babies die?

  Because Minnie Davies and Horace Bothamley reported no sounds of crying babies when they visited Burren Street, the Makins must have drugged their babies using Godfrey’s Cordial. Miss Davies had testified that on one of her visits to Burren Street, the Makins had given her daughter a mixture which soothed and stopped her crying. The Makins would have been well aware of the effects of too much opium on babies and the varying concentrations of different chemists’ mixtures.

  We know from the outcome of the inquest into the death of Baby Mignonette that the Makins were found responsible for starving her. At the George Street inquests, we will hear from another mother who will give evidence that her baby was thin and hungry when she saw her child, suggesting that underfeeding, along with liberal doses of Godfrey’s Cordial, was, as for most baby farmers, part of the Makins’ repertoire. Yet Constable Joyce had a different theory which was based on the discovery of bloodstains on the wrappings of one of the infants found buried in George Street. These bloodstains were on the left hand side, near the armpit and the baby’s heart. Similar stains had been found on the wrappings of Baby 2 (of Burren Street). These bloodstains and the discovery of a packet of long, fine needles in the Makins’ empty house in Levey Street had confirmed for Joyce his ‘theory that death was caused . . . by a large needle being driven through the heart from the left side’.17 A doctor had told a reporter that if such a long needle were to pierce the heart, death would not result immediately. The very small outside wound would probably close and the children would die a lingering death from a slow internal haemorrhage.18 Perhaps this was the final act causing death when the Makins found it necessary to quickly dispose of their drugged, underfed babies as they prepared for another late night move.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Mothers, mothers everywhere: the George Street inquests begin

  12 November–16 December 1892

  Sydneysiders were in for more excitement and intrigue with the beginning of yet another set of inquests after Constable Joyce’s busy day of digging at 109 George Street. The Burren Street inquests had lasted 14 days with 26 witnesses and 453 sheets of evidence being faithfully written down by an exhausted clerk of the court.1 If the government had been able to charge for seats in the Coroner’s Court, they would have made a tidy sum.

  At the George Street inquests, the public’s fascination with the Makins turned to ridicule as they were escorted, handcuffed and herded between their police guards, from the Coroner’s Court at Chancery Square across Hyde Park to Central police station at the end of each day, with crowds heckling, gawking and throwing bits of rotten food. Once so cavalier and untouchable, the Makins were now the subjects of a ditty that mocked them:

  Big Constables James and Brown

  Went to Macdonaldtown

  Many babies there were found

  Buried underneath the ground.

  What will Mother Makin say

  On Resurrection day

  When those kids rise up and say

  Ta-ra-ra, ta-boom-dee-ay.2

  Before the George Street inquests commenced, Constables Joyce and Brown had been ‘out all hours of the night hunting up witnesses’. Joyce took evidence from more than twenty, as well as five unmarried mothers who said they had given their children to the Makins. One of these babies was Horace Amber Murray, who was born on 30 May 1892 to 18-year-old Miss Amber Murray. When Miss Murray asked John about her baby in the courtroom, he shook his head and replied, ‘I will let you know that when I get in the witness box’. Each unmarried mother would experience highs and lows during the inquests and some would learn what had happened to her child. For others, their only comfort was seeing the Makins trapped for all to see in the dock of the King Street court.

  At the South Sydney morgue on Saturday, 13 November 1892, the Coroner opened the inquest into the deaths of the four babies found in the backyard of 109 George Street the previous Tuesday, who were called Babies A, B, C and D.3 Two of the babies were male and one was female while the sex of the fourth was unknown. All were in a similar state of decomposition, which seemed to confirm that receiving babies for ‘adoption’ was a regular practice of the Makins.

  The same 12 jurymen from the Burren Street inquests were sworn in. Sarah and John along with their two daughters were present at the morgue, all in police custody, for an unpleasant start to a third lot of inquests. The Makins knew the tightly spun ball of their secret lives had unravelled with babies, long dead, being dug up at an alarming rate. But they made no further statements to the police. Perhaps nearly two months in Darlinghurst Gaol had convinced them that silence was their only defence. Silence, hope and the vagaries of circumstantial evidence. They must have wondered whether it would be enough.

  ‘A great sensation’

  The first George Street inquest was quick and uncontroversial, if a little peculiar, since Dr Milford gave evidence that Baby A was actually a pile of sheep bones.4

  The second George Street inquest was much more interesting for the hungry spectators in the court. This inquest concerned the death of Baby B, a female, whose body had been discovered on 9 November wrapped in a shawl along with the pile of sheep bones. According to Dr Milford, she had died between two and six weeks of age, discarded with the leftovers of the Makins’ family meal.5

  During this inquest, Clarice Makin made another star appearance as a witness for the police. Almost immediately, her mother began to moan ‘and fell helpless on her husband’s shoulder’ while Constable Joyce gave her a glass of water to revive her. Sarah spent the rest of the morning with her face buried in her handkerchief, resting on John’s shoulder.

  Clarice identified the tweed material that had been found wrapped around Baby B as part of a shawl belonging to her mother. She had last seen it in George Street about a month before her parents moved to Burren Street. At the time she saw the shaw
l her mother was caring for four babies, two girls and two boys, although one of the female babies had disappeared before they left for Burren Street. Clarice did not know what became of it.

  Under questioning by the Coroner, Clarice then revealed the sensational evidence, amid ‘mutterings of surprise’ in the courtroom, that there had been six babies in the house at George Street who were all alive when her parents left for 25 Burren Street.6 Clarice recalled seeing Miss Amber Murray at the George Street house. Horace Amber Murray became the sixth child in the house. This evidence contradicted Clarice’s previous statement at the inquest into the death of Baby 4 (of Burren Street) when she said only two babies had been taken by her parents to Macdonaldtown. Under cross-examination by Mr Williamson, she explained she had said two because Constable Joyce had only asked about two babies. Although Clarice denied the suggestion that she and Joyce had discussed the evidence she would give at this inquest, what encouragement had Joyce given her?

  More cracks in the cone of silence

  Even though she could only read ‘a little’, Clarice read over the handwritten transcript of her evidence, and left the court on the receiving end of the ‘most insulting jeers’ from her whole family. Panicked by Clarice’s evidence, ‘a violent scene’ occurred between the Makin family ‘who appear[ed] to be divided amongst themselves’. As the court adjourned for lunch, Makin joked with the constables ‘about some wax figures that he heard were being exhibited as the Makin family’, ignoring Sarah, who was crying to herself, muttering, ‘Oh let me die, let me die’. Blanche began to abuse her father, at first inaudibly, then ‘with great vehemence she accused him of being the cause of all the trouble that they were in’. She rose to her feet and exclaimed: