She Devils Around the World

by Sylvia Perrini

  After funeral expenses, this left his widow Margaret with a profit of around £100, ($162) making Margaret Higgins a wealthy widow.

  Thomas’s brother Patrick, who had heard the gossip surrounding the house at 5 Skirving Street, was highly suspicious of his brother’s death, due to his brother’s former health and vigor. When he learned that five insurance policies had been taken out in his brother’s name, he contacted the authorities.

  Catherine and Margaret hosted an Irish style wake in the Ascot Street house. It is frequently joked that the only difference between an Irish wedding and an Irish wake is that there is one less person present to enjoy the heavy drinking that accompanies the occasions.

  During the wake, as the hearse waited outside the house, the drinking mourners were surprised by the arrival of officials from the coroner’s office who forced entry into the house and demanded that a full autopsy was to be carried out on Thomas’s corpse.

  Catherine on hearing this news fled through the back door dressed in her black mourning clothes and went into hiding.

  The coroner during his post-mortem examination of Thomas’s body found traces of arsenic in several of Thomas’s organs. His examination concluded that Thomas had died of arsenic poisoning over a period of several days.

  During a search of the house in Ascot Street, Dr Campbell Brown, a poison expert, found a bottle containing a white substance that was arsenic that had been obtained by dissolving flypaper covered in arsenic in water. Further traces of arsenic were discovered in a pocket of one of Margaret’s dresses.

  Margaret was immediately placed under arrest, and the police sought Catherine. Catherine succeeded in evading capture for a few days as she moved from one boarding house to another, but was eventually arrested in the nearby Liverpool suburb of Wavertree.

  Margaret and Catherine were both formally charged with the murder of Thomas on October 16, 1883.

  The police, then ordered for the bodies of John Flannagan, Mary Higgins, and Margaret Jennings to be exhumed and examined. All three bodies showed evidence of death by arsenic poisoning.

  During police questioning, Catherine attempted to blame the murders onto her younger sister Margaret even offering to turn Queen’s Evidence. Her offer was rejected.

  More worryingly to investigators was Catherine’s claims that the murders they had committed were not the only ones carried out in the area and that the fraudulent burial insurance scam was a way for widows or others to escape poverty. The other women that Catherine claimed to have also benefited from the scam had all been associated with suspicious deaths, but the police did not have sufficient evidence to prosecute them.

  Catherine and Margaret’s trial in 1884 was a sensation and was widely covered by the media of the time, causing the public gallery to be full, and with a long queue awaiting for admittance. The prosecution alleged, during the trial that Catherine was the brains behind the scheme. The jury found both Catherine and Margaret guilty of murder and the judge sentenced them to be hanged. On hearing the sentence, Catherine, then aged 55, showed no emotion and Margaret, aged 41, collapsed.

  In the midst of a bitterly cold, snow storm at Kirkdale Prison, on 3 March1884, in front of an estimated one thousand people, Catherine and Margaret, accompanied by a Roman Catholic priest and prison guards climbed twenty-two grey stone steps to the scaffold were they were hung by the executioner Bartholomew Binns.

  The Flannagan’s sisters case caused a furor in the press and prompted the government of the day to review the law that allowed people's lives to be insured without their knowledge.

  Wax effigies of Catherine and Margaret were made after their executions and put on display in Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors.

  JESSIE KING

  Jessie King lived in Canonmills, Edinburgh, Scotland with her boyfriend Thomas Pearson. She was a baby caregiver who had recently started this career. One child that was in her care was a baby boy called Alexander Gunn. He appeared to be well-cared for but all of a sudden mysteriously disappeared. Shortly after this, Jessie moved to the Stockbridge area of Edinburgh. Here, she took in a baby girl. Like Alexander, she mysteriously vanished.

  A group of young boys playing on wasteland in the Stockbridge area of Edinburgh stumbled across a long brown paper parcel. They began to kick it about to each other. Eventually the parcel fell apart, and a dead body rolled out in front of their horrified eyes. Frightened, the boys ran to fetch a policeman. A constable Stewart returned with the boys to the wasteland. He noted that the body was badly decomposed and took it to the local mortuary. Dr Henry Littlejohn examined the little body. In his report, he noted that the little corpse had a mummified appearance and was wrapped in an oilskin coat. He was a male child; he speculated, and he was between twelve-to-eighteen-months in age and in previous good health. An apron string had been tied twice around the neck and pulled so tightly it had become embedded in the skin. The baby had been strangled. A police investigation was launched.

  A local builder in the area, James Banks, was distressed on hearing the news about the finding of a dead baby so close to his home on Cheyne Street. A few months previously, he had started renting a room to a couple who called themselves Mr and Mrs. Macpherson. Mrs Macpherson was pregnant. He felt uneasy about them. Apart from the room, he also rented them a coal cellar which they kept locked. One day, Mrs Macpherson had driven up to the house with a baby girl, Isabella Banks. When he had asked whose baby it was, Mrs Macpherson replied that it was her friend’s who would be calling by later to collect her. The baby was never seen again. Mrs Macpherson requested Mr Banks that if a young servant girl came looking for her would he please tell her that she was out. Mrs Macpherson had left the house near the end of her pregnancy to stay with her sister, she had told Mr Banks. When she returned without the baby, she told Mr Banks that she had left it with her sister, explaining that the countryside was a far healthier place for a child.

  Mr Banks decided to go to the police. The police were extremely interested, as a Mrs Tomlinson had reported her baby granddaughter missing. She had told the police that her daughter, Alice Tomlinson, a domestic maid had given birth to a baby girl, Violet Duncan Tomlinson, in the Edinburgh Maternity hospital. Her daughter, Mrs Tomlinson explained, was in no position to care for a child, so she had housed them both until they found someone to adopt the baby. Mrs Tomlinson had advertised the baby, and a number of applicants had applied. Among them was a Mrs Burns, of Cheyne Street, who had submitted the lowest price. She had said that she wanted the baby for her childless sister and her husband who worked for a Duke. Mrs Burns said the baby would be brought up on the Duke’s estate in the countryside. Mrs Tomlinson had liked the idea of her granddaughter being raised in the countryside and had handed her granddaughter, at the age of one month and two pound coins to Mrs Burns.

  Since then, Mrs Tomlinson had paid several visits to the house on Cheyne Street to find out news on her granddaughter but had each time been informed that no Mrs Burns lived at that address. This had made her feel suspicious, so she went and made a statement to the police. With Mrs Tomlinson’s report and Mr Bank’s report, the police decided to visit the Cheyne street house themselves and question Mrs. Macpherson.

  At the house, they began to question Mrs. Macpherson, alias Mrs Burns. They asked her where Violet Tomlinson was. She told them that she was with her sister in the countryside being well taken care of. The police started to search the premises. They found the key to the coal cellar at which point Jessie King, alias Mrs. Macpherson, alias Mrs Burns, broke down and confessed.

  The police went down to the coal cellar and were confronted by scenes of horror. The corpse of a baby girl bundled in a piece of canvas cloth was found lying on a shelf. It was the body of Violet Tomlinson. On another shelf, there was a stain in the shape of a small child’s body, together with some scraps of cloth matching those found in the parcel on the waste land. Also found were various bits of children’s clothing; to whom they belonged, no one would ever know.


  Jessie was arrested and charged with both murders. There were suspicions of another child in her care that had gone missing, but no evidence to back it up, and the fate of Jessie King’s own baby was never revealed.

  In February of 1889, Jessie King stood trial for Alexander’s murder. In her statement to the court, she said that she had strangled Alexander in a state of "drunken melancholy." As to the little girl, she claimed that she had given her whisky to help her sleep but not to kill her. The post-mortem of Violet Tomlinson, however, showed death by strangulation.

  Jessie King was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Jessie King, while awaiting her execution in her condemned cell, attempted to strangle herself with strips of cloth she had torn from her skirt.

  On Monday the 11th of March 1889, she was hanged by James Berry. He reportedly said, "In all his life he never saw a woman meet her death so bravely." Prison officers said she was "Calm in the extreme" before her death.

  Jessie King was the last woman hanged in Edinburgh.

  AMELIA ELIZABETH DYER

  Amelia Elizabeth Dyer was the youngest daughter of Samuel Hobley, a master shoemaker, and his wife Sarah Hobley. She had three brothers Thomas, James, and William, and a sister Ann. They lived in a small village just east of the town of Bristol in England. Growing up in a modestly, wealthy home, she was educated in reading and writing and would spend hours lost in books, reading both poetry and literature.

  Amelia’s childhood was somewhat spoiled by her mother’s mental illness which was attributed to typhus. Following her mother's early death, Amelia moved to Bristol to live with an aunt. Here, she met and married a George Thomas who was nearly sixty at the time of their marriage.

  Following her marriage, she became a trainee nurse, a grueling but respectable occupation. Amelia became pregnant with a daughter and had to give up nursing when Ellen Thomas was born. Shortly afterwards her husband George Thomas died, and Amelia needed to earn money.

  As a nurse, she had learnt about baby farming. Amelia began placing advertisements in newspapers offering to nurse or adopt babies. For adoptions, she would charge a large single payment plus clothing for the infant. In her ads and subsequent meetings with customers, Amelia would assure them that she was a respectable, married woman who would give the child a loving and safe home.

  Amelia Dyer, soon after receiving the money for the infant, would murder the child so she would not have to bear the cost of caring for them. She began working in Bristol but moved to Reading when a doctor started to become suspicious about the number of baby death certificates he was writing out for infants in her care.

  In 1895, three infant corpses were found drowned in the River Thames. They had all been strangled with white tape that was still wrapped around their necks, packed into parcels, and thrown into the river.

  The following year, seven more similarly packaged dead strangled babies were found in the River Thames. The police began investigating the baby farms in the area. They visited Amelia Dyer’s home. The first thing that struck the police as ominous was the smell of human decomposition, although they found no decomposing bodies. They did, however, discover plenty of other evidence. This included white tape, telegrams relating to adoptions, children’s clothing, pawn tickets, receipts for newspaper advertisements, and written letters from mothers pleading for news of their children.

  The police arrested Amelia on the charge of murder. She had been running her business by this time for at least fifteen years. She reportedly said to the police,

  "I used to like to watch them with the tape wrapped about their necks, but it was soon all over with them."

  When the police asked her how many babies she had killed, she simply replied,

  “You’ll recognize mine because of the tape.”

  In 1896, on the twenty-first of May, Amelia stood trial at the London Old Bailey. She was charged with just one murder. The prosecution reasoned that if they lost this case, they had plenty more cases to charge her with. The trial lasted two days. The defense pleaded insanity as she had twice been committed to mental hospitals in Bristol.

  The jury was unconvinced and took just minutes before returning a verdict of guilty. The Judge passed a sentence of death by hanging. While awaiting her execution, she attempted to strangle herself with her bootlaces.

  She was hung by James Billington at Newgate prison on Wednesday, the 10th of June, 1896.

  In the month awaiting her execution at Newgate prison, she wrote pages and pages of her supposedly "true confession." The evening before she was to be hung, the priest visited her and asked Amelia if she wanted to say anything. She gave him her written pages and reputedly said,

  "Is this enough?"

  As Amelia stood on the scaffold before her hanging, she was asked if she wished to say anything. She replied that she did not.

  It is unlikely that the actual number of the children she killed will ever be known. When Amelia was arrested, she had been baby-farming for between 15 to 20 years. Some estimates have suggested that Mrs. Dyer may have murdered in excess of four hundred babies.

  ADA CHARD-WILLIAMS

  Ada Chard-Williams was only in her early twenties when she began her career in the baby farming business.

  One of her unfortunate customers was an unmarried young mother, Florence Jones. Florence realized that she could not afford to keep her baby daughter Selina. At her wit’s end as to how to cope, she read a newspaper advertisement in the Woolwich Herald on August 18, 1899:

  It seemed like the answer to Florence’s plight. She liked the idea of being able to give her child a better life than the one she could provide. She contacted the advertiser at an address in Hammersmith, London.

  A Mrs. Hewetson wrote back and arranged to meet Florence and her baby daughter at the railway station of Charing Cross, London at the end of August 1899. At the meeting, Mrs. Hewetson agreed to take Selina on for the fee of five pounds. Florence had only three pounds on her but promised to bring the other two pounds within a month to an address that Mrs. Hewetson had provided in Hammersmith, London. Florence, with a heavy heart, gave her daughter and a bag of her clothes and three pounds in cash to Mrs. Hewetson. Florence firmly believed she was doing the right thing by her daughter, as Mrs. Hewetson seemed so caring and maternal.

  When Florence eventually made the journey to Hammersmith to pay the outstanding two pounds she could find neither her daughter nor the motherly Mrs. Hewetson. The address she had been given was a newspaper shop. Unbeknownst to Florence, this newsagent was a paid mail pick up address where Mr. Chard-Williams collected all letters addressed to Mrs. Hewetson.

  Distraught and worried about her daughter, Florence Jones contacted the police. On hearing Florence’s story, the police began an investigation. They first visited the newsagents where they discovered that the woman Florence knew was, in fact, Ada Williams, not “Mrs. Hewetson.” They then visited the address the newsagent had on record for Ada Chard Williams but found that it was false. The investigation then stalled until September 27th, 1899. A package containing a small child’s body was found in Battersea, London in the river Thames. The parcel was tied with twine using a knot called a Fisherman’s bend. The post-mortem revealed that the twenty-one-month old baby had been battered and strangled to death. The young, broken-hearted Florence identified the child as her daughter Selina.

  The police stepped up their efforts to discover Ada Chard-Williams. It was a difficult task, every time they got a lead, she had moved on. Then, they received a letter from Mrs. Hewetson on December fifth, 1899. In the letter, she claimed to have read of the murder of baby Selina in the newspaper. She denied the murder but admitted having taken charge of the baby but had since sold her to a woman in Croydon. Ada was eventually found, arrested and, along with her husband, charged with strangling and battering to death twenty-one-month old Selina Jones.

  The police, during a search of her home, found parcels containing children’s clothes tied with twine using an unusual knot called a ‘
Fisherman’s bend’. This was to be an important part of the evidence at Ada’s Old Bailey trial.

  Mr. and Mrs. Chard-Williams went on trial at London’s Old Bailey on the sixteenth of February, 1900. The jury found Ada Chard-Williams guilty of strangling and battering to death Selina Jones. Her husband was found not guilty. Ada was only charged with one murder. Despite the fact other children’s bodies where found in the River Thames parceled up with twine using a Fisherman’s bend knot.

  On Tuesday, the sixth of March, 1900, Ada Chard-Williams, at the age of twenty-four, was hanged by the executioner James Billington in Newgate prison.

  Ada Chard-Williams was the last woman to be executed at Newgate prison.

  ANNIE WALTERS and AMELIA SACH

  The “Finchley Baby Farmers”

  Frances Amelia Sach, née Thorne, was born in Hampreston, Dorset, England on May 5, 1867. She was the fourth born child out of ten children. She had three sisters and six brothers. She trained as a midwife and moved to London after her father found work there as a handy-man. While in London, she met Jeffrey Sach, a builder. They married in 1896, and Amelia gave birth to a daughter they named Lillian who was born in Clapham, London.

  In the summer of 1902, at the age of twenty nine, Amelia Sachs opened a "nursing home" in East Finchley, London for unmarried mothers. It was a large, semi-detached house called Claymore House.

  Amelia would place advertisements in London newspapers calling herself Nurse Thorne that would read: