This meant that a mother who was unmarried could enter ‘Claymore House,’ have the child, and then leave the home leaving the child at ‘Claymore House’ to be taken care of.
It was this advertisement that caught the attention of a servant girl named Ada Charlotte Galley. Ada Galley moved into Sach’s lying-in home and on November 15 1902, gave birth to a healthy boy.
Amelia Sachs persuaded Ada to give her baby up for adoption. She told Ada she would arrange this for twenty five pounds. She assured Ada that her baby son would be well cared for and would want for nothing and have a life cared for by a 'titled lady.’
A fifty-four year old who woman, Annie Walters, who claimed she was a nurse, despite being neither literate nor very bright, worked for Amelia Sachs. She lived in rented accommodation in Islington, on Danbury Street. Her landlady’s husband was a police officer. Once a mother had left Amelia Sach’s nursing home, Amelia would hand the baby over to Annie Walters. Annie would receive ten shillings to ‘take care’ of the baby.
On the morning of November 12th, a telegram was delivered to Annie Walters from Amelia Sachs - 'This evening at five o’clock’. Annie then left her house to go to Claymore House, arriving back later at Danbury Street with a baby boy. In answer to her landlady’s questions, Annie explained that she was handing the baby over the following day to a widowed woman in Piccadilly. The next day, Annie reported to the landlady that the lady was enchanted with the baby who was now beautifully clothed in 'lace and muslin.'
On the morning of November 15th, another telegram arrived for Annie from Claymore House, and Annie once again left Islington returning back to Danbury Street with another baby. This time she told her landlady that she was delivering the baby to a wife of a coastguard who she was meeting in South Kensington station. The landlady became suspicions and reported her suspicions to her policeman husband, who in turn reported it to his colleagues. The police decided to watch and follow Annie Walters.
Three days later, on November 18th, when Annie left Danbury Street carrying a baby, the police were on the case. A detective followed her to a tavern in South Kensington. Here, she went into the ladies' washroom. After waiting for her to reappear, the detective decided to enter the women’s room. Here, he found Annie holding a dead baby. The baby’s little hands were grasped tight, his tongue horribly swollen, and his lips a grotesque black and purple. The baby was the few days old son belonging to Ada Galley. The officer arrested her. She said to the officer,
“I didn’t kill the baby; I just gave it two tiny drops in its drinking bottle like I have myself.”
What Annie was referring to was chlorodyne, a deadly but freely obtainable mixture of cannabis, chloroform, and opium. Its use was originally for treating cholera. Given her statement to the officer, it’s possible that Annie was an addict of chlorodyne.
Annie’s room at Danbury Street was searched, and a number of telegrams from Claymore House found. They proceeded to Claymore House and arrested Amelia Sach. Amelia denied knowing any Annie Walters. When the police searched the premises at Claymore House, three hundred articles of baby clothing were found in Amelia’s bedroom.
Amelia Sachs
Both Annie Walters and Amelia Sach were arrested for murder, with Amelia Sach charged with accessory to murder. They were tried at London’s Old Bailey on the 15th of January, 1903 before Mr. Justice Darling. Both pleaded not guilty but neither woman gave evidence. It took the jury just forty minutes to find them guilty. Mr. Justice Darling sentenced them to be hanged.
Although the women were convicted of murdering one child, they were suspected of killing many more. According to newspaper reports and evidence at their trial, Annie Walters removed the babies from Claymore House and then drugged them with a lethal narcotic before wandering the streets looking for somewhere to dispose of the body in the Thames or burying it on a rubbish dump.
On a bitter winter's morning on Tuesday, February third, 1903, Amelia Sach and Annie Walters went to the Holloway Prison execution yard together. A brand new scaffold awaited them. William Billington, assisted by John Billington and Henry Pierrepoint, executed them.
On the day of her execution, Amelia Sach was said to have been in a state of virtual collapse in the condemned cell. Executioner Pierrepoint recorded in his diary the following:
Annie Walters is said to have called out “Goodbye Sach” as she was hooded on the trapdoors. They were the first women to be hanged at Holloway Prison, and they were the last double female hanging in England.
A fortnight after Amelia Sach and Annie Walters were arrested, nine starving infants and two newborn babies lying in the lid of an old rush basket were discovered in a house in Wood Green, not far away from Claymore House. The elderly woman in charge had received thirty pounds to care for each child.
RHODA WILLIS
Rhoda Leselles, nee Willes, was born in Sunderland to middle-class parents. Rhoda had a good, private education in London at a girl’s only boarding school. She was an attractive girl with a blaze of golden hair.
When she was about nineteen-years-old, she met Thomas Willis who she fell in love with and married. Thomas was an engineer living in Sunderland. Thomas and Rhoda relocated to Cardiff, Wales. Here, Rhoda had a baby girl. Her husband Thomas died shortly after, leaving Rhoda as a single mother. She then met a man called Macpherson, who was also an engineer, and they began living together. Macpherson and Rhoda had two daughters together. They eventually separated, and Rhoda moved to her brother’s house in Birmingham. She left her daughters in Cardiff with Macpherson.
She eventually moved back to Cardiff. Here, she found a room in Portmanmoor Road, Splott, and began drinking heavily.
Rhoda decided to take in babies for a living and put an ad in the Cardiff Evening Press. As an address, she used a P.O.Box No. The first reply she received was from Emily Stroud. Emily had given birth to a baby on the 20th of March, 1907. Rhoda took over the care of the child for eight weeks and then left it abandoned outside the Salvation Army Offices in Cardiff, with a letter explaining she was a single mother and could no longer cope with a child. Unfortunately, the baby was not found fast enough and died from exposure eight days after been found.
Another woman, Mrs. English, acting on behalf of Maude Treasure her pregnant sister, contacted Rhoda, who was now using the alias Leslie James. During the correspondence between the two women, they agreed that Rhoda, a.k.a Leslie James, would take care of the baby for the sum of eight pounds once it was born. On the fourth of June, 1907 at Hengoed station, Rhoda picked up the baby girl and made out a receipt which she handed to Lydia English. Rhoda took the baby girl on the train and returned to Portmanmoor Road. On the journey, she smothered the baby to death and bundled the body up into a parcel. When she got back to her room, she left the parcel on the floor and wrote a letter to Mrs. English saying,
"I am just about to leave on my journey North. Baby has just had a nice bath. She is so lovely."
On the fifth of June, Rhoda went out and returned back to her room drunk. Her landlady helped her to bed. While she was helping Rhoda, she tripped over a parcel on the floor. The landlady opened it and was shocked and horrified to discover the corpse of a tiny baby girl. The police were called and placed Rhoda Willis under arrest for murder. Rhoda was held in custody until her trial on June the 23rd of 1907at the Glamorgan assizes in front of Commissioner Shee.
Rhoda put in a plea of not guilty. She insisted that the baby girl had been sick and had died due to natural causes. A post-mortem of the infant showed it had died of asphyxia. There was also the evidence of the letters. Handwriting experts were called to the court and testified that the writing on a letter discovered with the baby that had been left by the Salvation Army offices was in Rhoda’s writing. They further testified that it was identical to the writing on the letter Rhoda had sent to Mrs. English and also matched the writing on a receipt for eight pounds that Rhoda had given to Mrs. English. The jury took just twelve minutes to find Rhoda guilty.
Commissioner Shee approved of the verdict and turned to Rhoda and said:
Rhoda requested the governor of Cardiff prison to allow her to have a meeting with her former partner, Mr. Macpherson. Her request was allowed. In what must have been an emotional meeting, Rhoda begged Mr. Macpherson to never let their daughters know what crimes she had committed. She left all of what little property that she had to Macpherson.
At 8:00a.m. Wednesday, the 14th of August, 1907 Rhoda Willis was hanged. It was her forty-fourth birthday.
Rhoda Willis was the last woman to be hanged for baby-farming and the seventh person to be executed at Cardiff prison. She was the last woman to be hanged in Wales.
MARY ELIZABETH WILSON
The Merry Widow of Windy Nook
Mary Elizabeth Wilson was born in Hebburn, South Tyneside, England in 1893. As a teenager, she got a job in service with the Knowles family. She cultivated a friendship with the son, John Knowles, and married him in 1912.
Mary and John moved to a house in Windy Nook, Gateshead. At some point in the marriage, Mary began an affair with a John Russell who eventually moved in to the house with them as a lodger. In 1955, John Knowles, after forty-three years of marriage, died. Five months after her husband’s death, Mary married her lover John Russell. In early 1957, John died. The local doctor attributed both husbands’ deaths to natural causes. In both cases, Mary inherited everything.
In June of 1957 at the age of sixty-four, Mary married wealthy Oliver Leonard, an estate agent, in a registry office in Jarrow. Twelve days after the marriage, Oliver became ill and died the following day. The local doctor pronounced heart failure as the cause. Mary again inherited everything.
Mary then married husband number four, Ernest Wilson, another wealthy man. At the wedding reception, Mary joked to her friends that the left over cakes could be saved and used at the funeral. Just a few days after the wedding, Ernest became sick and died. The doctor attributed the death to "Cardiac Failure”. During Ernest’s funeral, Mary joked to the undertaker that with the amount of trade she had given to him she should have a discount. Her morbid humor and general cheerful demeanor gave rise to gossip and the nickname the ‘Merry Widow of Windy Nook’.
The local constabulary became suspicious, as Mary seemed to be chalking up a lot of dead husbands. The police ordered the exhumations of the bodies of Oliver and Ernest. The pathologist concluded that phosphorous poisoning, a toxic condition caused by ingesting white or yellow phosphorus, occasionally found in rat poisons and certain fertilizers, had killed both men.
Mary was arrested and charged with two murders. Her defense was that both Oliver and Ernest took sexual stimulation pills that contained phosphorous. The jury was not convinced and found Mary guilty of murder. The judge sentenced her to death. Because of her age, her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in London’s Holloway women’s prison. She died there four years later at the age of seventy.
The bodies of her earlier two husbands, John Knowles and John Russell, were also exhumed, and the pathologist reached the same conclusion: that of phosphorous poisoning. However, it was considered pointless to have a second trial.
BEVERLY ALLITT
THE CARING NURSE?
Beverley Gail Allitt was born on the 4th of October in 1968, in England as one of four children. As a small child, she appeared happy but as she grew, she began to wear bandages and dressings over wounds she refused to allow anyone to examine. Her parents felt it was all due to attention seeking. As she entered puberty, she became overweight and increasingly sought attention. Beverly also began to show aggressive tendencies. Beverley also complained increasingly of physical pains that had her parents constantly taking her to the hospital with symptoms such as headaches, pains in the gall bladder, uncontrolled vomiting, urinary infections, blurred vision, appendicitis, back pains, and ulcers, to mention just a few. She faked her appendix symptoms so well, she ended up having a perfectly normal, healthy appendix removed. This ended up being extremely slow to heal as Beverly kept picking at the surgical wound. Doctor’s soon began to see her attention-seeking behavior.
After Beverly left school, she began training to become a nurse. During her training, she was frequently sick due to claiming a variety of illnesses. Her fellow students suspected her of odd behavior, such as smearing feces on a wall and in a nursing establishment where she undertook her training, leaving excrement in the fridge. A boyfriend of hers at this time later reported that she was deceptive, manipulative, and violent. Before their relationship had ended, she had claimed a false pregnancy and rape. He thought he was well rid of her. Unsurprisingly, due to her poor attendance; she failed many of her nursing examinations. Despite this, she was given in early 1991, at the age of 23, a six-month contract at the critically understaffed NHS hospital of Grantham and Kesteven, in Lincolnshire. She began work in Ward 4, a children’s ward. When Beverly began working at the hospital, only two properly qualified trained nurses were on the day shift and only one on the night shift.
On February 21st, 1991 Liam Taylor, a seven-month-old baby was placed in Ward Four with a suspected chest infection. Nurse Beverly Alitt reassured his distraught parents that their son was in the best possible place to recover. She persuaded the parents that the best thing they could do for their child was to return home and get some sleep. The following morning when Mr. and Mrs. Taylor returned, Beverly told them that, in the night, Liam had suffered a respiratory problem but was now fine. She told the anxious parents that she would do an extra night’s duty so she personally could keep an eye on their son. Mr. and Mrs. Taylor also decided to sleep that night in the hospital in a room kept for parents of small children.
That night, baby Liam suffered another respiratory complication but came through it to the doctor’s satisfaction. Baby Liam was then alone with only Nurse Beverly Allitt in attendance. Another nurse appeared and noticed that Liam was deathly pale and then red patches surfaced on his little face. Beverly began yelling for an emergency team. The other nurses on duty were perplexed as to why the alarm monitors had not sounded when Liam had stopped breathing. Baby Liam Taylor suffered cardiac arrest. The attending doctors did all they could but even with all of their efforts, Liam suffered massive brain damage. The only thing now keeping the baby alive was the life-support machine that kept his lungs functioning. On the doctor’s advice, because of the severe brain damage, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor agreed to have the life support turned off. Liam’s death was attributed to heart failure. Beverley observed the whole drama before putting on her coat and going home. She returned to work later for her next night shift almost as if nothing had happened.
On March 5th, 1991 Timothy Hardwick, an eleven-year-old boy who suffered from cerebral palsy, was admitted to Ward 4 having had an epileptic fit. Nurse Beverly Allitt was on duty and took over his care. Within a few moments of being left alone with Timothy, she began yelling for help that Timothy was suffering a cardiac arrest. Other hospital staff ran to her aid including the emergency resuscitation team, who on reaching him found he had no pulse and was turning blue. Despite strenuous efforts by the medical team, Timothy died. An autopsy was carried out but failed to provide a clear cause of death and so his death was attributed to epilepsy.
On March 3rd, 1991, Kayley Desmond, a one-year-old little girl, was taken to Ward 4 suffering from an infection of the chest. She appeared to be responding well to treatment until five days later when she was left alone with Nurse Beverly Allitt. Kayley then suffered a cardiac arrest. The emergency team succeeded in reviving her, and she was moved to a Nottingham hospital. Here, during an extensive examination, a doctor found a needle mark under her armpit along with an air bubble close by. The doctor thought it was most likely caused by an accidental injection, and there was no investigation carried out.
On March 20, 1991, Paul Crampton, a five-month-old boy, was admitted to Ward 4 with a bronchial infection that was not considered serious. Just before Paul was discharged, he was left alone with Nurse Beverly Allitt. With
in minutes, Beverly was calling for help as the baby boy appeared to be suffering from insulin shock. On three separate occasions, Paul sank into a near-coma. On each occasion, the doctors managed to revive him, but they were puzzled by the fluctuations in his insulin levels. He was sent by ambulance, accompanied by Nurse Beverly Allitt, to the Nottingham hospital where on admission he was again fond to have too high levels of insulin. Paul survived.
The following day, Bradley Gibson, a 5-year-old boy who was in ward 4 suffering from pneumonia, suddenly experienced cardiac arrest. The emergency team of doctors saved him. They then ran some blood tests and were puzzled by his high levels of insulin. Later that night, when alone with Nurse Beverly Allitt, he suffered another cardiac arrest. Yet again, he was revived and then moved to the Nottingham hospital where he recovered. Extraordinarily, with all the unexplained and mystifying health events that all happened in Nurse Beverly Allitt’s presence, no suspicions were aroused.
On March 22nd, 1991, a little two-year-old boy, Yik Hung Chan, who was on ward 4 after having fallen out of a window and fracturing his skull, was left alone with Nurse Beverly Allitt. He began to turn blue and appeared to be having some kind of attack. Beverly called for help, and the boy was revived with oxygen. A few hours later, Yik Hung Chan suffered another similar attack. After reviving him again, he was transferred to the bigger hospital in Nottingham. His symptoms were thought to be due to his fall.
Nurse Beverly Allitt then began to take an interest in two little twin baby girls, Katie and Becky Phillips. They were two-months-old and had been born prematurely and were being kept in the hospital for observation. After being allowed home, Becky Phillips was brought to Ward 4, on April 1st, 1991, suffering from gastroenteritis. On April 3rd, Nurse Beverly Allitt told doctors that she thought Becky was hypoglycemic and cold to the touch. On examination, the doctors found no ailment. Becky Phillips was discharged and sent home with her mother Sue Phillips.
She Devils Around the World Page 14