Caregiver to Killer: Amelia Dyer & The Dark World of Baby Farming
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Who was Amelia Dyer and why is she infamous?
Hi friends, how are you today? My name is Bailey Sarian, and today is Monday, which means it's Murder, Mystery, and Makeup Monday. Today, I'm excited because we have an audio exclusive. Oh yes, this is just for the podcast. This is just for you. I just want to give a disclaimer that today's episode does involve children and infants and death and murder. Hi. I'm sorry. So listener discretion is advised. Today we're going to be talking about Amelia Dyer. Have you heard about her? Because I didn't. So let me tell you about her, okay? So she lived in the late 1800s, and if the estimates are accurate, she killed as many as 400 infants and children over the course of her life. Yes, you heard that number correctly, 400.
Again, these are estimates, but she was convicted of killing six. So it's between six to 400, the number's in there somewhere. And honestly, I think we can all agree that killing six alone is horrific in itself, right? Okay, thank you. I'm glad we agree. A lot of witnesses and neighbors at the time think that police only scratched the surface of what this woman did. So take a journey back with me to Victorian era England, a time when young women were vilified and the government did nothing to help them. Amelia Dyer, she was born in 1838 in the southwest of England in an area called Pye Marsh. I believe it's Pye Marsh, okay? But this was like, I don't know, a little small town, a mining district, one would say, but it was near Bristol.
So she was the youngest of five children, and she was born into like a pretty respectable working class family. She was the daughter of a master shoemaker. Hello. So, you know, she had things to live up to. When Amelia was around five years old, her mom contracted typhus fever, okay? So she gets this and she starts to experience hallucinations and other like mental health problems because of the typhus fever. She was going crazy, okay? And she ended up being admitted to a private asylum for treatment. And then eventually her mom, Amelia's mom, would return home. So just because her mom was home didn't mean things were better. There was permanent brain damage to Sarah's mind, you know? And so the hallucinations, they would continue and they caused periods of mania. Her speech was also altered and dysfunctional. And then in 1848, Amelia's mother passed away. You know the saying, when it rains, it pours.
And that seemed to be the case for Amelia because after her mom passed away, then her two younger sisters, they both passed away from an illness called I'm making an assumption here, but Amelia ended up leaving school at the age of 14, I'm assuming because she probably needed to help take care of the house and work, but I don't know for sure. But she left school at the age of 14 and she started an apprenticeship as a corset maker. And then sadly, her father ends up passing away of bronchitis. So now she, well, her parents are dead. Some of her sisters are dead. I mean, what the hell is she supposed to do? So she ends up living at a lodging house. And I know this might be dumb, but whatever, I'll be dumb because I was like, what's a lodging house? So I Googled it and I'm just, I'm here for you if you're like me. A lodging house is a Victorian-era term for a form of cheap accommodation in which the inhabitants are all lodged together in the same room or rooms, whether for eating or sleeping. You're welcome.
So she is at this lodging house and this is where Amelia meets another boarder who was a tradesman just like her father and her brothers. This guy, his name was George Thomas. He was a 57 year old widower whose wife had just died, I guess like a few months earlier. Look, it's the 1800s. So, you know, 24 year old Amelia naturally marries this 57 year old guy named George. It was only five months after the death of his wife when George and Amelia got married. Which some people are like, it's a little quick. And then they actually lied on their marriage license saying that George was 48 years old and Amelia was 30. I guess, you know, back then, even back then in the 1800s, people would have thought that this was a little gross.
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