Quick, name a serial killer! You thought of a guy, didn't you? It's okay, I did too. Turns out, there are some SCARY female serial killers. The first on my list is about forty times more prolific than Jack the Ripper. And as if that's not scary enough, this lady killed BABIES, not hookers. And nobody has ever heard of her.
Amelia Dyer (1838-96) is possibly the most prolific serial killer of all time. She was convicted for only one murder and hanged for it, but she almost certainly killed more than four hundred infants.
In merry old England illegitimate children were frowned upon, so Amelia became a "baby farmer." For a fee, she would take in a mother, deliver the baby, and "farm it out" for adoption. But if there were no takers, she would drug the baby to shut it up and let it starve. Eventually she realized she could streamline the process by skipping the opiates and killing the child outright.
For awhile she managed to do this without arousing suspicion, though she was caught in 1879 by the doctor who signed the death certificates. However she was only sentenced to six months of hard labor for neglect. By this time she was also addicted to opium and laudanum, and was an alcoholic.
When she was done with her sentence, she resumed her nursing career, though she committed herself to mental institutions several times for nervous breakdowns. Conveniently, however, these breakdowns always occurred when people began to wonder about her.
In 1890 she was "caring for" the illegitimate child of a young governess, and the mother came back to visit her child. Because the young woman knew what her own baby looked like, she was not fooled and not amused. Amelia tried to off herself by drinking two bottles of laudanum, but she had built up a ridiculously high tolerance to it and survived.
Amelia narrowly escaped being caught that time, so she moved further underground. She no longer called doctors to sign death certificates; she just dumped bodies in the river. To prevent parents from visiting their children, she moved from town to town and used aliases.
Her undoing came in 1896 when a popular young barmaid, Evelina Marmon, had a baby named Doris. She needed a family to take care of Doris temporarily while she made a little more money. She met Amelia and gave her the baby. Evelina wanted to pay Amelia a small sum each week to cover expenses, but Amelia insisted on a lump sum up front. Evelina didn't like that, but she had no choice.
Amelia strangled little Doris with ribbon, a slow death. They pawned her clothes and dumped the body in the Thames. The next day she murdered a 13-month-old boy with the same length of ribbon. This was on April 2.
Two days earlier, a fisherman found the body of another baby, identified as Helena Fry wrapped in paper in the river. A microscopic examination of the paper revealed the address where Dyer had been staying. Police put her under surveillance and sent a young lady undercover to meet with her. When detectives searched her flat, it smelled like dead bodies. There were none in the flat, but they found the ribbon, pawn tickets for baby clothes, and letters from concerned parents.
After searching the Thames, seven bodies were found. But she had killed more than twenty in the last few months alone. Doris's remains were identified by her mother eleven days after she had given her to Dyer. She was tried and convicted of only the murderer of Doris Marmon, but she was hanged on June 10, 1896, and no one has ever deserved it more than her.
She is the most prolific murderess of all time, perhaps the most deadly serial killer of either sex. Some people even believe that she was the infamous Jack the Ripper. The prostitutes were victims of botched abortions. While Amelia did kill in London at the same time that the Ripper killings were occurring, there is no hard evidence to connect the two.
This lady killed more people than Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac Killer, HH Holmes, BTK, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy combined.
Sleep tight.
So not sleeping tight - horrific nightmares tonight. *shudder*
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