Couples Who Kill (25 page)

Satanic experts have also suggested that the Wests were working for powerful professional people – but would professionals have employed a nonstop talker like Fred West who endlessly drew attention to himself by offering to perform home abortions? People who are into such religions tend to read widely about their chosen craft, but Rose West admitted to her daughter Mae that she was enjoying reading romantic sagas in prison as she’d never had time before.

Fred West was even more poorly read than his wife. He struggled with writing, spelling, punctuation and grammar, as an extract from his prison diary shows. (He was writing about finding his child Anne Marie being sexually abused by Rose West’s father.) ‘I Wint up stair to him and said What going on anna Was With Me Bill said Rose said anna could sleep With Me, but anna playing up.’

Rose West is currently incarcerated in the high-security Durham Prison, but as it’s facing closure she will be recategorised and moved to another women’s prison. She still has supporters who – ignoring the fact that she sexually abused Anne Marie, beat all of her children,
abducted Caroline Owens and brutalised teenage girls from the nearby orphanage – believe that she is not a sadistic sexual predator. The Home Secretary has said that she will never be released.

It’s comparatively rare for a couple to be found guilty of murdering children. The Moors Murderers and the Wests were, but they also murdered young adults so are profiled separately.

At least one child a week dies in Britain at a parent’s hands: for example, over eighty children were murdered in 2001, most by a family member. But, though both parents may have offered violence to the child throughout its unhappy lifetime, it’s invariably only one parent who deals the fatal blow. So records show that it was a mother
or
father who killed.

These cases attract minimal publicity. At best, a paragraph appears in the local paper along the lines of ‘a Birmingham man was arrested today for the suspicious death of an eighteen month girl.’ The public rarely hears of the catalogue of cruelty this father inflicted on his firstborn, so they can continue to believe in the sanctity of the family and convince themselves that the main risk is from stranger danger, which is actually comparatively rare. The mother’s part in her child’s death – everything from looking the other way to helping demonize the infant as the source of all of the couple’s problems – is likely to be minimised by a feminist interpretation which assumes that she’s suffering from postnatal depression or is afraid of the man.

When it’s the mother who kills, a significant percentage of the public simply refuses to believe she’s guilty, and if she has a partner he’s often criticised for being insufficiently supportive. Modern society tends to
scapegoat one of the couple for blame.

But historically couples have occasionally killed children for profit and out of sadism, though sometimes one of the couple was not found guilty despite grossly failing to protect the children in their care.

Margaret Waters, an educated middle class woman, became a widow at age twenty-nine, at which stage she opened a lodging house in Brixton. She took in her sister Sarah Ellis, seven years younger, who was separated from her husband. Together, as the 1860s progressed, they began to advertise for babies to adopt, usually asking for five pounds per child.

The two women treated these infants abominably, leaving them lying in their own excrement for days at a time. They also gave them sleeping draughts. Police eventually raided the house and found it completely unsanitary. The seven babies in the house were so drugged and undernourished that they did not move or make a sound. Five older children were found locked in the yard, also in a poor state of health.

Taken into the workhouse, the babies were found to have numerous health complaints. Some were so weak that they could not feed and one by one they began to die. Ironically it turned out that they were the favoured children as they were boarders whose parents might visit them – other adopted infants had simply disappeared.

At the trial, it transpired that the infants would be brought down from the upstairs bedroom in the morning and left lying on the settee until the evening. Meanwhile Margaret Waters continued to advertise for more babies to adopt and admitted taking in at least forty in the past four years.

As is often the case, she was tried for only one murder, where a father had handed his baby over to her and paid the required sum, only for Mrs Waters to disappear. When he tracked down his son he was desperately dehydrated, drugged, filthy and suffering from thrush and diarrhoea. He took his child from the household but the shrivelled infant couldn’t feed properly and soon died.

When she took the stand, Margaret said that she took full responsibility for the children (though she denied that they’d been ill-treated) so her younger sister Sarah was acquitted of the murder. But Sarah was charged with obtaining money by deception though she was allowed to keep her own child.

There was speculation as to how many children had been murdered. Forty had been taken in by the sisters, of whom five had died. The women claimed these deaths were natural causes. Another five had died in the workhouse. And the sisters’ maid said that another six had disappeared with nineteen others remaining unaccounted for. Incredibly, Margaret Waters blamed the parents, saying that if women didn’t have children out of wedlock then there would have been no need for baby farmers like herself.

She continued to show no remorse for her incredible cruelty to her helpless charges and was executed at Horsemonger Jail on 11th October 1870.

Edwin Bailey allegedly had a relationship in the 1870s with an eighteen-year-old servant called Susan Jenkins. She duly gave birth to an illegitimate baby and obtained a court order requiring him to maintain the little girl. The baby
was left with Susan’s mother as Susan had to work.

Edwin, who owned a shop in Bristol, bitterly resented the five shillings a week he had to pay. He constantly complained about the situation to his housekeeper, a thirty-one-year-old charwoman called Anne Barry. He sent her to Susan’s house incognito to find out the real father of the child. Anne kept visiting the baby, saying that it reminded her of her own dead daughter. She seemed to grow fond of the infant and recommended special teething powders when the little girl was in pain. The grandmother replied that they couldn’t afford such powders, so naturally they were pleased when three packets arrived in the post, allegedly from a charity to whom they’d applied for aid.

The next day Anne arrived at the baby’s house and it was clear that she had been crying. She explained that this would be her last visit as she was moving away. She urged the grandmother to give the infant one of the powders and the grandmother duly mixed a powder with water, breadcrumbs and sugar and fed it to the child.

Susan then carried her baby out into the garden and immediately the infant began to scream. Her body went rigid and even her jaw locked. Ten minutes later she was dead.

Poison wasn’t found in the infant’s corpse but rat poison was found in the two remaining powders. They hadn’t been sent by the charity.

Edwin Bailey and Anne Barry were tried on 22nd and 23rd December 1873. The letter from the charity was found to be in Edwin Bailey’s handwriting. Anne claimed to know nothing about the murder, claiming she only
visited the baby on her employer’s instructions to find out who the father was.

Both were found guilty and executed together in Bristol on 12th January 1874.

Jessie and her lover Thomas Pearson lived in an Edinburgh lodging house. Both used the surname of Macpherson and various other aliases. She was in her early twenties, had a low IQ and lied frequently. He was an overweight, bald labourer at least thirty years her senior, a stronger character than she, though equally shiftless. They were poor and often turned to drink.

When their landlady was away on holiday they brought a baby to the house and the landlady’s daughter saw them with it. But when the landlady returned from her vacation, the infant had disappeared. Jessie said that she’d been given twenty-five pounds to adopt the child but had farmed it out to someone else for eighteen pounds in order to make a profit. She then added that if a young woman should call at the house, the landlady should say that Jessie wasn’t there. Worryingly, there were baby clothes in the house but Jessie explained this by saying that she was planning a pregnancy.

On 28th October 1888, children opened an
oilskin-wrapped
parcel they found lying in an Edinburgh street and found it contained the corpse of a tiny baby. A cord around its neck suggested strangling was the cause of death. When the discovery was made public, Jessie King’s landlady went to the police.

The police searched the lodgings and found another corpse in the basement, also wrapped in an oilskin. This
baby was female and approximately six weeks old. She had been strangled and a cloth had been tied tightly over her mouth.

It soon came to light that a third baby had died after being handed over to Jessie King. Someone had seen her giving the infant whisky. She now claimed that the baby had choked on the whisky and accidentally died.

Jessie, now age twenty-seven, and her lover were tried at the Edinburgh High Court on 18th February 1889. It became clear that she’d looked after two of the babies for several weeks, perhaps only killing them when the adoption money ran out or when she tired of their crying. She said that she’d strangled one of the babies whilst Macpherson was out because she couldn’t afford its upkeep any more. She added unconvincingly that he knew nothing of the murder. She’d allegedly killed the second by accident whilst he was out working and she refused to make any statement about the third.

He, in turn, said that he’d been told by Jessie that she’d sent the babies to orphanages and that he believed her. He denied any prior knowledge of the corpses in the basement. He was let go by the court as they simply could not prove his guilt, but they believed him to be as culpable as she.

It took the jury only four minutes to find Jessie King guilty and she was carried, crying and then half fainting, from the dock. Over the next few days she tried to commit suicide several times, tearing strips of cloth from her skirt and winding it tightly around her neck. She was a Roman Catholic, so the authorities found her a priest and two nuns to talk to, and after that she appeared to settle down. She was hanged on 11th March 1889 clutching a crucifix.

William Chard-Williams was a respectable schoolteacher age forty-six who worked in a private school. He married the dark-eyed, small-framed Ada who was only half his age. She persuaded him to adopt two children but treated them abysmally, often hitting and neglecting them. Neighbours heard her husband pleading with her to stop hurting the children – but she merely threatened to hit him too. He often fed and changed the half-starved youngsters and was horrified by the weals he found on their backs. But for some unfathomable reason he didn’t take the children from the house and he remained deeply in love with his young wife.

Given that she clearly despised children, it’s unclear why she decided to adopt more, taking in an illegitimate baby girl for a small amount of money. One day she picked the infant up by its feet and swung it against the wall, smashing its head before strangling it.

In September 1899 a brown paper parcel containing the infant’s body was recovered from the Thames. The knots tied in the blind cord used to bind the parcel were unusual and would help link her to the crime.

When a description of the body was published, the baby’s mother went to the police and explained that she’d answered an advert from a couple asking to adopt a baby. She’d given the woman – who was using the pseudonym Mrs Hewerson – three pounds and promised to pay her the two pounds balance later. But when she went to the woman’s home she found that it was merely a shop used as an accommodation address.

Strangely, Ada – still posing as Mrs Hewerson – now wrote to the police explaining that she’d given the baby to
someone else and had played no part in its demise. Police went to her last known address but she and her husband had fled, leaving the rent unpaid. However, they found pieces of blind cord tied with the exact same knots that they’d found around the parcel containing the dead child.

The Chard-Williams had by now left the area (Barnet) but they were found that December working in a coffee shop in Hackney. Their little foster son was still with them and neighbours admitted they’d often heard him screaming. Mr Chard-Williams looked equally overwhelmed by life.

The couple were arrested but it soon became clear that William Chard-Williams had played no active part in the baby girl’s death. (Though, like all adults who do nothing whilst their spouse hits the children, he was culpable by remaining silent. Worse, it was admitted that two other foster children had died whilst his wife was ostensibly caring for them and he hadn’t informed the authorities.) The judge reluctantly ordered the jury to acquit him. That same jury soon determined that Mrs Ada Chard-Williams should hang.

On hearing the death sentence she lashed out at the wardens and screamed abuse at them. She was the last women to be executed at Newgate, going to the gallows on 6th March 1900.

It’s likely that Ada Chard-Williams took a sadistic pleasure in hurting her foster children. Perhaps she also derived excitement from their deaths – after all, she killed three of them. She had married a man almost twice her age so perhaps he was impotent or, at best, an infrequent lover, and she took her pleasure from inflicting pain on her helpless brood.

Amelia Sach trained as a midwife, married and had children whom she appeared devoted to. Whilst still in her twenties, she set up a nursing home in East Finchley. She later hired a woman called Annie Walters.

Annie was in her fifties, poorly educated and much more worn-down by life than the attractive and intelligent Amelia. But they had one thing in common – a desire to make money and a callous indifference to the babies entrusted to their care.

Amelia placed adverts in local newspapers offering birthing facilities and adding ‘baby can remain.’ As this was the start of the twentieth century, when illegitimacy was still frowned upon, she had many requests for such long-term baby care. Amelia took a minimum of fifteen pounds from each mother or father and told them that their baby had been adopted by wealthy families. But no one ever traced these families and the babies simply disappeared…

We don’t know where Annie was living when she first began working for Amelia Sach but by 1902 she’d become the lodger of a policeman and his wife. They were concerned when the middle-aged woman brought a baby to the house, only for the child to quickly disappear. A few days later she brought another child to the house, saying it was a little girl who was to be adopted. But the policeman’s wife checked on the infant and found that it was actually a little boy. Later she heard the boy give a strange cry so she asked after his health and Annie said that she’d given him a strong sleeping medicine and that he must not be disturbed.