History is full of monsters, but some stories feel particularly heavy because they involve the very people society expects to be protectors. You’ve probably heard the term "baby farming." It sounds like something out of a Dickensian nightmare, and honestly, it pretty much was. At the center of one of the most chilling cases in British legal history are Amelia Sach and Annie Walters.
They weren't just petty criminals. They were the architects of a localized "murder-for-hire" system that targeted the most vulnerable people in Edwardian London: unmarried mothers and their newborn infants.
The Setup at Claymore House
Amelia Sach was the "brains" of the operation. She was a midwife—which gave her a veneer of respectability—and she ran a nursing home called Claymore House in East Finchley. To a desperate young woman in 1902, Claymore House looked like a godsend. If you were a servant who had "gotten into trouble" (as they said back then), being pregnant meant losing your job, your housing, and your reputation.
Sach offered a "lying-in" service. For a hefty fee—sometimes up to £50, which was thousands in today’s money—she promised to care for the mother during birth and then find a "wealthy lady" to adopt the baby.
She lied.
The "wealthy ladies" didn't exist. Instead, there was Annie Walters. Walters was an older woman, described by some at the time as "feeble-minded" and struggling with a drinking problem. Her job was simple and horrific: she would collect the newborns from Sach, take them back to her lodgings, and kill them.
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How the "Finchley Baby Farmers" Got Caught
Greed usually leads to mistakes. For Sach and Walters, the mistake was a choice of lodging. Annie Walters took a room in a house in Islington. The landlord? A man named PC Seal.
Yes, a police officer.
You can't make this up. Walters wasn't subtle. She was seen bringing babies back to her room, only for the infants to disappear shortly after. She was also caught asking other lodgers to buy her chlorodyne.
What is Chlorodyne?
It was a patent medicine common in the Victorian era. It contained a potent, lethal mix of laudanum (opium), tincture of cannabis, and chloroform. In small doses, it was for coughs. In the hands of Annie Walters, it was a tool for infanticide.
PC Seal became suspicious when Walters claimed she was taking a baby to a "grand house" in South Kensington, yet he saw her wandering the streets with the child still in her arms. On November 18, 1902, the police followed her. They found her in a cafe with a dead baby wrapped in a parcel.
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The Trial and the "Unwomanly" Crime
The trial at the Old Bailey in January 1903 was a media circus. The public was obsessed. People couldn't wrap their heads around the idea of a midwife—a mother herself—orchestrating such a thing.
When the police raided Sach’s home, they didn't just find medical supplies. They found hundreds of items of baby clothing. It suggested that the number of victims was far higher than the few they could prove. Some historians estimate they might have killed dozens, though they were only tried for the murder of a single unnamed male infant.
The defense tried the "insanity" card for Walters, but it didn't stick. The jury took only 40 minutes to find them both guilty.
On February 3, 1903, Amelia Sach and Annie Walters were hanged at Holloway Prison. It was a landmark event—the first double execution of women in modern British history and the first to take place at Holloway.
Why This Case Changed Everything
The Sach and Walters case, following the even more prolific murders by Amelia Dyer a few years earlier, forced the UK government to realize that the "Infant Life Protection Act" of 1897 was basically toothless.
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- The "One-Child" Loophole: Before this, people only had to register if they were looking after more than one infant. Baby farmers got around this by only keeping one child at a time while "processing" them.
- Adoption Regulation: It highlighted that "private adoption" was essentially an unregulated black market.
- The Stigma of Illegitimacy: It started a slow, painful conversation about why these mothers were so desperate to begin with. If society didn't treat unmarried mothers like lepers, they wouldn't have been forced into the arms of people like Amelia Sach.
What to take away from this history
If you’re researching the history of child welfare or true crime in the UK, the Sach and Walters case is a foundational moment. It marks the transition from Victorian neglect to the beginning of modern social services.
To understand the full scope of how these laws evolved, look into the Children Act of 1908. This was the direct legal descendant of the public outcry following the Finchley murders. It essentially abolished the "baby farming" industry by requiring much stricter oversight of any person taking in an infant for payment.
The graves of Sach and Walters remained at Holloway until 1971, when they were moved to Brookwood Cemetery during a prison renovation. Today, they serve as a grim reminder of a time when the "safety" of a child was a commodity that could be bought, sold, and discarded for the price of a bottle of chlorodyne.
Actionable Insights for History Enthusiasts:
- Verify Primary Sources: If you're visiting London, the National Archives at Kew hold the original police files and trial transcripts for the Sach and Walters case.
- Comparative Study: Compare this case to Amelia Dyer (the "Ogress of Reading") to see how the pattern of "baby farming" evolved over 30 years.
- Legal Context: Look up the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 to understand the legal framework that made these women’s crimes possible by removing the responsibility of fathers.