This is still another episode of the LADY KILLERS series from 1980 that dramatized some British murder trials. As I mentioned in one of the other reviews, the series was panned (possibly unfairly) back at the time it showed up on American television due to the presentation and production values. Having not seen the show, I am unable to review the performances, but the casts seem to have good actors in the lead roles. In this particular episode, the lead was played by Joan Sims, a well known British comedienne (from the "Carry On" series) but best recalled more recently as "Madge Hardcastle", the lively step-mother of "Lionel Hardcastle" in the ever popular series, AS TIME GOES BY.
It must have been a considerable change for Sims. Amelia Dyer is one of the darkest figures in Victorian crime - she was one of the worst (if not the worst) of the so-called "Baby Farmers" who were active between 1870 and 1903 in England and Scotland (and even in Australia). The idea of "baby farming" was supposedly similar to the child care industry of today, where children are left with specialists by their parents while the latter are working in the daytime hours. But their was a sinister edge to it in the 19th Century. It seems that many unmarried mothers (and a few of their boyfriends) would pay a fee to a relatively unknown woman to take care of their unwanted babies - supposedly taking care for them to be healthy and alive, but in reality knowing that the child was likely to die due to neglect or worse in a short time. The system was quite active because of the lack of any social agency to get involved - at least until five or six really bad cases came to trial. Only after Mrs. Dyer and the last baby farmers (Mrs. Sach and Mrs. Waters, and Mrs. Chard Williams) did the government put an end to the system.
All these women were pretty bad types, but Dyer was in a class of her own. According to F. Tennyson Jesse in her introduction to her book MURDER AND ITS MOTIVES, we will never know how many babies died due to her killings, but given how easily everything unraveled in the end it must have been a long line of victims - that she grew careless due to her long period of hidden success. Basically what happened was a dead child was found in the Thames wrapped in paper, and the paper had the name and address of Mrs. Dyer on it. This happened in April 1896. The police found that Dyer had a newspaper advertisement about how she gave good care to children. She charged from five pounds to eighty pounds - it was quite a sum range in 1896.
Mrs. Dyer's daughter narrowly avoided being arrested and tried as an accessory - the last victims were briefly in the daughter's home. I said victim's because the daughter noticed different children with her mother overnight on a visit to the daughter's house. But Mrs. Dyer reassured the daughter that everything was all right (although when the first child vanished, the daughter noticed Mrs. Dyer was concerned about a large carpet bag she brought with her, and when the later child vanished Mrs. Dyer was seen coming back from the Thames (where the child was found).
She was one of the greasiest figures ever to be handled by the British police. A short and heavy woman (she was thought to be a near dwarf in some descriptions), she had a verbal line of sanctimony and religious thoughts. She constantly was praying and writing religious poetry. Even after she was convicted she continued this behavior pattern. It may have been her attempt to build up an insanity plea - she admitted the dead child was one that had been left with her, saying that one could find "her" charges by the string around their necks. Even in the condemned cell she wrote - she wrote a multiple book memoir in small pamphlet like books that were supplied to her - but the contents did not impress the religious authorities or the warden who read them.
Her execution was odd too - it was put off by twenty-four hours because three men (a pair of burglars named Milsom and Fowler, and a single murderer named Seamen) were being hanged together, and the executioner did not think he could do four in one day. Instead Mrs. Dyer was given a twenty-four hour delay in her sentence. She was given some drink on the last day, and more of her less attractive personality finally came out through the alcohol. She then went to the gallows the next morning. Unlike many other cases there was no groundswell of petitions to save Mrs. Dyer.
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