Amelia Sach and Annie Walters - Crimes

Crimes

Amelia Sach operated a "lying-in" home in Stanley Road, and later at Claymore House in Hertford Road (both in East Finchley), London. Around 1900, she began to advertise that babies "could be left", and took money for adoptions. The clients, judging from the witness accounts, were mostly servants from local houses who had become pregnant, and who had employers who were keen for the matter to be resolved discreetly. There was a charge for lying-in, and another for adoption, a "present" to future parents of between £25 and £30.

Annie Walters would collect the baby after it was born, and then dispose of it with poison — chlorodyne (a medicine containing morphine). They were caught after Walters raised the suspicions of her landlord in Islington who was a police officer. An unknown number of babies were murdered this way, possibly dozens. During their trial at the Old Bailey, the quantity of baby clothes found at Claymore House was used as evidence of the scale of their crimes. A local campaign to have their sentences commuted to life failed, and they became the first women to be hanged at Holloway on 3 February 1903, by Henry Pierrepoint, in what was the only double hanging of women to be carried out in modern times.