24

Murder of the Innocents

As it would be for many years to come, times were tough for single mothers around the turn of the 19th century – society looked down on any woman who had a baby out of wedlock. To make matters worse, contraception was far less reliable, and abortions were difficult to obtain, and highly dangerous.

As a result, with few mothers wanting to adopt their children out, ‘baby minding’ became big business. This practice saw the infant child placed in the care of a minder for a weekly fee. The baby would generally be cared for by staff in the nursery of a large house, with the parent or parents being able to visit regularly. Once the child had grown to school age he or she would be returned to the parent and (usually) introduced as the niece or nephew of a dead relative. This way both the child and parent avoided the stigma placed on them by society.

But while most baby minding centres were honest and went out of their way to provide reliable care and attention for the children placed in their charge, there were inevitably cases of unscrupulous people cashing in on the misfortune of others. Some centres sold babies to desperate childless couples, others took the mothers’ money – handed over in good faith, in the belief that it was going towards food, care and medical bills – and then let the infants live in squalid conditions. More often than not, these unfortunate children would die from starvation or disease. The heartless murderers of these young innocents came to be known as ‘baby farmers’.

In 1893 there were more than 60 official inquests for babies who had either been found dead and abandoned or died through neglect. More than 20 of those cases were treated as murders, but those responsible had usually moved on, leaving no trace, before justice could be served. Many more infants had gone missing, presumed sold.

One of Australia’s most shocking baby farmer cases came to light on 11 October 1892, when drainer James Hanoney was digging in the soft dirt of a backyard in the Sydney suburb of Macdonaldtown, not far from the CBD. About two metres down he found the cause of the blocked drain he had been called to see to – two bundles of foul-smelling baby clothing. James removed the material and was horrified to find the decomposing remains of two babies. He called authorities immediately, and they uncovered the rotting remains of five other infants in the yard.

Detectives used tenancy records to find another dwelling of the cottage’s previous tenants, 50-year-old John Makin and his wife Sarah, 47. This house was in nearby Redfern. The remains of more babies were found there.

Police tracked the Makins to their latest home, in Chippendale, and found more infant corpses buried in their yard. This brought their tally to 12. The entire family – John, Sarah and their four daughters, Florence, 17, Clarice, 16, Blanche, 14, and Daisy, 11 – were arrested. John and Sarah were charged with murder. The nation was, understandably, appalled.

At the Makins’ trial, the Sydney Supreme Court heard that the family were professional child minders who cared for children for a weekly fee until the mothers were in a position to reclaim their offspring, or suitable parents were found to adopt the children. It was also said that in some cases, the Makins made it possible for the mother to continue visiting her child after it was placed with new parents.

The prosecution said that these claims, while fine in theory, were incorrect. The Makins, they said, used deception to stop the mothers seeing their children, all the while collecting money from them every week.

The first witness called was Amber Murray. In March 1892 Amber, 18 years old at the time, gave birth to an illegitimate son she named Horace. Finding herself in no position to care for the infant, she placed an ad in the Sydney Morning Herald seeking a loving mother to adopt her baby. She added that she was willing to pay a weekly fee for the child’s support.

It wasn’t long before she received a reply from the Makins, at that time living in Redfern, saying they’d care for Horace for 10 shillings a week. Amber called on the family the next day. She met John and Sarah and two of their daughters. The four Makins all claimed to fall in love with Horace instantly. They said they couldn’t wait to have him live with them, and intended to give him much love and support. They also told Amber that they had lost a young son of their own. The Makins explained away the five or six other babies in the house at the time by saying they were looking after them for friends.

After agreeing to the 10 shillings a week fee, Amber left, with the Makins’ agreement that she could visit Horace. That was the last time she ever saw her child alive.

John Makin made sure he called upon Amber each week to collect the 10 shillings, but every time she asked to see her son she was given another excuse. John eventually told Amber his family were moving from Redfern to the southwestern suburb of Hurstville. He said he would forward her their new address in around six weeks. Meanwhile, he continued to collect his weekly fee.

Instead of Hurstville, however, the Makins relocated to nearby Macdonaldtown, where they moved in under the cover of the night. Their daughter Clarice would later tell the court that there was no sign of young Horace during the move. The child had already been murdered, but John still collected the weekly 10 shillings. Before long they moved again, this time to the house in Chippendale.

At the trial, Amber Murray and three other mothers identified clothing that Sarah Makin had pawned as belonging to their babies. Yet another couple claimed they had given the Makins a substantial up-front payment and agreed on the 10 shillings weekly fee for caring for their child until they could sort their affairs out. But within days they were told their baby had died. They then handed the Makins £2 to go towards a funeral – which they didn’t attend.

When questioned, Sarah and John Makin were no match for the prosecution. Despite constantly denying that they’d murdered the 12 babies, their own children eventually turned against them. Clarice Makin identified clothing found on one of the dead infants as something that she had seen in her mother’s possession. Daisy Makin testified that only two baby girls were with the family for the move from Redfern to Macdonaldtown.

There was little doubt in the court. Mr Justice Stephen sentenced John and Sarah Makin to death by hanging. John held his wife as she collapsed.

None of the Makin children had a conviction recorded against them. After two appeals, John Makin was hanged. Sarah Makin won a reprieve and was sentenced to life in prison with hard labour. She was released in 1911 after 19 years.

Still, the horrific practice of baby farming continued. In September 1893 a man moved into a house in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick that had been vacant for three months. He decided to put a vegetable garden in the backyard, but when he started digging, he found the decomposing corpse of a baby girl just below the surface. A length of rope was tight around the child’s neck. Police were called and neighbours told them that the previous tenants, married couple Rudolph and Frances Knorr, had also lived in another nearby house. When that garden was investigated, the decaying remains of two infant boys were found. Autopsies revealed that the girl had died of strangulation, and the two boys had been suffocated.

Though the Knorrs had moved to Sydney, they were easily tracked down and extradited back to Melbourne. Frances had been born into a respected religious family in London. Growing up into a rather too lustful teenager, she was sent to Australia at the age of 19. She arrived in Sydney in 1887. She met and married German waiter and petty criminal Rudolph while working as a domestic servant. The pair had a daughter named Gladys, but Rudolph then disappeared – he served 18 months in prison for fraud. Frances had an affair with a man named Edward Thompson, but reunited with Rudolph after Thompson broke it off with her. The couple then decided to become child minders.

Frances was known to have lived at several different addresses during their career. More than a few women wanted to speak to her about their missing babies, but were too frightened to report it to the police. When Frances was arrested in Sydney she was in bed, about to give birth to her second child.

In October 1893, the inquest into the death of Isaac Marks, one of the infant boys found in the Brunswick garden, was held at the Melbourne morgue. One of the 33 witnesses called upon was a 13-year-old nursemaid who had worked for Frances at times through the years. She remembered Frances borrowing a spade from a neighbour and complaining that the front garden was too rocky to dig. She said she would have to dig in the back instead.

The evidence against Frances at the inquests into each of these three infants’ death proved so damning that she was committed to stand trial on three counts of murder. Still she maintained her innocence, denying that she had played any part in killing or burying the babies.

At her trial the prosecution wasted no time producing a letter Frances had written from jail to her former lover, Edward Thompson, asking him to fabricate evidence on her behalf. Thompson’s mother had handed the letter over to authorities. It had been Frances’s crude attempt to incriminate the man who had cast her aside, trying to make it look as though he was in some way responsible for the murders and burials. Midway through the trial Frances admitted to burying the infants, but despite autopsy reports to the contrary, she insisted they had all died of natural causes.

At the end of the five-day hearing Frances was found guilty. She was sentenced to death by hanging. In the days leading to her hanging Frances found God and confessed to the murders. ‘Placed as I am now within a few hours of my death, I express a strong desire that this statement be made public, with the hope that my fall will not only be a warning to others, but also act as a deterrent to those who are perhaps carrying on the same practice,’ she stated. ‘I confess to be guilty.’ Deemed not to have played a part in the murders of the babies, Rudolph was not called before the court and disappeared. After Frances was hanged, authorities said that she could have murdered as many as 13 babies placed in her care. Sadly, she wasn’t the last woman to be found guilty of such horrific crimes.

The illegitimate birth of a baby girl named Ethel to Elizabeth Booth in 1906 was the catalyst that finally brought serial baby killer Alice Mitchell to justice. All up, 37 infants left in her charge were either murdered or died due to her negligence after being left in squalor unfit for animals.

Young Ethel was happy and healthy when she was born at the House of Mercy, a refuge for unmarried mothers run by Catholic nuns at Highgate Hill in Perth, Western Australia. But, as per policy, three months after the birth, Elizabeth and Ethel were sent out to fend for themselves.

Though Ethel’s father had left Elizabeth, she had no intention of putting her daughter up for adoption. But with little education, work was difficult to come by, making it near impossible to provide for them both. She had little choice but to find a child minder and content herself with visiting the infant as often as possible.

It was recommended that she place Ethel in baby lodgings at 24 Edward Street, East Perth, around the corner from the House of Mercy. The premises were run by a friendly middle-aged nurse, Alice Mitchell. Mitchell and Elizabeth agreed on a child-minding fee of five shillings a week, with an extra five shillings for vaccinations and an additional five shillings for every doctor’s visit. The doctor in question was Dr Officer, who examined Ethel on admission.

Three days later Elizabeth came back to visit Ethel and was told Dr Officer had examined Ethel and found her to be in excellent health. Less than six weeks later the infant was dead.

Not long after Ethel was placed in Mitchell’s care, Elizabeth fell behind in her payments – mysterious fees kept arising for Dr Officer having to attend to the child. Mitchell called the police to collect the debt. Not sure what to do, the constable Mitchell contacted called his boss, Sergeant Patrick O’Halloran, who visited Mitchell’s boarding house. He was shocked by what he saw. In his official report, he said of one baby, ‘The child was in an appalling condition. Pus was coming from its eyes, it was fly specked, extremely wasted and giving off an offensive odour.’

O’Halloran came back with a government medical officer, who pronounced that the child in question was close to death. The child was Ethel Booth. When questioned about her arrangement with Mitchell, Elizabeth said she usually called in late at night after work. Each time she was told Ethel was asleep and couldn’t be disturbed. After some weeks, she finally demanded to see her child. Needless to say, she was shocked. Her once healthy baby was now skinny and covered in sores. Ethel was taken away to better care but died two days later. Elizabeth told the police and said she suspected foul play. An investigation into Alice Mitchell’s child-minding practices began. The results finally brought an end to uncontrolled baby farming.

Alice Mitchell had run baby lodging establishments since 1900, moving from one premises to the next whenever trouble was afoot. Adult boarders she had taken in along the way told authorities about the horrors they had witnessed: rooms full of babies lying on the floor in their own excrement; piles of used, unwashed nappies riddled with maggots sitting in corners; the unbearable stench; flies laying eggs in the weeping sores on the children’s faces and bodies; babies crawling free in the back yard where fowls were kept; infants immersing themselves in mud and eating the chicken droppings that littered the yard. The investigation found that 37 infants had died at Alice Mitchell’s hands in six years. But no one had informed the authorities. And while they were shocked at the high number of deaths, police suspected the toll could well be higher, though they couldn’t prove it because no further records could be found.

The fact that amazed police most was that 37 babies had been buried by grieving mothers without the authorities becoming aware of it. The law stated that a coroner’s certificate had to be issued before a burial could proceed. Police were also to be notified, but not a single certificate had ever been issued for babies who died in Alice Mitchell’s care.

When the matter was further investigated, it was found that the four main Perth funeral directors at the time were all unaware that a coroner’s certificate was required. As a result, they had carried out 37 funerals at government expense for babies under Alice Mitchell’s care without any suspicion that something could be wrong.

On top of that, Dr Officer – the only medical practitioner to service the babies in Alice Mitchell’s charge – claimed he’d never noticed anything irregular about the conditions at Alice Mitchell’s various establishments. And the Council Health Department inspector whose job it was to do regular and thorough checkups on the babies and their conditions, a woman named Miss Lenihan, said that while she heard about the occasional death she didn’t feel it was something worth reporting to her superiors. Despite strong evidence to the contrary, Miss Lenihan also maintained that Alice Mitchell’s establishments were always found to be satisfactory.

At a coroner’s inquest on 12 March 1907, a three-man jury found that ‘the child Ethel Booth died from wilful starvation and culpable negligence by Alice Mitchell’. The coroner said the case was ‘the most revolting ever dealt with. It is loathsome, disgusting, filthy and monstrous.’

Alice Mitchell was arrested and charged with wilful murder, but with no evidence and no witnesses to any actual killing, she was acquitted of that charge; she was only found guilty of the manslaughter of Ethel Booth, for which she was sentenced to five years’ hard labour.

With the sentencing of Alice Mitchell, authorities introduced strict regulations into the baby farming industry and within a few years it was outlawed all together, thus bringing a close to one of the most evil chapters of serial murder in Australia’s history.