Amelia Dyer became known as the ogress of Reading and also as the Redding baby farmer.

Baby farming was a lot like what it sounds like, unfortunately.

Babies were viewed as a cash crop, and it was a common 19th century practice in England

where women offered to adopt or foster illegitimate or unwanted children for a small fee.

Selling a child to a baby farmer was an option

most often utilized by desperate single mothers looking for a humane way to give up custody of

their child so they could get back into the workforce and avoid poverty, starvation, and the very strong

punishing social stigma that came with being an unwed mother in Victorian England.

Unfortunately, baby farming was not a positive practice in almost every case.

Most baby farmers, it seemed, based on the historical analysis,

use the infants and sometimes older children they brought in to make easy money.

It had a lot more to do with profit than anything even remotely humanitarian. After getting the child into their custody, most baby

farmers simply neglected them, shipped them off to a workhouse or to another family, sold them to

someone else, or in many cases let them die of starvation and or disease. And then

there was what Amelia Dyer did. Instead of collecting a small weekly or monthly fee from mothers,

as was customary, she pocketed a one-time payment for full custody of the child, and then typically

the child she adopted was quickly murdered. Most of them within the first 24 hours of

coming into her care. Amelia used the wildly unregulated baby farming industry to monetize infanticide.

She posted ads in the paper under a false name, collected the children along with the payment,

and then straight up strangled them towards the end with white edging tape before throwing their

tiny bodies into the River Thames waded down by bricks.

Amelia is believed to have murdered anywhere from 200 to somewhere around 400 infants and children.

...