The Baby in the Bulrushes

On 30 March 1896, a tightly wrapped package is found in the bulrushes on the banks of the Thames in Reading. When police open up the paper and cloth bundle they find the body of a one-year-old child, strangled by a knotted tape ligature. It’s only a matter of weeks before two more dead babies are found at the same spot, dumped in the river with a house brick to weigh them down. Who could be responsible for this systematic and heartless series of crimes?

An eyewitness account records that a tall pensive woman was seen walking by the riverbank. She was wearing a long cloak and appeared to be concealing something. On the same day of the murder, police search the house of an unmarried seamstress, Miss Pinto. They find the body of a smothered newborn child but the seamstress and her one-year-old daughter are nowhere to be seen. She appears to be a suspect.

Soon investigators unearth more suspects, a sinister foster family in Caversham. During this time of intolerance, when pregnant unmarried mums would be dismissed from their jobs, a huge number ‘farmed out’ their babies to other families, paying a fee to support the child’s upkeep. Some of these children were genuinely cared for, but could this family have other motives, keeping the money and murdering the children surrendered innocently into their arms?

A gruesome web of exploitation unravels, but a telling clue is a pair of boots at the family's house, tied with the same knot as used on the tape that strangled the babies. Did they belong to Granny Smith, Annie Thomas (aka Mrs Harding), her daughter Polly or the daughter’s husband Ernest Palmer? Armed with the owner's identity, the police also have Polly's admission to police that she saw her mother strangling a child. Thomas, whose real name was Amelia Dyer, confessed and was convicted of the murder of only one child. There was always the suspicion that she killed many more and after a house she had occupied was renovated, builders discovered eight small graves. Polly escaped charges for giving evidence and neither Granny Smith nor Palmer were convicted of any part in the crime.

Miss Pinto turned up safe and well with her daughter, and her dead baby was revealed to have been stillborn.

top