For part one of this article, read “Death on the ‘baby farm’: part one“.
Ritual child sacrifice & the Ukrainian “Angelmakers”
Throughout Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries the term “angel-making” was a commonly used euphemism for infanticide. The term has, in at least in one case, a horrifyingly literal denotation. Here is an excerpt from a news report describing a Ukrainian cult, or “sect,” said to be “infamous under the denomination of ‘Angelmakers,’” located in Odessa. This ultra-creepy serial baby-killing case dates from 1885.
The sect members “profess their mission is to murder for the assured salvation of the souls of their innocent victims, and at the same time to earn for themselves eternal glory. It is difficult, however, to obtain any exact account of the origin and organisation of this sect, whose members, it would appear, were under some vow of secrecy. The prisoner tried yesterday was charged under the name of Rachel Ostrovoskafa, but is known to the police by several aliases. She is a married woman, 28 years of age; one of her known victims being her own and only child. Three cases of child murder, one by strangulation, were proved against the prisoner, who was too leniently condemned to 15 years’ hard labour. The woman appeared unaffected, and when called upon by the judge, replied simply, and with the utmost composure, ‘Do with me what you will; I am in your hands.’”
A global business model
Baby farming scandals peppered the English language newspapers for many, many decades. But reports of sensational baby farming murder cases were not restricted to the English-speaking world. They ranged across the globe: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, Portugal, Italy, Russia, Hungary, Ukraine and Japan.
In Christiania, Norway [now called Oslo] in 1902 “the remains of a small army of tiny corpses were dug up” by police from the “private cemeteries in gardens and fields” on the properties of a consortium of twenty baby farmers.
The sheer scale of some baby farmer “death camp” operations from the early 1900s is astonishing. In 1913, Madame Kusnezowa of Archangel, Russia, was accused of murdering 1,012. In 1906, Mr. and Mrs. Holmen’s baby farm in Stockholm, Sweden, the death count was over 1,000.
The Holmens, proprietors of the National Children’s Sanitorium in Stockholm, were sophisticated con artists as well as merciless serial killers. The international news of the day revealed that “It appears that the alleged Sanitorium was simply a baby farm on an immense scale, and that wholesale murders of babies were committed. The authorities are trying to trace Gustav Holmen and the woman who passed as his wife. He posed as a minister and she as a trained nurse and specialist in children and their bringing up. They secured numerous contributions, and especially handsome amounts were subscribed to the building fund. It is calculated, that in the three years the institution had been running, over a thousand babies have been received. Yet only thirteen babies are alive and well. These are the healthiest, fattest and prettiest of those received, and they were used as decoy, or show babies. They were shown to mothers and to all visitors and their pictures were sent out on the literature used.”
Across the globe, in Japan, baby farmers thrived – and many of their charges died. Japan’s adoption practice, a “dowry” system, created a formally sanctioned incentive that attracted those ready to make an easy kill for easy money. An English-language newspaper explained that “according to the Japanese institution of adoption, parents who cannot afford to give their children the best opportunities may offer them to more affluent families who are childless or lacking in a male heir. It is frequently customary for the family to pay a dowry to the family adopting the child.” (quote from the Tanaka case, below)
In 1902, in Osaka, a family whose name was not given in the English-language reports and described as “an elderly woman, her married daughter, husband and two other persons” was arrested and charged with the murder of 300 children within a single year of operations. In 1906, also in Osaka, a woman, un-named (whom I have labeled the “Osaka ‘Devil Woman,’” based on the pejorative given her by her community), was “charged with having murdered over 100 babies. On the way to the Public Prosecutor’s office from the police station, she was greeted, it was reported, by large crowds, with shouts of “’human devil,’ ‘kill the devilish woman,’ and similar execrations.”
In 1924, in a suburb of Tokyo, the closet of Mr. and Mrs. Tanaka, dowry-takers, were found to contain bones of child victims following their arrest on a complaint that the couple were thought to be in the process of deliberately starving two babies to death at their home.
In 1948, a sensational Japanese serial baby-killing case erupted into the international news involving the Kotobuki Maternity Hospital in Shinjuku, operated by Mrs. Miyuki Ishikawa and her husband Takeshi Ishikawa. Dramatic photos were published showing victim children packed like sardines into a baby farm bunk. Another picture shows a troop of nurses removing the surviving children from a death house. The five surviving babies removed from the Ishikawas were all found by doctors to be in “critical condition, suffering from malnutrition, pneumonia, bronchitis and skin diseases.” Wikipedia notes that “it is estimated that her victims numbered between 85 to 169, however the general estimate is 103. When she was finally apprehended, the Tokyo High Court’s four-year sentence Mrs. Ishikawa received was remarkably light considering her actions resulted in a death toll so high that it remains unrivaled by any other serial killer in Japan.”
Starvation – which would frequently lead to disease – was a common method of murder used by killer baby farmers all across the world, yet my research on these serial killers reveals that the diversity of heartless murder methods employed by baby farmers is dizzying in its variety.
Feige Noskina, of Vilnius, Lithuania (” Vilna, Russia” in the papers), was apprehended in 1885, seems to have found a certain pleasure in inventing new ways to snuff out tiny lives. For her, variety was the spice of death.
“Many of [her victims] were allowed to die of cold and hunger and neglect, and others were poisoned with a decoction of poppy seed; but a large number were violently put to death, being suffocated by means of pillows, or packages of wadding or linen, while others again were strangled by the accused, or drowned in cesspools.”
Massacre of the Innocents, Memphis style
Here is a case that ought to be regarded as one of the most notorious serial killer cases in world history, yet it has never appeared on even a single list of serial killers (apart from my online publication).
Georgia Tann of Memphis, Tennessee, is credited with having created modern adoption practice – as it is still conducted – in the United States. We can thank Tann, the once-famed philanthropist, for having established the practice of falsifying birth records that is still standard practice in the adoption industry today. In her day, the 1930s-1940s, this Tennessee baby farmer was a nationally recognized expert on child-rearing. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt corresponded with her seeking her authoritative opinion when crafting child welfare policy. She was invited to lecture in Washington, New York and other cities on how to care after children. Portly pleasant-looking Miss Georgia Tann was a successful entrepreneur who raked in substantial profits and enjoyed the perks of social recognition during her nefarious operation’s heyday.
Miss Georgia Tann was also a fraudster, a sadistic child sexual molester, a serial child kidnapper and the murderer of many hundred – perhaps over a thousand – children.
In her criminal racket Tann was assisted by a respected writer on children’s welfare, a female Memphis judge who took bribes from Tann, Judge Camille Kelly. Kelly, like Tann, had a high public profile as a philanthropic benefactor of children. Kelly authored books such as A Friend in Court (1942) and Delinquent Angels (1947) published by major New York houses.
Wikipedia’s brief article on Kelly describes her involvement in Tann’s human trafficking scheme:
“Hallmark Productions was producing a movie based on her book, Delinquent Angels, but suspended production after her resignation from the bench in November 1950, in a storm of controversy and charges after the results of a special investigation ordered by governor Gordon Browning was released. The investigation surrounded illegal adoptions-for-profit by Georgia Tann and the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. It charged that approximately 20% of the illegal adoptions at the home were funnelled through Kelly’s court, where she would remove parental rights and provide Tann with documents to place the children as she deemed appropriate.”
According to one surviving victim (interviewed by Tann’s biographer), Georgia and her same-sex companion would hit the children “on the scalp so no one could see the bruises.” Favored forms of child torture at the Home included “tying a rope around a child’s wrists and hang[ing] it up on a coat rack and dangling a child from a rope down the laundry chute.”
The story of Mommie Dearest (bestselling book and cult film starring Faye Dunaway), the tortured saga of control-freak movie star Joan Crawford’s adopted daughter, was the story of one of the many children Georgia Tann had sold for big money to Hollywood purchasers.
During Tann’s tenure (during the 1930s and 1940s) as head of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis, the city was noted as producing the highest infant mortality rate in the nation. This fact, observed by a government researcher in Washington, D.C., led eventually to the exposure of Tann’s crimes, but she died before she could be prosecuted. Georgia Tann’s practice was to rid herself of those babies put in her charge – or kidnapped by her with official sanction with the collaboration of a corrupt judge – she deemed unsaleable by leaving them unattended out in the sun until they broiled to death. She and her lover (her adopted daughter) and male sexual deviants she employed would beat and torture children for the perverse sexual thrill of it.
“But she also literally stole many young children from their birth families – taking them away in her big car, or through social workers – and sold them. Tann disposed of more than 5,000 babies and children in this way” notes Charity Vogel in her review of the well-researched and superbly written 2007 book on Georgia Tann titled The Baby Thief : The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption, by Barbara Raymond.
Georgia Tann passed away in 1950 just at the moment her brutal crimes were being exposed to the public by a Congressional investigation. She had been a wholesale murderess who had mesmerized people into looking to her as some kind of social work saint.
Most serial killing child care providers, however, were obscure criminals who operated on a small scale.
By 1948, the term “baby farm” was for the most part obsolete. “Boarding house for babies” was a newer way of expressing the same thing (in the US). Of the two-bit con woman Edna Roseberry of Atlanta, Georgia, the operator of such a “boarding house”, the newspapers tell us, a “motherly-looking operator of a boarding house for babies was portrayed in criminal court today as a cruel woman who played the radio loud to drown out the screams of infants when she beat them. She was arrested for torturing children, but there were no homicide accusations. At her trial one witness testified that the 52-year-old care provider ‘beat a nine-year-old senseless and left another with the outline of her open hand plainly outlined on its body.’”
Before passing sentence after having been found guilty of beating one-year-old Charlene Stallings until she had blood running from her mouth, the trial judge asked “Mrs. Roseberry, have you any previous record?” The child care provider frankly replied, “Yes, sir, for hijacking, bootleg liquor in Kansas back in 1934,” she replied, adding that she was given from 10 to 21 years on a charge of armed robbery and served six years of this term.
Edna Roseberry had the classic profile of a criminal. Had present-day information technology been available in her day she might have been prevented from getting her hands on her victims. Yet Georgia Tann was a sophisticated white collar criminal, with brains and connections within the court system, protected by the political machine of Memphis. She was a famous philanthropist who had in her pocket a respected female judge who herself was an expert on the welfare of children. Two radically different socioeconomic profiles: the one was an obvious, sleazy, two-bit “blue collar” sociopath, the other was a successful, sophisticated pillar of society, a “respectable” sociopath who could get away with the most hideous sorts of crimes on an epic scale.
Baby-Sitter Serial Killers
There is, I would argue, evidence in the data on female serial killer cases that point to a type of mania for murdering helpless children. It is known that many run-of-the-mill female serial killers (hundreds of them) have murdered their own children during their killing careers – along with other family members, parents, siblings, husbands. The list of women who are known to have serially murdered their own newborns is as long as it is depressing.
There is another category of female serial killer who murdered children – other people’s children – that must be looked at if we are to seriously ponder what type of person might become a serial killing baby farmer. This category is the baby-sitter serial killer.
Unlike male serial killers of children, females (with some rare exceptions, such as Guadalupe Martinez de Bejarano) do not kill to cover up sexual molestation as do so many male serial killers of children. Their perversion is different. They do not do it for the money, or to save expenses (from food, bathing and linen costs), as do the baby farmers, that is certain. Yet the baby-sitter serial killers clearly do have a mania for killing. Why should we assume that murderous baby farmers are so very different, merely because of the financial aspect of their criminal activity? More likely, many of them were attracted to their occupation by the thrill of killing helpless victims just like the serial killer nurses and baby-sitters of recent decades whose cases are much better known to the public..
Here are nine examples of baby-sitter serial killers dating (and one baby farmer for comparison) from 1906-1989:
1906 – Ida Schnell – Munich, Germany – teenage child-care provider who had a special technique for murdering babies, “plunging a hairpin into the lower part of the back of their heads till they ceased to cry.”
(I must add that in Schnell’s method there is a similarity to Australian baby farmer Sarah Jane Makin’s manner of executing infants. In 1892, at two different locations near Sydney, “the bodies of thirteen infants were found and to-day, two more bodies were found in the yard of a house at Chippendale. The mothers of some of the murdered babies have been traced. The theory of the doctors is that the babies were killed by having their hearts or spines pierced with needles.” Sarah Jane and her husband, John, were sentenced to death. John was hanged; Sarah Jane had her sentence commuted to life. She served 18 years and was paroled in 1911.)
1906 – Lillian B. Thorman – York, Pennsylvania – A 15-year-old servant girl murdered a child whom she “roasted from head to toe” by placing the youngster on the stove. After her arrest it was learned she had previously murdered three other children in the same manner, getting away with the crimes by having concocting stories of unfortunate accidents.
1908 – Jeanne Weber – Paris, France – She was obsessed with strangling children of various ages, and murdered at least ten. Among her victims were three children of her own; the rest were mostly the children of relatives. She was caught in the act several times, but got away with murder with the help of the brilliant and famous men of science and law who defended her in court on two separate occasions. Having been found innocent once, she was free to kill again. She was caught again, found innocent again and continued her strangling career, until finally she was caught in such a flagrant act of violent child-strangling that even the “experts” could not be able to employ their sophisticated and erroneous theories to save her. After being declared insane and sent to prison, Jeanne strangled herself to death.
1956 – Virginia Jaspers – New Haven, Connecticut – A retired head pediatric nurse killed three babies by shaking them to death because “children sometimes get on her nerves.” Other of her victims lived through their ordeals. Among these Nurse Jaspers had broken the leg of one and caused a serious head injury to yet another. After her arrest Mrs. Jaspers said: “How will I ever face people again?” This highly trained professional child care provider explained her actions thus: “It was all uncontrollable. I didn’t know why I did it. Children sometimes get on my nerves.”
1980 – Helen Patricia Moore – Claymore, NSW, Australia – She smothered 3 children and 3 additional children survived her abuse, one of them being rendered blind and unable to walk.
1982 – Christine Laverne Falling – Calhoun & Taylor Counties, Florida – She murdered at least 5 children. According to her testimony, she had heard voices that ordered her to kill the babies by placing a blanket over their faces.
1984 – Lise Jane Turner – Christchurch, New Zealand – She murdered two of her own babies plus one other baby, and attempted to kill four other babies she had been looking after.
1986 – Sandra K. Pankow – Appleton, Wisconsin – Accused of murdering three babies she “sat” for, she was convicted of murdering two.
1989 – Amy Lynn Scott – Phoenix, Arizona – She murdered three babies in 1989. The parents of the victims were all met by the baby-sitter murderess at the same church. She was not convicted until 2007.
“I didn’t know why I did it.” (Virginia Jaspers, retired head nurse, 1956)
Regarding the moral hazard inherent in the baby farming business model Dr. Johnston, in her Psychology Today article on baby farmer serial killers, properly observes that “the financial arrangement itself was partially the problem. On the one hand, women who paid for their child’s care by the month gave the child care provider a reason to keep the child alive but by the cheapest means possible. … As such, hundreds of these babies died from neglect, either directly from malnutrition or from a secondary disease as a result of a weakened immune system.”
Yet “the bottom line” should, I would argue, not be concluded to be merely a matter of economics, of weakness in the face of temptation, or of greed, or of fear of poverty. Such agency-discounting arguments as that fail to address the question of why so many other persons, many quite poor, chose not to become murderous baby farmers.
It is Dr. Johnston’s conclusion that “we’ll never know whether or not [the baby farmers discussed in her article] would have taken some other malevolent path if the one they chose had not been available to them, a path that started with deception and ended in murder.” Strictly speaking, this is perfectly true, for we lack the definitive documentary evidence that might offer deep insight into the personalities of these individuals. But that does not mean one must avoid making an earnest probe to try to comprehend the character and psyche of such a serial baby killer. We should, I suggest, try our best to know as much as we can.
This “we’ll never know” conclusion is not much different from nipping the inquiry in the bud and asserting that “some things are better left unsaid.”
When one constructs a hypothetical question that cannot have an answer and that is in its essence an irrelevant one – whether the criminal might have not committed the crime if the victim and the booty had not been within reach – the construct is no more than a straw man argument. We are reminded of the exclamation of Virginia Jaspers, professional head nurse and obsessive child killer, made by her to investigators in 1956: “I didn’t know why I did it.” Yet investigators working in 2013 to uncover the psychology of serial killers cannot get away with failing to seriously make an effort to find out why they did it.
The fact remains that insight into the murderous personality type of the baby farmer serial killer is available in abundance should one to choose to conscientiously look at it. Rather than give up trying to comprehend the mindset of a woman who would incinerate babies alive in a deliberately set house fire, or throw murdered babies to the hogs (Skoublinska, of Warsaw) or batter a child so that its skull is cracked in half (Geisen-Volk), we ought to make our very best effort to attempt to comprehend and expose that mindset.
Dr. Johnston’s Psychology Today article on baby farms, however, glaringly avoids discussing the gory details of the murder methods of the women she writes about. Instead her article employs the unspecific and innocuous catch-all term “neglect,” a rather benign-sounding method, leaving her reader with the false impression that the little victims of violent death at the hands of the serial killing baby farmers the article cites – Dyer, the Warsaw baby farmer and Mrs. Geisen-Volk – just faded away painlessly into the ether like cloudy cherubs.
Allowing the cause of death to be seen as simply “neglect” (unspecific, without details given) allows the discussion to completely sidestep the disturbing fact that huge numbers of infants have, by these frequently pathologically sadistic serial killers, been strangled, stabbed, smothered, burned alive, frozen to death, drowned, killed by having their necks twisted, crushed to death with furniture, poisoned, drugged to death and battered to death. No: “neglect” is not an adequate term to describe these acts; nor is “weakened immune system” adequate to identify the “mass of putrid sores” on the two-year-old victim of Madame Julien (1867, France) or the “pneumonia, bronchitis and skin diseases” of the five children rescued from the care of Mrs. Ishikawa (1948, Japan).
It is imperative that we consider the possibility that some women (as well as some men too, but in fewer numbers) get a sick addictive kick from cruelly snuffing out the life of a defenseless child.
Beyond the “bottom line”
The issue of baby farmers who kill, how they kill, and why they choose to kill, is germane today: crucially germane to all of us, I would assert.
In addition to the recent proffering of a mother’s right to kill in the form of “after birth abortion,” being promoted by specialists in the burgeoning field of “bioethics,” we have other eminent experts attempting to turn back the clock to the druggy days of laudanum for babes.
Dr. Sandra Scarr – former President of the Society for Research in Child Development, the Association for Psychological Science, the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology, and the Behavior Genetics Association, and CEO of Kindercare corporation, the biggest day care franchise – claims that a baby’s strong maternal attachment – resulting from having put into the care of “professional” strangers – ought to be seen as a mental disorder that can be, in Dr. Scarr’s ominous philosophy, “treated.”
“Treated!”
Another major child expert has big, and highly lucrative, plans for transforming infanthood into a “scientific” industry. Dr. Joseph Biederman, “a world renowned Harvard child psychiatrist,” a hugely influential producer of studies that assist pharmaceutical corporations (who underwrite the studies) to market their products – claims that a small child as young as three can be “diagnosed” with bipolar disorder, which, as you might guess, can be “treated” by placing the infant on a lifelong, permanently mind-altering and expensive regimen of powerful psychotropic drugs. His experiments, or “studies,” were conducted with the babies of poor, presumably single, mothers who profited from making their children available to Dr. B.
The Psychology Today article on baby farmers which prompted me to write this piece cited, you will recall, four important serial murder cases by way of illustrating the general subject of repeated deaths of infants on baby farms. It was the author’s decision to forgo informing her readers the crucial and telling details of those four cited cases – namely such details as a building containing children having been set deliberately afire, the throwing of babies’ corpses to hogs, a child’s “skull cracked in half,” a girl having been grabbed up by its ankles and dashed with force against a wall, the drugging of babies with opiates, and the brutal strangling of babies with cotton edging tape followed by disposal of the lifeless victim in a canal – that compelled me to offer my somewhat different thoughts, speculations, and interpretations from those expressed by Dr. Johnston and prompted me to pose difficult questions she did not elect to take up.
The issue of serial homicide and abuse by hired child care providers in days gone by is not merely an academic one. The subject has significant import today as we face a fiercely metastasizing (albeit cautiously incremental and seemingly benign) combined state/corporation central planning agenda that aims, like all great human total-management schemes, to control the minds and bodies of children – and to control them absolutely. In this period we are now living in we have finally passed the threshold into the full scale Orwellian Zone where the health of an infant – whether about-to-be-born or “after birth,” whether female or male – has become subsumed under the innocuous “human resource management” rubric of “women’s health.” Oh, but we can surely trust the experts, can’t we?
Let us be reminded that government-regulated foster child programs in the United States are well-known for their monumental, excruciating failures. Children in these programs die in rates many times higher than is the case in the general population. Further, these children are also sexually abused at a much higher rate. The children are heavily drugged with cocktails of multiple powerful psychotropic drugs – to the great profit of those businesses that worked so hard, investing huge sums to purchase the best experts money can buy, in order to design public policy after their own image. It is all done under protocols created, and heavily subsidized, by a distant centralized federal government.
It is with good reason that the history of serial abuses by child care providers – and the battalions of miscreants such a business can be proven to have attracted – continues to get the white-wash treatment. This serial child care provider infanticide business is a bit of history which many interested parties would rather see sanitized and swept under the rug (along with so much other portions of history that are either politically inconvenient or ideologically outré).
Forgotten baby farming practices of days gone by, and the kinds of people this type of business repeatedly draws, are topics which more than deserve an incisive looking into. If we choose to turn our gaze away from the sordid “uncomfortable” facts we are engaging in a shameful act of self-censorship. Averting one’s gaze – as a self-protection strategy – is a manifestation of magical thinking, a psychological state of denial. Moreover, such denial further promulgates a blinding normalcy bias that favors simplistic, easy, and reassuring explanations. It dumbs us down. It gets us used to uncritical acceptance, cowardice and moral numbness.
Let us not deploy the banal and hackneyed professorial formula of causes described as “social stressors” or other methods of social determinist interpretation for the purpose of erasing all serious consideration of free will and personal agency, in our examination of such subjects as serial killers who fatally abuse displaced children. Let us neither justify nor excuse future crimes by invoking facile and mechanical explanations for deeds committed by individualized criminals long gone. Let us not concoct, in our mythological narrative constructions, freshly absolved tribes of “justified sinners.”
Not trying to know as much as we can possibly manage about the subject of deadly child care providers – whether they be malevolent or merely incompetent – as a pervasive criminal and psychological phenomenon (one which has been relentlessly and painfully exposed to light within this article), can indeed numb our minds to what is, in fact, a continuously pertinent issue of life and death.
If you, dear reader, have been patient and brave enough to read this essay along from beginning to end, you will have, if you are a normal person with a human heart, read it and wept.
Our tears are not shed in vain. Great changes are upon us in this our rapidly moving age. It is incumbent that we go forth daily with eyes wide open and for us to marshal our will – to master our minds and souls and ready ourselves to blaze new trails of escape from the cloudy maze of baffles and falsehoods – fake history, twisted ideologies, amoral imperatives – that has been constructed by our overseers expressly designed to imprison our individual minds – and, more importantly – the minds and bodies of our fresh and sparkling innocent little children.
We must reject sound-bite explanations which serve to lull us into indifference. We must go beyond tidy and ideology-tainted generalizations and look deeper, for “the Devil is in the details.”
•?•?•?•
NOTE
Photo of rescued baby, Frankie Heath, from: [“New Baby-Farm Horror – Little Frankie Heath Is Found by His Mother Dying of Starvation Amid Most Revolting Conditions.” The Sunday Journal (Minneapolis, Mn.), Nov. 11, 1906, p. 1]
•?•?•?•
BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Dr. Scarr • William Norman Grigg, “New Century Children,” The New American, Vol. 19, No. 18, Sep. 3, 2008; Brian C. Robertson, Day Care Deception (book), Encounter Books, 2004
• “After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?” Journal of Medical Ethics, Feb. 23, 2012
••• Historical Cases:
• Exposure to elements method – a case not cited in the text body, but an excellent example of the type: Christiana Breitschweidt, Jersey City, New Jersey, 1892 – [“Leaving Infants To Die – Mrs. Breitschwert Arrested For Baby Farming In Jersey City.” The New York Times (N.Y.), Jan. 15, 1892, p. 10]
• Philanthropy, professionalism & neglect – The Nivison case, not mentioned in my article, provides a bizarre example of apparent incompetence (or, perhaps insanity) on the part of a professionally trained and well-funded nurse who operated a publicly sanctioned baby farm – [“Terrible Revelation – Evidence of Infants Being Murdered by the Score.” Daily Evening Bulletin (Mattville, Ky.), Jun. 6, 1884, p. 1] [“Miss Nivison’s Denial – Indignant At The Charges Against Her Home. – She Says That the Babies Died From Measles and Pneumonia, and Were Buried With Religious Ceremonies Whose Offspring the Infants Were.” The Evening Herald (Syracuse, N. Y.), Jun. 6, 1884, p. 8] [Untitled, The Upper Des Moines (Algona, Io.), Jul. 9, 1884, p. 2]
• Ashmead, Elizabeth – [“New-Jersey ‘Baby Farm’ Mystery Rivals Gunness Case,” syndicated The Waterloo Times-Tribune (Io.), May 21, 1910, p. 8]
[“Babies Were Buried Alive – Mothers’ Bodies Were Cut Up,” The Tacoma Times (Wa.), Apr. 11, 1904, p. 4]
[“Given Five Years – Baby Farmer Was Sent to Federal Prison,” The Lowell Sun (Ma.), Jul. 1, 1911, p. 7]
• “Christiana Baby Farmers” – [“Christiania The Wickedest Capital in All Europe,” The Atlanta Constitution (Ga.), Jul. 6, 1902, p. 16]
• Delpech, Madame –[From “Parisian Gossip.” The Southland Times (Invercargill, New Zealand) May 20, 1869, pp. 2-3] [“Wholesale Infanticide.” Lloyd’s Weekly Newsletter (London, England), Mar. 14, 1869, p. 1] [“Infanticide In France.” The Saturday Review (London, England), Mar. 20, 1869, p. 385]
• Dyer, Amelia – [“Hundreds of Victims. – Amelia Dyer, Baby Farmer and Strangler.” syndicated, The Logansport Pharos (In.), May 15, 1896, p. 6]
“Hundreds of Victims. – Amelia Dyer, Baby Farmer and Strangler.” syndicated, The Logansport Pharos (In.), May 15, 1896, p. 6
[“Britain’s worst ever serial killer: The Victorian angel of death that murdered 400 babies,” Written by 24 Tanzania Reporter, Tanzania.com, Feb. 23, 2013]
• Eckhart, Wilhelmena – [“Murderer of Infants Charge Against Woman – Grave Accusations Against Mother by Her Two Daughters, Who Caused Her Imprisonment in Tombs.” The Washington Times (D.C.), Nov. 21, 1906, p. 8] [“Light Sentence For Baby Farmer,” The Pensacola Journal (Fl.), Dec. 22, 1906, p. 1]
• Falling, Christine – [Max Haines, Deadly Babysitter,” Lethbridge Herald (Alberta, Canada), Jan. 25, 2004, p. A9]
“Christine Falling,” from Murderpedia.org
• Geisen-Volk, Helen – Jay Maeder, “Mother’s Day; Baby Nest, May 1925 Chapter 34, Daily News (New York, N.Y.), Mar. 15, 2000
• Guzovska, Madame – [Untitled, The Bruce Herald (Tokomairio, New Zealand), Jun. 16, 1903, p. 4]
• Holmen, Mr. & Mrs. – [“A Thousand Babies Murdered – On Huge Baby Farm in Stockholm. Decoy Infants.” Syndicated, New Zealand Truth (Wellington, N.Z.), Dec. 22, 1906, p. 8]
• Ishikawa, Miyuki – “Miyuki Ishikawa,” on Wikipedia; [“Two New ‘Baby Death Suspects Rounded Up,” Pacific Stars and Stripes (Tokyo, Japan), Jan. 20, 1948, p. 1]
[“On Trial As Baby Murderers,” Pacific Stars and Stripes (Tokyo, Japan), Sep. 24, 1948, p. 4]
• Jaspers, Virginia –[“Nurse Admits Shaking Three Babies to Death – They Refused to Take Formulas and Got On Her Nerves, She Explains To Police,” syndicated (AP), The Milwaukee Journal (Wi.), Aug. 28, 1956, p. 1]
• Julien, Madame – [“Systematic Child Murder.” The Atlas (London, England), Sep. 21, 1867, p. 8]
• Kusnezowa, Madame – [“Thousand Murdered Babies. – Russian Woman Charged. – Victims Killed By Poison.” Poverty Bay Herald (Gisborne, New Zealand), April 12, 1913, p. 10]
• Makin, Sara Jane – [“Hearts Pierced With Needles. – Bodies of Many Infants Found on Australian Baby Farms.” syndicated (AP), The World (Brooklyn, N.Y.), Nov. 14, 1892, p. 2]
• McCloskey, Margaret – [“Baby Farming.” New York Tribune (N.Y.), Jun. 28, 1876]
The New York Times report on this case gives the name as“Margaret McClinchy.” (“Baby Farming. A Woman Sent To The Penitentiary For Six Months And Fined $250.” New York Times (N.Y.), Jul. 2, 1876, p. ?)
• Moore, Helen Patricia – “The Ultimate Female Sentencing Discount: Helen Patricia Moore,” Porky’s Place, undated
[“Babysitter ‘was killer,’” The Age (Melbourne, Australia), Apr. 2, 1980, p. 3]
[“Woman faces further murder, assault charges – Boy now blind, unable to walk, SM told,” The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), Apr. 10, 1980, p. 2]
[Alison Stewart, “Portrait of a baby killer – A life of agony haunts babysit killer’s family,” The Sun-Herald (Melbourne, Australia), Dec. 14, 1980, p. 2]
• Noskina, Feige – [:Wholesale Infanticide In Russia. – Shocking Disclosures.: The South Australian Chronicle, Adelaide, SA, Australia), Jun. 18, 1892, p. 6]
[“Baby Farmers Sentenced.” The Sun (New York, N.Y.), May 5, 1892, p. 2]
• “Osaka Baby Farmers” – [“Three Hundred Babies Victims Members of a Japanese Family Arrested at Osaka on Charge of Child Slaughter.” (Special By Scripps-McRae.), Dec. 29, 1902, p. 1]
• “Osaka Devil Woman” – [“Wholesale Infanticide – Woman Charged With Murdering Over 100 Babies.” The West Australian (Perth, Australia), Aug. 28, 1906, p. 2]
• Ostrovoskafa, Rachel – [“A Murderous Sect.” Marlborough Express (Blenheim, Marlborough, New Zealand), Mar. 25, 1885, p. 3]
• Overbye, Dagnmar – [Helle Harbo Sørensen, “Child killer Dagmar Overbye,” TV2 Finans, Jun. 22, 2008] Link to Danish original: Helle Harbo Sørensen, “Bardemordersken Dagmar Overbye,” TV2 Finans, Jun. 22, 2008]
• Pankow, Sandra K. – [Lee Bergquist, “Appleton sitter gets 40 years for 2 killings,” Milwaukee Sentinel (Wi.), Aug. 22, 1986, p. 1]
• “Premysi Baby Farmers” – [“Wholesale Infanticide. – Terrible Revelations of an Austrian Baby-Farm – Dozens of Bodies Found by the Authorities – Social Scandals Threatened.” The Toronto Daily Mail (Canada), Mar. 6, 1893, p. 1]
• Roseberry, Edna – [“Woman Convicted of Beating Baby,” St. Petersburg Times (Fl.), Feb. 20, 1948, p. 8]
• Schnell, Ida – [Bernard Fischer, “Girl of Thirteen Slays Six Babies – Remarkable Record of Murder Is Confessed by a Child in Munich.” Syndicated, The Salt Lake Tribune (Ut.), Nov. 10, 1907, p. 17]
• Scott, Amy Lynn –[Jill Redhage, “Woman convicted of killing three babies decades after their deaths,” East Valley Tribune (Tempe, Az.), Mar. 7, 2007 (updated Oct. 7, 2011)]
• Skoublinska, Marianne; “Skublinski,” “Stysinski, ” etc. – [“Horrible Crimes At Warsaw – Fifty Murdered Babies Found.” The Echo (London, England), Feb. 24, 1890, p. 3]
[“A Diabolical Crime.” Supplement to Evening Post (Wellington, New Zealand), May 17, 1890, p. 1]
[“The Polish Baby Murderer Sentenced,” The Nelson Evening Mail (New Zealand), May 27, 1890, p. 4] [« Les faiseuses d’anges, » (Chronique Ou Crime) Le Stéphanois (Paris , France), Feb. 28, 1890, p. 2] [Untitled, Free Russia, (The Organ of the English Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, American Edition), (New York, N.Y.), Apr. 1891, p. 6]
• Tanaka, Mrs. Juniki – [“Infants Starved To Death For Dowries – Eight Murders Charged to Tokyo (Japan) Couple.” The Kingston Daily Freeman (N.Y.), Sep. 11, 1924, p. 7]
• Tann, Georgia – “Devil in disguise: Adoption in America,” The Buffalo News, May 22, 2007 (book review); Barbara Raymond, The Baby Thief, The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption,2007 (book; highly recommended)
• Thorman, Lillian B. –[“Fire Used To Kill. – Girls Says She Killed Three Children by Placing Them on the Stove.” Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Oh.), Feb. 23, 1906, p. 1]
• Turner, Lise Jane – [“Lise Jane Turner,” murderpedia.org] [“Lynn Turner (murderer),” Wikipedia]
• Waters, Margaret – [“Trade Of Murder – Review of the Case of Margaret Waters, the Murderess, Hanged on Oct. 11.” (from the London Spectator, Oct. 1), The New York Times (N.Y.), Oct. 15, 1870, p. ?] [Untitled, The Guardian (London, England), Oct. 12, 1870, p. 1191 (p. 7 of issue)] [“Baby Farming,” Victorian History, Mar. 14, 2012]
• Weber, Jeanne – [“‘The Fatal Woman.’ – Mystery Of Seven Infants’ Deaths.” From Paris Daily Mail, The Daily Mail (London, England), May 11, 1908, p. 5] [“Ogress’s Fate – Murderess of Many Children Sent to a Lunatic Asylum.” Lloyd’s Weekly News (London, England), Nov. 29, 1908, p. 10]
• Wiese, Elizabeth – [“Terrible Charges Against A Berlin Baby Farmer.” Daily Mail (London, England), Oct. 6, 1903, p. 5] [“Baby Farmer Must Die. – Notorious German Woman Receives Five Capital Sentences.” Syndicated (Bulletin Press Association), Oshkosh Daily Northwestern (Wi.), Nov. 1, 1904, p. 4]
• West. Mrs. Fred Mr. – [“Babies Instead of Dogs Said to Be Sold in Iowa – Woman Charged With Killing Unsalable Child – Accused of Throwing Noisy Infants Into Furnace.” The Washington Times (D.C.), Jun. 4, 1907, p. 4
•?•?•?•
