2 cases tagged “strangulation”
Convicted: Amelia Elizabeth Dyer (née Hobley)
'You'll know all mine by the tape around their necks.' When Amelia Dyer spoke those words to Reading police in the spring of 1896, she did so with the calm of a woman who had been getting away with murder — quite literally — for two decades. On March 30, 1896, a bargeman pulled a brown paper parcel from the River Thames near Caversham. Inside was a baby girl, strangled with white dressmaker's tape. She would not be the last. By the time detectives closed in on the mild-mannered, churchgoing widow operating out of a modest terrace on Kensington Road, seven infant bodies had been recovered from the river. Experts now estimate that Amelia Dyer — the 'Ogress of Reading,' a trained nurse turned baby farmer — murdered between 200 and 400 children over twenty years, making her one of the most prolific killers in British history. The jury took four and a half minutes to convict her. The tape never lied. This is her story.
Convicted: Mary Flora Bell
The morning after Mary Bell strangled four-year-old Martin Brown to death, she broke into a nursery school and left four handwritten notes claiming responsibility for the killing. Police dismissed them as a prank. The author was ten years old. What followed over the summer of 1968 in Scotswood, Newcastle, was one of the most disturbing chapters in British criminal history: a child killer operating in plain sight, in broad daylight, returning to mutilate a victim's body with broken scissors, and sitting with the grieving families of her victims as though nothing had happened. Mary Flora Bell was not a monster who emerged from nowhere. She was a product of almost incomprehensible abuse, a girl whose own mother allegedly tried to poison her with sleeping pills and drop her from a first-floor window. That context explains nothing and excuses nothing, but it haunts everything. She would become Britain's youngest female killer on record, a title she still holds. This is her story.
