10 Horrifying Serial Killers You've Never Heard Of

3. The Reading Baby Farmer

Amelia Elizabeth Dyer, born Amelia Hobley in 1837, was probably one of the most prolific and least remembered serial killers in recorded history.

Dyer was involved in a Victorian phenomenon called "baby farming": unwanted children were palmed off on others, who would charge a fee to look after the babies. In some of those cases, the babies were fostered on, in others, they were strangled at at birth, since Victorian doctors were unable to tell the difference between suffocation and a traditional stillbirth.

Doctors grew concerned at the number of death certificates that they were being asked to issue, and Dyer was arrested: alarmingly, she was only charged with neglect, and spent six months in prison. When she got out, she knew that her method had to change to avoid a similar occurrence.

Taking in babies for permanent adoption only from that point, Dyer would stay in one place for a few months and then move on, sometimes changing her name. The fees pocketed, the babies were suffocated shortly afterwards, a length of tape wrapped around their throats.

Death would not have been instantaneous: but Amelia enjoyed that, saying "I used to like to watch them with the tape around their neck, but it was soon all over with them."

Although over fifty bodies were recovered when the Thames was dredged, their condition was such that identification proved impossible. In the end, Amelia Dyer was convicted in May 1896 of the murders of Doris Marmon, Harry Simmons and Helena Fry, all a year old or younger, and hanged the following month.

Police confirmed that in the two months before her arrest, she had taken at least 20 tiny children into her murderous "care", none of whom had been found alive. Extrapolating her likely death toll over her thirty year career as a baby farmer, even a conservative estimate of ten children a year places her as having personally taken the lives of 300 babies.