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Frances Lydia Alice KNORR

 
 
 
 



A.K.A.: "The Baby Farming Murderess"
 
Classification: Murderer
Characteristics: "Baby farmer"
Number of victims: 2 +
Date of murders: 1891 - 1893
Date of arrest: August 1893
Date of birth: December 10, 1868
Victims profile: Children
Method of murder: Strangulation
Location: Brunswick, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Status: Executed by hanging at the Old Melbourne Gaol on January 15, 1894
 
 
 
 
 
 

During the 1890s depression jobs were scarce, there was no state welfare and it was difficult to avoid becoming involved in petty crime. When Rudolph Knorr was sent to prison in February 1892 for selling furniture being bought on hire purchase, his wife Frances was left pregnant and penniless. She managed by 'baby farming' - looking after children whose mothers could not care for them.

In September 1892 the bodies of three babies were discovered in Brunswick. Frances was arrested and sent for trial in December. The Weekly Times described the 23-year old woman as 'white and careworn'. She probably suffered from epilepsy. The public was deeply divided when she was sentenced to be executed. The hangman, Thomas Jones, committed suicide two days before the event. His wife had threatened to leave him if he hanged Mrs Knorr. Nevertheless, Frances Knorr hanged on 15 January 1894. This was the first execution of a woman in Victoria since 1863.

Frances Knorr found little support either among newspapers of the day or among government officials, for they had all come to believe in the deterrent effect of capital punishment. Her execution was intended as a warning to other wayward women. The city's health officer, Dr Neil, told a royal commission in 1893 that, of about 500 post-mortems he had performed on child bodies, more than half indicated murder.

Vic.gov.au

 
 

Frances Lydia Alice Knorr (10 December 1868 - 15 January 1894) was known as the Baby Farming Murderess. She was found guilty of strangling two infants and hanged on Monday 15 January 1894.

Frances Knorr was born as Minnie Thwaites in London, England in 1868 and emigrated to Sydney, Australia in 1887. Initially she worked as a domestic servant and married Randolph Knorr, a German immigrant. She later had an affair with one Edward Thompson and soon afterwards moved to Melbourne. The short lived affair was not successful and Minnie had to find a means to support herself and her daughter.

Baby farming

In February 1892, Australia was in the midst of a depression and jobs were scarce when Rudolph Knorr was sent to prison for selling furniture he had bought on hire purchase. Pregnant and penniless, Frances decided to set up business as a child minder, and moved around Melbourne frequently using both her maiden and married names. Frances Knorr strangled some of the babies she could not place elsewhere or sell to childless couples. While she was living on Moreland Road in Melbourne, she buried two of her victims in the garden. Knorr then moved back to Sydney and returned to her husband.

Arrest

The new tenant at the Moreland Road residence discovered the body of a baby girl while preparing a garden bed. Police dug up the rest of the garden and discovered a boy's body as well. The police soon traced them to Knorr. When they arrested her, she was about to give birth to her second child. She told the arresting officer, Detective Keating, "I know what you have come for". While awaiting trial she wrote a letter to her former lover, Edward Thompson, asking him to manufacture some evidence for her defence. Thompson's mother surrendered the letter to the police.

Trial

Knorr came to trial on April 11, 1893, charged only with the murder of the girl. The letter to Thompson was presented by the Crown as evidence. The letter was worded to implicate Thompson in the murders, but was deemed pure fabrication.

Knorr gave a statement herself from the witness box and admitted that she had buried the babies in Moreland Road but claiming that they had died of natural causes. The Crown however demonstrated that they had been strangled with a tape and that the neck of the little boy had been compressed to less than half its normal size. The trial lasted five days and resulted in a guilty verdict. As the death sentence was mandatory and as Judge Holroyd passed it, Knorr sobbed, "God help my poor mother! God help my poor babies!". She was taken back to the Old Melbourne Gaol to await execution.

Although Frances found little support among the newspapers of the day, the public was deeply divided on her sentence. Thomas Jones, the state's hangman, committed suicide two days before the execution after his wife threatened to leave him if he hanged Frances.

Execution

She was a model and penitent prisoner in the condemned cell and spent her time singing hymns and praying. She also made a written confession on her last day. "Placed as I am now within a few hours of my death, I express a strong desire that this statement be made public, with the hope that my fall will not only be a warning to others, but also act as a deterrent to those who are perhaps carrying on the same practice. I now desire to state that upon the charges known in evidence as Number 1 & 2 babies, I confess to be guilty".

Her execution was at 10:00am on Monday 15 January 1894. Her last words were recorded as: "Yes, the Lord is with me! I do not fear what men may do to me, for I have peace, perfect peace!" When the trap door was released, she dropped seven feet, six inches. Death was recorded as "instantaneous". Her death mask is on display at the Old Melbourne Gaol.

1893 Welfare Commission

Australia was in severe depression from 1873 to 1896 and with no state welfare, women in particular faced a hard life. The diaries of John Castieau, governor of Old Melbourne Gaol from 1869 to 1884 indicates that as children were permitted to stay with their mothers, it was a common practice for a pregnant woman to commit a crime so that she could have her delivery in the gaol and be cared for. During the 1893 commission Melbourne's public health officer testified that the post mortems he had performed on over 500 children who had died indicated that more than half had been murdered.

Wikipedia.org

 
 

Knorr, Frances Lydia Alice (Minnie) (1867–1894)

By Kathy Laster

Frances Lydia Alice (Minnie) Knorr (1867-1894), baby-farmer, was born on 6 November 1867 at Hoxton New Town, Middlesex, England, second daughter of William Sutton Thwaites, tailor, and his wife Frances Janet, née Robin. William became a respectable hat-maker at Chelsea, London. After at least one affair with a military man, young Frances (known as 'Minnie') migrated to Australia, reaching Sydney in the Abyssinia in 1887. Initially in domestic service, she became a waitress and on 2 November 1889 at St Philip's Church of England married Rudolph Knorr, a German-born waiter (and swindler). They moved to Melbourne. After the birth of their daughter in 1892, during the financial depression, Rudi was sentenced to a gaol term in Adelaide for selling off the family's partially paid-for furniture.

Left to fend for herself and her child, Frances tried her hand at dressmaking but when this venture failed she stole money and went back to Melbourne. There she took up with Edward Thompson, a fishmonger's assistant. When he left her, she turned to 'baby farming'—taking care of usually illegitimate children. Many such children died in circumstances that led to the belief that they had been murdered or neglected. Mrs Knorr moved around Melbourne frequently and when Rudi was released the couple returned to Sydney. Following the discovery of the corpses of three infants in premises at Brunswick, Melbourne, that she had occupied, she was arrested and, after giving birth to a second child on 4 September 1893, brought back to Melbourne, where she was tried for murder.

The circumstantial case against Knorr maintained that she was not only promiscuous and deceitful but also a ruthless racketeer. A more sympathetic reading of the evidence was that she was an unstable young woman eking out a precarious existence in difficult times. She had cared for some infants, and returned one to its mother. In other cases she passed on children to other women, paying them a lower fee. She made no great profit from any of these enterprises.

The Crown used against her a letter she wrote to Thompson, attempting to persuade him to obtain false evidence on her behalf, and she was convicted on 1 December 1893 of the wilful murder of a female child. Rudi's plea for clemency to the governor claimed that his wife was an epileptic, given to severe fits that sometimes led to irrational impulses and long bouts of staring blankly into space. Despite a petition from the 'Women of Victoria', who prayed that 'the killing of any woman by any body of men does not accord with the moral sense of the community', Frances Knorr was hanged at Pentridge gaol on 15 January 1894. She went to her death singing 'Abide with Me'. Her final words were said to have been, 'The Lord is with me, I do not fear what man can do unto me, for I have peace, perfect peace'. In her own hand, but not her idiom, she left a letter advising the premier how better to regulate baby-farming so as to protect infant life. She was one of only five women hanged in Victoria.

Adb.anu.edu.au

 
 

Frances Knorr

By Paul B. Kidd

Melbourne: 1893 - Lots of Questions

In September 1893, the new tenant of a house in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, decided to turn his backyard into a vegetable garden. As he was digging, to his horror, just below the surface of the unkempt backyard he unearthed the decomposing remains of a baby girl. Around the infant’s neck was a tightened length of rope.

Police were immediately summoned to the house to examine the find. Neighbors also pointed out a nearby house where the same tenants had also lived, and when they dug around the garden there, they found another two decaying infants, both boys, buried just beneath the surface.

The previous tenants of both addresses, Rudolph and Frances. Knorr, had recently moved to Sydney and weren’t hard to find. They had moved to Brisbane Street in the suburb of Surry Hills and were picked up by police within days of the discovery of the three tiny bodies and extradited to Melbourne to face the authorities.

An autopsy would reveal that the little girl had died of strangulation and the two boys had been suffocated. The Knorrs had a lot of questions to answer.

Police learned that Frances Knorr was born Minnie Thwaites in Chelsea, London, of a highly respected, God-fearing family. An unruly child and a lustful teenager of many conquests, she was sent from the family home to do her best in Australia and arrived in Sydney at age 19 in 1887.

She changed her name to Frances and fell in love with and married Rudolph Knorr, a German waiter whom she met while working as a domestic servant. Rudolph was well known to police in both Melbourne and Sydney as a petty criminal.

The Knorrs had a daughter named Gladys and after a series of misadventures, in which Rudolph did 18 months in Pentridge for fraud and Frances had an affair with an Edward Thompson and even lived with him for a time until he cast her aside, they reunited and turned to the new industry of “child minding.”

It wasn’t hard to do. Any woman with a child or children of her own who could get away with claiming to be a nurse could take babies in on a long-term, full-time basis. The usual deal was that the mother would pay an initial down payment of between five and 20 pounds and then pay a smaller monthly payment. In return her baby would be cared for and the mother would have access to her baby at prearranged visiting times.

The trouble with such loose arrangements was that often the mother would turn up to find that the child minder had taken her down payment and gone missing, presumably having sold the child, and numerous others, to childless couples for an extortionate sum and set up business again in another suburb or state.

Damning Evidence

The child minding industry became notorious. In Victoria in 1893 there were more than 60 inquests into babies  that had been found dead or had died through neglect. More than 20 of these cases were treated as murder, but the perpetrators were usually long gone and no one was charged with a capital offense. Many more infants had gone missing without trace, presumed sold.

Frances Knorr was known at numerous addresses throughout Melbourne during her child minding career and didn’t stay in one place too long. There were many mothers who wanted to have a word with her about her missing baby but were too frightened to report it to the police for fear of being exposed as a single mother. And it now seemed highly likely that the babies that Frances Knorr couldn’t farm out or sell had been murdered.

As they arrived to arrest her, Sydney police found Frances Knorr in bed about to give birth to her second child. After it was born in custody, the Knorrs were taken under armed escort aboard the steamer Burrumbeet to Melbourne.

The inquest into the death of one of the baby boys found in the backyard in Brunswick, Isaac Marks, was held in Melbourne Morgue in October 1893. Among the 33 witnesses called was a 13-year-old nursemaid who had worked for Frances Knorr on and off for several years. Her evidence was damning. She recalled Frances Knorr borrowing a spade from a neighbour and then complaining that the front garden was too rocky to dig in and that she would have to dig in the back garden instead.

The doctor who examined the deceased infant said that a tape that had been drawn around his neck was the width of a sovereign coin, thus limiting the breathing capacity and causing the baby to suffocate.

The inquest heard evidence that Frances Knorr had so many dealings with unwed mothers who were reluctant to come forward, swapping babies and farming babies out to other child-minding centers at reduced rates, that it was almost impossible to keep track of what was going on. She had even pretended that her own baby, Gladys, belonged to another mother and that she was minding the girl for her.

After the inquest was held into the death of each of the three tiny bodies found in her backyard, Frances Knorr was charged with three counts of murder. But even in the face of indisputable evidence, she steadfastly denied murdering the babies or having anything to do with burying them.

At her trial the prosecution was swift to play its trump card and produce a letter that Frances Knorr had written from her cell in Old Melbourne Jail to Edward Thompson, the lover who had cast her aside, asking him to fabricate certain evidence on her behalf. The letter was given to police by Thompson’s mother.

The letter was also a crude attempt to incriminate Thompson and have authorities believe that he was in some way responsible for the deaths and burials of the children. Frances Knorr wrote to Thompson urging him to pay a particular man and woman money to say that they had buried Knorr’s and Thompson’s child, which had died of consumption. She said in the letter that the woman would confirm this in court and clear both of them of any wrongdoing.

Frances Find God in the End

Thompson denied any knowledge of such involvement, and the police believed him. When this ploy failed, Frances Knorr dramatically changed her evidence in the middle of the trial. She admitted to burying the babies in the backyard, saying they had died of natural causes. This was a contradiction of the autopsies, which proved that they had definitely been murdered.

At the end of her five-day trial Frances Knorr was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. As she sat back in the dock sobbing at the sentence, she turned to Edward Thompson, who was sitting in the court and screamed: “God forgive you for your sins Ted. God help my poor mother. God help my poor babies.”

In the days leading up to her hanging Frances Knorr embraced God and finally confessed to her sins of murder. “Placed as I am now within a few hours of my death, I express a strong desire that this statement be made public, with the hope that my fall will not only be a warning to others, but also act as a deterrent to those who are perhaps carrying on the same practice. I now desire to state that upon the two charges known in evidence as Number 1 and Number 2 babies, I confess to be guilty.”

Although the man who was appointed to hang Frances Knorr, Thomas Jones, had a record of sending 15 men to their deaths on the gallows, he wasn’t too keen about the prospect of hanging his first woman, who also happened to be the first woman to be hung in Victoria in 30 years, so he took to the bottle.

Two days before Frances Knorr’s execution date, Jones committed suicide by cutting his own throat while in a drunken stupor.

But the hanging was scheduled to go ahead with a new hangman despite the desperate pleas of  hundreds of Melbourne citizens for a reprieve on the grounds that it was inhuman to hang a woman and mother.

On the Sunday night on the eve of her hanging -- at 10 a.m. the following morning on Jan.15, 1894 -- a crowd of 200 protesters gathered outside Old Melbourne Jail and sang hymns through the night and petitioned for a last-minute reprieve. But the government stood its ground.

As the execution party reached the scaffold to await the arrival of the condemned woman, they heard hymns being sung from her cell in a strong, yet plaintiff voice. Frances Knorr had been singing hymns since dawn and continued to do so as she walked the few paces from her cell to the scaffold unaided, was tied hands and feet and had the noose placed around her neck.

She only stopped singing in the last few seconds to say in an unbroken voice: “Yes. The Lord is with me. I do not fear what men may do to me, for I have peace, perfect peace.”

Then Knorr, killer of defenseless babies entrusted into her care, dropped the two and a half meters to her instantaneous death.   

After Knorr was hung, authorities assessed that, given the period of time that she was in the child minding business and the amount of women who clandestinely came forward later and told police that they had given her their babies, it is believed that she could have murdered as many as 13 infants.

TruTV.com

 
 

Frances KNORR

The practice of baby farming was also exported to Australia. Frances Knorr had been born Minnie Thwaites in London in 1868 and emigrated to Sydney, Australia in 1887.

Initially she worked as a domestic servant and met Randolph Knoor who was German. She soon became bored with him and had an affair with one Edward Thompson and soon afterwards moved to Melbourne. The short lived affair was not successful and Minnie had to find a means to support herself and her daughter. She decided to set up business as a child minder and moved around Melbourne frequently using both her maiden and married names.

Like Mrs. Dyer, Knoor had strangled some of the babies she could not place elsewhere or sell on to childless couples. While she was living in Moreland Road Melbourne she had buried two of her charges in the garden and the body of one of these, a little girl, was discovered by the next tenant. Police dug up the rest of the garden and discovered a boy's body as well.

Knorr had moved back to Sydney by this time and was back living with her husband. The police soon traced them however and when they arrested her she was about to give birth to her second child. She told the arresting officer, Detective Keating "I know what you have come for". While awaiting trial she wrote a letter to her former lover, Edward Thompson, asking him to manufacture some evidence for her defence.

She came to trial on April 11th 1893, charged with the murder of the little girl only. The letter to Thompson was presented by the Crown, having been handed to the police by his mother, and was a damning piece of evidence. It also tried to implicate Thompson in the murders and seems to have been pure fabrication.

She gave a statement herself from the witness box and admitted that she had buried the babies in Moreland Road but claiming that they had died of natural causes. The Crown however demonstrated that they had been strangled with a tape and that the neck of the little boy had been compressed to less than half its normal size.

The trial lasted five days and resulted in a guilty verdict. As in Britain the death sentence was mandatory and as Judge Holroyd passed it, she sobbed "God help my poor mother! God help my poor babies!" She was taken back to the Old Melbourne Gaol to await execution. She was a model and penitent prisoner in the condemned cell and spent her time singing hymns and praying. She also made a written confession on her last day. "Placed as I am now within a few hours of my death, I express a strong desire that this statement be made public, with the hope that my fall will not only be a warning to others, but also act as a deterrent to those who are perhaps carrying on the same practice." "I now desire to state that upon the charges known in evidence as Number 1 & 2 babies, I confess to be guilty".

Her execution was set for 10.00 a.m. on Monday 15th January 1894

A few minutes before 10, the witnesses were brought into the yard and stood opposite the gallows waiting for the arrival of the sheriff. From where they stood in silence they could hear Knorr singing a hymn in her cell, and some of them were visibly affected by this.

The condemned cell opened onto the scaffold, and immediately opposite was another compartment in which the executioner and his assistants, wearing false beards and spectacles, remained concealed until their services were required. They then entered the cell and pinioned her, before leading her onto the scaffold. Her appearance had changed almost beyond recognition since she received her sentence, but she was able to walk onto the trap with a firm and steady step, without support. Dr Shields, the medical officer of the gaol, attended her and she appeared to derive comfort from the encouragement he gave. Stepping on the trap, she stood quietly while her dress was being tied round her ankles, and then the sheriff asked if she had anything to say. In a clear and unbroken voice she said: "Yes, the Lord is with me! I do not fear what men may do to me, for I have peace, perfect peace!" The noose was then adjusted, the trap released, and she fell 7 ft 6 ins. Death was recorded as being "instantaneous".

 
 

Crimes against infants

By Allan L Peters

The tragic death of baby William Manifold at Port Adelaide in 1873 disclosed no crimes, but shed light on the brutal practice of baby-farming.

William was born in the Adelaide Destitute Asylum on May 24, 1873. He and his mother, single woman Harriet Manifold, remained at the asylum for nine weeks after his birth.

After nine weeks, Harriet and William were forced to leave the sanctuary of the asylum. William’s father, John Flaherty, had not been heard from since before the birth of the infant, and had contributed nothing toward his support. It later emerged that he was serving a jail sentence for an assault on his wife.

Harriet had no family besides a stepmother and two brothers. It seemed they were either unwilling or unable to help the young mother and her child.

In desperation, Harriet obtained a position as a general servant for eight shillings a week and fostered William out to a Mrs Godfrey of Port Adelaide.

Mrs Godfrey had several other children, but agreed to care for William for the sum of seven shillings a week, and allowed Harriet to visit him once a month.

William died at Mrs Godfrey’s place just four months later.

At a subsequent inquest into William’s death, several of Mrs Godfrey’s neighbours gave evidence. Many said the child always appeared clean and well cared for. However, his bed was nothing more than an upturned box with a bag of chaff as a mattress and a shawl for a blanket.

Mrs Godfrey fed the baby from a bottle, which she said contained a boiled mixture of milk, water and flour. The neighbours said the baby was often seen in the street in the care of a girl of about nine or 10, and that sometimes that girl placed the baby into the lap of a another child – aged about three – while she went off to play.

One neighbour said she sent the older girl home on a particularly cold day to get a shawl for William.

In any case, all witnesses maintained that the baby seemed to have been well cared for. Yet, under questioning, two admitted they had offered to take over the care of the baby and to give it a nice, soft bed and a change of diet.

Another witness said that, on at least two occasions, she alerted Mrs Godfrey to the fact that the milk she was feeding William was sour. She said Mrs Godfrey then immediately threw it away and sent for some fresh milk.

When William took ill, Mrs Godfrey called in a doctor, at whose suggestion she changed his diet to one of fresh milk. However, William continued to weaken, became emaciated and died.

The doctor said he had diagnosed William as suffering from atrophy, and that while many people believed flour, milk, and water to be good for infants, he considered it to be injurious. He said that when he visited William the day before he died, he found plenty of milk in the house, but that William was unable to digest anything.

On the evidence presented, the Coroner’s jury found that William had died from natural causes, and attached no blame to Mrs Godfrey.

As tragic and avoidable as William’s death might have been, baby-farming was yet in its infancy. It had not then reached its vilest aspect, and far more horrific cases would surface.

In a somewhat similar case in Western Australia in 1907, East Perth woman, Alice Mitchell, was charged with the murder of five-month-old Ethel Booth. Ethel, who had been in Mitchell’s care, was proven to have been starved to death. Evidence showed that of the 32 infants Mitchell had in her care over a five-year period, 29 had died. The same physician attended most of the babies, and most of the deaths were attributed to marasmus (wasting illness).

Mitchell was subsequently found guilty of the manslaughter of Ethel Booth and accordingly sentenced to five years’ imprisonment with hard labour.

In a Sydney case in 1892, 50-year-old John Makin was executed, while his wife, 47-year-old Sarah, had her death sentence commuted to life imprisonment.

They had each been found guilty of murder in its most vile and repulsive form. The court heard that under the guise of taking infants into their home to be cared for and given “a mother’s love and attention,” children were murdered and buried in the yard “as you would the carcass of a dog”.

The promised “mother’s love and attention” was, of course, not freely given. The mother of the usually illegitimate child paid for the service, and continued to pay long after the child had died. When a mother called to make payment and to visit her child, various excuses were offered to explain the child’s absence. After a while, the Makins moved house and left no forwarding address.

Though the full extent of the operation has probably never been revealed, the bodies of at least eight babies were discovered buried in the yards of various houses in which the Makin family had lived.

A Melbourne baby-farming case in 1893 had an SA connection. A year before her arrest in connection with the case, the chief offender, 26-year-old Frances Knorr, born Minnie Thwaites, had spent time around the Port Adelaide area.

During her time there, the SA Police sought to interview her in connection with at least two minor crimes. They described her as: “...age about 25 years, height 5ft, 2in (157.4 cm), fair complexion, very stout build, light brown hair, very large peculiar-shaped mouth, very talkative, and speaks with a lisp.”

Like the Makins, Knorr ran a clandestine baby-minding service for destitute and single mothers, with fees paid in advance. It was thought she sold some of the babies to childless couples. And, those she could not sell she strangled and buried in the gardens of the various houses she rented. This proved to have been the fate of at least three of her infant charges.

After her conviction, and faced with the inevitability of her execution, came a suddenly renewed sense of religion. Knorr confessed her guilt in a written statement. It read: “Placed as I am now within a few hours of my death, I express a strong desire that this statement be made public, with the hope that my fall will not only be a warning to others, but also act as a deterrent to those who are perhaps carrying on the same practice."

PoliceJournalSA.org.au

 
 


Frances Knorr

 

Frances Knorr

 

 

 
 
 
 
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