Frances Knorr, the ‘baby farmer of Brunswick’, killed children for profit

Frances Knorr, like many other women in depression-hit 1800s Melbourne, ran an early form of childcare. But instead of visiting a loving home, the infants she was trusted with met a much darker fate.

Baby farmer Frances Knorr was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol for murder in 1893.

She was the young Melbourne mother-turned-serial killer known as the “baby-farming murderess”.

Frances Knorr, like many other so-called “baby farmers” in depression-hit late-1800s Melbourne, was entrusted by mothers to care for their babies in her home.

Instead, she strangled the babies and buried them in her garden.

The harrowing tale of Frances Knorr is the subject of the latest In Black and White podcast, out today.

Historian Trevor Poultney is a tour guide and researcher at the Old Melbourne Gaol, where Knorr was hanged for murder in 1894.

He investigated the disturbing story for his book Victims of the Rope.

Knorr turned to baby farming in desperation to support herself and her baby after husband Rudolph was imprisoned for selling furniture he didn’t own.

Mothers paid Knorr up to 20 pounds — a huge sum at the time — plus a weekly fee to take in each baby.

Historian and ghost tour guide Trevor Poultney inside the Old Melbourne Gaol. Picture: David Caird.

But Poultney says Knorr soon found a way to vastly inflate her earnings.

“I think at some stage … (she) decided this baby-farming lark wasn’t quite efficient enough, because she could only manage a baby at a time, and that’s not giving her much in the way of income,” Poultney says.

“Frances decided that most of that money should be going into her pocket, rather than supporting the baby, and her babies that she looked after started to get sick … and die.

“She was quite smart. She moved babies around, and when one baby died, replaced it with another, and even when the original mother came to visit to see her baby, she didn’t realise the baby she was looking at was not her own daughter but someone else’s.”

It was only when a new resident began digging a vegetable garden in the backyard at Knorr’s previous home in Brunswick that the first body was discovered.

The death mask of Frances Knorr.

An illustration of Knorr.

In all, it is believed Knorr killed up to 13 babies, moving house after burying each body in the garden.

When Knorr was sentenced to hang, the public was deeply divided, with many fiercely opposed to the execution because she was a woman. No woman had been hanged in Victoria for 30 years.

The hangman’s wife threatened to leave him if he hanged her, and he took his own life two days before the execution.

Earlier, at Knorr’s trial, she denied murdering the babies.

But she was caught out when she made another startling admission, which proved she was the killer.

Listen to the new podcast to find out what she revealed.

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here, on Spotify here or on your favourite platform.

Read more on the earlier episodes, from the slum boss and her relationship with Richmond great Jack Dyer, to the one-legged gang that ruled Melbourne’s streets.

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