Young women commonly looked after the children of wealthy households in the Victorian era (Image: Getty Images)
On Wednesday, April 19, 1871, the Morning Advertiser informed its readers that Detective Sergeant Henry Mullard of L (Lambeth) Division, while testifying at an inquest into the death of a toddler, “stated a series of facts so startling as almost to exceed the bare possibility of belief”.
On the afternoon of April 7, John Beer and his wife went out to dine with friends and left their three children in the care of 15-year-old nursemaid Agnes Norman, whom they’d hired three days earlier. The couple returned home at midnight to hear screaming upstairs.
Rushing to investigate, “they found a child undressed on the floor and another dead between the bedstead and the wall”. The dead child was 14-month-old Jessie Beer.
The family’s physician was of the opinion she had suffocated but could make no determination as to the cause.
Mullard elicited a collective gasp from the coroner’s court when he said police inquiries suggested Agnes had killed at least four other children, along with “three dogs, a cat, a parrot, a number of goldfish and nearly a dozen fancy birds”.
Given the age of the accused, the press were sceptical.
The Morning Advertiser, which was a daily paper in the capital, proclaimed: “We do not wish for one moment to assert our belief in this catalogue of horrors. In the last instance, the child might have fallen out of bed and been suffocated between the bed and the wall. Such things do occur.
“But either Detective Sergeant Mullard has been listening to a number of romances and cruel groundless scandals, or the tragic suggestiveness of his story is of a nature to curdle the blood with horror and take away the breath.”
The coroner’s jury also dismissed DS Mullard’s claims and returned a verdict “that the deceased died, accidentally caused”.
Jessie’s father was less than satisfied, as was Metropolitan Police Commissioner Edmund Henderson. He assigned Inspector James Pay of Scotland Yard’s Detective Branch to make a careful inquiry, as the case had “the horror-mongling population of London in a state of excitement”.
Pay’s investigation would confirm that “wherever [Agnes] went, something died”.
She first went to work for Ralph and Elizabeth Milner in Kennington Park in January 1869.
Their 10-month-old son Thomas was dead within a month. A coroner’s inquest ruled the child died from natural causes. The Milners suspected nothing and kept Agnes in their employ. Their three-year-old daughter Minnie died two weeks later.
In the wake of this tragedy, the Milner’s six-year-old son Arthur, who’d been paid half a crown by Agnes to keep quiet, told his parents he’d seen her lock Minnie in a wardrobe. Agnes eventually pulled the unconscious girl out and put her in bed.
She felt the child’s forehead, turned to Arthur and said laughingly: “She’s dead.”
The Milners, unable to prove the story, let Agnes go – but not before Elizabeth warned her never to work with children again.
“Do you like children?” Elizabeth asked her.
“No,” replied Agnes, “not so much.”
Mary Bell’s killing of two young boys when she was aged 11 has eerie echoes of Agnes Norman’s case (Image: NC)
On April 21, 1870, Agnes went to work for the Gardener family in Stockwell. Ten days later a family friend named Fanny Taylor paid a visit with her five-month-old son. Left for three hours that evening in Agnes’s care, the baby, “a perfectly healthy child”, was dead by night’s end. An inquest returned a verdict of “natural death”.
The Gardeners,unaware of the monster living under their roof, left Agnes to watch their 15-month-old son James Alexander on May 18.
He “was then quite well to all appearances” when they went out at 8pm. Returning three hours later, they “found the child quite dead” in his cot.
As little James “suffered from bad health”, an inquest was deemed unnecessary.
Only Agnes and the family cook were home at the time of the death, but the grieving Gardeners suspected nothing.
Their ordeal had not yet run its course, though. “During the six weeks that Agnes Norman was in the service of Mr Gardener,” Pay wrote in his case report, “three dogs, a cat, a parrot, 12 canaries and linnets and some goldfish died very mysteriously”.
It was Agnes who “found them all dead”.
With no more children in the home to care for, the Gardeners dismissed her with areference that highlighted her “sobrietyand civility”.
She soon found work in August as a housemaid with George and Charlotte Brown. It didn’t last long.
Noted Pay: “She was in service at Mr Brown’s a fortnight, during which time a cat, a canary, a linnet and some goldfish died, and the parrot was thought to be dying. Mr Judd, a bird fancier, was called to see it, and he was of [the] opinion the neck had been pinched, it being swollen at the time”.
The Browns had two guests staying at the time, Elizabeth Parfitt and her 10-year-old nephew Charlie, who was visiting for the school holiday. One morning, Elizabeth heard “a stifling sort of cry, as it seemed, from a room upstairs”.
Entering the bedroom, she found Agnes standing over the boy’s bed.
“What’s the matter?”Elizabeth asked.
“He’s been dreaming and is frightened,” replied Agnes.
“Oh, no, Aunt!” Charlie cried. “I have not been dreaming. Agnes tried to choke me!”
He said he woke up to find her kneeling on his stomach with one hand over his mouth and the other pressed over his nose. Only when he managed a muffled scream did she get off him.
“Oh, Charlie, you naughty boy,” Agnes said. “I did not.”
Elizabeth could see the boy’s lips looked sore and noticed that “his neck [had] swollen very much”.
Agnes, deemed an undesirable presence in the house, once again found herself looking for work.
It might seem strange by today’s standards that a 15-year-old – a child herself – kept finding employment as a nanny, but such was the norm.
“Children taking care of children form one of the most curious spectacles of the London streets,” The Daily Telegraph reported at the time.
“One sees a little creature who, if her parents were rich, would not be allowed to stir a yard from her father’s door without mama, or the governess, or the nurse, and yet, because her parents are poor, she is head nurse to three or four.”
As for getting hired without references, as Agnes managed to do on multiple occasions, that, too, proved common.
“As a rule, it is almost impossible to get ‘characters’ of the usual sort with girls of fourteen or fifteen,” the paper noted, explaining the difficulties of finding good domestic help.
“If they have ‘not been out before’, they live with relations only too anxious to get rid of them, and who would swear that black is white to get them off their hands…
“But the ranks of domestic service are not choked by applicants; there is a steady demand and a rather fitful supply.”
Scotland Yard officers stood outside Lewisham Police Station in 1845 (Image: SSPL via Getty Images)
And so it was that on April 15, 1871, Agnes went to work for the Beers. The coroner’s inquest may have found nothing suspicious about the death of 14-month-old Jessie Beer but Detective Branch Superintendent Williamson – upon reviewing Pay’s report – thought otherwise and authorised Agnes’s arrest on suspicion of murder.
She would also be charged, Pay warned her, on suspicion of murdering Thomas Milner, Minnie Milner, John Taylor and James Alexander Gardener as well as the attempted murder of Charlie Parfitt. “Me, murder the child?” Agnes proclaimed in disbelief.
It was about as vocal as she got.
“She treated the matter very quietly,” Pay recalled, “declined to say anything.”
Her silence only intensified the mystery of her character and, short of additional details, her background. Where had she come from and what, in her life, had twisted her in such an evil fashion?
“This extraordinary girl,” noted The Irish Times, “is either insane or one of the greatest monsters of the age.”
Because medical experts could not unanimously agree on whether Jessie Beer’s death was a homicide, the case failed to move forward. Lack ofevidence also resulted in the other murder charges being dropped.
Ultimately, however, Agnes was successfully prosecuted for the attempted murder of Charlie Parfitt and jailed for 10 years. According to records, she served six years of her sentence and was released on licence on August 9, 1877.
One paper dubbed Norman’s crimes“systematic child murder”.
She was a serial killer, although the term wouldn’t enter the lexicon until the late 20th century. The press puzzled at her motivations, which remain unclear, while law enforcement lacked the expertise to make sense of her actions.
Not until the Jack the Ripper murders, more than a decade later, did Scotland Yard seek to comprehend a killer’s psychological make-up with what’s believed to be the first-ever attempt at criminal profiling. I’d never heard of Agnes Norman and stumbled across her story by chance in old newspapers while researching my book, Scotland Yard: A Bloody History.
The news coverage led me to Inspector James Pay’s report at the British National Archives. The document is a chilling read for its assessment of a young girl who seemingly has no compunction about killing – and would have most likely continued if she hadn’t been caught.
Norman’s case bears a chilling parallel to more modern-day child killers, such as Mary Bell, who murdered two preschool-agedboys in the Newcastle area in 1968 when she was 11. Both cases provoke a sense ofhorror, for they shatter our notions of childhood innocence.
Today, Norman’s crimes are mostly forgotten but the systematic way she moved from house to house, killing children and pets, haunts the imagination. A caregiver turned predator, she remains a chilling example of the evil that can lurk beneath the most innocent exterior.
Scotland Yard: A Bloody History, by Simon Read (Headline, £22) is out now. Visit or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25