On the afternoon of 27 August 1867, eight-year-old Fanny Adams, playing in a field near her home in Alton, Hampshire with her sister Lizzie and a friend Minnie, was abducted, killed and mutilated. A man described as wearing a black jacket and fawn trousers had picked blackberries for them and had given each girl a half penny to buy sweets but had taken Fanny off with him.
Minnie immediately told her mother but the woman disregarded her and it was not until 7pm when Fanny failed to return for supper that a search was begun. That evening her head was found on two hop poles. Parts of her mutilated body were literally strewn around the locality. A good deal of the body was never found.
Minnie identified Frederick Baker, who worked for a local solicitor named Clements. The next evening he left the office at 6pm for a drink in the Leathern Bottle with a fellow clerk, whom he told he was thinking of leaving Alton and working elsewhere as a butcher. At 8pm he returned and was arrested. He could not explain why there were bloodstains on his cuffs or why his trousers had been washed. More telling, in his diary was the entry 'Killed a young girl. It is fine and hot'.
Baker ran something of a rolled up plea: rather unpromisingly, that Minnie had made a mistake in identifying him. More promisingly, because there was no doubt more than a streak of insanity in the family, he declared he was insane. Neither plea succeeded. The jury retired a bare 15 minutes.
He was hanged before a crowd of 6,000 (mainly women) outside Winchester Prison on Christmas Eve having ‘gratifyingly’ made a full confession in which he attributed the murder to ‘strong drink’. That year, mutton in tins was distributed throughout the Royal Navy and sailors joked it was the undiscovered remains of ‘Sweet’ Fanny Adams. Today the phrase is a euphemism meaning nothing.
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