Horror Icons and an English Ogress

Vol. 125: So very Halloweenie!

Your Halloween Screen: What To Watch

That’s it, sit three inches from the screen

Are you staying home to hand out candy? Perhaps turning your porch light out and pretending you aren’t home while eating all the candy yourself (been there)? You might want to plan of what to watch on the best night of the year, and that’s where my love of list-making can help.

Family Viewing: Hocus Pocus 2, Goosebumps 2, Nelly Rapp: Monster Agent, Coraline, It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Beetlejuice, Creeped Out, Sleepy Hollow, Wednesday

Safe To Have On While Opening the Door (these have no swears, nudity and other stuff that will get you a reprimanding look): I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, Little Shop of Horrors (original), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (original), Dracula (original), The Mummy (original) The House on Haunted Hill

Super-Duper Halloweenie Vibes: Hubie Halloween, The Curse of Badger Hollow, Dark Harvest, Spirit Halloween: The Movie, Tales of Halloween, Sabrina

You Want Scary Laughs: Werewolves Within, Freaky, Bubba Hotep, Scare Me, The Loneliest Boy in the World, Studio 666, Slice, Renfield, Some Guy Who Kills People, Bubba Hotep

You Want Terror: Hereditary, The Midnight Meat Train, Cloverfield, The Babadook, Hell House LLC, Freaks, Nosferatu, Dahmer, Late Night with The Devil, The Oddity

Reese’s Dark Chocolate Cookies

• 1 stick of butter, softened

• ¾ c sugar

• 1 egg

• 1 c flour

• 1/3 c dark or black cocoa powder

• dash of vanilla

• ¼ tsp baking powder

• ½ tsp salt

• ¾ c Reese’s Pieces candies

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla and mix until smooth. Add the flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt and mix until combined. Add the candy and mix in by hand.

Use a cookie scoop and place the dough 1 ½ inches apart. Bake 13-15 minutes.

The Infamous Icons of Horror: Where Are They Now?

You know their names and methodology. You know their fashion sense and hangouts and victim preference. In some cases, you even know their (twisted) family trees. Fame comes and goes for pop singers and horror icons alike, so let’s find out: where are they now?

Michael Myers- This old school serial killer had a penchant for mechanic jumpsuits and looking like William Shatner’s ghost. He killed his sister when he was just six years old, then went on to kill a whole graduating class of teens.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the Energizer Bunny of Killers is now a silent spokesman for Balance of Nature supplements. His commercials show Myers planting geraniums, pushing a lawnmower and running track at a high school, though he appears to be chasing the kids on the track team. The ad ends with a speech bubble near his mouth that says “I Can Outrun People Half My Age!”

Leatherface- Ironically, killed in a chainsaw mishap while cutting lumber for a home addition. The mask was removed from his decapitated head and witnesses were surprised to find another mask underneath that depicted a terribly deformed face. When that was removed, they found the true face of Leatherface to be radiant and as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Tiny pores.

Regan MacNeil- She was just a child when she became possessed by a demon, leading to the deaths of three men who had the misfortune of encountering her. Two were priests who gave their lives to save Regan. The third was a British drunk and you know how depraved they are, I mean, what was he doing in her room? Trying to steal her Rick Springfield t-shirt? A twisted neck was likely too good for him.

What has Regan been up to? Admittedly, she’s spent the ensuing years trying to find her milieu. There was the line of pet jewelry, but it turned out that animals don’t like stacks of bangle bracelets on their legs. There was the canned soup, which might have lasted if there were more flavors than just split pea. There was the branded “Regan MacNeil’s Ouija Board” which were 100% guaranteed to put the user in touch with the netherworld. They worked all right, resulting in the demonic possession an entire class of 7^th graders in Grand Rapids, MI. The lawsuits have wiped MacNeil out financially, but luckily, there’s the horror con circuit. Have your photo taken with Regan frantically wagging her tongue at you for $20!

I thought hard about what would be an appropriate cap on this post. It had to be something really over the top, and luckily, people are awful so I had a lot to choose from. I decided to take you to Jolly Ol’ England to meet a baby strangler…

The Ogress: Amelia Dyer

It’s a fact that female serial killers don’t come anywhere close to the number of male serial killers. Our little bitty hands make it hard to overpower a victim, which is why poison is usually the weapon of choice for women. But when you do come across a truly motivated female killer, she tends to have tunnel vision and a specific goal at the end of her rainbow.

Money. That’s the big motivator for most female killers. Sure, you’ll find the woman who wants revenge or to get rid of a romantic rival, but money is the usual reason. And so, let’s get to the story of Mrs. Dyer, who defied so much of what we believe about female killers.

Amelia Hobley was born in Bristol, England in 1837, the youngest of five siblings. Her father had a successful shoe making business, and he did well enough to educate his children. Amelia was a reader from a young age, and she might have enjoyed a good childhood if not for her mother’s violent mental illness. The woman was kept in the care of her family, which means the children were often left to handle their mother as best they could. She died when Amelia was about ten years old, proceeded by two daughters. By the time Amelia was 21 years old, her father had also died, and in the tradition of Victorian melodramas, everything was left to Amelia’s older brother. The younger siblings were left with nothing but the suggestion to go pound sand.

Amelia had to fend for herself. She was forced to move out of her family home and begin apprenticing for a corset maker. She married George Thomas, a man who was around 35 years older. It may have been a marriage of convenience, but a daughter was born.

Amelia began studying with a midwife named Ellen Dane. On the surface, it was to learn nursing from Dane, but Amelia wasn’t a nurturer and there was a much easier way to make money in health care.

An unmarried woman had few options in the Victorian era, but their situation was made worse by the passing of The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which made assistance available only to those in workhouses, those government-run establishments that forced the poor to work in exchange for food and a bed. But because being an unwed mother was considered immoral, these women weren’t allowed to reside in workhouses. The new amendment also ended the practice of forcing the fathers to pay child support, meaning men were off the hook. This left the mother with even fewer avenues for supporting her child, which was exactly what the law intended. She was meant to learn a lesson the hard way. Many of these mothers found places that were secretly dedicated to giving women a place to live until their babies were born, then the home took care of adopting out the baby to a good home, or just someone who would feed the baby and give it a roof. At least, that was the way it was supposed to work. It was called “baby farming”, as in, farming the baby out to someone who would tend it in exchange for a fee. Sometimes the baby was cared for, but sometimes, after the mother had paid a flat fee, the babies were left to starve to death in the baby farmer’s home. If the baby was the result of an indiscretion on the part of a person from a wealthy family, the baby farmer could and often did blackmail the new parent.

A large percentage of these babies were kept quiet as they starved by being dosed with opium-laced tonics advertised specifically to keep young children too lethargic to be a bother. Amelia Dyer’s preferred brand was called Godfrey’s Cordial, a product that contained opium, brandy and was sweetened with treacle.

George Thomas died in 1869. Amelia was still a young woman and she married a man who worked in a brewery, William Dyer, in 1872. Whether or not he was ever aware of what his wife was doing is unclear. They had two children together before Amelia decided she was better off on her own. With three children to provide for, she needed more money and less work. In newspaper ads, she offered care or adoption to inconvenient infants for a flat fee of five pounds, the equivalent of less than $1000 today. It’s hard to believe that anyone thought their baby would be safe for that price, but it was likely a case of having no choice but to hope that the woman would be kind.

In 1879, one doctor counted up the number of death certificates he was signing at Dyer’s home and reported her for neglect. She was sentences to six months hard labor, and this was a time when “hard labor” meant backbreaking work and likely abuse of the prisoners. After her release, it was noted that Dyer was a changed woman, but not for the better. From this time on, for the next two decades, Amelia would have episodes that resulted in short stays in the asylum. Many people would later believe that this was her “long con”, a way to set up an insanity defense, because Dyer was intelligent and some part of her knew she couldn’t get away forever with cruelty on such a scale. By this point, Dyer had stopped taking the time to starve the babies to death, which took days and room that she needed for more clients. She found it much more expedient using dressmaker edging tape to strangle them almost as soon as they were left in her care. The tape wasn’t the thin, sticky-sided tape we know today. Instead, picture a spool of shoelace material. She would tie the tape around the infant’s neck, watch them die, then bundle the corpse in wrapping paper or a bag before throwing them in the Thames.

Dyer was always on the alert for the authorities. When she felt that the police were getting close, she moved to a new city or section of London, changed her name and created a new business name. She was always placing ads in the newspapers stating “married couple having no child would adopt” or “highly respectable married couple” and always receiving babies from women who had nowhere else to turn. Even among the most destitute mothers, five or ten pounds could be gotten for the infant’s care.

Her downfall began in 1896, when a bargeman fished a large mailing envelope out of the Thames. It had the name and address of a Mrs. Thomas on it and it was weighted down with a brick. The bargeman opened the envelope and found the body of a baby inside. Detective Constable James Anderson was given the case, and he discovered Mrs Thomas’ baby farming history. Reverting back to her previous married name, Dyer was now living in Reading and was assisted by her eldest daughter Polly and son-in-law Arthur Palmer. The river was dredged and six more babies with bows of tape around their necks were recovered.

DC Anderson hired a young woman to pose as a mother who wanted to discuss terms with Dyer. At the time of their appointment, Dyer opened the door to a police raid. The constables noted that, although the home didn’t contain any corpses, the stench of death inside was obvious. They found the edging tape, along with pawn tickets for baby clothes and a stack of letters from worried mothers who wanted information about their babies. Dyer rarely replied, because after all, the babies were gone and the money spent.

Dyer was arrested April 4, 1896. The police tried to tally the exact number of deaths under Amelia Dyer’s various roofs and came up with up to 400 over a period of 30 years. At the time of her arrest, she boasted, “I used to like to watch them with the tape around their neck, but it was soon all over with them.” She also told the police that they could tell if a murdered baby was one of her victims by the tape left around their neck, her signature. Her daughter and son-in-law were arrested as accessories, as Polly admitted to helping her mother on at least one occasion, but there was no tangible proof against either of them and they were freed. Shockingly, Dyer was charged with just a single murder, that of an infant named Doris Marmon who had been recovered from the river. Her mother was a local barmaid who had intended to leave her baby with Dyer temporarily. She was the rarity, a mother who not only came back looking for her child, but one who would work with the police to convict Dyer.

The defense claimed insanity and pointed to Dyer’s many stays in asylums. The prosecution argued that Dyer faked her episodes, and daughter Polly testified against her mother, agreeing that her mother was a fraud and murderer. The jury took less than five minutes to deliberate before finding Dyer guilty. She was sentenced to death by hanging. She mounted the scaffold promptly at 9am on June 10, 1896 and was given the opportunity to speak. This is the time when many would express remorse, but Dyer’s last words were “I have nothing to say.”

She became known as “The Ogress of Reading”, an infamous character who became a children’s song and then faded from memory with each generation. But in 2017, the great-great grandson of DC Anderson was going through the attic of the family home and came across something unexpected. For over one hundred years, Dyer’s edging tape and the envelope that had contained Doris Marmon had been in the home, and the family learned about the case their ancestor had cracked.

October’s Pick of the Month: Likely my last nod to Netflix, the “Demon 79” episode of Black Mirror is horror-comedy perfection. An introverted London shopgirl accidentally summons a demon and is suddenly responsible for saving the world. It includes one of the best lines ever. The woman and demon enter a man’s disgustingly dirty home, with the demon cringing and saying, “Looks like he wipes his arse with his house.”

You think I’m done with October? Bite your tongue, I’m sending out a wicked short story on October 31^st as an extra treat. In the meantime, put your ear buds in and listen to “Sitting Up with Granny”, my story that was in season 5 of Full Body Chills.