# 4: Sweet Fanny Adams' Horrific Murder

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 27 Apr 2023, 21 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/105f723ac/podcast/play/103880290/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-5-9%2F401851557-44100-2-72fbbbe3c33ad437.mp3

Today's episode is on the case of Sweet Fanny Adams - an 8 year old girl from Hampshire that took place in 1867 Trigger Warning: child death, murder Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:05] Hello everyone, and welcome to Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor
[0:09] Neil, a true crime podcast where we crack open some of the most
[0:12] notorious cases in history. Given the topics that we'll be
[0:16] investigating, it goes without saying that this show comes with
[0:20] a content warning. The details can get a bit heavy,
[0:23] and you might find some of the themes we discuss triggering.
[0:26] Listener discretion is strongly advised, and check the
[0:29] description for some resources and further information.
[0:39] So this case really interested me when I first heard of it
[0:42] because I'd heard of the girl's name.
[0:44] Her name is Fanny Adams, but I didn't know where I knew the
[0:48] name from, if you know what I mean.
[0:49] So there's a saying in England. I don't know if it's like
[0:52] worldwide or whatever, but people say sweet Fanny Adams.
[0:55] And I'll explain where that saying comes from at the end of
[0:58] the video. But this case is one of the
[0:59] first ever recorded cases to make, like, national headlines.
[1:04] This case literally happened in the 1860s.
[1:08] I just want to give my usual disclaimer that I mean
[1:10] absolutely no disrespect to anyone that I talk about in this
[1:13] video. This is all just information
[1:15] that I have found on the Internet and I'm compiling into
[1:18] one video. S Fanny Adams was born on April
[1:21] 30th, 1859 in Hampshire in England.
[1:24] She lived with her mother and father, Harriet and George Adams
[1:28] along with her five siblings. In age order these were Ellen
[1:31] George Walter and then Fanny was the 4th youngest and then Lizzie
[1:36] and then Lily. Ada.
[1:37] Fanny was described was tall, she was very intelligent.
[1:40] She was very kind of older looking so she was just eight
[1:43] years old, but she looked maybe like 1314 years old.
[1:47] She was known around the town that she lived in.
[1:49] She lived in a town called Alton in Hampshire and she was known
[1:53] for just her very like cheerful, lively disposition.
[1:57] She was just always smiling. Every time she passed anyone on
[2:00] the street she'd say hi, have a conversation.
[2:03] She was just a very like lively 8 year old girl.
[2:05] Fanny had a best friend called Minnie Warner who was also eight
[2:09] years old. She lived like 2 houses down
[2:11] from her and they spent like every waking moment together.
[2:14] They were best friends but they were more like sisters.
[2:17] Like I said. The town that Fanny lived in was
[2:19] called Alton and it was very well known for its supply of
[2:22] hops, which is a plant used in like beer production.
[2:26] And because of this it meant that the town had a lot of hop
[2:28] fields, it had a lot of breweries, it had just a lot of
[2:31] jobs surrounding the production of beer.
[2:34] On the afternoon of August 24th 1867, Fanny was playing in in
[2:38] the garden with her best friend Minnie Warner and her five year
[2:41] old younger sister Lizzie. It was a really warm sunny day
[2:44] that day and the girls were getting a little bit bored
[2:47] playing in the garden. They'd been there all day and so
[2:49] they decided to ask Fanny's mother Harriet if they could go
[2:52] to the Meadow at the end of the lane.
[2:54] This Meadow was called Flood Meadow and it had like hot
[2:57] fields around it. It was just a really nice little
[3:00] area where the girls would go and play.
[3:02] It was safe. It was a really like large area.
[3:05] They had so much room to play, so they used to go there quite
[3:08] often. Harriet agreed, because she
[3:10] wanted to do housework. She wanted the girls out of her
[3:12] way, really, and they'd been there so many times she trusted
[3:16] them. It was only at the end of the
[3:17] road, so she just let all three of them go and play there.
[3:20] And you've got to remember that this was the 1800s, and crime
[3:23] rates were absolutely nothing like they are nowadays.
[3:27] To Harriet, there had been no kind of Major Crimes in her
[3:30] living memory, so she'd never witnessed any kind of abductions
[3:34] or murders or she'd never heard of anything like that happening
[3:37] in the town. So she felt completely safe
[3:40] letting all three girls just go and play.
[3:42] So the girls set off walking to the Meadow.
[3:44] They took a shortcut through one of the hot fields and that was
[3:47] when they bumped into a friendly face, 29 year old Frederick
[3:50] Baker, who was a solicitor's clerk in the town.
[3:53] Baker was relatively new to the town, he'd been there about two
[3:56] months, but the girls recognized him because he was always in
[3:59] church every week and like the whole town all went to the same
[4:02] church, so they recognized him. The newest face that said hi to
[4:05] him so they felt safe stood talking to him for a bit.
[4:09] Baker picked the girls some blackberries to eat and just
[4:12] kind of watched them play. They were running up and down
[4:14] this road that was nicknamed the Hollow.
[4:16] They were just having fun and then they came back and ate the
[4:18] blackberries with Baker. Eventually the girls got pretty
[4:21] bored and kind of tired and particularly Lizzie and Minnie
[4:25] wanted to go home, but Baker tried persuading all three of
[4:28] them to stay, particularly Fanny.
[4:31] Baker offered Fanny half a penny to go for a walk with him, but
[4:34] then Lizzie and Minnie also wanted to come.
[4:37] They didn't want to be left by the themselves.
[4:38] They wanted to go wherever Fanny was going, but Baker didn't want
[4:42] that. So then Baker offered Lizzie and
[4:44] Minnie three half pennies to go off and buy themselves some
[4:47] sweets while he went on a walk with Fanny.
[4:49] But then Fanny refused to go on this walk with him.
[4:52] Baker then kind of realized that he didn't have to persuade
[4:55] Fanny. He was so much bigger than her,
[4:57] so much more powerful than her. And so he just picked her up and
[5:01] walked away with her as Minnie and Lizzie watched.
[5:03] And so Lizzzy and Minnie ran straight home to Minnie's
[5:06] mother, Martha Warner, and they kind of told her the whole
[5:09] story, but Martha just kind of brushed it off.
[5:13] Like I said, it was the 1800s and things like abduction didn't
[5:17] happen. And so Martha just kind of
[5:19] thought that they were playing a joke on her or playing a game or
[5:23] something. She just didn't think that a man
[5:25] had picked up Fanny and taken her somewhere.
[5:28] And with the girls being just eight and five years old, when
[5:31] Martha kind of reacted very calm, like she didn't care, the
[5:34] girls then thought, Oh well, Fanny must be safe.
[5:37] If my mum don't care, then we shouldn't really care.
[5:40] Because of Martha's calm demeanor, the girls just kind of
[5:44] carried on playing. They didn't think that anything
[5:46] was really wrong. They thought that, well, Fanny
[5:48] would be fine because otherwise Martha would be panicking.
[5:51] So the girls carried on playing at Minnie's house for a little
[5:54] while, and then finally Lizzie, the five year old Fanny's
[5:58] younger sister, decided to go home.
[6:00] This was at around 5:00 PM. Lizzie returned home, obviously
[6:03] without Fanny, and when Harriet, their mother, realized that
[6:07] Fanny had been taken by a man, she was immediately worried.
[6:11] So Harriet ran straight round to a neighbor's house named Mrs.
[6:13] Gardner, and she asked Mrs. Gardiner if she'd help look
[6:16] around like the surrounding fields, meadows, hop fields to
[6:20] see if they could find Baker and Fanny.
[6:22] And it wasn't long before they did find Baker.
[6:24] They found him in the same hop fields by the Meadow that he
[6:27] originally met the girls in, but he was alone and there was
[6:31] absolutely no sign of Fanny. So Mrs. Gardner asked Baker what
[6:35] he'd done with Fanny. Obviously they knew that he'd
[6:37] picked her up and just walked away with her.
[6:39] And he just kind of replied that he gave her money for sweets.
[6:42] He always did that with the kids around the town because he's
[6:44] generous and she was probably off getting her sweets.
[6:48] So Mrs. Gardner replied to Baker.
[6:50] I have a great mind to give you in to the police.
[6:52] And Baker told her that pretty much in his own words, that she
[6:55] could do what she wanted. He didn't care.
[6:57] But remember, Frederick Baker was a solicitor's clerk in the
[7:00] town, and that was a very kind of respected and trustworthy
[7:04] job. He was a very respected and
[7:06] trustworthy individual in the town.
[7:08] And so if he gave a reasonable explanation as to where Fanny
[7:11] was, they kind of believed it. Obviously, they didn't 100%
[7:16] believe that they were still suspicious of him.
[7:18] But I mean, you know, you know what I mean.
[7:21] They just had to kind of believe him.
[7:23] I mean, she wasn't with him like they thought that she would be.
[7:26] And he gave a reasonable explanation.
[7:28] And so Harriet and Mrs. Gardner just kind of returned home and
[7:32] waited for Fanny to come home. They waited and they waited and
[7:35] they waited. But still, at around 7:30 PM,
[7:38] Fanny still hadn't arrived home. And at this point they were
[7:42] reasonably worried and so they banded together a group of
[7:45] neighbors to all go out and search kind of the nearby
[7:48] meadows and hot fields. So they began along the hollow
[7:51] which was that strip of Rd. that the girls liked to run up and
[7:54] down, but there was absolutely no sign of Fanny there.
[7:57] So then they headed to the hot field which was just by flood
[7:59] Meadow where Harriet and Mrs. Gardiner had recently seen
[8:03] Frederick Baker and spoken to him.
[8:05] But when they got there they were met with a labourer from
[8:07] the town. His name was Thomas Gates.
[8:10] He was a Crimean War veteran turned labourer and he was
[8:14] working in the town. He was walking home from work.
[8:17] He took a shortcut through this hot field and he saw something
[8:20] terrifying. He saw the severed head of a
[8:23] child stuck on top of two hot poles and the head itself had
[8:27] also been mutilated. One of the child's ears had been
[8:31] cut off and there were two large incisions from the mouth all the
[8:35] way to the ear creating a kind of smile shape.
[8:38] Immediately when Harriet heard of the news, obviously there was
[8:41] only one child missing, it had to be Fanny and so she ran all
[8:46] the way to the town to go and tell her husband George.
[8:49] So Harriet set off running to go and meet George who was playing
[8:52] cricket. But due to obviously all of her
[8:55] overwhelming emotions, Harriet collapsed on her way there and
[8:59] so someone sent a message to George.
[9:01] When George heard the news he went straight home and loaded
[9:04] his shotgun and went looking for Baker.
[9:07] However, the neighbors kind of managed to calm him down and
[9:09] they had to stay up with him all night to make sure he didn't go
[9:12] out looking for Baker the next day hundreds of people it seemed
[9:16] like the whole town was out looking for Fanny's remains and
[9:20] like murder weapons or any form of evidence.
[9:23] But it's actually believed that this really kind of hindered the
[9:26] investigation because hundreds of people were trampling over
[9:29] like possible evidence. A base was set up in town at a
[9:32] pub called the Leave Them bottle for people to kind of report
[9:35] back to if they found anything to bring back any forms of
[9:39] evidence that people might find. Because obviously it wasn't just
[9:42] police on this case, it was volunteers from the town,
[9:46] hundreds of them. So they set up this pub for
[9:48] anyone to just kind of drop in and give any form of
[9:52] information. Fanny's clothes were found, they
[9:55] were cut up into shreds and they were found scattered all over
[9:58] the fields in the surrounding area.
[10:00] However, her hat was never found.
[10:03] And then people began to find body parts.
[10:05] Fanny's body had been dismembered and scattered across
[10:09] the nearby fields for just anyone to Fanny's torso was
[10:13] found with half of one of her legs, and the other leg was
[10:16] hanging on by the smallest amount of flesh.
[10:20] There were three incisions on the left side of her chest.
[10:23] There were five incisions on her liver.
[10:25] All of the contents of the inside of a torso were removed,
[10:28] including her heart, which was also found separately.
[10:32] Her remaining legs, arms, and feet were all found separately.
[10:35] One of her feet was actually found still inside her shoe, and
[10:39] all the different parts of her body just had kind of seemingly
[10:43] random deep cuts all over them. Both of her eyes were found in
[10:47] the nearby river. There was also a rock found with
[10:50] flesh and hair on it, and whoever found that rock believed
[10:54] it could have been like a possible murder weapon maybe.
[10:57] However, the murder weapon was believed to have been small
[11:00] knives, and they still hadn't been found.
[11:02] At this point, all the different parts of Fanny's body were taken
[11:05] back to the pub. They'll leave them bottled to be
[11:08] sewn back up so that they could be taken to the police station
[11:11] to be looked at. That evening, the police
[11:13] Superintendent, William Cheney, arrived at the Leven Bottle Pub
[11:17] to be kind of informed of everything that had happened.
[11:20] And when he got there, he was handed a bundle labeled Portions
[11:24] of a child. When William Cheney was told the
[11:26] whole story, he was immediately suspicious of Frederick Baker,
[11:30] just like everyone else was. And so he ordered his whole
[11:33] police team to go and track down his work.
[11:36] They arrived at his work at the solicitor's office at 9:00 PM,
[11:39] and Baker was actually still there, even though he normally
[11:42] left an hour earlier at 8:00 PM every day.
[11:45] Despite being the only suspect in the whole case, he was the
[11:48] only person that police were looking at.
[11:50] He was adamant that he was innocent, and so police did kind
[11:55] of look at other different avenues for a couple of hours,
[11:58] but ultimately decided it had to be Frederick Baker.
[12:01] By the time the police went to arrest him, there was already a
[12:03] huge mob of townspeople outside and they were, as you can
[12:07] imagine, very angry. And so police had to sneak him
[12:11] out of the back out of fears that someone might try and kill
[12:14] him. And when he was searched at the
[12:16] police station, Frederick Baker was found to be in possession of
[12:19] two small knives. And the murder weapon was
[12:22] believed to have been two small knives.
[12:25] Both of the knives were clean. They weren't stained.
[12:28] And you might say, well, he cleaned them.
[12:29] He washed them. Obviously.
[12:31] However, they also weren't rusty.
[12:34] And I don't know if that's like a clue or anything, but that
[12:37] seemed to come up a lot in my research.
[12:39] People said, well, they weren't rusty, but they but also weren't
[12:42] stained. So how could he have used them?
[12:44] And I don't know if like metal in the 1800s just wasn't treated
[12:49] very well in the production and it got rusty really quickly when
[12:53] it came in contact with water. I have no idea.
[12:55] So I don't know if that's a clue or not.
[12:57] But all I know is that this man had two small knives, which was
[13:01] the believed murder weapon. I mean, and he was the only
[13:04] suspect, the only suspect in the whole case had the believed
[13:08] murder weapons. So I feel like that's enough
[13:10] evidence for me. He also had spots of blood on
[13:13] the cuffs of his shirt, on his socks and also his trousers had
[13:16] been soaked to get rid of any blood staining.
[13:19] But there was still blood staining on his pants.
[13:22] And when police asked Frederick Baker why he had so much blood
[13:25] on him, he replied, well, I don't see a scratch or cut on my
[13:29] hands to account for the blood, which is just so creepy.
[13:33] Baker was just overall just very creepy, very eerie and very
[13:37] relaxed and calm in his interviews.
[13:40] He didn't seem like he was there on a murder charge.
[13:42] He seemed like he was just, I don't know, just sat at a
[13:46] friend's house or something. He was very creepy.
[13:50] During his questioning, another group of police officers went to
[13:53] his work at the solicitor's office and just went and looked
[13:56] around all these things to see if they could find like any
[13:58] further murder weapons, just anything, any form of evidence
[14:02] at his work. They didn't find any murder
[14:05] weapons or anything relating to the murder directly, but they
[14:08] did find a diary which was the evidence they needed to say that
[14:12] this was 100% Frederick Baker. There was an entry made in the
[14:16] diary for that day, August 24th, 1867, and the entry said killed
[14:22] a young girl. It was fine and hot, the last
[14:25] sentence meaning the weather, but I think that's even more
[14:29] creepy that he just put those two sentences together, killed a
[14:33] young girl and then just a comment about the weather as if
[14:36] those are like equal subjects. I I think that was the most
[14:40] interesting part for me. A lot of kind of articles that I
[14:42] read kind of left off that second sentence, but I think it
[14:45] was really important to put that in because it shows how
[14:49] unimportant he feels the murder was.
[14:53] He feels like it was a similar subject to just kind of talking
[14:55] about the weather. And that, to me, is so creepy.
[14:59] So Baker tried multiple times to claim that he was innocent, and
[15:02] one of his claims was that he was actually insane.
[15:05] And so he wasn't criminally responsible for this murder.
[15:08] And there were actually some grounds for that.
[15:11] Not for Frederick in particular, but his family had a long kind
[15:15] of history with mental health issues.
[15:18] Frederick himself had attempted suicide in the past.
[15:20] His sister died from a form of mania.
[15:23] His father spent a little time in a mental hospital.
[15:26] However, Frederick himself was determined to be completely
[15:30] mentally sane. He then tried to claim he was
[15:32] innocent because he was intoxicated.
[15:34] However, witnesses and people that had spoken to him earlier
[15:38] that day said that that's just not true.
[15:40] He wasn't intoxicated that day. And obviously, if you remember,
[15:43] Harriet and Mrs. Gardiner spoke to him like maybe 20 minutes
[15:47] after he committed the murder, and they would have known if he
[15:51] was intoxicated or not, and he just wasn't.
[15:53] So Frederick Baker was being held in Alton Prison from August
[15:57] when the murder happened until December, when his trial would
[16:00] be just because he's a potentially dangerous person,
[16:04] until he's decided guilty or not guilty, he can't be let out on
[16:07] the streets. But in that time, before his
[16:10] trial in December, some new evidence emerged In October, so
[16:14] two months after the murder took place, a young boy that lived on
[16:18] the same St. as Fanny Adams came forward saying that he saw
[16:22] Frederick Baker in the minutes after he supposedly killed
[16:25] Fanny. The boy said that he saw
[16:27] Frederick Baker leave the hop garden at 2:00 PM that day and
[16:31] his hands were covered in blood and he had blood like on his
[16:35] clothing. He said that Baker calmly knelt
[16:38] by the river. He washed his hands, he washed
[16:40] his clothes a little bit with a handkerchief, and then he washed
[16:43] 2 objects, one of which was a knife, and then put them both in
[16:47] his coat pocket. And you can probably imagine
[16:49] that the other one was the other knife, because I think he only
[16:52] had two objects on him anywhere, which were the two small knives.
[16:56] Baker's clothes were sent off for testing, but as you can
[16:59] probably imagine, it was the 1800s.
[17:01] Testing wasn't overly brilliant back then, so they could only
[17:06] determine whether it was human blood or like animal blood.
[17:10] And of course, the blood on Frederick Baker was human.
[17:13] It was determined that Fanny's actual cause of death was
[17:16] probably from a blow to the head using that stone that someone
[17:20] found. It's been suggested that a
[17:22] larger weapon or larger instrument was probably used to
[17:26] dismember Fanny. However, it's not been confirmed
[17:29] and this larger instrument has never been found.
[17:32] But a lot of people say that it would be impossible to dismember
[17:36] Fanny Adams with just two small knives.
[17:39] But I mean, there's conflicting opinions on that so I don't
[17:41] know. Forensics determined that the
[17:43] dismemberment took less than an hour to complete, and Fanny's
[17:47] body must have still been warm when he was dismembering her.
[17:51] So while Frederick Baker was in Alton Prison awaiting his trial
[17:54] in December, he seemed very disturbed.
[17:57] He wasn't sleeping very well at all.
[17:59] He would get like an hour's sleep per night and he was
[18:02] barely eating and he would shudder at the sight of meat.
[18:06] A couple of months later, he was eventually transferred to a
[18:08] different prison, still awaiting his trial in December.
[18:11] And all of that just stopped. So no one knows why he was like
[18:15] that. But as soon as he moved, his
[18:17] sleeping schedule was fine. He was eating fine.
[18:20] He was talking to the guards, joking with them, joking with
[18:22] other inmates. He was a completely different
[18:25] person when he moved prisons. On December 5th, 1867, after
[18:30] just 15 minutes of deliberation, the jury came back to say that
[18:34] Frederick Baker was guilty of the murder of eight-year old
[18:37] Fanny Adams. Baker was sentenced to death and
[18:41] hung on December 24th, so Christmas Eve of that same year,
[18:45] 1867, to a crowd of over 5000 people.
[18:50] So that's the end of this case. Now let me just explain where
[18:53] the saying sweet Fanny Adams comes from.
[18:55] I kind of debated putting this in because it's kind of, I don't
[18:58] know, but I feel like a lot of you are going to be thinking the
[19:01] same thing. You're going to have recognized
[19:02] the name Fanny Adams and wondered where it came from.
[19:05] And just remember, I didn't make this up.
[19:07] I didn't make this saying up myself.
[19:09] I'm just kind of relaying the information so don't get mad at
[19:12] me for this, but it is really kind of distasteful.
[19:15] So the same sweet Fanny Adams originated 2 years after Fannies
[19:19] murder in 1869. New kind of rationed tins of
[19:23] mutton were introduced to the British Navy.
[19:26] And these tins of mutton tasted really bad.
[19:30] And as a kind of messed up joke, the sailors used to kind of joke
[19:34] to each other that maybe it wasn't mutton, maybe it was the
[19:37] remains of Fanny Adams in those tins.
[19:40] And before long, Fanny Adams just became like slang for
[19:44] mutton or Stew or just anything of very low value.
[19:49] And now to this day, people still say sweet Fanny Adams as a
[19:53] synonym for all, really. So, yeah, a very distasteful
[19:57] joke, a very distasteful saying that's still used to this day.
[20:01] I don't like it at all. Thank you so, so much for
[20:04] watching this video. I know it was a very short one,
[20:06] but it was also a very interesting one, I thought.
[20:13] Thank you so much for listening to usual disclaimer.
[20:16] At this point, I just want to say that if you've been affected
[20:18] by any of the topics we discussed today, please check
[20:21] the description where we've left some helpful resources.
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[20:42] See you next time.

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