Before the Cabbage Patch Kids, there was Amelia Dyer. And she didn't give babies certificates. She gave them white tape — around their necks — and threw them in the Thames.

In Part 1 of the Angel Makers series, we go back to where it all started: Victorian England, where baby farming was legal, advertised in major newspapers, and almost entirely ignored by the government for decades. We're talking about the women who took in infants for a "small fee" — and what happened to those babies when nobody was watching.

This episode covers:

🪡 The system that made baby farming possible — the 1834 Poor Law, the workhouses, and the laws that stripped single mothers of every option except desperation

🪡 Margaret Waters — the Brixton Baby Farmer, the first to hang, and the woman whose execution changed almost nothing

🪡 Amelia Dyer — trained nurse, serial killer, and quite possibly the most prolific murderer in recorded history. Up to 400 babies. Thirty years. Three names recovered. The rest: unknown.

🪡 The Butterbox Babies — Nova Scotia, Canada, 1928–1947. A minister, a midwife, and a maternity home that sold healthy white babies to wealthy couples from New York — and starved the rest in butter boxes.

🪡 The thread — baby farming, orphan trains, asylums, and Cabbage Patch Kids. Same bones. Different clothes. We're just getting started.

Plus — your first Time Killer Files prompt: Tell me about your Cabbage Patch Kid. And does it feel different now?

Content note: This episode contains detailed discussion of infant death, child neglect, and systemic exploitation of vulnerable women. Listener discretion advised.

Just Killing Time is a true crime and conspiracy podcast hosted by Elizabeth Stanton, a Derby, Kansas native with a personal connection to the stories she tells and a deep belief that the forgotten deserve to be remembered.

New episodes drop every Tuesday & Thursday. Find us on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Submit your Time Killer Files at JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com.

On July 30, 1990, nine-year-old Nancy Shoemaker walked a block and a half from her home in south Wichita, Kansas to get her sick baby brother a 7-Up. She never came home. In the premiere episode of Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton, host Elizabeth Stanton — a Derby, Kansas native who grew up 12 miles from this case — tells the full story of Nancy's kidnapping and murder: the two killers (Doil Lane and Donald Wacker), the court records, the decades-long fight by Nancy's father Bo Shoemaker to keep her killers behind bars, the 22,000-signature petition, and the haunting willow tree at Beech Elementary that connects Nancy to another lost Wichita child 28 years later. This is Episode 1. This is for Nancy. Submit your Time Killer File: JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com. Content warning: kidnapping, rape, and murder of a child.