Between 1854 and 1929, an estimated 200,000 children were loaded onto trains in New York City and shipped west. They were told they were going to new families. What they weren't told was that strangers would be waiting on platforms to look them over — and choose which ones they wanted to take home.

They called it charity. They called it saving children. The word "orphan" was a lie they told to make the whole thing easier to swallow.

This is Angel Makers, Part 2: The Orphan Trains. Part of a multi-episode series tracing the machinery America built to process unwanted children — from the baby farmers of Victorian England to the streets of 1850s New York, all the way to a small medical clinic in Cleveland, Georgia in 1978. You'll have to keep watching to see where that thread ends.

In this episode: — The world that built the trains: 30,000 homeless children on New York City streets, the immigrant families who couldn't outrun poverty, and the prisons the city used instead of solutions — Charles Loring Brace: the Yale minister who genuinely wanted to help — and also believed Catholic immigrant children were genetically inferior and potentially dangerous — What actually happened on those platforms: children in their best clothes, lined up for inspection, selected or left behind like livestock at auction — The ones who were never chosen: disabled children, older children, children who weren't white enough for Protestant Midwestern farm families — The Catholic Church's counter-system: the Baby Trains, where families could specify gender, hair color, and eye color when requesting a child — The darkest parallel: while the orphan trains ran west, the U.S. government was running its own version for Native American children — with a stated policy of "Kill the Indian, Save the Man" — Why the trains stopped in 1929 — and it wasn't because anyone decided the system was wrong — The direct line from the orphan trains to the modern American foster care system, and why the same failures keep appearing under a different name — Concordia, Kansas: the end of the line, the children nobody picked, and why 50+ bronze statues of those children now stand permanently in the streets of a small Kansas town

🔎 If you think you might be a descendant of an orphan train rider — start here: orphantraindepot.org. The National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia, Kansas holds over 8,000 rider records and handles 250 research requests every year.

📬 TIME KILLER FILES: Are you a descendant of an orphan train rider? Do you have a family story that got hushed up — a great-grandmother who arrived in Kansas on a train and nobody talked about it? A name change in the family tree nobody could explain? Send me your story: [YOUR EMAIL / SUBMISSION LINK]

⏭️ MISSED PART 1? Watch Angel Makers, Part 1: For a Small Fee — Victorian baby farming, Amelia Dyer, and the Butterbox Babies: [LINK]

⏭️ NEXT TIME: Angel Makers, Part 3 — The asylums. The stolen mothers. The women declared insane for reading novels and disagreeing with their husbands. And the children left behind when the locked door closed.

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Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton is a true crime and conspiracy podcast covering the cases, the systems, and the uncomfortable truths the official story leaves out. New episodes on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

🎙️ Hosted and produced by Elizabeth Stanton 📍 Based in Derby, Kansas

JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com

Subscribe so you don't miss Part 3.

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.