Melbourne: 1893 — Lots of Questions
In September 1893, the new tenant of a house in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, decided to turn his backyard into a vegetable garden. As he was digging, to his horror, just below the surface of the unkempt backyard he unearthed the decomposing remains of a baby girl. Around the infant's neck was a tightened length of rope.
Police were immediately summoned to the house to examine the find. Neighbors also pointed out a nearby house where the same tenants had also lived, and when they dug around the garden there, they found another two decaying infants, both boys, buried just beneath the surface.
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| Francis Knorr |
The previous tenants of both addresses, Rudolph and Frances. Knorr, had recently moved to Sydney and weren't hard to find. They had moved to Brisbane Street in the suburb of Surry Hills and were picked up by police within days of the discovery of the three tiny bodies and extradited to Melbourne to face the authorities.
An autopsy would reveal that the little girl had died of strangulation and the two boys had been suffocated. The Knorrs had a lot of questions to answer.
Police learned that Frances Knorr was born Minnie Thwaites in Chelsea, London, of a highly respected, God-fearing family. An unruly child and a lustful teenager of many conquests, she was sent from the family home to do her best in Australia and arrived in Sydney at age 19 in 1887.
She changed her name to Frances and fell in love with and married Rudolph Knorr, a German waiter whom she met while working as a domestic servant. Rudolph was well known to police in both Melbourne and Sydney as a petty criminal.
The Knorrs had a daughter named Gladys and after a series of misadventures, in which Rudolph did 18 months in Pentridge for fraud and Frances had an affair with an Edward Thompson and even lived with him for a time until he cast her aside, they reunited and turned to the new industry of "child minding."
It wasn't hard to do. Any woman with a child or children of her own who could get away with claiming to be a nurse could take babies in on a long-term, full-time basis. The usual deal was that the mother would pay an initial down payment of between five and 20 pounds and then pay a smaller monthly payment. In return her baby would be cared for and the mother would have access to her baby at prearranged visiting times.
The trouble with such loose arrangements was that often the mother would turn up to find that the child minder had taken her down payment and gone missing, presumably having sold the child, and numerous others, to childless couples for an extortionate sum and set up business again in another suburb or state.
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