What the sergeant saw appalled him. In his official report, he said of one baby, "The child was in an appalling condition. Pus was coming from its eyes, it was fly specked, extremely wasted and giving off an offensive odour".
Sergeant O'Halloran returned with a government medical officer who, also appalled at the filthy conditions, pronounced that the child in question was close to death. It was Booth's baby daughter.
Interviewed about her arrangement with Alice Mitchell, Booth said that she usually called in late at night after she had finished her work. Each time she was put off from seeing her child on the excuse that the baby was asleep and could not be disturbed. After weeks of being put off she finally demanded to see her child and was shocked at what she saw. When her once healthy and bubbling baby was brought to her she couldn't believe her eyes. The baby was covered in sores from head to foot and was a crying bag of bones. The infant died two days later.
Booth went to the police and told them that she suspected foul play. A full investigation into the child-minding practices of Alice Mitchell began. The discoveries would shock the nation and once and for all bring a close to uncontrolled child minding.
Since 1900 Alice Mitchell had run a number of baby lodging establishments in Perth and had moved from one address to the next as things got too hot for her. Adult boarders in her establishments told police of babies lying on the floor in their own excrement with piles of used, unwashed napkins riddled with maggots in the corner. The stench from the rooms was unbearable and flies lay their eggs in the weeping sores on the children's faces and bodies.
The babies were allowed to crawl out into the back yard where the fowls were kept and immerse themselves in the mud and eat the chicken droppings that littered the yard.
As the investigation progressed, it was revealed that, over the six years that she had been in business, 37 infants had died at the hands of Alice Mitchell yet not a word of it had reached police. Investigators had little doubt that the death toll was a lot higher, but no more records could be found among the squalor.
What amazed police the most was how 37 babies could have been buried by their grieving mothers without the authorities becoming aware of it. It was law that a coroner's certificate be issued before any burial could proceed. Yet not one such certificate had ever been issued in the case of the babies that had died in the care of Mitchell.
To the astonishment of police and Health Department officials it was discovered that the undertakers did not know such documentation was required. The four main Perth funeral directors all claimed that they were unaware that the coroner's certificates were required and had carried out 37 funerals, some at the government's expense, of babies in the care of Mitchell without the inkling of a suspicion that all may not be in order.
Dr. Officer, who was the only doctor to service the babies in Mitchell's charge, claimed that he had never noticed anything irregular about the conditions at Mitchell's establishments.
And a Miss Lenihan, the Council Health Department Inspector in charge of such establishments, whose job it was to do regular checkups on the babies, said that she heard about the odd death from time to time but said it wasn't anything worth reporting to her superiors.
In spite of the huge amount of evidence to the contrary, Miss Lenihan maintained that Mitchell's establishments were always found to be satisfactory.
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