Murder at the West Baby Farm Des Moines, Iowa

Mrs. Fred West

Baby farms were the scourge of the nineteenth century. They thrived on the outskirts and in the city’s underbelly and took in unwanted babies mothers could not or would not take care of.

Jacob Riis, a noted journalist of the day, described baby farms as a “fiendish plan of child murder” and said, “The name means starving babies to death.”

“Persons usually of disreputable character eke out a living by taking two, three, or four babies to board,” said Elbridge T. Gerry. “They feed them on sour milk and give them paregoric to keep them quiet until they die, when they get some young medical man without experience to sign a death certificate. “The baby is dead, and there is no one to complain.”

That would have happened in the next case, except the nurse had a guilty conscious and spilled her guts to the Iowa Humane Society.

Constable Griffen arrested Mrs. Fred West, the proprietor of the West Baby Farm at 1314 Thirty-fifth Street in Des Moines, after Flora Goble, a former nurse, swore Mrs. West gave a baby enough laudanum to kill it. She said, “It was not unusual to see children jerked around by the leg or arm and whipped when they cry.”

The Leo Moses family adopted baby Jim. Soon after they got the baby, it got sick, and doctors feared it would lose its eyesight, so they returned it for treatment.

Rather than treat the baby, Mrs. West ordered nurses to give it a lethal dose of laudanum. “The child’s mouth was forced open,” said Flora Goble, “and the drug poured down its throat. A short time afterward, the dose was repeated, and the child died.”

Flora said West killed the baby because a blind baby was impossible to adopt and useless to her. Do not be “foolish,” Mrs. West told her. It was what they always did when babies gave them trouble. “They put them out of misery as fast as possible.”

But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

There has always been traffic in babies, reported the Evening Times-Republican. “The infants were bought and sold, and when this was impossible, given away. Inmates of disorderly houses, it is said, bought the babies, using them as one would a poodle to play with.” They only wanted baby girls, but paid good money for them.

West Baby Farm, Des Moines, Iowa

Flora said the bodies of the dead children were thrown into the furnace and incinerated. “It required but a few moments’ time for the flames to lick up the little bodies.” Afterward, the ashes were scooped up and dumped out back with the other cinders.

When the prosecutor at the preliminary hearing asked Anna Beattie if she ever saw any dead bodies disposed of in the furnace at the West home, she said, “No.” So, the prosecutor changed the question and tried again. “Do you know of a baby’s body being taken from a mother and carried into the furnace room?” Anna answered, “I don’t remember.” The prosecutor asked, “Do you have a good memory?” The girl just looked at him.

Another nurse at the West home told Elizabeth Baird of the Iowa Humane Society she was dispatched to the home of Edward Vertuba on Easter morning, 1905. Mrs. West told her to leave the baby on the doorstep and get away without being seen.

Myrtle Boozell testified that Mrs. West “kept a laboratory in her house, and several drugs of a poisonous nature were kept there.” Under examination, Nurse Beattie said she did not know what chloroform was used for. Then, she changed her mind and said it was given to confined people to help them sleep.

Flora Goble said Mrs. West instructed her to give “Baby Jim” twenty drops of laudanum. When she refused, Anna Beattie assisted Mrs. West in administering the fatal dose.

Beattie swore she did not do it, and no medicines were kept in the house except for “stomach medicine.”

“Were you ever in the room with Mrs. West, Miss Goble, and Baby Jim?” asked the prosecutor.

“I might have been. I don’t remember.”

“Did you ever give Baby Jim paregoric, stomach medicine, or alcohol?”

“Not that I know of.”

Anna’s answers to most of the questions were, “I don’t remember.” If prosecutors were hoping to get incriminating evidence against Mrs. West from her, they were disappointed.

The Des Moines Daily News interviewed Mrs. West in her jail cell shortly after her arrest.

“The Humane Society has always had it in for me,” said West. “Do I look like a woman who would do such a thing? If I wanted to commit murder, would I have a nurse girl do it? Isn’t that foolish?”

The case went to trial in June 1907.

When she was put on the stand, Mrs. West denied practically everything Flora Goble accused her of. She only admitted that there was a baby Jim, and his real name was Fred Wilson.

West’s first trial ended in a hung jury, and she was released on a $10,000 bond. Then, just as quickly, she found herself back in prison when Mrs. W. L. Gerloch revoked the bond her husband had posted.

County Attorney Lawrence DeGraff dismissed the cases against Mrs. Fred West and Anna Beattie in January 1908 because of a lack of evidence. The good news was that she was out of the baby farm business.

A mysterious fire destroyed the West Baby Farm overnight on July 1, 1908. It was the second fire at the home in as many months.