THE FANNY ADAMS CASE

so today's video is finally gonna be another true crime video I just want to start this video by saying I'm sorry for my absence but I feel like I've got a good enough reason and that is because starting on Monday I am doing another true crime week on my channel finally it's been so long if you don't follow me on Twitter or Instagram you would know about true crime week but from Monday to Sunday I will be uploading a new true crime video every single day of the week so that's where I've been preparing for that so today's video is just gonna be a kind of mini true crime video just to kind of put you on until then so I hope you're excited for true crime week and I'm just gonna get into this one so this case really interested me when I first heard of it because I turned of the girl's name her name is Fanny Adams but I've never like I didn't know where I knew the name from if you know what I mean so there's a saying in England I don't know if it's like worldwide or whatever but people say sweet Fanny Adams and I'll explain where that saying comes from at the end of the video but this case is one of the first ever recorded cases to make like national headlines this case literally happened in the 1860s which is that all this case I've ever covered on this channel quickly before I get into this video and I know this inter has been so long but I just want to let you know that this is one of the most gory cases I have ever covered on my channel so if you're very sensitive to things like that and like child murders sorry to spoil it for you but I'm sure you could have guessed that that was come in then this is probably not the video for you that being said I just want to give my usual disclaimer that I mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone that I talk about in this video this is all just information that I have found on the internet and I'm compiling into one video so Fanny Adams was born on April 30th 1859 in Hampshire in England she lived with her mother and father Harriet and George Adams along with her five siblings in age order these were Ellen George Walter and then Fanny was the fourth youngest and then Lizzie and their little and Fanny was described as tall she was very intelligent she was very kind of older looking so she was just eight years old but she looked maybe like 13 14 years old she was known around the town that she lived in she lived in a town called Alton in Hampshire and she was known for just her very like cheerful lively disposition she was just always smiling every time she passed anyone on the street she'd say hi have a conversation she was just a very like lively eight-year-old girl funny had a best friend called Minnie wanna who was also eight years old she lived like two houses down from her and they spent like every waking moment together they were they were best friends but there were more like sisters like I said the town that Fanny lived in was called Alton and it was very well known for its supply of hops which is a plant used in like beer production and because of this it meant that the town had a lot of hot fields it had a lot of breweries it had just a lot of jobs surrounding the production of beer on the afternoon of August 25 1867 Fanny was playing in the garden with her best friend Minnie Warner and her 5 year old younger sister Lizzie it was a really warm sunny deer that day and the girls were getting a little bit bored playing in the garden they'd been there all day and so they decided to ask Fanny's mother Harriet if they could go to the major at the end of the lane this meadow was called flood meadow and it had like hot fields around it it was just a really nice little area where the girls would go and play it was safe it was a really like large area they had so much room to play so they used to go there quite often Harriet agreed because she wanted to do housework she wanted the girls out of the way really and they'd been there so many times she trusted them it was only at the end of the road so she just let all three of them go and play there and you've got to remember that this was the 1800s and crime rates were absolutely nothing like they are nowadays - Harriet there had been no kind of major crimes in her living memory so she'd never witnessed any kind of abductions on murders are she never heard of anything like that happening in the town so she felt completely safe letting all three girls just go and play so the girls set off walking to the meadow they took a shortcut through one of the hot fields and that was when they bumped into a friendly twenty-nine-year-old Frederick Baker who was a solicitor's clerk in the town Baker was relatively new to the town he'd been there about two months but the girls recognized him because he was always in church every week and like the whole town all went to the same church so they recognized him the new his face that said hi to him so they felt safe talking to him Herbert Baker picked the girls some blackberries to eat and just kind of watch them play they were running up and down this broad that was nicknamed the holler they were just having fun and then they came back and hit the blackberries with Baker eventually the girls got pretty bored and kind of tired and particularly Lizzie and Minnie wanted to go home but they could try persuading all three of them to stay particularly Fanny Baker offered funny half a penny to go for a walk with him but then Lizzie and Minnie also wanted to come they didn't want to be left by themselves they wanted to go wherever Fanny was going but Baker didn't want that so then Baker offered Lizzie and Minnie three half pennies to go off and buy themselves some sweets while he went on a walk with Fanny but then funny refused to go on this walk with him bear could then kind of realize that he didn't have to persuade fanny he was so much bigger than her so much more powerful than her and so he just picked her up and walks away with her as Minnie and Lizzie watched and so lithium Minnie run straight home to Minnie's mother Martha wanna and they kind of told her the whole story but Martha just kind of brushed it off like I said it was the 1800s and things like abduction didn't happen and so Martha just kind of thought that they were playing a joke on every are playing a game or something she just didn't think that a man had picked up Fanny and taken her somewhere and with the girls being just 8 and 5 years old when Martha kind of reacted very calm like she didn't care the girls then thought oh well Fanny must be safe if my mom don't care then we shouldn't really care because of Martha's calm demeanor the girls just kind of carried on playing they didn't think that anything was really wrong they thought that will funny you'd be fine because otherwise Martha would be panicking so the girls carried on playing at Minnie's house for a little while and then finally Lizzy the five-year-old funding to her sister decided to go home this was around 5 p.m. Lizzy returned home obviously without Fanny and when Harriet their mother realized that funny had been taken by a man she was immediately worried so Harriet ran straight round to a neighbor's house near mrs. gardiner and she asked mrs. gardiner she'd help look around like the surrounding field Meadows hot field to see if they could find Baker and funny and it wasn't long before they did find Baker they found him in the same hop fields by the meadow that he originally met the girls in but he was alone and there was absolutely no sign of funny so mrs. Gardner asked Becca what he'd done with funny obviously they knew that he'd picked her up and just walked away with her and he just kind of replied that he gave him money for sweets he always did that with the kids around the town because he's generous and she was probably off getting her sweets so mrs. Gardner replied to Becca I have a great mind to give you in to the police and Becker told her that pretty much in his own words that she could do what she wanted he didn't care but remember Frederick Baker was a solicitor's clerk in the town and that was a very kind of respected and trustworthy job he was a very respected and trustworthy individual in the town and so if he gave a reasonable explanation as to where funding was they kind of believed it obviously they didn't 100% believe that there was still suspicious of him but I mean you know you know I mean they just had to kind of believe him I mean she wasn't with him like they thought that she would be and he gave her a reasonable explanation and so Harriet and mrs. Gardner just kind of returned home and with four funny to come home they're way ahead anywhere anywhere but still at around 7:30 p.m. funny still hadn't arrived hub and at this point they were reasonably worried and so they banded together a group of neighbors to all go out and search kind of the nearby meadows and hop fields so they began along the hollow which was that strip of road that the girls liked to run up and down but there was absolute sign up fatty there so then they headed to the hop field which was just by flood meadow where Harriet and mrs. Gardiner had recently seen Frederick Baker and spoken to him but when they got there they were met with a laborer from the town his name was Thomas Goetz he was a Crimean War veteran turned laborer and he was working in the town he was walking home from work he took a shortcut through this hop field and he saw something terrifying he saw the severed head of a child stuck on top of two hot poles and the head itself had also been mutilated one of the child's ears had been cut off and there were two large incisions from the mouth all the way to the Correa in a kind of smile cher immediately when Harriet heard of the news obviously there was only one child missing it had to be funny and so she ran all the way to the town to go and tell her husband George so Harriet set off running to go and meet George who was playing cricket but due to obviously all of her overwhelming emotions Harriet collapsed on her way there and so someone sent a message to George when George heard the news he went straight home and loaded his shotgun and went looking for Baker however the neighbors kind of managed to calm him down and they had to stay up with him all night to make sure he didn't go out looking for their cut the next day hundreds of people it seemed like the whole town was out looking for Fanny's remains and like murder weapons or any form of evidence but it's actually believed that this really kind of hindered the investigation because hundreds of people were trampling over like possible evidence a base was set up in town a pub called believin bottle for people to kind of report back to if they found anything to bring back any forms of evidence that people might find because obviously it wasn't just police on this case it was volunteers from the town hundreds of them so they set up this pub for anyone to just kind of drop in and give any form of information funny's clues were found they were cut into shreds and they were found scattered all over the fields in the surrounding area however her hat was never found and then people began to find body parts Fannie's body had been dismembered and scattered across the nearby fields for just anyone to find Fanny's torso was found with half of one of her legs and the other leg was hanging on by the smallest amount of flesh there were three incisions on the left side of her chest there were five incisions on her liver all of the contents of the inside of a tosser were removed including her heart which was also found separately her remaining legs arms and feet were all found separately one of her feet was actually found still inside her shoe and all the different parts of her body just had kind of seemingly random deep cuts all over them both of her eyes were found in the nearby river there was also a rock found with flesh and hair on it and whoever found that rock believed it could have been like a possible murder weapon maybe however the murder weapon was believed to have been small knives and they still hadn't been found at this point all the different parts of Fanny's body would take him back to the pub they'll even bottle to be sawn back up so that they could be taken to the police station to be looked at that evening the police superintendent William Cheney arrived at the lethal bottle pub to be kind of informed of everything that had happened and when he got there he was handed a bundle labeled portions of a child when William Cheney was told the whole story he was immediately suspicious of Frederick Baker just like everyone else was and so he ordered his whole police team to go and track down his work they arrived at his work at the solicitor's office at 9 p.m. and Baker was actually still there even though he normally left an hour earlier at 8 p.m. every day despite being the only suspect in the whole case he was the only person the police were looking at he was adamant that he was innocent and so police did kind of look at all the different avenues for a couple of hours or ultimately decided it had to be Frederick Baker by the time the police went to arrest him there was already a huge mob of townspeople outside and there were as you can imagine very angry and so police had to sneak him out of the back door our fears that one might try and kill it and when he was searched at the police - and Frederick Becker was found to be in possession of two small knives and the murder weapon was believed to have been two small knives well if the knives were clean they weren't stand and you might say well he cleaned them he washed them obviously however they also went rusty and I don't know if that's like a clue or anything but that seemed to come up a lot in my research people said well they weren't rusty but they also went stained so how could he have used them and I don't know if like metal in the 1800s just wasn't treated very well in the production and it got rusty really quickly when he came in contact with water I have no idea so I don't know if that's a clue or not but all I know is that this man had two small knives which was the believed murder weapon I mean and he was the only suspect the only suspect in the whole case had the believed murder weapon so I feel like that's enough evidence for me he also had spots of blood on the cuffs of his share on his socks and also his trousers had been soaked to get rid of any blood standing but there was still blood staining on his pants and when police asked Frederick Baker why he had so much blood on him he replied well I don't see a scratch or cut on my hands to account for the blood which is just so creepy Baker was just overall just very creepy very eerie and very relaxed and calm and his interviews he didn't seem like he was there on a murder charge he seemed like he was just I don't know I just sat at a friend's house or something he was very creepy Germany's questioning another group of police officers went to his work at the solicitor's office and just went and looked around all these things to see if they could find like and he said the murder weapons just anything any form of evidence at his work they didn't find any murder weapons or anything relating to the murder directly but they did find a diary which was the evidence they needed to say that this was a hundred percent Frederick Baker there was an entry made in the diary for that day August 25 1867 and the entry cent killed a young girl it was fine and hot the last sentence May in the weather but I think that's even more creeping that he just put those two sentences together killed a young girl and then just a comment about the weather as if those are like equal subjects I I think that was the most interesting part for me a lot of kind of articles that I read kind of left off that second sentence but I think it was really important to put that in because it shows how like unimportant he feels the murder was he feels like it was a similar subject to just kind of talking about the weather and that to me is so creepy so there could tried multiple times to claim that he was innocent and one of his claims was that he was actually in CID and so he wasn't criminally responsible for this murder and there were actually some grounds for that not the Frederic in particular but his family had a long kind of history with mental health issues Frederic himself had attempted suicide in the past his sister died from a form of mania his father spent a little time in a mental hospital however Frederic himself was determined to be completely mentally sane he then tried to claim he was innocent because he was intoxicated however witnesses and people that had spoken to him earlier that day said that that's just not true he wasn't intoxicated that day and obviously if you remember Harriette and mrs. Gardiner spoke to him like maybe 20 minutes after he committed the murder and they would have known if he was intoxicated or not and he just wasn't Sir Frederick Baker was being held in Alton prison from August when the murder happened until December when his trial would be just because he's a potentially dangerous person until he's decided guilty I'm not guilty he can't bail out on the streets but in that time before his trial in December some new evidence emerged in October so two months after the murder took place a young boy that lived on the same street as Fanny Adams came forward saying that he saw Frederick Baker in the minutes after he supposedly killed fanny the boy said that he saw Frederick there can leave the hop garden at 2:00 p.m. that day and his hands were covered in blood and he had blood like on his clothes he said that Baker calmly knelt by the river he washed his hands he washed his clothes a little bit with a hankerchief and then he washed two objects one of which was a knife and then put them both in his coat pocket and you can probably imagine that the other one was the other knife because I think you only had two objects on him anywhere which were the two small knives there his clothes were sent off for testing but as you can probably imagine it was the 1800s testing wasn't overly brilliant back then so they could only determine whether it was human blood or like animal blood and of course the blood on Frederick Baker was human it was determined that funnies actual cause of death was probably from a blur to the head using that stone that someone found it's been suggested that a larger weapon or larger instrument was probably used to dismember funny however it's not been confirmed and this larger instrument has never been found but a lot of people say that it would be impossible to dismember funny atoms with just two small knives but I mean there's conflicting opinions on that so I don't know forensics determined that the dismemberment took less than an hour to complete and funny's body must have still in wha when he was dismembering us so while Frederick Baker was in Alton prison awaiting his trial in December he seemed very disturbed he wasn't sleeping very well at all he would get like an hour's sleep per night and he was barely eating and he would shudder at the sight of meat a couple of months later and he was eventually transferred to a different prison still awaiting his trial in December and all of that just stopped so no one knows why he was like that but as soon as he moved to prison his sleeping schedule was fine he was eating fine he was talking to the guards joking with them joking with other inmates he was a completely different person when he moved prisons on December 5th 1867 after just 15 minutes of deliberation the jury came back to say that Frederick Baker was guilty of the murder of eight-year-old Fanny Adams Baker was sentenced to death and hung December 24th Christmas Eve of that same year 1867 to a crowd of over 5,000 people so that's the end of this case now let me just explain where the same sweet honey Adams comes from I kind of dab it and put in this in because it's kind of I don't I don't know I feel really strange about putting this in I don't know but I feel like a lot of you are gonna be thinking the same thing you're gonna recognize the name funny Adams and wondered where it came from and just remember I didn't make this up I didn't make this tell you not myself I'm just kind of relaying the information so don't get mad at me for this but it is really kind of distasteful so the same sweet Fanny Adams originated two years after Fanny's murder in 1869 new kind of rationed tins of mutton were introduced to the British Navy and these tins of mutton tasted really bad apparently and there's a kind of messed up jerk the sailors used to kind of joke to each other that maybe it wasn't mutton maybe it was the remains of Fanny Adams in those tins and before long Fanny Adams just became like slang for mutton osh to are just anything of very low value and now to this day people still save sweet Fanny Adams as a synonym for a fall really so yeah a very distasteful joke a very distasteful same that's still used to this day I don't I don't like it at all but yeah like I said please don't get mad at me for that because I didn't make my saying I don't know I'm very I'm very kind of worried about putting that on the internet you know what I mean but yeah thank you so so much for watching this video I know it was a very short one but it was also a very interesting one I thought but yeah true-crime week on Monday until Sunday or is it until Monday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Monday to Sunday next week I am so stressed but at the same time I'm so excited to spend so much time with you guys and just get all of the things that I've been working on for the last like month out there I feel like I've just been like a little hermit working on all this stuff and not being able to share it with you yet so yeah thank you so so much for watching this video you enjoyed it make sure you leave a big thumbs up so I know and subscribe down below if you want to see some more from me like I said next week is true crime week I can't say enough so if you want to be a part of that if you want to watch that make sure you subscribed with my notifications up but yeah thank you so so much for watching and I will see you in the next one bye

Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,915,841

Keywords: 2018, abducted, abduction, crime watch daily, disappearance, documentary, eleanor neale, eleanor neale 2, interview, killer, missing, mystery, now, serial killer, solved, solved disappearance, solved mystery, true crime, unsolved, unsolved disappearance, unsolved mystery, where is, fredrick baker, fanny adams, sweet fanny adams, murder, murder mystery

Id: 6Ip_ZZkrgYg

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 07 2018