Today, we bring you the story of dressmaker Margaret Lucy Donnelly, who was charged with the “willful murder” of her own child in January, 1909. 

Early one morning, a brick carter named George Sharp stumbled across a parcel; inside was a dead baby girl with a piece of tape tied very tightly around her neck. 

A postmortem was later conducted, revealing the perfectly healthy baby of only one or two days old had been strangled to death.

In the course of their investigation, police noticed an address written on the parcel in which the baby was found dead. 

They visited that address and found Donnelly’s very confused family, who had absolutely no idea that their 31-year-old daughter was pregnant or had given birth.

Ironically, her mother was a police constable. 

When the police eventually found Donnelly, they described her as being in a “precarious state” of health and took her straight to hospital to be placed under supervision, where she remained for two weeks until she was imprisoned. 

She pleaded not guilty and was quickly committed for trial. 

During her trial, a doctor told the court he had examined when she was about seven months’ pregnant, but she had sworn him to secrecy.

When Donnelly herself was called to the stand, she insisted that she had no recollection at all of giving birth to a child or of being in the hospital – the only thing she could apparently remember was being in jail.  

In his address to the jury, her lawyer tried to convince the court that his client had acted out of insanity, telling them “in all the sad circumstances… it was reasonable… to draw the inference that [Margaret] had broken down under the strain of her great trouble”. 

However, the judge was not buying it, and gave the jury three choices: murder, concealment of birth, or contributory murder. 

It took the jury only 15 minutes to return their verdict of concealment, however, they pleaded with the court to show Donnelly some mercy as a result of her mental condition. 

After the trial, Donnelly tried to leave the court in the arms of her mother and father, but she collapsed and had to be carried out by two constables. 

Donnelly was ultimately sentenced to 12 months’ jail with light labour.

The last known record that can be found of Donnelly is in a coronial inquest file, which says she eventually died of cardio vascular degeneration in September, 1949. 

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