“I have no mother. I have no father. I have no home. I have no money. I have nothing,” 23-year-old Frederick Edge told his sister when he called at her home on SEPTEMBER 28th, 1905. Handing her a parcel which he said contained most of his clothes, he said they were for his younger brother, Arthur. Then he kissed his sister and left, saying she might never see him again.
He returned to his lodgings in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, where he was in arrears with his rent and had been told by Mr. and Mrs. Frank Evans that he must leave. That afternoon he cut the throat of the couple’s five-month-old baby, and then went to the local police station to give himself up.
He told detectives he would have liked to kill the child’s mother too, but had had no opportunity. The baby’s murder was his revenge for being asked to leave his lodgings, and he paid for it on the scaffold at Stafford Prison on December 27th, 1905.