Dagmar Overbye, the “Angel Maker”

Unmarried mothers and a market in children

In Denmark in the years around the First World War, a woman who gave birth outside marriage faced poverty, stigma and the near-impossibility of keeping a job while raising a baby alone. Many such mothers looked for someone who would take the child off their hands. Private foster arrangements were common, and some were arranged through small newspaper advertisements with little or no involvement from the authorities. A Danish police history group, looking back on the case, has described a society in which unmarried mothers and their children were treated as having little worth. That gap in public oversight is the setting for the crimes of Dagmar Overby, a name also widely spelled Overbye.

Who Dagmar Overby was

According to the Danish national encyclopedia Lex, Dagmar Johanne Amalie Overby was born on 23 April 1887 in Assendrup in Vedslet parish. She had a troubled youth, was sent away from home at around twelve, and later worked as a domestic servant. She acquired convictions for theft, serving her first prison term on Funen in 1909, and a further sentence in 1918 for stealing poultry, a lamb and milk. She was briefly married, worked as a housekeeper near Randers in 1913, and moved to Copenhagen around 1915, where she ran a small sweet shop on Holmbladsgade. She lived with a stoker named Svendsen; his part in what followed was never established.

The killings

Overby made contact with desperate unmarried mothers through newspaper advertisements and offered to arrange an adoption in return for a one-off cash payment. Lex notes that the first mother paid her 12 kroner. These arrangements had no legal standing. Instead of placing the infants with families, Overby killed them, usually on the same day she received them, and hid or disposed of the remains. Both Lex and TV 2 date the first such killing to 1916, while Lex places the full series of convicted killings between 1913 and 1920. Of the nine deaths for which she was eventually convicted, one was her own child and eight were children entrusted to her by other women. Lex also records that one child in her care survived and was placed under the supervision of the child welfare council.

Discovery and investigation in 1920

The case unravelled in the summer of 1920. A young mother, identified by Lex as Karoline Aagesen, had handed her newborn daughter to Overby and returned the following day to her home on Enghavevej to see how the child was. Overby's answers did not add up, and the mother went to the police station on Svendsgade in Copenhagen to report the baby missing. Officers went to the address, took Overby in for questioning and found the infant's body in the flat. As the investigation widened, she confessed in the city court to as many as sixteen child killings, though she later withdrew some of her admissions. Prosecutors were ultimately able to prove nine.

Trial and sentence in 1921

Overby was tried before a jury at the Eastern High Court (Østre Landsret) in a hearing lasting three days, with Poul Gammeltoft prosecuting and Gottlieb Jacobsen for the defence. Medical experts concluded that she was not insane, although she was thought possibly to have been under the influence of naphtha and ether, and no clear motive was established beyond the payments she received. On 3 March 1921 the jury found her guilty of all nine killings and she was sentenced to death. No appeal was lodged. Roughly a month later, on the recommendation of a Council of State meeting, she was pardoned, on the strict condition that she would never be released and never receive any easing of her prison regime. She was held at the women's prison in Christianshavn and later at Vestre Fængsel in Copenhagen, where she died on 6 May 1929.

Why the case matters

The trial caused a sensation and prompted a national debate about the responsibilities of mothers, fathers and the state toward children born outside marriage, including calls for maternity homes and closer public supervision. The most direct result was the 1923 Act on the Supervision of Foster Children, which brought all children born outside marriage under public oversight and remained in force until 1965. The case also sits at a turning point for capital punishment: Overby's death sentence was never carried out, and Denmark abolished the death penalty in 1930, before reintroducing it for a period after the Second World War.

Conflicting numbers and a new film

Figures for the case vary between sources. Danish reference works and TV 2 give nine convictions, while a 2024 TIME article put the convictions at eight and said she was suspected of killing up to 26 infants; a police history account mentions a confession to eight killings since 1916. Overby's story returned to international attention through Magnus von Horn's black-and-white drama The Girl with the Needle (Pigen med nålen), with Trine Dyrholm as Overby. The film, which centres on a fictionalised version of the mother who alerted police, was Denmark's submission for the Academy Awards and was announced in January 2025 as a nominee for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards. The filmmakers drew on the court transcript held by the Danish National Archives but have openly taken creative liberties with events.