WARNING: GRAPHIC AND UPSETTING CONTENT
The baby farmer.
The Black Widow.
The Heavenly Creatures.
The Herald looks back at the women who have been convicted of murder, manslaughter and mercy killlings in New Zealand.
WARNING: GRAPHIC AND UPSETTING CONTENT
The baby farmer.
The Black Widow.
The Heavenly Creatures.
The body in the garden.
Lillybing. Decelia. Moko. Malachi.
These are all notorious criminal cases in New Zealand where people have been murdered at the hands of women.
Husbands, children, friends, lovers and complete strangers slain. Babies and children abused, neglected and brutalised.
Police figures show between mid-2012 and 2022, about 280 people were convicted of murder in New Zealand.
Of those, just 9.5 per cent of offenders - 26 in total - were women.
A further 47 women were convicted of manslaughter, 27 per cent of the 271 total offenders in that category.
Senior crime and justice reporter Anna Leask looks back at some of New Zealand’s most shocking cases of murder, manslaughter and even some mercy killings carried out by women.
You can also listen to Herald podcast A Moment In Crime, which revisits the offending by some of these offenders.
Some of these cases relate to child abuse or domestic violence. For information on where to get help or report concerns or crimes, scroll to the bottom of this article.
Minnie Dean - multiple murders
In the 1880s Dean started taking in the children of unmarried mothers or women who had too many children.
She was paid a fee for looking after the children.
In 1891 Dean appeared before a coroner after several babies in her care died.
It was determined conditions at Deans’ rural Winton farmhouse were inadequate and there were concerns there were too many children under her roof - but the woman was cleared.
After the inquest police began to investigate Dean, and it was eventually alleged that in a series of train journeys across Southland and South Otago she had killed babies given to her to look after and stuffed them in hat boxes to transport them and dispose of their bodies.
In May 1895 police began to dig up Dean’s garden and found the bodies of two baby girls and a boy aged about 4.
Dean denied murdering the children, saying one girl was accidentally given too much of an opium-based medicine used to calm babies and the other suffocated after inhaling vomit.
Despite her protests, Dean was hanged.
Asked, when standing at the gallows trapdoor, if she wished to speak one last time, she replied: “No, except that I am innocent.”
Juliet Parker and Pauline Hulme - murder
The 15-year-olds murdered Pauline’s mother, Honora Rieper, in Christchurch in 1954 by bludgeoning her on a park walkway.
The schoolgirls lured Rieper to Victoria Park in Christchurch, on June 22, 1954 and proceeded to hit her repeatedly on the head with half a brick in a sock.
Pauline had planned the killing in her diary and on the day of the fatal act, wrote an entry titled “The Day of the Happy Event”.
The pair were both charged with murder and later convicted.