Scene of the Crime: In 1895, the notorious Southland “baby farmer” Minnie Dean was hanged for infanticide. But 130 years on, it is still uncertain what really took her to gallows: murder, mishap or a moral panic.
A bell tolled slowly and solemnly as the notorious Minnie Dean walked to the gallows. At just before 8am on August 12, 1895, the Invercargill sheriff Walter Martin demanded, as protocol required, that the town’s gaoler, a Mr Bratby, “produce the body” of Dean for her execution, an event widely anticipated not just in the country’s most southern town, but by the entire colony of New Zealand.
With Dean produced, Martin called for the executioner, a notorious drunkard called Long, to do his duty before the officials formed up to march the prisoner to the scaffold, a wooden affair built a quarter of century earlier and brought down from Dunedin specially.
At the head of the column was Bratby, then came the prison surgeon, a Dr Macleod, followed by Dean’s spiritual advisor, the Rev G Lindsay, who read aloud the burial service. Next came what the Southland Times called “the doomed woman” accompanied by a prison guard on either side. Following Dean, like some spectre, came the hangman Long, and behind him the sheriff.
What had occasioned this grim cortège to the gallows was the horrific crime of infanticide. Dean, a 50-year-old wife and mother of two adult children of her own, had spent years taking “illegitimate” babies and children into her home for money. She was now to become the only woman ever executed by law in New Zealand, after being found guilty of murdering one such unwanted child, an 11-month-old girl called Dorothy Edith Carter.
The prosecution was not convinced her crimes ended there. Although she was charged with the single murder of Dorothy, it had been alleged in court that Dean could have done away with as many as seven other children. As historian Lynley Hood writes in her definitive and extraordinary account, Minnie Dean: Her Life & Crimes, police convinced the press, the public and finally a Supreme Court jury that Scottish-born Dean had been engaged in a “large-scale, cold-blooded, mercenary scheme of systematic, premeditated murder”. This was a devil woman, the colony had been told, and she was getting what she deserved.
After ascending the stairs to the scaffold, Dean had her arms and hands pinioned by Long, who then placed the noose around her neck. As Dean awaited her fate she displayed “marvellous composure and extraordinary self-control,” a reporter from the Southland Times wrote, though in the moment before Long pulled the lever to open the scaffold’s trap, Dean’s last words were far from untroubled. “Oh God,” she entreated, “let me not suffer.”
Death, thankfully, was instantaneous. However, it was what Dean had uttered just before declaring her hope for a painless end that lingers. After Sheriff Martin had asked if she had anything she wished to declare before she left this world, Dean offered she had nothing to say, “except that I am innocent”.
Desperate for money
Those who had decided her guilt thought different. By the time Williamina “Minnie” Dean went to the scaffold, a six-man coroner’s court jury and a 12-man Supreme Court jury had found Dean guilty of murder after three sets of remains, two recently interred babies and a skeleton of a child, had been discovered buried at The Larches, her home near Winton shared with her five remaining (and healthy) adopted children and her husband Charles.
These verdicts were the culmination of years of suspicion. Baby farming may have been legal in Victorian New Zealand, but it was far from respectable. And Dean’s involvement in this underground business led to growing attention from police, most particularly from Winton’s only cop, Constable Rasmussen.
His suspicions seemed justified when, in 1891, two babies taken in by Dean died in March and May. However, a coroner’s jury found no evidence of wrongdoing in the first death, and the coroner decided no inquest was needed for the other. Yet police suspicions over Dean’s motives and actions only continued to grow, and finally appeared justified by the tragic events of early May 1895.
Though no longer legally able to take in children under two since the passing of the Infant Life Protection Act in 1893, Dean, desperate for money the police alleged, had quietly begun advertising in early 1895 under a false name to take in more babies. Soon enough she had found two unwanted children in the Southland towns of Bluff and Milburn.
As the juries would later be told, on April 30 Dean caught a train to Bluff where she collected 11-month-old Dorothy Edith Carter, though the £10 promised to Dean for taking the child was not forthcoming. The toddler, distraught at being separated from her granny, was soon dosed by Dean with laudanum she had bought to soothe the fretful child for the trip back to Winton. There was nothing inherently suspicious in that. Laudanum, an over-the-counter opiate, was then commonly used to calm young children.
Two days later, with a hatbox in hand and Dorothy again with her, Dean took another train journey, via Dipton and Lumsden, to Milburn to collect a second child, a one-month-old named Eva Hornsby. Again the restless Dorothy was given laudanum, Dean would admit to police. This new dose, on top of the others, proved too much. A medical expert would later testify in court that Dorothy’s quiet death as she lay beside Dean on the train between Dipton and Lumsden was from an overdose of laudanum.
Dean, now “bereft of reason” she would later claim, hid the little body in the hatbox before leaving the train and staying the night in Lumsden. The following day, as if nothing untoward had occurred, Dean headed on to Milburn, collecting Eva on the way, and was later seen boarding the first of her return trains carrying a baby as well as her hatbox.
Eva did not survive the journey. By the time Dean stepped off the train in Winton the following day, Dean was observed carrying only the hatbox, it now containing, it was concluded, the body of not just of Dorothy Edith Carter but that of Eva Hornsby too.
Suspicions were reported to the police; Dean was arrested for murder five days later. Two days after that, two babies’ bodies and then the skeleton were found buried in her flower garden. The case against the Winton baby farmer seemed conclusive.
Not guilty?
The story now goes that dolls in miniature hatboxes were sold as souvenirs outside the Invercargill courthouse during Minnie Dean’s Supreme Court trial. In the years to come, indeed when I was growing up in Invercargill in the 1970s, Dean was a folk devil who was said to murder babies with hatpins and whose name was invoked to scare wayward children.
Her hanging, it might be said, had been a purging. In the decades after that, her crimes held both fascination and embarrassment for Southlanders. Nationally her name became synonymous with a particular kind of evil. But was Minnie Dean really guilty? And why, when other women found guilty of murder had had their death sentences commuted, was Dean denied clemency by the government and hanged?
In Minnie Dean: Her Life & Crimes, Lynley Hood presents a picture of a women caught in a web both of her making and not of her making. The former was a result of her actions and her lies; the latter came from the realities and hypocrisies of the age.
In New Zealand during the late-Victorian period, a child’s death was not a rarity. The mortality rate for infants was very high, with between 80 and 100 of Pākehā children dying for every 1000 live births. Life in the rough colony also took its toll on those who survived, with children taken by disease and accidents, as well as by lack of care and murder.
The overwhelming hypocrisy of the age put children in danger too. So-called Victorian values meant that the birth of children outside of wedlock was both a social disgrace and – if hidden – a crime. To save their reputations, the families of unmarried women and girls who gave birth to “illegitimate” babies would quietly find women willing to take care of the unwanted child for a payment.
These women were cursed too. They were not seen as carers offering a vital service, but as “baby farmers” making money. It was this imperfect and opaque solution – one wide open to abuse – that ultimately led to a pervasive moral panic in New Zealand and across the British Empire. And in the years shortly before Dean’s arrest, cases of horrific infanticides by baby farmers, both in New Zealand and Australia, had been through the courts and had been widely and luridly reported in the colony’s many newspapers. Into this febrile mix of reality, media hysteria and hypocrisy fell Minnie Dean.
By the standards of the time, she received a fair trial at the Supreme Court. Indeed, upon the guilty verdict, the Southland Times declared that “no prisoner ever had a fairer trial than Minnie Dean”. But what fairness could there really be when, before her Supreme Court trial, her guilt in the death Dorothy Edith Carter had been decided – quite legally for the period – by a corner’s court jury and her named dragged through the mud by a moralistic media? By the standards of modern justice, she was hung out to dry.
Yet the proof of guilt for Dean’s murder of Dorothy was far from strong. It certainly could not be established beyond a reasonable doubt that Dean had deliberately poisoned the child with laudanum. In the absence of that proof, police and the prosecution were allowed by Supreme Court judge Justice Joshua Williams to present other evidence – evidence that would be inadmissible now – to bolster the case against Dean: a cavalcade of suspicions and insinuations about other missing children and possible unexplained deaths at The Larches, though a medical expert did also testify that he believed Eva Hornsby had been suffocated.
Dean went to the gallows having admitted both children died in her care, though through misadventure, not murder. But she did herself no favours. She had clearly lied to police. She had obviously obfuscated. And she refused to say where seven of the 26 children she had taken in during the years had later gone.
Her lawyer, the famous Dunedin barrister Alfred Hanlon, argued strongly that the prosecution’s case was weak. “It seems to me that the real honest issue is whether the accused is guilty of intentionally killing the child or is innocent altogether,” Hanlon told the jury in an impassioned final address that won applause from all in court.
But in a quite virulent summing up the following day, Justice Williams made it plain to the jury that even if Hanlon had found flaws, a verdict of murder should be found. “I warn you, gentlemen, against returning a verdict of manslaughter … it seems to me such a verdict would indicate a weak-kneed compromise”. It is little wonder the jury, after retiring at 12.30, returned just 30 minutes later with the verdict that the Winton baby farmer was guilty as charged.
Two months on, on August 12, Dean was walked to gallows to pay for the death of 11-month-old Dorothy Edith Carter. But 130 years, on we still cannot know what really put her up there on the scaffold. Was it murder? Or was Minnie Dean a victim of her times?