MURDERER: Minnie Dean

The first woman to be executed in New Zealand was found guilty of a horrendous crime but she wasn’t charged for all her crimes.

In Greenock, Scotland railway engineer John McCulloch and his wife Elizabeth Swan had their daughter Williamina ‘Minnie’ Dean on September 2nd 1844. Shortly into Minnie’s life, her mother passed away from cancer in 1857, after that not much else is known about Minnie or her family’s life.

The next thing documented is Minnie Dean living in Invercargill, New Zealand with two young children in the early 1860s. It is unknown how she arrived or who the father of the children was but according to the story that Minnie was sharing her husband was a Tasmanian doctor who passed away before she moved to Invercargill.

The next notable thing in Minnie’s life was marrying innkeeper, James Dean in 1872. For a while they lived in Etal Creek, a hotspot between Riverton and Otago goldfields, using the gold rush to their advantage. But when the gold dried out, so did their income. Together the couple moved to Winton, taking up farming to earn their money. Both Minnie’s children were married and no longer living with the pair. Charles took up pig farming whilst Minnie went a different route of farming that took advantage of the social crisis of women having babies out of wedlock.

Very quickly Minnie had around 10 children under three in the small two-bedroom cottage. The enclosed space mixed with the already high infant mortality rates, kids began to die in Minnie’s care. The first was March 1889, 6-month-old died from convulsions and just two years later in October, a 6-week-old passed from cardiovascular and respiratory ailments. Around this time, a young boy around 3 years old allegedly drowned under Minnie’s watch but nobody was aware of his death since Minnie buried him in her garden.

After the two reported deaths, a coroner’s inquest was held and it was found that Minnie wasn’t responsible for the deaths due to the universally bad hygiene standards. It was also found that the children in Minnie’s care were well cared for but the living arrangements were inadequate.

Despite legally not being for the deaths, the community began to mistrust Minnie. They began gossiping and rumours began to spread about mistreatment and infanticide. There were also rumours that children would go missing whilst in Minnie’s care. These rumours couldn’t be proven or disproven since childcare at the time didn’t need to keep a record of children in their care.

What was the start of Minnie’s downfall was in 1895 when a railway guard witnessed Minnie get on a train with a baby and a hatbox. On the return trip, the guard noted that there was no baby but the hatbox was suspiciously heavy. Jane Hornsby came forward claiming that she had given her 1-month-old granddaughter to Minnie. The police took Jane to the Dean’s home and identified a piece of clothing when asked Minnie couldn’t produce the baby. The police went to search the railway but after the search proved fruitless, they arrested Minnie on charges of murder. With that they dug up the garden, finding three bodies buried in the mud.

A 3-year-old’s skeletal remains were found and two recently buried baby girls were also found. Eva Hornsby, 1 month, was one of the babies and it was later found out that she had suffocated. Dorothy Carter was the other baby, 1 year, later found that she overdosed on laudanum, an opiate that was commonly used to calm infants at the time.

At the trial, Minnie was defended by Alfred Hanlon. His defence was that all the children died accidentally and Minnie covered it all up to avoid public shaming and ridicule as she had previously. On the 21st of June Minnie was found guilty of Dorothy Carter’s murder and was sentenced to death.

Between the time of June and August, Minnie wrote an account of her life. In this, she claimed to have cared for 28 children. 5 were in good health, 2 were the Dean’s adoptive children from before she began baby farming, 1 was reclaimed, 14 were unaccounted for and the other 6 were dead. But the police suspected that they had all been murdered.

August 12th, Minnie Dean was hung.

But her crimes and death brought about two legal acts that would later protect children from this kind of violence, the Infant Life Protection Act & the Infant Protection Act. These were the only positives to the case.

(originally posted on medium.com/@natasha.leigh)