On May 2, 1895, a railway guard watched a middle-aged woman board his train at Winton, in Southland, carrying a young baby and a hatbox. When she got off at Lumsden the baby was gone and she had only the hatbox, and she left the station before he could stop her. He reported it. The woman was Williamina Dean, known as Minnie, who took in other people's infants for money at her house outside Winton, The Larches, and the police had been watching her for years.
The baby was Dorothy Edith Carter, one year old, handed to Dean by her grandmother. Dean stayed the night at Lumsden and took a train to Dunedin, where she put the hatbox in storage; porters later testified it was suspiciously heavy. In Dunedin she met Jane Hornsby, who gave her a one-month-old granddaughter, Eva. Dean started home, collecting the hatbox on the way. On the return journey she again had no baby, only the hatbox and a wrapped parcel.
Jane Hornsby went to the police. They took her to The Larches, where she recognized clothing Eva had been wearing, but the child was not there, and a search along the railway line found nothing. Dean was arrested on May 9 and charged with murder. Then the police dug up the garden, where her husband, Charles, it turned out, had been strictly forbidden to work. Buried in the soil were the bodies of Eva Hornsby and Dorothy Carter and the skeleton of a boy of three or four, whom Dean later said had drowned. An inquest found that Eva had been suffocated and that Dorothy had died of an overdose of laudanum, the opiate then commonly given to quiet fretful infants. The boy's cause of death was never determined. Bottles of laudanum and chlorodyne were found in Dean's bedroom. She said the hatbox had held flower bulbs; the woman she named as the source said she had given her only cuttings. Charles Dean was also arrested, and the charges against him were dismissed at a lower-court hearing.
She was born in Scotland in 1844; some accounts say Edinburgh in 1847. She emigrated to New Zealand, married Charles Dean in 1872, and settled at East Winton. From the late 1880s she took in children for a lump sum or a small weekly payment, at a time when contraception was unreliable, children born outside marriage were shunned, and there was no state provision for them. At times as many as nine children under three were in her care.
Children in that care died. A six-month-old died in 1889. In 1891 a six-week-old died of inflammation of the heart valves and congestion of the lungs, and the inquest found that the dead infant and the other children were well cared for but that the house was inadequate. The press took notice, and so did the police.
As was usual, she was tried on a single charge: the murder of Dorothy Carter. The trial ran from June 18 to June 21, 1895, in the Supreme Court at Invercargill before Justice Joshua Strange Williams. Her lawyer, Alfred Hanlon, a young Dunedin barrister, argued that all three deaths were accidental and that she had hidden them to avoid the kind of publicity that had nearly ruined her before. She did not take the stand. The jury convicted her on June 21, and she was sentenced to death. Outside the court, dolls in hatboxes were sold as souvenirs.
Between her conviction and her execution she wrote a forty-nine-page account of her work. In it she said that, besides two girls she and Charles had raised, Margaret Cameron and Esther Wallis, whom they adopted in 1890, she had cared for twenty-six children between 1889 and 1895, Eva Hornsby and Dorothy Carter among them. Of those, six are known to have died, one was taken back by family, and five were found alive at The Larches when she was arrested. Fourteen have never been accounted for. Police believed they had been killed. Whether that line of inquiry was ever pursued is not known.
She was hanged at Invercargill prison on August 12, 1895. Asked on the scaffold whether she had anything to say, she answered, "No, I have nothing to say, except that I am innocent." She remains the only woman ever executed in New Zealand. Hanlon, who went on to become one of the country's best-known defense lawyers, later said he believed his client was guilty and would have gone on had she not been caught. He wrote that the extraordinary nerve of the woman was shown by her carrying the Carter baby's body in the hatbox all the way from Lumsden to meet Mrs. Hornsby.
The case has been argued over in New Zealand ever since. To the prosecution and the public of 1895 the hatbox settled it. Later historians have pointed to the poverty of the trade, the mothers who had nowhere else to turn, the routine dosing of infants with opiates, and the moral panic over baby farming in Australia and New Zealand in those years, and some have argued that the evidence shows neglect and one fatal overdose rather than systematic murder. The fourteen missing children are the point on which that argument has never been resolved.