Williamina Dean, known all her adult life as Minnie, was hanged at Invercargill gaol on the morning of August 12, 1895. She was 50, according to the New Zealand Police Museum, and had spent the years since about 1889 taking in other people's babies for money at her home outside Winton, a farming town in Southland. A Supreme Court jury had convicted her of murdering one of those children, Dorothy Edith Carter, an infant girl. She is the only woman ever executed in New Zealand.
The case turned on a train journey in early May 1895 and on what police found at Winton days later. Newspapers across the colony reported the trial in detail. More than a century later, historians and lawyers still argue over whether she was a calculating killer, a desperate and negligent caregiver, or something between, and whether her trial was fair by the standards of its own day.
She was convicted of one murder only. She was also charged with the murder of a second infant, Eva Hornsby, but that charge did not go ahead after the first verdict. Other deaths among children in her care were the subject of inquests and of police suspicion.
According to her entry in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, written by her biographer Lynley Hood, she was born Williamina McCulloch on September 2, 1844, at West Greenock, Renfrewshire, Scotland. She was the fourth of eight daughters of Elizabeth Swan and John McCulloch, an engine driver for the Glasgow, Paisley and Greenock Railway. Her mother died of cancer in 1857. Nothing is known of her life between then and her appearance in Invercargill in the early 1860s, when she called herself Mrs McCulloch, a widow with two small daughters. Her neighbors believed she had come from Tasmania, where her husband, a doctor, had died. No record of that marriage, of the daughters' births or of the husband's death has ever been found.
On June 19, 1872, she married an innkeeper who had also come from Tasmania, at his home at Etal Creek in Southland. Etal Creek had been a stopping place for wagons on the route from Riverton to the Central Otago goldfields in the 1860s, but by the 1870s it was a backwater. Her husband turned to farming in 1878. His land was overrun with rabbits, and when the land boom collapsed in 1884 he went bankrupt. The Deans were left with almost nothing. Her own two daughters had married and left home, and in 1880 the couple adopted a five-year-old girl.
About 1887 they moved to Winton and took over The Larches, a two-story house on about 22 acres roughly a mile from the town, which had been given up to the mortgagee two years before. The house burned down soon after they arrived. Her husband built a two-room cottage with a lean-to on the site and raised pigs. Minnie began to take in babies.
The work she took up was known, with open disapproval, as baby farming. In late nineteenth century New Zealand there was little reliable contraception, abortion was dangerous, and unmarried mothers were shunned. There was almost no organized childcare. A woman who had a child outside marriage, or a married woman who could not keep another child, often paid someone else to take it, sometimes for a time while she worked and sometimes for good, in what amounted to an informal adoption.
The government history site NZHistory describes how court cases in Britain and Australia in the 1880s made New Zealanders aware of so-called baby farmers who neglected the children in their care, hid their deaths or killed them. New Zealand newspapers soon began reporting suspected cases at home, usually with exaggeration. A Christchurch police survey in 1889 found more honest caregivers than baby farmers. In 1893 the Commissioner of Police, Arthur Hume, wrote that the "evil" of baby farming existed in the colony "to a large extent."
Dean advertised discreetly in newspapers. Hood records her fees as five to eight shillings a week for some children, or lump sums of 10 to 30 pounds for adoptions. NZHistory says that at times she had as many as nine children under three at The Larches. Infant mortality among European children in New Zealand at the time was estimated at 80 to 100 deaths for every 1,000 live births, so some deaths among so many very young children were to be expected.
In October 1889 a six-month-old in her care died of convulsions after a three-day illness. The Otago Daily Times, in a 2008 account of the case, reported that this child was a girl the Deans had legally adopted. In March 1891 a six-week-old baby died. NZHistory gives the cause found at the inquest as inflammation of the heart valves and congestion of the lungs. The medical witness found that the dead child and the others in her care were well fed and well looked after, but that the house was not adequate for so many. The coroner cleared her of blame and urged her to take fewer children and improve the conditions. Hood writes that she made only a small reduction.
The inquest brought her name before the public. Hood describes local outrage, made worse by another death six weeks later, and a tendency to link Dean in the public mind with the British and Australian baby farmers who had been convicted of murder. No further deaths were reported, but rumors spread that children were disappearing from The Larches. Dean grew secretive and began to use assumed names.
In 1890 the Deans adopted a second girl, a ten-year-old, who was still living with them in 1895. Hood also records that when a boy died in her care in 1894, by her own later account by drowning, she buried him secretly rather than face another inquest.
The police had their eye on her for years, but the law gave them little to work with. Before 1893 they could not enter or inspect her property, and she was not required to keep records or answer their questions. NZHistory reports that police inquiries found she had sought more children and had tried, without success, to take out life insurance on some of the infants.
One episode drew particular attention. A woman later identified as Dean took a three-week-old baby while staying at a Christchurch boarding house, and the boarding-house keeper alerted the police. A detective removed the child. NZHistory, which dates the episode to 1892, says the baby had been taken from its single mother for 25 pounds, was in dirty clothes, and was being fed sour, curdled milk, and that police believed they had probably saved its life. Hood dates the episode to August 1893 and records the detective's belief that the child would have been killed or abandoned before Dean reached Dunedin. In 1893 the Commissioner of Police wrote to the Minister of Justice with renewed concerns about her.
That year Parliament passed the Infant Life Protection Act 1893. NZHistory describes it as requiring any home paid to look after infants under two for more than three days in a row to be licensed as a foster home and open to police inspection. Sophie Davis, in a 2015 study of the case in the Victoria University of Wellington Law Review, notes that the act required carers to register themselves and their homes and let police inspect them. Dean did not register.
Dorothy Edith Carter was a baby girl, 11 months old according to Davis and one year old according to Hood. Her mother was unmarried, and the arrangement to place her with Dean was made through a woman who acted for the mother. On Tuesday, April 30, 1895, Dean traveled to Bluff and collected the child. Davis notes that Dean had recently adopted her. Under cross-examination at the trial, the go-between admitted that Dean had never been given any money for Dorothy, although there had been an arrangement to pay.
Eva Hornsby was one month old. Her grandmother arranged to hand her over to Dean, and the meeting took place on the railway in South Otago; Hood names Clarendon station. Eva had been in the world only a few weeks, and the record holds little more about her than her name, her age and the clothes she wore, which her grandmother would later recognize.
Little else is recorded about the two girls. They are remembered because of how their short lives ended, and because the case of the woman who took them led to stricter law on the paid care of infants.
The sequence of the journey comes from the evidence at the trial, as summarized by Hood and Davis. Dean spent two nights at Winton after collecting Dorothy, then left again with the child and an empty hatbox. On May 2, NZHistory reports, a railway guard saw her board a train with a young baby and a hatbox. On the return she had only the hatbox, which railway porters later said was suspiciously heavy. Davis writes that she planned a night at Lumsden on the way north, and that the inquest later placed Dorothy's death on May 2, between Winton and Lumsden.
On May 3, according to Davis, she collected Eva from her grandmother. By then, witnesses said, Dorothy was no longer with her and the hatbox was heavy. She came back to Winton with the hatbox and some parcels, and without either child.
Eva's grandmother went to the police. They took her to The Larches, where she found clothing that Eva had been wearing. The child was not there. Dean was arrested. Davis and Hood both write that she was first charged with infanticide.
Police searched along the railway line and found nothing. They then searched The Larches. At Winton in May 1895 they found the bodies of two infant girls, later identified as Dorothy Carter and Eva Hornsby, and the remains of a boy. Hood describes the boy as about four years old; Davis gives about three. Dean said the boy had drowned.
Her husband was arrested as well. The magistrate who later heard the case against the couple accepted that there was no evidence he knew what his wife had done, and discharged him.
Three inquests were held before local juries. On Dorothy Carter, the jury found that she had died of poison administered by Dean; the medical cause was an overdose of laudanum, an opiate that NZHistory notes was commonly used to quiet fretful infants. On Eva Hornsby, doctors gave the cause as asphyxia, and the jury returned a finding of wilful murder but its foreman did not name anyone. On the skeleton, the jury could not establish the cause, the time or the place of death, but said it strongly believed the remains were those of Willie Phelan, a boy who had disappeared while in Dean's care about two years earlier. The New Zealand Police Museum also names the boy as Willie Phelan. Hood records that the coroner publicly called Dean a murderer. Davis concludes that the inquests were procedurally valid by the rules of the time, but cites Hood's view that they presented Dean to the public as a multiple murderer before any trial had begun.
The case against Dean went before a magistrate for three days from June 6, 1895. Her lawyer, Alfred Hanlon, a young Dunedin barrister, exposed some weaknesses in the Crown's case but held back his defense for the higher court. She was committed for trial.
Hanlon then asked a judge, in chambers, to move the trial to Christchurch. He argued that she could not get a fair hearing in Southland. Davis describes hostile press coverage from the day of the arrest, some of it inaccurate, sensational newspaper "investigations" of The Larches, and crowds that jeered Dean as she was moved between places. The application was refused. Davis compares this with the case of Thomas Hall, tried in a poisoning case in 1886, who was granted two changes of venue. She concludes that local prejudice existed, but that a move might not have helped, since the coverage was national.
The trial opened in the Supreme Court at Invercargill on June 18, 1895, before Justice Joshua Strange Williams. The New Zealand Police Museum records that Dean faced two charges: the murder of Dorothy Edith Carter, and the murder of a second infant, at first unidentified and later named as Eva Hornsby. The trial proceeded on the Carter charge. Hanlon was assisted by Josiah Hanan, according to the Police Museum.
The jury was drawn from men aged 21 to 60 living within 20 miles of Invercargill. Hanlon challenged ten potential jurors and the Crown nine before twelve men were sworn. Davis points out that juries of the time excluded women, and that an all-male panel from a single district would be seen as unrepresentative today.
The Crown called 47 witnesses and put in 35 exhibits. It had to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Dean caused Dorothy's death and did so intentionally. Its case on motive was that Dean wanted to avoid the cost of keeping the child and the penalties of the Infant Life Protection Act, under which she was unregistered.
The prosecution also wanted the jury to hear about Eva Hornsby, to rebut any suggestion that Dorothy's death had been an accident, and about other children who had passed through Dean's hands. Hanlon objected that this evidence was unfairly prejudicial. Justice Williams admitted the evidence about Eva as part of the same course of events, and on June 20 he declined to reserve the question of the other children for a higher court, though he noted Hanlon's objection. The leading authority was a Privy Council decision, Makin v Attorney-General for New South Wales (1894), which also concerned the deaths of infants. It held that evidence of other acts was generally inadmissible but could be admitted to show that a death was designed rather than accidental. Davis records that Hanlon accepted the case was hard to get around.
Dean did not give evidence. The Police Museum quotes her lawyers' later explanation that they felt they "could not depend on anything she said unless they really knew it to be true independently of her." Hanlon called no witnesses.
Hanlon addressed the jury for about an hour and a half. He argued that Dorothy's death had been an accident, that the Crown had shown no real motive, and that the children found alive at The Larches were well nourished. The verdict he sought was manslaughter rather than murder. The gallery applauded, and Davis notes that at least one reporter thought manslaughter was a likely result. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography's entry on Hanlon records that his address was so impassioned that the judge adjourned before summing up, to give the jury time for calm thought. Justice Williams later said as much himself.
His summing up the next morning leaned strongly toward the Crown. He told the jury that the real question was whether the child had been killed intentionally or whether the accused was innocent, and he called a manslaughter verdict "a weak-kneed compromise." Davis argues that this came close to directing a murder verdict, and that some of his comments, including his treatment of the adoption as a business deal and his dismissal of the motive argument, went beyond what the evidence showed. A judge of that time was allowed to comment on the evidence; Williams had argued publicly in 1894 against limits on that right.
The jury was out for about half an hour. It found Dean guilty of murder, and she was sentenced to death. Because she had been convicted on the Carter charge, the second charge, over Eva Hornsby, did not proceed. Asked whether she had anything to say, she said only that she wished to thank the detective in the case for the kindness he had shown her, according to the NZHistory video account.
Observers at the time, Hall's entry on Hanlon records, thought the verdict was the only one the jury could reasonably have reached, but that Dean had been ably defended against great odds. It was the only one of Hanlon's sixteen or more murder trials as senior counsel in which his client went to the gallows.
Under the criminal law reforms of 1893, a judge could note an objection he did not think frivolous, and a convicted person could then seek leave to appeal with the consent of the Attorney-General. Appeals in criminal cases were not automatic in New Zealand until 1945. Hanlon obtained the Attorney-General's consent and applied for leave, arguing that the evidence about other infants should not have been admitted.
The application was heard in Wellington on July 27, 1895, by five judges: Chief Justice Prendergast and Justices Williams, Richmond, Conolly and Denniston. Hanlon could not attend, and Dr Findlay argued the case for Dean. He conceded that the evidence about Eva Hornsby had been admissible, but said the evidence about other children was not similar enough to be let in, since no other bodies had been found and the skeleton had not been shown to be that of a child Dean had received. The court refused leave unanimously. Prendergast read the Makin decision as allowing evidence of earlier similar conduct, such as taking in infants for inadequate payment, to be admitted to show design. The decision is reported as R v Dean (1895) 14 NZLR 272.
A death sentence was mandatory for murder in New Zealand from 1840 to 1961, apart from the years 1941 to 1950. Mercy lay with the Executive Council, which could advise the Governor to commute a sentence. The Police Museum notes that the council had long been reluctant to hang women, but considered itself fully justified in Dean's case. Premier Richard Seddon's government declined to commute.
Davis sets the decision against earlier cases. Phoebe Veitch's death sentence was commuted in 1883 after a jury of matrons found her pregnant, and in 1891 the death sentences of Anna and Sarah Flanagan were commuted to life imprisonment. Davis cites the historian Alison Clarke's count of 98 other nineteenth century cases involving the deaths of newborns, which produced only one murder conviction, of a father. She argues that the climate of feeling against baby farming, and public anger over the Flanagan commutations, probably weighed on the council.
Dean never testified, but in the weeks before her execution she wrote a 49-page account of her life and work. Hood summarizes it in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Dean wrote that 26 children had passed through her care between 1889 and 1895, Dorothy Carter and Eva Hornsby among them. She also named her two adopted daughters.
Of the 26, Hood writes, six are known to have died, one was taken back by its family, and five healthy children were living at The Larches when she was arrested. What became of the rest is not known. Dean wrote that seven had been adopted by families who wanted the adoptions kept secret. Davis quotes from her "Last Statement," in which she described herself as having been "bereft of reason" at the time of Dorothy's death. The Otago Daily Times gave a figure of six healthy children at the house at the time of the arrest, counting her adopted daughter, who was then 15.
She was hanged in the courtyard of Invercargill Prison on the morning of Monday, August 12, 1895, three months after her arrest. Davis records that the sheriff, a doctor, the magistrate and a small number of reporters were present. The Otago Daily Times reporter described her dignified bearing and her gray hair. When the sheriff asked whether she had anything to say, she replied, "I have nothing to say, except that I am innocent." The New Zealand Police Museum gives her age as 50 and counts her as the only woman among the 85 people executed in New Zealand. NZHistory's list of executions likewise records her as the only woman hanged in the country.
She was buried at Winton. Her husband died in a house fire at Winton in 1908, at 73. For more than a century their grave had no marker.
Hood writes that the Infant Life Protection Act 1893 was revised and strengthened in 1896 in response to the case.
Alfred Charles Hanlon, born in Dunedin in 1866, had been admitted as a barrister and solicitor only in December 1888. The Dean trial was his first famous case. Hall writes that it did more than any other to build his reputation, and that it was the case he was best remembered for. He went on to practice for more than 50 years, appearing in courts throughout the country, became president of the Otago District Law Society, and was appointed King's Counsel in 1930. He died in Dunedin in 1944.
The Otago Daily Times reported in 2008 that Hanlon later wrote that he believed his client had been guilty, and that she would have gone on had she not been caught. He wrote of what he called the "extraordinary nerve" she had shown in going on to meet Eva's grandmother after Dorothy's death. NZHistory quotes him describing how "sober, home-loving folk from end to end of the country shuddered" at the Crown's account of the case.
In 1985 his defense of Dean was dramatized in the television series Hanlon, which NZ On Screen credits to the director Wayne Tourell. NZ On Screen describes the episode, Hanlon: In Defence of Minnie Dean, as Emmy-nominated and as having contributed to a reassessment of her conviction. In its account, Hanlon vowed that none of his later clients would share her fate.
Hood records that Southland children were warned they would be sent to Minnie Dean, that a Southland wildflower came to be called a Minnie Dean, and that a legend grew up that nothing would grow on her grave. The singer-songwriter Helen Henderson, raised in Southland, recalled Dean as "the bogeyman of our town" and wrote a song about her. NZHistory also records that a myth grew up about her and the hatboxes.
The Winton writer and historian Vince Boyle told the Otago Daily Times in 2008 that he believed Dean was probably negligent rather than evil. Children had died in her care, he said, but murder requires motive and intent, and he doubted both. He put the bare grave down to caretakers' weedkiller. Hood, the Dunedin writer whose 1994 biography Minnie Dean: Her Life and Crimes challenged the older picture of a heartless baby farmer, called her "the New Zealand equivalent of the witch in Hansel and Gretel" in the same 2008 article. An earlier writer, J. O. P. Watt, whose The Trial of Minnie Dean appeared in 1973, had called her "a female Jekyll-Hyde," according to the paper.
In December 2008 the Otago Daily Times reported that a relative of Dean's in Stirling, Scotland, who had spent ten years on his family history, had written to the Winton Community Board asking to place a headstone on the grave. The board raised no objection. Its chairman said the board had earlier turned down a signpost to the grave because it did not want the site to become a focus for visitors. The principal of a nearby school said staff were split down the middle on the idea.
In January 2009 a headstone that no one had authorized appeared on the grave, puzzling the town and Hood alike; she said it showed that Dean "just won't lie down." The authorized stone was unveiled at the old Winton cemetery on February 9, 2009, in a downpour, before about 100 people. It names husband and wife, with his dates and hers (Williamina McCulloch, 1844 to 1895). It uses her maiden name, following Scottish custom.
A relative of Dean's who spoke for the family said the stone recognized her as a human being, a daughter, sister, wife, mother and grandmother, and that while the family could not easily change her reputation, they could offer her forgiveness and love. The granddaughter of the first child the Deans adopted, who asked not to be named, said her grandmother had described Dean as "a nice person" and "not all bad," a woman she thought well-meaning but overwhelmed. Hood said the service meant people could now go and make peace with her.
In August 2020, on the 125th anniversary of the execution, the Otago Daily Times reported that the town remained divided over her. The Winton Community Board chairman said the subject always came up sooner or later. A French writer and photographer, Amaury da Cunha, was then at work on a book about her, Baby Farmer, and said he did not know whether she was guilty but felt compassion for her.
How many children died. Dean was convicted of one murder. The second murder charge, over Eva Hornsby, was never tried. The inquest jury on Eva found wilful murder without naming anyone, and the inquest on the boy found no cause of death. Rumors at the time, according to NZHistory, put the number of children who died in her care as high as 20. Hood writes that police and the public assumed that the children whose fate was unknown had been murdered, and that no one considered the possibility that some had died of natural causes and been buried in secret. No court ever found that any child other than Dorothy Carter was murdered by her.
Accident or design. Dean's own position, and Hanlon's at trial, was that Dorothy's death was an accident. The jury rejected that after a summing up that Davis regards as strongly weighted toward the Crown. Boyle and others have argued for negligence rather than murder; Hanlon himself, by the 2008 newspaper account, came to believe she was guilty.
Fairness of the trial. Davis concludes that correct procedure was generally followed by the standards of 1895, but she questions the refusal to move the trial, the strength of the judge's summing up and the makeup of the jury when judged by modern standards. She also argues that Dean received none of the procedural or executive leniency shown in some comparable cases of the period, and that the public mood against baby farming was a key reason.
Her early life. Her claim to be a doctor's widow from Tasmania has not been confirmed, and the years between 1857 and her arrival in Invercargill are a blank in the record. Accounts also differ on dates. Hood and Davis give her birth year as 1844, as does her headstone, while the 2008 Otago Daily Times article gave 1847. Hood places her in Invercargill in the early 1860s; the 2008 article says 1868.
The Christchurch baby. NZHistory dates the removal of a baby from her care in Christchurch to 1892; Hood dates it to August 1893.
The boy's identity and age. The inquest jury believed, without being able to prove, that the skeleton was Willie Phelan's. Hood puts his age at about four, Davis at about three.
September 2, 1844: Williamina McCulloch born at West Greenock, Renfrewshire, Scotland.
1857: Her mother dies.
Early 1860s: She appears in Invercargill as Mrs McCulloch, a widow with two daughters.
June 19, 1872: Marries an innkeeper at Etal Creek, Southland.
1880: The Deans adopt a five-year-old girl.
1884: Her husband goes bankrupt after the land boom collapses.
About 1887: The Deans move to The Larches, near Winton.
1889: She begins taking in children for payment; in October a six-month-old in her care dies of convulsions.
1890: The Deans adopt a ten-year-old girl.
March 1891: A six-week-old dies; the inquest clears her but criticizes the house.
1892 or August 1893: Christchurch police remove a three-week-old baby from her.
1893: Infant Life Protection Act passed; she does not register.
1894: A boy in her care dies, by her own account by drowning.
April 30, 1895: She collects Dorothy Edith Carter at Bluff.
May 2, 1895: A railway guard sees her board a train with a baby and a hatbox; Dorothy's death is later placed on this date.
May 3, 1895: She collects Eva Hornsby from the child's grandmother.
May 1895: Arrest; police find the bodies of Dorothy and Eva and a boy's remains at Winton; inquests follow.
June 6, 1895: Three-day magistrate's hearing begins; she is committed for trial; her husband is discharged.
June 18, 1895: Trial opens in the Supreme Court at Invercargill before Justice Williams.
June 21, 1895: Found guilty of the murder of Dorothy Carter; sentenced to death.
July 27, 1895: Court of Appeal in Wellington refuses leave to appeal.
August 12, 1895: Hanged at Invercargill gaol.
1896: Infant Life Protection Act strengthened in response to the case.
1908: Her husband dies in a house fire at Winton.
1973: J. O. P. Watt's The Trial of Minnie Dean published.
1985: Television drama Hanlon: In Defence of Minnie Dean.
1994: Lynley Hood's biography Minnie Dean: Her Life and Crimes published.
February 9, 2009: Headstone unveiled on the Deans' grave at Winton.
August 2020: 125th anniversary of the execution.