Williamina Dean was born in Scotland in 1844 and emigrated to New Zealand, settling at East Winton in Southland with her husband Charles. From the 1880s she advertised to take in infants, the practice known as baby farming, for a lump sum or a small weekly payment. Illegitimacy carried severe stigma and there was no state provision, and women in her position across the English-speaking world took in children that nobody else would.
Children in her care died. In 1889 a six-month-old died and the inquest returned natural causes; in 1891 another death was recorded as accidental. Suspicion grew, and the police watched her. The New Zealand press called her the Southland Witch.
In 1895 she was seen boarding a train with a baby and a hatbox and leaving without the baby. The bodies of Dorothy Edith Carter, one year old, and Eva Hornsby, one month old, were found buried in her garden, along with the skeleton of an older child. Dorothy Carter had died of a laudanum overdose.
She was tried at Invercargill in June 1895, convicted of Dorothy Carter's murder, and hanged at Invercargill prison on August 12, 1895.
The case is still contested in New Zealand. Her defence was that the laudanum was given as a sedative, as was then routine, and that the death was accidental; the prosecution said she killed children for whom the payments had run out. The hatbox became the emblem of the case and of the certainty of her guilt. Historians since have pointed to the poverty of the practice, the absence of any alternative for the mothers, and the moral panic of the period, and have argued the evidence supports neglect and one probable overdose rather than a system of murder. The range of two to three reflects that dispute honestly, and this entry does not resolve it.