Minnie Dean, hung as a child killer — but was she guilty?

Press, 29 September 1984, Page 19

Minnie Dean, hung as a child killer — but was she guilty?

KEN COATES

Minnie Dean, the infamous babyfarmer of Winton and the only woman hanged in New Zealand, was innocent, according to claims being made almost 90 years after she was executed in Invercargill. After sensational police hunts, inquests, court hearings, and finally a Supreme Court trial, Mrs Dean was found guilty of murdering a baby during a train journey. It was claimed she placed the body in a tin hat-box and buried it in her flower garden. This is only a fragment of the story which has come under scrutiny from a Television New Zealand drama team shooting a series called “Hanlon,” after the brilliant criminal lawyer, Alfred Hanlon, K.C., who defended Minnie Dean in 1895.

At the time, the case set the country agog with horrified interest. Minnie Dean, a Scottish woman of respectable background and well educated, turned through misfortune to a business that was the product of the hypocrisy of the times.

For payment, she took illegitimate babies, whom society condemned as “shameful and sinful,” and undertook to find them good homes. She wrote letters that were understanding and sympathetic, promising to do her duty, “before God and man.” Mrs Dean was tried for the murder of only one child, but a mass of evidence was piled up against her after police discovered in a flower bed at her home, “The Larches,” Winton, two babies’ bodies and the skeleton of a young boy. They suggested a horrific and systematic programme of child murder.

The damning picture of malevolence and brutality painted by the Crown against Minnie Dean represented her as a woman who, under the guise of benevolent motives, took in these unfortunate infants as a profession, adopted them to give them a good home, and then destroyed them. As they were “nobody’s children,” negotiations for the collection of children and what happened to them were always conducted in

secrecy. Could this woman have been the victim of circumstances, or a struggling one-woman social service agency? Was she overcome by looking after a dozen or more young children, many sickly and in poor health, and needing permanent homes where their identity had to be kept secret? Two of the leading actors in the TV series, to be screened next year, believe Minnie Dean was innocent.

The Australian actress, Robyn Nevin, who plays Mrs Dean, says after reading her statement that the woman was incautious with the sleeping draft she used to keep the children asleep while she was travelling, rather than guilty of a premeditated murder. Miss Nevin’s co-star, the English actor David Gwillim, who plays the defending lawyer, Hanlon, also believes in Mrs Dean’s innocence. “It was death by misadventure, and I’m sure that is what Hanlon believed,” he says. “It is ludicrous to think she would carry the children all that way only to bring them back again and bury them in front of her own house.”

The actor says research showed that most of the records were terribly biased to the Southland point of view, and this was that Minnie Dean was a callous and cruel child-murderer. He read the scripts and was surprised when he finished the first episode to. find she was found guilty. Some strange aspects of the case have never been satisfactorily explained. Mrs Dean, who went to Invercargill from Tasmania as the widow of a doctor with two young daiigh-

ters, became a teacher. Old pupils remembered her as a kindly, refined, and lovable teacher. Her alleged crimes were so much at odds with her reputation and personality that soon after her arrest doubts were raised as to her sanity, though this was not pleaded at her trial. “The descent to infanticide of such a woman of unblemished origin and early life is impossible to fathom,” writes a local historian, F. G. Hall-Jones. “Abrupt change to the direst poverty may have snapped some moral fibre.” Minnie Dean married Charles Dean, an indifferent farmer who went bankrupt. They moved from Etal Creek to Winton where Mrs Dean bought “The Larches,” a 22acre property with a two-storeyed house with eight rooms, garden and orchard.

Disaster struck not long after they moved in. The house was burned down, and with no insurance the Deans could afford only a small, roughly constructed twobedroomed house with a lean-to, built partly from roofing iron and other material from the burnt-out home.

Three children slept in the same bed as Mrs Dean and four in boxes in her room. Two slept with Mr Dean in a lean-to, and one shared the bed in the kitchen of Margaret Cameron, who lived with the Deans.

Evidence showed that while the children were with Minnie Dean, she ensured they were reasonably well fed but poorly clad. Though her house was not registered as a children’s home, the local constable called regularly to keep an eye on her.

To collect children for “adoption,” largely as a result of advertising, Mrs Dean travelled constantly. Southland at the time had one of the best railway networks in the country, and it was the keen

eye of a guard that apparently alerted police to Mrs Dean’s suspicious behaviour. She had taken delivery of a baby, Dorothy Edith Carter, daughter of an unmarried woman living with her mother in Christchurch.

. After a couple of days with it at “The Larches,” Mrs Dean said she was going away. A 15-year-old girl she was looking after, Esther Wallis, went with her to a station north of her home where she boarded the Invercargill-Kingston train.

Minnie Dean said she planned to give the child to “a lady” and with the baby she took a small handbag

and a tin hat box which was empty. They went as far as Dipton where she got off and went to a hotel. A man named Baker met her at the train and carried her hat box to the hotel where she stayed until the evening train. Baker saw her back on the train and told the trial jury the hat box was very light and, he thought, empty. Mrs Dean had the carriage to herself after leaving Dipton and the railway guard gave evidence that on his first walk through checking tickets he noticed the woman, the baby, and the tin hatbox. But on his return later he did not see the child, but noticed the hat box again. When she arrived at Lumsden, Minnie Dean gave a boy sixpence to carry the hat box across the road to Crosbie’s Hotel. This boy, as well as staff, at the. hotel, testified that the box was by this time very heavy. The wife of the licensee gave evidence that Mrs Dean had no child with her when she arrived.

Next morning, the traveller left for Gore where she caught a northbound train for Milburn, to take delivery of another child, Eva Hornsby.

In his book “Random Recollections,” written 40 years later, Hanlon says: “The extraordinary nerve of the woman is illustrated by the fact that she brought the body of the Carter baby all the way from Lumsden in the hat box to meet Mrs Hornsby (grandmother of Eva). “The two women met at Milburn and went by train to Clarendon, that box, with its gruesome contents being left in the waiting room at Milburn.

“While waiting for the south train at Clarendon, Mrs Dean asphyxiated the child and then rolled it up in a shawl which she fastened by travelling straps. “When she boarded the train, she placed this in a rack above the seat, and at Milburn she collected, from the waiting room, the tin box with the corpse of the other child inside.

“So on the journey to Clinton, she had one body beneath her feet and one above her head. Before she reached Winton, both bodies had been placed in the tin hat-box.” Minnie Dean arrived at Winton with the box, a brown paper

parcel, another parcel wrapped in newspaper, and a third enclosed in a red shawl secured with travelling straps. Two parcels were left at the local butcher’s shop, and the box and the third parcel were carried home by Mrs Dean and the girl, Esther.

When carrying the hat box, Esther asked why it felt so heavy. Mrs Dean said the box contained bulbs with earth around them, and as they neared the house she told the girl to hide the box among rushes.

Next morning, the girl was instructed to bring the box into the house, and Mrs Dean put it under her bed.

The parcels left at the butcher’s and that brought with the box were opened and contained baby’s clothing, dress material, and a shirt, but the tin box was not opened. Plante brought home were put in the garden, and it was in the plot that contained them that police

found the two babies’ bodies after Mrs Dean was arrested. Medical examination of the Carter baby showed death was due to a poisonous dose of opium given to the child in laudanum (tincture of opium), often used as a sedative. At an inquest into the death of the Hornsby baby, a doctor found after post mortem that the child died of asphyxia. There were marks on the head which could have been caused by the pressure of the thumb on one side and a finger on the other. The presence of these marks led the doctor to suppose asphyxia was caused from without, not inconsistent with the child having been suffocated externally.

While Minnie Dean was not actually charged with the murder of the Hornsby baby, the finding of its body and the cause of death, ruled as admissible evidence in spite of objection by Mr Hanlon, were significant factors in her trial.

Further damning evidence was produced showing that she made a practice of taking children into her care, and many of them eventually disappeared. The unearthing of a skeleton buried in her garden of one of these children was established.

Hanlon says in his book that the mass of evidence at the trial relating to the death or disappearance of children other than the infant Carter hardly lessened his task of defending Minnie Dean.

He tried to show that although many of the facte produced in evidence were consistent with guilt, they could be consistent with death by misadventure, or by the negligent administration of laudanum.

Hanlon also argued that there was no motive for murder, because as Mrs Dean had not been paid for the child, it was in her interest to keep it alive, at least until she had received payment. Why should she bring the bodies back to her home, he asked, especially as there were plenty of rivers in which the bodies could have been dumped? The judge’s summing up was most unfavourable to Minnie Dean. He said a verdict of manslaughter

would be a weak-kneed compromise.

Every eye was on the accused as the judge put on the black cap and pronounced the death sentence. Minnie Dean remained impassive and walked from the dock with head erect and a firm step. A fact that impressed all observers was her extraordinary calm. Her lawyer was amazed at her demeanour throughout the long proceedings. “No matter how damning the evidence, she listened unmoved to it all,” he wrote.

A curious feature of the case was the complete ignorance of Minnie Dean’s husband, Charles, of the children’s deaths. He was initially arrested and charged with murder, but later discharged by a magistrate “without a stain on his character.”

Minnie Dean went to the gallows boldly and without flinching. Her only sign of emotion was holding the hand of the chaplain. “With marvellous composure,” wrote a reporter at the time, she stepped on to the trapdoor. “Given her last chance to speak, she said, ‘No, I have nothing to say except that I am innocent’.”

The sheriff told the hangman to attend to his duty. At the last moment, Minnie was heard to say under the white calico cap which covered her face, “Oh God, let me not suffer.”

No sooner had she spoken, than the trapdoor clanged shut, and she was gone.

Was this woman really innocent, the victim of a mountain of damning circumstantial evidence? Her distinguished lawyer, Hanlon, seems to have thought she was guilty. “Sober, home-loving folk from end to end of the country shuddered under a thousand evening lamps when the grim and ghastly story of Minnie Dean’s infamy was narrated by the prosecution,” he wrote.

“The very thought of the use of a public railway train for the destruction of helpless victims is like the wind in the chimney of a haunted house, chill, blood-curdling, frightening.” The night before she was hanged, Mrs Dean rose at 3 a.m. and wrote a long statement. In it, she tries to exonerate herself and describes

Charles Dean, the husband: he was also charged with murder but later was discharged “without a stain on his character.” how the two babies met their deaths. She tells of giving the Carter baby several doses of laudanum to make her sleep, and in the train had laid the child on the seat beside her.

"I put my cloak around her, and it was not until we passed Josephville that I saw the child was dead. What to do I did not know, and for a time I think I was bereft of reason.

“I know it was not until the train stopped that I put her in the box, and lost no time in getting to the hotel.

“When in the bedroom, I took her out of the box and no sleep visited me that night. With this child I received no money, not even expenses. I was simply putting the child out to nurse for a month.”

She also describes meeting Mrs Hornsby, taking delivery of the baby and getting out of the train. “I went into the shelter shed and the child Hornsby started crying bitterly. “I was on my knees undoing a parcel when I saw the child reeling over. I made a spring to catch her, but was too late.

“The child fell to the ground and never moved after. I know I was the cause of the child Carter’s death, that I had given her an overdose of laudanum, but with no intention of causing death. The Hornsby baby was not ten minutes alive in my care altogether.” Minnie Dean admits that she concocted the story about the tin hat-box containing bulbs. “It was the only feasible lie I could invent to account for the weight of the box,” she wrote. “I buried the bodies in my garden on the Sunday, evening?’

Minnie Dean also asked in her statement that it be publicly contradicted that she was a drunkard, as alleged during her trial.

In her accompanying note to her defence lawyer she wrote: “Goodbye. May you live to a ripe old age, and may your end be in peace, for long ere this time tomorrow; I will be cold in death. God bless you.”