The Baby-Farming Sensation.

Feilding Star, Volume XVI, Issue 278, 29 May 1895, Page 2

The Baby-Farming Sensation.

(Per Press Association.) Invercargill, May 28. At the inquest on the body of the infant Dorothy Edith Carter, found in a garden at Winton, and with the murder of whom Minnie and Charles De»n are charged, the child was traced from the hands of her grandmother (a Christchurch woman), who gave it Mrs Dean, passing as Mrs Gray, at the Bluff to Winton oh 30th ult-, thence to Dipton on the 2nd inafc., by train with Mrs Dean. The child was in the carriage in the evening train to Lumsden, when the guard passed the third, first, and second time, but disappeared before Lumsden was reached, and at no subsequent time was it seen with her- The tinbox, which she carried, was light at Dipton. At Ziumsden a twelve-year-old boy could scarcely carry it, arid it was heavy when returned home on Saturday without the child but with her clothes and those of a smaller baby in a parcel. The girl, who went to meet Mrs Dean at the train, said that she told her the box contained bulbs from a lady at Mataura, but this was denied. The girl, by Mrs Dean's order, left the box all night in the rushes in a paddock. It was brought to a house on Sunday still as heavy. On Wednesday she saw it outside the door empty. All the railway guards identified Mrs Dean, who is well-known through frequent travelling, and a chemist at the Bluff deposed to selling laudanum on the 30th ult., when she signed the poisons . book as "Mrs Gray," the writing being identified as Mrs Dean's. The inquest will be continued to* morrow.