THE DEAN CASE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1212, 24 May 1895, Page 34

THE DEAN CASE.

Sydney, May 16. The Dean Commission continued taking evidence to-day as to the antecedents of Mrs Seymour. Two witnesses with a past confirmed the reports as to her bad character. One of these, Boulton, revealed the fact that he shipped to Port Chalmers in the Severen in 1864 as ship’s surgeon, without having any medical qualification. Sydney, May 20. Before the Commission set up to consider the Dean case, a man named John Asprey, aged 70 years, found living in the bush at North Shore, said his attention had been called to the case on Saturday last, and he clearly identified Mrs Seymour, the mother of Mrs Dean, as his wife. In the course of his evidence he declared that he married her at Hobart, whence he in 1850 had been transported for seven years on a charge of stealing. They kept several publichouses, and lived happily for a time ; then rows, the result of jealousy, ensued, and finally his wife left him, taking with her the cash-box, and he had not seen her for the last 20 years. Some time before she cleared out, added the witness, he twice suffered severely, and the symptoms were those of arsenic poisoning. Afterwards he discovered that the contents of a bottle of arsenic in the house which he had bought for the purpose of poisoning rats had mysteriously diminished.