Minnie Dean's letter

Newsroom

3 days ago

On this day 130 years ago, on August 12, 1895, a plump-cheeked, 49-year-old woman met her dreadful end at the end of a rope. Minnie Dean is the only woman in New Zealand history to have received the death penalty.
She was charged with the murder of an 11-month-old baby entrusted to her care. Following her sentencing, she spent several weeks in the Invercargill gaol's condemned cell and wrote a near 50-page manuscript outlining her interpretation of events. (She wanted it published after her death, with the proceeds given to her husband and a widow of her acquaintance). I was curious to read it firsthand. On a cold June day, I visited National Archives in Wellington to inspect Minnie's meditation.
I was handed a heavy file holding her manuscript and trial notes. The archive reading room was even quieter than usual; its final days in Mulgrave Street pending its long anticipated amalgamation with the National and Turnbull Libraries. I took a seat at a long desk in a shaft of weak winter sun. Out the window I could see a cruise ship berthed in Wellington harbour.
It was eerie to touch the very same paper that Minnie had once done felt. Her hard-to-decipher handwriting, her curling cursive, in blue ink on lined and yellowed paper, is easier to read in its digitised version, but nowhere near as compelling as the original. There are few mistakes or crossings out, just the odd ink blot and insertion. Was this an inborn exactitude or did she painstakingly write several versions until she finally achieved one she was happy with? Words common in the Victorian age but since mostly lost, such as 'cripple', 'tidings', and '[mental] asylum', are scattered throughout.
As the document nears its end, as does she, her writing becomes more scrawled, imbued with a growing sense of despair and hopelessness.
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Minnie's back story involved an early migration from her Scottish birthplace of Greenock to Tasmania, where at 16 she gave birth to a daughter; followed by a move, while pregnant, sometime in the early 1860s, to Invercargill. A marriage to a local farmer, Charles Dean (sometimes described as 'feckless and dull' in contrast to the 'highly intelligent' Minnie) was shadowed by a series of tragedies. These included the drowning in a well of Minnie's oldest daughter and her two young children, Minnie's grandchildren, and the burning down of The Larches, the house Charles and Minnie had bought outside the rural Southland town of Winton, forcing them to rebuild a much more primitive dwelling. To add to their woes, a man to whom they owed money came and took away their 115 fruit trees.
Sometime in the late 1880s, the hard-up and increasingly desperate Minnie commenced her career of taking in, and occasionally adopting, other people's unwanted offspring. At any one time she had up to nine children under her wing. But, in October 1889, after a short illness, a six-month-old baby died from convulsions; then in March 1891, a six-week-old infant (some accounts say younger) perished from congested lungs. Although Minnie was cleared of direct responsibility, and the children at The Larches were found to be well nourished, the coroner recommended that Minnie reduce the number of children living in her cramped confines. She was now under police and public scrutiny.
In early May 1895, an official investigation was launched into the suspicious disappearance of a baby. Minnie had been spotted boarding a train with a hatbox and a young baby but disembarking later with only the hatbox. The police tracked down the baby's grandmother, Jane Hornsby, who had handed over her one-month-old granddaughter, Eva Hornsby, into Minnie's keep. The police took Jane to The Larches where she identified her granddaughter's clothing. Minnie was arrested and charged with infanticide.
Eva's body and that of a larger baby (later identified as the eleven-month-old Dorothy Edith Carter), as well as the skeleton of a third child were discovered buried beneath some freshly planted bulbs. Other children were also found to have vanished from The Larches.
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Much of Minnie's penned lament is moving. She clearly loved, and was loved by, her ragtag collection of children. When the police turned up at The Larches the resident urchins looked happy and well fed. Minnie wrote, 'I'd have clad them in gold if I'd had it.' Her anguish that her remaining brood of chicks was not allowed to visit her during those long frightening weeks in jail is evident. 'My body and spiritual welfare have been well cared for, but the one yearning wish of my heart has to remain ungratified. I have been refused to let see the children'. Just as haunting is her gnawing regret over her 'profession': 'If I had never troubled with other people's children I would not now be where I am. They made me a social pariah.'
At her sensational trial at the Invercargill Supreme Court, Minnie faced an all-male jury (women were not allowed to serve on New Zealand juries until 1942) and an unashamedly partial judge, Justice Williams, who directed the jury that a charge of manslaughter would be a 'weak-kneed compromise.' In his 2024 book Fragile foundations: the application of English criminal law to crimes committed in Aotearoa New Zealand between 1826 and 1907 retired high court judge David Collins dissects the trial, observing that Justice Williams' summing up resembled 'the closing address one would expect from Crown counsel rather than the summing up of an impartial judge'.
The jury returned the verdict of the wilful murder of Dorothy Edith Carter. The baby had suffered an overdose of laudanum, an opiate then commonly used to 'soothe' babies. The evidence, although significant, was circumstantial, with the Crown unable to establish that the death was premeditated. Minnie, who maintained the overdose was 'accidental', did not appear in the witness box to give evidence.
In her prison cell, Minnie wrote, 'I have always given laudanum to children to keep them quiet while travelling… I could not do without it for a crying child is such an annoyance to other passengers and there would be comments made and questions asked that I was not always disposed to answer.' The term 'laudanum' comes up many times in Minnie's last statement, along with the sense of its general acceptability for 'soothing' fractious infants in such medicines as Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup. The other recurring theme is of incessant crying of both Dorothy and Eva; there is no reason not to believe this or how dreadful this must have been for all parties.
The trial notes depict the harshness of the period. Even tiny Eva Hornsby, who it was determined died of asphyxiation (supposedly smothered by Minnie, as inferred from two small bruises at the back of her head), had already sustained injuries – burned fingers during her first month of life when she was nursed by another woman – before her grandmother passed her over to Minnie. These burns helped identify Eva's body when it was dug up from Minnie's flowerbed.
I also wanted to believe Minnie's distress on finding that the bottle of milk given to her by Eva's grandmother was 'ice cold'. 'She knew how far I had to travel with her that night before I could get a warm drink for her. After the child stopped crying I laid her on the bench in the shed (Clarendon), spread the pink shawl on the ground, placed the paper parcels in the shawl to make them into one parcel. I was on my knees doing this when I saw the baby rolling over. I made a spring to catch her but it was too late. The child fell to the ground and never moved after.'
But babies of that age cannot roll.
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Minnie's circumstances as a kind of caregiver were dire. Winton's winters are bitter, and The Larches was described as a 'hovel'. But maybe Minnie's gravest challenge was her obvious inability to breastfeed the babies in her care. In Minnie's time, most infants were breastfed. For those who weren't the death rate was astronomical, with 'Death for want of breastmilk' often recorded on death certificates.
The usual alternatives to breastfeeding were cow's milk or pap (a thin gruel of flour or oatmeal and water). Raw cow's milk is susceptible to bacterial and faecal contamination, and was sometimes watered down and sweetened, while dirty and unwashed 'sucking bottles' often resulted in dysentery and typhoid, or even pneumonia, if bacteria were inhaled. These illnesses were all common causes of death.
Until the late 1800s in rural Southland, water for diluting milk or making pap was sourced from streams, rainwater, or wells, though groundwater was sometimes fouled by long drops. Even with basic sanitation knowledge, obtaining, warming, and feeding milk—and cleaning equipment—was difficult in primitive conditions like The Larches or when travelling by train and staying in hotels.
An incident that helped turn public sentiment against Minnie occurred in 1892 when Christchurch police traced her to a boarding house and took charge of a three-week-old child who she had adopted from its single mother for £25. Damningly, Minnie was reported to be feeding the baby with a bottle containing 'sour and curdled milk'. But is that really so surprising in the days before pasteurisation and refrigeration?
The best work on the Dean case is Lynley Hood's 1994 masterpiece Minnie Dean: Her life and crimes. She emailed me last week, 'Minnie Dean was New Zealand's most famous child care worker. Her business of caring for unwanted babies was an unwelcome reminder to righteous Victorians that their campaign for the suppression of fornication was a dismal failure. Some unwanted babies were killed or abandoned at birth. Others were cared for by women like Minnie Dean. The debate over her guilt or innocence continues to this day. Was Minnie Dean a mercenary cold-blooded killer or a scapegoat sacrificed on the altar of Victorian hypocrisy?'
Caring for, and sometimes even getting rid of, unwanted babies was an unavoidable evil in the nineteenth century. Did Minnie do society's dirty work and suffer for its sins? She was ostracised, othered, outlawed, and eventually condemned for her alleged crimes against children. Closing her manuscript, I was glad she had a small fire, flowers, and sunlight in her cell as she awaited her hanging.