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Nothing was heard of Minnie from that moment until 1863 when, pregnant at 19 with Isabella, she knocked at the door of her mother’s sister’s house in southern New Zealand Apart from Minnie’s unlikely tale, given her age, that she was a widow who had arrived via Australia’s island state of Tasmania, little more is known of her movements since leaving Scotland. The one exception is the recent
eight daughters of Elizabeth Swan and her husband, John McCulloch, an engine-driver of 45 years’ standing with the Glasgow, Paisley and Greenock Railway. When she was 13, Minnie’s mother died of cancer. Nothing was heard of Minnie from that moment until 1863 when, pregnant at 19 with Isabella, she knocked at the door of her mother’s sister’s house in southern New Zealand, with her first daughter, Ellen, aged three. The aunt, Granny Kelly (nee Christina Swan), from the village of Cardross – on the north side of the Firth of Clyde halfway between Dumbarton and Helensburgh – had not seen Minnie since she was three, when she herself had migrated to New Zealand with her family. Not long after joining other Scots in ‘Dunedin – dubbed locally “the Edinburgh of the South” ... [Christina’s husband, Dugald Niven] was killed by a falling tree,’ wrote Hood in Minnie Dean: Her Life & Crimes. A year or so later Christina married John Kelly and in 1856 founded the nearby Invercargill.
Right: Some of the telegrams that finally saw Minnie Dean caught, prosecuted and hung for the crime of murdering children. 69
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