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The Case of the Persistent Poisoner

In Australia’s bleak homicidal past, cases of murder by poisoning are commonplace. And the one thing that most of them had in common was that women were behind the dastardly crimes. One of the better-known cases was Melbourne’s Martha Needle who, from the mid-1880s to 1894, murdered her entire family and her boyfriend with an arsenic-based rat poison named Rough on Rats. Three other similar cases immediately spring to mind: in the early 1900s Martha Rendell murdered her three stepchildren and, in the 1940s and 1950s, great-grandmothers Caroline Grills and Gladys Fletcher saw seven people off between them with the help of a thallium based rat poison.

In the mix with all of these larcenous ladies was a bloke – and the only male administer of potent potions of note I can find – who could arguably be titled ‘the world’s worst poisoner’. This blunderer allegedly made six blatant attempts to murder his wife for no apparent reason and was eventually sentenced to death by the most notorious hanging judge of the time. But that wasn’t to be the end of it, not by a long stretch, if you’ll pardon the pun.

George Dean was the least likely murderer imaginable. The tall, handsome Sydney Harbour ferryboat captain, with an easy smile and a pleasant nature, was highly regarded for his bravery when he dived from his ferry to save two women who had slipped and disappeared into murky Circular Quay. George and his wife Mary lived happily with their newborn baby in a cottage in Miller Street, North Sydney. If there was a problem it was that George didn’t always see eye-to-eye with his mother-in-law, Mrs Seymour, who had stayed with them following the birth of the baby. However, after she had left, it seemed to be a joyous household.

But it seemed that from mid-January 1895, George tried to kill his wife on six occasions by putting a mysterious white powder in the beverages and meals he served her. And there was no mistaking that something was going on as, according to Mary, he was so careless about it. The food and drinks he prepared for her had a strange bitter taste and there was a white powder residue around the bowl or cup. Each time Mary had managed to swallow the food or drink she was violently ill.

When George allegedly mixed some white powder into a lemon syrup drink in front of her, and she drank it and was violently ill, against Mary’s wishes George insisted on calling the doctor. In front of her husband Mary asked the doctor if the powder was part of her medicine. The doctor said no and her husband denied mixing it in. Mary gave a sample of the drink to her mother who couldn’t get it to the police quickly enough. Sure enough, it contained traces of both arsenic and strychnine. On 9 March 1895 George Dean was arrested and charged with the attempted murder of his wife.

But although according to his wife and his mother-in-law George Dean was as guilty as sin, he had one huge factor in his favour – the lack of a motive. He was an absolute cleanskin with no girlfriends and had never missed a day’s work in order to provide fulsomely for his little family, whom he adored. Why on earth would he try and murder his wife? It was up to Richard Meagher, who was Sydney’s most promising defence lawyer, to prove that George had no case to answer and that there was a lot more in play than met the eye.

At the committal hearing Richard Meagher had some curly questions to ask. Why would the happily married family man attempt to kill his wife? And if he did, why so openly? And why would Mary continue to eat and drink substances from her husband when she allegedly suspected him of tampering with them? And when Mary did not want to call the doctor it was George who insisted. His concern for her health was hardly the behaviour of a scheming poisoner.

When George Dean’s mother-in-law, the purse-lipped Mrs Seymour, took the stand she found herself the subject of a vicious personal attack. Was it true that she had once boarded known criminals in her home? Was she a part-time madam in a brothel? Had she been in jail for a conviction of petty theft 30 years earlier? To each accusation she hissed that she had not. But Mr Meagher’s attempts to cast aspersion upon the characters of the mother and her daughter and conjure up a theory of conspiracy to frame George Dean were fruitless and he was committed for trial.

At his trial George Dean contradicted every word his wife and mother-in-law said. He stood stoically in the box denying everything. His lawyer’s pompous three hours’ of summing up didn’t help matters and Judge Windeyer, better known as the ‘hanging judge’ who had sentenced nine youths to death in the infamous Mount Rennie Rape Case, was not impressed. In his brief summing up, the judge said that he did not believe that Mary Dean had tried to poison herself – six times over!

When the jury wasn’t back in eight hours, His Honour called them back and told them that if they hadn’t reached a guilty decision by midnight he would lock them up until the court resumed on Monday morning. They were back in 10 minutes with a sympathetic guilty verdict with a strong recommendation for mercy.

Judge Windeyer’s version of mercy was to send George Dean to the gallows. This brought public outrage. Most people believed that Dean was innocent because there was no proof that he had purchased the arsenic – all chemists were bound by law to keep a register of poisons sold to the public and all such registers had been checked by police.

A Dean Defence Committee was formed and thousands of citizens protested across the colony. It worked. George Dean’s sentence was commuted to life in prison. Then a Royal Commission inquired into Judge Windeyer’s performance and the flimsy evidence on which Dean was convicted. Richard Meagher convinced the commissioners that, urged on by her mother, Mary Dean – although she risked certain death on six occasions – poisoned herself in order to bring charges against her husband for no particular reason. George Dean was pardoned and set free. He returned to his ferry and became Sydney’s biggest tourist attraction.

Then, for reasons known only to himself, Richard Meagher, George Dean’s lawyer, told the colony’s most distinguished barrister, Sir Julian Salomons, that Dean was guilty of the poisonings; that he had confessed to him that he had purchased the poison from a chemist named Smith who hadn’t entered it in his ledger. Smith was hauled in and admitted his guilt. George Dean was sent to trial again but the best they could get him on was ‘for falsely swearing he had not bought the poison’. He went back to prison for 14 years. Upon his release in 1907 he disappeared into oblivion.

Richard Meagher, George Dean’s lawyer who knew all along that his client was guilty, went on to a successful career in politics and became President of the Labor Party, Speaker of the House and the first Labor Lord Mayor of Sydney.