Crosbie Wells and Anna Wetherell's affair and the child's paternity

Crosbie Wells and Anna Wetherell’s concealed relationship became a crucial link between the disputed gold, the missing Emery Staines, and the unresolved events surrounding Anna’s pregnancy. Staines identified Wells as the child’s father, while Anna maintained that the money promised to her belonged to Staines, not to Wells’s estate. Their connection thus came to light through testimony and legal documents, but not as a complete account of what had passed between them.

Paternity and the October disclosure

On 11 October 1865, after learning that Anna had been assaulted, Emery Staines went directly to the Arahura Valley to tell Crosbie Wells. Staines later explained that he considered the news important because Wells was the father of the child Anna was carrying and would want to know that the child had died. The testimony established Wells’s paternity and showed Staines treating the news as something Wells had a personal stake in. Wells, according to Staines, said little; the two shared a drink and sat together late.

That account situated the relationship within a wider sequence of losses and disappearances. Wells died on the same day Staines vanished, a conjunction that left the connection between Anna, Wells, and Staines open to suspicion. At the gathering of men examining the case, Walter Moody considered whether the many apparent coincidences formed part of an explanation not yet uncovered. He recognized that the relationships and motives of people absent from the room remained uncertain; the meeting could identify the links, but could not settle what had happened between Anna and Wells.

Lydia Wells’s account of the rupture

Lydia Wells later described Anna as a young woman who had been in her charge in Dunedin. In Lydia’s account, she had taken Anna in as an act of charity, but Crosbie Wells treated Anna badly, prompting a serious quarrel between the two women. Wells left Dunedin shortly after their disagreement. Lydia said she did not know where he had gone or hear from him again until she read his obituary in the West Coast Times.

When asked to identify the young woman at the center of that dispute, Lydia named Anna and claimed that Anna had abused the charity extended to her. Her testimony reveals how Anna and Wells’s association had affected Lydia’s relationship with Wells, but it is Lydia’s own account, not an independent finding about the full circumstances. She also said she did not know whether Anna and Wells’s acquaintance continued after they both relocated to Hokitika. The testimony therefore supplies a cause for the rupture between Lydia and Wells while leaving the later course of Anna and Wells’s relationship unclear.

A gift distinct from Wells’s inheritance

The legal confusion surrounding the relationship centered in part on a deed concerning money intended for Anna. When Cowell Devlin pressed her to explain what she knew, Anna insisted that the paper concerned Emery Staines’s money, not Crosbie Wells’s. Her distinction resisted the assumption that any document linking her to money discovered in Wells’s cottage must represent a claim on Wells’s inheritance.

At trial, Moody described the deed as recording a gift of £2,000 from Staines to Anna, witnessed by Wells. He compared Wells’s signature on it with the signature on Wells’s marriage certificate and private correspondence, distinguishing those signatures from the one on the Godspeed bill of sale. The comparison helped expose the bill of sale as forged, while also placing Wells’s name as witness on a document joining Staines and Anna. It strengthened the documentary record of their connection without itself explaining the private relationship among the three people.

Uncertainty and the wider mystery

Moody’s reflections show how easily the relationship could be absorbed into competing theories. He wondered whether Anna had known that dresses once belonging to Lydia Wells concealed a fortune and whether that knowledge connected her to the earlier blackmail and forced transfer of the Godspeed. He also considered the circumstances of the child’s death relevant to the mysteries, while recognizing that Anna’s relations with both Crosbie Wells and Francis Carver were poorly understood by the men investigating them. These were suspicions, not established conclusions.

The relationship’s narrative importance lies in the way one fact—the paternity of Anna’s child—rearranges the apparent connections among the characters without resolving them. Wells’s paternity gives his meeting with Staines a personal dimension; Lydia’s testimony ties Anna’s presence in Wells’s life to their quarrel; and the deed places Wells beside Anna and Staines in a formal transaction. Yet the record remains divided among testimony, documents, and conjecture, making their relationship both a revelation and a continuing source of uncertainty.