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The trial against Lauren Dickason kicked off on Monday at the High Court in Christchurch, New Zealand, over two years since the South African doctor allegedly killed her three children after moving to New Zealand in 2021.

Dickason is facing three charges for killing her daughters – six-year-old Liané and two-year-old twins Maya and Karla.

Tragic and shocking details about the murder have emerged, revealing what all happened to lead up to the night in September 2021 when orthopaedic surgeon Graham Dickason found his children strangled with cable ties in their beds.

The day of the deaths had started off normally, with Graham helping his wife with school preparations, per a report from The Citizen. Only in the evening, when he arrived home from work and found Lauren in the kitchen, did he find out that things had gone horribly wrong:

“She looked strange, she looked wobbly. Like she wanted to fall over. I asked if she was okay. She didn’t really reply. I asked what’s the matter, and she told me ‘it’s too late,’” reports Stuff.

He first went to their bedrooms, where he found the girls in bed, covered in blankets. When he lifted the covers he discovered they had been strangled with cable ties. He then cut the ties off his daughter’s neck with scissors and checked their pulses, but they were already dead.

Lauren had apparently given up on the cable ties, killing the girls by suffocating them with blankets and then tucking “them in with their soft toys”.

The court heard how Lauren had struggled with being a mother of her three children due to mental health struggles, suffering from depression and more tellingly, postpartum depression, which she is said to have recovered from after the twins’ birth:

He also revealed how the couple struggled with infertility, but eventually concieved all three children with the help of IVF. While she was excited about the twins’ birth, she did suffer a series of anxiety attacks and reportedly twice mentioned that she “could do something to their children”. On one occasion, Lauren said she could “make an end to it all” by sedating the children and cutting their arteries “so it could all be over”.

Graham revealed to the police that while Lauren always ensured the girls were provided for, she wasn’t particularly nurturing.

“She wasn’t someone who would pick them up and cuddle them often, but she also didn’t spank or harm them. She cried a lot, and often couldn’t say why,” he said.

The accused, who was sobbing in court listening to her husband’s testimony, was also said to have “harboured resentment and anger” towards her kids because they got in the way of her relationship with her husband:

“Three kids has really killed all the passion and a lot of the happiness,” she reportedly told one of her friends in a text message.

According to cellphone records, the 42-year-old had searched for information on the internet about how to overdose children and had sent a number of messages to friends in the months before her children’s deaths referencing murder.

Prosecution lawyer Andrew McRae told the court that messages between the mother of three and a friend revealed unhappiness with the size of the quarantine room allocated to the family when they immigrated to Timaru, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“She said ‘He, as in God, knows that we might commit murder in that small room over those two weeks’.” The messages continued right up until the night before the girls died,” McRae continued.

This evidence supports the prosecution’s case, which appears to lean towards premeditation. Lauren, however, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and infanticide.

On the second day of the trial, Lauren’s defence lawyer Anne Toohey grilled Graham about the alarming warning signs pointing to his wife’s mental instability in the months leading to his kids’ murders, another Citizen report notes:

According to the New Zealand publication, Stuff, Lauren’s defence team is arguing the mother of three was experiencing a major depressive episode, hounded by thoughts that she had to kill herself and take her daughters with her.

In the cross-examination, Graham noted that Lauren had been displaying profound signs of depression, with a “flat” mood, weight loss that led to physical pain and reduced communication with friends and family:

Toohey zoned in a single instance in which Lauren described one of the ways she could kill the children by feeding them sleeping tablets and cutting their femoral arteries, saying he [Graham] must’ve been very alarmed upon hearing this from Lauren.

“I was surprised by what she said. I would say I was concerned … I wouldn’t describe myself as angry, as my primary response, but yes, caught by surprise, and concerned,” he said.

Toohey painted a picture of Graham being dismissive of Lauren’s obvious psychotic breakdown.

Despite these tragedies, Graham maintained that Lauren was a caring, attentive mother to their daughters.

The trial will continue.

[source:citizen&citizen&iol]