WARNING: This story contains graphic and sensitive content.
The trial for a South African woman charged with murdering her three young children has been adjourned until Monday due to a juror being unwell.
Lauren Anne Dickason admits she killed her daughters Liané, 6, and 2-year-old twins Maya and Karla in September 2021.
But she has pleaded not guilty to three charges of murder and has mounted a defence of insanity or infanticide.
She is on trial in the High Court at Christchurch before Justice Cameron Mander and a jury.
The trial is in its thrid week.
So far, extensive evidence has been presented about the 42-year-old’s life - her upbringing, marriage, the gruelling fertility treatment she underwent to have children and her long battle with anxiety and depression.
The jury watched footage of police interviews with Dickason and her husband Graham - who found his children dead in bed and his wife in need of medical attention when he returned from a work function.
This week the jury has been hearing evidence from psychiatric experts about their assessment and formal opinion of Dickason’s mental state at the time of the alleged murders.
That evidence was set to continue today.
However, a juror has become sick and is unable to attend court.
Justice Mander, after conferring with the Crown and defence teams, agreed to adjourn proceedings until Monday.
After the expert evidence is complete the jury will hear closing addresses from the Crown and defence.
Then Justice Mander will sum up the case in its entirety and instruct the jury on its role - and how it should work towards reaching a verdict.
The jury will then be sent to deliberate.
It is expected the trial may not reach that point until late next week.
The Crown alleges Dickason murdered the children in a “calculated” way because she was frustrated, angry and resentful of them.
It acknowledges Dickason suffered from sometimes-serious depression, but maintains she knew what she was doing when she killed the girls.
Last week, Crown prosecutor Andrew McRae alleged Dickason was an angry and frustrated woman who was “resentful of how the children stood in the way of her relationship with her husband” and killed them “methodically and purposefully, perhaps even clinically”.
The defence says Dickason was a severely mentally disturbed woman in the depths of postpartum depression and did not know the act of killing the children was morally wrong at the time of their deaths.
Further, it says she was “in such a dark place” she had decided to kill herself and felt “it was the right thing to do” to “take the girls with her”.
Crown Prosecutor Andrew McRae said there was no question the case was tragic and that Dickason was mentally unwell.
“There is no doubt in this case that the defendant was responsible for killing,” he said.
“The issue in this case, is whether Mrs Dickason intended to kill her children out of frustration, anger for their behaviour, or resentment for how they got in the way of her relationship - or whether in fact, her state of mind at the time was such that she must have been insane or have the partial defence of infanticide.
“The Crown says there was anger here, and she methodically killed all three of her children.
“This is going to be a difficult trial and one that you’re going to need to listen very carefully to the evidence is presented.
“But I stress to you - this is not a trial by expert. The expert evidence will be a part of the material that you will need to make your decision in this case.”
McRae said trials were not “a search for excuses, or even reasons”.
“A trial is a search for the truth - and the Crown says that the truth is that while the defendant was likely suffering from a major depressive disorder, she knew what she was doing before, during and after she acted methodically and purposefully, perhaps even clinically and what she did.
“She knew, the Crown say, what she was doing was morally wrong, and continued on her course, in any event.
“Your task is to determine the truth of what happened, and more specifically the truth about Mrs Dickason’s state at the time that she killed her children.”
He said Dickason had “a lifelong propensity towards anxiety and perfectionism”.
“[She was] always demanding very high standards from herself, and a tendency towards self-criticism for any actual or perceived failure to meet those standards.
“The Crown says the unpredictable nature of children and their behaviour clashed strongly with their personality traits.
“The Crown case is that the defendant was angry at her children on the night - she was angry at them for not listening, and for jumping on the couch after her husband had left the house.
“She described the pressure she was under and this made her snap. The anger was bubbling over from many aspects of her life, the ongoing behaviour of the children but, also, the Crown says she was resentful of how the children, that they stood in the way of her relationship with her husband.”
McRae said the jurors would naturally want to find “a palatable motive to explain the inexplicable”.
“But the Crown says that the motive was simple here that she snapped.
“It was the straw that snapped the camel’s back, she was under pressure, and when the children misbehaved her anger at the children took over and she killed them.
“The cause of this, the Crown say, was not a disturbance of the mind from childbirth, nor was she insane.”
Dickason is represented by a team of lawyers led by Kerryn Beaton KC.
On the first day of the trial, Beaton briefly outlined the defence case.
“Lauren Dickason was a loving mother and wife. She loved Liané, Maya and Karla very much and yet she killed them - and as you’ve just heard it was violent and it was prolonged.
“But afterwards she put her girls in their beds, she tucked them in with their soft toys, she covered them up with their blankets and then she took an overdose of pills trying to kill herself, but she failed.
“This is brutal. It’s confronting. It’s difficult to hear and to imagine… what Lauren Dickason did was shocking and horrifying and you might well be thinking what mother could do that to their children?
“A terrible person, is what the Crown would have you believe, who resented her children and who wanted them gone.
“But the truth is that Lauren Dickason is a woman who longed to be a mother who went through 17 rounds of IVF to have her three daughters. She wanted those children very much and she loved her family.
“But on the 16th of September 2021, Lauren Dickason was experiencing a major depressive episode of such severity that not only did she think she had to kill herself, she thought she had to take her girls with her.”
Beaton said it was undeniable her client “sometimes struggled with being a mum”.
“She was sometimes angry or irritated with her kids, her husband, with motherhood, she complained about them.
“She ranted to her friends, having twins was hard.”
Beaton said Dickason battled with her mental health and " thoughts and feelings of harming her children” over the years.
“She was scared by those thoughts and feelings and in 2019, she saw a psychiatrist for help,” she revealed.
“But you’ll hear that despite those thoughts and feelings, she was loving, she was protective of her children, including on the day they died, she actually took great care of her children.
“She always tried to do what was best for them. They were not mistreated or abused until the night of the 16th of September 2021.
“Despite what the Crown would have you think, Lauren Dickason is not a bad person - she’s intelligent, she’s educated, she’s caring, she’s loving, she’s a much-loved daughter, sister and friend.
“And you’ll hear that by the 16th of September, she wasn’t communicating well with her husband or her family and she was very unwell and while those close to her were worried about her, tragically, no one recognised just quite how unwell she was until it was too late.”
Beaton said the defence evidence would show the “tragic event” happened because Dickason was “in such a dark place so removed from reality”.
“So suicidal, so disordered in her thinking that when she decided to kill herself that night, she thought she had to take the girls with her,” she said.
“These issues will crystallise for you during the trial.
“You will hear that no one who knew her would ever have thought she could do this to her babies. But she did.”
When the defence case opened, lawyer Anne Toohey expanded on insanity and infanticide.
She said after Dickason killed the girls her “intention was to go to bed… and to never wake up”.
“The question is why she did that,” she posed.
“All three defence experts say her mind was disturbed by reason of her postpartum depression arising from childbirth.
“All of the defence experts agree that there was an altruistic motive… That means that Lauren killed her children out of love.
“In her mind, she was killing them out of love - she was killing herself and she didn’t want to leave the children… she was so sure this was the right thing to do she persisted.”
Toohey said the decision to kill herself and the children was “spontaneous”.
“She believed life was no longer worth living, for either her or her children.
“She decided to kill herself and she felt that they were all better off dead. Lauren felt inadequate as a mother, she found it hard to cope…”
Toohey said Dickason was “severely” unwell and had been effectively spiralling into a deep depression with suicidal thoughts for months.
“This is about postpartum depression and a mother who killed her children,” she said.
“She did not want to leave her children without a mum… she also did not want her children to suffer from having such a bad mother.
“This was an impulsive decision - she did not plan it.”
Toohey said Dickason was “a highly intelligent capable person”, a doctor by profession whose “entire vocation in life is geared toward saving lives”.
“Why did she kill her three beautiful girls, who she fought for years to get through brutal IVF treatments - her girls who she loved and protected?
“The answer is that Lauren was severely mentally unwell on that night. There is no question about that.”
In the weeks leading up to the family moving to New Zealand Toohey said Dickason’s family and husband were “all desperately worried” about her.
On the day of the alleged murders her client was “so deep into her depression, removed from reality… that she decided to die and take her daughters with her.”
“If you find that Lauren’s mind was disturbed at the time, this happened due to postpartum depression, then this is not murder, it’s infanticide,” Toohey said.
“And if she didn’t know what she was doing was morally wrong that night, then she is not guilty of murder or infanticide, that is insanity.”
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