The New Zealand trial of South African doctor Lauren Dickason, dubbed Killer Mum after the murder of her three daughters, raises difficult questions about parenting, migration and mental health, writes Rebecca Davis in Daily Maverick.
On the night of 16 September 2021, Lauren Dickason (41) walked into the garage of the home her family had recently moved into in Timaru, New Zealand.
She collected a bunch of cable ties she would subsequently interlock around the necks of her three children: two-year-old twins Maya and Karla, and six-year-old Liané, after telling them that they were going to “make necklaces, and when this strangulation method failed, she smothered them to death.
In New Zealand, where Dickason is on trial for three counts of murder, details from the pathologist’s report have been suppressed from the public out of sensitivity. There is arguably no greater taboo in human society than maternal filicide, the killing of a child by a mother, and the public response has been one of appropriate horror.
But complicating this has been the fact that the New Zealand Crown, prosecuting the case, has been unable to produce one witness to deliver a significant criticism of Dickason’s character.
Outside the courtroom, those who know her have consistently spoken of her in glowing terms – as an exceptionally kind person who was also “the best mom I knew”.
The trial itself, meanwhile, has thrown up some troubling issues, as the Crown maintains that text messages sent by Dickason to friends venting about the difficulties of parenting should be considered evidence of long-held murderous intent.
The central questions
Both sides agree Dickason killed her children in the specified manner. The key contestation instead is over why she did it – a question which the trial has revealed, astonishingly, was not ever asked by police after the murders.
The other riddle is whether she knew that what she was doing was morally wrong. She has pleaded not guilty by reason either of insanity or infanticide – the latter an unusual loophole within the New Zealand statute books that allows a defendant to escape a homicide conviction if it can be proven the crime can be linked to childbirth.
Other jurisdictions, including South Africa, have similar allowances in law for criminal acts committed in the condition of postpartum depression – but only New Zealand, it seems, allows this defence to be used for up to 10 years after a child’s birth.
If the infanticide defence succeeds, Dickason could spend as little as three years in prison. Even if it fails, she could still be found not guilty by reason of insanity if the jury of eight women and four men can be persuaded she was in a psychotic state when she committed the murders.
Dickason has been kept in a psychiatric hospital since the night of the murders, when she also tried to kill herself directly afterwards – initially with a knife and, then with an overdose of pain medication.
It is one of the more brutal aspects of the case that Dickason’s sincerity in trying to commit suicide has become another of the questions of the trial: Did she try hard enough?
There are, in fact, certain legal implications revolving around this question. One of the claims from Dickason’s team is that she murdered her children out of “altruism”.
Defence witness Dr Susan Hatters-Friedman, an expert on filicide, told the court that killing one’s own children “out of love” was one of five common motives for the act: usually in the belief that, by killing them, the murdering parent is saving them from a worse fate.
Dickason told interviewing psychiatrists that she thought at the time of the murders that she was saving her daughters from the “horrible world”, and giving her husband Graham some “peace and quiet”.
There is no disputing she seems to have brought a greater efficiency to bear on her children’s murders than on her own suicide attempt.
The prosecution has dwelled on the fact that Dickason, by her own admission, used her medical training to check the vital signs of the children to ensure they were dead before covering their bodies. By contrast, her attempt to take her own life can be seen as slapdash.
One point that has emerged, however, is that she subsequently stockpiled her sleep medication in the psychiatric hospital, intending another suicide attempt, which was foiled.
Impact of pregnancy, parenting
The court has heard of Dickason’s struggles with mental health stretching back almost three decades, when her first depressive episodes began at 15 while she was at boarding school in Pretoria.
This long history of depression has been a double-edged sword for the defence. On the one hand, it clearly establishes a woman who has wrestled with demons for many years. On the other, the infanticide defence rests specifically on proving her mental state was linked to childbirth.
This argument seems weakened by her depression long predating having children.
But if there is one clear feature of Dickason’s recent life to emerge from the testimony in court – from her husband, family and psychiatrists – it is the harrowing impact of pregnancy and parenting on a woman predisposed to mental health battles.
The defence has highlighted her gruelling, years-long journey to fall pregnant with her three children and which required 16 rounds of IVF treatment.
The process is notorious for the emotional and physical toll it takes on a woman’s body, as well as the financial cost.
Dickason was a doctor married to a doctor. She had hoped to specialise in neurology or gynaecology, the court has heard, but set her career aside to have children. In recent years, she had returned to work part-time as a manager for her husband’s practice, but had not practised as a GP since 2012.
In one exchange in court, prosecutor Andrew McRae suggested that the fact that Dickason could get her children up for school on the day of the murders, make them lunches and “do their hair immaculately” was evidence she was “functioning at a high level”.
The court was read a message Dickason sent to a friend in 2021 asking for help on how to cope with motherhood, explaining she felt her anxiety and depression stemmed from “frustration and boredom as I look after the babies during the day and …have no identity of my own”.
Elsewhere she said: “Mums always feel this instantaneous love for their children and I never really experienced it with my kids … I think there was something wrong with me.”
The division of parenting labour in the Dickason household seems to have been decidedly old-fashioned. In Graham Dickason’s own testimony, he admitted often working late; Lauren told psychologists she “made sacrifices” to allow him to continue his hunting weekends with the boys after they became parents.
The picture emerging is of a bright and accomplished woman struggling to adapt emotionally and intellectually to her role as a mother – and compensating for her guilt about this by over-performing in practical ways. She was the parents’ representative for her eldest daughter’s school class; she frequently took the children on outings, and was the queen of arts and crafts activities.
Her husband, equally, seems not to have known quite what to do in response to her depression. Dickason claims she had told him in the past that she was having violent thoughts towards her children and he reacted with shock and anger, telling her not to talk like that.
On one occasion during a depressive episode, he told her to “put her big girl panties on”.
The problem of the text messages
Much of the first week of the trial (now in its third week) was taken up by presentation of evidence from Dickason’s cellphone – in particular, WhatsApp messages to friends.
This has been questionable on numerous counts. Investigators admitted they used (notoriously unreliable) Google Translate to translate some messages from Afrikaans to English. For another, the defence has pointed out that vital context in some cases has been missing from the messages presented to the jury.
But arguably the most problematic aspect has been the suggestion that Dickason was being literal when she vented to her friends in the messages about wanting to “murder” her kids.
As the defence has protested: What parent has not sent similar messages in frustration to trusted friends, without the slightest intention of committing actual violence?
Living the South African dream
It is unclear what impact this being a jury trial is likely to have on Dickason’s fate, although it is possibly revealing that her lawyers will not be putting her on the stand.
One suspects, however, the jurors may have been unimpressed by Dickason’s views on life in New Zealand, to which the family emigrated in mid-2021.
This element of the case is a stark reminder of the under-discussed mental and emotional toll of migration on families. The Dickasons left South Africa because, as Lauren said in messages to friends, they did not believe their children would have a decent future in the country.
Yet, as many South Africans painfully experience, life abroad turned out not to be anywhere near the imagined paradise. At home in Pretoria, the Dickasons had built a home on a hectare plot, with a big garden and a jungle gym, and a trampoline: the middle-class South African dream.
In Timaru, Dickason found the people “unkempt” and overweight; the children all looked sad, she reported, and she could not get over the small houses compared with what they were used to back home.
Perhaps in time she would have assimilated. The defence has argued that her responses to her environment were clearly coloured by her mental state.
Since the murders, Dickason’s husband has moved back to South Africa, and testified in her trial via video link. However, Dickason herself is unlikely to be able to leave the island any time soon – or to escape the reality of life after her deeds.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
No evidence of insanity when Dickason killed children, court hears
Dickason’s mother testifies in New Zealand murder trial
Dickason tragedy: Mom’s mental evaluation to take up to 18 months