Taking the stand in the Christchurch, New Zealand High Court this week, Lauren Dickason’s mother said her daughter had loved her three children “very much”, but shortly before the family emigrated, she was concerned her daughter would have a “breakdown”, and was extremely worried about her.
Dickason is charged with strangling and smothering her daughter Liané – who was a week away from her 7th birthday – and two-year-old twins, Maya and Karla, on 16 September 2021, before trying to kill herself, while her husband, Graham, an orthopaedic surgeon who was about to begin a new job, was out for dinner with new colleagues.
The family had relocated from Pretoria weeks before.
She told police the day afterwards that she had been “thinking about it” for a while, that she had not “felt normal” for months and that “something just snapped” in her, reports TimesLIVE.
Her tearful confession video was played to the court earlier this week.
The former orthopaedic doctor has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity or infanticide. Under New Zealand law, “infanticide” is a crime similar to culpable homicide and can be invoked by women who argue their minds were temporarily “disturbed”. The maximum prison term is three years.
The Otago Daily Times and New Zealand Herald quote her telling police: “Last night something just triggered me … so now I have three dead kids.”
She tried to end her own life after the triple murder, saying the stress of emigration had worsened her long-standing problem with depression.
Wendy Fawkes described drastic changes in her daughter’s mood, “especially in the last couple of weeks”, saying she had stopped communicating, and “I was extremely worried about her… I’ve never seen Lauren in such a bad mental state”.
“In her messages to me, she told me how broken she is.”
Fawkes, supported by her son while she gave evidence, read a statement to the court before answering questions from Dickason’s lawyer, reports the New Zealand Herald.
The retired teacher and her husband Malcolm have attended every day of their daughter’s trial, leaving only once, during the pathologist’s evidence about the post-mortems.
“I had significant reservations about Graham and Lauren emigrating to New Zealand. I was concerned they would lose all their support networks,” said Fawkes.
The support was both physical and emotional from a wide group of family and friends, Fawkes added, which included being able to help out with the children, reports News24.
She described her oldest child’s desperation to be a mother and her “heartbreaking” IVF journey, saying her daughter was very anxious and stressed after every treatment.
In May 2019 she was called to Dickason’s house, she said.
Earlier that day, Dickason had told her husband she’d had thoughts of hurting the children. “I understood they needed help and they were not coping,” said Fawkes.
“When I got there, Graham was sitting with his head in his hands … Lauren came in, and both were upset.
“I remember saying you need to go and get help and see somebody. Lauren was visibly upset and obviously wasn’t coping with the children.”
Dickason later told her mother she had seen a doctor and he had adjusted her medication.
The defence opened its case by painting a picture of a severely mentally disturbed woman swamped by postpartum depression.
It followed more than a week of evidence from the Crown, which alleges she murdered the children in a “calculated” way because she was frustrated, angry and resentful of them.
While the Crown acknowledges Dickason suffered from sometimes-serious depression, it maintains she knew what she was doing when she killed the girls.
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”.
Fawkes told the court she was not aware of the full extent of Dickason’s psychiatric issues.
“From what I saw she loved her children very much… there is absolutely no doubt about that.”
When Liane was born the whole family was overjoyed. But Dickason struggled from the start, said Fawkes, adding that her daughter had been haunted by the loss of their first child, Sarah, at 22 weeks, and that her depression worsened after the birth of the twins.
While she was devoted to the children, she struggled with anxiety and was over-protective of them.
“She found it hard to relax with the children because she was constantly ensuring she had everything covered.”
A relative had said the harrowing conception process and a “difficult” pregnancy seemed to deeply affect Dickason.
“She took a big knock… she was crying a lot, she was very down,” she said.
After the twins were born, the relative said Dickason was struggling again and she took her to see a counsellor at her church.
As the family prepared to move to New Zealand the relative noticed Dickason had lost a lot of weight. “She started looking like a skeleton.”
Defence lawyer Anne Toohey said there was no dispute that Dickason killed the children and then tried – using multiple methods – to take her own life.
“Her intention was to go to bed… and to never wake up,” she said.
“There was an altruistic motive… That means 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 that she persisted.”
Toohey said the decision to kill herself and the children was “spontaneous” because Dickason was “in a dark place”.
“She believed life was no longer worth living – for either her or her children,” Toohey said.
“She felt that they were all better off dead.
Toohey told the jury that should they find the murders were caused by Dickason's postpartum depression, it would be a case of infanticide and not murder. If they find that she did not know that what she was doing was morally wrong, it would be a case of insanity and not murder.
Dickason had stopped taking her antidepressant medication in March 2021 without checking with her psychiatrist because she thought it was not working for her anymore, and there had been a steep decline in her mental health from July 2021, Toohey said.
She had resumed her medication in August 2021. “But six weeks (on the new medication) was not enough time.”
Dickason was committed to a psychiatric hospital after her arrest, and some time after her release from the hospital, she was assessed by an on-call psychiatrist as having little understanding of what was going on.
“For a long time after this happened, she continued to tell psychiatrists that while she felt guilty and remorseful, she still felt it was best for her girls that they had died,” Toohey said.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Dickason tragedy: Mom’s mental evaluation to take up to 18 months
Dickason tragedy: Further mental observation and trial date
Doctor who killed children diagnosed with post-partum depression, court hears