Father gets life for killing wife and children

The grandmother of two children killed by their father sank to her knees in tears yesterday as a jury convicted her only son of murder.

As Robert Han was led from the High Court at Auckland to begin his three terms of life imprisonment, his mother and sister sobbed loudly, and his father look stunned.

The nine-woman, three-man jury took just an hour and a half to find Han guilty of killing his wife, Angela, and his children, Nicholas, aged four, and Christina, two.

Han had not denied bludgeoning and stabbing his family to death in their home last year but pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

During the four-day trial, the jury heard evidence that Han, a former BNZ mortgage manager, was a pathological gambler and was suffering from major depression.

He had racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt at the Sky City Casino.

He had lost $100,000 borrowed from his sister, as well as money he gained from refinancing his mortgage.

He left New Zealand to work in Korea in March last year to try to clear his debts.

But on the weekend of the murder, he arrived back at his Manukau home unexpectedly. The family spent a happy weekend together, before Han bashed them with a hammer and fatally knifed them in the early hours of the Monday.

Defence counsel Robert Fardell said an acute level of depression drove Han to despair and he started hearing a voice in his dreams.

The voice, which he thought was God, suggested that if he and his family died, all would be well and they could all be together.

In summing up, Mr Fardell said letters Han wrote to his family and people he owed money to several months before the killings were an insight into his unbalanced mental state.

In a letter to his wife, he called himself "human rubbish" and implied he was going to kill himself to end the family's financial woes.

The letter gave his wife practical advice on how to manage his life insurance and asked her to tell their children, "Daddy was really sorry."

But evidence from the Crown suggested Han was not, and never had been, insane.

Psychiatrist Graham Mellsop said he did not think Han had any disease of the mind and had not been depressed at the time of the killings. Therefore he did not meet the requirements for a defence of insanity.

In his closing address, Crown prosecutor Kieran Raftery told the jury that they could not find a verdict other than guilty and that Han had meant to kill his family when he acted.

"You cannot have horrendous and brutal acts like that, that mean anything less."

Outside the court, the officer in charge of the case, Detective Senior Sergeant Karl Wright-St Clair, said the jury delivered a verdict the police had expected.

He said the case had been tragic.