WARNING: This story contains graphic and sensitive content.
Lauren Dickason “struggled” with motherhood and often “ranted” about her children - but she is not a terrible person and certainly not a murderer, her lawyers will tell a court today.
Dickason’s defence team will begin presenting their case to the jury in her High Court murder trial today, aiming to convince the jury’s eight women and four men that she is not guilty by reason of insanity of infanticide.
While she admits to killing her three daughters in Timaru in September 2021, she was so intensely mentally disturbed that she cannot be held responsible for her actions.
Liane, 6, and twins Maya and Karla, 2, were found dead in their beds by their father Graham Dickason when he returned home from a work function.
The family had just emigrated from South Africa and had only been in Timaru about a week after spending time in managed isolation.
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”.
But defence lawyer Kerry Beaton KC refutes that.
She will give a full opening address to the jury today, but on the first day of the trial she spoke briefly to them about the defence position.
“Lauren Dickason was a loving mother and wife. She loved Liane, Maya and Karla very much and yet she killed them.
“It was violent and it was prolonged; brutal. It’s confronting. It’s difficult to hear and to imagine we understand that you will be rightly shocked and horrified.
“That’s understandable because 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.”
Yesterday the jury watched a video of Dickason’s interview with police the day after the girls died.
Dickason first spoke - often through tears - to the interviewing officer about the move to New Zealand saying the emigration process was “so overwhelming”.
“Something just snapped last night,” she said.
“Basically the kids were being wild again, jumping on the couches, not listening to what I’m trying to tell them.
“I have been thinking about it for sure. Last night something just triggered me.”
Dickason explained to police that she went to the garage looking for something to kill the children with.
She then gathered the three girls in the twins’ bedroom, telling them they were going to “make necklaces” and used cable ties to try and strangle them.
When that was unsuccessful, she told police, she suffocated them.
“I did the twins first. The first one was being really, really, really horrible to me lately,” she explained.
“She has been biting me and hitting me and scratching me and throwing tantrums 24 hours a day - and I just don’t know how to manage that. That is why I did her first.
“Then I decided I had to do something with myself. I wanted to die.”
Dickason spoke further to police about the lead-up to the alleged murders.
“I have been functioning on two hours sleep a day. I think in the last three months I’ve probably lost 10kg just from stress,” she said.
“I can’t sleep at night.”
She said she felt “lost” and when the girls “started playing their high jinks again” that night she lost it.
“That’s when I just couldn’t anymore,” she said.
“I was so tired of screaming... saying no.”
Dickason admitted she had thought of harming the children in the past.
“These other thoughts were something pretty new,” she said.
“Something completely different popped up in isolation. I don’t know where those thoughts suddenly started coming from.”
Earlier in the trial the jury heard extensive evidence about Dickason’s life before the alleged murders, including her gruelling fertility journey and devastating loss of a baby daughter at 18 weeks’ gestation and her family’s move to New Zealand from South Africa in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Jurors heard two days of evidence from Dickason’s husband, who came home from a work function to find his three children dead in their beds.
And a tranche of messages were read in court in which Dickason spoke about killing or murdering her kids, how they were “crazy” and how frustrated and upset she was with them.
Beaton earlier urged the jury to keep an open mind and not to judge Dickason.
“You have not heard it all yet,” she said last week.
“You’ll hear that she 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. You’ll hear that marriage and parenting for Lauren and Graham Dickason during those long periods of lockdown in South Africa was hard.”
Beaton outlined Dickason’s mental health issues - depression from her teens, postnatal depression and being diagnosed with a major depressive disorder in 2015.
“Lauren had told her husband in 2019 and in 2021 that she had had thoughts and feelings of harming her children, she was scared by those thoughts and feelings,” Beaton said.
“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.”
The jury heard that immigrating and MIQ were “stressful experiences” for Dickason and she was “isolated from her support networks”.
“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,” Beaton said.
“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.”
The defence will argue that Dickason was so mentally distorted or disturbed as a result of childbirth that she should not be held fully responsible for the deaths.
“It exists in our law to recognise the relevance of mental illness for some women who kill children,” said Beaton.
“And the Crown will have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that this is not infanticide.”
Beaton said the jury could also find that Dickason’s mental illness was “so severe that when she killed her daughters, she did not know that what she was doing was morally wrong”.
“That would mean she was legally insane at the time,” she said.
“As you’ll hear, the evidence is why? Why would Lauren Dickason do this? If she’s not unwell enough to be legally insane, then why did this happen? What’s her motive?
“Is she just a bad person who wanted to be free of her children and start a new life? Is she someone who planned this all along?
“The Crown theory that we’ve heard seems to be that yes, she’s unwell - but it actually happened because she’s resentful, frustrated and angry about how her children were standing in the way of her marriage and that’s why she killed them so brutally.
“Why then did she try to kill herself? If she just wanted more time with her husband - then why try and kill herself?”
Beaton said the event was simply a tragedy and happened “because Lauren was in such a dark place”.
“[She was] 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.
“Research shows that statistically one in six people will experience some form of depression in their lives. It affects women more than men, it can affect anyone at any age, of any occupation and its extent is often hidden.
“While Lauren Dickason had experienced ongoing depression for many years, no one who knew her would ever have thought she could do this to her babies.
“But she did.”
Beaton told the jury last week that it was only natural for them to feel sorry for her client, or angry at her.
“Recognise those feelings for what they are and then please put them to one side,” she implored.
“It’s okay to be shocked and horrified about what you’ve heard about what happened. That is a normal reaction - but as jurors at the same time, your job is to keep an open mind.
“You can’t decide these issues today based on your emotions and your feelings. Please keep an open mind, please listen carefully to the evidence that you’re going to hear because these are very important issues to decide.”
The trial before Justice Cameron Mander is expected to run for another two weeks at least.