WARNING: This story contains graphic and sensitive content.
For two weeks a jury in the High Court at Christchurch has listened to extensive and often harrowing evidence at the trial of Lauren Anne Dickason who is accused of murdering her three little girls in 2021.
Dickason and her orthopaedic surgeon husband Graham had emigrated from South Africa when he got a job at Timaru Hospital.
The couple and their children Liané, 6, and 2-year-old twins Maya and Karla spent two weeks in managed isolation at an Auckland hotel before arriving at their new home on the mainland.
A week later - 20 minutes after her husband left to attend a work function - Dickason smothered the children to death.
She also tried to take her own life and was rushed to hospital.
The next day she was arrested and charged with three counts of murder.
After appearing in court, Dickason was remanded in custody to the forensic psychiatric unit at Hillmorton Hospital. She remains there to date.
Over the past two weeks, the court has heard about Dickason’s life before and after children, the gruelling fertility treatment she had to conceive and the loss of a baby girl along the way, her fears about South Africa in the wake of unrest, riots and looting, the family’s time in lockdown during the covid pandemic and their emigration journey which was hampered by numerous delays.
Graham Dickason returned to South Africa after his children died and gave evidence from his home in Pretoria via audio-visual link.
He revealed in court he has travelled to New Zealand once this year and spent time at Hillmorton with his wife.
Two of his sisters have made the trip to Christchurch from their homes overseas to attend the trial.
Dickason’s parents are also in Christchurch and have been in the courtroom every day, leaving just once when the pathologist took the stand to describe the children’s fatal injuries.
Herald senior reporter Anna Leask has been at the trial and recaps here what the jury has heard so far.
The trial begins and for the first time, the details of the alleged murders can be published.
The court hears that 20 minutes after her husband Graham left for a work function Lauren Anne Dickason gathered her three daughters in a bedroom and told them they were going to make necklaces. She then tried to asphyxiate them using cable ties.
She was not successful so smothered the children to death one by one using handtowels. She then tucked them all into their beds, covering their faces, and tried to take her own life. Her husband arrived home to find the children dead just before 10pm.
The Crown and defence both outline their cases for the jury. More detail on each side can be found below.
The jury are played a video of Graham Dickason’s interview with police during which he describes coming home to find the children dead and the aftermath.
He also speaks about the family’s life before the alleged murders and describes his wife’s parenting and mental health struggles.
Graham Dickason then gives further evidence live in court - via audio-visual link from South Africa where he returned after the tragedy.
Graham Dickason gives a full day of evidence including cross-examination by the defence.
It is revealed in his evidence there were three occasions before the alleged murders where Dickason told him she’d had thoughts about harming the children.
Today the jury hear from police and paramedics who attended the scene of the alleged triple murder - and from a couple who rushed to the scene after getting a frantic call from Graham Dickason.
Evidence is also given by colleagues of Graham Dickason who had just started work as an orthopaedic surgeon at Timaru Hospital, and their wives; and a group of school mums who met and interacted with Dickason in the lead-up to her killing the girls.
Teachers at the girls’ school recalled their contact and conversations with the Dickasons and shared details of Liané, Karla and Maya in the classroom.
Hundreds of messages sent and received by Dickason were then read to the jury - in which she vents about her children and husband and talks about “murdering” the girls.
Further messages retrieved from Dickason’s phone are read to the jury.
The defence then introduces its own cache of messages which it says portray the accused very differently.
Lauren Dickason’s interview with police is played in court - the first time the accused has been heard confessing to killing her children.
In the hour-long video, a tearful Dickason describes in detail how she killed the girls.
The Crown completes its case and the defence opens by addressing the jury.
Lawyer Anne Toohey said Dickason’s 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 decided to kill herself and she felt that they were all better off dead.”
The jury then heard from Dickason’s mother and another close family member.
Lauren Dickason’s last words to her daughters before she killed them were revealed in evidence given by Dr Susan Hatters-Friedman - a global expert on forensic and reproductive psychiatry.
The expert explained at length to the jury all the information she had considered to come to a formal conclusion about Dickason’s mental state at the time of the killing.
Hatters-Friedman gave her formal opinion on Dickason, saying the case was a clear example of an altruistic motive - where a parent kills “out of love” rather than out of anger or hate.
She said Dickason was “severely depressed and had developed psychotic thinking”.
“It is my opinion that at the time of her alleged offending Lauren Dickason was labouring under a disease of the mind to such an extent that it rendered her incapable of knowing that the act was morally wrong. She conceptualised that [killing the children] was the right thing to do.”
Crown Prosecutor Andrew McRae then began his cross-examination, which will continue on Monday.
It may take a full week for them to complete their testimony.
After that, the Crown and defence will give closing addresses and Justice Cameron Mander will deliver a lengthy summing up of the entire case for the jury.
They will then be sent to begin deliberating.
The jury is made up of four men and eight women.
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 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,” said 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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