To make it look like her daughter had ataxia, the woman overdosed the girl on medicine and filmed her in a drugged state so she could show it to doctors, Harborow said.
Her actions became even more serious with the birth of her son. She twice
suffocated her infant son and then used her phone to video him "as he lay lifeless, struggling to breathe", Harborow said.
The boy was subsequently taken out of her care as police investigated, but the woman still took an opportunity during a supervised visit to secretly feed him a button battery - common in electronics, such as toys - prosecutors said.
Numerous doctors and medical staff testified during the trial that the woman appeared unusually "cheerful and happy" on the many occasions she arrived with children she claimed were seriously ill.
She appeared to thrive on "the buzz of the emergency" and would spend her time socialising with other patients and hanging around the nurse's station, Harborow said.
To seemingly gain further sympathy and attention, the woman would then go home and "text everybody" and write posts on Facebook detailing her children's illnesses, he said.
He also said psychiatrists had been unable to agree that the mother had a debilitating anxiety that made her react in an over-protective way as her defence lawyer Susan Gray had claimed.
Ultimately, Harborow said, the woman would end up getting more attention than she envisaged as the police and now prosecutors accuse her of criminally neglecting her children.
• The woman in this story cannot be named or her picture shown by order of the High Court.
- NZN
