By Alison Horwood
At 9 pm on June 5 last year, Tania Tokona took two puffs on a joint and told her husband, Moses Matekino: "I'll take the kids for a ride."
She bundled young Alexandria, Winiata and Simon into the car and backed from the driveway of their Tirau home.
After picking up a Bible and a copy of her whakapapa (family tree) from a local kaumatua, she took the children 5km to a family grave site near Paparamu Marae.
She parked the car and trudged with the children up the steep hill to the urupa, where they prayed together.
"I was scared the evil spirits would get my babies," she would later tell psychiatrists.
She gathered the children to her and they huddled under wooden planks near a grave and fell asleep. The following morning, Tokona woke to "feel a presence."
She picked up her slumbering baby, Simon, aged 18 months, and stabbed him several times in the throat and chest with scissors she had taken with her.
He died of blood loss after his carotid artery and jugular were severed.
The 30-year-old then grabbed Winiata, aged 3, and did the same. Cuts to his right hand may mean he tried to defend himself. Pathologists say he suffocated on his own blood and mucus.
"I knew it was wrong but I couldn't stop," Tokona said later. "I used the scissors to do it to them. The ghosts wanted my babies. They wanted my babies bad."
After putting the bodies into the boot of her car, she strapped Alexandria, aged 2, into a carseat and gave her a bottle. No one knows why her only daughter was spared.
The killings took place two days after Tokona failed to keep an appointment with a psychiatrist.
Yesterday, Tokona was acquitted of the infanticide of her children by reason of insanity.
In the High Court at Wanganui, Justice Doogue told Tokona that she would be detained as a special patient under the Mental Health (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Act 1992.
Tokona would not be released until she was fit to go back into the community, he said.
She is being held at Porirua Hospital, but may move to a facility in the Waikato to be near her whanau.
Justice Doogue said reports from two psychiatrists showed Tokona suffered a disease of the mind from matters arising from childbirth.
After the killings, Tokona drove her babies nearly 250km to her ancestral land on the Whanganui River.
Psychiatrists believe that during the journey she began to realise the severity of what she had done and planned to commit suicide.
Hours later, hunters came across her car jack-knifed on Whanganui River Rd, its bonnet in a ditch.
Pushing it out, they saw the mumbling woman behind the wheel and the barefoot girl in the back, but did not see the blood-soaked nappy inside the car and the blood smears on the steering wheel, visor and door.
Further along the road, Tokona pulled over and left Alexandria on the side of the road.
She was found by local resident Huriana Whale.
Later, another local answered a knock on the door and found Tokona, soaking wet and wearing only her underwear and a raincoat.
"She said, 'I am cold, can I come in?'" the Fyfe family said in their statement to police.
She had a bump on her head and grazes on her stomach and told them she could not remember what had happened.
Police investigations would reveal that Tokona drove the car down a steep gully off River Rd. After wriggling from the wreck, she swam across the river to shore.
An hour later, police and fire officers, helped by locals, found the car and its gruesome contents.
In his police statement, farmer Don Wickham described finding the boys' bodies lying on a pair of their mother's blood-soaked jeans.
"I opened the boot and saw the legs of what appeared to be a small child. I put my hand in and touched the leg. It was still and cold.
"I thought there was only one, then I saw another child, the small one under the big one. They were lying close, with their heads together."
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