Johannesburg - Lauren Anne Dickason was getting just two hours of sleep and had increasing feelings that she was a bad parent in the weeks leading up to her smothering her three children.
Dickason, 42, originally from Pretoria, was also sick of forcing her children to eat their vegetables and was experiencing a growing sense of hopelessness in the short time she and her family had lived in New Zealand.
Yesterday the High Court in Christchurch, New Zealand, heard testimony about her mental state as her defence argued she was not guilty of murder by reason of insanity.
The mother is charged with murdering her daughters ‒ Liane, 6, and twins Maya and Karla, 2.
The three girls were found dead by their father Graham on September 16, 2021, after returning from work to their Timaru home on New Zealand’s South Island.
Witness Dr Susan Hatters-Friedman told the court that soon after the murder, Dickason was admitted to a psychiatric unit where she presented with “severe melancholic depression”.
Media reported that Hatters-Friedman had spent ten hours interviewing Dickason and found that she had become preoccupied by her inability to be a good parent.
“I don’t want to have to force my kids to eat their vegetables… I didn’t want to feel like a bad parent anymore,” she is reported to have told Hatters-Friedman during the interview.
Dickason’s defence is arguing that severe post-partum depression left her believing that her only option was to kill her children and herself.
It was an action defence lawyer Anne Toohey described as being taken out of love because she didn’t want her children to suffer from having such a bad mother.
Earlier in the week the court heard of the day Dickason killed her children.
She had smothered the girls about 20 minutes after her husband had left for a work function.
Dickason told police that she killed Karla first because she had been the worst behaved at the time. In the days before the killings, Dickason said, she was only getting two hours of sleep a night and had lost weight because of stress. The stress had been exacerbated by the family’s recent move to New Zealand.
She told the police that soon after she killed the girls, she climbed into bed with a hot water bottle.
The court also heard that Dickason was diagnosed with a major depressive disorder in 2015 and had experienced post-natal depression after the birth of her children. However in early 2021 she had stopped taking medication for the depression.
Earlier in the trial, which has been set down for three weeks, a police video was played that described what happened when Graham had returned home and found his dead children.
He told how he found his wife in a disorientated state and the three dead children tucked in bed with cable ties around their necks.
In his opening statement, Crown prosecutor Andrew McRae had outlined his argument that Dickason had snapped at her children misbehaving and had killed them in a “clinical manner”.
The trial continues.