Lisa Davies and Laura James, who followed in detail the Lauren Dickason trial's weeks of distressing evidence, explain what the jury based their decision on.
In September 2021, six-year old Liané and two-year-old twins Karla and Maya moved to Timaru with their parents from South Africa.
But within five days of arriving in their new town, their lives came to a violent end at the hands of their mother.
Lauren Dickason, 42, has now been found guilty of their murders after a trial at the High Court in Christchurch lasting more than four weeks.
The parents of Dickason, Wendy and Malcolm Fawkes, travelled to New Zealand to be present. They've sat in court every day.
Her husband's sisters were also here for the first three weeks of the trial.
The mother's lawyers argued she killed her children out of love, that she was suffering from postpartum depression and her mind was so disturbed at the time, she didn't realise her actions were morally wrong.
"The girls' deaths have nothing to do with anger and resentment and everything to do with what was clearly, a severe mental illness," Kerryn Beaton told the jury.
But the Crown said her actions were out of anger and a need for control.
"She ought to still be held fully responsible for what she's done," prosecutor Andrew McRae told the court.
New arrivals in New Zealand
The family of five arrived in Timaru on Saturday September 11 2021, after a fortnight in managed isolation.
They moved straight into a temporary rental property across the road from Timaru Hospital, where Graham was set to start work as an Orthopaedic surgeon a week later.
On September 16 the twins had their first day at preschool.
Their big sister spent her second day at Timaru Christian School, beginning the morning by giving her teacher a hug.
It was a seemingly ordinary day. Their mother collected them at the end of class and they made a family trip to the park. That night, the three girls were showered and put in their pyjamas before their father left home to attend a work function.
When he left, the children started acting up. Dickason called it their “usual high jinks".
Within 20 minutes she had gathered the girls in a bedroom, telling them they were going to make necklaces, before smothering them to death.
Her eldest, Liané, asked her why she was doing it. She told her “mummy's very sick and is going to die” and, “I can't leave you behind because I don't know who's going to look after you”.
Afterwards, she tucked each of her daughters’ bodies into bed, hugged them, and tried to take her own life.
Graham Dickason arrived home around nine o’clock. He was careful to be quiet, not wanting to wake the twins who slept in the room next to where he parked the car.
Inside, he found his wife looking “strange” and “wobbly”, “as if she wanted to fall over”.
“I asked her if she’s OK," Graham told police. "She didn’t really reply and I asked her, 'what’s the matter' and she told me 'it’s too late'."
The father’s two hour 50 minute evidential interview recorded the day after the girls were killed was played to the jury on the second day of the trial.
“I assumed the kids were sleeping,” he said. But it was then he suddenly realised something was wrong.
“I walked to Liané’s bed she was covered with the blanket. I lifted the blanket, her face was pale.”
He checked the twins and found the same, before running back to his wife and asking what she’d done.
“The last time I saw Lauren she was lying on her back with her eyes closed, wasn’t sure if she was alive or dead. I remember yelling and screaming and crying.”
He called his colleague, Mark Cvitanich, who he’d just been out with.
Cvitanich said: "I'd only been home for approximately five minutes when Graham phoned me. Graham was crying and it was hard to understand him. He was really distraught.”
He and his wife Cathy arrived to find Graham outside the house, sitting on the ground, his jacket over his head, howling.
'She's done this to hurt me'
Cathy Cvitanich told the court Graham Dickason said, "She's mad".
"She’s done this to hurt me," he told her, and, "it's my fault".
Cvitanich said she saw Lauren leaving the house, walking with emergency service personnel either side of her. She noticed "she was really wonky".
The paramedics who took her to the hospital said she was able to make her way to the ambulance with minimal assistance, and knew where she was going and why.
She denied having taken any substances.
Lauren Dickason recalled her next memory after the killings was waking up in hospital the next day.
“Hell”, she called it. She said she wasn’t supposed to have lived.
"I thought I got my family to safety and I was left behind," she said in a later interview.
“It was meant to be a happy ending for everyone, but it's not a happy ending," she told someone else.
In her police interview on September 17 she said: “Last night something just triggered me and I just, just the end."
The officer asked if the girls said anything to her at the time.
Replying, she said, “The oldest one was very angry and she wants to know why I’m doing this to them because I’m the best mum and she loves me".
She told the officer how she’d killed two-year-old twin Karla first, because she “was being really, really horrible to me lately”.
The mother's mental state at the time of the killings polarised experts, who gave evidence throughout the trial.
Collectively they spent more than 53 hours interviewing Dickason.
Forensic psychologist Ghazi Metoui, and forensic psychiatrists Dr Susan Hatters-Friedman and Dr Justin Barry-Walsh were the experts who gave evidence for the defence.
They all believed Dickason was eligible for both insanity and infanticide defences.
Hatters-Friedman has written a book called Family Murder about why parents kill their children.
She told the court Dickason “conceptualised the joint filicide suicide as saving the children, the right thing to do for her family. She perceived that she and the children would go to heaven together”.
Metoui spent 20 hours interviewing Dickason.
'I didn't want to hurt my children'
She told him: “I wanted to hold my kids and push them back inside me, everything was unravelling."
“I didn't want to hurt my children. I wanted them to be with me.”
Barry-Walsh observed Dickason continued to have a distorted view about the killings, even when he spoke to her earlier this year.
“She would do anything to change what happened but she still sometimes still feels she has saved the children from the pain of the world.”
But prosecutor Andrew McRae said the defence experts who submitted anger wasn't the motive "didn't look hard enough".
"They got caught accepting and not testing the account of Ms Dickason, which had been subject to the influence of her rationalising her acts in her head in treatment," he said in court.
“Those that spoke with her at an early time were able to crystallise an account from her, that the Crown say is the account closest as possible to the truth."
Dr Simone McLeavey was appointed by the court to assess the defendant and conducted her first interview just six days after the killings.
She felt the suggested altruistic motive didn’t add up.
“It seemed to be more a manifestation of control, of not wanting another mother, another woman to parent her children.”
In her opinion Dickason did not have the defence of infanticide or insanity available to her.
Dr Erik Monasterio came to the same conclusion.
“The defendant did not give any indication that she killed the children to protect them from harm, spare them suffering or because she felt they would be better off dead,” he said.
The court heard about Dickason's complex mental health history.
She told Monasterio that by age 15, she had "persistent mood and anxiety" issues and was diagnosed with depression.
The jury also learnt that over the course of several years, the mother went through a gruelling 16 cycles of IVF.
In 2013, their first baby Sarah died at just 18-weeks gestation, and was stillborn.
The following year, Liané was conceived via a donor egg and was born in September.
Lauren Dickason suffered depressive episodes after that pregnancy and then, later, after the births of the twins.
The court heard how there’d been three occasions Dickason had shared thoughts with her husband about harming the girls.
She had been getting help in South Africa, before moving to New Zealand.
Antidepressants
But in early 2021, she decided to cease taking medication for a period.
In one interview with Monasterio, she said she'd been feeling her best in 12 years.
He shared messages she'd sent, supporting that.
"For the first time in nine years I am not using antidepressants anymore. I cross-fit three times a week, and no longer binge eat. Was just a mindset shift," one said.
Another read: "I have been off antidepressants for three months already after 10 years."
Monasterio said Graham Dickason also noticed the difference in his wife.
"He reported that in the first half of 2021 the defendant's mood seemed consistently good and positive."
But by July, with Covid restrictions and riots in South Africa, where they were living, her mood plummeted again.
She reported feeling as though a big cloud hung over her.
"I felt ignored and unappreciated," she said.
Forensic examination of Dickason’s cellphone also revealed eight deleted Google searches for ways to end children's lives.
They included, "most effective overdose of children" and "drugs to overdose kids".
There were also searches for fatal levels or doses of various drugs and substances.
The searches took place in the month before the killings.
Messages the mother sent in the lead up to the killings were also uncovered.
One read, “I will murder them if everyone stays home again like with lockdown”.
In another text, she wrote: “I wish I could give them back and start over, I would decide differently.”
All this evidence played out in court over the course of the heartbreaking trial lasting a month. The jury of eight women and four men listened to it all throughout and, after deliberating at length over the differing expert opinions on Dickason's state of mind, they reached their conclusion on the killing of Dickason's three young daughters.
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