Three months after she killed her 3 children, mom Lauren Dickason still thought she did the right thing

Lauren Dickason was in the grips of such a deep depression that she was not only overwhelmed by viewing the world through an obsessively negative lens, she believed killing the children was morally correct at the time.

And on the three-month anniversary of her children's deaths, she told a forensic psychiatrist she still felt she had done the right thing, 1News.co.nz reports.

Liane, 6, and two-year-old twins Maya and Karla were killed in September 2021, at Timaru in New Zealand to which the South African family had relocated. The family had arrived in the town that week, after a fortnight in Covid-19 quarantine on arrival in the country.

During the trial in a Christchurch court, the prosecution has alleged the former Pretoria doctor was driven by anger and jealousy towards her children and acted with deliberate intent when she strangled and smothered them. Her lawyers are leading a defence of insanity and infanticide, calling witnesses to testify about her long-standing problems with her mental health, which worsened during the IVF treatment she needed to become pregnant, isolation of Covid-19 lockdowns and stress of emigration.

Forensic psychiatrist Justin Barry-Walsh is on the witness stand this week, and he believes that because of her depression, she wasn't capable of understanding her actions were wrong.

“She was unable to reason as to the moral wrongfulness of her actions with a reasonable degree of sense and composure, and beyond that would seem to have considered her actions morally correct.”

This was the case even three months after her children's deaths, he said.

By this point, she told Barry-Walsh, “the numbness had worn off” and she was “missing my girls so much”.

“She stated now she would do anything to change what happened but she still sometimes feels she has saved the children from the pain of the world.”

Waking up each morning was “like a kick in the guts, that she had no future and just wanted to die”.

He asked her whether she still felt she'd done the right thing. He said her response was, “the way that I am feeling, yes”.

“Despite this, she described feeling terrible guilt, which began about five weeks after she was hospitalised, when the period of numbness began to wear off and feelings started to come back. She described tearfully the level of distress she feels with 'all the hurt I have caused'.”

Barry-Walsh believed, because of her depression, she wasn't capable of understanding her actions were wrong.

“The weight of evidence is sufficient to sustain within the balance of probabilities the defence that Ms Dickason was not guilty by reason of insanity,” he said.

On the day of the killings, she told him she felt “so overwhelmed”, felt “the world was such a mess” and “wanted to die so badly”.

“I was not prepared to leave the kids ... didn’t want them to not have a mother, didn’t want to leave [husband] Graham with the burden.”

Barry-Walsh said: “She thought 'at least they are free of all the frustrations and the problems in the world'. She told me 'I still feel like it's a good thing they are free of that'.”

The NZ Herald reports he disagreed with other experts that she killed her children out of anger or a need to control her family.

“There is not enough evidence of the extraordinary level of anger required to act in such a way,” he said. “She didn’t just lash out ... in an appalling methodical way, she killed all three. This woman was depressed and she was getting more depressed and as she got more depressed she got to a position where she could not see any way of going on.

“She got to a position where she decided she had to commit suicide ... she also decided that her children would be better off dead and that was that apparent logic that drove her to commit this act.”

Barry-Walsh said if he had seen her the day of the killings and taken her history and considered her lack of support in New Zealand, he would have admitted her to a psychiatric ward.

“And if she declined treatment I would have thought she readily met the criteria for compulsory treatment under the Mental Health Act,’ he said.

Stuff media outlet reported the court heard during Barry-Walsh's testimony that after the children’s deaths, Graham Dickason wrote a letter to Lauren. He said he was struggling to understand what had happened, and why she did what she did.

Lauren's reply to Graham was that it was difficult to understand his lack of understanding, because he was by her side and witnessed everything they’d been through in the lead-up.

The court previously heard Dickason had told her husband, family members and friends about her feelings of wanting to “divorce” or harm the children before emigration, seeking help from a psychiatrist in Pretoria over these feelings. However, she went off the medications in early 2021 when she started feeling better.

This was not a good idea, Barry-Walsh said.

He also told the jury that her treatment “wasn't as good as it should have been, in my view”. He said medication is just one approach. “Psychological therapies would be another obvious one ... that's a good approach for an intelligent, motivated woman, like Ms Dickason.”

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