Lauren Anne Dickason in the High Court at Christchurch on 17 July 2023. Photo: Pool / NZME/ George Heard
Warning: This story contains distressing content.
The first psychiatrist to formally interview Lauren Dickason believes the mother killed her children out of control, not love.
Dickason is on trial for the murder of her three young daughters, two-year-old twins, Karla and Maya, and six-year-old Liané, in Timaru in September 2021, but denies the charges.
Instead, her defence team is seeking a verdict of insanity and infanticide.
Prosecution witness, consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Simone McLeavey, assessed Dickason in the weeks after the deaths, in a series of interviews in September and October 2021.
McLeavey told the court Dickason said she killed her girls because she did not want them to suffer any more.
But the reasoning did not stack up for McLeavey, so she "drilled further" to try better understand Dickason's motive.
"The defendant did not disclose her suicidal preoccupations to her husband, i.e. she did not phone him. She had accompanying thoughts to harm the children in that moment as 'I didn't want to leave the children with Graham [her husband] without a mum. I didn't want them raised by another mother. They didn't deserve that if Graham remarried (beyond her intended suicide)'," she said.
Not wanting her children to have another mother figure in the event of her death was Dickason's primary concern, McLeavey believed.
"There was certainly no suggestion of infidelity, she was not of the opinion that her husband was having an affair and was likely to divorce her and move on and remarry. But she anticipated that if indeed she had suicided as she said she had intended, that the prospects of her husband remarrying and her children having another mother was an untenable proposition to her," she said.
McLeavey said Dickason told her it had felt like - on the night of 16 September, 2021 - her husband was "giving up" on parenting their children.
He had removed himself from the room where the girls were earlier in the day, with Dickason telling the psychiatrist she thought he was also finding dealing with the children on top of their move across the world during the pandemic "too much".
Graham Dickason also spoke with McLeavey over the phone in October 2021 and told her he thought they "had come through the bottleneck" of a difficult period and he "had no concerns for the safety of his wife and children".
He told the psychiatrist "I just don't understand how it came to this", because while he knew his wife leaned on him, she was a good wife and mother, and he thought she was making progress in managing her depression and anxiety.
Lauren Dickason denied having hallucinations or delusions leading up to and during the killing of her children in her assessment with McLeavey.
"She denied any unusual beliefs regarding her children, she denied any delusional ideation driving her intent, she denied believing the children to be 'possessed'. She denied specifically any religiosity and or a belief in 'resurrection or reincarnation'," she told the court.
Dickason explained to McLeavey she had "disconnected" from her historic Christian faith in the weeks leading up to the deaths.
"She denied any hallucinations in any sensory modality, e.g. no voices or visions in her ears or eyes only. She denied specifically hearing any voice or voices commanding her to act, with her alleged actions instead of her own volition."
Nightmares and flashbacks of the night did plague her in the weeks after her children's deaths, Dickason told McLeavey.
But the psychiatrist did not believe there were grounds for an insanity or infanticide verdict, she told the court.
McLeavey will continue to be cross-examined by the defence on Friday.
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