Warning - This story contains distressing details that may upset some readers.
The interview police conducted with Lauren Dickason after she killed her three children has been played to a jury at the High Court in Christchurch.
It's the second week of her trial. The mother denies murdering her children in September 2021, and is using the defences of insanity and infanticide.
The interview was carried out at 4.30pm the day after the killings, when Lauren Dickason was released from hospital. It ran for just over an hour.
Detective Michael Kneebone conducted the interview, and the footage shows Lauren Dickason nodding in reply to his statements about the process.
While being questioned, she was sitting under a blue blanket with her arms wrapped around herself. Throughout the interview, she was often distraught and hard to understand.
She began by giving a detailed background about their stressful experiences with immigration and Covid-19, finishing by saying, “I’ve had the kids around me 24/7 with no break, and um, it just got too overwhelming.”
“With the new visa thing that came through yesterday, I just, I see no hope for us here in the future.”
The detective then asked her to talk about what had happened the night before.
Crying, Lauren Dickason replied, “I, basically, the kids were being wild again, jumping on the couches, not listening to what I’m trying to tell them.
“I made them all go lie in the bedroom so that they were together, but during the end I basically had to suffocate them.”
Throughout the interview the detective repeatedly tells Lauren she’s doing well.
She explained, almost inaudibly through tears, that after she killed the girls, she put them into bed and just tucked them up.
In the interview the mother reveals what happened moments before her children died. (Source: 1News)
Kneebone asked her, “Is this something you’ve been thinking about for a while, Lauren?”
She replied, “I’ve been thinking about it yeah, to try and find a way to ease the pressure."
He asked her if she had those thoughts in South Africa, or if it was just after arriving in New Zealand.
“When did those kind of ideas come into your head?”
She replied, “The whole immigration process finally kicked off like eight or nine weeks ago, when the visas came through. So I managed to brush them aside and just be like, unimportant, so now I’ve got three dead kids.”
The detective again asked about her previous thoughts, “Have you actually thought about this kind of thing before? Have you actually thought about hurting your kids before or…?”
She replied, “Not to the degree of what happened last night, no… last night something just triggered me and I just, just the end.”
The interviewer asked her to explain what happened after her husband Graham Dickason left at 7pm that night. He was attending a work function.
She told him the kids started with "their usual hijinks", saying they were out of control.
"They don’t listen to me at all," she said. "I think that’s one thing lockdown has taught me – I don’t know my kids at all."
"You think you’re going to move to another town and things are going to be different, but it brings up a whole lot of new problems."
She explained she went in the garage looking for "something that would work".
The officer replied, “And when you went in you told the kids that you were making, doing necklaces, is that right?” She nodded her head.
Lauren Dickason was asked about the girls' reactions to what she was doing to them.
"Were they saying anything to you, Lauren?" She replied, “Not the two little ones, but 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 said, "The first twin (Karla) was being really, really horrible to me lately... that’s why I did her first."
The detective asked, “When you’d finished, Lauren, did you know that they’d passed away?” She nods. “Did you check for any vital signs?”
“I listened for their hearts and pulses,” she said, and then she told him, “I decided to do something to myself."
She told the officer she took some medication. Crying, she said, “I wanted to die.”
The detective said, “I kind of get the impression, Lauren, that you thought that moving to New Zealand was going to be the ‘fix it’, would that be fair to say?” She nodded.
She talked about how she missed being able to work after she had the children, saying, “I miss the alone time and just having time alone, for me.”
Kneebone asked her to talk about the girls' personalities.
“Liané is a dreamer. She’s always thinking of some weird and wonderful plan or experiment or magic potion... but doesn’t have ears.”
The detective asked, “Doesn’t listen?” She replied, “Not at all, and very lovable little girl.”
“Karla is the first twin… she’s a real little firecracker, she has got such a temper… and it scares me and it scares her dad.
“Maya’s a fruitcake, she just laughs and smiles at everybody. She’s a real happy-go-lucky but also experiencing the terrible twos right now.”
She continued, “Ever since they were born, mums always feel this instantaneous love for their children and I never really experienced it with my kids, like I don’t know what people are talking about... and then I think there was something wrong with me for not feeling that and I did my best that I could... they definitely preferred their dad over me.”
Later in the interview, Lauren Dickason said, “What I’ve done now is irreversible”.
Dickason told the officer the day she killed her girls, was the first day she’d had alone time for four months and she had crawled into bed with a hot water bottle to process everything that had happened. She said when she picked the twins up from preschool, Karla threw a huge tantrum in the car.
She said she had given the girls dinner, they’d settled in front of the TV, but when her husband left they started their hijinks “and that’s when I just couldn’t anymore”.
“I was so tired, screaming, I was saying no.”
Before the interview was played, another officer involved in arranging the interview was questioned in court.
Defence lawyer Kerryn Beaton asked her, “What steps did the police as an organisation, you specifically, take to make sure that she was actually in a fit state to be able to participate in an interview?”
She replied, “I have relied on the doctor who's said she is cleared, medically cleared and was comfortable she could be spoken with. I also, when I first spoke with her, obviously observed how she presented and from my opinion, and I'm not a doctor, but she was fully cognitive, she was engaged, she was polite – there was nothing that caused me concern.”
Beaton told the witness that an on-call psychiatrist assessed the accused on Saturday morning, the day after the interview. In their notes, they wrote, “Initial impression on brief assessment, depression severe with possible psychosis… will need further longitudinal assessment to verify or otherwise, as in acute shock”.
She asked the officer is she knew about that assessment. She said no.
“There was nothing in the way she presented that made me think she was not suitable to speak with.”
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