Forensic psychiatrist Dr Simone McLeavey was ordered by the court to assist in determining the issue of insanity, just two days after Lauren Dickason killed her three children.
The 42-year-old, who had just moved to New Zealand from South Africa when she killed them, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of her girls, Liane, Karla and Maya in Timaru in September 2021.
She's using the defences of insanity and infanticide.
McLeavey interviewed the accused five times before submitting her report on October 12 2021.
The interviews took eight hours in total, and she told the jury during those interviews she didn’t observe any features of psychosis.
Over the last three days the court has heard evidence from a forensic psychiatrist for the Crown, Dr Erik Monasterio, who interviewed murder accused Dickason four times over a total of nine hours.
He has told the jury that following his assessment he doesn’t believe the defences of insanity or infanticide were available to her.
McLeavey, who's also a Crown witness, is an expert on mentally disordered offenders.
She told the jury her first interview didn’t address the alleged offending, but her background. She said context is everything and part of it is a means of establishing rapport with the individual. A lot has been said about the traumatic nature of going through these interviews.
It was revealed earlier in the week that Dickason had done 53 hours of interviews with five forensic psychiatrists for the defence and the Crown.
McLeavey said “the defendant denied any emergent psychotic symptomatology... no well-systematised delusional belief system was elicited, no current positive psychotic symptoms endorsed on functional inquiry at the assessment interviews".
Crown prosecutor Shawn McManus asked “was there any delusions or psychotic symptoms obvious to you during the course of your interviews in your assessment?”
She replied that “over the course of my assessments I did not discern any evidence of psychotic symptomatology".
Dickason told the doctor in the days before the family left South Africa for New Zealand she “didn’t appreciate how bad things had got".
"I was in the throes of it. Graham sensed something was wrong and said we didn’t have to go, but I couldn’t communicate with him. It was my brain fog,” McLeavey said of Dickason's comments.
“In the days prior to departure the defendant described dread at the prospects of leaving South Africa."
She said she was "feeling the worst I had" and felt there was "no coming back".
"She disclosed morbid preoccupations, with thoughts "to do what I did" but emphatically denied any intent to enact such thinking," McLeavey said.
The doctor read from her report: ”The defendant confirmed for me that she had had thoughts of harm possibly, or killing the children but without any disclosed means or method by which that she would do so."
"So there was no reference either to suicidal thinking in that moment. The morbid preoccupation she clarified for me, were directed towards the children, to harm or kill.”
When they got to New Zealand she described their weeks in managed isolation as “like being in hell” and when they reached Timaru, she said her first impressions were not good.
Her eldest daughter, six-year-old Liane started school on September 15, and when she dropped her off she felt "all of the children seemed sad".
On the day of the killings “she denied believing the children to be 'possessed'", but told the forensic psychiatrist, “I didn't want to leave the children with Graham without a mum".
"I didn't want them raised by another mother. They didn't deserve that if Graham remarried."
She then described the order in which she killed her girls, “tending to Karla's first, admitting she was angry with her, then Liane and then Maya".
At one point Dickason recalled having an "out of body experience, like I was up above".
McLeavey said, "At no point in time did she reconsider what she was doing or contemplate stopping following through," explaining in their interview, "they would have known what I did".
“The defendant said that her motive for her suicide attempt was one of 'self-destruction' and the children's alleged killing was an extension of the suicidal act, the two were intertwined."
Lauren Dickason: Cross-examination of Crown psychiatrist continues
Dr Erik Monasterio previously told the court that after interviewing the defendant four times over a period of nine hours, he had determined the defence of insanity and the defence of infanticide were not available to her.
August 2, 2023
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"It was, as the defendant described it, an altruistic motive 'to save the children from suffering from me being such a bad mother'."
The forensic psychiatrist continues to give evidence, as the trial comes to the end of its third week.
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