A judge on Wednesday found a woman guilty of killing her three children and sentenced her to 18 years imprisonment.
The convicted woman in New Zealand, Lauren Dickason, will begin her sentence at a mental health hospital for the triple killings, according to a Christchurch High Court official.
In a statement to local media after her sentencing, remorseful Lauren Dickason said, “I take responsibility for taking our three beautiful girls from this world.”
She said that with particular reference to her husband, identified simply as Graham
“I would like to take this opportunity to convey the deepest and most sincere remorse for the extreme pain and hurt caused to my children and my family by my actions,” she added.
Laueen Dickason, a South African woman, was found guilty last August on three counts of murder after she was said to have smothered her two-year-old twins Maya and Karla and first daughter Liane who was six years old.
The killings took place in September 2021 while her husband was out to dinner with colleagues in Tamaru, New Zealand.
He found the bodies of his children when he returned home.
The husband has since returned to South Africa from where the family had moved to New Zealand only a couple of weeks before the bloody act of his wife.
At a point during trial last year, Dickason admitted killing the girls but had pleaded infanticide, a defence in New Zealand for a mother blamed for the killing of her child if the balance of her mind was considered disturbed at the time of the killing.
The prosecution, however, contended that she fully knew what she did and knew that it was wrong while she was doing it.
A majority verdict by a jury of eight women and four men reportedly said Dickason was not insane at the time of the killings and was guilty of murder.
She, nonetheless, escaped life imprisonment, usually the penalty for murder in New Zealand.
Many women around the world have over time admitted to killing their own children, some of them advancing laughable reasons for the act.
Somewhere in England last year, a woman reportedly told a jury that she went into a rage and killed her two children because she did not want her husband to have the children.
Veronique John, 50, told Nottingham Crown Court that she stabbed her son Ethan John, 11, severally, and inflicted brain damage on her daughter Elizabeth John; after which she went for her estranged husband and almost also killed him.
The couple lived separately, as they had been having issues for a while, including a dispute over who should keep the children.
In Nigeria’s Kano city, a story emerged in 2020 about a mother who allegedly stabbed her children to death because her husband married a second wife.
It was established that she became mad with jealousy and set about eliminating her own children while the husband was having what he believed was a good time with his new wife in another house.
In Kaduna two years ago when one Faith Hassan was arrested by the Police for allegedly killing her one-year-old daughter, she said it was for a chance to marry her boyfriend.
The boyfriend, she said, did not want her to come to him with another man’s child.
She made the confession while crying out her heart, moaning that she did not realise what she was doing until her baby became a lifeless body.