Re Thaiday

[2017] QMHC 1

[2017] QMHC 1

MENTAL HEALTH COURT

DALTON J

DR F.T. VARGHESE
and DR C. GRAY, assisting

Court Proceeding No. 0241 of 2015

REFERENCE BY THE DIRECTOR OF MENTAL HEALTH
IN RESPECT OF RAINA MERSANE INA THAIDAY

BRISBANE

2.30 PM, THURSDAY, 6 APRIL 2017

REASONS FOR FINDING

HER HONOUR:   This is a reference in relation to Raina Thaiday, who was born on the 26^th of February 1977.  She is charged with eight counts of murder dating from the 19^th of December 2014 at a time when she was 37.  The victims were seven of her children and a niece. 

I have a report from Dr Voita pursuant to section 238 of the Act dated the 28^th of September 2015, and I have an update report from Dr Voita dated the 5^th of April 2017.  Dr Voita has been Ms Thaiday’s treating psychiatrist from very shortly, that is, four days, after these events. 

Dr Voita gives the history of how this offending was brought to the attention of police.  Police were alerted by a triple O call from one of Mrs Thaiday’s adult children, her son.  When they arrived at the house, they found Mrs Thaiday on the verandah of her home with about 35 self-inflicted knife wounds, which included a punctured lung.  Mrs Thaiday’s children and her niece were found inside the house.  All had been stabbed.  Mrs Thaiday admitted that it was she who had killed them to police really as soon as police arrived, and I think it is one of the features of this case that right from that first contact, Mrs Thaiday has always acknowledged what she has done, and she has given I think an honest and consistent account of herself, as I say, really from that first contact.

The police arrested her and took her to Cairns Base Hospital.  The information which they gathered in the immediate aftermath was that Mrs Thaiday had been agitated the night before.  She has been out in the street and walking up and down in front of her home.  The thing that seemed to be particularly upsetting her at that time was that she had allowed one of her children and a godchild who lived in the house to go out shopping on the condition that they return by 10 o’clock, but the children had not returned, and it is clear that Mrs Thaiday was terribly distressed and terribly agitated about this.  She was worried for the children’s safety, and she was also concerned that they had disobeyed her.

One of the pieces of evidence is a telephone call that Mrs Thaiday made to police demanding, really, that they find her children and bring them home.  It is Dr van de Hoef I think in one of her reports who says that you can see and hear in this phone call that Mrs Thaiday is indeed mentally unwell at the time she made that call.  As well as that, there were reports from neighbours or from friends that as she was walking up and down the street in front of her house. Mrs Thaiday, whether talking to herself in the street, or talking on the phone, was saying things that, with the benefit of hindsight, are clearly psychotic.  She was saying things like, “I am the chosen one.  I have the power to kill people and to curse people.  You hurt my kids, I hurt them first.  You stab my kids, I stab them first.  If you kill them, I will kill them.” 

Mrs Thaiday’s daughter returned home late, about 1.30 am, and I think it is fair to say she remained agitated about that issue and about the one child who still had not returned home, and when she was spoken to by police at the hospital, that is what Mrs Thaiday told them.  She told them how anxious she had been about the two

missing girls, and she said that the next morning, to use her words, something got to her.  In this state, she killed the family’s pet duck, and then she moved on tragically to kill her seven children and her niece. 

When explaining that to police at the hospital, Mrs Thaiday said things which really showed that she was very ill.  She said, Papa God came to her and gave her the key.  She said inconsistent things.  She said that she had to kill her children to save them.  She said she did not mean to do it, and she acknowledged that there would be a lot of hatred towards her because of what she had done, but she said she knew it was right.  She explained her own wounds, and in particular the punctured lung, by saying that she had tried to stab herself in the heart for what she had done. 

Dr Voita goes on really to talk about Mrs Thaiday’s history.  She is a lady of Torres Strait Island descent.  She was adopted as child by a relative, and she described to Dr van de Hoef and Dr Grant I think in particular that she had a very close family and a happy childhood on Darnley Island.  I think she spoke particularly to Dr Voita and Dr van de Hoef in saying that her children were the things that had given her the most happiness in life. 

She had no criminal history and she had had no psychiatric history;  that is, she had not been in contact with mental health services at all through her life.  Dr van de Hoef notes that when she made investigations into Ms Thaiday’s history, she found that there had been incidents in her past which may have been something like the psychosis she experienced at the time of the killing, and one of those included a fairly serious suicide attempt.  But, as I say, there was nothing in the past - here was no contact with mental health services.

Immediately after Mrs Thaiday was hospitalised at the Cairns Base Hospital, she was noted to have religious delusions.  As I think the doctors explain in their reports, and Dr van de Hoef explained in her evidence before the Court today, these were not normal religious ideas that fitted within, say, a set of Christian beliefs, or even any other set of cultural or Indigenous beliefs.  They were ideas that were overly religious or confused, exaggerated religious ideas.  So they were not just religious beliefs;  they were religious delusions.  In particular, Mrs Thaiday expressed a great concern that there were evil spirits on her street and in her house.  She was suspicious of the doctors who were trying to assist her, and thought that they were persecuting her.  She also continued to express the view that she was special.  She referred to herself, for example, as “the anointed one”. 

The diagnosis at hospital was that she had a psychosis.  She had a marked formal thought disorder.  She was placed on an involuntary treatment order, and really she remained in much the same condition as this at the Cairns Base Hospital, and she was soon after taken to Brisbane and has been there ever since at the secure unit at The Park. 

It was evident to police talking to those people close to Ms Thaiday that there had been a marked change in her behaviour recently before the killings.  Mr Gavin Wiley told police that her behaviour had changed a lot over the last four weeks.  She had

become overly religious and she had objected to his smoking cannabis in the house notwithstanding that she and he had been in the habit of smoking cannabis before this.  Ms Thaiday’s adult son said the same thing although in different words.  He said that she seemed very stressed and very serious in the week before the killing.  She was not sleeping and she spent a lot of time lecturing him about God.  She also made other strange comments, saying to him that she was not afraid of the government.  At other times, she would be crying and distressed.  Mrs Thaiday’s adult daughter also reports similar things that she had noted in her contact by telephone with Mrs Thaiday in the time before the killing.

After Mrs Thaiday was transferred to The Park high secure unit on the 24^th of December, it became evident that she was preoccupied with these religious delusions.  It also became evident that she was very distressed and remorseful about what had happened to the point that she was really quite suicidal.  And this state of both psychosis and having religious delusions, but also being distressed continued, really, right up until July of the next year notwithstanding that the doctor treating her, Dr Voita, tried several different anti-psychotic medications to see if they could alleviate her illness.

Over time, Mrs Thaiday was able to give Dr Voita a clearer account of her state of mind at about the time of the killings.  She described that she had had a big clean up of the house and yard in the week before the offending.  And that is true, and it comes from witness statements that the police gathered.  It was not a normal spring clean.  All the furniture from the house was taken outside and put in the yard.  And inside the house was cleaned in a most unusual way, including scrubbing the ceilings and the walls.  And a lot of Mrs Thaiday’s possessions were thrown away and a lot of them were quite valuable possessions that she threw away at this time. 

She spoke to Dr Voita about wanting to clean the house and saying that she wanted to teach her children the things that her mother had taught her.  And she felt some great distress associated with these ideas.  She remembered encouraging the children in religious activities like singing and watching religious videos. 

She explained again to Dr Voita how distressed she had been when her eldest daughter and her niece and godchild had gone out shopping and did not return at 10 pm when they should have.  She explained that she slept outside on a mattress which had been taken out as part of the cleaning of the house.  She slept outside with her youngest daughter.  That she woke very early and she was still worried, and that she walked up and down and yelling out.  She had enough insight by then to say that the things she was saying were, in her words, “talking silly”.

She remembers that in the early morning she chastened some boys in the neighbourhood who she thought were misbehaving.  She was carrying a stick and a bicycle chain.  She said at this time she was hearing voices, including hearing a dove’s voice. 

She remembered that in the weeks before the killings, she was praying and crying and waking up early in the morning.  She remembered believing she was very special

– that she was somehow the key to the end of the world.  She remembers also that  she had persecutory ideas about the government. 

Dr Voita’s conclusion from what she saw of Mrs Thaiday, but also the information that she received from the police investigation, was that at the time of the killing, Mrs Thaiday was suffering from a mental illness, paranoid schizophrenia, and that she had no capacity to know what she was doing was wrong.  In fact, to her way of thinking at that time, what she was doing was the best thing she could do for her children;  she was trying to save them.  Dr Voita also thought that Mrs Thaiday had no ability to control her own actions at the time of the killings. 

Dr Voita looked at the question of intoxication, and I will say something about that.  Mrs Thaiday gave a history of the use of cannabis since she was in grade 9 at school.  And I think all the psychiatrists thought that it is likely that it is this long-term use of cannabis that caused the mental illness schizophrenia to emerge.  As Dr Voita explained in her evidence – and Dr Phillips, too – the illness began to emerge probably one or two months before the killings and when it emerged, it took the form of this concern with religion and with cleansing.  As part of that, Mrs Thaiday stopped using cannabis and stopped using alcohol because she was trying to live her life in accordance with these new values which were preoccupying her. 

So it seems that at least a month before the killings, she stopped using cannabis.  This is what she says, but it is also what other people say, because she was very concerned that other people not use cannabis, either, either in her house or sometimes in her neighbourhood.  So I think there is objective evidence of that, as well.

So notwithstanding that probably that long history of using cannabis caused the schizophrenia to develop, there is no evidence that Mrs Thaiday was intoxicated with cannabis or with alcohol or with any other drug at the time of the killing. 

Some blood and some urine were taken at the Cairns Base Hospital soon after her arrival.  There was no indication of any alcohol.  There was some morphine, but that was because doctors had given her morphine for her own injuries.  There were some traces of cannabis in these drug screens, but, as Dr Phillips explained and Dr Voita did, too, if you have been using cannabis for such a long time as Mrs Thaiday had, itis absorbed into the tissues of the body and leaches out slowly for months after use ceases.  So the fact that there were some traces of cannabis in the toxicology screens does not mean that Mrs Thaiday was intoxicated with cannabis at the time of the killing.

Dr Voita was the treating doctor for Mrs Thaiday.  As well as her report, I have three reports from independent psychiatrists. 

The first of those is Dr van de Hoef.  Her report is dated the 5^th of November 2016. and she gave evidence today.  She received from Mrs Thaiday a very similar history of poor sleep, poor appetite and weight loss, along with paranoia and religious preoccupation in the weeks before the killing.  Mrs Thaiday described the huge clean of the house and the washing of the walls and ceilings to Dr van de Hoef.  She

explained that all of the furniture had been moved outside and that the family slept outside so that the house could dry from the cleaning she had given it.  She told the same story to Dr van de Hoef about her anxiety re the girls staying out.  She explained how she had had trouble sleeping because of that and had not much sleep.  She explained the same history in relation to killing the family pet before moving on to kill the children.

Dr van de Hoef’s report gives a very detailed account of information from the neighbours, from the friends and from the relatives of this lady, and there is a remarkably consistent account of behaviour that is quite out of character in the weeks before this offending. Dr van de Hoef goes through this, as I say, in a very detailed way.  She gives dozens of instances.  And if I could say this:  there has been a very thorough police investigation, and then I think a very thorough psychiatric investigation, which is summarised in Dr van de Hoef’s report.  Altogether, it amounts to a very convincing body of evidence that Mrs Thaiday was psychotic at the time of the killing. 

Like Dr Voita, she comes to the diagnosis of schizophrenia and believes that Mrs Thaiday did not have the capacity to know she ought not do the acts or to control herself when she did them.

I have a report from Dr Grant, who is a very experienced psychiatrist.  He is an independent psychiatrist rather than a treating psychiatrist.  It is dated the 17^th of December 2016.  Dr Grant was unable to give evidence today. 

By the time Dr Grant saw Mrs Thaiday, she was much improved, I think, in her mental state, although still not entirely well.  She gave him a consistent account to the accounts she had given to the other psychiatrists.  He also gives a very detailed description of all the information that the police obtained from family, friends and neighbours, and comes to the conclusion that Mrs Thaiday was clearly psychotic in the weeks before the killing. 

He diagnoses a severe psychosis at the time of the offending, and he, like Dr Phillips, thinks it had been developing probably for longer than a month;  he says probably one or two months.  He also notes something which my assisting psychiatrist Dr Varghese took up with Dr Voita, that this illness seemed to have some affective features, and in particular the cleaning of the house to such a great extent falls into that category. 

Dr Grant thought that Mrs Thaiday was deprived of the capacity to know she ought not do the act or acts involved in killing the children, and that she was deprived of the capacity to control herself at the time. 

The last report I have is a report from Dr Phillips, 28 February 2017.  Dr Phillips gave evidence today.  It is a long and thorough report.  Again, it contains a great deal of information from other people:  family, friends; not just Mrs Thaiday’s own account.  The account of all these people, including Mrs Thaiday, is consistent with what I have already described. 

Dr Phillips thought that Mrs Thaiday had schizophrenia for at least one or two months, she said in evidence today perhaps three months, before the killing.  Like the other doctors, she thought that she was deprived of the capacity to control herself and the capacity to know that she ought not do the act.

In those circumstances, then, the defence of insanity under our criminal law is made out, and my findings will be in relation to all the offences that Mrs Thaiday was of unsound mind. 

It is necessary that I make a forensic order.  These are very serious offences and particularly I think the advice from Dr Varghese highlights this.  Mrs Thaiday suffers from a very serious illness.  It is necessary to make a forensic order for the safety of the community, for the treatment of Mrs Thaiday, and indeed for Mrs Thaiday’s own safety.  If there were not some such order, she would not take medication, for she still is not well enough to understand her illness and the need for medication.  Without medication, she would became even more ill than she currently is, and she would become a risk of violence to herself and to others, and I note in that regard that even in hospital there have been times when she has had thoughts of killing other patients.  So it is certainly very necessary that there be a forensic order.

The forensic order will allow Mrs Thaiday to have escorted leave on the grounds of the hospital where she is.  Questioning from my assisting psychiatrist Dr Gray really went to whether or not there were acceptable risks associated with that.  I think that the risks associated with that are acceptable.  So I will make orders in terms of the drafts you handed up, Mr Hamlyn-Harris.

Can I just say in conclusion that this matter has proceeded as an uncontested matter:  that is, all the evidence from Dr Voita, the treating psychiatrist, from the three independent psychiatrists and from my two assisting psychiatrists is all to the same effect:  that is, that Mrs Thaiday had a mental illness that deprived her of capacity at the time of the killing;  she is entitled to the defence of unsoundness of mind.  There is just no doubt about that on the evidence, and there is no doubt about the legal conclusion that flows from that. 

I will acknowledge what Dr Varghese said in his advice to me, that in terms of an illness, this is the worst schizophrenia gets, and, of course, one of the most serious results from such an illness - one of the most serious killings that he is aware of.  So I certainly acknowledge that. 

I also want to acknowledge Mrs Thaiday’s relatives and the relatives of the children, and friends in Court today, and I want in a formal way to acknowledge the tragedy of the loss of these eight young lives.

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