Murray St: ‘Crime scene so tragic you just couldn’t comprehend it’

The loss of eight children, killed in a west Cairns home by a woman suffering from drug-induced schizophrenia and paranoid delusions, left the country shaken to its very core.

THE bodies of eight children lay throughout a low-set home on Murray St in west Cairns.

Although it legally cannot be considered a crime, it is the worst mass killing that has ever occurred in the Far North.

Eight children, seven siblings and a cousin aged between two and 15 years, with their whole lives ahead of them slain by a woman meant to be their protector.

“It’s the most tragic circumstances that we… have ever investigated,” Cairns Criminal Investigation Branch Detective Sergeant Brad McLeish said.

Raina Thaiday.

Emergency crews had no idea what they were about to be confronted by on December 19, 2014.

“You can’t prepare yourself for something like that,” Det Sgt McLeish said.

“The image in my mind that I’ll never get rid of is a tiny little two-year-old laying there in a nappy among the laundry… obviously deceased.

“Another little boy, eight-year-old, tried to hide himself in the toilet and he’s got killed on the toilet.

“The crime scene was just so tragic, you just couldn’t comprehend it.”

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The most incomprehensible thing about this tragedy is the person responsible.

Mother to seven, aunt to one, Raina Thaiday had snapped that morning after hearing a dove chirp, believing it was a sign from God that she should stab the children to save them.

After she was done, she tried to stab herself in the heart and was found sitting on her veranda by her eldest son Lewis Warria.

Police at 34 Murray St, Cairns, where 8 children were found murdered. Photographer: Liam Kidston.

The then-20-year-old was the first on scene at 34 Murray St.

He had dropped by to see his family and had no way of knowing he was about to walk in on the aftermath of one of the country’s worst mass killings.

“They looked like they were asleep when it happened,” he had told the Cairns Post in 2014 when he first spoke about the tragedy.

“When I shut my eyes I can see their faces.”

Devastated 21-year-old Lewis Warria displays a portrait of five of the victims from the tragedy. Lewis was the first person to the discover the bodies of 7 younger brothers and sisters plus a cousin on December 19, 2014. PICTURE: JUSTIN BRIERTY

Det Sgt McLeish said scientific officers spent two days in the house, with up to 24 hours of that while the bodies of the children were still there, collecting evidence.

Thaiday was suffering from cannabis-induced schizophrenia and had paranoid delusions that the world was going to end.

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She was seen talking to herself saying “I am the chosen one” by neighbours.

“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’ll kill them.”

She believed she was the anointed one and the sound of a bird chirping had sent her over the edge.

“It’s hard to accept as an investigator that (someone) is mentally unstable, but she was psychotic,” Det Sgt McLeish said.

“Probably to this day cannot explain her actions.”

Thaiday’s drug-induce psychosis came about because she had been using cannabis for most her life but had stopped about a month before the killings.

A 2017 hearing in the Mental Health Court was told that her unshakeable false beliefs drove Thaiday to do what she did.

“She firmly and unshakeably believed, against evidence to the contrary, that she was in some way special, that she could personally and directly communicate with the almighty (and) that he was delivering message to her in various ways…,” psychiatrist Dr Palmela van den Hoef said.

“She believed at that time and for some days and weeks beforehand that the end of the world was coming, and she had to act…”

The house at 34 Murray St, Manoora, where eight children were killed, was demolished in 2015. Picture: Stewart McLean

Justice Jean Dalton found that Thaiday was of unsound mind and legally not responsible at the time she killed the eight children.

She has resided at the Park Centre for Mental Health at Wacol since her arrest and was in a psychotic state for nine months after the tragedy.

The Murray St home was razed to the ground in 2015.

Eight frangipani trees were planted in its place in memory of the eight innocent lives that had been taken.

Manoora Community Advisory Group member, Ono Kata and Torres Strait and Cape York elder, Pearson Wigness at the Murray Street memorial site where frangipani trees are planted in memory of the children. PHOTO: TONI CALDWELL

Originally published as Murray St: ‘Crime scene so tragic you just couldn’t comprehend it’