Akon Guode pleads guilty to killing children by driving into a lake

A MOTHER has pleaded guilty to murdering her one-year-old son and four-year-old twins after she crashed her car into a lake.

Akon Guode's who's car after it plunged into a lake. Picture: Mark Stewart

A MOTHER has pleaded guilty to murder after driving her three children into a lake.

Akon Guode, 37, on Monday pleaded guilty to murdering her one-year-old son and four-year-old twins, Hanger and Madit, 4, and attempting to murder her six-year-old daughter in 2015.

Guode has previously pleaded not guilty to murdering her three children when she crashed into Lake Gladman in Wyndham Vale in Melbourne’s southwest in 2015.

Four-year-old twins Madit and Hanger died after their mother drove them into a lake.

Last April she said in court she should not be blamed for her children’s death and claimed witchcraft could have been behind the fatal crash.

A key witness previously told the court Guode thought she was under a “spell” and she claimed her lover’s wife may have been behind it.

The court also heard in July last year a woman allegedly heard Guode admit she caused the death of her three children.

Akon Guode.

One-year-old Bol.

An investigator told the court he believed the car was driven in deliberately.

Victoria Police collision investigator and civil engineer Detective Senior Constable Robert Hay examined the scene of the crash and conducted several re-enactments with a similar vehicle. “From the drive-throughs of the collision scene, it is my opinion that the car could not and did not just drift off the roadway,” he said in a report tendered to Guode’s committal hearing.

He also said the tests demonstrated a driver would have to turn the steering wheel three times to get to the lake’s ballast area on the banks of Manor Lakes from the road next to it.

“During the drive-through it was demonstrated that there would be three turns of the steering wheel to get to the ballast area,” Sen-Constable Hay wrote.

He says his analysis of the scene shows Guode’s car veered off Manor Lakes Boulevard, passed between trees planted on the grass reserve and continued along the reserve’s concrete walking track.

It then travelled down the bank, striking large rocks, and landed in the lake.

— with AAP