Raina Thaiday: Mentally ill Cairns mother will not be prosecuted for killing eight children

Raina Thaiday will never face trial for killing eight children because she has cannabis-induced paranoid schizophrenia.

The Queensland Mental Health Court ruled that Raina Thaiday was insane at the time of the murders and could never be prosecuted.

Raina Thaiday will never face trial for killing seven of her children and her niece because she has been diagnosed with cannabis-induced paranoid schizophrenia and believed she was trying to save them from the end of the world.

Cairns woman Raina Mersane Ina Thaiday fatally stabbed the children, aged between two and 15, at her far north Queensland home on December 19, 2014, before attempting to stab herself through the heart.

Before the killings, Thaiday was psychotic, pacing the suburban street, saying: “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.”

The house at Murray Street, Manoora, where the children died.

In a decision of the Queensland Mental Health Court, published today, judge Jean Dalton ruled that Thaiday was insane at the time of the murders and could never be prosecuted.

Justice Dalton said Thaiday was still seriously ill and ordered she be kept medicated in hospital, with only “escorted leave” from the grounds allowed.

“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,” Justice Dalton found, adding that six psychiatrists had backed the decision.

“There is just no doubt about that on the evidence, and there is no doubt about the legal conclusion that flows from that.”

Justice Dalton’s judgment explores Thaiday’s history. At the time of the killings, she was 37, with no criminal history or no contact with mental health services. However, she may have experienced previous psychosis and had been suicidal in the past, it was found.

Thaiday — who grew up in the Torres Strait — was a long-term cannabis user, and psychiatrists who advised Justice Dalton found it was that heavy drug use that likely caused the schizophrenia to emerge. However, as the illness emerged a month or two before the killings, she stopped using cannabis and alcohol, and developed religious delusions.

She was not intoxicated at the time of the killings.

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When police arrived at Thaiday’s home, she immediately admitted what she had done. At hospital, she gave signs she was mentally ill.

“She said, Papa God came to her and gave her the key,” Justice Dalton found. “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.”

Floral tributes to the children left in Murray Street.