On December 19th, 2014 Raina Thaiday stabbed eight children to death on 34 Murray Street, Manoora in the Cairns region of Australia. Of the eight children, Thaiday killed seven were her own while the eighth was her niece.
Nobody had been prepared for such a drastic action from the young mother, thirty-seven years old at the time. Mersaine Warria, as she was also known, was a loving parent according to her neighbors. She took pride in her children and cared for them. That is why many people could not understand why she had one day decided on killing the children, aged between two and fourteen years.
The Precursors
According to one psychiatrist named Dr. Pamela van de Hoef, Thaiday had had no prior records of mental illnesses before the heinous incident. “However, she had undergone a lot of stress, and maybe they instigated the incident,” van de Hoef said. Several people who lived around Thaiday said that a few weeks before the occurrence, Thaiday’s behavior changed. In one case, Thaiday was a heavy cannabis user. Days before she turned violent, she quit all forms of drugs. Next, Thaiday began ‘cleansing’ her house. Witnesses report that she put her family’s belongings outside the house before ‘cleaning the house from top to bottom.’ Also, Thaiday took an undue interest in religion and the apocalypse. She went from church to church seeking answers.
Experts in psychiatry agreed that these were signs that Thaiday had developed what they called ‘apocalyptic delusions.’ One of the psychiatrists assigned to the case, Dr. Frank Varghese, stated that Thaiday’s precursors indicated that she had ‘one of the worst cases of delusional schizophrenia’ he had ever witnessed.
A Fateful Day
Thaiday seemed convinced that on that December day the world was coming to an end. Those who saw her then said she was ranting about killing her children before they suffered a worse fate. To make matters worse, Thaiday’s fear of the apocalypse was compounded with two of her daughters being out past curfew on that day. Thaiday tried calling the police to find the children and was frantic by the time the two girls arrived.
According to Dr van de Hoef, these events may have been the tipping point for Thaiday. “It added to her belief that something wrong would happen that day, so she had to cleanse her family,” the psychiatrist remarked. Another psychiatrist, Dr. Angela Voita, stated that Thaiday had delusions that she believed in so much they were unshaken. “She believed she was the chosen one and thought a dove call she had heard on that day signaled that she was to cleanse her family,” said another psychiatrist.
Thaiday did not realize what she was doing when she killed the children or stabbed herself 35 times was the consensus among the psychiatrists. Judge Jean Dalton of the Mental Health Court agreed, and sentenced her indefinitely to mandatory treatment at Park Center for Mental health, Brisbane for ‘her wellbeing.’
The scene where the killing took place has since been converted to a memorial park to remember the eight children the community lost on that day.
