A ‘white witch’ mother accused of murdering her 16-month-old daughter has been found not guilty by reason of mental illness.
The 44-year-old’s little girl, known as ‘Astra’, hasn’t been seen since 2000 in the NSW Hunter Valley, when she lived at Scone.
Witnesses told the court the mother began suffering drug-induced hallucinations and started behaving strangely in the years before Astra’s birth, the ABC reported.
Friends said the woman began to suffer delusions about a motorbike-riding person named ‘wolfman’ and said she might need to sacrifice a baby girl.
A New South Wales woman accused of murdering her 16-month-old daughter has been found not guilty by reason of mental illness
‘It would always go back to the wolfman. It was always brought up,’ one former friend told the court.
Astra, born in August 1999 in NSW, was a ‘smiling, beautiful baby, always clean and well fed’ but as time went on her mother’s mental health was dramatically deteriorating.
She had previously spoken of having to slit a child’s throat for the ‘wolfman’ so she could go home with aliens and made delusional claims about her own mother and pedophiles.
When the toddler ‘disappeared’ just after her second Christmas, the woman claimed she was in the care of a couple who she wasn’t prepared to name or say where they were.
One person said the woman began to suffer delusions about the ‘wolfman’ and said she might need to sacrifice a baby girl
But on Friday, the day after what would have been Astra’s 18th birthday, Justice Robert Allan Hulme concluded that the mother killed her toddler daughter.
However, he found her not guilty of murder after accepting unanimous psychiatric evidence she was suffering from a form of schizophrenia at the time and did not know what she was doing was wrong.
The woman, who can’t be named for legal reasons, pleaded not guilty in the Supreme Court in Newcastle to murdering her daughter, aged between 16 and 28 months, between December 25, 2000 and December 25, 2001 at an unknown place in NSW.
Justice Hulme referred to extensive police inquiries into the disappearance of the toddler – given the pseudonym Astra.
‘In all of the circumstances it would be astonishing if Astra was alive after having disappeared at an age when she was barely able to walk, with there being no evidence, independent of the accused, of her being alive in the following 16 years,’ he said.
Justice Hulme referred to extensive police inquiries into the disappearance of the toddler – given the pseudonym Astra
‘I am satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Astra is dead.’
He also concluded her death was caused by a deliberate act or omission of her mother.
‘I cannot determine what the act or omission was, but a charge of murder may be proved even in circumstances where the precise cause of death is not known.’
He referred to a considerable body of evidence ‘that before, during and after the time of Astra’s death the accused persisted with delusional and persecutory beliefs about various matters but particularly concerning her mother and Community Services’.
The New South Wales woman was arrested at her Evan Head home in 2016 (pictured)
Community Services staff had decided there were no concerns about the safety of the mother or daughter after a number of home visits, although she told them about her interest in white witch practices and that she had been a victim of ritualistic sexual abuse in her childhood.
‘With the benefit of hindsight, an eminent forensic psychiatrist described this missed opportunity for intervention as ‘tragic’,’ the judge said.
The psychiatrist noted that ‘despite unearthing evidence of acute mental illness, there’s been no intervention to initiate treatment whilst the child was still alive’.