Mothers Who Murder (30 page)

After the fact Cikos showed genuine remorse and contrition, which were considered mitigating circumstances when it came to sentencing. He was sentenced to twenty-one years for each of the murders, to run concurrently, with a non-parole period of fifteen years and six months.
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Cikos was a man under stress, and it appears
the imminent arrival of the deadline by which he had been ordered to murder the other woman, together with months of physical and psychological abuse, pushed him too far and he snapped. Without considering the reason for the murders of the children, the only explanation for which appears to be the one Cikos gave himself – that is, he didn’t want to leave them without any parents once he went to prison – this case could be argued to be the result of battered woman’s syndrome.
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Although the majority of interpersonal and domestic violence is perpetuated by men against women, a significant number of men are assaulted by their female partner every year, with some studies suggesting somewhere around 18 per cent have experienced some form of domestic abuse since they were sixteen. We understand that sometimes women, after prolonged and sustained abuse, snap. Was that the case here? Or was he a man who just could not cope with the pressure on him to murder someone, felt trapped, and was incapable of finding another solution to his problem?

In 2004, thirty-six-year-old Steven Fraser was found guilty of the murder of his three children in 2001.
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His motive was apparently that he was scared he would lose contact with them after his estranged wife starting a new relationship. Fraser had a long history of psychiatric disturbance, which did affect him at the time of the murders as he was listed as ‘severely mentally disturbed’. However, his culpability was exacerbated by the fact that, in addition to his fear about losing contact, he also wanted to punish his ex-partner, Maria, and that the crimes were clearly premeditated.

Fraser’s relationship with his ex-partner had been troubled, and the couple had separated and reconciled on
a number of occasions. More than once during arguments, Fraser had told Maria that if she ever left him she would never see the children again and he also made unspecific threats of harming the children. Regardless, in late 1997 the couple separated, and Maria moved into a house in Chippendale, a small inner-city suburb of Sydney. Custody of the children was split, with Maria taking them for four days a week, Fraser the remaining three days, but the arrangement was flexible. For around fifteen months Fraser lived at the house in Chippendale with the rest of the family, and Maria at all times encouraged him to spend time with the children as she thought it was good for all of them.

In early 2001 Fraser moved out to live in a flat in Caringbah, a southern Sydney suburb, having told Maria that he did not intend to live with her again as he had never loved her. Relations between the couple appear to have deteriorated when Maria attempted to take the children abroad on holiday. Fraser blocked the trip, refusing to give his permission for the children to leave the country. This in turn led to Maria seeking to reduce his visitation rights. In July Maria began a relationship with another man, a situation that caused Fraser considerable distress. Following a confrontation at the Chippendale house about the relationship, Fraser took the children for an arranged visitation for the weekend of 18–19 August 2001. Maria never saw them alive again.

Fraser’s highly emotional state continued, and conversations with his mother over the weekend led her to become concerned. Eventually she called the police who attended the scene. When the police entered Fraser’s flat they found the children dead and Fraser in the bath in the process of
trying to commit suicide. Fraser had drugged his two sons (Jarrod aged four and Ryan aged five years) and daughter (Ashley, aged seven years) with sleeping tablets to try and ensure compliance, or at least to prevent them from fighting him, and then he drowned them in the bath. It didn’t work as planned in that the post-mortem on Ashley’s body revealed injuries that indicated that she had struggled violently against her father’s attempts to drown her, but he was eventually successful and murdered all three of his children in this fashion. Fraser then made a genuine, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt at suicide
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by taking a significant number of sleeping pills and then getting in the bath, thinking he would fall asleep and drown as well.

Fraser admitted killing his children, but made a plea of guilty of manslaughter as opposed to murder, based on the defence of substantial mental impairment.
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The Crown refused this plea, and the only decision the jury had to make was whether the defence demonstrated on the balance of probabilities that his culpability was diminished because of his psychological state at the time of the killings. Clearly, the jury did not accept his defence, as Fraser was found guilty of murder. For the murder of Ryan and Jarrod he was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison for each count, and for killing Ashley Fraser he received a term of twenty-five years. The non-parole period was set at twenty years.

It may seem harsh that the jury did not consider Fraser guilty of manslaughter as opposed to murder, but although he was severely psychologically disturbed at the time of the killings, there was clear evidence that retribution against his ex-partner Maria Fraser was at least part of his motive. Fraser clearly under the impression that
Maria Fraser would be the first person to enter the flat on the Monday morning, so before attempting suicide, he prepared the apartment to create what the court documents call ‘a horrifying spectacle for her benefit’.
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The children’s bodies appeared to have been laid out in such a way as to cause Fraser’s ex-partner the most distress, a ‘scene from her worst nightmare and one she would never forget’.

It didn’t work as Maria was not the first on the scene. Instead, that was the police. Strangely, the first sight that met the police officers’ eyes on entering the flat was a child’s toy, a monkey, hanging from a noose with a knife through its body. The hands had been removed and were lying on the floor, and tomato sauce had been used to indicate the entry and exit wounds in an attempt to make it look as if the toy was bleeding. Next Ryan’s body was found on a mattress in the lounge, and on the child’s face were written the words ‘I love you Ryan, RIP. XO’. The next body found was the other son, Jarrod, on the double bed in the master bedroom. Jarrod’s face had also been inscribed with a similar message to Ryan, and above the bed on the wall, Fraser had written ‘I’m not to be toyed with!’ Ashley’s body was in the second bedroom on the lower bunk. On the computer the offender had set the screen saver to display the message as soon as the PC was turned on: ‘… I always promised you that come what may, Ashley, Ryan, and Jarrod would be with me forever, always … always … with or without you’. Fraser was clearly a disturbed man when he murdered his children but the evidence suggests forward planning, and that revenge was at least part of the rationale for his crimes.

In the summer of 2002 Craig Andrew Merritt was
tried for the murder of his three children on 2 September 2001.
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The children were all very young at the time of their deaths; Jackson Merritt was six years old, Taylah Pringle was eleven months, and Mikaylah Merritt was eleven weeks old. All were Merritt’s biological children but each by a different mother. Merritt had custody of all three children for the weekend as they were scheduled to spend the time with Merritt and his family for Father’s Day. The children were all bathed, fed, and put to bed as normal. At some point, Mikaylah woke up and Merritt brought her out of the bedroom in which she had been sleeping; at this stage there was a disagreement between Merritt and his mother as to who should attend to the baby. This may have added to the offender’s distressed state of mind later, in that his lack of confidence in how to manage the baby led to increased feelings of insecurity as a father.

The offender had had a lot to drink, although how much is debated between family members. He then had a hostile exchange with his aunt on the telephone, again the focus of which was his children and the fact that they had three different mothers. Later Merritt sent her a text message saying ‘Thank you & good bye!’ This was followed by text messages in a similar vein to his then partner, Mrs Frary, who was awoken at 5.30 am after hearing noises in her house. Merritt was kneeling next to her bed, shaking and crying; he then spoke to her briefly before he left. She phoned the Merritt household and the children were found dead in bed. No major injuries were apparent, but post-mortems revealed that Jackson and Taylah had died from mechanical asphyxiation, consistent with intentional suffocation. The pathologist could not make a definitive diagnosis for Mikaylah’s cause of death,
but given the circumstances and admissions by Merritt at Parramatta Police Station on the morning of the killings that he had ‘just put his kids to sleep’ the court considered that all three had been suffocated by their father.

Merritt was diagnosed by an attending psychiatrist as suffering from a chronic, fluctuating, depressed mood, which had begun in late 2000. There was no psychotic disorder or major depressive disorder, nor was there evidence that he suffered from a mental disorder. He claimed, and the psychiatrist believed him, that he was suffering amnesia and did not remember harming his children. The psychiatrist noted that he knew and admitted to having killed his children, but had no memory of actually doing so. Although Merritt had stormy relationships with the mothers of his three children, partly as a result of his emotionalism and alleged problems with alcohol and gambling, he seems to have got on with them fairly well, at least in terms of access to the children. All of the mothers were of the impression that Merritt had good and loving relationships with the children, and there was no history of any violence or abuse on Merritt’s part.

One ongoing issue was that he had argued with the mothers of his children as well as his own mother regarding his ability to care for the kids. Merritt had been in a heightened emotional state on the afternoon of the murders, talking to his mother about whether he was a failure, having three children by three different women, and was a little concerned about caring for the new baby. In addition to his argument with his aunt, he also had an acrimonious exchange with his partner when she had been with them earlier in the day. In general, it had been a difficult day emotionally for Merritt, so much so that after the telephone
call with his aunt she had become concerned that he might harm himself. At no point, however, did anyone ever think that he would hurt his children.

Perhaps, had someone been looking, there were warning signs. In 1999, for example, Mikaylah’s mother gave evidence that Merritt had told her that he had considered committing suicide and taking Jackson’s life at the same time, but dismissed the idea, saying ‘why should he suffer because it’s not his fault’.
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Even knowing this and his emotional state on the day in question, the reason for his actions is still impenetrable. As a result, the motive at trial was listed as ‘incomprehensible’. Merritt plead guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment on each of the three charges of murder. It was his level of culpability that was really in question due to his disturbed mental state at the time of the killings. An appeal into the severity of the sentence in 2004 led to an overall reduction to thirty-four years, with a non-parole period of twenty-four years.
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It appears that Merritt felt he was inadequate father and this, together with his emotional instability, led to his desperate and murderous acts.

Another case worth reviewing in terms of motive for why men intentionally kill children is that of James Harry Barton, who on 29 June 2007 was charged with three counts: count one of manslaughter, count two of murder and count three of attempted murder. The motive given was provocation.
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In the court documents, the victims were referred to by initial only because two of the victims were children, and to protect their identity their family members’ identities also had to be kept confidential. Consequently, the adult male Barton murdered was called ‘M’, the second murder charge related to ‘N’, M’s three-year-old daughter.
The third count related to the attempted murder of M’s five-year-old son, ‘J’.

At the time of the incident, M was living in Housing Commission premises with his two children in Albury, a major regional city in New South Wales, 350 kilometres south-west of Canberra. M had sole custody of the children since the breakdown of his relationship with their mother, ‘K’, following a violent argument. Barton (aged fifty in 2007) had known M for about thirty years, having met through a citizen’s band radio club. It is not clear what led to the establishment of this enduring relationship as the two men were very different, but what is clear is that understanding the background to the men’s connection will help explain why the situation arose in which Barton felt compelled to kill his long-term associate. M was the one who had been in trouble with the law and had a significant criminal record. Added to that, he was often violent and resorted to intimidating behaviour; he was also involved with drugs as both a user and a supplier. In contrast, Barton had been in full-time employment all his adult life and had nothing to do with drugs. He’d had one run-in with the law in 1977, when he was involved in lighting fires, but that was the extent of his previous criminal history.

You wouldn’t necessarily call the men friends, as evidence presented at Barton’s trial irrefutably established that M had been blackmailing Barton regularly since 1994, the basis of which was Barton’s inappropriate sexual behaviour towards an eleven-year-old boy. This was admitted by Barton to police when he told them that during a camping trip he had tried to touch the child in a sexual manner. M had been present at the time, giving him the information he needed to blackmail Barton. Although the jury was
asked to exclude the reasons behind the blackmail from their deliberations when they considered whether Barton was guilty as charged of murder and attempted murder, at sentencing the evidence supporting Barton’s claim M was extorting money from him was included. It comprised a significant amount of written material, as well as around twenty conversations Barton had recorded between himself and the deceased, transcripts of parts of which are included in the court documents.
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