Maria Victoria Perkin

Sixteen years ago a Nelson mother killed her three young daughters and then herself after a ruling that granted her estranged husband access to their children. Charles Anderson reports as part of the Faces of Innocents project.The mother had her final meal at her father's house. She finished up, walked the short way home, and began laying out her children's things. She picked out an outfit for each of them — eight-year-old Alice, six-year-old Maria, and 23-month-old Cherie. The girls had soft brown hair. One loved the sea and whales. One was a free spirit with a great concern for others. The youngest loved books and was only just learning to speak. The mother laid out the girls' clothes on each of their beds. They were outfits complete with brooches. Then she packed away their toys into plastic bags and addressed them to friends and family. She wrote a note to her father and, along with her will, placed it on the kitchen bench. She was "terribly, terribly sorry," the note read. Then she crushed up 21 sleeping pills that she had been stockpiling for a month and evenly spread them into three glasses of water. She offered the toxic dose to her daughters. Then she put them to bed and, a short while later, smothered the girls with their pillows. Rosemary Perkin, 36, then consumed seven pills herself, went down to the basement, and took her own life. It was September 30, 2000. A few weeks earlier Perkin had promised her doctor that she would not harm herself because she loved her children too much. She had been prescribed anti-depressants and sleeping pills. She had been depressed after separating from her husband, Patrick Perkin, and losing her mother to cancer. She was also angry, her doctor Alexander Moreland told a coroner's inquiry. The Friday night before she killed her children a Family Court decision had granted Patrick unsupervised access to them. Perkin's father, Gordon Murphy, found them all on Sunday morning. After the childrens' deaths three small plain white coffins, each with a solitary pink balloon, lay in St Barnabas Church in Stoke. The girls are buried in Marsden Valley Cemetery, a short drive from where they lived. Source: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/faces-of-innocents/81558731/faces-...