William Robert Roil

Annie Roil was described as 'a good wife and very fond of her children' during her Supreme Court trial in 1884. That she had taken her two youngest children and drowned them in the Heathcote River was an almost inconceivable act, but was accounted for by the fact that she had suffered from 'an attack of puerperal mania' after the birth of her last child, and for one night had been clearly 'quite insane'. Family members declared that Annie had 'not been the same woman' in the six months since the episode – she complained of burning pains in her head and had said that she feared she was going out of her mind. Moreover, irrefutable evidence of a family history of insanity was produced during the trial proceedings – Annie‟s father was being held in the Christchurch Lunatic Asylum and her mother had recently died there. Predictably there was no hesitation in finding Annie not guilty of the murders on the grounds of insanity. However a conversation alleged to have taken place while the accused was awaiting trial suggests that Annie Roil acted with a degree of rationality in drowning her two small children. It was reported that Annie was aware that she had come close to dying during her last difficult labour, and the severe headaches she continued to suffer had brought her close to suicide on a number of occasions. As a religious woman, Annie's husband's atheistic world-view left her with the fear that after her death the children would be brought up outside of religion. She had apparently 'sen[t] the children to go before her' in a determined attempt to 'save' them, before unsuccessfully attempting suicide by drowning. Source: THE OGRESS, THE INNOCENT, AND THE MADMAN: Narrative and Gender in Child Homicide Trials in New Zealand, 1870 - 1925 by Debra Powell (2013).