Winiata Q Matekino

On June 6 Tania Tokona drove her three youngest children to a cemetery 5km from the family home in Tirau. There she took her sleeping 18-month-old Simon and stabbed him to death with a pair of industrial scissors. Three-year-old Winiata was then stabbed repeatedly in his chest and throat; he suffocated to death in his own blood and mucus. Tokona’s 2-year- old daughter, Alexandria, was spared. The 31-year-old mother of five put the bodies of her two youngest sons in the boot of her Ford Fairmont and drove 250km to the Whanganui River where, in a failed suicide bid, she drove off the bank. Tokona was acquitted on the grounds of insanity. She is now in a residential care unit in the Waikato. Source: 4theKids.

It has been 16 years since Tania Tokona used scissors to hack her sons to death in a family cemetery in South Waikato. Winiata Matekino was three; Simon Matekino, 15 months. Alexandria Matekino, who was two, was spared. In his first interview since that day, the children's father, Moses Matekino, said he blames himself. "I was angry at her and I was angry at myself because I wasn't there for my boys and my girl." Matekino is sitting in a friend's sun room. He's in his 50s now, and his hair, pulled back in a ponytail, reflects that - grey and wiry. So is the beard. But his face is young, virtually unlined. The tye-dyed T-shirt belongs with the face. He puffs regularly on a ciggie. On June 5, 1999, at their rural Tirau home, Tokona bundled Simon, Winiata and Alex into the family's white Ford Fairmont and drove the 5km to Tirau to visit her elderly uncle. It was 9pm. She asked her uncle for a Bible and a copy of her whakapapa (family tree). They stayed about 20 minutes and then headed off. But they didn't make it home. Not a stone's throw from the house, Tokona, who was 30 then, parked the car in a paddock and she and the children climbed the steep hill to the urupa (burial ground). They spent the night there, huddling together for warmth under a wooden frame. When she woke the next morning, she "felt a presence, a ghost". That's when she took the scissors and stabbed Simon, then Winiata. "They wanted my babies and wanted them bad," she later told police. She didn't explain who "they" were. "I knew it was wrong but I couldn't stop." She would be charged with infanticide, but would be found not guilty by reason of insanity. Tokona is a paranoid schizophrenic. Tokona then placed her dead children in the boot of the Ford Fairmont, strapped Alex into her carseat and drove 250km south to her family's ancestral land of Ranana on the Whanganui River. The Jerusalem of James K Baxter fame is a few minutes up the road. Tokona was headed for the Gentle Annie cliff. She stopped on the way at the home of Huriana Whale and put Alex in a pigpen on the property, which is across the road from the cemetery where her mother is buried. She then drove off the cliff. She would later admit it was a suicide attempt. But the car was snagged by trees, and she scrambled down the bank and swam across the river to a house. The woman who lived there rang Don Wickham, a nearby neighbour, to ask for help with the woman who showed up at her door soaking wet and wearing nothing but her underwear and a jacket. "I poked around and opened the boot of the car and here were these two little souls cuddled up in the back. I felt them because they weren't moving and they were cold." He decided to wait for police. Back at Huriana Whale's house, Huriana sent her two grandsons to feed the pigs. It was 7.30 in the morning. "The two came in and said 'Nan, there's a kid out there.' I thought they meant a goat," said Huriana, who still lives in the same house. "I went out and there was a little girl out there. I called to her to come to nanny, although I didn't even know who she was. She came to me. She had nothing on her feet but she was well clad." Huriana bathed the little girl to warm her up and fed her a bowl of Weet-Bix. She tried talking to her, but Alex wouldn't respond. Huriana then called her next-door neighbour. "If anyone would be able to tell who it was, it would be my neighbour Ma Butler. I rang her and asked her to come up because she worked with the kohanga. She practically knew everyone's kiddies who came up the river." Ma Butler did know the toddler. It was her niece, Tokona's child. Ma knew Alex had younger brothers. The entire village - 49 people - swung into action, scouring the rugged bush and river banks. It would be another six hours before Ma would find out Tokona had swum the river and fetched up at a stranger's house. At that point, Ma asked the distant neighbour to ask Tokona where the boys were - she said she didn't know. The kuia, on learning of the deaths of Tokona's two young boys, travelled by car to the Gentle Annie cliff. They had a karakia and wailed into the night, finally leaving one of their number to stay with the police guarding the bodies. The bodies would be released to the village the following day. Simon and Winiata shared a white casket, where they lay arm in arm. They buried them in the village urupa, near Tokona's mother's grave. The whole village accompanied Matekino home to Tirau after the funeral. Source: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/74001114/the-last-thing-they...