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WARNING: This story contains graphic and sensitive content.

A video interview triple murder-accused Lauren Dickason gave to police where she outlined how she killed her three young daughters in their Timaru home will be played to the jury at her High Court trial today.

Dickason, 42, is on trial in the High Court at Christchurch charged with murdering her daughters Liané, 6, and 2-year-old twins Maya and Karla.

She admits to smothering the children to death but has pleaded not guilty to the murder charges by reason of insanity or infanticide.

While the Crown acknowledges Dickason suffered from sometimes-serious depression, it maintains she knew what she was doing when she killed the girls.

Last week Crown Prosecutor Andrew McRae alleged Dickason was an angry and frustrated woman who was “resentful of how the children stood in the way of her relationship with her husband” and killed them “methodically and purposefully, perhaps even clinically”.

The defence refutes that and says the woman was “very unwell” and while those close to her were worried - no one recognised how unwell she was “until it was too late”.

“This tragic event happened because Lauren was in such a dark place so removed from reality, so suicidal, so disordered in her thinking that when she decided to kill herself that night, she thought she had to take the girls with her,” Dickason’s lawyer Kerryn Beaton KC told the jury.

Lauren Anne Dickason appears in court on the first day of her two-week trial for the murder of her three children.

During the first week of the trial, the jury heard extensive evidence about Dickason’s life before the alleged murders, including her gruelling fertility journey and devastating loss of a baby daughter at 18 weeks’ gestation and her family’s move to New Zealand from South Africa in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Jurors heard two days of evidence from Dickason’s husband, who came home from a work function to find his three children dead in their beds.

A video of his police interview was played and then Graham Dickason gave lengthy evidence and faced cross-examination by the defence.

The court also heard from those first to the scene after Graham Dickason found his children dead and from people who met the Dickason family after they arrived in Timaru, including the girls’ teachers.

Liané had been at school for two days and the twins just one when they died.

Police standing in a guard of honour as the bodies of the three dead children were removed from their Timaru home. Photo / George Heard

And hundreds of messages sent to and received by Dickason in the lead-up to the alleged murders were read by police in court.

In many, Dickason speaks about having “rough” days with her children, being depressed, anxious, overwhelmed, emotional, stressed and tired - and often crying for long periods or being on the verge of tears.

The messages span from 2016 to several hours before the children were killed - through the pandemic, lockdowns and growing political unrest and violent crime in South Africa, the family’s emigration process and a number of delays to them moving to New Zealand including having to reschedule flights twice due to the children testing positive for Covid.

She described having three young children as “a hard hard season”, saying there was “no time to just sit and talk” with her husband because “there is always a kid in the middle”.

There were also a number of positive messages sent by Dickason talking about how much she loved her children and how she was happy and “super excited” about their “new adventure” in New Zealand.

“We want to give our three little princesses for whom we have prayed so long and hard, the adventures of a lifetime,” Dickason told a friend.

The trial is set for about four weeks before Justice Cameron Mander and a jury.

The Crown will call more than 30 witnesses, including five experts on insanity and or infanticide.

The defence will then open its case and is expected to call a number of witnesses, including its own experts, to give evidence about Dickason’s mental state.