Insanity plea: Mersane Warria has been deemed unfit for trial due to her mental health; She most likely will be committed to a psychiatric institution for life

A 37-year-old woman who stabbed her seven kids and her niece to death in her family home three years ago has been declared unfit to face trial.
In a crime that shocked Australia the Queensland woman, Schizophrenic Raina Thaiday, then 34, also stabbed herself 35 times after slaughtering the children , aged between 18 months and 14 years in Cairns, Queensland, northern Australia on December 19, 2014.
Mersane Warria, also known as ‘Raina Thaiday’, believed she was the ‘chosen one’ and thought her house was full of spirits.  Malili, Daniel, along with  Rayden, Petronella, Rodney and Azariah were killed by their mum.
Done with her gruesome task of killing all but two of her nine biological children, Mersane Warria lay in the front yard, neighbours could hear her screams, pleading for forgiveness.
The multiple homicide occurred around 11:20am on Friday, December 19, 2014, and Lewis Warria, Mersane’s 20-year-old son had walked into the Cairns home he shared with his mother and seven siblings, to find a gruesome murder scene. Eight children dead – seven siblings and one cousin.

Warria, who had nine kids by five dads, was seen by neighbours throwing out
bedding and screaming into a phone before she went on the killing rampage.
Among the dead were brothers and sisters Malili, 14, Rayden,9, Azariah,
8, Daniel, 6, Rodney, 5, Petronella, 2, 11-year-old Chantay and their cousin, Angie
Thaiday, who was just about to turn 13.
So gruesome was the murder scene, so horrifying, that police’s “screams and shouts” for an ambulance from inside the home could be heard from the street.
Lewis walked inside and found the first body in the lounge room. The rest, scattered among the blood soaked house.The panel of judges announced that Mersane will not stand trial for the brutal murders as she was suffering from paranoid delusions at the time.
The mother-of-eight, had been smoking up to 20 rolls of marijuana a day when she developed severe schizophrenia late that year, Queensland State Mental Health Court heard. There had also been initial mention that police were probing whether her use of the drug methyl amphetamine, also known as ice, had triggered the slaughter.
Several psychiatrists agreed her lifelong use of the drug triggered the onset of the mental illness, which court records revealed had been getting worse in the lead up to the killings.
In the days immediately before the murders, the court was told she thought there were evil spirits in her home.
She believed she was the “chosen one” and became obsessed with cleansing to protect herself and her family from demons, according to news.com.au.
On the night of the stabbings, she told of hearing a “dove call” triggering her to act.
She first killed the family’s pet duck before turning the knife on the four boys and four girls and then on herself.
Six of the seven young victims seen in a garden were stabbed or suffocated in the rampage.

 Police fornsic team works the crime scene after the horrible massacre of the children in Dec 2014Lewis Warria discovered the bodies of his seven younger brothers and sisters plus a cousin

Mersane was found bleeding on the veranda by her 20-year-old son Lewis, who called the police. One investigator said the bloody scenes inside the house were like “something out of a horror movie”.
Cops said some of the children were stabbed multiple times – with one child suffering at least 12 knife wounds to the front and 10 more in the back.

Family members mourn at the scene of a memorial set up in a park near the family home, in Dec 2014

Horrified neighbors and members of the public comfort each other after news of the killings broke

That night she is alleged to have shouted in the street: “I am the chosen one. I have the power to kill people and to curse people.
“You hurt my kids, I hurt them first. You stab my kids, I stab them first. If you kill them, I will kill them.”
Justice Jean Dalton said there was convincing evidence the mum had suffered a psychotic episode and had no capacity to control or understand her actions.
He said: “Her children were the things that had given her the most happiness in life.”

Ariel view of Thaiday’s family home in Cairns, Queensland, Australia, where the killings happened 

Police activity at the crime scene as first responders cordoned off the area 

In April, the court ruled that Mersane Warria had been of “unsound mind” when the children were slain, with state law preventing the ruling from being reported until May 4.
She remained psychotic until July 2015, and has had two relapses, once at the two-year anniversary of the deaths. She had then expressed a desire to kill her fellow patients, the court heard.
She will be held indefinitely in a high-security ward of a psychiatric hospital in the state capital Brisbane and it is unclear if she will ever be released.
The house where the killings took place was demolished in 2015 with a park installed as a memorial to the slain children.