Disturbed women who killed their offspring

Published on Monday 11 July 2011 18:14

Theresa Riggi was jailed in April for 16 years after she admitted killing her three children at their Edinburgh home in August last year.

The 47-year-old had pleaded guilty to a charge of culpable homicide on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

Her eight-year-old twins Austin and Gianluca and their five-year-old sister Cecilia were found stabbed to death at their flat in Slateford Road.

Riggi had deliberately thrown herself from the flat's balcony following a gas explosion

California-born Riggi was involved in a custody battle with her estranged husband over access to the children. She was said to have suffered from narcissistic, paranoid and hysterical personality disorders.

In 1986, Sheena McLaughlan, 23, who had an obsessive interest in the occult, was jailed for five years for the culpable homicide of her baby daughter, Kether, named after the ancient Hebrew tree of life. One night three years earlier, McLaughlan and her lover Alan Porter, 28, had taken the three-month-old baby from Glasgow to the banks of Loch Lomond

McLaughlan's life was ruled by "spirit guides" and Tarot cards. She said she had been warned by her spirit guide that the baby had to die. Porter, a self-proclaimed spiritualist and faith healer, claimed McLaughlan tried to strangle the baby, and he then "took the baby from her and strangled her with my own hands to put her out of her suffering".

They buried the body and McLaughlan explained her daughter's disappearance by saying there had been a cot death. Eventually, she broke down and told her parents. She helped police search for the body, but it was never found.

At their trial, Porter was found guilty of murder and jailed for life. McLaughlan's plea to the reduced charge of culpable homicide, on the basis of diminished responsibility, was accepted by the Crown.