A mother has been convicted of murder after stabbing her two daughters as they slept in their beds.
An inquiry will now take place into the actions of teachers, doctors and social workers who dealt with the family in the years before the tragedy.
Rekha Kumari-Baker killed her daughters Davina, 16, and Jasmine, 13, with two kitchen knives as they slept at her home in Stretham, Cambridgeshire, in the early hours of June 13, 2007. Davina was stabbed 37 times and Jasmine 29 times.
She had admitted their manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, but yesterday the jury at Cambridge Crown Court found her guilty of murder.
Kumari-Baker, 41, a waitress, is due to be sentenced today.
The inquiry was ordered after it emerged that three years ago Kumari-Baker had told teachers that she “wished Davina dead”. Staff at the girl’s school, Impington Village College, had described Kumari-Baker as a “volatile woman who frequently showed strange mood swings”, and social services had been called in. Kumari-Baker had been diagnosed in 2003 with “reactive stress with mild depressive features” and referred to a counsellor.
The prosecution claimed that she murdered her daughters to “wreak havoc” upon her former husband, David Baker. She had left a handwritten note at the scene saying: “I don’t want them to get hurt as I did.”
Emma Dmitriev, for the prosecution, said yesterday: “This cruel and vicious act was clearly premeditated by Kumari-Baker as she purchased the knife two days prior to the killing. She had broken up with her husband and then her boyfriend of several years and had left her job after a dispute with her employer.
“She was clearly angry and resentful and took out her accumulated rage on two innocent girls. This brutal attack has had enduring, tragic consequences.”
The defence argued that she was suffering from an “abnormality of mind”. But after the killings, the court was told, Kumari-Baker was examined by a number of psychiatrists, most of whom concluded that she was not clinically depressed and was responsible for her actions.
Outside court the girls’ uncle, George Baker, read a statement on behalf of their father. “Not a day passes when I don’t think of my girls. I was robbed of my daughters by an act of calculated viciousness by a woman who, having given life to them, in her vindictive mind believed she also had a right to take that life from them. She will now pay the price for this,” he said.
Detective Inspector Jim McCrorie, who led the police inquiry, said: “It became clear, as this investigation progressed, that Rekha Kumari-Baker set out to murder her children. Only she will know the reasons why she carried out such a vicious and deliberate attack as they lay sleeping in their beds.
“In 25 years in the police service I have never before investigated such an upsetting or sickening crime.”
During the trial Lyle Hamilton, for the defence, had said that medical literature showed that women had killed children because they were “mentally ill” and because they were a “retaliatory type”, both categories which Kumari-Baker fell into.
Neil Hunt, a consultant psychiatrist, said that he had interviewed Kumari-Baker on the day of her arrest and, although he suspected she may have been suffering from a mental disorder, he found no evidence of serious mental illness.
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