A woman who fed her two children cakes laced with sleeping pills and then set her house on fire with them in it sent a chilling final email to a friend, saying she’d “try her luck in her next life.”
The 37-year-old woman, Anitha Mathew, also died in the house in which her sons Philip, 9, and Mathew, 5, perished, and the judge has ruled that she committed the act to punish her husband.
The horrific June 1, 2012 incident happened while her husband George Philip was returning to their Clayton South home from a trip to India.
Her fatal act of revenge on him was, as Judge Ian Gray found, a mixture of difficulties the couple had been facing while in Australia. They were in an arranged marriage in their native India, and Philip had stopped talking to his wife months prior.
The month before the fire, Judge Gray also found that Philip left for India without informing Mathew, and told her he did not want to live with her.
The Coroners ruled that his demeaning behaviour constituted family violence under Australian law, but in no way did that mean she had the right to kill her sons, according to Judge Gray.
An inquest last year heard that four months before the horrible fire, Mathew told a cousin in Canada: “If nothing happens I am going to kill him, I’m going to die, I’m going to kill everybody.”
She had written: “I will try my luck in my next life,” in an email to a friend the day before the fire, and had also left a suicide note on the car.
Philip was adamant in telling the inquest he was not a ‘forceful’ husband, or that he was ever physically violent towards her.
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