Michael Clark Tinnion was eight months old on May 28, 1984, when his mother, Lauree, put him down in his crib at their home on Hereford Street in Christchurch and went into the city on an errand. The neighbor who had insisted on minding him and his older brother Chris was Lise Turner, who had moved into the flat next door in March and often came over to use the phone. Lauree was back within forty minutes. Turner was busy at the kitchen sink, Chris was hiding under the table, and the bedroom window Lauree had left shut was open. Michael was not breathing, and there was blood on his pillow.
Turner had talked often about her two daughters who had died of crib death, showing Lauree their photographs. She said she represented the South Island on a crib-death committee and was registered with the Department of Social Welfare as a babysitter. That morning Turner's own mother had asked Lauree whether she was sure she wanted Lise to watch the children. When the doctor pronounced Michael dead, Turner was chatty and elated, talked about going to jazzercise that evening to burn off energy, and told a visiting friend that the baby next door had just died of crib death. The doctor later testified that he found her behavior bizarre. Kelvin Tinnion, Michael's father, had never liked her and was suspicious at once. The police were at the door the next morning.
Michael had been born in September 1983, the third son for Lauree, then twenty, and her first with Kelvin; his older brothers were Jeremy and Chris. About ten days after his death the police charged Turner with his murder, and she appeared in the Christchurch District Court. In her statement she first denied hurting any child, then broke down when the detective urged her to clear her conscience. "I killed Michael by putting the pillow over his face. I don't know why I did it," she said. She described flashbacks of her own dead babies and of Megan in her coffin, and said that something, perhaps a bumped knee, had set her off. As she held the pillow down, she told police, she was thinking, "Why should they have kids?"
She was born Lise Dwan in Upper Hutt, the younger daughter of June and Patrick Dwan, and grew up in Christchurch from about the age of five. Before high school she spent four years under the care of child psychologists, and her last year of schooling was at a special school near Nelson. By her own account to police she took LSD and morphine as a teenager, worked as a prostitute and attempted suicide three times. In 1973 she was involved with James Lewis, whom she left about six months before he and his brother murdered an elderly woman, Phyllis Reidy, in her Christchurch home in April 1974. A marriage at twenty-one to Aiden Duckworth lasted six months. In April 1978 she met Godfrey Turner, a superintendent for the Ministry of Energy. They never married, but she legally took his surname.
Their first daughter, Megan Jennifer, was born in October 1979 after a twenty-four-hour labor that ended in a cesarean section. Turner told police she had been pregnant twelve times without a living child before her. The family was living in Twizel, and on several occasions Godfrey was called home from work by a fairly hysterical Turner who said Megan had stopped breathing. He gave the baby mouth-to-mouth and she recovered, and there was never a problem while he was home. In January 1980, at about eleven weeks, Megan was rushed to the doctor's office in Twizel and could not be resuscitated. A pathologist recorded crib death of undiagnosed natural cause. Turner spent six weeks in a psychiatric ward in Christchurch, and after a move to Auckland she was admitted to Carrington Hospital.
Pregnant again in 1981, she moved with Godfrey to Tuai, between Napier and Gisborne. Three days before she gave birth, she was minding the eight-month-old daughter of one of Godfrey's colleagues and called an ambulance, saying the baby was bleeding from the nose and struggling to breathe. At the hospital the child was alert and bright, and nothing could be found wrong. Cheney Louise was born on January 31, 1982, a healthy baby with no breathing trouble. On March 15 Godfrey came home for lunch and found her perfectly normal. That afternoon a friend of Turner's phoned him to come home at once, and he found his forty-four-day-old daughter lifeless on the kitchen table with blood and vomit around her mouth. That death, too, was recorded as sudden infant death.
By October 1982 the couple were living in Napier with another couple, and the four-month-old daughter of the house began to have attacks. The first came during a fifteen-minute shopping trip by her mother, who was having an affair with Godfrey: the baby was found bleeding from the mouth and grunting, her face covered in blood. Doctors found no abnormality. Over the next six months there were several more episodes, and Turner was present at every one. When a doctor asked to speak with everyone who had been there, she reacted wildly, and once she was kept away from the child the attacks stopped. In 1983 Godfrey told her he would not marry her, and she returned to Christchurch. That June, babysitting a friend's five-week-old daughter overnight with a male friend, she told him the baby was sick; he found the infant pale, cold and clammy, with vomit on her face. Doctors suspected pneumonia, then ruled it out. Like the other two girls, she was never left alone with Turner again and had no further trouble.
In August 1984 police charged Turner with murdering Megan and Cheney by deliberate suffocation and with the attempted murders of the three girls. She pleaded not guilty to all six counts and went on trial in Christchurch in November 1984. After eight days of evidence the jury took three hours to convict her on every count, and she sobbed and howled as the verdicts were read. She was sentenced to life imprisonment. Some later press summaries named only two surviving victims, a five-week-old and a four-month-old; the detailed account of the trial describes three separate girls, including the colleague's baby in Tuai.
She served thirteen years. Before her parole in 1997, at forty-one, Lauree and Kelvin Tinnion were allowed to write to her and then to meet her in prison. In one reply Turner said a forensic psychiatrist had helped her identify why she killed Michael, Megan and Cheney. She never said what the reason was. On her release the Tinnions issued a statement calling it the end of justice for their son, and her parole barred her from unsupervised contact with children. Afterward she told a newspaper, "I loved my babies. It was a terrible tragedy. It wasn't me then." Lise Turner died in September 2023, aged sixty-eight, in a retirement home in Waikanae, of heart failure, cognitive impairment and epilepsy. Lauree Ashworth has four children born since Michael, and every one of them grew up knowing about him.