Riggi was born in 1963 in the United States and had lived in Aberdeen with her husband, an oil executive, and their three children. The marriage had broken down and there were bitter proceedings over the children; she had taken them to Edinburgh, and a court order for their return was in force.
On August 4, 2010, in a rented flat in Slateford Road, Edinburgh, she stabbed her eight-year-old twin sons Austin and Gianluca and her five-year-old daughter Cecilia to death. She then caused a gas explosion in the flat and either jumped or fell from the balcony, suffering serious injuries.
She was charged with murder. The Crown accepted a plea of culpable homicide on the ground of diminished responsibility, the psychiatric evidence establishing a severe personality disorder and a delusional belief that the children were about to be taken from her permanently. On April 26, 2011 she was sentenced to sixteen years.
She died in HMP Bronzefield in England on August 6, 2016, aged fifty-three; the death was recorded as suicide.
This is a single act, not a serial case. It sits with the other custody-dispute killings in this archive, and in this one the diminished-responsibility plea was accepted by the Crown rather than rejected by a jury, which is the difference between it and several of the American cases here.