Forty-eight hours before the children were found, Theresa Riggi telephoned her husband and asked him whether he was going to take them away from her. Pasquale Riggi, an American petroleum engineer working in Aberdeen, told her she had left him no choice. "Say goodbye then," she said, and hung up.
She was a violinist and music teacher from California. The couple had come to Britain in 1997 and lived at Skene in Aberdeenshire with their twin sons, Austin and Luke, and their daughter, Cecilia. When the marriage broke down she took the children to Edinburgh, to a town house on Slateford Road, and the parents fought over custody and access in the Court of Session. On August 3, 2010, after she failed to appear at a hearing, the judge instructed court officials to find her. Another hearing was due the next day.
On August 4 neighbors heard a gas explosion at the house. Riggi was seen throwing herself from a second-floor balcony; a passerby broke her fall and deflected her onto the hood of a car. She had stab wounds to her neck and wrists. Inside, police found the three children lying side by side in a bedroom. Austin and Luke were eight and Cecilia was five. Each had been stabbed eight times, with a different knife for each child, while a song called Angel played. "I want to be with my babies," she told a hospital chaplain afterward. "I'm not meant to be here."
She was charged with three murders. Psychiatrists who examined her diagnosed narcissistic, paranoid and histrionic personality disorders and agreed that they had shaped her motives and distorted her view of the world. Her defense was that she believed her husband was a genuine danger to the children, a claim the Crown rejected as untrue. The Crown accepted her plea to culpable homicide on the ground of diminished responsibility.
She was sentenced at the High Court in Glasgow on April 27, 2011 by Lord Bracadale, who said she had had a genuine but abnormal and possessive love for her children, and that she had believed she was giving them a last gift of protection from the ills of the world. "The number and nature of the stab wounds to each child is indicative of a truly disturbing degree of violence," he told her, which must have been sustained over a significant period of time. A psychiatrist, Dr. Crichton, had found the violence inexplicable in terms of her disorder. Any degree of responsibility for such ghastly and grotesque acts, the judge said, had to be met with a long sentence, and he imposed sixteen years in place of the life term a murder conviction carries. Her counsel, Donald Findlay, told the court he feared that, given the chance, she would follow her children.
She was sent to Cornton Vale, Scotland's only women's prison, near Stirling, where other inmates said she hid in her cell for fear of attack. In November 2011 another prisoner was charged with assaulting her, and after she was slashed she was moved to the Royal Edinburgh Hospital and later to Rampton Secure Hospital in Nottinghamshire. Police were called to Rampton shortly after two in the morning on March 10, 2014 and found her dead. She was fifty. Nottinghamshire police said the death was not being treated as suspicious, and a report was prepared for the coroner.
Pasquale Riggi said after the killings that he took comfort in believing his children were in a safe place with God. This was a single act against her own children, not a series of killings.
1997: Theresa and Pasquale Riggi come to Britain.
August 3, 2010: she fails to appear at a custody hearing in the Court of Session, and the judge instructs officials to find her.
August 4, 2010: Austin and Luke, eight, and Cecilia, five, are found stabbed to death in the Edinburgh house; she survives a fall from a balcony.
April 27, 2011: after her plea to culpable homicide on the ground of diminished responsibility, Lord Bracadale sentences her to sixteen years.
November 2011: another prisoner is charged with assaulting her at Cornton Vale.
March 10, 2014: she is found dead at Rampton Secure Hospital at fifty.