I've just listened to podcast 2: Mrs Bain, the Diary and the Devil.
It seems clear Mrs Bain was seriously mentally unwell. She spent days, or longer, in bed; made her own medicines consisting of urine and phlegm; saw the Devil everywhere; was very overweight and desperate to resume her sex life with her husband. All commentators refer to the properties as dirty and uhygienic. At one stage she was living outside in the caravan as she thought the Devil was in the house. This women was in desperate need of psychiatric treatment.
Many said the children run around naked in PNG. Sounds to me the children should have been removed by social services but maybe they were all able to fall under the radar in PNG. DB and Arawa could barely read and write when they returned to Dunedin. So much for their mother's home schooling.
Is it possible Mrs Bain was the perp and DB moved the rifle to spare his mother's reputation? Hence her lens in SB's bedroom?
Fascinating that these two cases of familcide with sole surviving sons also have matriarchs with mental illness, obsessed with the Devil and Christianity.
The Bambers actually seem quite 'normal' compared with the Bains.
MB wouldn't have known one end of a rifle from the other, (now where have I read that somewhere before?). It was David's rifle, and he was the licence holder.
DB borrowed MB's spare spectacles after he fell outside and damaged his own during choir practice the previous Thursday. He wore them on the Sunday night prior to the murders, but at the first trial his lawyer said that David had told him he had only used them months before. The lawyer thought this so so serious, he advised the opposition of what he'd said, but the latter didn't pursue it in court.
MB's damaged specs and loose right lens were found on a chair in David's room, whereas the missing left lens was discovered on the floor in Stephen's room under an anorak near his body.
MB had no blood on her person other than her own from a single eye shot, therefore none from any fight with Stephen.