A close friend of Maria Claudia Lutz, who was found dead in her Sydney home alongside her husband and their two autistic children, says she may have been planning to leave Australia to escape the pressures of her demanding home life.
Police discovered the bodies of 43-year-old Lutz, her husband Fernando Manrique, 44, and their two children, Elisa, 11, and Martin, 10, on Monday morning, with mounting evidence the family were deliberately gassed to death in a murder-suicide.
The tragedy has shaken the suburb of Davidson as more details emerge indicating that Lutz, an active and much-loved member of her local school community, may have been struggling to cope in a country far from her native Colombia.
Maria with her children Elissa and Martin. Source: Facebook
One of Lutz' friends spoke anonymously to Bogota's The City Paper: "With a marriage struggling over constant worries of the future of their severely autistic children, Maria Claudia wanted to return to Colombia.
"The children could not travel due to their health issues on a 14-hour flight and in order to comfort Maria Claudia, her family would visit Australia once a year," they said.
"She was going home this year, she decided."
Lutz and Manrique were childhood sweethearts who moved to Australia in 2005, so Manrique could study his MBA at Macquarie University in Sydney.
Their first child, Elissa, was born in May that year and Martin was born in August 2006.
"Maria Claudia had met her perfect match and seemed very much in love before the children were born," the friend said, but added that she had felt increasingly isolated as her husband became "very distant".
Police have not been able to rule out a murder-suicide pact, but are reportedly leaning towards the notion that Manrique, a high-flying executive, acted alone.
Mia Freedman says she feels "sick" about it. Listen to the Mamamia Out Loud Podcast here:
A neighbour who lives directly opposite the family's house, was one of several who witnessed him working on the roof over the weekend, building the elaborate network of pipes which was later used to funnel deadly carbon monoxide around the house.
"He was right up on the roof replacing tiles and using power tools of sorts," Ofik Thomassian told the Courier Mail.
"He was cutting and banging and making all sorts of noise and pulling up tiles but I don’t really know what he was doing."
Thomassin also described Lutz as a careful, caring mother but acknowledge things could not have been easy for her.
"She looked after them but I have to say she never looked happy," he said.
"She always had a very serious look on her face. Thinking back now, she looked like she was in pain. She probably had been for a very long time."
Feature image: Facebook
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Top Comments
I have live three kilometres away since 2008. Although I never met Maria and her children I will never forget them. I wish with all my heart that I had bumped into them at the local shops and got to know them. We mothers living this kind of life can spot other mothers walking the same path and we are eager to network and help.
I know what mothers of children with profound disability need because I lived that life and thank God that I made it through the darkest years. I know that mothers of children with severe profound intellectual disability need other mothers walking the same path by their side. I wish I could have had that chance meeting in the local supermarket!
My son has profound intellectual disability and cannot communicate verbally. He was assessed as too disabled for St Lucy's when I applied when he was 10 years old. I was so fortunate that that a Monday to Friday boarding school called Kingsdene Special School accepted my him and he flourished and grew into a beautiful young man there. The government deemed the school, which had been a shining example of special needs education and intensive support for families for 35 years, too expensive to fund and the charity donations that the school relied heavily on were insufficient after the Global Financial Crisis to maintain the school, and it closed forever in 2010.
Knowing my son was being appropriately educated and kept safe, healthy and happy through the week allowed me to earn income and concentrate on my younger son. My husband left us, penniless (except for the $85 in my wallet that day) in 2005 when my older son was 10 years old. In 2008 he pressured the bank to take our home away so I had to cash in all my superannuation to keep us housed until the court case that finally ended his control over our lives. To this day I struggle to understand how SOME fathers can do terrible things to their children.
Kingsdene and the mothers I met there saved me and my sons. Now there is nothing in Sydney or Australia that can provide this intensive help to single parents (usually mothers) of children with profound disability.
The NSW Government provides precious little support and you have to fight for every bit of support and then the government makes you feel that you should be eternally grateful for the crumbs they give you and give not-so-subtle warnings that if you complain they'll even take the crumbs away.
I am now a battle scarred and very tough fighter in a network of battle scarred tough fighters and we would have been tough enough to have helped Maria escape the difficulties she faced, I only wish we had that chance meeting at the local supermarket.
I would think this is a suicide pact. As a mother with a severely disabled son life can become so difficult death can seem like a blessing. By the complexity of the system built pipes running through every room in the house with two massive cylinder generators. I would find it hard to believe that your husband could come up with an excuse for turning your home into a gas chamber that didn't stretch credulity to the extreme. I hope they found peace.
Dear Anon, I agree that it is a profoundly hard path we walk but I cannot believe Maria was in any way involved in a pact to end her life or her children's lives. This evening I read the cards attached to the flowers and leant on the front gate of her beautifully maintained home and just knew she was there for the 'long haul'. She was a maternal fighter like the rest of us.