The body of child killer Theresa Riggi is to be flown back to the United States for a private memorial.
The 50-year-old was found dead at a high security hospital on Monday almost four years after she killed her eight-year-old twins Austin and Luke and five-year-old daughter Cecilia.
Riggi stabbed the children repeatedly after becoming convinced her estranged husband Pasquale was going to take them from her.
She then stabbed herself, caused an explosion and jumped from the window of the Edinburgh flat where they were staying after leaving their home in Skene, Aberdeenshire.
Detectives investigating her death are understood to have told her family she died of natural causes.
Riggi is believed to have suffered from an eating disorder and bleeding stomach ulcers and had been too frail to attend the trial of a woman accused of slashing her throat with a razor blade in Cornton Vale prison in March 2011.
Rev Monsignor Craig Harrison, of St Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Riggi’s home town of Bakersfield, California, has known her family for most of his life.
He said: “This was rather a shock when they got the phone call. Right now they are trying to get more information. The family were told that Theresa died of natural causes.”
The full circumstances surrounding Riggi’s death are unlikely to be known until an inquest is held.
When her body is repatriated, her family plan to hold a private memorial at the St Francis of Assisi Church.
Riggi admitted three charges of culpable homicide on the grounds of diminished responsibility, and was jailed for 16 years at the High Court in Glasgow in 2011.
Psychiatrists who examined her found she had narcissistic, paranoid and histrionic personality disorders.
She began her sentence at Cornton Vale in 2011, and died at Rampton secure hospital in Nottingham.