Case 338: The Folbigg Children (Part 2/2)

[Part 2 of 2] *** Content warning: child victims *** As police looked into the deaths of Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura Folbigg, they were introduced to Meadows Law – the theory that one infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious, but three is murder. With suspicion mounting against Kathleen Folbigg, years of investigation eventually led to a legal outcome that no one could have ever seen coming. --- Narration – Anonymous Host https://www.instagram.com/caseys.snaps/ Research & writing – Elsha McGill Production & music – Mike Migas http://mikemigas.com/ Audio editing – Anthony Telfer Sign up for Casefile Premium: Apple Premium https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/casefile-true-crime/id998568017?ign-itscg=30200S&ign-itsct=casefile_podcastsSpotify Premium https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/9gSwcv7USsbPatreon https://www.patreon.com/casefileFor all credits and sources, please visit https://casefilepodcast.com/case-338-the-folbigg-children-part-2-2 https://casefilepodcast.com/case-338-the-folbigg-children-part-2-2/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 2:18Speaker 00

  Our episodes deal with serious and often distressing incidents. If you feel at any time you need support, please contact your local crisis centre. For suggested phone numbers for confidential support and for a more detailed list of content warnings, please see the show notes for this episode on your app or on our website. Today's episode involves crimes against children and won't be suitable for all listeners.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  The police listened on as Craig Folbigg expressed his belief that maybe he had killed their four children. Kathleen asked why he would think such a thing. Craig told her to think about it. Every time they'd had a child, it had driven a wedge between them, and the best way he could get Kathleen's attention was to get rid of the kids. He presented a scenario in which he waited until Kathleen went to sleep in the middle of the night and then got up to kill the children.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  With Laura, he waited until Kathleen went outside and then sneaked in through the front door without her ever knowing he was there. "Who had anything to gain out of them not being around?", Craig asked before answering, "Me."

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Kathleen told Craig that he was being ridiculous. Craig clarified that he was suggesting a hypothetical, but that such a case against him was just as feasible as the one the police were building against Kathleen. Referring to Detective Bernie Ryan, Craig said, "All I'm trying to show you is the futility of the bullshit he's going on."

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Kathleen said she was scared and told Craig never to mention such a thing again. "It's bad enough Detective Ryan is going for one of us", she said. "I'm not having him going after you."

• 4:19Speaker 00

  Craig told Kathleen it was Detective Ryan who had first planted the idea in his head that the children had been murdered, adding: "I don't want him going after you for something you didn't do. I know you didn't do it, like you know I didn't do it."

• 4:37Speaker 00

  But Craig's support for Kathleen was too late. The police had already started to compile evidence that suggested to them that Craig's reported suspicions were right all along.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Detectives working the Folbigg case put together a preliminary brief of evidence. It contained the medical histories of the four Folbigg children as well as transcripts of Kathleen's police interview and copies of her diaries. Then they got to work seeking expert opinions. It quickly became clear that the majority of experts strictly adhered to Meadows Law. When it came to the unexplained death of an infant, one was a tragedy, two were suspicious, and three most likely pointed to murder.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  After reviewing the case, one police psychologist concluded: "If natural causes are eliminated, then in my opinion, Kathleen Folbigg became angry and frustrated with her children's crying and need for constant attention to a point where it overwhelmed her, and she lost control and consciously ended the lives of each child."

• 6:13Speaker 00

  The brief of evidence was also sent to Dr Susan Beale, a paediatrician from Adelaide's Women's and Children's Hospital, who had studied SIDS for more than 30 years and was considered one of Australia's leading experts in the field. As far as Dr Beale was aware, there had never been more than three SIDS-related deaths in a single family anywhere in the world. The only such occurrences had later been revealed to be homicide. She also agreed with Dr Alan Carler that the deaths of Caleb and Sarah Folbigg shouldn't have been classified as SIDS. Not only weren't they in the right age bracket, but they had also both been found sleeping on their backs.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  Eighty per cent of SIDS deaths occur when the infant is lying on their stomach. In Patrick's case, Dr Beale didn't believe that epilepsy had caused his first apparent life-threatening event, or Ulti. In babies as young as Patrick, epileptic fits were typically caused by another disease which would be detectable in an EEG brain scan or at autopsy. Furthermore, it would be rare for the first epileptic fit to cause the level of brain damage that Patrick had sustained. As for Laura, Dr Beale didn't think the myocarditis played a role in her unexplained death either. Like Professor Hilton,

• 7:41Speaker 00

  she believed that Meadows' Law must be applied to the Folbigg children and that it was most likely that all four of them had been suffocated, telling Detective Ryan, "I have no hesitation in saying I believe that all four children were murdered by their mother."

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Detective Ryan flew to the United States to meet with Dr Janice Oppoven, a paediatric forensic pathologist who specialised in mothers who kill their children. Years of research had taught her that the number-one cause of deaths in infants living in developed countries wasn't disease, but physical injury typically inflicted by a caregiver.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  After reviewing the Folbigg case file and examining tissue samples taken from the four children, Dr. Oppoven ruled that none of their deaths could be attributed to SIDS. She stated that SIDS is not a hereditary problem and that “the statistical likelihood that four children could die from SIDS is in excess of one in a trillion”. As the children had all been growing normally and their autopsies identified no sign of disease, Dr. Oppoven believed that all four of them had been suffocated by the last person to see them alive: Kathleen Folbigg.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  Dr. Alan Carle submitted his final autopsy report for Laura, listing her death as “undetermined” and stating it was possible that all four children were deliberately smothered. He pointed out that it would be relatively easy for an adult to smother an infant or small child using their hand, a soft toy, or a pillow, without leaving a trace. Dr. Carle’s report concluded: “The possibility of multiple homicides in this family has not been excluded.” Opinion was also sought from UK paediatric pathologist and SIDS specialist Professor Peter Berry, who said he was not aware of any other case where four infants from the

• 9:51Speaker 00

  same family had died of unexplained natural causes. He pointed out that Caleb’s autopsy had revealed signs of hemocytopenia, or repeated bleeding, in his lungs. Combined with Kathleen’s diary entry from the night Caleb died, in which she enthusiastically wrote “finally asleep”, Professor Berry believed it was possible that Caleb had not only been smothered to death, but also smothered on a previous occasion from which he was able to recover. He also agreed that it was unlikely that Patrick’s faulty was caused by an epileptic seizure. Instead, he thought Patrick might have been suffocated to the point of brain damage.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  As for Sarah, if he viewed her death in isolation, Professor Berry agreed he could put it down to SIDS. But knowing what he knew about her siblings and the alleged tension between Kathleen and Sarah on the night that she died, he had his misgivings. In regards to Laura, he said the level of myocarditis in her heart was extensive enough to cause sudden death, but there wasn't damage to her actual heart muscles as one would expect if myocarditis was responsible. He pointed out that myocarditis was also commonly found in individuals who died from other causes, such as traffic accidents or suffocation.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  Professor Berry concluded: "I am unable to rule out that Caleb, Patrick, Sarah, and possibly Laura Folbigg were suffocated by the person who found them lifeless. And I believe that it is probable that this was the case." It took the investigation team months to compile their brief of evidence. By late 2000, nearly two years after Laura's death, Detective Ryan finally felt confident enough to submit the preliminary brief to the Director of Public Prosecutions. The DPP would decide if there was enough to charge Kathleen Folbigg with murdering her children.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  To his disappointment, the answer was no. The DPP felt there wasn't sufficient evidence to secure a conviction and recommended the case be handed over to the coroner for a full coronial inquiry instead. Detective Ryan was undeterred. At the end of the day, the decision to proceed with charges lay with him, and after devoting years of his life to the case, he was convinced that Kathleen was guilty. Determined to get justice for the innocent and defenceless Folbigg siblings and put a serial killer behind bars, Detective Ryan discussed the case with a deputy state coroner and a crown prosecutor.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  They agreed there was enough evidence to at least charge Kathleen with Laura's murder.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  Detective Ryan was convinced that if he could just get Craig back on his side, there would be enough to proceed with all four murder charges. And he had an idea of how he could do it. While the investigation had continued slowly behind the scenes, Craig and Kathleen split up for good in mid 2000. Kathleen was already living with her new boyfriend, a builder she'd met at the gym. If there was any chance of convincing Craig to withdraw his support for Kathleen and admit that he'd lied when retracting his original police statement, the time was now. On April 19, 2001, Detective Ryan visited Craig at work and placed him under arrest

• 13:38Speaker 00

  for hindering the investigation into his children's deaths. Faced with this, Craig admitted he was telling the truth when he initially went to the police to voice his suspicions about Kathleen. He stood by the story that he'd woken up about half an hour before Sarah's dead body was discovered to find that she and Kathleen weren't in their beds. Craig said that Kathleen's stories about the children simply didn't add up. Referring to his last interaction with Laura, he said: "How could I kiss a perfectly gorgeous little baby goodbye and half an hour later be confronted with that child dead?"

• 14:22Speaker 00

  In the year and a half since flip-flopping on his allegations against Kathleen, Craig had felt deeply ashamed of himself. "I've lived with the shame of coming and changing that story," he said. "I've felt that I couldn't protect those children in life, and I certainly didn't protect them in death." With Craig back on their side and agreeing to testify against Kathleen, the detectives were finally ready to make their move. That afternoon, they went to Kathleen Folbigg's flat and knocked on the door. When she answered, Detective Ryan looked her in the eyes and said the words

• 15:04Speaker 00

  he'd been working for years to bring to fruition: "Kathy, you are under arrest for murdering your four children. Do you understand?"

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Thirty-three-year-old Kathleen Folbigg was charged with four counts of murder and remanded without bail. The media quickly picked up on the story and the news sent shockwaves through the local community, particularly for Kathleen’s new boyfriend, Tony. He’d fallen head over heels in love with Kathleen and envisioned them getting married and having a family together. He couldn’t fathom that the warm and loving woman he knew could be responsible for such a horrific allegation. The press published some of the most damning expert opinions from the police statement of facts, including Dr. Ophoven’s belief that the odds of all four Folbigg children dying of unexplained natural

• 16:02Speaker 00

  causes was one in a trillion. Accompanied by the excerpts from Kathleen’s diary in which she compared herself to her murderous father, it didn’t take long before she was considered guilty in the Court of Public Opinion. If the Court of Law also found Kathleen guilty, it would make her one of the most prolific female serial killers in Australian history. But the press had to be careful. Kathleen’s case was quickly likened to that of Lindy Chamberlain, a Queensland mother who was accused of killing her newborn daughter Azariah in 1980, as covered in episode 136 of Case File.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Lindy steadfastly maintained that Azariah had been taken by a dingo. However, the media painted her in such a negative light that it played a significant role in what turned out to be Lindy’s wrongful conviction and one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Australian legal history. A month after her arrest, Kathleen applied for bail again. The prosecution still had a long road ahead to prepare their case for trial, and she wanted to live with Tony and resume her job as a waitress while she prepared her defence. The judge agreed to release Kathleen on $8,000 bail, citing the fact that she had no other

• 17:26Speaker 00

  children and therefore didn’t present a threat to anyone else. Tony helped secure her bond, convinced that Kathleen was innocent and that once this whole fiasco was behind them, they could move on with building a life together.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  While Kathleen was out on bail, the months passed as the prosecution team continued building their case against her. In addition to the expert opinions and circumstantial evidence provided by her diary entries and witness statements, they established a ten-point list of what's known as coincidence evidence.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  This is a type of circumstantial evidence that shows that two or more similar events occurring in similar circumstances are too improbable to have happened by chance.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  The list highlighted that all four of the Foglebig children died suddenly and unexpectedly while at home during a period of sleep. Prior to each death, or in Patrick's case, his ulti, each child had appeared perfectly normal and healthy.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  All of the deaths occurred while Kathleen was the only adult at home or awake. She was the one to discover each of them during what she claimed to be a normal check of their wellbeing. Three of these checks just so happened to have occurred on her way back from the toilet, and all, literally, within minutes of the child stopping breathing.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  In each incident, except for Laura's death, Kathleen didn't offer any assistance. She didn't even lift the children out of their beds.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  Kathleen was bolstered by support from Tony and a group of faithful friends, many of whom had known her since childhood. They didn't believe the allegations against her for a second. Among them was Kathleen's foster sister, Lee, her trustworthy protector. Or so she thought.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  While Lee had fiercely defended her sister since the beginning, in the years since Laura's death, she'd had numerous conversations with Detective Bernie Ryan. Over time, her opinion had started to change.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Reflecting on events, Lee realised there had been instances where Kathleen's behaviour was questionable. In January 1998, when Laura was five months old and still using the AppNow monitor, Lee and her family had gone to stay with the Folbigg. One day, Laura was napping inside while everyone else was out in the pool. Lee felt a migraine coming on and went inside to lie down. To her great surprise, the AppNow alarm went off, twice. Despite its loud, high-pitched noise, neither Kathleen or Craig responded to it.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  When Lee mentioned it to Kathleen later on, she seemed indifferent and simply said she hadn't heard it.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  Another time, when Laura was 17 months old, the Folbigg went to Melbourne to stay with Lee and her family for Christmas. One day, while feeding Laura in her highchair, Kathleen was in a bad mood, complaining that she wasn't getting enough sleep. When Laura refused to eat, Kathleen lost her temper and yanked the toddler out of the highchair by her arm.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Lee had been alarmed. Not only did she think it was totally uncalled for, she had never seen this side of her sister's personality. She caught another glimpse of it on Christmas Eve, when Laura was too excited to sleep and Kathleen once again lost her temper and overreacted. Lee had also been alarmed when Kathleen told her that she'd once disciplined her puppy by kicking him down the stairs.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  Eventually, like Craig Folbigg before her, Lee turned against Kathleen and contacted the police to change her statement. But Kathleen was none the wiser.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  The two sisters remained in regular contact, with Lee agreeing to record their phone conversations and act as a witness for the prosecution while feigning ongoing support.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  On Friday, May 24, 2002, more than a year after her arrest, Kathleen Folbigg officially entered her plea of not guilty to all four murder charges. She was committed to stand trial in the Supreme Court the following year. Six months later, she was hit with an additional charge of maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm in relation to Patrick Zolti. Kathleen pleaded not guilty to this charge as well. It had been a challenging time for Kathleen’s defence team, who were so convinced of her innocence, that New South Wales senior public defender Peter Zahra had agreed to work the case pro bono.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  The defence applied to have the cases for each of the Folbigg children tried separately, so that the jury could judge each of their deaths as a standalone case without knowing about their siblings. The application was denied on the grounds that when considered separately, there could be plausible natural causes for the death of each child. It was only when all four cases were examined together and the coincidence evidence was considered that the case for murder became apparent. But there was one piece of good news for the defence. Something huge had happened in the time since Kathleen’s arrest.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  In England, back in 1996, an 11-week-old boy named Christopher Clark had died unexpectedly in his sleep. Two years later, his eight-week-old brother, Harry, suffered the same fate. Both cases were initially recorded as SIDS, but the boy’s mother, Sally Clark, became suspected of having smothered them. She was ultimately charged with murdering both of her children.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Renowned paediatrician Professor Roy Meadow testified at Sally's trial, presenting his theory that one sudden infant death in a family is a tragedy, two is suspicious, and three is murder unless proven otherwise. Meadow said that the odds of both Christopher and Harry, who had been born into an affluent, non-smoking family, dying from SIDS was one in seventy-three million.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  According to Professor Meadow, two SIDS deaths in a single family was so rare, he would only expect it to occur once every one hundred years. He said there was a better chance of someone placing an eighty-to-one outside a bed on the Grand National Horse Race and winning four years in a row.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  Based in part on Professor Meadow's evidence, Sally Clark was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, which she unsuccessfully appealed in 2002. On her second appeal in early 2003, it emerged that during the autopsy for Sally's younger son, Harry, he had tested positive for a bacterial infection that could have been fatal. The pathologist who performed Harry's autopsy didn't disclose his findings to either of the legal teams, and it therefore hadn't been presented at Sally's trial.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Furthermore, serious questions had been raised about the statistics put forward by Professor Meadow, with the Royal Statistical Society saying his figures were false. A professor of mathematics had reviewed SIDS statistics against homicide statistics, and concluded that although instances of double SIDS are very rare, double murder is even rarer. Statistically speaking, it was actually twice as likely for two children from one family to die from SIDS than it was for a mother to kill two of her babies. The appellate judges reviewing Sally's case found that Christopher and Harry's deaths should not have been tried together.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  They also found that the statistical information put forward by Professor Meadow was clearly inadmissible and should never have been allowed in evidence, as it misled the jury.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  Sally Clark was subsequently released from prison in January 2003 and had her conviction overturned.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  With just months until Kathleen's trial was scheduled to begin, this was positive news for her legal team. If Professor Meadows' statistics were unreliable, then Dr. Oppovens scathing opinion that there was a one-in-a-trillion chance of four children from the same family dying of SIDS was essentially meaningless. The judge ruled Dr. Oppovens' conclusion inadmissible at Kathleen's trial, despite it having already been widely published in the media.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Meanwhile, the defence asked for extra time while they sought further information from overseas about a potential correlation that was starting to emerge as a result of Sally Clark's appeal. It had been hypothesised that particular genetic mutations might lead to an increased risk of SIDS, or even cause SIDS. The judge adjourned the case temporarily to give the defence time for further testing, but with no further developments emerging, it was time for Kathleen to face the music.

• 27:27Speaker 00

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• 30:53Speaker 00

  By the time Kathleen Folbig's murder trial commenced in the New South Wales Supreme Court on Tuesday, April 1, 2003, Craig Folbig was engaged to another woman and surrounded by loved ones and supporters. Then now 35-year-old Kathleen, on the other hand, was essentially alone. Her foster mother, with whom she had a strained relationship, was siding with Craig despite the two not getting along in the past. Her foster sister had turned on her, and one of her closest friends was unable to travel to Sydney to testify on her behalf due to health concerns about her own pregnancy. Kathleen had also ended her relationship with Tony to focus on the trial, despite his firm belief that she was innocent.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Instead, Kathleen relied on support from a Salvation Army court chaplain named Major Joyce Harmer, who had kindly agreed to look after her while the trial was underway.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  The prosecution was led by senior Crown prosecutor Mark Todeski, a formidable figure in the New South Wales legal world, who had secured convictions against high-profile killers such as Ivan Malat, covered in episode 109 of Casefile, and Kelly Lane, covered in episode 300 of Casefile. In his opening address, Todeski told the jury they were to consider two possibilities: either Kathleen Folbigg had deliberately intended to kill her children by smothering them during a flash of anger, hatred, and resentment, or she deliberately intended to render them unconscious or put them to sleep by smothering them so she could sleep or have a moment to herself.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  He made it clear that regardless of which situation was correct, either possibility constituted murder.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  Tedeschi said that Kathleen had a very low threshold for stress and resented the restrictions her children put on her life, particularly when it came to sleep, exercise, and her social life. She also resented Craig for not providing what she considered to be adequate help. Tedeschi told the jury that Kathleen was “constantly preoccupied, to an exaggerated degree, with her weight gain, and that this was partly due to the fact that her children stood in the way of her going to the gym as often as she would have liked.” Tedeschi and his team wanted to detail Kathleen’s dark family history to argue that she had inherited murderous traits or mental illness from her father.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  But the judge had forbidden anything about her father’s crimes from being mentioned as it could lead to unfair prejudice. Instead, the prosecution’s case relied on three major factors: the medical evidence, the coincidence evidence, and Kathleen’s diary entries. After presenting the 10 points of coincidence evidence to the jury, Tedeschi said there was only one way to explain the similarities between the deaths of Caleb, Patrick, Sarah, and Laura, and that was that Kathleen Folbigg was responsible for each one.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  He read 40 of her diary entries in court, telling the jury they showed the frustration Kathleen felt with her weight gain, her exhaustion, her moods, her lack of toleration for her babies, and her inability to control her actions when around them. These entries were proof, in Tedeschi’s eyes, that Kathleen was involved in each death and carried guilt about each one. They also demonstrated her belief that she’d finally changed when Laura was born, only for this to unravel when the same frustrations she’d suffered with the other children had gotten the better of her. Tedeschi closed arguments for the prosecution by telling the jury that Kathleen Folbigg

• 34:51Speaker 00

  had been unable to cope with the demands of parenthood. She was so obsessed with her own wants, needs and desires that she eventually resolved her frustration by killing her children. Kathleen Folbigg did not kill or injure her children to get attention for herself or in a state of profound depression, Tedeschi declared. She killed them because she couldn't stand their crying and the demands they made on her life. Kathleen's lawyer, Peter Zara, told the jury that there was no evidence Kathleen had ever abused or mistreated her children. In fact, she had always advocated for their health and wellbeing.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  Even those who were testifying against her said she had been a loving mother who had taken good care of her kids. As for the suggestion that Kathleen was motivated to kill so she could get on top of her weight, Zara pointed out that Kathleen hadn't even joined a gym until five months after Sarah, her third child, had passed away. Countering the prosecution's position, Zara said that each of the children's deaths could be explained by a natural medical condition. Caleb had a floppy larynx, Patrick had epilepsy, Sarah had a congested displaced uvula, and Laura had myocarditis.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Zara argued that in the face of these medical conditions, the coincidence evidence presented by the prosecution was meaningless. Given that Kathleen was her children's primary carer and it was her responsibility to get up in the night to care for them, it made sense that she was the one to have found them more reborn or lifeless. There was also nothing suspicious about the fact that the children had died while in their beds, as this is a common factor for most children who die from unexplained causes. While it was true that Craig Folbigg had been the one to administer CPR for Caleb, Patrick and Sarah, Kathleen hadn't hesitated to perform CPR on Laura when Craig wasn't there to help.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  As for the diary entries, Zara urged the jury to draw on their own experiences and consider that Kathleen was actually using her journals to work through her completely reasonable and normal feelings of grief, shame and guilt. He said she had used them to ask hypothetical “what-if” questions, using words that were never intended for anyone else’s eyes. The prosecution presented their case over several weeks, with Craig Folbigg the first witness to take the stand. Kathleen appeared emotionless as Craig spoke of his deep love for his children and shared some of his negative memories of Kathleen’s mothering skills.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  He spoke about the growl she regularly made during moments of frustration and the aggression she had shown towards Laura on the morning she died. Speaking about the day the police came to arrest him for hindering the investigation, Craig said that was the moment he decided to tell the truth. He vehemently denied that revenge had been a motivating factor. For the differing statements he’d made to the police over the years, Craig was granted indemnity against being prosecuted for perjury, although the defence was quick to point out his lies. Peter Zara reminded Craig that he had been recorded telling Kathleen that he had initially

• 38:28Speaker 00

  gone to the police because he was so full of hate, spite and anxiety that he wanted to ruin her life like she did his. Zara also asked Craig about a previously recorded conversation in which he told a friend that if he had even the slightest inkling that Kathleen had killed the children, he probably would have killed her himself. Craig told another friend that detective Bernie Ryan had “planted some bullshit” in his head during one of the lowest points of his life. He’d shared his view that it angered the detective when people spoke about what a good mother Kathleen had been. On the stand, Craig claimed he didn’t recall these remarks and agreed that he could have

• 39:13Speaker 00

  been lying at the time. Kathleen’s lawyer replied: “You see, Mr Folbigg, it is now becoming increasingly difficult to tell when you lie and when you don’t.”

• 39:29Speaker 00

  With the jury left to ponder whether Craig Folbigg genuinely believed that Kathleen had murdered their children, or was simply seeking revenge for her having left him, Craig’s allegations that Kathleen was occasionally rough with her children were backed up by testimony from Kathleen’s foster sister, Lee Bown. Although in cross-examination, Lee conceded she had only ever seen Kathleen lose her temper with Laura twice, and that she hadn’t been forthcoming with this information until many years after the fact. The medical and forensic experts who testified for the prosecution all agreed that they had never heard of another case in which three or more sudden unexplained infant deaths

• 40:13Speaker 00

  had occurred naturally within a single family. They were required to give evidence about the death of each child individually, and while the autopsy findings for each one differed slightly, each of the experts agreed that it was possible Kathleen had deliberately smothered her children. Kathleen chose not to take the stand in her own defence, which meant the only time the jury heard from her was when the video of her one and only police interview from July 1999 was played to the court. When it came to the point of the interview where Detective Ryan had asked Kathleen point-blank if she had killed her children, Kathleen became hysterical and had to be removed from the dock.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  She was taken to hospital and sedated while proceedings were adjourned for the day. The only other time she showed any emotion was during testimony from pathologist Dr. Alan Carla when a video was played of a happy, healthy Laura playing by the pool on the day before she died. Dr. Carla said that based on the footage, it was quite unlikely that Laura had died of myocarditis. At this point, Kathleen covered her head in her hands and broke down in tears.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  The defence took just three days to present their case. Without access to the genetic information they'd been seeking from overseas, their strongest testimony came from Professor Roger Bayard, an internationally acclaimed SIDS expert from Adelaide's Forensic Science Centre. Bayard said the video of Laura proved nothing. While she might have looked happy and healthy, it was impossible to tell from the footage whether she had a fever or any other symptoms that could be attributed to myocarditis. He cited another case where a young girl had played a game of basketball and swam forty metres in a pool before dying of myocarditis.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  While the level of Laura's myocarditis might have been moderate, Professor Bayard said, "It was the sort of inflammation I have seen in a number of cases of sudden death in children."

• 42:27Speaker 00

  As for Caleb, Patrick and Sarah, he said there was no evidence that any of them had been smothered, and reminded the jury they were not dealing with absolutes. He didn't think the hemociderin found in Caleb's lungs was significant either. A study he'd conducted had revealed the presence of hemociderin in twenty percent of all SIDS cases. Although Professor Bayard admitted under cross-examination that he didn't know of any other case where four children from the same family all died suddenly and unexpectedly from four different natural causes.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Testimony was heard from three of Kathleen's friends from the gym who had witnessed her being a loving and caring mother to Laura. Under cross-examination, however, they each admitted that they hadn't been close enough to Kathleen to know much about her marriage or private life. The prosecution said this rendered their testimony meaningless and further proved that the only real insight into how Kathleen really felt was through her diaries.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  In Summing Up for the Prosecution, Tedeschi said that while he couldn't disprove the possibility that Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura had died from the various natural causes put forward by the defence, he also couldn't disprove the possibility that pigs might one day fly. “If you look at what the defence is suggesting,” Tedeschi stated, “not in isolation, but in totality, there has never, ever been before in the history of medicine that our experts have been able to find any case like this. It is preposterous. It is not a reasonable doubt. It is fantasy.”

• 44:16Speaker 00

  The judge acknowledged the emotional nature of the seven-week trial, telling the jury, “It is unlikely to imagine a more tragic series of events happening to a single family. You must not judge this case with your heart, but with your heads.”

• 44:37Speaker 00

  The jury left to deliberate and were called back in the following afternoon. The general assumption was that they would request more time to consider their verdict. It therefore came as a surprise to everyone in the packed courtroom when they announced they were ready to give their decision on all five charges. Tension hung thick in the air when the foreperson was asked how they found Kathleen Folbigg in relation to the murder of her firstborn son, Caleb. Their answer was unexpected: not guilty. As those in the gallery tried to maintain their composure, the foreperson was asked

• 45:19Speaker 00

  how they found Kathleen in relation to Caleb’s manslaughter. Guilty, came the reply. Relief washed over Craig and his family while Kathleen appeared to be in a state of shock. For the charge of causing grievous bodily harm to Patrick, the jury also found Kathleen guilty. For Patrick’s murder, guilty. Sarah’s murder, guilty. Laura’s murder, guilty.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  Craig and his loved ones looked on in stunned disbelief. Many of them broke down in tears, while Lee Bowden let out a shout.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  The relatively stony demeanor Kathleen had maintained for a majority of the trial crumbled in an instant. She burst into tears, her whole body shaking as she slumped down in her seat, unable to stand. Kathleen's only supporter, Major Joyce Harmer, was given permission to help. Quietly, she put her arm around Kathleen and half-carried her out of the dock and towards the holding cells downstairs.

• 46:32Speaker 00

  Outside court, Craig Folbigg faced the hordes of reporters to deliver a message to the members of the jury. Through tears, he said: “My most humble thanks go to twelve people who I have never formally met, who today share the honour of having set four beautiful souls free to rest in peace.”

• 46:57Speaker 00

  While Kathleen awaited her sentencing, she was kept in solitary confinement. Word of her conviction quickly spread, and the officials feared for her safety due to the level of hatred from the other inmates. Anytime she was taken from her cell, she was protected by guards on all sides. She barely ate, fearful that her food had been poisoned.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  Although Kathleen strongly maintained her innocence, the public backlash against her was fierce, and she quickly earned the undesirable title of “the most hated woman in Australia”. Nobody could understand how a mother could do such a thing to not one, but all four of her children, and expect to get away with it. The question the public wanted answered was why would someone continuously go through the strain of pregnancy and childbirth if they knew they couldn’t handle the pressure of parenthood? The fact that Kathleen’s father had killed her mother became a hot topic in the media, with many questioning the role that genetic and environmental factors could have played in Kathleen’s crimes.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  She was examined by various psychiatrists, who also reviewed her government records to try to find a logical explanation for why she had killed her children. It was revealed that the first few years of Kathleen's life had not started well. After her mother was killed, eighteen-month-old Kathleen became a ward of the state and went to live with her maternal aunt and her husband. The couple soon noticed that Kathleen displayed some troubling behaviour. They said she was aggressive, had difficulty learning acceptable manners, and seemed preoccupied with her genitals. A medical officer assessed Kathleen and concluded that she had likely been sexually abused by

• 48:51Speaker 00

  her father when she was a baby and was "a very disturbed little girl".

• 48:59Speaker 00

  Kathleen's aunt was unable to care for her, so she was put into a foster family who went on to raise her as their own. Kathleen's foster parents said she was happy and well-adjusted, but Kathleen found her foster mother to be excessively controlling, socially isolating, and at times, violent. Sometimes she hit Kathleen with a wooden spoon or a belt. Despite this, Kathleen felt she inherited many positive traits from her foster mother too. She went on to do relatively well at school, and although she didn't have many friends growing up, she formed some lasting friendships in her adolescence that she cherished into adulthood.

• 49:41Speaker 00

  It was only as a teenager that she discovered the truth about her parents and was left to deal with the complex feelings this raised. Constant clashes with her foster mother prompted her to move out of home at the age of seventeen, and she met Craig Vollbig shortly after.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  One of the psychiatrists who assessed Kathleen ahead of her sentencing believed that the first few years of her life had impacted her ability to form emotional attachments. In turn, this contributed to her inability to care for or protect her own children.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  Opposing the opinion of another psychiatrist, he didn't believe Kathleen had a diagnosable personality disorder, but that she was a deeply tormented and disturbed woman who struggled with depression, feelings of rejection, and low self-esteem, all of which stemmed from her first few years of life. The neglect and abuse she'd endured as a young girl also explained her emotional detachment and what was viewed as her inappropriate grieving process after each of her children's deaths.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  The psychiatrist said these negative feelings were evident in Kathleen's diary entries, which provided the only real insight into her state of mind.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  The various mental health professionals who had dealt with Kathleen also noted that she spoke of the children as though she had nothing to do with their deaths. One psychiatrist thought she could be disassociating from the traumatic crimes, or had repressed them completely. Another concluded: “I am sure we will never know why Kathleen did it.”

• 51:28Speaker 00

  When Kathleen's sentencing took place five months after her trial in October 2003, Justice Graham Barr agreed that Kathleen's early life provided an insight into her state of mind as an adult. In his view, the stress Kathleen experienced raising her own children was heightened because she was psychologically damaged and barely coping.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  He accepted that she was generally a good mother, but that her mental state left her unable to ask for help when she felt herself struggling with the demands of sick, willful, or disobedient children.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  Justice Barr didn't think the deaths were premeditated, but that they'd occurred once Kathleen was pushed beyond her ability to manage. He said she would always present a danger to any children in her care, and it was unlikely she'd ever admit the truth about her crimes. Acknowledging the potential harm Kathleen faced in prison, Justice Barr recommended that she be held in solitary confinement 22 hours a day. And with that, he delivered his sentence.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  For the murders of her four children, Kathleen Folbigg would spend forty years in prison, with a non-parole period of thirty years.

• 52:48Speaker 00

  Outside court, Craig Folbigg avoided the media throngs, eager to put this horrendous chapter of his life behind him and move on. Kathleen's lawyer had one final message to deliver to the waiting press. Mrs. Folbigg has asked me to say that she is innocent of these charges. She did not kill her children, or harm them in any way.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  For Kathleen's foster sister, Lee, the sentencing came as a relief. If Kathleen's crimes had taught her anything, it was that other unexplained infant deaths should be examined more carefully by law enforcement and forensic specialists. She called on the press to make sure someone was giving a voice to those who couldn't speak for themselves.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  So scathing was Lee's opinion of Kathleen that she'd even handed over a private letter to the press that Kathleen had written to her from prison while awaiting sentencing. The letter had been published on the front page of the Daily Telegraph newspaper. In it, Kathleen voiced her disbelief that Lee had turned against her, saying it wasn't fair that she was being compared to her father when she'd actively fought against having any connection to him. She said any personality trait she had inherited came from her foster parents, just like Lee's had, and none of them were capable of murder.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  Kathleen accused Lee of purposely lying, deceiving and manipulating her during the four years it had taken the police to build a circumstantial case against her.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  She said that nobody had any right to interpret the meaning of her diary entries, saying it was, quote, "A sad day when a mother can be put away for merely being a normal mother, who wrote down her emotions, anxieties, and frustrations in bloody books.

• 54:46Speaker 00

  The diaries are not literal, definitely not a window to my brain," Kathleen wrote. "How ridiculous. They were a place for me to offload and then wipe my hands and move on." Lee, I know my failures and have taken responsibility for them, but I will not be forced to take responsibility for something I have not done. I have no more energy to battle with people who won't hear. Try to imagine your life being spread out, rippled to pieces, examined, opinions cast, character assassinated. Your every word, action, thought, doubted, and you're told you don't know yourself.

• 55:31Speaker 00

  Add to that, becoming the most hated woman alive. I now live with that every day. I endure all of this, knowing that vindication will one day be mine.

• 55:54Speaker 00

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• 58:40Speaker 00

  While Kathleen Folbig came to terms with her new reality in the aftermath of Sally Clark's wrongful conviction in England, a review was ordered into a number of other cases where Professor Roy Meadow had provided evidence for the prosecution. Subsequently, three other women who'd been convicted of murdering their children had their convictions overturned and were released from prison. Among them was Angela Canning's, a mother of four who had been found guilty of smothering two of her babies.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  In the review of Angela's case, the appellate judge was scathing of Meadow's law. He said that two or more sudden, unexplained infant deaths in a single family certainly warranted an explanation, but that great care must be taken to not simply assume the infants were deliberately killed.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  The judge stated: “If murder cannot be proven, the conviction cannot be safe. In a criminal case, it is simply not enough to be able to establish even a high probability of guilt. Unless we are sure of guilt, the dreadful possibility always remains that a mother, already brutally scarred by the unexplained death or deaths of her babies, may find herself in prison for life for killing them when she would not be there at all. In our community, and in any civilized community, that is abhorrent.”

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  Kathleen’s legal team used Angela’s case as one of the grounds of their first appeal against her conviction, while also arguing that the various charges against her should never have been tried together.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  The appeal was rejected, with the judges finding that Kathleen’s case differed from Angela’s in multiple ways, and that enough evidence had been presented at Kathleen’s trial to uphold her conviction.

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  Although, they did agree that her forty-year sentence was excessive, and reduced it to thirty years, with eligibility for parole after twenty-five.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  Kathleen filed a second appeal in 2007, on the grounds that her trial had miscarried by way of juror misconduct. Over the years, it had emerged that one of the jurors on Kathleen’s trial had been fascinated by a comment that Craig Folbigg made during his testimony. Recalling the conversation in which he told Kathleen that he’d given her diary to the police, Craig said Kathleen had asked him what was written in it. He’d told her: “Oh, there was that thing about being your father’s daughter.”

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  As this particular diary entry had been ruled inadmissible at the trial, the jurors didn’t know what Craig was talking about. One of them was curious enough that they googled Kathleen’s name when they got home, and discovered that she was the daughter of a convicted murderer, a detail they then shared with the other jurors. This was a major no-no, as the jurors were forbidden from conducting any external research while the trial was underway. It also turned out that another juror had conducted their own research pertaining to how long an infant’s body would stay warm for after they died. Kathleen’s second appeal was also rejected,

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  with the prosecution successfully arguing that the jurors knowing about Kathleen’s father could have actually helped her case.

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  Despite everything that had been printed in the media that essentially inferred Kathleen had been born to kill, the prosecution said that if anything, this detail would have elicited sympathy from the jurors. Kathleen appealed to have her case heard by the High Court, but this was rejected too. With her appeal avenues exhausted, she was forced to accept her new reality as Australia’s worst-known female serial killer. But despite public opinion, Kathleen never faltered in her claim of innocence. In the letter she’d written to Lee while awaiting sentencing, Kathleen had said: “I don’t like being hated, so why would I do something that ensures I am?

• 1:02:58Speaker 00

  This is the last time I’ll state: I did not kill my children.”

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  Unbeknownst to Kathleen, she wasn’t the only one who refused to accept this. Dr Emma Cunliffe is an Australian professor of law who spent her PhD researching the ways in which the legal process, medical knowledge, and expectations of motherhood work together when a mother is charged with killing a baby who died under mysterious circumstances. As she looked into various case studies, she realised that over the years, most of the accused women had either had their charges acquitted, their convictions overturned, or evidence against them thrown out completely. All of them, that was, except for Kathleen Foulby.

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  Professor Cunliffe was particularly struck by the testimony from medical experts at Kathleen’s trial, who said they weren’t aware of any other cases where more than three children in a single family had died from unexplained natural causes. When she looked into the medical research available at the time of Kathleen’s trial, she found at least eight other such cases. In the wake of Sally Clark’s appeal in the UK, even more cases had emerged.

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  Furthermore, in Laura Folbigg's autopsy, Dr Alan Carla had noted that she was suffering from myocarditis at the time of her death. How then, Professor Cunliffe wondered, had he testified that it was unlikely that she had died of myocarditis? She couldn't understand how Dr Carla had reached the conclusion that each of the Folbigg children had been smothered, particularly when some of Dr Carla's colleagues had also examined the slides of Laura's heart tissue and thought the level of myocarditis was significant enough to cause death. Notably, none of those experts had been called to give evidence at Kathleen's trial.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  Then there was the issue of Kathleen's diaries, which the prosecution had posited were as good as having “a machine to look into Kathleen's mind”. While Professor Cunliffe agreed that the diaries were shocking and even distressing to read, she began researching the reactions of mothers who had unexpectedly lost a child. She found that self-blame and guilt were very common, especially when the death was sudden and unexplained. Professor Cunliffe found it odd that no expert evidence about maternal grief and bereavement had been submitted at Kathleen's trial. She also believed that many of the submissions made by the prosecution were based on what

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  she described as misogynistic stereotypes about self-sacrificial mothering. For example, they had suggested that Kathleen wanting to leave Sarah with a family member so she could exercise at the gym or work part-time was evidence that she couldn't cope as a mother. Nothing was said about the benefits that exercise, financial independence, and social relationships had on postpartum women.

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  The more Professor Cunliffe learned, the more she believed that Kathleen’s diaries were evidence of a woman who was struggling with grief and trying desperately to regain some form of control. It sounded to her like Kathleen blamed herself for her children’s deaths because she believed it was her responsibility to protect them from harm. Over time, her entries showed that she became superstitious, almost to a point of obsession, about controlling every detail of their upbringing. And, most importantly for Professor Cunliffe, at no point did she ever write that she had harmed any of her children in any way.

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  Professor Cunliffe’s findings were published in 2011 in a book titled Murder, Medicine and Motherhood, with the conclusion that Kathleen Folbigg had been wrongfully convicted. By this point, Kathleen had spent eight years behind bars. Publication of the book propelled her case back into the spotlight, with others coming forward to voice their support and call for the case to be re-examined. The problem was, Kathleen had already exhausted her avenues of appeal. For her case to be reviewed, the New South Wales Attorney General would have to order an official inquiry. The possibility that Kathleen could be innocent gained even more traction after Professor

• 1:07:42Speaker 00

  Cunliffe voiced her concerns in a segment about the case on popular current affairs programme 60 Minutes. This was countered by an appearance from Kathleen’s foster sister Lee Bowden, who was unwavering in her belief that Kathleen was guilty, and told the reporter that she believed Kathleen deserved to die for what she did to her children. Professor Cunliffe's findings caught the attention of various eminent lawyers, who agreed there were some serious questions about Kathleen's conviction. This led to the case being reviewed by a group of law students from the University of Newcastle's Legal Centre, who scrutinised the trial transcripts and examined the similar British cases

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  that had been sullied by the now debunked Meadows Law. While the debunking of this theory had a positive impact on many wrongfully accused women, the damage it had caused was irreparable. In 2007, Sally Clark, the British mother who was acquitted of killing her two babies, died of acute alcohol poisoning, having never recovered from the trauma of her ordeal.

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  The deaths of Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura Folbigg were independently reviewed by Professor Stephen Cordner, the former director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, who was widely considered to be Australia's leading forensic pathologist. After spending an entire year on the case, Professor Cordner was bewildered by the fact that it had never been explicitly stated during Kathleen's trial that there had been no physical evidence to support the possibility that the children had been smothered or killed by any means.

• 1:09:24Speaker 00

  This was particularly poignant in Laura's case. As Laura was old enough to have fully erupted teeth, if she had been smothered, Professor Cordner would have expected to see tooth marks on the inside of her mouth. Instead, there were absolutely no signs of asphyxia or compressions to her face, and no evidence of a struggle expected in a toddler of that age. However, the level of myocarditis was significant enough that, in Professor Cordner's view, most forensic pathologists would feel comfortable to rule it the cause of Laura's death. He also found it completely reasonable to attribute Caleb and Sarah's deaths to SIDS.

• 1:10:08Speaker 00

  While he couldn't determine what had caused Patrick's Ulti, he was confident that his eventual death was, quote, "an unsurprising consequence of the state he was left in following the Ulti."

• 1:10:23Speaker 00

  Professor Cordner put his findings in a 125-page report that was peer-reviewed and supported by a number of international experts who further debunked the theory that two or more infant deaths should be treated as homicides. They agreed with Cordner when he concluded: “There is no forensic pathology evidence to suggest that the Folbigg children were deliberately smothered or killed. In my view, it is wrong on the forensic evidence available in this case to conclude that one or more of the Folbigg children are the victims of homicide. There is no merit in forcing certainty where uncertainty exists.

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  If the convictions in this case are stand, I want to clearly state there is no pathological or medical basis for concluding homicide. The findings are completely compatible with natural causes.”

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  In 2013, the Newcastle Legal Centre officially took on Kathleen’s case pro bono and announced that they would be seeking an inquiry into her conviction. In addition to Cordner’s report, they had Kathleen’s diary entries studied by a clinical psychologist who was scathing of the prosecution’s interpretation of them as being confessions to the alleged crimes. Just like Dr Emma Cunliffe had suggested, the psychologist believed the diary entries proved that Kathleen was no different from many other postpartum mothers in that she felt isolated and sometimes depressed and worried about her marriage and physical appearance following childbirth.

• 1:12:05Speaker 00

  Kathleen’s diary entries suggested to the psychologist that she interpreted her feelings of stress, irritability, and exhaustion as evidence of poor mothering. She then equated her reaction to motherhood as the reason that her children had died. The psychologist found it significant that Kathleen had never once mentioned having harmed any of the children or even wanting to harm them. Why hold this information back in a diary that she didn’t expect anyone else to ever read? The psychologist concluded that the prosecution using the diaries as evidence was misleading and unsupported by psychological literature on maternal adjustment.

• 1:12:48Speaker 00

  Despite everything that had emerged from Sally Clark's appeal in the UK, Kathleen's defence team had not called any experts to testify that theories such as Meadows' Law had been discredited. Kathleen's new legal team had the case reviewed by a British professor of mathematics who'd provided evidence for the Clark case. He called Meadows' Law “complete nonsense” and concluded that the jury in Kathleen's case had been misled by expert statements about the rarity of multiple SIDS in a single family. While multiple SIDS cases were indeed rare, the professor pointed out that statistically speaking, there were far more instances of multiple SIDS than there were of multiple infant murders.

• 1:13:34Speaker 00

  With such a large number of women giving birth each week, he concluded it was inevitable that there would be instances of multiple unexplained deaths in the one family.

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  A long-running study in the UK had actually shown that families who had lost one child to SIDS had an increased chance of losing a second baby to SIDS. With the jury in Kathleen's case being told there were no recorded instances of three or more SIDS in the one family, the professor said this had essentially left the jury incorrectly believing that homicide was the only explanation for the deaths of the Folbigg children.

• 1:14:14Speaker 00

  With all of this new evidence coming to light, in May 2015, Kathleen's legal team announced that they had signed a petition calling for her convictions to be reviewed by the New South Wales Attorney General.

• 1:14:28Speaker 00

  For Kathleen Folbigg, this news couldn't have been more welcome. By this point, she had served 12 years of her sentence, two of them in solitude, and she'd never wavered from her position that she was innocent. The truth was that like many other new mothers, Kathleen had struggled with the identity shift that comes with being a parent. While she had loved Craig deeply in the early years of their marriage, she grew to resent the fact that the overnight parenting duties always fell to her. Craig was and always had been an incredibly deep sleeper. Once his head hit the pillow, he was out for the count until morning, and he joked that a bomb could go off without waking him.

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  None of the baby's cries ever woke him, leaving Kathleen to deal with the nights alone. As someone who had always been a big sleeper herself and didn't like to stay up late, the lack of sleep or time to herself really took its toll on Kathleen. Because of this, establishing predictable routines with each of the children's bedtimes was important to her. She found it frustrating that Craig didn't seem to take this seriously, and instead interpreted her as being somewhat neurotic and overly controlling. It wasn't just the lack of sleep that bothered Kathleen. Shortly after Patrick died, she found Craig in what looked like a romantic embrace with one of her friends.

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

  Years later, after Sarah was born, she suspected that Craig might be interested in other women.

• 1:16:07Speaker 00

  Craig had also made some comments about Kathleen's weight gain over the years, which contributed to her own self-consciousness.

• 1:16:15Speaker 00

  It was around this time that their relationship reached rock bottom, with Kathleen feeling severely insecure, unattractive, and rejected by Craig. While she first started exercising as a means to lose weight, she grew to love the other benefits that exercise gave her. Going to the gym wasn't the vain obsession that the prosecution had depicted, but a way to keep her mental health in check. It had always bothered Kathleen that such a big deal was made about her going back to the gym just the days after Laura died. After all, Craig had gone back to work at the same time, and nobody had batted an eye at that.

• 1:16:57Speaker 00

  Then there was the scrutiny about her perceived lack of emotion following her children's deaths.

• 1:17:04Speaker 00

  When Kathleen was a child, her foster mother often reacted negatively any time Kathleen was in a bad mood. She therefore grew up believing that she had to keep any negative emotions in check because she didn't want to inflict them on other people. In reality, the deaths of all four of her children had devastated Kathleen. She had simply chosen not to wallow in her grief and to do her best to get on with life. After she was suspected of killing her children, she detached herself from the situation, a coping mechanism she'd learned when she entered the foster system as a three-year-old. It also helped her survive in prison, where she was the target of hatred and violence from other inmates.

• 1:17:51Speaker 00

  The diaries were a way for Kathleen to unload her darkest feelings without burdening anyone else. She didn't use them to record feelings of joy or contentment, even though these were emotions she experienced regularly. Assuming that no one else would ever read them, she had just jotted her thoughts down as they poured out of her without taking time to explain. It was a way to purge her negative emotions, as well as try and figure out what was going on in her life.

• 1:18:23Speaker 00

  For example, the comment that Sarah had left with a bit of help was a reference to God or some kind of higher power having already taken her two sons.

• 1:18:34Speaker 00

  Kathleen believed in karma and fate, and at the time of writing the diaries, she thought it was possible that her deceased children could communicate with one another. When she wrote that she couldn't have handled another child like Sarah, and that Laura had saved her life by being different, she was simply reflecting on this belief.

• 1:18:55Speaker 00

  Her entry about wanting Sarah to shut up, and one day she did, wasn't an admission of guilt, but merely an observation. As for the comment that she was most scared about being left alone with the baby, this wasn't because she presented a threat to them, it was because she was petrified of finding them dead. Kathleen was adamant that if she had killed the children, there would be no room for misinterpretation, and she would have used her diaries to try and figure out why she'd done such a thing. If she was guilty, she would have either confessed or taken her own life. Given how young the babies had been when they died, Kathleen had very little to remember them by.

• 1:19:40Speaker 00

  The longer she spent in prison, the more distant those memories became. She did what she could to maintain her sanity while serving her sentence, keeping her head down to avoid poor treatment from other inmates and leaning on the friendships she still had in the outside world. Kathleen welcomed anyone who wanted to help her case, and with the petition to the Attorney General being filed, she was hopeful that her side of the story would finally be believed.

• 1:20:12Speaker 00

  But the petition languished for years as Kathleen and her legal team waited with bated breath for news. With nothing appearing to be happening, in August 2018, the case was covered for the second time by ABC's Australian Story. Not only did the segment present expert evidence suggesting that Kathleen had been wrongfully convicted, it also featured interviews with Kathleen by way of phone calls from prison with her strongest supporter, a childhood friend named Tracy Chapman.

• 1:20:45Speaker 00

  It was the closest thing Kathleen had ever made to a public appearance and gave her the chance to explain her side of the story for the first time. Within days of the episode airing, the New South Wales Attorney General held a press conference to announce that a full inquiry would be held into Kathleen Folbigg's convictions. While this was excellent news for Kathleen and her supporters, there were even bigger things brewing. There had always been questions about whether the Folbigg children had a genetic mutation that could explain their deaths, and recent advancements in medical technology meant such testing was finally possible. By studying the DNA of Kathleen, Craig, and their four children,

• 1:21:29Speaker 00

  comprehensive genetic testing, known as whole genome sequencing, had the power to unequivocally reveal whether the children had a genetic abnormality that could explain why they died.

• 1:21:42Speaker 00

  In October 2018 Kathleen provided a saliva sample and a buccal swab to a team of scientists along with her comprehensive medical history. Genome sequencing was conducted on the sample and in early December the data was given to two leading immunologists Professor Karola Vinuessa and Dr Todor Asov. They both sat down to examine the data individually, curious to see if they arrived at the same conclusion. Eventually, they both looked up from their computers at the same time and exclaimed in astonishment: “CARM2”.

• 1:22:22Speaker 00

  Carmodulin2, more commonly known as CARM2, is a crucial calcium-binding protein that helps control human heart function, especially the electrical signals that keep the heartbeat steady. Both Professor Vinuessa and Dr Asov noted that Kathleen Folbigg carried a mutation to this gene that had never been seen before. Such a mutation would prevent the channels that normally allow calcium to enter and exit the heart from closing properly. As a result, calcium could build up and cause the heart to stop beating. Other known mutations of the CARM2 gene had been found in patients who suffered from

• 1:23:04Speaker 00

  Long QT Syndrome, a heart rhythm disorder where the heart’s electrical system takes too long to recharge between beats. It can be triggered during exercise, emotional distress, or during sleep. Symptoms of Long QT Syndrome can include fainting, seizures, heart palpitations, and even sudden death, particularly in young patients. While the CARM2 mutation seen in Kathleen was novel, other known mutations to the gene had been associated with sudden death in infants.

• 1:23:40Speaker 00

  While Kathleen was not known to have long QT syndrome, her medical history did show instances of fainting in the past, including after completing a swimming race and moments of stress. This indicated that she had an irregular heartbeat.

• 1:23:57Speaker 00

  The next step was to see if Kathleen had passed this genetic mutation on to any of her children.

• 1:24:04Speaker 00

  Craig Folbigg refused to provide a DNA sample of his own, and was not legally compelled to do so. But DNA samples from the Folbigg children could be obtained from preserved tissue samples, and in a groundbreaking achievement, from their neonatal Hilkrik tests that were taken at birth. Comprehensive genetic sequencing of the children's DNA provided a startling revelation. Both Sarah and Laura Folbigg shared the same novel CARM2 mutation as Kathleen. A mutation that had the potential to be fatal.

• 1:24:44Speaker 00

  The inquiry into Kathleen Folbigg's conviction commenced in the Lickham Coroner's Court in March 2019, four years after Kathleen's legal team first petitioned for it. The aim of the inquiry was to reexamine the original evidence presented at trial in light of the new research and developments that had emerged since then, to see if Kathleen's case should be referred to the Court of Criminal Appeal.

• 1:25:10Speaker 00

  In addition to a review of the medical and scientific evidence relevant to the case, Kathleen was also given the opportunity to testify about her incriminating diary entries for the first time. However, the inquiry's commissioner, former District Court Chief Judge Reginald Blanch, denied the request for any psychological evidence to be presented relating to the diaries, stating that a psychiatrist's view of the meaning of the diary entries would be of no use.

• 1:25:40Speaker 00

  Craig Folbigg, who had gone on to have a child with his new wife, was strongly against the inquiry. Outside court, his brother John gave a statement on behalf of the family, saying: “As a family, we welcomed Cathy, loved her, supported her. We, along with the public, have endured this process to discover the truth regarding the deaths of our dear Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura.

• 1:26:08Speaker 00

  What has been most devastating has been that, in the end, the answer lay with Kathleen. We kept our thoughts regarding her actions, her supporters’ vitriolic outbursts, and our pain and our grief about not only the loss of our four beautiful babies, but the loss of this part of our family group to ourselves. This chapter unfolding now, we feel, was unnecessary and most definitely unwelcome. However, we have endured it to ensure the justice that Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura received in 2003.”

• 1:26:48Speaker 00

  With numerous hearings held over the following three months, hopes were high for Kathleen and her supporters when Judge Blanch released his 550-page report in July 2019. But, much to their dismay, Blanch found that the evidence relating to the Cal2 gene mutation wasn’t compelling. Evidence had been presented at the inquiry from a team of scientists who opposed Professor Vinoese’s findings on the grounds that no Calmodulin deaths had ever been recorded in sleeping infants. Judge Blanch subsequently concluded that the science was too new and the mutation had not been proven to be harmful.

• 1:27:30Speaker 00

  Furthermore, only Laura and Sarah had the mutation, meaning it couldn’t be explained in all four of the children’s deaths. Blanch stated: “On the evidence before the inquiry, I find that there is no reasonable possibility that any of the Folbigg children had a known or recognized pathogenic, or likely pathogenic genetic variant which caused their deaths, or Patrick’s Ulti.”

• 1:27:58Speaker 00

  In Blanch's view, it was Kathleen's diary entries that still provided the most compelling non-medical evidence for her guilt. He denounced the explanations she gave as to the meaning of the most incriminating entries, calling them unbelievable and untruthful.

• 1:28:16Speaker 00

  Blanch was satisfied that the prosecution had interpreted the diary entries correctly at the 2003 trial.

• 1:28:24Speaker 00

  Judge Blanch ultimately concluded there was no reasonable doubt about Kathleen's guilt, and that if anything, the new evidence presented during the inquiry only reinforced the original verdict rather than undermining it. He concluded: "It remains that the only conclusion reasonably open is that somebody intentionally caused harm to the children, and smothering was the obvious method. The evidence pointed to no person other than Ms. Fulbick."

• 1:29:00Speaker 00

  Judge Blanch's decision caused outrage amongst the scientific community, particularly for Professor Vinuasa. She found it bewildering that the writings of a grief-stricken mother could be given more weight than the CARM2 mutation, which her team believed presented a 90% probability of infant cardiac death. Concerned that the inquiry had ignored the available science and hadn't taken her genetic evidence seriously, Professor Vinuasa went straight to the Australian Academy of Science to ask for help. The academy reviewed the case before announcing their support for Kathleen. It wasn't their aim to prove whether or not she was innocent.

• 1:29:44Speaker 00

  They simply wanted to make sure that the science was being taken seriously, and in this instance, they didn't believe it was. In a story for the Australian National University, Professor Vinuasa said: "The problem was the judge was trying to weigh the genetic evidence with the diary evidence, and the science was complex, perhaps too complex to be heard. I thought, how can we have a legal system that has difficulty understanding complex science? There's something wrong with this process. Science has not been heard or understood." Kathleen's life depended on the science being fully understood.

• 1:30:28Speaker 00

  In October 2019, Kathleen's legal team applied to have a judicial review conducted of Blanch's report. They argued that he had demonstrated apprehended bias in various aspects of his conduct and had failed to properly consider the fresh genetic evidence submitted. They were particularly concerned that he had denied a psychological interpretation of Kathleen's diaries, with one of Kathleen's lawyers telling the Sydney Morning Herald: "Blanche isn't a psychiatrist, he's not a mother, and he hasn't lost four children." But he still felt able to interpret Kathleen's words and why she wrote them.

• 1:31:12Speaker 00

  Determined to prove the potential dangers of the CARM2 mutation, Professor Vinuasa enlisted the help of a team of 27 leading international scientists, who began conducting lab tests, heart cell studies, and comparisons with other known deadly carmodulin mutations. Their studies confirmed that the CARM2 mutation seen in Laura and Sarah Folbigg was just as damaging as other known carmodulin variants that had been known to kill children from cardiac arrhythmias. Not only could it cause sudden death, but it could be triggered by infections, such as myocarditis.

• 1:31:53Speaker 00

  Although it wasn't the main focus of their research, the international team also discovered that Caleb and Patrick Folbigg carried a rare mutation of the gene known as BSN, which is known to cause early onset lethal epilepsy in mice. This was significant, given Patrick's epilepsy diagnosis, and while further research needed to be done in this regard, Professor Vinuessa said that it highlighted that a single unifying cause of death in the four children was not needed to explain what happened. Speaking about the genetic mutation to investigative journalist Quinton McDermott for his comprehensive book on the case titled "Meadows Law",

• 1:32:37Speaker 00

  prominent molecular biologist Professor John Schrein explained that the Folbigg girls were incredibly unlucky to have inherited the Kalm2 mutation. Schrein stated: "If you have four people randomly running around the earth, the chance of all four being hit by lightning are incredibly slim. However, if each of the four is given a very large lightning rod that they carry around, their chances increase significantly. It's a bit like that. Once the mutation occurs in a family, then your chance of suffering the similar thing are 50%, incredibly high."

• 1:33:22Speaker 00

  A peer-reviewed paper on the findings was published in the highly respected medical journal Europace, which led to even more support from the scientific community. In early March 2021, a petition was submitted to the governor of New South Wales, which was signed by over 100 eminent scientists and clinicians, including two Nobel Prize winners. The petition argued that Judge Blanch's findings in the 2019 inquiry were counter to the scientific and medical evidence that now exists.

• 1:33:56Speaker 00

  The petition ultimately stated that all four of the Folbigg children had likely died from natural causes, that the evidence used to convict Kathleen was outdated, and that a miscarriage of justice had therefore occurred. In what was one of the strongest scientific interventions in any criminal case in Australian history, the petition called for Kathleen Folbigg to be pardoned.

• 1:34:21Speaker 00

  Given the new evidence and the global pressure, the New South Wales Attorney General ordered a second, more comprehensive inquiry be conducted into Kathleen's conviction, with focus on the newly available genetic evidence, as well as the psychology, psychiatry, and other evidence relevant to Kathleen's diary entries. The inquiry was led by former Chief Justice Tom Bathurst, with evidence presented over three separate hearings between November 2022 and February 2023. Final submissions were then presented in April.

• 1:34:58Speaker 00

  The new scientific evidence on the CAR2 mutation was presented, with various experts agreeing the mutation could have caused fatal arrhythmias in Sarah and Laura Folbigg. Just like in Kathleen's trial and in the 2019 inquiry, numerous experts also agreed that it was reasonable to believe that Laura could have died from myocarditis.

• 1:35:23Speaker 00

  As for Patrick, a paediatric neurologist said it was extremely unlikely that his Ulti had been caused by smothering. Instead, she thought it was likely caused by a then unexplained epileptic disease that resulted in progressive neurological dysfunction and his eventual death.

• 1:35:44Speaker 00

  Although there still wasn't a clear cause of death for Caleb, it was presented that if his three siblings had died from natural causes, then the coincidence evidence that helped secure Kathleen's manslaughter conviction against him was essentially relying on the long since discredited Meadows Law.

• 1:36:03Speaker 00

  In regards to Kathleen's supposed rage towards her children, counsel assisting submitted that caution should be taken not to idealise mothers as being universally patient, nurturing, and kind. A study was presented of 63 Finnish mothers who described experiencing various forbidden feelings in motherhood, the most frequent being fatigue, rage, anger, aggression, and guilt. Independent psychologists and delinquentists rejected the theory that Kathleen's diaries were evidence of guilt or akin to a confession, instead reinterpreting them as expressions of grief.

• 1:36:43Speaker 00

  Judge Bathurst was scheduled to hand down a report into his findings later in the year, but on May 30, 2023, he phoned the Attorney General to advise that he had already formed a firm view about the matter, and suggested that instead of waiting months for him to write his full report, he would provide a brief summary with these recommendations in just a few days’ time.

• 1:37:09Speaker 00

  On Monday, June 5, 2023, Kathleen was going about her day at the Clarence Correctional Facility when she was suddenly told to pack her things and that a prison van was waiting outside.

• 1:37:23Speaker 00

  Judge Bathurst had agreed that there was enough evidence to indicate a reasonable possibility that at least Patrick, Sarah and Laura had all died from natural causes.

• 1:37:34Speaker 00

  He didn’t accept Craig’s version of events from the night Sarah died, nor did he agree that the evidence had established Kathleen was anything but a caring mother for her children.

• 1:37:46Speaker 00

  He also agreed with the psychological evidence put forward that Kathleen’s diary entries weren’t admissions of murder, but the words of a “grieving, depressed and traumatised mother, feeling guilt at the unexplained deaths of her four children”. With these factors in mind, he said that the coincidence evidence that the prosecution case relied on at Kathleen’s trial fell away, and concluded that there was reasonable doubt as to Ms Folbigg's guilt.

• 1:38:18Speaker 00

  After two decades of being labelled one of Australia’s worst female serial killers, the New South Wales Attorney General publicly declared that Kathleen be unconditionally pardoned. He announced: “I am glad that our legal system in New South Wales contains provisions that allow for the continual pursuit of truth and justice. This is a day of high emotions. There are no winners from this story. It’s a terrible story of four lives lost, of a grieving father, and a woman who’s been incarcerated when she shouldn’t have been for 20 years.

• 1:38:57Speaker 00

  I think we all have to put ourselves in Ms Folbigg's shoes and let her now have the space she needs to get on with her life.”

• 1:39:07Speaker 00

  The pardon wasn’t just excellent news for Kathleen, but for the scientific community as a whole. The team of scientists and lawyers who’d supported Kathleen over the years was ecstatic. Having been offered very little funding by the Attorney General’s Office or legal aid, a spokesperson for the group said: “The result today brought together the science through the endeavours of our great scientists, with huge support from the Australian Academy of Science and the philanthropists who have committed their skills and their financial resources in an extraordinary way. Without that, I don’t think this would be possible.”

• 1:39:49Speaker 00

  The chief executive of the Australian Academy of Science pointed out that Kathleen’s case would have enormous implications for the Australian justice system, saying: “The question must now be asked: how do we create a more science-sensitive legal system, bringing to bear new, complex and emerging science routinely, every day, and not just in exceptional circumstances?” While news of the pardon was a major triumph for Kathleen’s supporters, no one was more ecstatic than Kathleen. Unable to fully wrap her head around what was happening, she was escorted from prison to the Coffs Harbour home of her best friend, Tracy Chapman, who had stood by her side

• 1:40:33Speaker 00

  all these years. Kathleen knew exactly how she wanted to spend her first night of freedom: soaking in the bath, eating a T-bone steak, and spending quality time with friends without the limitations of a prison visit. But the vindication of her pardon didn’t eradicate decades of trauma. Tracy told reporters: “I know the past 20 years have been horrific for Kathleen, not least for the pain and suffering she has had to endure following the loss of her four children. They were gorgeous children. They are all missed, every day.”

• 1:41:15Speaker 00

  Craig Folbigg released a statement via his lawyer, saying that his view about Kathleen's guilt had not changed whatsoever. He reminded the public that despite the pardon, Kathleen hadn't been acquitted and her convictions were still in place.

• 1:41:32Speaker 00

  She might be free, but in Craig's eyes, that didn't mean she was innocent.

• 1:41:38Speaker 00

  Much had been made in the media about Craig's allegations over the years. As journalist Quinton McDermott observed in his book, Meadows Law, at the heart of the evidence given by Craig were the negative observations he made about Cathy's mothering skills. This was rich, considering how little help he himself gave her at home.

• 1:42:02Speaker 00

  Five months later, in November 2023, Bathurst handed down his extensive 619-page report into the findings of the inquiry. He said the evidence demonstrated that Kathleen was a loving and caring mother who sometimes got angry and frustrated with her children, which was nothing out of the ordinary for primary caregivers. He found that the evidence, quote, "provides no support for the proposition that she killed her four children." Bathurst referred Kathleen's case to the Court of Criminal Appeal, with the general assumption that her conviction would be quashed.

• 1:42:44Speaker 00

  And on Thursday, December 14, 2023, it was.

• 1:42:51Speaker 00

  A panel of appellate judges reviewed Judge Bathurst's report and unequivocally agreed with his findings, declaring that all five convictions against Kathleen be formally quashed. It was the news Kathleen Folbigg had been waiting 20 years to hear. Gathered in the courtroom with her lawyers, friends, and supporters, it was a joyous scene as the unexpected news sunk in. Even some of Kathleen's lawyers were unable to hold back their tears. Outside court, Kathleen's voice trembled as she told the gathering reporters: "I hope that no one else will ever have to suffer what I have suffered.

• 1:43:35Speaker 00

  My children are here with me today, and they will be close to me for the rest of my life. I love my children, and I always will."

• 1:43:46Speaker 00

  While the acquittal was a major victory for Kathleen, it also served as a tragic reminder of all that she had lost.

• 1:43:54Speaker 00

  Despite all the years that had passed, her children were never far from her mind.

• 1:44:00Speaker 00

  In prison, she had kept a photo of Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura in her cell and spoke to them every day. Cleared of any involvement in their deaths, those few photos were the only physical reminders she still had, with Craig claiming to have scattered the children's ashes in the ocean.

• 1:44:20Speaker 00

  Craig Folbigg died of a sudden heart attack in 2024, still convinced of Kathleen's guilt. His lawyer released a statement on his family's behalf, saying the past few years had taken an enormous toll on Craig. He was graciously remembered by those who knew him as a private man who always maintained his dignity despite the extreme hardship he faced. For Kathleen, Craig's death was one final blow, eradicating the possibility that the two could ever restore a sense of harmony between them.

• 1:44:57Speaker 00

  She released a statement via her lawyer, which said: "There were only two people on this earth who knew what it felt like to lose Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura. My condolences go to the loved ones Craig leaves behind."

• 1:45:16Speaker 00

  In August 2025, the New South Wales Government offered Kathleen Folbigg $2 million in compensation for her 20-year wrongful imprisonment. Kathleen called the offer “a slap in the face”. Not only had she lost the best years of her life, but adjusting to life in the outside world had been a major struggle. She faced ongoing issues with her mental health, and so much had changed in the years since she was incarcerated, particularly in regards to technology, that she had to learn to live in society all over again. Having not worked for decades, she also missed out on the opportunity to earn superannuation.

• 1:45:58Speaker 00

  All Kathleen wanted was to live comfortably with financial security, be able to afford her ongoing mental health treatment, and to repay the legal team who had so generously worked pro bono for her cause for many years. When asked how much compensation she thought she should be given, Kathleen told reporters she couldn’t put a number on it. The New South Wales Attorney General, Michael Daly, refused to meet with Kathleen or issue a formal apology, although he has denied allegations that this is because of his personal belief that Kathleen is guilty. Addressing Daly at a budget estimates hearing, Greens MP and spokesperson for justice, Sue Higginson, said:

• 1:46:43Speaker 00

  “Daly is just another man continuing the cycle of injustice and inhumanity in Kathleen Folbigg's life. He knows what happened to Ms Folbigg was wrong. But he refused to look Kathleen in the eye. He didn’t bother asking anyone what she needs to avoid financial destitution, and he knows full well she can’t afford years of court battles with the New South Wales Government.” Our entire ex-gratia payment process is extremely flawed. Men in suits in smoky back rooms get to unilaterally decide what happens to women who are victims of grave injustice inflicted by errors of the state.

• 1:47:25Speaker 00

  It just shouldn't be this hard to get the Attorney General to care about justice and to care about women who are victims of injustice. Imagine what Kathleen must be feeling, having been wrongfully imprisoned for 20 years, losing four children, and now being ignored by the man who was supposed to embody justice in this state.

• 1:47:49Speaker 00

  Kathleen Folbigg's wrongful conviction continues to be compared to that of Lindy Chamberlain. Both were grieving mothers whose parenting and seemingly sullen reactions to their children's deaths were put on trial ahead of the concrete evidence against them, calling into question society's views of motherhood and the role misogyny plays when women are accused of harming their children. One of Kathleen's supporters compared the two cases to Quinton McDermott while Kathleen was still fighting for freedom, and stated: “What struck me was that we haven't learned a thing.”

• 1:48:28Speaker 00

  In August 2025, Kathleen told reporters for the ABC that if she's awarded further compensation in the future, she would like to help people with cases similar to hers and bring genetic testing to the forefront of evidence. She would also like to support other women who have lost their children. With all the time that has passed since the deaths of Caleb, Patrick, Sarah, and Laura, Kathleen said she no longer balks at talking about them, stating: “They deserve the respect of being spoken about.”

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