It was four short questions during a nine-hour police interview in 1999 that made Kathleen Folbigg fully comprehending what was happening.
“Kathy, did you kill Kaleb?” asked the officer sitting next to Folbigg in a small room at a police station near the banks of Australia’s Hunter River.
“No,” she sobbed, tissue in hand.
Folbigg gives the same answer to the following three questions: did she kill her children Patrick, Sarah and Laura?
In 2003, Folbigg would be found guilty of the murder of three of her children, and the manslaughter of one child. She has been labeled a baby killer, a serial killer and Australia’s “most hated woman”.
But Folbigg, now 56, has always maintained her innocence. In June, 20 years after she was incarcerated, she was pardoned and released. Thursday the court of criminal appeal destroy her beliefs.
An investigation previously found there was reasonable doubt as to Folbigg’s guilt for each of the deaths to new scientific evidence found three of the children could have died of natural causes.
Her lawyers say she suffered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Australia’s history.
“It is impossible to comprehend the injury that was inflicted on Kathleen Folbigg,” said her lawyer, Rhanee Rego.
“The pain of losing her children, nearly two decades incarcerated in maximum security prisons for crimes that science has proven never happened.”
‘My baby isn’t breathing’
By 1999, Folbigg had already lost three of her children in their infancy. That year, she found her fourth child, 18-month-old Laura, unresponsive.
“My baby’s not breathing,” Folbigg told an ambulance operator from her home New South Wales town of Singleton in a recording played before the court.
“I had three Sids [sudden infant death syndrome] deaths already… I’ve already had three.”
Paramedics were unable to revive her daughter and Laura was pronounced dead.
She was Folbigg’s fourth child to die. Caleb, a calm baby with intense eyes, died in 1989 at the age of 19 days. Patrick, who suffered from epilepsy and visual impairment, died in 1991 at the age of eight months. And Sarah, remembered as the cheeky child, died in 1993 at 10 months.
Folbigg already had a traumatic start in life. She was raised by foster parents after her father stabbed her mother to death before her second birthday, an inquest later found.
When Folbigg’s trial began in 2003, there was no physical evidence that she harmed the children. Instead, the prosecution relied heavily on diary entries written by Folbigg.
“Very depressed with myself, angry and upset – I did it. I lost it with her,” read one January 1998 entry about Laura.
“I shouted at her so angrily that it scared her, she didn’t stop crying. Got so bad that I almost deliberately dropped her on the floor and left her.
“I contained enough to put her on the floor and walk away. Went to my room and left her to cry. Was probably only 5 minutes away, but it seemed like a lifetime. I feel like the worst mother on earth. Afraid that she will leave me now. As Sarah did. I knew I was short tempered and sometimes cruel to her and she left. With a little help.”
The prosecution argued Folbigg’s diary entries were an admission of guilt, proving she struggled as a mother and had a tendency to lose her temper with each of the children and then suffocate them.
The 2003 trial was also heavily influenced by the since-discredited Meadow’s Law, a prescription advocated by a controversial pediatrician, Roy Meadow, which suggested that three or more sudden infant deaths in one family were homicides until proven otherwise. is proven.
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The new evidence that could see Kathleen Folbigg walk free
Throughout the trial, Folbigg was criticized for not grieving as the wider public expected of a woman not guilty of murdering her children.
When the guilty verdict was handed down and she was sentenced to 40 years in prison, she buckled and cried.
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Later, that sentence would be reduced to a 25-year non-parole period.
A push for release
In the years following Folbigg’s conviction, more and more people began to push for her release.
They included Folbigg’s school friend, Tracy Chapman, who called Folbigg almost every day in prison, and Folbigg’s attorney Rego, who has worked pro bono on the case for the past six years.
A judicial inquiry in 2019 following Folbigg’s conviction found the evidence confirmed Folbigg’s guilt.
But another investigation was launched last year following new scientific findings that Folbigg and her two daughters – Laura and Sarah – carried a rare genetic variation known as CALM2-G114R, casting doubt on her beliefs.
Counsel assisting the inquest, Sophie Callan SC, said there was “compelling expert evidence” that one of Folbigg’s sons, Patrick, may have died from an underlying neurogenetic disorder. The cause of her son Kaleb’s death remains undetermined.
“On the totality of the evidence before this inquiry there is a reasonable doubt as to Ms Folbigg’s guilt,” Callan said in April.
“I was sitting in court a month ago and I heard the words reasonable doubt and I was hanging on those words, wait, wait,” Chapman told reporters.
The psychological and psychiatric experts at the more recent investigation also determined that the diary entries should not be interpreted as an admission that she killed or injured her children. Instead, they should be read as a grieving and possibly depressed mother, who blames herself for the death of each child.
The NSW Attorney General Michale Daley in June announced that Folbigg had been pardoned based on summary findings of the investigation.
“We have four little bullies who are dead. We have a husband and wife who lost each other, a wife who spent 20 years in prison and a family who never had a chance,” he said. “You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t feel something about it.”
What happens next?
Human rights and criminal justice lawyer Felicity Graham said in June that Folbigg’s case was an indictment of the country’s system.
“Throughout Australia, we need to reform our systems for dealing with potential justice,” she said. “The current safeguards are not sufficiently robust, nor do they adequately respond to the urgency and horror of someone wrongly convicted.”
Rego said it was time for Australia to implement a body that reviews such cases, following the lead of the UK, Scotland, Norway, New Zealand and Canada.
“This case should reignite the discussion to strengthen the interactions between law and science, to make important reforms so that the legal system makes decisions based on the best scientific evidence available, not speculation,” she said in June. .
“It is Ms Folbigg’s hope that the justice system will thoroughly investigate sudden infant deaths before trying to blame parents without good reason to do so.
“Mrs Folbigg’s freedom is a breakthrough moment on a long and painful journey. We are all inspired by her tenacity to reveal the truth.”
Rego said Thursday that now her convictions have been overturned there should be compensation from the state. She would not put a figure on it, but suggested it would be “larger than any significant payment made before”.
