In 2003 Kathleen Folbigg was convicted of smothering and killing her four young children, Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura. She was given a prison sentence of 40 years and dubbed Australia’s worst female serial killer.
Folbigg had to be kept in protective custody to prevent violence from other inmates but has steadfastly maintained her innocence, a claim that has slowly gathered support over the years. Scientists, including several Nobel prize winners, have since argued that a mutant gene was responsible for the children’s deaths.
As the evidence mounted, a judicial inquiry was held in 2019 but it refused to overturn Folbigg’s verdict. However, scientists and supporters have persisted and this week will have their moment in court when a second judicial review into her case opens on Monday.
Folbigg was arrested in 2001, two years after the death of her fourth child, Laura. Her husband Craig had discovered her diary. “This time I am going to call for help, this time I’ll not attempt to do everything myself any more,” she had written during her last pregnancy. “I know that that was my main reason for all my stress before and stress made me do terrible things …” Nor was Folbigg helped by the fact that he testified against her.
But it was the influence of Roy Meadow, a British paediatrician who studied child abuse, that really counted against her. In 1997, he argued that, in a single family, “one sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, until proved otherwise”. At the time, the assertion had considerable influence at trials of women accused of killing their children.
At Folbigg’s trial, it clearly influenced some experts’ testimony though concerns about Meadow’s theory had been slowly steadily growing over the years, as his arguments and statistics were questioned with some intensity. Meadow was eventually struck from the UK medical register in 2005 because of misleading testimony he had offered during the UK trial of Sally Clark, who had been convicted, wrongly, of killing two of her children.
Since then, the science of DNA analysis has developed dramatically and generated new evidence that at least two of Folbigg’s children carried a genetic mutation associated with sudden heart irregularities, and were not victims of murder.
Among those to petition for a new inquiry in the wake of this evidence are John Shine, president of the Australian Academy of Science; Peter Doherty, a Nobel laureate in medicine and a former Australian of the Year; and Elizabeth Blackburn, who won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2009. “The attorney general of New South Wales now has sufficient medical and scientific evidence before him that provides an alternative explanation for the deaths of the Folbigg children, that carries more weight than the circumstantial evidence used to convict her,” Shine said at the time.
In November 2020 an international team published findings in the journal EP Europace that concluded the mutation carried by at least two of Folbigg’s children had set the stage for a fatal arrhythmic event that could have been triggered by an infection. Both girls were reported to have had respiratory illnesses before their deaths. Last week Nature reported that many scientists who contacted the journal said they found this evidence persuasive.
The new inquiry will hear evidence for two weeks but is not expected to hand down judgment until next year. Overturning the verdict that she killed her children would bring solace to a life that has known little cheer. In 1969, when Folbigg was 18 months old, her father killed her mother. He served 15 years in prison before being deported to England. Folbigg was placed in foster care until she left school at 15. She married Craig Folbigg in 1987.
Folbigg wrote in 2006 that she just wants the truth to be uncovered. “That day I shall not gloat, or say, ‘I told you so’. I’ll simply cry and keep crying all the tears that are due to me.”
