Kathleen Folbigg has been acquitted of killing her four young children following a 20-year battle to clear her name after she was labelled Australia’s worst female serial killer.
Folbigg is expected to seek a record compensation payout from the New South Wales government after the state’s court of criminal appeal on Thursday ruled her convictions should be overturned.
The 56-year-old burst into tears in the courtroom and was given a standing ovation by her supporters after the three judges found there was “reasonable doubt” as to her guilt.
Speaking outside court, an emotional Folbigg said she loved her children and always would.
“My children are here with me today and they will be close to my heart for the rest of my life,” she told reporters. “The system and society need to think before they blame a parent of hurting their children.”
Folbigg said she was grateful updated science and genetics had given her “answers” as to how her children died.
“However, even in 1999, we had legal answers to prove my innocence, but they were ignored and dismissed,” she said.
Folbigg was released from prison in June after receiving a pardon following an independent inquiry which heard new scientific evidence that indicated her children may have died from natural causes or a genetic mutation.
In his final report, released in early November, the inquiry’s commissioner, Tom Bathurst, found there was an “identifiable cause” for three of the deaths and Folbigg’s relationship with her children did not support the case she killed them.
Folbigg had spent two decades behind bars after being convicted in 2003 and ordered to serve a minimum 25-year sentence for the suffocation murders of three of her children and manslaughter of a fourth.
The children – Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura – died between 1989 and 1999 at ages ranging from 19 days to 18 months.
Bathurst found Patrick’s death was likely caused by a neurogenetic disorder and there was a reasonable possibility that Sarah and Laura’s deaths had been caused by a genetic mutation known as CALM2-G114R – which they and their mother had.
With Caleb’s death, Bathurst found the “coincidence and tendency evidence which was central” to the prosecution’s case in 2003 “falls away”.
Bathurst, a former NSW chief justice, said Folbigg’s diary entries – which were controversially used during her trial to help secure her convictions – did not contain reliable admissions of guilt.
The appeals court on Thursday quashed Folbigg’s convictions based on the findings of Bathurst’s inquiry.
A pardon clears a person from all consequences of the offence they were found to have committed but does not eliminate the conviction itself, meaning Folbigg’s name wasn’t cleared until the appeals court’s decision.
Folbigg on Thursday said prosecutors had “cherrypicked” phrases from her journals.
“Those diaries contained my private feelings, which I wrote to myself – no one expects those types of things to be read by strangers, let alone opinionated on,” she said outside court. “They took my words out of context and turned them against me.”
Her lawyer, Rhanee Rego, said now her convictions had been overturned there should be compensation from the state. She would not put a figure on it but suggested it would be “bigger than any substantial payment that has been made before”.
The NSW attorney general, Michael Daley, said the government would consider any compensation requests.
“After all that has happened over the past 20 years, it is impossible not to feel great sympathy for all involved,” he said. “The government will carefully consider any submission that Ms Folbigg or her representatives put forward.”
Rego said NSW needed to evaluate its system of post-conviction review.
She said Australia should “consider moving to an independent body for review such as a criminal case review commission like those established elsewhere in the world”.
Sue Higginson, the Greens justice spokesperson, backed the call for a review body.
“We need a post-conviction review system that is based on procedural fairness, effective administration and the rules of evidence,” she said.
“Other jurisdictions around the world have had such systems for decades, NSW is an outlier. What happened to Kath and is still happening to other people across the state who maintain their innocence is wrong. We can and we must do better.”
