Tracy Chapman grinned widely as she recounted sitting down for dinner with her best friend, Kathleen Folbigg, after 20 years.
The pair shared a pizza and garlic bread, washed down with a nostalgic Kahlua and Coke, on Folbigg’s first night of freedom after being pardoned and released from jail. It followed two decades spent in prison over the deaths of her four children.
“We just got to enjoy each other’s company to spend a lot of time with my dogs,” Chapman said.
“She slept for the first time in a real bed, had a cup of tea in a real crockery cup, real spoons to stir with. That sounds basic to you all, but she’s grateful.
“And she slept in a real bed last night. She’s actually said it was the first time she’s been able to sleep properly in 20 years.”
Unsurprisingly, the technology that greeted Folbigg was “bamboozling”, Chapman said, and the advances in TV-on-demand were mesmerising on her first night out.
“She watched in awe,” Chapman said. “Even the television, she was going, ‘Oh my god, look at the television, it’s got so many capabilities.’”
Many might be bitter after being dubbed Australia’s worst female serial killer, but Chapman said her friend had turned to her at one point to say, “My face muscles hurt from smiling so much.’
“There’s no hate in her heart,” Chapman said. “She just wants to live her life.”
Chapman and Rhanee Rego, Folbigg’s lawyer, flagged the need for legal reform and more empathy in the New South Wales system when they addressed the media in Coffs Harbour on Tuesday morning.
“There’s a lot of things that could have been done better with this case,” Chapman said. “We’d like to see a significant amount of reforming the system, a lot more empathy.”
Rego said it was too early to discuss compensation and the focus was getting the convictions quashed once the inquiry head and former state chief justice Thomas Bathurst releases his final report in coming weeks.
“The system has failed her at every step,” she said. “Instead of trying to understand why her children died, potentially through an inquest … we threw her in jail, locked her up, called her Australia’s worst female serial killer, put her in solitary. How would any of you feel to have it happen to you? None of us could put ourselves in Kathleen’s shoes.”
Better appeals processes on the basis of fresh scientific evidence will be part of the changes Folbigg’s advocates will call for.
Folbigg, who has always maintained her innocence, had served 20 years of a 25-year sentence since being convicted in 2003 of murdering three of her children, and the manslaughter of one child.
The NSW attorney general, Michael Daley, ordered her release from prison after summary findings prepared by Bathurst advised there was a reasonable possibility that three of the children died of natural causes.
Folbigg has not spoken publicly since being released but vision of her being greeted by Chapman for the first time showed her smiling broadly.
“I am so elated it’s not funny,” Folbigg said in the footage, aired by Channel Nine.
“I am nervous and I am everything.”
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said Daley had shown Folbigg “mercy”.
“She’s been in jail for some 20 years and Michael Daley has chosen to show mercy and to intervene in this case,” he told ABC on Monday night.
“It is an extraordinary set of circumstances and I am certain that the obvious is that Kathleen Folbigg will be very relieved.”
