ONE MORNING IN the spring of 2017, in Silverwater jail’s Willet East protection wing, a fellow inmate of Kathleen Folbigg, Tara Mammen, walked out of her cell carrying a toaster. Folbigg snatched the toaster from Mammen. ‘You’re not allowed to take the fucking toaster in the room,’ she snarled.¹

‘Well, I didn’t know that. Don’t tell me what to do,’ said Mammen. ‘What are you going to do about it, then?’

Folbigg punched her in the stomach. Mammen responded with a hook to the ear and fired, ‘We all know why you’re here.’.²

And there it was – every day Folbigg has to live with the taunts and the knowledge that she is Australia’s worst female serial killer. The woman who killed all four of her babies.

At Folbigg’s appeal against her sentencing for the assault, for which she had received an extra four months in prison, her barrister, Isabel Reed, pointed out that Folbigg had an exemplary prison record. The assault was completely out of character. Reed tendered character references from fellow inmates. One, who was in jail for murdering her own daughter, wrote, ‘I have had the opportunity to understand Ms Folbigg’s behaviour and the amazing changes she has made throughout this journey.’.³ She continued: ‘Ms Folbigg has shown her vunerable [sic] side and her strong side. Kathleen has helped women adapt to their new surroundings and help them achieve their goals for their future. Ms Folbigg has always given the women words of wisdom and knowledge to help them progress.’.⁴

During her time in jail Folbigg has become something of a den mother to the other inmates. Another woman, who was caught filming herself sexually assaulting her own children and uploading the images to a paedophile website, wrote: ‘Kathleen has had a huge [effect] on me and taught me to come out of my comfort zone and made me feel like an important and wanted woman.’.⁵

Judge Tanya Bright accepted that the assault was out of character and that Folbigg was genuinely remorseful but dismissed the appeal and upheld the magistrate’s sentence.

For Kathleen Folbigg, then 14 years into her sentence for killing her four children, the result was largely academic. She had bigger fish to fry.

At Folbigg’s trial in 2003, the lack of eyewitness testimony and the prosecution’s reliance on her diaries rather than any direct evidence from Folbigg herself left doubts in some people’s minds about the safety of her conviction. She maintained her innocence. Some loyal friends began to fight for a review of her case. As all levels of court appeal had been exhausted, a review would require the NSW attorney-general to order an inquiry.

In 2013 Folbigg’s lawyers presented a 125-page report by Australia’s leading forensic pathologist Professor Stephen Cordner into the deaths of Folbigg’s children, and called for an inquiry into her conviction. Then they waited, and waited, and waited. Five years later, in August 2018, the ABC’s Australian Story broadcast an episode which contained, for the first time since her interview with the police years before, the voice of Kathleen Folbigg. She had been taped at Cessnock Correctional Centre talking to her loyal friend Tracy Chapman, whom she calls most days. ‘My life just seems like it’s been never-ending battles, and things that I’ve been having to get over and conquer,’ she told Chapman on the phone..⁶

Barrister Isabel Reed told the program: ‘Kathleen Folbigg has been in jail now for fifteen years, for the murder of her three children and manslaughter of one. The evidence against her was entirely circumstantial. I try to get out to see Kathleen as often as I can, so I drive from Newcastle to Cessnock. We’ll go through what’s happening with the legal process. In 2013 I gathered together the great legal minds in Newcastle [lawyers from the University of Newcastle’s Legal Centre], and started researching and looking into it.’.⁷

A petition to the attorney-general was submitted in 2015. It argued that the evidence against Folbigg was entirely circumstantial and that Professor Cordner, supported by international experts, had concluded that the deaths of the four children could be ascribed to natural causes. The report by Cordner, a former director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, was an important element of Folbigg’s argument. It examined all the forensic evidence presented at the trial and came to some very different findings. Professor Cordner concluded that Caleb had died from SIDS, Patrick from his epilepsy disorder, Sarah from SIDS and Laura from myocarditis or inflammation of the heart muscles.

Dr Ray Hill, an honorary professor of mathematics from Britain’s University of Salford, who’d worked for the defence teams of mothers such as Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Trupti Patel after they were accused of the murders of their babies due to their unexplained deaths, added, ‘It’s important to note that while multiple cot deaths may be a rare event, so also will be multiple homicide.’.⁸

For her part, Folbigg was recorded on Australian Story on the telephone from Cessnock finally talking about the diaries, the compelling entries used to convict her. ‘Those diaries are written from a point of me always blaming myself. I blame myself for everything. I took so much of the responsibility, because that’s, as mothers, what you do,’ she said.⁹

Canadian-based Australian academic–lawyer Emma Cunliffe’s book Murder, Medicine and Motherhood, which argued Folbigg had been wrongly convicted, played a significant role in getting the case re-examined. Cunliffe also interpreted the diary entries differently. ‘I read the diaries now as Kathleen Folbigg blaming herself for getting frustrated and feeling as if, if only she had been a better mother, perhaps the children would not have died. But that’s very different from admitting that she killed the children.’¹⁰

As Folbigg’s team waited to see if the attorney-general agreed, Folbigg said, ‘I do feel incredibly frustrated. And I think it’s just because we’re simply waiting for a decision, for three years now we’ve been, you know, clinging to that, you know, little bit of hope. If I can get myself heard in any way, then I guess my last 15 years in prison will have been worth it.’¹¹

Broadcaster Alan Jones had been visiting Folbigg in jail since 2015 and told me, ‘Having met the woman, I find her a very courageous woman and an outstanding person, who faces this injustice with great dignity, but it’s very, very hard.’ He agreed with Cunliffe that the evidence used to convict Folbigg was ‘discredited’ and added, ‘Society collectively should be concerned if a woman is lying in jail, convicted for [killing] four children, if she did not do it.’

The case put forward by researchers from the University of Newcastle Legal Centre was bolstered by the discrediting of Sir Roy Meadow, whose infamous statement on cot death had been relied on by the prosecution at Folbigg’s trial. Meadows said of cot death, ‘One is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder.’ Jones said, ‘I am persuaded that the expert evidence is not convincing at all. This so-called “scholarship” has been discredited.’ Jones was the most high profile of the supporters agitating for Folbigg’s case to be reopened. ‘She is optimistic that the truth will come out,’ he said.

On 22 August 2018 Folbigg finally got her wish. NSW Attorney-General Mark Speakman announced an inquiry into Folbigg’s convictions. ‘After carefully considering Ms Folbigg’s petition and taking extensive advice, I have formed the view that an inquiry into Ms Folbigg’s convictions is necessary to ensure public confidence in the administration of justice,’ he said. ‘Today’s decision is not based on any assessment of Ms Folbigg’s guilt.’¹²

Folbigg supporter Helen Cummings predicted the normally calm Kathleen would be ‘over the moon.’¹³ Mr Speakman said he knew the decision would, however, cause ‘renewed distress and pain’ to Folbigg’s husband, Craig. ‘The distress that today’s decision will cause has weighed on me heavily in formulating this recommendation,’ he said. He had personally called Craig to explain his reasoning because he knew the toll of once again going through the deaths of his children would be heavy. ‘The worst thing that can happen to anyone in their life, I believe, is to lose a child,’ Mr Speakman said. ‘Just imagine what it must be like to lose four children.’¹⁴

Governor David Hurley appointed the former chief judge of the District Court, the Hon. Reginald Blanch AM QC, to conduct the inquiry. In the following months Kathleen’s lawyers finished preparing their case – upsetting Craig in the process, who complained to the Commissioner of Victims Rights after her solicitor approached him for a DNA sample.

The inquiry opened at the new NSW Coroners Court complex in Lidcombe with counsel assisting the inquiry, Gail Furness, SC, running through the facts as they were known from the original trial. The first week was dedicated to the forensic pathology around SIDS. Key to Folbigg’s case was new evidence from experts including Professor Cordner and Professor John Hilton, who’d conducted the autopsy of Folbigg’s third child, Sarah, and given evidence at the original trial. They both disagreed with the submission from Allan Cala, who had also given evidence at the original trial and stood by his original view that Folbigg had smothered all four of the children. In his lengthy report, Professor Cordner said, ‘If the convictions in this case are to stand, I want to clearly state there is no pathological or medical basis for concluding homicide.’ In other words, the findings are perfectly compatible with natural causes. ‘Put simply, there is no positive forensic pathology support for the contention that any or all of these children have been killed.’

Professor Hilton weighed in heavily on Laura’s death, saying she had died from myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscles. ‘Laura died with, and highly probably because of, florid myocarditis,’ Professor Hilton wrote in his submission. ‘There was no medical evidence demonstrable or demonstrated in the report of the post-mortem examination to support another cause for her death.’

Behind these two men the experts were lining up to pour cold water on the findings from the first trial. Dr Cala was accused of ignoring the evidence that SIDS or SUDI, Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy could have explained the deaths, by Professor Caroline Blackwell, a Conjoint Professor at the University of Newcastle’s School of Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy. She said, ‘There is a growing body of evidence that SUDI or SIDS can be caused by infection. Since 2003 there is increasing evidence that these factors need to be considered.’ This was not, as Dr Cala had implied, a vague theory by microbiologists, or ‘junk science’. ‘The findings have been reported in well-respected, peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals and presented at major national and international meetings,’ she said.

Consulting forensic pathologist Professor Johan Duflou challenged the time Sarah had died in August 1993 on the basis of the temperature of the body and the stomach contents, which, he thought, ‘would suggest that Sarah died closer to the time she was put to bed by Craig at around 21.00 hours, rather than when found by Folbigg at around 01.30 hours.’

The director of the Neurology Department at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Professor Monique Ryan, ploughed through Patrick’s medical records and noted that he had been admitted to hospital many times. ‘On no occasion was he reported to have shown any obvious evidence of inflicted injury,’ she said.

After those experts came a week of genetic evidence and then, finally, Kathleen Folbigg took the stand to explain the diaries and, everyone hoped, what really happened to her four children.

Folbigg was escorted into the witness box by corrective service officers, her hair now long, grey and curly. At 51-years-old, she was a stockier, older version of the young woman with the red bob who was once so obsessed with the gym. Craig, thinner, greyer, but finally a father and with the life he’d always wanted, sat quietly with his brother John in the public gallery, as he was reluctantly dragged back to relive the hell he’d hoped was long behind him. As the inevitability of the inquiry had encompassed him, he had hired the formidable former Crown Prosecutor Margaret Cuneen, SC, to represent his interests and question the mother of his four dead children.

The court rose as Justice Reginald Blanch entered, and waited as a few legal formalities were dealt with. The lines of questioning were tightly restricted to Folbigg’s diaries. NSW senior Crown Prosecutor Chris Maxwell, QC, began the cross-examination almost immediately, going straight to the missing diaries Folbigg had been asked about in her original police interview.

‘You got rid of the diaries because there was significantly incriminating evidence in the diaries,’ Mr Maxwell said.

‘I only recall getting rid of the one,’ Folbigg replied.

‘You say, “I just got rid of them all”,’ said Mr Maxwell, building his argument that Kathleen had been a habitual diary keeper and that crucial diaries had gone missing.

She could not explain their disappearance, could not remember.

The lawyer drilled down into the entries. Finally, after all these years in jail, Folbigg had her chance to explain what they really meant. This was her shot for freedom.

In a diary entry written four months before Laura was born, Folbigg wrote, ‘What scares me most will be when I am alone with baby.’

Breaking down in tears she explained now, ‘That’s purely because when I found the children I was always alone.’

Mr Maxwell saw it differently: ‘What you are saying is that the time of greatest danger to the baby was when you were alone with them [sic] and that’s what scared you the most because you would “snap a cog” [a quote from another of her entries].’

Dabbing her eyes with a tissue, she said, ‘No, no, no,’ as he spoke.

In the dock she repeated her frustration, expressed in the diaries, that Craig had slept too easily and had not helped with the children.

‘With Sarah I really needed him to wake up that morning and take over from me,’ she wrote.

Mr Maxwell said that this entry was a ‘cry of desperation’ and, more importantly, ‘It means you were awake when Sarah died.’

Before Laura was born in 1997, Folbigg told her diary she would ask for help and not try to do everything herself because, ‘I know that was the main reason for all my stress before and stress made me do terrible things.’

She said now that, as she battled depression, a terrible thing could be something as simple as leaving her child to cry. ‘A dangerous mood to me equals depression, but it does not mean dangerous – as in dangerous.’

Mr Maxwell said, ‘What I am suggesting is that “terrible things” is far more consistent with killing your children than having an angry thought.’

He moved on to the diary entry in which she mentioned how she and Craig had been to a clairvoyant. She wrote about Sarah, ‘I always believed there’s more going on than just human nature. I seem content now, because I now know that even though I’m responsible, it’s all right. She accepts and is happy there. I’ve always felt her strongly and now I know why, she is with me.’

Asked about the entry, Folbigg explained, ‘The clairvoyant that I went to was a general one, it was in a mall. I didn’t specifically go to a targeted one. She was capable of reading auras and colours as such, and had stated that she thought she saw children around me, that they were all happy, and that everything was okay.’

Mr Maxwell said, ‘So, as a result of going to the clairvoyant, you came away believing that Sarah was happy, wherever she might be?’

‘Yes, because to me there . . . there would have been no . . . no worse thought than your children have passed on and they’re not at peace in some way,’ said Folbigg. And she went on to explain that when she said she felt ‘responsible’, it was ‘because I felt responsible, I was their mother.’

In another entry she said she knew there was nothing wrong with Laura – ‘Nothing out of the ordinary anyway because it was me not them.’

Mr Maxwell said, ‘I suggest you are blaming yourself because you killed three children that had nothing wrong with them and that’s what that means.’

Folbigg denied this. Again and again she denied the accusations fired at her. She refused to accept that an entry that read ‘All I wanted was for her to shut up and then one day she did’ was ‘heartless’. ‘Well, she did . . . she died,’ Folbigg said.

She told the inquiry that she believed in a ‘higher being’ and felt in those years that her first three children had communicated with Laura while she was still alive. ‘Thank goodness it has saved her from the fate of her siblings,’ she wrote in her diary.

She told the inquiry she was trying to understand what happened. ‘I am always searching for why – it never stops.’

Mr Maxwell said, ‘I suggest you know why, because you smothered them and that’s what you are talking about in that entry.’ He claimed this was reinforced by a diary entry in which Folbigg wrote, ‘Obviously I am my father’s daughter,’ a reference to the unforgettable fact that Kathleen’s father had killed her mother when she was a child.

Mr Maxwell’s interpretation of the diary entry was that her father ‘was a killer when he was angry and you are concerned about that quality in you’.

Folbigg said her father had ruined her life and that she very seldom thought of him. She said she had written the entry as she was ‘preparing to have another child, and my father happened to pop into my head, and I merely reflected on that’.

By the end of the first day, Folbigg’s team was buoyant and happy that their fighter had performed well in the adversarial ring.

 

On the second day of her evidence, wearing a teal cardigan and with her grey hair tied back in a bun, Folbigg appeared ready for business. Facing her was Margaret Cuneen, SC. Her first questions were on how Folbigg had said she wanted control of her life. ‘You could control things like your calorie intake and going to the gym and exercise – that’s right, isn’t it?’

Folbigg agreed.

‘But the thing that was beyond your control was the behaviour of each of your babies?’

‘Yes, I agree with that,’ Folbigg said.

‘And it was that, really, which was the huge difficulty for you, wasn’t it?’

‘No. The difficulty for me was in doubting myself and my own ability, not in the difficulty of the behaviour of children. Everyone expects children to behave whichever way they’re going to behave. I didn’t expect anything different,’ Folbigg replied. It was one of many answers over the two-and-a-half days of evidence in which she projected an image of a loving mother coming to terms with unimaginable loss, breaking down in the witness box in apparently genuine, heart-wrenching tears.

They moved on to a diary entry in 1997 in which Folbigg wrote of the sacrifices to be made with another baby – Laura – on the way. ‘But I feel confident about it all going well this time. I’m going to call for help this time and not attempt to do everything by myself anymore. I know that was the main reason for all my stress before and stress made me do terrible things,’ she wrote.

Folbigg explained that phrase again: ‘I’m saying the word “terrible” things is that it covers a whole heap of ground here. You’re . . . you’re trying to limit it to a terrible action I’m supposed to have taken, and I will always argue that point – there was no terrible action on my part.’ For her, that terrible thing could be putting down a child while she was crying.

Ms Cunneen drew attention to an entry in which Folbigg talked about her father, Thomas Britton, who’d killed her mother when Kathleen was a baby. She wrote she had ‘a father so selfish and unthoughtful that he took my mother from me and ruined my life from that one action’.

Ms Cuneen said, ‘You didn’t say he was an evil, dreadful murderer?’

‘I didn’t know him,’ said Folbigg. ‘My views were not that he was evil, just the act of what he did ruined my life.’

In her diary she wrote, ‘I can’t help but feel my life would have been so different, and how it was meant to be, if only Tom hadn’t made a stupid mistake one night and the family hadn’t interfered in the way they did.’

She told the hushed inquiry, ‘It was a stupid mistake, wasn’t it? An error of judgement, a stupid mistake, be it, however he made it.’

‘You don’t even describe your father’s killing of your mother as “terrible”,’ said Ms Cuneen. ‘Only a selfish and thoughtless thing.’

‘My father killing my mother is just an assumed terrible thing,’ Folbigg replied.

Ms Cuneen said, ‘The terrible things are smothering your children under great stress.’

In a diary note just before Laura was born, Folbigg wrote that if all her locked-away memories were to surface, ‘They will lock me up and throw away the key – something I am sure will happen one day.’

Ms Cuneen suggested that this meant ‘you were sure that the law would catch up with you for killing your children?’

‘I am referring to my psychiatric state there,’ said Folbigg, who insisted that back then she did not know that the expression ‘throwing away the key’ could be applied to jail as well as mental institutions. ‘I only know that [now] because I happen to be in prison and I have been in prison for 16 years,’ she said.

The inquiry returned to the diary entries in which Folbigg wrote that Laura had ‘saved her life by being different’. Laura was good-natured, she wrote. ‘Thank goodness it has saved her from the fate of her siblings. I think she was warned.’

Ms Cuneen said, ‘You are there plainly acknowledging that if Laura had been a catnapper like Sarah, or not agreeable, she would meet the fate of her siblings – and that would be to be suffocated by you.’

Folbigg denied this, saying, ‘It goes to my extreme belief that something else had taken my other three children.’

Ms Cunneen suggested that the diary entry in which Folbigg wrote that her three deceased children had warned Laura ‘not to be a loud or sickly kid’ was tantamount to a warning that otherwise ‘]Laura] would end up like them’, and be smothered by their mother.

‘That’s a mystical representation,’ said Folbigg. ‘That’s me reflecting on my beliefs – as in karma, and the children all talking to each other and God and all of those sorts of beliefs that I had.’

At this point Justice Blanch interjected, apologising for not being familiar with clairvoyant beliefs, and seeking clarification.

‘At the time,’ explained Folbigg. ‘When writing these, because I was searching for questions so hard and always wanting to know why I had a belief that fate, karma, God, a spiritual thing going on . . . there was another reason as to why all this was happening. And when I went to a clairvoyant . . . that clairvoyant gave me the peace that my children and Sarah were happy, and it was a belief that was just ingrained in me; that there was other things going on beyond my control, and all the answers that I was seeking all the time. [Me writing] “She saved her life by being different” is my hope and dream that Laura being different would have saved her life, but in the end it didn’t.’

The judge peered over his bifocals at the woman in the witness box beside him. ‘Are you saying there was some supernatural power which took the other three children away from you, and you were concerned that that same supernatural power would take Laura away from you, and that she saved her life by being different?’

‘Yes.’

Folbigg went on to explain that the diaries ‘are me continually searching and asking and questioning. Statements such as those in them are me grasping and grappling with answers that I’m trying to get. And when you take it from the point of view that I’m constantly blaming myself, yes, I had in my head a belief that my moods affected everything – they affected my children, my children then died and decided they didn’t wish to be with me anymore. It was quite a warped view as to how I was thinking and is evident in the diaries and how I’m writing them.’

‘Because you know, don’t you,’ said Ms Cuneen, ‘that children, babies, don’t decide whether or not to live?’

 

When the inquiry had concluded, Craig stood next to his brother as John read out a statement from the family:

We kept our thoughts regarding her actions, her supporters’ vitriolic outbursts, our pain, our grief at not only the loss of four beautiful babies but of the loss of this part of our family group to ourselves . . . As a family we welcomed Kathy, loved her, supported her. We, along with the public, have endured this process to discover the truth regarding the deaths of Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura since 1999. What has been most devastating has been that in the end the answer lay within Kathleen and what she had done.

The pain of having to relive those years was etched on Craig’s face.

In 2003 we walked away, having discovered that we really did not know this person, nor what she was evidently hiding. This chapter unfolding now we feel was unnecessary and most definitely unwelcome; however, we have endured it as ultimately it would, we feel, help to ensure that the justice that Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura received in 2003 is upheld.

The message from Kathleen’s camp was very different. After the statement her close friend Tracy Chapman made a beeline for Craig and tearfully hugged him. She told him that Kathy had asked her to pass on a message – that ‘she has never stopped caring about him and this has just been horrible and she wants it all to stop.

‘Kathy said she is just glad that she was able to look him in the eye and he met her gaze in the court,’ Ms Chapman said. Kathleen had told her: ‘He is hurting just as much as me.’

On 22 July 2019 the Hon. Reginald Blanch, AM QC, delivered his report. It was damning and devastating for Kathleen Folbigg.

NSW Attorney-General Mark Speakman broke a holiday in London to state how bringing on the inquiry had caused him enormous distress. ‘Of course that distress is incomparable with the distress the Folbigg family has been through, in particular Craig Folbigg, the children’s father over the past years,’ said Mr Speakman.¹⁵ ‘I acknowledge that the decision to commence an inquiry has further aggravated what already was an unimaginable tragedy. I hope that the conclusion of the inquiry, and the report’s findings, might provide comfort in some way to the relatives of Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura, and will dispel community concern regarding Folbigg’s conviction.’¹⁶

The 552-page report of the experienced judge forensically dissected every aspect of Folbigg’s new defence and gave him rise, Blanch wrote, for no ‘reasonable doubt’ of her guilt.¹⁷ In fact, it reinforced what the original trial judge had said in his comments to the jury; it backed the conclusions of the three judges in the Court of Criminal Appeal, who’d found in 2007 ‘ample evidence’ to justify the jury’s findings; it backed up the second appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeal, whose three judges found the evidence against Folbigg ‘overwhelming’; and reiterated the findings of the three judges of the High Court, who had also dismissed Folbigg’s appeal.

Justice Blanch said his mind was not ‘foreclosed’, particularly given the extensive investigations and new evidence not available at the time of Folbigg’s trial or appeals, ‘to enable careful forensic scrutiny of Ms Folbigg’s convictions’.

However, he said the significant investigations had ‘failed to identify a reasonable natural explanation for the five events’.

In fact, quite the contrary. ‘The investigations of the inquiry have instead produced evidence that reinforces Ms Folbigg’s guilt. I find Ms Folbigg’s evidence and the listening device transcripts, neither of which were before the jury, when considered in light of her interview with police, show that Ms Folbigg has been in many respects untruthful, unbelievable and made deliberate attempts to obscure the fact that she committed the offences of which she was committed.’

Of the diaries he said, ‘I am satisfied that Ms Folbigg was untruthful to the police during her interview, and in the evidence she gave before the inquiry, in a clearly, deliberately designed attempt to obscure the fact that she had committed the offences.’ He said he was satisfied the diaries were ‘virtual admissions of guilt for the deaths of Sarah, Patrick and Caleb, and admissions that she appreciated she was at risk of causing similarly the death of Laura’.

Judge Blanch stated that all the evidence reached one inescapable conclusion: ‘It remains 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 Folbigg.

‘The evidence at the inquiry does not cause me to have any reasonable doubt as to the guilt of Kathleen Megan Folbigg for the offences of which was convicted,’ he wrote.

And he said damningly of her attempts to finally speak up and prove her innocence, ‘Indeed, as indicated, the evidence which has emerged at the inquiry, particularly her own explanations and behaviour in respect of her diaries, makes her guilt of these offences even more certain.’

Kathleen Folbigg remains in jail. She will be able to apply for parole in 2028 when her non-parole period ends. She will be 61.