Officials free woman convicted in deaths of children in 2003
Two decades ago, Kathleen Folbigg was convicted of smothering all four of her young children. Australian tabloids called her the country's worst female serial killer.
But Folbigg, who was sentenced to 40 years in prison, insisted she was innocent. And in recent years, a growing number of scientists began to argue that she was telling the truth. Genetic evidence, they said, indicated that the children had very likely died of natural causes.
On Monday, the attorney general of New South Wales, Michael Daley, announced that Folbigg, 55, had been given a full pardon and released from prison. He cited an official inquiry's preliminary conclusion that there was “reasonable doubt” about her guilt.
“What is the difference between today and what has transpired in the past is that new evidence has come to light,” Daley said. “It is appropriate that we do have the mechanisms to reconsider the source of questions in light of new evidence.”
There was no immediate comment from Folbigg or her attorney.
The former New South Wales chief justice who led the official inquiry, Tom Bathurst, said in a statement Monday that he was unable to accept “the proposition that Ms. Folbigg was anything but a caring mother for her children.”
He said he had concluded that there was a reasonable probability that three of the four children had died of natural causes, and that prosecutors' argument that she'd killed the fourth had relied on “coincidence and tendency evidence” that no longer held up.
All four of Folbigg's children died before the age of 2: Caleb, at 19 days, in 1989; Patrick, at 8 months, nearly two years later; Sarah, at 10 months, in 1993; and Laura, at 18 months, in 1999.
Initially, the deaths appeared to be simply a series of horrific tragedies. Two were deemed to have been from sudden infant death syndrome, a third from choking. A coroner concluded that Laura had died from an “undetermined” cause.
But after Folbigg's husband found one of her diary entries, which said that Sarah had left the world “with a bit of help,” he turned her in to police.
There was no direct evidence that Folbigg had smothered the children, as prosecutors alleged. She told authorities that her diary entries had reflected the stress of motherhood, and that “a bit of help” referred to her hope that God had taken her baby home.
But at her 2003 trial, prosecutors argued that it was more likely that pigs would fly than that four young children would die of natural causes so young, in the same family, over a span of 10 years. A jury agreed, and Folbigg, then 35, was found guilty of murder in the deaths of Patrick, Sarah and Laura, and of manslaughter in Caleb's.
But in recent years, geneticists have found that Folbigg and her two daughters had a rare genetic mutation in what is known as the CALM2 gene. In 2020, an international team of scientists published a research paper concluding that the mutation was likely to result in life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias.