Guilty Until Proven Innocent: Kathleen Folbigg
She was convicted of murdering her four babies until science proved they died of natural causes. How did she come to be accused of being "Australia's most hated serial killer?"
Kathleen Folbigg’s dreams of a family seemed to continually shatter over the decade of her sometimes rocky marriage. By 1999, Kathleen had given birth to four babies. All four had died in her care. Little Laura, only 19 months old, died on March 1, 1999 from what doctors initially believed to be a viral infection which inflamed her heart muscle. Kathleen had carried her to bed that day, and hours later, she had stopped breathing.
An autopsy determined Laura’s death to be “undetermined” — that is, until the pathologist discovered the deaths of the previous three siblings. Dr. Allan Cata put in a call to the police and wrote in his report (cited by Emma Cunliffe in her article, “(This is Not a) Story: Using Court Records to Explore Judicial Narratives in R v Kathleen Folbigg”):
“The death of Laura Folbigg cannot be regarded as ‘another SIDS’ (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). The family history of no living children following four live births is highly unusual…
The possibility of multiple homicides in this family has not been excluded. If homicidal acts have been committed, it is most likely these acts have been in the form of deliberate smothering. Smothering, whether deliberately or accidentally inflicted, may leave no trace. There are no specific post-mortem findings for smothering. It is usually performed by one person, in the absence of any witnesses. It is relatively easy for an adult to smother an infant or small child with a hand, pillow, soft toy, or other similar object.”
By the time Kathleen and her husband, Craig, arrived at the hospital following the heart-wrenching loss, a police officer already awaited them.
To be greeted by a cop within the same day as losing her fourth baby must have sent her reeling. For legal trouble to knock on the door of the already troubled marriage while processing the grief of another baby to die in her care must have felt unfathomable.
Investigators searched the Folbigg home. By June 2000, Kathleen had moved out, the marriage of 16 years over while the investigation intensified. She had left behind some of her personal items. Cunliffe writes that when Craig asked her what she wanted done with her things, she told him to throw it all away. Craig had initially denied having any suspicions regarding his wife’s involvement in the deaths of their babies.
But then he found her diaries. Of all the things she left behind, Kathleen’s own words written in moments of depression, grief, frustration, and coping with motherhood would come back to haunt her in the worst way possible when Craig handed the diaries over to police, claiming what he read “made me want to vomit.”
Those words she wrote, believing they were personal, her own, and not to be viewed by any other eyes, betrayed her when, on April 19, 2001, police arrested her for the murders of her children. She pleaded not guilty, but it didn’t stop the media from soon labeling her as a monstrous mother. The worst serial killer in Australian history. A manipulative murderess who couldn’t handle listening to her babies crying, had anger issues, and in moments of rage, coldly killed her own children for no reason other than being unable to cope with motherhood.
Those diaries, a series of character assassinations, Craig’s testimony, and a little thing called Meadow’s Law would ultimately lead to Kathleen being convicted. And yet, in 2023, Kathleen Folbigg walked out of prison a free woman after serving 20 years. Exonerated. Her innocence supposedly exposed by new science and forensics while Craig, until the day he died, believed she murdered their children.
Four babies, dead. Their mother, a woman who saw tragedy at too young an age and who knew only grief of losing her children and a crumbling marriage, only to spend two decades behind bars for crimes she didn’t appear to commit. A father, filled with grief for those same babies, firm in his belief that his wife took their lives.
Did the justice system wrongly convict an innocent woman? Did science outsmart a prosecution who relied heavily on circumstantial evidence? Was Kathleen Folbigg guilty in the eyes of the press and investigators until proven innocent many years after the fact?
The little girl who tragedy followed
The little girl born Kathleen Megan Britton on June 14, 1967 in a suburb of Sydney, Australia knew a most harrowing loss before she was two-years-old. Reader’s Digest explains that she had barely started her life when her mother’s ended at the hands of her father, Thomas Britton. Thomas stabbed Kathleen’s mother to death in 1968 during an argument. He spent 15 years in prison in Australia before being deported back to his homeland of England.
Kathleen, essentially orphaned, got sent to live with her mother’s sister in western Sydney. But by 1970, Kathleen’s aunt tired of the child and complained to child services about several behavioral issues the little girl supposedly exhibited: aggression, being impolite, unclean, obsessed with masturbation. The aunt, known only as Mrs. Pratt, complained that the stress Kathleen brought to her home had caused her own marriage to deteriorate.
By the time she was three, Kathleen wasn’t even wanted by her own blood family in the aftermath of her father’s cruelty.
Doctors came to believe that Kathleen had likely also been abused by her father. Psych Central notes that anger, irritability, disrupted relationships, and hypersexualization are only a few symptoms that can be seen in young girls who have been sexually assaulted.
“If a child is too young to be excessively masturbating or is engaging in pre-mature sexual play or behavior, this is typically a sign that the child has witnessed, been a participant in or has been exposed to adult sexuality,” Mihaela Bernard, MA, LCPC, writes on the site.
Kathleen was much too young to even comprehend, let alone talk about, whatever might have happened to her or her mother. And she was far too young to know anything about sex or masturbation. It seems weird her aunt would have said this until it is put into the context that Kathleen could have also been victimized by her father.
It makes this familial abandonment of Kathleen even sadder.
Child services also determined that she had a low IQ, which they attributed to her withdrawn, restless nature, according to Reader’s Digest. In September 1970, child services placed her with a foster family. Deirdre and Neville Marlborough of Newcastle took in the little girl, moving her 120 kilometers away from Sydney.
The peace of this new family life didn’t last long. Kathleen struggled to bond with Deirdre, got caught shoplifting, left school before graduating, and then left the foster home at 17 to move in with a friend’s family.
At 18, she met Craig Folbigg. The 23-year-old man worked as a forklift driver and swept Kathleen off her feet with his charm. They married in 1987, after which Kathleen set out to create the home she’d never had. She had just turned 20 when she wed. They rented an apartment in Georgetown, Newcastle, where Kathleen worked as a waitress at an Indian restaurant.
Craig shared her desire for a family, as he came from a family of eight children. It didn’t take long before Kathleen became pregnant. Finally, it seemed that she would build the home, the family she had been without since that catastrophic day her father took her mother’s life.
Sarah Treleaven for Reader’s Digest writes that Kathleen became protective of her baby long before it was born. She forbid Craig from smoking in their home, and she began eating better.
Caleb was born on Feb. 1, 1989. Kathleen told people she felt complete. Peace had settled in. But it wouldn’t last.
A mere 19 days later, on Feb. 20, 1989, Kathleen found Caleb dead in his crib. An autopsy determined his death to be from SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).
According to the Mayo Clinic, SIDS is the unexplainable death of an infant, usually less than a year old. The cause of it has plagued medical professionals for many years, but brain defects; low birth weight; respiratory infection; sleeping on the stomach or side, or on soft surfaces; and overheating are thought to be possible risk factors.
Kathleen’s devastation over the loss didn’t stop her longing for children. Her and Craig’s second son, Patrick, was born on June 3, 1990. Treleaven writes that doctors did extensive tests on the infant and a sleep study, but everything appeared to be normal. This didn’t stop Kathleen from being scared for Patrick’s life after what had happened to Caleb.
On October 18, 1990, history began repeating itself. Patrick, four months old, had what is called an apparent life-threatening event, which is usually attributed to a lack of oxygen. He suffered brain damage, visual impairment, and seizures as a result. Patrick was repeatedly in the hospital.
Patrick’s care had become Kathleen’s obsession. She was never without her disabled son, until February 13, 1990, when he died. The autopsy determined his cause of death to be asphyxia due to an obstruction of his airway resulting from his seizures.
Treleaven writes that Kathleen blamed herself for these deaths, and in the midst of her depression, convinced Craig to sell their home and move to Thornton, north of Newcastle. She craved a fresh start for her and her husband, away from the house that held memories of their precious boys. Craig began work selling cars, while Kathleen accepted a job at a baby-product store.
On October 14, 1992, their daughter, Sarah, was born. Once again, numerous tests found nothing wrong with the infant. But the fear of losing her continued to keep Kathleen in its obsessive grip.
Craig would later claim that he saw Kathleen “growl” at Sarah the day before she died while trying to get her to sleep. He said Kathleen passed 10-month-old Sarah to him and told him to deal with her.
On August 30, 1993, little Sarah succumbed to what a medical examiner determined to be SIDS.
Craig became severely depressed after this loss. He and Kathleen bought a home in Cardiff, closer to Craig’s family. But the heart-wrenching loss of three babies began revealing the fractures in the marriage; Craig and Kathleen would split up only to get back together several times. Four years after Sarah’s death, they decided to give their marriage, and parenthood, one more try when they moved to Hunter Valley.
Kathleen gave birth to Laura on August 7, 1997. This time, Laura underwent tests and cardiovascular monitoring for 12 months. No problems seemed obvious with her heart and breathing.
Laura’s first birthday came into sight. Kathleen planned a big party to celebrate a milestone that could mean the worst was over, that Laura would survive her first year and beyond, unlike her siblings. Kathleen’s anxiety began to calm.
Still, Craig later said he became concerned at Kathleen’s alleged flashes of anger. He explained in February 1999 that he noticed Kathleen had become frustrated with Laura.
“Oh, she’s got the sh—s with me,” Folbigg said, according to Craig. “It’s probably over what I did to her last night. I lost it with her.”
On March 1, Craig claimed that Kathleen was having trouble feeding Laura cereal for breakfast before he left for work. Kathleen allegedly pulled Laura out of her high chair and said “go to your fucking father.” Craig said Laura was watching TV when he went to work.
Kathleen later called Craig at work to apologize for losing her temper that morning, and brought Laura to visit him on his morning break. Laura slept in the car on the ride home. Kathleen carried into the house and to bed.
Laura died in her own bed later that same day.
A pathologist’s suspicions turn on a grieving mother
Laura had survived to her first birthday, but not much longer than that. Any hopes that Kathleen had while celebrating that milestone were shattered at the loss of her fourth baby. The pathologist who conducted the autopsy found the presence of myocarditis, a heart condition.
Dr. Allan Cala ruled Laura’s death as inconclusive — that is, until he learned of her three siblings’ deaths preceding hers. By the time police intervened and Craig handed over Kathleen’s diaries, it was all over: her marriage, her dreams of a warm and loving family, her attempts at motherhood. At 34, everything she had aspired for had deteriorated.
Investigators continued to look into the deaths of the children throughout 1999. Kathleen moved out of her marital home in June 2000, the marriage over for good this time. Between the tragic deaths of four children and police suspicion glaring at Kathleen, there seemed to be no salvaging her relationship with Craig.
Two years passed between Laura’s death and Kathleen’s arrest on April 19, 2001. Despite her not guilty plea, the media clamored to assuming the worst: that this woman had, indeed, smothered her four children to death despite the prosecution’s evidence being circumstantial: witness and expert testimony, the diaries, and Craig’s words.
Using her diary entries, her most private thoughts, prosecutors took over 200 entries to accuse kathleen of not bonding with her babies, not loving them, and claiming that her resentment of motherhood had led her to smothering her children. Reader’s Digest published a few of such entries used against Kathleen:
June 3, 1990: This is the day that Patrick Allen David Folbigg was born. I had mixed feelings this day whether or not I was going to cope as a mother or whether I was going to get stressed out like I did last time. I often regret Caleb and Patrick, only because your life changes so much, and maybe I’m not a person that likes change, but we will see.
November 9, 1997: With Sarah, all I wanted was her to shut up and one day she did.
January 28, 1998: I feel like the worst mother on this earth, scared that [Laura] will leave me now, like Sarah did. I knew I was short tempered and cruel sometimes to her and she left, with a bit of help. I don’t want that to ever happen again. I actually seem to have a bond with Laura. It can’t happen again. I’m ashamed of myself. I can’t tell Craig about it because he’ll worry about leaving her with me.
Australia’s worst serial killer. A monster. Australia’s most hated woman. The labels were thrown about before the trial even started in the spring of 2003. In February 2003, Kathleen applied for an order to request that each of the charges related to the deaths of her children be tried separately, and separate even from Patrick’s case. This was dismissed. She appealed the decision that same month, which was also dismissed.
By the time Kathleen Folbigg stepped into a courtroom in April 2003, it seemed Australia — and the world — had deemed her guilty, especially when the prosecution pointed out a little thing called Meadow’s Law.
Meadow’s Law: A presumption of guilt without evidence
“One sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, until proved otherwise.” - Roy Meadow
A British pediatrician in 1977 first coined both the term “Münchhausen by Proxy Syndrome” and later on, this idea that multiple infant deaths in one family should lead to an assumption of foul play on the mother or caregiver’s part. Dr. Meadow testified during the trial of Sally Clark in 1999, around the same time as Folbigg faced suspicions over her own children. Clark stood accused of murdering her two sons. According to Cornell University, “Dr. Meadow claimed that the chance of her two sons dying suddenly and randomly due to SIDS was 1/73,000,000.”
Peter Donnelly explained in TED talks that Dr. Meadow looked up the chances of a baby dying of SIDS in a non-smoking household, took that rough statistic of 1/8500, and squared it since Clark had two children. Cornell University’s blog goes into details on the numbers and how Dr. Meadow came to his conclusions. I am not good with numbers, but I will link to this article in the sources section of the story.
In short, Dr. Meadow made a presumption that since both children died in Clark’s care, she must have murdered them because two infant deaths in the same family had to be, in his opinion, “suspicious.”
This did irreparable damage when Clark was convicted of the murders. She was eventually acquitted of the crimes but she never emotionally or mentally recovered from the ordeal of losing her sons, then being accused of their murders with no evidence. Clark tragically died of alcohol poisoning in 2007, her life torn to shreds by the testimony of a man who led courts and juries to making dangerous assumptions about mothers before any forensic evidence could prove their guilt or innocence.
The justice system is built on assuming one is innocent until proven guilty. So why was this doctor allowed to invert that and use it on grieving mothers without sufficient evidence to prove they committed any crime? It’s logical that an investigation would be conducted in circumstances such as Kathleen’s, but to jump to a conclusion before anything is shown in a court of law undermines what should be a fair and balanced justice system.
Around the same time as Clark was convicted, Kathleen felt the weight of that same assumption of guilt.
In fact, in 2004, Dr. Meadow faced charges of serious professional misconduct after his so-called “law” led to the wrongful convictions of three women accused of murdering their babies. Owen Dyer writes in an article called “Meadow Faces GMC over evidence given in child death cases” (National Library of Medicine) that Meadows and a pathologist named Alan Williams were both to be charged with serious professional misconduct for their parts in the wrongful convictions of Sally Clark, Angela Cannings, and Trupti Patel.
Dyers notes that “Trupti Patel lost three babies. Sally Clark lost two. Angela Cannings lost three, but was accused of killing two.”
A Wales Online story also notes that Dr. Meadow’s testimony led to a fourth woman, Donna Anthony, to being convicted of the murders of her two children in 1998, for which she was cleared of six years later when Dr. Meadow’s testimony was deemed flawed.
Dyers writes that when Clark saw her conviction overturned, the Court of Appeal called Dr. Meadow’s statistics he cited during the trial “grossly misleading.” The BBC notes that due to environmental and genetic factors, the odds of a second SIDS death in one family is closer to 200 to one.
A BBC profile of Dr. Meadows says that the General Medical Council found him guilty of serious professional misconduct in 2005 and struck him from the medical register. He appealed, and this verdict has since been overturned.
But it doesn’t ease the pain his “law” and associated assumptions have caused. Instead of Sally Clark being allowed to grieve for her babies, she was arrested, convicted on a doctor’s baseless theory, and her life effectively ruined up until the day she died. The stigma of being a murderous mother never truly fades, even if the conviction is overturned.
It’s likely that Dr. Meadows meant the best when he presented Meadow’s Law, given that he did make the breakthrough of giving a name to Münchhausen by Proxy Syndrome. He still deserves credit for that, but the impact of his work otherwise cannot be ignored.
Kathleen would be the fifth woman to be convicted based on a prosecutor throwing around Meadow’s Law in a court room without any actual forensic evidence to back it up.
Despite each of the children’s deaths being ruled inconclusive (SIDS), a lack of forensic evidence implicating criminal activity, and the reliance of circumstantial evidence, a jury found Kathleen guilty of all four murders on May 21, 2003. She was found guilty of three counts of murder, one count of manslaughter and one count of inflicting grievous bodily harm. In October 2004, the judge sentenced her to 40 years in prison, no parole for 30; later reduced on appeal to 30 years in prison with no parole for 25 years.
At 35 years old, Kathleen Folbigg was incarcerated at the Silverwater Women’s Correctional Facility in Sydney, back where her tragic life had started.
When it seemed she had no one else to believe in her, an old childhood friend raised her voice
Something was wrong with this whole picture. Tracy Chapman had been convinced of it from the day of Kathleen’s arrest.
Tracy hadn’t been in Kathleen’s life for some years, but she found herself glued to the TV to watch the trial of her old friend. Tracy believed Kathleen would be found not guilty — so when Kathleen was convicted, Tracy reached out to her.
From the moment the rest of the world condemned Kathleen, Tracy remained convinced of her friend’s innocence.
She called lawyers. She read transcripts and court documents. She maintained contact with Kathleen through long letters. Tracy would later tell Reader’s Digest that Kathleen didn’t lose her compassion and humanity while behind bars and despite her losses.
“She’s got a strong moral compass. And I supported her to not allow the system to eat that up,” Tracy said.
According to Rule of Law, on November 26, 2004, Kathleen filed another appeal with NSW Court of Criminal Appeal (NSWCCA) for all five convictions and for leave to appeal against her sentences. The NSWCCA dismissed her appeal regarding her convictions, but did deem her sentences to be excessive. Kathleen’s sentence was reduced to 25 years in prison with a 20-year non-parole period.
In 2005, three High Court Justices dismissed a special leave application Kathleen filed.
Kathleen filed yet another appeal with the NSWCCA on November 27, 2007 alleging jury misconduct during her trial. This, too, was dismissed.
It turned out that Tracy wasn’t the only one questioning the prosecutor’s case. Emma Cunliffe was an Australian student at the University of British Columbia at the time, working towards her PhD. In the background, she also reviewed trial records and came to the conclusion that something was wrong.
She published an article titled “(This is Not A) Story: Using Court Records to Explore Judicial Narratives in R v Kathleen Folbigg” in the Australian Feminist Law Journal in 2007. She had spent two weeks in January 2006 reviewing all the court records regarding Kathleen’s trial in the Criminal Appeals Registry, and then another two years with copies of the documents in an attempt to understand how so little and fragmentary evidence paired with a prosecution’s woven narrative around that evidence could lead to a woman spending two decades in prison.
“Feminist scholars have cautioned that legal judgments ‘may not adequately reflect women’s
lives’ because legal categories and legal fact finding are both prone to discriminatory reasoning,” Cunliffe wrote. “This is perhaps especially true in relation to women who are accused of harming or killing their children.”
She maintained that given “the present state of medical knowledge we cannot know, by the standards our society regards as reliable, whether Folbigg killed her children.”
Over the years, more medical and legal experts came to question Kathleen’s conviction. Some things simply didn’t add up. If Laura had been suffocated, why were there no teeth marks on the inside of her mouth from the pressure it would have taken to do so? Why were there no signs of violence if Kathleen had been so sadistic and brimming with rage? Anytime she had shown anger or irritation with the kids, she had given them to Craig, according to his testimony.
And her dairies weren’t the smoking gun the prosecution believed they were. She wrote no outright confessions or details outlining exactly what she allegedly did. She had been a mother expressing frustration and difficulty with motherhood (because newsflash, it isn’t easy), and then she wrote of her deepest grief. After all, what mother wouldn’t feel some form of guilt over her babies dying? Like she didn’t do enough. That she could have somehow prevented the tragic shadows creeping up on her child, unseen.
Her remarks that “she left, with a bit of help” and “all I wanted was for her to shut up and one day she did” aren’t outright confessions. They could be interpreted as those of a murderous woman, or those of a grieving mother struggling with having more children after the previous ones died. Yes, such remarks at first glance appear sinister. But to take a few remarks out of pages and pages of written material doesn’t tell the entire story of what Kathleen was going through at the time.
Craig was also grieving and searching for answers when he handed the diaries over to police; a father who also lost his four babies and didn’t know why. Nor had he been home when it all happened. It seems inevitable that he would read those diaries and come to believe that his wife had something to do with the deaths which ultimately tore the marriage apart. But he had nothing more than the diaries and nothing to back that assumption up, too.
Had Kathleen not left her personal belongings in that house and told Craig to throw them out, had she taken the diaries with her or destroyed them, it’s possible she never would have been arrested to start. That’s how heavily the prosecution relied on them to convict her. It made for a fractured foundation on which to build a case.
But she likely never wanted to look at them again, and didn’t want to touch them.
Cunliffe published a book in 2011 titled “Murder, Medicine, and Motherhood” which analyzed the forensics and arguments presented at Kathleen’s trial. Quentin McDermott for Australian Story writes that Cunliffe became publicly vocal about the injustice she perceived to have been committed against Kathleen.
In 2015, lawyers acting on Kathleen’s behalf sent a petition requesting a review of the case to the governor of NSW at the time, General David Hurley. Professor Stephen Cordner, from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, wrote a 100-page report which re-examined the case, coming to the same conclusion.
“There is no positive forensic pathology support for the contention that any or all of these children have been killed,” Cordner wrote.
Cordner reviewed Laura’s death, and the myocarditis the pathologist, Allan Cala, had originally deemed to cause the infant’s death. Cordner agreed with Cala’s first conclusion that an inflammation of the heart killed Laura, not Kathleen.
Cala’s only reasoning for suspecting homicide was Meadow’s Law and the deaths of Laura’s siblings.
McDermott writes that he got involved with the case, too, in 2017. No discussion had been raised at Kathleen’s trial of multiple natural infant deaths happening within in the same family despite there being examples of such, as Cunliffe pointed out. McDermott invited another forensic pathologist to take a look at the slides of Laura’s heart muscles. That pathologist, Matthew Orde from the Vancouver General Hospital, agreed with Cordner, calling Laura’s death an “eminently fatal” case of myocarditis.
Orde told the Australian Story: “Of course, we can’t say for sure that this would have been the cause of death in Laura’s case. All I can say is I think this provides a very good explanation for her untimely death.”
And yet, the petition sat stagnant, with no action being taken despite mounting evidence that challenged the conviction.
McDermott talked to Nicholas Cowdery, who had been the NSW director of public prosecutors when Kathleen went on trial. The three years which passed since the petition was submitted had been, as he called it, an “inordinate delay.” But Cowdery stood by the jury’s decision.
“I have looked at the petition that Mrs Folbigg has lodged. I've looked at the reports that have accompanied that petition. I remain of the view that the jury was correct,” he told the Australian Story. He added that even if Laura’s death had been due to natural causes, it didn’t mean the other deaths weren’t homicides.
Kathleen’s attorney, Robert Cavanagh, said the courts couldn’t pick and choose like that.
“You can’t just simply say, ‘Well we got one wrong but the others can still stand.’ They chose to run the trial and they packaged the trial — four trials happening within the one,” he retorted.
Through various discreet prison phone calls between Kathleen and Tracy, McDermott let Kathleen tell her story in her own voice and words, and in 2018, published the article in the Australian Story outlining the blatant flaws in the evidence which sent her to prison. For the first time, Kathleen spoke of what her words in the diary entries meant, her children, her ex-husband, and her hopes for the future.
“You’ve got to understand that those diaries are written from a point of me always blaming myself,” Kathleen said in one of those phone calls. “I blamed myself for everything. It’s just I took so much of the responsibility, because that’s, as mothers, what you do.”
Kathleen explained that the diary entry where she wrote that Laura left “with a little bit of help” referred to a higher power, not murder.
“That quote, that was a reference to God or to some higher power or something going on that I didn’t understand,” she said. “I was thinking why was I not allowed to have the other three but now I've fallen pregnant again, am I going to be allowed to keep this one?”
She reflected on how she has no memory of her parents despite the early trauma her mother’s murder no doubt caused.
“My life just seems like it’s been never-ending battles and things that I have to get over and conquer,” she said.
McDermott writes that nine days following the publication of that story in 2018, a judicial inquiry was finally announced to look into Kathleen’s case. Cavanagh credited the Australian Story with making the final push to put pressure on the judicial system to take a second look. Otherwise, that petition may have sat in a file somewhere for years, ignored.
A young lawyer named Dave Wallace got involved shortly after this. He recruited genetic immunologist Professor Carola Vinuesa, at the Australian National University at the time, to help try to find a genetic and natural cause for the deaths of Kathleen’s other three children.
Vinuesa recalled reading the Australian Story’s story..
“I saw firsthand some of those images of the pathology of Laura's myocarditis. I was intrigued. I thought there could be a genetic basis for that disease,” she explained. “The coincidence was that just a few weeks before, I had been referred a family in which there had been four neonatal deaths in children aged from 20 days to four months, and we had found a genetic cause for their deaths.”
The attorney in charge of Kathleen’s defense team, Isabel Reed, obtained permission to get a buccal swab for DNA from Kathleen in the prison in October 2018.
The findings from that changed everything.
Upon testing the DNA, experts discovered that Kathleen carried a possibly pathogenic cardiac mutation called CALM2 G114R. It is a protein that is vital to regulating heart function.
“I was quite excited,” Vinuesa told the Australian Story. “It had never been identified in any other individual in the world.”
Laura and Sarah were also found to carry the same genetic mutation. Two professors in Denmark, named Michael Toft Overgaard and Mette Nyegaard, contributed through experiments which let them to determining that this mutation had more than likely caused the deaths of the infants.
BBC notes that research has linked the genetic mutation to a rare condition that occurs in one in every 35 million people and has the potential to cause severe cardiac abnormalities. The CALM2 G11R variant has the ability to interfere with the passage of calcium ions into cells, which can cause the heart to stop beating.
Vinuesa’s team also discovered another genetic mutation in Patrick and Caleb. This one was linked to sudden onset epilepsy in mice.
In June 2023, the NSW announced that Kathleen Folbigg would be pardoned and released from prison as a result of these findings deeming her children’s deaths to be from natural causes.
“In relation to the diary entries, evidence suggests they were the writings of a… depressed mother, blaming herself for the death of each child, as distinct from admissions that she murdered or otherwise harmed them,” said NSW Attorney General Michael Daley when he announced the pardon.
A Free Woman
Tracy Chapman welcomed her old friend into her home in her farm after Kathleen’s release from prison. With no family otherwise, Kathleen had nowhere else to go. On her first night out of prison, McDermott reported that Kathleen and Tracy ate pizza. Kathleen slept in a real bed for the first time 20 years.
“She slept in a real bed. She’s actually said it was the first time she’s been able to sleep properly in 20 years,” Tracy said.
As of June 2025, news.com.au reports that Kathleen is still living with Tracy. She has been unable to find a job or secure income of any kind, as the road to quashing her conviction and attaining compensation for the wrongful conviction will be a long road.
“I’ve moved back into Newcastle, returning back to where I went to high school and stuff but I just can’t find a rental, it’s so hard and I guess I’m single, have a dog, no job,” she said.
She added that Tracy let her put her stuff into storage and stay with her. Despite the struggle, Kathleen said she plans to spend her future advocating for others who land where she was, and to push law enforcement to use genetic testing as the “first stop not the last stop” when it comes to alleged filicide cases.
“What happened to me could happen to anyone. I had an extremely rare condition that couldn’t be found until this genetic testing became available and what’s to say it won’t happen to someone else. It won’t be found until there is standard genetic testing,” she explained.
Final Thoughts
It is truly heart-wrenching that the grief-filled words of a woman who suffered so much loss could be used against her by the legal system. Kathleen had the upbringing of someone who could have easily resorted to violence and murder. The disruption to the attachment with her mother at a young age. The trauma of her mother’s murder. A violent father. The symptoms of childhood sexual abuse (if it happened). But she longed instead for the warmth of a home and the love and acceptance of a family, and tried to make it happen. Childhood trauma of any kind does not automatically equal to someone being a killer — and as we have learned, neither does the occurrence of numerous infant deaths within one family.
Wouldn’t it be just her luck that a rare genetic mutation would take her babies from her the way her father’s cruelty took her mother?
Kathleen would be in her late fifties today. Instead of looking forward to grandchildren and retirement and slowing down, she is starting all over from nothing. No work experience. No money. No foundation to build a new life from except for that which has been provided by the friend who has stood by her for all of these years. No family to return to. Tracy Chapman has become the family she sought for so long.
Craig Folbigg died in 2024, and until his death, he stood firm in his belief that Kathleen murdered their children. He even refused to provide a DNA sample for the experts to test for other possible genetic mutations. In his mind, he had the answers, even if the prosecution’s case had been proved otherwise. There was no room for forgiveness or seeking alternative answers within him.
At the heart of it all, the babies were victims of nothing more than faulty genetics which took their lives, leaving behind two grieving parents: one who took the blame, and the other who did the blaming out of devastation. Both were wrong in the end. Kathleen never harmed her children or caused their deaths in any way. Craig couldn’t get past that when faced with the truth.
Where Kathleen Folbigg goes from here, we will have to see. She still awaits compensation and the legal route to actually quashing her conviction following her pardon. She is determined to help others, to advocate for the wrongly convicted, and to bring genetic testing to the legal world to help the women who find themselves where she stood twenty years ago, so they don’t have to sit in prison for decades due to flimsy circumstantial evidence and a legal system that enables such convictions.
The list of women wrongly convicted of filicide is long. In my notebook, I have twenty names listed (not including Kathleen) just from my research and reading for this story alone. A few are even on death row in the U.S. And I’m sure that isn’t all of them. Meadow’s Law. Misogyny. Character assassinations. The double standards women face in society. It all adds up to any and everything being used against them when the worst happens to their children. And we’re going to explore this aspect of filicide: the crimes that weren’t crimes, after all.
The “Guilty Until Proven Innocent” series will be a long one, but it will stand alongside the “Case Files” and “From the Past” except for the part where these women were innocent of murder (and not just filicide). We’re going to examine the other side of true crime. Do come along.
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Sources
Australian Story
March 4, 2024 (Craig Folbigg’s death)
News.com.au