CANBERRA, Australia (AP) – A woman convicted of suffocating her four children over a decade lost an appeal in a Sydney court on Wednesday against the conclusion that an investigation had been launched into her investigation that her victims did not die of natural causes.
An increasing number of scientists believe that Kathleen Folbigg is the victim of a miscarriage of justice, although many others consider the series of deaths to be tragic for being bad luck alone.
The Court of Appeal in New South Wales has rejected her application for a review of a judge’s ruling, making her guilt over these offenses even more certain.
Her last hope for early release now lies in a petition for forgiveness lodged with the Government of New South Wales this month by Margaret Beazley. Folbigg’s convictions will still apply, but she will be released.
The petition bore the signatures of 91 scientists, medical practitioners and related professionals, including two Nobel Prize winners.
Folbigg (now 53) was convicted in 2003 of the murder of three of her children and the manslaughter of a fourth. She consistently denied guilt. She was sentenced to 30 years in prison with a minimum of 25 years to serve before she could be considered for parole.
Her first child, Caleb, was born in 1989 and died 19 days later in a court that is the lesser crime of manslaughter. Her second child, Patrick, was 8 months old when he died in 1991. Two years later, Sarah passed away at the age of 10 months. In 1999, Folbigg’s fourth child, Laura, died at 19 months old. Folbigg was the first on the scene of every tragedy.
An autopsy found that Laura had myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle that can be fatal. But given the deaths of her three siblings, a pathologist calls the cause of her death as ‘indefinite’.
Patrick contracted epilepsy and his death was attributed to an obstruction in the airway as a result of an attack. The other two were recorded as Syndrome Syndrome for Child Death.
Folbigg’s lawyers told the jury during the trial that there were medical statements for each death. Caleb had a sloppy larynx and Sarah had a stuffed uvula that could obstruct her airways.
Folbigg did not testify during her trial, but she testified for almost three days during the judicial review of her convictions in 2019, based on the findings of a pathologist that the children probably died of natural causes without suffocation.
The judge hearing the review also heard testimony from experts that both girls had a hereditary genetic mutation linked to abnormal heartbeat and sudden death in children, suggesting that their death may have been caused by infections they had at the time. had.
Last year, the findings of 27 scientists describing the genetic mutation in Folbigg girls and their functional validation were published by Oxford University Press in the peer-reviewed cardiology journal Europace.
The case against Folbigg was controversial and relied on interpretations of vague entries she made in personal diaries, one of which her estranged husband, Craig Folbigg, reported to police.
The entries included: ‘Obviously I’m my father’s daughter’, a reference to her father who stabbed her mother to death in 1968 when Folbigg was 18 months old.
Folbigg’s lawyers note in their plea that the diaries do not contain any admission of guilt.
“You have to understand that the diaries were written from a point of view that I always blame myself,” Folbigg said in a 2018 prison call recorded by Australian Broadcasting Corp.