SYDNEY, Australia – Australian tabloids call Kathleen Folbigg a killer of innocent babies – the country’s “worst female serial killer.” In 2003, a court sentenced her to 40 years in prison for suffocating her four children before each became 2.
But Folbigg kept insisting that she was innocent and that her children were all the victims of the sudden infant death syndrome.
Now 90 leading scientists say they are convinced she is right. According to scientists, new genetic evidence suggests that the children died of natural causes, and that they should be pardoned.
In a petition sent to the governor of New South Wales last week, the group of scientists, which includes two Nobel Prize winners, called for Folbigg to be released immediately and for the ‘miscarriage of justice’ to end.
The public challenge poses a tense difference between some of the world’s leading medical minds and a criminal justice system that is rarely convicted. It is a story of judges who place more emphasis on the ambiguous thoughts of a mother’s diary than on rare genetic mutations, and scientists who are determined to respect the legal system for the latest expertise.
Caught in the middle is me. Folbigg, who is now 53. More than 30 years after her first child’s death, her story has not changed, and she maintains that she will be justified.
A difficult mother and her children
Me. Folbigg’s life has been difficult since birth.
She was just 18 months old when her father, Thomas Britton, killed her mother in 1968. His wife ran into them over a money dispute. He stabbed her in a drunken rage on a public footpath in Sydney.
About 28 years later, Ms. Folbigg wrote in her diary: “I am, of course, my father’s daughter.”
By that time, she had married a miner, Craig Folbigg, in 1996, to a working-class suburb, Newcastle, a coal capital north of Sydney, and lost three of her children.
Me. Folbigg’s firstborn, Caleb, died on February 20, 1989 at the age of 19 days. His death was classified by doctors as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
The next child, Patrick, died almost two years later, at 8 months. He was blind and had epilepsy and suffocated to death, according to his death certificate.
A girl, Sarah, died on August 30, 1993 at the age of 10 months and her death was also classified as SIDS. Me. Folbigg’s last child, Laura, died in March 1999 at the age of 18 months, with the cause initially described as ‘indefinite’.
The deaths initially seemed like a simple, horrific tragedy. But Folbigg’s husband handed her over to police after reading one of her diary entries. It is said that Sarah left ‘with a little help’.
Mrs. Folbigg told authorities that what she wrote merely captured the anxiety and despair of young motherhood and that ‘a little help’ refers to her hope that God had taken her baby home.
In her trial, the doctor who ruled Laura’s death indefinitely, Allan Cala, testified that he had never seen a case of four children dying in the same family. He was admitted as an expert witness, and although he did not provide independent data, prosecutors relied on his account, arguing that lightning strikes and flying pigs were more likely than four babies dying in a family as young as ten years.
“There has never been such a case in the history of medicine,” one prosecutor said in recent arguments. “It’s not a reasonable doubt, it’s ridiculous.”
The jury agrees. Me. Folbigg (then 35) was convicted of the murders of Patrick, Sarah and Laura and the murder of Caleb. She collapsed in tears when the verdicts were read.
The science that can set her free
But there was never any medical evidence of suffocation, say the scientists – it was one hole in the case. This is the first thing that in their forgiveness petition for me. Folbigg is called.
None of the children were healthy, according to them. Laura, the last to die, was ill with a respiratory infection, and an autopsy later found an inflamed heart.
With these tips in mind, her lawyers asked geneticists to investigate the case, looking for a mutation that could explain the family’s experience.
Carola Vinuesa, an immunologist from the Australian National University in Canberra, and another doctor, Todor Arsov, visited Kathleen in prison on October 8, 2018 and obtained permission to sequence her genome. They both found that Mrs. Folbigg had a rare mutation in what is known as the CALM2 gene.
The genetic disorder essentially creates cardiac arrhythmias that can cause cardiac arrest and sudden death in infancy and childhood.
It is known that only about 75 people in the world have the mutation, Professor Vinuesa said, including some parents without symptoms. But children died in at least 20 of these cases, and in many other cases they suffered cardiac arrest.
This was especially the case when triggers triggered adrenaline – and one known trigger is pseudoephedrine, a drug Laura used when she died.
Using blood and tissue samples from all four children, shortly after they were born, Professor Vinuesa and dr. Arsov found that Sarah and Laura both had the same mutation as their mother.
By that time, Folbigg’s lawyers, who had already exhausted formal appeals, had succeeded in obtaining a formal investigation into the case. Professor Vinuesa submitted a lengthy report in December 2018.
But there were signs of resistance. Dr. Cala appears again and tells the judge that by the time Laura’s body arrives, after three deaths, ‘you’ should have it in the back of your mind, is there something else going on regarding possible trauma? ‘
Bob Moles, a law professor at Flinders University, said the admission of such rulings showed a major flaw in Australian justice.
“One of the biggest problems we have is the willingness of courts to allow scientific evidence that is not really scientific,” he said.
Professor Vinuesa, realizing that the evidence is not being taken seriously, writes to Peter Schwartz, a world leader in genetic researchers in Milan. He wrote back that he had studied a family in the United States with the same mutation, including two children who had died of heart attacks.
He sent a letter to the investigation with his findings. In July 2019, the judge reached a decision. He said that he had considered the scientific evidence, but that he had read the diary of Mrs. Folbigg found it compelling – and that he had no reasonable doubt about her guilt.
Refuse to give up
Frustrated, but more determined, the scientists’ network gradually expanded.
Several of those involved, including Dr. Arsov, presented their findings to an international peer-reviewed journal. The paper was published in November.
Further investigation of Caleb and Patrick’s genomes revealed that they had a separate rare genetic variant, which has been linked in studies with mice to early fatal epileptic seizures.
A total of 90 leading scientists agree that the medical evidence proves that Folbigg is innocent. The signatories of the pardon petition include Dr. Schwartz; John Shine, President of the Australian Academy of Sciences; and Elizabeth Blackburn, a 2009 Nobel laureate in medicine who teaches at the University of California, San Francisco.
“We will feel excited for Kathleen if she is pardoned,” Professor Vinuesa said. “It will send a very strong message that science must be taken seriously by the legal system.”