Kathleen Folbigg: Australian woman jailed for 20 years over deaths of her four children is pardoned

An Australian mother who spent 20 years in prison for allegedly killing her four children was pardoned and released on Monday based on new scientific evidence that they died by natural causes, as she had insisted.

Kathleen Megan Folbigg’s children died separately over the space of a decade, aged between 19 days and 19 months old.

She was convicted in 2003 for the murder of three of the children and manslaughter of the fourth, but has always maintained her innocence.

An initial inquiry in 2019 found the evidence reinforced her guilt, but a second inquiry, led by former chief justice Thomas Bathurst, last year revisited her convictions after new evidence suggested two of the children had a genetic mutation that could have caused their deaths.

New South Wales state Attorney General Michael Daley pardoned Folbigg on Monday after summary findings from the Bathurst inquiry found reasonable doubt for each conviction.

“There is a reasonable doubt as to Ms. Folbigg’s guilt of the manslaughter of her child Caleb, the infliction of grievous bodily harm on her child Patrick and the murder of her children Patrick, Sarah and Laura,” Mr Daley told reporters.

“I have reached a view that there is reasonable doubt as to the guilt of Ms. Folbigg of those offences.”

“Given all that has happened over the last 20 years, it is impossible not to feel sympathy for Kathleen and Craig Folbigg,” he added.

Folbigg, now 55, was on Monday released from prison in Grafton, New South Wales state, where she was serving a 30-year sentence that was to expire in 2033. She would have become eligible for parole in 2028.

The pardon was seen as the quickest way of getting her out of prison, while a final report from the second inquiry into her guilt could recommend the state Court of Appeals quash her convictions.

Mr Bathurst conducted the second inquiry into Folbigg’s guilt, following a petition signed by 90 scientists, medical practitioners and related professionals that said it was “based on significant positive evidence of natural causes of death”.

Prosecutors acknowledged to his inquiry in April that there was reasonable doubt about her guilt.

Folbigg’s first child, Caleb, was born in 1989 and died 19 days later in what a jury determined to be the lesser crime of manslaughter. Her second child, Patrick, was 8 months old when he died in 1991. Two years later, Sarah died at 10 months. In 1999, Folbigg’s fourth child, Laura, died at 19 months.

Evidence discovered in 2018 that both daughters carried a rare CALM2 genetic variant was one of the reasons that the inquiry was called.

Lawyer Sophie Callan said expert evidence in the fields of cardiology and genetics indicated that the CALM2-G114R genetic variant “is a reasonably possible cause” of the daughters’ sudden deaths.

Myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, was also a “reasonably possible cause” of Laura’s death, Callan said.

For Patrick, Ms Callan said there was “persuasive expert evidence that as a matter of reasonable possibility, an underlying neurogenetic disorder” caused his sudden death.

The scientific evidence created doubt that Folbigg killed the three children and undermined the argument made in Caleb’s case that four child deaths were an improbable coincidence, Ms Callan said.

Prosecutors had told the jury at her trial that the similarities among the deaths made coincidence an unlikely explanation.

Folbigg was the only one at home or awake when the young children died. She said she discovered three of the deaths during trips to the bathroom and one while checking on a child’s wellbeing.

Prosecutors also had told the jury that Folbigg’s diaries contained admissions of guilt.

Her former husband, Craig Folbigg, said in submissions to the inquiry that the implausibility that four children in one family would die of natural causes before the age of two was compelling grounds to continue treating the diary entries as admissions of his former wife’s guilt.

But Ms Callan said psychologists and psychiatrists gave evidence that it would be “unreliable to interpret the entries in this way.”

Folbigg had been suffering a major depressive disorder and “maternal grief” when she made the entries, Ms Callan said.