True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast was recorded on fifty six minutes. That's how long it took for a woman who was once known as Australia's worst female serial killer to be
released from prison after twenty years. Kathleen Felby went from one of the worst types of criminals, one even fellow inmates can't stand, one who would take the life of a child, to fifty six minutes later being a free woman cleared of the deaths of her four babies Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura between nineteen eighty nine and nineteen ninety three.
I hope and pray that one day I would be able to stand here with my name cleared. For almost a quarter of a century, I faced disbeliefment, hostility, I suffered abuse in all what's formed. My children are here with me today and they will be close to my heart for the rest of my life. The system preferred to blame me rather than accept that sometimes children can and do die suddenly, unexpectedly, at heartbreakingly.
Kathleen Folbig could actually be the focus of two completely separate episodes of True Crime Conversations. One would focus on her childhood, marred by the murder of her mother at the hands of her violent father, a man with known criminal ties who reportedly stood over her mother's body in the street and told the neighbor that he just had to do it after she'd left him with little Kathleen.
Or maybe we'll look into the aunt and uncle who would take her in only to hand her over to the state, Or the foster family who eventually raised her, only for her foster mother to end up shunning her when her new grandson arrived in the world. Despite all that hardship, a young Kathleen still managed to make a life for herself. That resilient young woman made incredible friends, friends who had become invaluable to her in the fight
that she would face later. She met and married her husband, Craig Folbig, got a job, and then started a family, a decision that would alter the course of her life once again and again lead her to tragedy, heartbreak, and a criminal conviction that should never have been. Little Caleb's death in nineteen eighty nine at aged just nineteen days was attributed to Syd's sudden infant death syndrome, as was his sister Sarah who died in nineteen ninety three, aged
ten months. Both children had issues with their respiratory systems, conditions like sleep apnea. Patrick, who died in nineteen ninety aged eight months, suffered from seizures, which doctors say contributed to his death in nineteen ninety but by the time Little Laura, who lived longer than any of the Folby children, making it to eighteen months and twenty two days, was
pronounced dead. Police were starting to get suspicious when a call came in from detectives in the New South Wales regional town of Singleton, where Kathleen and her husband then lived. Professor John Hilton, the pathologist who'd performed the autopsy on little Sarah a few years before, was told just the name Phoebic and the number four. He responded with, one is tragic, two is unusual, three is suspicious, or he said, is fucking murder. Now those words weren't completely Hilton's alone.
The saying had actually come from another academic, one whose theory had condemned many more women than just Kathleen Folbig. I'm Claire Murphy and this is True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. In the nineteen nineties, Australian parents were being educated on something that had been classified in the late seventies but that many were not really aware of.
There are three simple ways you can help produce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome. One, put your baby on the back to sleep. Two make sure your baby's head remains uncovered during sleep, and three always keep your baby in a smoke free environment.
Sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, as it's known, was a terrifying condition that it impacted parents around the world. One day, your baby is alive and happy, and then you wake the next to find their lifeless body in their cot where you'd lovingly place them to sleep the night before. Their short lives snuffed out they simply stop breathing.
In the United States, SIDS is the leading cause of death for infants age between one month and one year, and in fact, it takes the lives of around three hundred babies a year in the UK and one hundred babies a year here in Australia. While this sounds like a terrible amount of little lives, lost before the education programs used to be so much worse. It was in the nineteen eighties that Roy Meadow stepped into this tragic conversation. He in nineteen eighty nine wrote a formula in his
book The ABC of Child Abuse. That formula would see women like Kathleen Folbig treated as criminals rather than victims. It stated that one sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious, and three, according to his formula, is murder until proved otherwise. Quentin McDermott is an award winning investigative journalist and the author of Meadow's Law, The True Story of Kathleen Folbig and the Science that set Her Free.
He has spent years investigating Kathleen Folbig's case, spending time with her and her crew of supporters who have worked tirelessly for her freedom. He sat down with us to explain just how Meadow's Law put women like Kathleen in a place where they could not possibly defend themselves, forcing them, while suffering through the worst thing that could ever happen
to a mother, to fight for their lives. I'd like to kick it off with you, maybe gives an understanding of how Meadow came to his law and what dares he was basing his law off of, and how that was received by the sort of wider medical and legal communities when it started to infiltrate into those spaces.
Roy Meadow came up with his theory, which, as you say, was you know, one death is a tragedy, two is suspicious, and three is homicide. Unlet's proven otherwise, following his own experience as a British pediatrician. Now he wasn't the only person to come up with this theory. There were two medical examiners in the United States who at the same time came up with a very similar theory. And what stood out for me in looking at this but a
couple of things. First of all, that this was based, I think, in Roy Meadow's cases, was based simply on his practical and clinical experience as a pediatrician, but not on any kind of justified statistical analysis of the cases of infants who died suddenly and unexpectedly in families. And the second thing that stood out for me was that in the case of the medical examiner in the United States, their inclination was to blame the mothers rather than the father's.
So one of these medical examiners wrote to a pediatric learned publication saying exactly that that in almost all of the cases where there'd been sudden unexpected deaths which were homicides, it was the mother who had carried out the killing.
And so that of itself kind of set a framework, if you like, which suggested that in any case where there had been three or more sudden unexpected deaths of infants in a family, not only was that homicide, but almost certainly it was the mother who had carried out the homicide.
When you consider Kathleen Folbig's case, why do you think suspicion then only fell on them after the death of their fourth child? Because if we look at Meadow's law, as you've suggested, they should, after the third death be really considered a homicide case. So why did it have to be four children's deaths before they looked at the phobies in that light rather than just as them suffering just immeasurable tragedy.
Look, I think that's a fantastic question as well, and in fact, no one else has ever asked me that. But I'll tell you what happened in her case was that in each of the first three cases where the children tragically died, there was no suspicion raised purely and simply, I think, because in terms of the circumstances surrounding each death, the doctors and the police found nothing that was suspicious. Now, following the death of her third child, Sarah, two things
happened of note. First of all, as a kind of routine, if you like, the police came to their home on the night that Sarah died, and they carried out a pretty farer kind of look at their place, and you know, I think really just as a matter of kind of routine in order to just double check that there was kind of nothing suspicious, and they didn't believe that there
was anything suspicious. This is the police. And the second thing that happened with Sarah's death is that her post mortem, her autopsy, was carried out by a very eminent forensic pathologist called John Hilton, and he examined the body, he carried out the autopsy, and he came to the conclusion that she had died from Sid's sudden infant death syndrome
and he couldn't see anything suspicious in her death. And so at that point you know, the death was kind of squared away as being SIDS and Caleb had been ascribed. Caleb's death had been ascribed to SIDS. Caleb was their firstborn. And so the suspicion was raised in Laura's case mainly because a police officer came to John Hilton and said,
this is the fourth death in the family. And I think that kind of tipped him over the edge if you like to exclaiming, well, I mean, he's Scottish, I can't do a Scottish accent, but he said, you know, for is fucking murder. And I think the problem then was that John Hilton, who was an extremely eminent forensic pathologist and who came to believe that she was innocent, by the way, but he was working in a context where Meadow's Law was kind of in the ascendant if
you like. Meadow's Law was accepted I think among many, if not all, of the forensic pathologists working at that time, and so he believed it was murder. They had a meeting and essentially, you know, the alarm was raised because
it seemed to be suspicious. Now, what then happened was that the autopsy on Laura was carried out by another forensic pathologist called doctor Alan Carla, who actually found an active potential reason for her death, which was a heart condition called myocarditis, But because the whole context was tainted by Meadow's law, and because they had been three other deaths in the family, doctor Carla declared that in his view, the cause of death was undetermined, and then the police
kind of at that point set off on their investigation.
Well, can we talk about that investigation, because in this case it does feel very extreme when you really look at how they conducted it. They tapped the Polvig's phone, they bugged their home, they questioned them, sometimes without lawyers, sometimes for eight hours at a time, Like it seemed like a very extreme investigation in this case. Would that have been unusual for a case like this or was that standard police procedure at the time.
It's very interesting you say that, Claire. Can I just take a step back. In the United States, there had been the case of a woman called Wanitahyde whose children had died. Four of them had died apparently from natural causes, and then a medical examiner and the police decided that they thought it was suspicious and they brought her in we need to hide under the guise of you know, can you please help us just to explain, you know,
the circumstances surrounding the deaths of your children. And it turned into an extremely aggressive interview, at the end of which she confessed to killing the children, but she later retracted her confession because it had been extracted from her frankly under duress. Now in Kathleen Folbek's case, something similar happened. So Bernie Ryan, the detective who was heading the investigation,
invited Kathy to come in and be interviewed. And as you say, no lawyer was brought in to help represent her. She was on her own completely, Craig, her husband wasn't even in the room with her, and she was interrogated for you know, well, she spent the whole day basically being interrogated. So for kind of seven or eight hours
she was interrogated. And it was interesting how the interview was carried out by Bernie Ryan, because he started off just you know, in a neutral way, asking her to tell her story and the story of her children, and it was only after about seven hours that he suddenly hit her with this kind of chilling series of questions, you know, did you kill Caleb, did you kill Patrick? Did you kill Sarah? Did you kill Lauren? And he
repeated this. He asked her this twice, and of course at that point she realized that she was actually the kind of prime suspect in this investigation.
Well, can you tell me about the conversation that police recorded between Craig and Kathy That would sound quite condemning at the time.
The investigation was intensely intrusive on Kathleen and indeed on Craig her husband. As you say, they bugged their home. And what I find particularly interesting, and I revealed this in my book for the first time, is that the only time that either parent got even close to a confession of having harmed their children was when they secretly recorded conversation where Craig came down one morning and he said to Kathy, he said, all night I've been thinking
maybe I killed the kids. Now you know that must have been an absolutely chilling moment, both for Kathy and indeed for the police who the detectives who were listening in. But what I think is very striking about this is that this secretly recorded conversation was one where not only did he say that I've been thinking maybe I killed the kids. He then went into a great detail about exactly how he could have killed them and what his
motive would have been. But this entire conversation, almost all of it was suppressed at her trial, and then when eventually, years and years later, in twenty nineteen, there was a judicial inquiry into her case, it was completely suppressed at that inquiry, and it was only much later on at the second inquiry, just before she was finally pardoned and released, that it was actually put on the recorder and it
was kind of allowed to be seen. And I think that's very striking, and I think it's an extraordinary example of the underlying misogyny, if you like, in the investigation and in the prosecution of Kathleen Folbeck.
Well, you mentioned the detective who was leading this investigation. He would not consider Craig a suspect really at any stage, it seemed during this process, and in fact, he would go and meet with Craig, sometimes at his place of work, like out of the blue, to try and convince him that mothers do kill their children like that? Is that how investigations unfold. I mean, I'm not a police officer.
I don't understand how these work, but that feels like the detective is trying to lead Craig towards a conclusion.
I think you're absolutely right, Claire, and speaking personally, I think it's entirely improper for the lead detective in a homicide or potential homicide investigation to be, you know, which involves both parents, who obviously are both key witnesses, to go to one parent and start talking to them. And indeed, you know, Craig Folbig in the trial revealed that Bernie Ryan had come to him and said, you know, it's
not just women in housing commissions, you know. In other words, he was suggesting, you know, kind of poverty stricken women on drugs or whatever who kill their children. It can be kind of middle class women as well. So Bernie Ryan had obviously been talking to him and kind of getting into his ear. And then the other highly significant thing is that in April two thousand and one, when the investigation was still ongoing, they actually arrested Craig Folbig
under suspicion of impeding or obstructing the investigation. Now, the effect of that must have been, and indeed was to put pressure on Craig Folbig to essentially say what the police wanted him to say. And it's very interesting because in this interview that followed that they brought him in, they said, you know, were arresting you on suspicion of
impeding the investigation. They then interviewed him. He did a long interview in which essentially he said all the things that the police wanted him to say, and he agreed to be a witness against Kathy at her trial. I think it's incontrovertible that pressure was put on Craig Folbig, Kathy's husband, to you know, to give evidence against her, and that indeed is exactly what happened at her trial.
Well, part of that pressure that Craig felt did lead him to give police some evidence which would later prove to be incredibly damning for Kathleen at her trial, and that was her diaries. But can you explain to us how those diaries were interpreted during the initial trial, because they had like a lineup of experts to discuss, which was never really refuted by the defense with their own
experts at the time. But how did they interpret Athleen's diary entries to prove to the jury that she had murdered her children.
Okay, Well, you're getting into a really interesting area here, Claire, because what happened at her trial was that the diaries, there was something like forty different extracts from her diaries which were kind of read out in open court to the jury, okay, And what happened was that the senior Crown prosecutor, Mark Tadeski interpreted these entries in her diaries as being virtual admissions to having killed her children. And indeed, with one or two of these entries, he actually kind
of put words into her mouth. He said, you know about one entry, what could this possibly mean other than you know, I killed the children or I killed this child. So that is what he did. However, the main experts who appeared at the trial were the medical experts, and what the medical experts were saying was that in their experience, they had never come across a family where three or more children had died from natural causes. So they were
essentially parroting Meadows law. Okay in terms of their own experience.
Was that true? Because you've already mentioned there was another case where four children had died, So they are testifying that there's just been no other case of this happening that then is not true.
Well, in fairness to the medical experts, I think what they were doing was they were saying, you know, in our experience, in my experience, I've never come across a
case like that. But in fact, you're absolutely right. And this was one of the main reasons that the first judicial inquiry was called was because it was later shown to be the case that yes, indeed, of course there had been other families where multiple children had died from natural causes, so the jury was completely misled on that point.
But the point I want to make about the diaries is this that although there were multiple medical experts appearing at the trial, there were no psychological or psychiatric experts who appeared at the trial to interpret the diaries. It was only after she had been convicted that psychiatrists submitted reports about her mental state and whether or not she was psychotic. And incidentally, none of the psychiatrists suggested that she had a psychosis which would have impelled her to
kill any of her children. So the problem for Kathe and her defense was that there was no one standing up at her trial to say, well, hang on, you know, the senior Crown prosecutor is saying that these diary entries
are virtual admissions of guilt. Well, actually there's an alternative explanation, and here it is really they were reliant on the defense and Peter Tzara, the senior public defender who appeared on her behalf, giving an alternative explanation, but without the benefit of being able to cross examine experts who might have backed that up.
For people who weren't aware of Kathleen Folbigg's trial when at first done FA in the early two thousands, what was the media coverage like then, because we know that they have the ability to swagh public opinion. What picture were they painting of Kathleen Folbig.
Well, it was a brutal picture essentially. Now, I think it's fair to say that as the trial went on, of course, court reporters were doing what court reporters always do and do professionally, which is to report the proceedings
in court. But as the trial progressed, it was becoming clearer and clearer that the prosecution was presenting evidence which on the face of it looked very damning, particularly in relation to the diaries and the medical experts, and also in relation to the evidence that was given by Craig Folbeg, who got up in the witness box and exaggerated frankly various insignificant incidents which had happened at home, as if to suggest that his wife was actually a murderous Okay, now,
it's very interesting. Cathy herself was acutely aware of how all of this might appear in the media and might appear to the public. And I include in the book this really revealing story. I think of how one day she came out of court, she was walking along the road. She spoke on the phone to one of her very best friends, Megan, and she said to Megan, I'm trying not to laugh. And Meghan said, well, why is that.
You know, why what's happened? And she said, well, there's a cameraman in front of me who's kind of filming me and backing away, and he's just backed into a garbage bin. And she said, but I can't laugh because of how it'll be portrayed. And I think that is both poignant and extremely revealing. What it showed was that she was acutely aware that if she was photographed laughing outside court, that would be interpreted by the media as
her being a callous bitch and a murderers. But of course, in the event what happened, it was a catch twenty two because by holding her emotions in and by not showing her emotions in public, you know, she was portrayed
as a kind of cold, unfeeling bitch, you know. And then after the trial, after she was convicted, I mean, the media just descended on her like a kind of torrent really, And there had been there was one diary entry which had been ruled inadmissible at her trial, but which the media was allowed to publish following her conviction, and that was the entry where she said, just a few words, obviously, I am my father's daughter. Now the
media lect on this. It kind of permeated almost all of the coverage following her conviction because of course what she was doing there where she was referring to her father, her biological father, who had murdered her biological mother by stabbing her twenty four times in a street. Okay, Now, the media obviously interprets did this as her saying when she said, obviously I am my father's daughter. You know,
I am a killer like him. But she has an entirely different explanation for why she wrote that, which is, you know, I was simply comparing myself to him and thinking, you know, I'm a loser. You know, my life is a mess. I'm a loser like he was. So the media was absolutely brutal, and of course they were publishing these articles right at the point where she was being kind of transported to prison where she faced terrible, terrible,
you know, vilification from the other inmates. Because when you go to prison as a mother convicted of killing one or more of your children, you are absolutely the lowest of the lure. You're the scum of the earth. You're the you know, the rock spider and so on, and you know, if you're in a public part of prison, you're in real, potential, real danger.
I want to talk about her prison experience in a minute, were going I backtracked just a little to talk about Kathleen's father and her upbringing, because it was a tragedy from the very beginning for her. It seems to have followed her for the majority of her life. But did that start to life impact how she was viewed within the trial itself, because you could view that in two ways. She seemed like a person who'd taken adversity in sort of made something of her life and had kind of
gone above and beyond those terrible starts. But then other people might have viewed that as well. Obviously that trauma has manifested in a way where she too has felt the need to kill another human being. Did that shape the trial itself, that start to life for.
Her, I wouldn't say it did shape the trial itself for a couple of reasons. First of all, she didn't herself give evidence, and so you know, there wasn't this kind of scenario in court where she would have been in the witness box and would have described her own early life. And then the other key point about her early life, which is as I say, is the fact that her biological father murdered her mother was ruled in admissible and so that wasn't brought up in court at all. Now,
you're absolutely right. I mean, her very early life was just horrific and tragic, you know, because her father murdered her mother when she was approximately eighteen months old, and then she was farmed out to a relative's family who sometime later rejected her essentially, and she was put into care the care of the state. As a state ward, she was farmed out, first of all to two separate children's homes, which in those days would have been pretty grim.
And then finally she was taken on board, if you like, by a foster family and transported up to Newcastle, to the suburb of Katara in Newcastle, where she lived with his foster family. But the problem there, I think was that it was a very dysfunctional family. The foster parents were much much older than parents of a tiny girl would normally be, and indeed her foster brother and foster sister were a lot older, and they were kind of
leaving home essentially. And then on top of that, her foster mother was sometimes really quite unpleasant and even cruel to her, you know, made her do lots of chores. She was a bit like a kind of Cinderella figure, I think, and if she failed to do them, or if she was blamed for something, her foster mother would beat her physically in some respects extraordinarily unpleasant difficult upbringing for her, and so of course, as a teenager she
kind of rebelled against all of that. And then finally, when she was eighteen years old, she met her future husband, Craig, and they kind of went from there. I don't think it's correct to say that her early life featured in any major way in the actual trial, although it did feature in the reports written by the psychiatrist following her conviction.
Can I check in with meadows law and where we were at with that when this trial was happening, because I understand that it had been used in other trials previously which were then overturned, and that it was brought up in another and then kind of refuted. And can you explain to us where we're at with meadows law and the understanding of what that meant in situations like Kathleen Folbick had found herself in while this trial was happening in the early two thousands.
Yes, absolutely so. Meadows law kind of originated from approximately kind of ten or fifteen years before her trial, okay, And through the nineteen nineties it was I think accepted probably by most forensic pathologists and probably and prosecutors and police as being a kind of a general rule that was valid to go by, if you like. And in the United Kingdom there was a group of women, all unconnected with each other, but a group of mothers who
were charged with and convicted of killing their children. Probably the most famous case was the case of Sally Clark, a solicitor who was convicted of killing her two sons. Okay, now, by two thousand and three, which is when Cathie went on trial, Sally Clark had actually been acquitted. So Sally
Clark had two appeals. The first appeal failed and then the second appeal, which was in very early two thousand and three, succeeded, and in the process the Meadows law theory, which in her case was that the chances of her two sons coming from a well off, reasonably wealthy family dying from natural causes. Roy Meadow said he gave evidence at her trial. He said, the chances of that happening, well, one in seventy three million.
Okay, this is something that a lot of people who work with stats and data have had lots of issues with over the time. Is where these numbers all came from?
Right? Absolutely? Yes, yes, So in his case, from memory, he said, you know, the chances of a single child dying from SIDS is you know, one in eighty five thousand, and he from that to say, therefore, the chances of two children from a wealthy family dying from SIDS is eighty five thousand times eighty five thousand, which is seventy three million. I think my mass is correct there, but the point is actually that the opposite is the case. Sadly and tragically, if a family has a death from SIDS,
that actually increases the chances of a second death from SIDS. Okay, and his statistics were completely wrong. Now, the point here in Kathy's case is that Sally Clark was acquitted in early two thousand and three, and literally just a couple of months later, Kathy was put on trial charged with
murdering all four of her children. So the prosecution and the defense knew about Sally Clark's case, and indeed, through the rest of two thousand and three, following Kathy's conviction, there were multiple other cases of women in the UK who had previously been convicted and one or two of them who were serving jail time who then won their
appeals on the same basis of Meadow's law. Now you know what the prosecution did at Kathy's trial, quite cleverly, I think, was not to mention Meadow's law by name, Okay, but there was a kind of a get around for me you know, the most notorious kind of get around was that the senior Crome prosecutor Mark Tadeski, in his closing address to the jury, he said, I'm paraphrasing here, but essentially he said, is it possible that the four
children died from natural causes? Yes, it is. But equally, he said, it's possible that farmer Joe would wake up one morning, look out of the window and see four piglets born to a sow who had sprouted wings and flown away. Okay. Now this was utterly and completely misleading. I mean, it was just crazy. Apart from the fact that he was seemed to be, you know, metaphorically equating Kathy and her children with a sou and her piglets,
which is arguably pretty offensive. Apart from that, he was essentially he was saying, you know, they did all of them die from natural cause of well, pigs might have wings, Okay, And that just turned out to be utterly misleading and just wrong, because, as I say, there had been multiple other cases of families with several infants who had died suddenly and unexpectedly and from natural causes.
You're listening to true crime conversations with me Claire Murphy, I'm speaking with Quentin McDermott, Award winning investigative journalist and author of the book Meadows Law. Next, we look at the similarities between Kathleen's story and Lindy Chamberlain's and how when a child dies, the justice system and media are
often a little too quick to blame. Mum, I want to ask you a little bit about We kind of touched on this when we're talking about the media's impact on creating the character of Kathleen Folbig in the press. But you mentioned that she was quite aware of how she was being perceived and so she had to act
in certain ways which would sometimes backfire on her. But this for Australians watching should have seemed very familiar because we'd seen all of this happen before with Lindy Chamberlain, whose daughter Azaria was taken by a dingo in nineteen eighty at LaRue. Why does it seem like we didn't learn the lesson from Lindy Chamberlain when we then applied it to Kathleen Folbig.
Ok.
I think that's an incredibly good question as well, Claire. Of course, Lindy Chamberlain's trial took place in the Northern territory, and of course Kathleen Folbig's trial took place in New South Wales, so there were kind of different different jurisdictions if you like. But I think you're absolutely right what I think it shows. Actually it does, I think show a kind of inherent bias within the criminal justice system.
You know. In Lindy Chambalin's case, You're absolutely right. You know, as it happens, the first coronial inquest in her case absolved her of any responsibility at all. I mean, everyone at the camp site when Azaria was taken by a dingo was saying Zaria was taken by a dingo. It was the police who then came back and sought other evidence and so on, and finally she was tried and convicted and sent to jail for the bat three and a half years. But you know why the criminal justice
system didn't learn the lesson? Well, I'm going to say something that may be quite shocking. I don't believe the criminal justice system, certainly in New South Wales, has learned the lessons of this even now. My opinion is that in Kathleen Folbigg's case, the criminal justice system did everything in its power following her convictions to keep her in prison when there were multiple occasions that raised significant doubts about her convictions. So I'll just give you one example.
She had two appeals following her trial, the second of which was in two thousand and seven, so she'd been in prison for approximately four years. The second appeal came up because during the trial, the line that she had written in her diaries obviously I am my father's daughter was ruled inadmissible, so that meant that it couldn't be raised at all or mentioned in the trial. But when Craig Folbig came to give evidence, he referred to this. He referred to having found the diary and in it
was this entry referring to her father. Now, what then happened, without anyone at the trial knowing, was that a member of the jury went outside the court room and researched Kathleen Folbig's father and found out what Thomas Britten, her father, had done, and he took this knowledge back to the jury. Now that must have had an enormous effect on the jury. Now, in two thousand and seven, her legal team appealed against
her conviction. They wanted a retrial, essentially on the basis that the trial was tainted by the jury's knowledge of this line in her diary. The Crown argued at her appeal that in fact, if he had taken this, which he did, if he, if this jury member had taken this back into the jury room, the jury would have felt some sympathy for her. Now, in my opinion, this was a crazy idea, because of course the opposite would
have been the case. They would have thought, ah, you know, the reason she wrote that is because she killed the children.
So that appeal failed, and I think, I think it's really interesting that the judges in that appeal turned it down because there have been other examples since then where jury members in other cases where jury members have gone outside the court have researched something to do with the case which they are not allowed to do, and come back into the into the courtroom, and then those trials have been you know, have been stopped. And there was a very famous case recently. So that's one example of it.
But for me, the most striking example is actually the first in the first judicial inquiry into her case in twenty nineteen, when the inquiry was presented with clear, fresh genetic evidence that pointed to reasonable doubt surrounding the deaths of Kathy's two daughters, Sarah and Laura, and the fact that they both had a cardiac genetic mutation which was likely pathogenic, and the judge who was in charge of this inquiry, Justice Reginald Blanche, decided that but essentially that
evidence didn't hold. He preferred the evidence of other medical witnesses who were saying, you know, we're not sure that in a clinical environment that would you know, that would happen, that it would actually be dangerous, And he actually came back with a judgment that said that the evidence he had heard reinforced Kathy's guilt. This was in twenty nineteen, So I think this is a very long way of coming back to answer your question as to why criminal
justice folk around Australia haven't learned the lessons of Linda Chamberlain. Well, I think it's just I think it's just ingrained. I'm afraid in some parts of the judicial hierarchy that you know, you don't admit to your mistakes, you don't admit that you got it wrong, and I think that's certainly the case.
It sounds like you agree with Tracy, who is Kathleen's very good friend and advocate and who's essentially turned into a lawyer and scientist in the process of freeing her friend. But she did an interview where she said the criminal justice system in Australia is adversarial and it's more about who is right and who is wrong, and who wins and who loses, rather than finding the truth. Would you agree with that?
Well, I think certainly in Cathy's case it has been absolutely I think you know as I say. I think that in this first the first inquiry, her entire case and the evidence surrounding her case should have been inquired into, but instead of that, it was completely adversarial, and the judge in charge of the inquiry, Reginald Blanche, invited Kathy
to come in and give evidence about her diaries. Now, to any kind of reasonable objective person, I think you would assume that when she came in from prison to give evidence, that she would at least be treated, you know, politely, and she would be invited to explain what she meant by those diary entries, which appeared on the face of it to be quite contentious and some of them may
be even quite troubling. But instead of that. For two and a half days, she was brutally cross examined by two Senior council and one of the senior Council, Margaret Kneen, was there to represent the interests of her former husband,
Craig Folbig, but she went far beyond that. She didn't just ask questions that related to his reputation, cross examined her really, I think, quite brutally and disrespectfully, and you know, use sarcasm in some of her questions and some of her comments, and you know, multiple, multiple times Kathy was challenged by the Senior Council to admit that she had killed her children, and every single time, as she has throughout this entire saga, she professed her innocence. She said, no,
that's not right. You know this, this diary entry doesn't
mean that I killed Sarah. So, you know, I think there is a kind of I think the adversarial system, certainly in the first inquiry, was deeply unhelpful, and it was deeply unhelpful not just to Kathy, but it was also deeply unhelpful to those scientific experts who came on board voluntarily to give evidence and who were not treated respectfully at all either, you know, they were treated as if maybe they weren't really expert in in their field,
or they weren't expert in a clinical field for example, and that happened to you know, a scientist called Professor Corolla Vuisa, who in my eyes is really the kind of scientific hero in this story. She was treated most disrespectfully at the first inquiry, rather than simply being asked to explain what she had discovered in relation to the
genetic mutation and what its implications were. Because the discovery of the genetic mutation clearly raised doubt about how the two daughters died, and that on its own, quite frankly, in my opinion, should have been enough to refer the case to the Court of Criminal Appeal, but that didn't happen.
Can we go back a little because in two thousand and three was that when Kathleen was sentenced. She's sent us to forty years behind bars, which is a very big sentence. But then, as you mentioned, she's going into prison as probably one of the most hate types of inmates. The inmates who killed children or who hurt children are considered the worst of the worst. So what is her
experience like in prison? Then from the beginning, which I know evolved and changed over time, but at the very beginning it must have been incredibly difficult for her.
Yes, I think it must have been unbearable. Quite frankly. I think it must have been unbearable. Quite frankly. I think, you know, she did have one person at her trial who stood by her the whole time, and that was his Salvation Army Major Joyce Harma, and you know, she kind of helped to shield her from the media at the trial when they were going to and from court
and so on. And then when Kathy was sentenced, as you say, to forty years, which was thank god, you know, reduced later at the first appeal to thirty years, but it was still a twenty five year non parole period. But Joyce would visit her in prison, and I think that was a great comfort to her. But essentially she was in isolation because the danger of you know, being bashed or literally being killed by other inmates, I think was very high, and of course it must have been
an incredibly isolating experience for her. I mean, here she was, you know, she was an innocent woman who had been convicted of the most heinous crimes. Possible and convicted as you say, and sentenced, as you say, to forty years in prison. And she was taken to this women's prison where she was just regarded as the lowest of the low. And I think she was afraid that she would be kind of poisoned, you know, her food would be poisoned.
She was afraid that she might be bashed, and she was bashed on occasion, at least a couple of times during her time in prison, she was bashed by other inmates. One has to say, in tribute to the prison staff, I think they try to ensure that from a medical point of view, she was kind of closely monitored and
so on. And it's interesting that by the time I produce an Australian story in twenty eighteen which questioned her guilt and actually pointed to real doubt over her convictions, we went to film outside a prison and I spoke to one of the prison staff who was escorting us around, and I said, what do you think and what do the staff here think? And he said, well, you know, we all believe she's innocent. So I think that's very interesting.
And I think eventually after the media started to change its tune and started to raise absolutely valid questions about her guilt. I think at that point finally the inmates in the various institutions where she was incarcerated began to
see a different side to her story. And I think by the time of there were two petitions on her behalf, and by the time of the second petition, which was an extraordinary petition signed by two Nobel laureates and ninety scientists and science advocates calling for her pardon and release, I think once that happened, she was kind of in the clear, if you like, inside the prison walls as far as the inmates were concerned, and probably as far
as the staff were concerned as well. So by that point it was I mean, she was still incarcerated, you know, but it was at least at that point it was very very clear, I think, to everyone that there were real questions surrounding her guilt and that something had to be done on her behalf.
After the break, what happened on the day that Kathleen was finally released from jail stay with us. I'd love to get your theory on why Kathleen Folbig was released so quickly, Like it was less than an hour. She got up that morning, not realizing today would be the day I'm out of jail. Her lawyer didn't know what was happening. Her friend Tracy, who's been by her side the whole time, I had no idea what was going to happen that day. She literally wakes up, goes about
her business. Someone comes in and says, pack you'r stuff, you're leaving, and then she's kind of shuffled out the door. And that whole process took less than an hour. What's your theory as to why that was done so quickly? Was it to keep her out of the spotlight? Was it a political thing? Like why did that happen so fast?
Well, can I take a step back if I may, and then I'll absolutely tell you what I think about that. So to take a step back, I think politics definitely came into the whole question of what was going to happen once medical experts, scientists and others had raised questions about her guilt. And I think it's very interesting that Mark Speakman, who was previously Attorney General of New South Wales, when he announced a second inquiry, he did so in
the knowledge. This must have been in the knowledge that if she was cleared by the inquiry, or if the inquiries proposed that her case go to the Court of Criminal Appeal, that that announcement and any announcement of her pardon and release would be made by the next state government's attorney general. And indeed that's what happened. So the next state government, he was a you know, coalition liberal
attorney General. Michael Day, who was the Labor Attorney General who came in after him, was the one who was tasked with actually saying, okay, I've ordered you know, or the governor, the Governor of New South Wales and my
recommendation has ordered that she'd be pardoned and released. And you know, there were several points in fact, during the first inquiry and the second inquiry where Senior Council were making it clear that any delays that occurred in those inquiries unfolding, that they could be to her disadvantage, to Kathy's disadvantage, because you know, if she was found at the end of all of it to be worthy of you release, then the longer it was delayed, the worse
it would be. So what happened in twenty twenty three was that right at the end of the hearings of the second inquiry, Tom Baffurst, who was the former Chief Judge who was in charge of the inquiry, he declared that in his view, there was enough evidence to suggest
reasonable doubt in her case. The problem then was that he had to write a report on the entire inquiry, giving his reasons and everything else, and that, as it turned out, and he knew this at the time, Everyone knew this at the time, was going to take months and months and months. So the question was, you know
what happens to Cathy. You know, is the Attorney General Michael Daily going to wait for Tom Bafferst to hand down his report, in which case he's going to be behind bars, probably for at least another six months, or
can he release her now? So what Tom Bathurst did, which I think was fantastic, was he wrote a memorandum summarizing his reasons why and his conclusions, saying, you know, the children died from natural causes and you know this is going to be my recommendation in my full report, sent that to Michael Daily, and Michael Daily then had no choice but to arrange for her to be released immediately. But what is also interesting is is that kind of leading up to this, Tracy Chapman and others had been
kind of lobbying furiously for her to be released. So I think there was an enormous pressure on Michael Daily, the Attorney General, to actually act quickly, and so so he obviously, you know, he did that, and as you say, she was released kind of within an hour, and without even knowing that was going to happen earlier that day.
I don't think there was any kind of sinister reason behind the speed, to be frank, I think at the end of the day, Michael Daily quite quite rightly decided that, you know, having received this recommendation from Tom Bathurst, and having made the recommendation to the Governor of New South Wales, that she should indeed be pardoned and released, and given how long she'd been in prison, that that had to happen very speedily, and so that's what occurred.
John, I think is quite shocking when you aren't in your world, so you had spoken to Kathleen, you knew her, people like you were involved in her story by this stage. But when she was released, I think for many of us who hadn't seen her in a long time, we
were stunned. At how young she still is, and I think we forget that everything that happened to her, both the tragedy or all of the tragedy, from her mother's murder, through her losing her four children, through all these trials and prison life, all of this happened to a very very young woman.
Yes, that's absolutely right, And so following on from that, of course, the tragedy is that, you know, she lost the best, arguably the best years of her adult life behind bars, you know, after being incarcerated. But you're right, you know, she had this incredibly tragic, very early childhood, and then she had this very difficult, in my opinion,
very difficult upbringing in quite a dysfunctional family. She married, she fell in love and married very young, had the four children, each of whom died suddenly and unexpectedly and tragically, and then she went through this ordeal, you know, from nineteen ninety nine when Laura died, until two thousand and three, so four years where the police were kind of digging and digging and digging, you know, and the prosecution was deciding, yeah, well, I think, well, you know, we'll try and do it
this way. And it could all have been so different because there was another case in Victoria several years later of a woman called Carol Matthew who was charged with murdering four of her five children. And this case came to a preliminary hearing in Victoria and the judge at that hearing basically threw the case out. I mean, he ruled most of the prosecution's evidence as being inadmissible, and
the prosecution the end of that decided. And this was a case where the prosecution had asked most of several of the same medical experts who appeared at Cathy's trial to appear at Carol Mathey's trial if it was going to take place, so they were using the same experts, and this Victorian judge, to his credit, said no, you know, there's just not enough here. He ruled most of the
evidence in admissible and she was released. Now, if that judge had been the judge at Cathy's trial, maybe she wouldn't have lost the next twenty years of her life. Or if tragically her children had died in Victoria, maybe she wouldn't have lost the next twenty years of her life.
So I do think that that Kathy was uniquely unlucky in you know, the location of this investigation and prosecution, and also, maybe more more importantly in the fact that Sally Clark had already been acquitted and then in the first year following Kathy's convictions, there were at least three other women in the UK who had been convicted off the back of Meadows Law who were then acquitted on appeal.
What does Kathy's life look like now. I know that she's mentioned that she's copped a bit of flak for selling her story, which is really interesting because I was reading in your book how Michael Craig's brother had at one stage tried to cash in on this by opening up bids to the media to buy photos of the children during the trial, and then offering up Craig's story for a fee too. So it's interesting that this has now come back on Kathy and not Craig and Michael
at the time. But she is, you know, talking a lot about what happened to her and hoping that this doesn't happen to anyone else again. But I guess for her like this is the only way she can make money at this stage, she's fresh out of jail. Her basically, as you mentioned, entire adult life is behind bars.
I mean, I think it needs to be noted that at her trial, although Michael, as you say, appeared to be suggesting that the media should bid for these photos of the children, that was kind of withdrawn later on and the photos were kind of handed out. But the facts of the matter of these that when Kathy was convicted, she lost everything from a kind of financial point of view.
She lost her home, basically everything went to her then husband, Craig, And indeed Craig was awarded a kind of victim's payment or payments for the deaths of the children. He was judged to be the victim in all this, which is quite ironic in the light of what occurred after that, because clearly Kathy herself was the main the chief victim. So when she emerged from prison in June twenty twenty three, Kathy didn't have a single cent to her name. I mean,
she was completely kind of poverty stricken. So Tracy Chapman, who is a wonderful, wonderful person, incredibly generous, incredibly loyal, and you know who, like Kathy herself, has shown unending stubbornness and persistence.
This is someone she met in primary school, right, So that is a lifelong friendship.
That's right, it's a lifelong friendship. And there are other very close friends of hers at Megan for example, who she met in primary school as well. But the point here is that, well, actually there are two points. If she hadn't had these incredible friends around her, arguably she might not have survived her incarceration. But she did. And you know, Tracy Chapman would ring her every day, go and visit her, and so on and so forth. She
would ring Tracy. But when she emerged from prison in June twenty twenty three, she did so without assent to her name. So Tracy Chapman put her up at her farm for a while. And yes, you know she has an agent. Kathy has an agent who was acquired for her, not by herself, but by the team known as Team Folbeg, who were looking out for her and wanted to ensure that she would emerge from prison able to actually live a life and pay for all the necessities of life
that she would need. So yes, she was paid a sum of money for an exclusive interview that she gave to Channel seven. And I don't see how anyone can object to that. Quite frankly, the real disaster here, in my opinion, and this goes back to the way in which the criminal justice system in New South Wales has behaved.
The real disaster is that even after her convictions were quashed in December twenty twenty three and verdicts of acquittal were entered against all of the charges against her, no one in the criminal justice system, in the judicial hierarchy has offered an apology to her for what occurred. And even now, even now, more than what a like fifteen eighteen months later, she is still awaiting an offer of compensation from the State of New South Wales.
You might know better than those of us looking in on this from the outside, as a woman who has suffered unimaginably in her time, you know, from her childhood to losing four children, which you know could have been the end of anybody. That is in itself the most heartbreaking and terrible thing that any mother could face at
any stage of life. To then go through what she's gone through, she seems like a very pragmatic woman like she you know, in the face of adversity, she seems to pick herself up and just kind of march on forward. But I can't imagine that that doesn't leave you with you know, PTSD or some kind of mental health issue after all that she has faced, Like how is she coping out in the real world trying to put this behind her.
You raise a really really important point, and my answer to that would be this that I think it's clear that from her very earliest life she acquired the ability, if you like, to kind of keep her emotions wrapped up inside and to kind of move on and be pragmatic.
I mean, she had to deal, as I say, with you know, being being, if you like, abandoned in reality by her biological father and mother because her father had killed her mother, and then he was sent to prison, and then he was kind of deported overseas back to Wales where he came from, so she never saw him again, and then you know, living in children's homes and then in the foster family. So I think she acquired an
ability to kind of hold her emotions in. That's the first thing, but also to kind of I think it toughened her probably in terms of, you know, whenever something bad would happen, she acquired the ability to kind of deal with it and move on, and as you say, to become very pragmatic. But you are also right that, of course the deaths of her four children profoundly traumatized her,
as they would any mother. And indeed, in twenty nineteen, Michael Diamond, a psychiatrist who examined her, concluded that she was suffering from complex post traumatic stress disorder. This was in twenty nineteen, very recently. What you also have to take into account is that when she was behind bars, you know, it's not the ideal environment in which to deal with your grief over the loss of four children, and particularly if the environment is perceived as being antagonistic
towards you. And so I think, yes, you know, I can't imagine that she won't be processing her grief and her trauma for the rest of her life. But what she does have, which is amazing, is she has an incredibly close circle of friends who kind of surround her metaphorically, who are in touch with her, you know, every day.
And I think, you know, she's appeared at one or TiO to public events since her release, where she's been almost unbelievably I think, kind of Carmen cool, Carmen collected, and she's you know, extremely articulate when she talks about her story, and she's very much focused as well on, you know, the law and the justice system kind of setting things right for other women who might find themselves
in this position. And one of the key things that she and others, Tracy Chapman and others have kind of argued for is the introduction of an entirely independent, well resourced body such as they have in the UK, in New Zealand and elsewhere, known as a Criminal Cases Review Commission, because you know, in Sally Clark's case, for example, and in multiple other cases of these mothers who were wrongly convicted in the UK, their cases were some of their
cases were reviewed in the UK to a Criminal Cases Review Commission, which, being in highly independent of government, was able to come back and say, well, yes, potentially a terrible mischaracter justice has eventuated here, and then to refer
it to the courts of appeal in the UK. Now Here, in New South Wales, what has happened is that these petitions which were lodged on her behalf were only considered by the Attorneys General of New South Wales who are politically appointed, and so the problem there, in my opinion and in the opinion of others is that this is not a fair or just way to deal with cases of this kind where self evidently you know there are questions being raised about a person's guilt.
So Kathleen fhear a big story maybe not over just yet, there might be a little bit more still to come.
We think, we hope, well absolutely, I mean what I hope for for her, and obviously what everyone hopes for her, I think is for her to be awarded substantial compensation and equally importantly for her to be offered an absolutely heartfelt, sincere apology for what has turned out to be probably the greatest miscarriage of justice since Linda Chamberlain.
Craig Folbig sadly passed away after suffering a heart attack in March twenty twenty four. He died still believing his ex wife was responsible for the deaths of Caleb, Patrick, Sarah, and Laura. Despite the heartbreak, though, Kathleen says she doesn't regret having a single one of her children. She says if she'd known about her genetic condition, maybe she might
have rethought how she became pregnant. But back in the late eighties and nineties, this kind of testing wasn't as easily accessible as it is now, As many women who want to have children know too, Sometimes the pool to become a mother overrides all else and since but she's made it very very clear she will never write in a diary ever again. Thanks to Quentin for helping us tell this story. True Crime Conversations is a podcast hosted by me Claire Murphy. The producer is Charlie Blackman, with
audio designed by Jacob Brown. Thank you so much for listening. You'll be hearing from Jemma Bath next week with another True Crime Conversation