The strains on the Folbigg marriage must have been immense, and the police inquiry into the death of Laura cannot have helped. The policeman assigned to make inquiries into Laura Folbigg’s death, Detective Sergeant Bernard Ryan, once learning that three other children had died in a similar fashion, immediately began to suspect Kathleen of murder. He was a believer in Professor Roy Meadows and what was known as ‘Meadow’s Law’ that:
"One sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious, and three is murder until proved otherwise."
And as he began to investigate Kathleen’s background, he discovered the fact that Kathleen’s father, Thomas Britton, was a murderer. For Detective Ryan, that was another deciding factor in his pursuit of finding Kathleen guilty of the murder of her four children.
Kathleen left Craig shortly after Laura’s death. She left the marital home taking remarkably little with her. One can only presume that anything she took from the home would remind her too painfully of all that she had lost.
In a letter to her foster sister, Lea Bown, Kathleen wrote:
“Us as a married couple has run its course. There’s too much pressure, sadness, depression, etc, for a relationship to bear.”
A little while after leaving, Kathleen moved back with Craig for a short time before leaving him again for good and moving into a flat, still not taking all of her possessions with her. She found a job as a waitress and began to see another man named Tony Lambkin. Kathleen and Tony moved in together in October of 1999.
When Craig discovered that Kathleen was now living with another man, he was upset and angry. He began sorting out Kathleen’s possessions and came across her diaries that she kept in a bedside drawer, pages filled with Kathleen’s secret thoughts and insecurities. The contents of, he later told the court, made him want to vomit.
THE DIARIES
Craig took Kathleen’s diaries to the police and despite his earlier statements to the police about what a caring mother Kathleen was, he now told Detective Bernard Ryan that he’d had,
“The odd suspicion but after finding the diaries, his suspicions became horribly real.”
Craig made a new statement to the police and unlike his earlier statement, it was extremely detrimental to Kathleen.
The diaries were the crucial turning point for Detective Bernard Ryan and his partner Detective Sergeant Dave Frith. Armed with the pages and pages of Kathleen’s secret thoughts and insecurities in her own handwriting, they spent the next two years assembling a case against Kathleen. On April 19th, 2001, Kathleen Folbigg was arrested at her home and charged with murdering her four children.
Following Kathleen’s arrest, she was taken to a police station for questioning. The interview was video-taped and later used as evidence against her. Most of the questions hinged on notes she had written in her diaries.
At one point she had written:
“When I think I’m going to lose control like the last times, I’ll just hand the baby over to someone else.”
The detectives asked her what this entry meant. Kathleen replied,
“That on occasion she had felt frustrated but never in a way that was detrimental to the children.”
Speaking about the death of Sarah, her third child, Kathleen said that she had woken in the night and had gone to the bathroom first before checking in on Sarah and said that was,
"A day I'll probably recriminate for the rest of my life."
The detectives also questioned her about her style of grieving, and Craig’s claim that she appeared to recover from each infant’s death easier than he did. Kathleen replied:
"That's just the persona of me, I suppose. I tend to maybe not deal with it, but I tend to put it away or lock it somewhere and choose just to move on and try to go forward..."
THE TRIAL
Kathleen Folbiggs’ trial had tones of Lindy Chamberlain’s Dingo case. Like Lindy Chamberlain, Kathleen was accused of lacking emotion and being cold and not showing enough emotion. It was a trial by media. As in Lindy Chamberlain’s case, the public had decided Kathleen was guilty even before the trial had begun. But unlike the Lindy Chamberlain case, the majority of the public still maintain that opinion.
It would seem from looking at various cases such as Lindy Chamberlain’s and Madeline McCann’s, that if the police and media cannot find an easy explanation for a child’s death it is simpler to blame the mother, and newspaper sales soar. The Tabloid newspapers have a tendency to rely on the fact that their readers always want someone to pay, and this is particularly true when it’s seen as a moral betrayal of human nature.
Kathleen’s trial took place in Sydney at the Darlinghurst Supreme court. The prosecutor, Mark Tedeschi, Q.C., in his opening statement said that although the prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial as no one had actually seen Kathleen kill her children, they would submit evidence from world experts, testimony from Craig, her estranged husband, and evidence from Kathleen’s own handwritten diaries to prove that Kathleen had murdered her four children. Mark Tedeschi said that while each of her children’s individual deaths had not produced alarm, their deaths, as a collective, could only be due to being suffocated. He paraded and quoted in front of the jury a group of international experts who unanimously testified that they had never heard of four children within the same family dying of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. They claimed that the odds of SIDS occurring in the same family were an astounding one in one trillion. (Both of these claims have since been disproven.) He also claimed that Kathleen had avoided investigation because none of the infants had displayed any signs of abuse and because of this fact the cases were never reported to Child Protective Services for examination.
During the seven week trial, the prosecution also alleged that Kathleen did not give the appearance of grieving her children’s death. Her estranged husband Craig testified that following the deaths of Caleb, Patrick, and Sarah Kathleen up boxed all of their belongings, including photos from their frames, and that Kathleen would never mention their names again. A nurse from a hospital reported that she was detached, and a neighbor described her as being straight-faced following Laura's death, with no trace of tears in her eyes. Kathleen’s foster sister Lea testified that Kathleen’s behavior changed all of a sudden at Laura's funeral. One minute she was crying and then she became a happy, laughing person enjoying the party.
As the prosecution delivered their evidence against, Kathleen who was sitting in the court room was calm, almost aloof. In the trial’s fourth week, as the prosecution showed a video police recording of her interview in 1999, Kathleen broke down uncontrollably and attempted to flee the court room. She was forcibly restrained and removed to a hospital for sedation. The hearing was delayed for a few days while Kathleen recovered.
Once court resumed, the prosecution continued with their case using Kathleen’s diaries as evidence. The prosecution tried to introduce Kathleen’s tragic family history as proof that she was capable of willfully murdering her four children as her father had murdered her mother.
Her diary entry:
“Would like all my mistakes and terrible thinking be corrected and mean something, though. Obviously, I'm my father's daughter.”
This entry, written after three of her children were already dead, was seized by the prosecution as an important link to her guilt. The prosecutor claimed the entry indicated Kathleen was a violent murderous woman just like her father and suffered from an attachment disorder that prevented her from bonding with her four children. The judge ruled that this diary entry was prejudicial and was not disclosed to the jury.
However, other parts of the diary were used by the prosecution to demonstrate that she was a woman totally engrossed with herself and looks and more concerned with going to nightclubs and the gym rather than caring for her own children. Mark Tedeschi told the court that Kathleen was continuously preoccupied with her weight gain and resented the fact that she couldn’t get to the gym because of her children.
The prosecution wound
up their case by admitting that, although the diary entries were circumstantial, they contributed to her partial admission of guilt. Mark Tedeschi stated that Kathleen smothered her four infants because she had a sparse tolerance for stress and had begrudged her children’s encroachment into her life and despite any factual evidence supporting the theory, he told the jury that Kathleen suffocated her children,
"In a flash of anger, hatred, and resentment."
Peter Zahra, the head of Kathleen’s defense team, told the court the children’s deaths were a coincidence. He said that all the children were, in fact, ill at the time before their deaths as had been diagnosed by hospital staff. He argued that Caleb, Patrick, Sarah, and Laura all died from SIDS. They said Caleb’s death was caused by a floppy larynx, Patrick’s death was caused by an epileptic fit, Sarah’s death was caused by an inflamed uvula, and Laura’s death was caused by myocarditis, a heart disease. They also brought up the fact that the children’s father Craig suffered from sleep apnea, a possible genetic fault that could be linked to SIDS.
He told the court that the medical experts the prosecution had called as expert witnesses had reached their conclusions after being shown Kathleen’s Folbigg's diaries and other statements.
He emphasized the fact that Kathleen was a caring mother and that at no time was she suspected of ill treatment of her children who were always well-nourished, clean, and tidy and was always attentive to their doctor’s appointments and that at no time did anyone think it was necessary for Child Protective Services to be called in. Peter Zahra read out loud some of the diary extracts to demonstrate Kathleen’s care and concerns as a mother and that Kathleen had appeared genuinely distraught to ambulance and police crews who had come into contact with her.
The defense portrayed Craig Folbigg as a dubious character, who had lied to the police, a car salesman who had used his children's deaths to sell cars, and who intended to hire Harry M. Miller, one of Australia's best known public relations consultants, promoter s, and media managers to handle the media for him. They claimed that his testimony was colored to make the domestic and mundane look sinister.
As to Kathleen’s preoccupation with weight, they demonstrated from her diaries that it was Craig’s preoccupation rather than hers. They showed that her diaries reflected that Kathleen worried that her husband would leave her as she felt intimidated when he joked about her weight, and she wrote about how this made her feel and how she felt threatened by his continuous flirtations.
Extracts from the diary about weight and insecurity:
“Craig's roving eye will always be of concern to me.”
“Must lose extra weight, or he will be even less in love with me than he is now. I know that physical appearance means everything to him.”
“On a good note, Craig said last night he accepts that I'm not going to be skinny again. That's wonderful, but I know deep in my heart he wants his skinny wife back.”
“Got to start changing my life and becoming a hot-looking energetic mother for my daughter and a sexy wife for my husband.”
“I actually relish in the fact he has a weight problem now. All the years of him tormenting me have come back to get him.
The defense denied that the contents of Kathleen’s diary related to the killing of her children and that any entries indirectly giving the impression of her responsibility could be put down to a normal grief stricken mother.
The defense pointed out that there was no physical evidence that could link Kathleen to the murders that the entire prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial, and that none of the doctors had come to a consensus on the cause of death for any of the children.
On the 21st of May in 2003, seven weeks after the trial began, the judge, after giving guidelines to the jury, directed them to retire to the jury room to consider their verdict. In slightly less than eight hours, the jury returned and announced they had reached their verdict. The jury found Kathleen Megan Folbigg guilty of one count of manslaughter, three counts of murder, and one count of grievous bodily harm. As the verdicts in the hushed court room were read out, Kathleen broke down and cried, crashing forward with her hands clutching her head.
CONVICTED
Kathleen was handcuffed and removed from the court to the Mulawa Women’s Detention center in Silverwater, Sydney. Here, for her own security, she was confined in isolation for fear that the other prisoners would critically injure her or kill her. “Rock spiders” (Australian prison slang for child molesters and child killers) in prison are intensely disliked and live a tenuous life within the prison walls.
On the 24th of October in 2003 Kathleen was returned to court, and Justice Graham Barr sentenced her to forty years in prison with a non-parole time of thirty years.
Outside of the court after the sentencing, Craig Folbigg was interviewed by journalists; he broke down in tears saying:
“My humble thanks go to 12 people whom I have never formally met, who today share the honor of having helped set four beautiful souls free. Free to rest in peace finally.”
Mrs. Deirdre Marlborough, her adoptive mother, sent Kathleen all her childhood photographs including a scathing letter containing the line:
"Kathleen Megan, I WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU."
Kathleen’s lawyers also made a brief statement saying they would begin work on Kathleen’s appeal at the earliest possible opportunity.
The Media went to town. Kathleen Folbigg became the media icon of monstrous motherhood.
''Incapable of love, compelled to kill: the diaries of a tortured mother.''
“Sometimes crib death runs in families. With Kathleen Folbigg, so does murder. Her father, hoist driver Thomas John Britton, stabbed her mother, Kathleen Mary Donavan.”
FIRST APPEAL
On Friday November 26th, 2004 David Jackson QC, Kathleen’s lawyer, argued against her conviction stating that the four cases of the children’s deaths should not have been heard collectively, that the jury verdicts had not been supported by the evidence, that medical experts should not have told the jury they were unaware of any previous cases of three or more infants dying of SIDS in one family, and that the judge had given incorrect instructions to the jury. He also brought up Craig’s Folbigg’s hereditary Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) which is caused by the soft palette or tongue obstructing air passage ways during sleep. Having a relative with OSA increases the odds that another family member may also have OSA. Obstructive sleep apnea has been linked with some instances of SIDS. This was glossed over in the appeal as if irrelevant.
David Jackson also brought up the British case of Angela Cannings. Angela Cannings was given life imprisonment on April 16th, 2002 for the murder of seven-week-old Jason Canning in 1991 and eighteen-week-old Matthew Canning in 1999. As Kathleen had, Angela Canning’s, claimed her sons died from SIDS. The British Court of Criminal Appeal overturned her conviction on December 10th, 2003, and she was free to return home. Angela Cannings' appeal was based on a number of factors but mainly that the statistical evidence and expert medical testimony of Professor Sir Roy Meadow was deceptive and misleading. In Angela Cannings’ trial, the same statistical evidence as was used in Kathleen’s trial was used (i.e. that the odds of SIDS occurring in the same family was an astounding one in one trillion.) Following the squashing of Angela Cannings’ convictions, Roy Meadow’s was found guilty of "serious professional misconduct" by the British General Medical Council for his misleading “expert witness” statistics.
Similar convictions in the British courts that had relied on ‘Meadow’s Law,’ in particular Sally Clark’s and Trupti Patel’s convictions, both who were mothers accused by the prosecution of suffocating their babies, were overturned on appeal.
Sally Clark, like Kathleen, was portrayed as a coldhearted and selfish woman, unequipped to handle the demands of motherhood. The prosecution said Sally Clark was an alcoholic, selfish, career-obsessed, depressive, grasping woman who liked pretty clothes and who first abused and then murdered her children because th
ey ruined her figure and stood in the way of her lucrative future.
A further 258 similar cases in Britain were urgently ordered to be re-examined.
The three judges of the New South Wales Supreme Court of appeal: Justices Brian Sully, Peter Hidden, and John Dunford rejected all the defense arguments. Justice Brian Sully held that Kathleen’s infants dying of natural causes were a “debate point” and not a reasonable basis for doubt. The court reduced Kathleen’s sentence to thirty years' imprisonment with a non-parole period of twenty-five years.
SECOND APPEAL
On December 21, 2007 Kathleen’s lawyers, headed by Bret Walker SC, sought for her conviction to be squashed citing irregular conduct by jury members during her 2003 trial. The information regarding the jury’s conduct was contained in a report by sheriff officers.
One juror, despite the judge’s instructions not to do so, had researched Kathleen’s background on the internet and found out that her father had murdered her mother when Kathleen was a small child. The juror then passed on the information to the other jurors during the course of the trial.
In the original trial, this information was not disclosed to the jury as it was deemed prejudicial by the judge.
Mr. Walker said that the conduct by the juror had been entirely inappropriate and could have led the jury to conclude "her father is a murderer; therefore, she is a murderer." Mr. Walker claimed the information was "very prejudicial" and was likely to have resulted in a miscarriage of justice.
She Devils Around the World Page 3