Speaker 1: True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
Speaker 1: waters that this podcast was recorded on fifty six minutes.
Speaker 1: That's how long it took for a woman who was
Speaker 1: once known as Australia's worst female serial killer to be
Speaker 1: released from prison after twenty years. Kathleen Felby went from
Speaker 1: one of the worst types of criminals, one even fellow
Speaker 1: inmates can't stand, one who would take the life of
Speaker 1: a child, to fifty six minutes later being a free
Speaker 1: woman cleared of the deaths of her four babies Caleb, Patrick,
Speaker 1: Sarah and Laura between nineteen eighty nine and nineteen ninety three.
Speaker 2: I hope and pray that one day I would be
Speaker 2: able to stand here with my name cleared. For almost
Speaker 2: a quarter of a century, I faced disbeliefment, hostility, I
Speaker 2: suffered abuse in all what's formed. My children are here
Speaker 2: with me today and they will be close to my
Speaker 2: heart for the rest of my life. The system preferred
Speaker 2: to blame me rather than accept that sometimes children can
Speaker 2: and do die suddenly, unexpectedly, at heartbreakingly.
Speaker 1: Kathleen Folbig could actually be the focus of two completely
Speaker 1: separate episodes of True Crime Conversations. One would focus on
Speaker 1: her childhood, marred by the murder of her mother at
Speaker 1: the hands of her violent father, a man with known
Speaker 1: criminal ties who reportedly stood over her mother's body in
Speaker 1: the street and told the neighbor that he just had
Speaker 1: to do it after she'd left him with little Kathleen.
Speaker 1: Or maybe we'll look into the aunt and uncle who
Speaker 1: would take her in only to hand her over to
Speaker 1: the state, Or the foster family who eventually raised her,
Speaker 1: only for her foster mother to end up shunning her
Speaker 1: when her new grandson arrived in the world. Despite all
Speaker 1: that hardship, a young Kathleen still managed to make a
Speaker 1: life for herself. That resilient young woman made incredible friends,
Speaker 1: friends who had become invaluable to her in the fight
Speaker 1: that she would face later. She met and married her husband,
Speaker 1: Craig Folbig, got a job, and then started a family,
Speaker 1: a decision that would alter the course of her life
Speaker 1: once again and again lead her to tragedy, heartbreak, and
Speaker 1: a criminal conviction that should never have been. Little Caleb's
Speaker 1: death in nineteen eighty nine at aged just nineteen days
Speaker 1: was attributed to Syd's sudden infant death syndrome, as was
Speaker 1: his sister Sarah who died in nineteen ninety three, aged
Speaker 1: ten months. Both children had issues with their respiratory systems,
Speaker 1: conditions like sleep apnea. Patrick, who died in nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: aged eight months, suffered from seizures, which doctors say contributed
Speaker 1: to his death in nineteen ninety but by the time
Speaker 1: Little Laura, who lived longer than any of the Folby children,
Speaker 1: making it to eighteen months and twenty two days, was
Speaker 1: pronounced dead. Police were starting to get suspicious when a
Speaker 1: call came in from detectives in the New South Wales
Speaker 1: regional town of Singleton, where Kathleen and her husband then lived.
Speaker 1: Professor John Hilton, the pathologist who'd performed the autopsy on
Speaker 1: little Sarah a few years before, was told just the
Speaker 1: name Phoebic and the number four. He responded with, one
Speaker 1: is tragic, two is unusual, three is suspicious, or he said,
Speaker 1: is fucking murder. Now those words weren't completely Hilton's alone.
Speaker 1: The saying had actually come from another academic, one whose
Speaker 1: theory had condemned many more women than just Kathleen Folbig.
Speaker 1: I'm Claire Murphy and this is True Crime Conversations, a
Speaker 1: podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to
Speaker 1: the people who know the most about them. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, Australian parents were being educated on something that
Speaker 1: had been classified in the late seventies but that many
Speaker 1: were not really aware of.
Speaker 3: There are three simple ways you can help produce the
Speaker 3: risk of sudden infant death syndrome. One, put your baby
Speaker 3: on the back to sleep. Two make sure your baby's
Speaker 3: head remains uncovered during sleep, and three always keep your
Speaker 3: baby in a smoke free environment.
Speaker 1: Sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, as it's known, was
Speaker 1: a terrifying condition that it impacted parents around the world.
Speaker 1: One day, your baby is alive and happy, and then
Speaker 1: you wake the next to find their lifeless body in
Speaker 1: their cot where you'd lovingly place them to sleep the
Speaker 1: night before. Their short lives snuffed out they simply stop breathing.
Speaker 1: In the United States, SIDS is the leading cause of
Speaker 1: death for infants age between one month and one year,
Speaker 1: and in fact, it takes the lives of around three
Speaker 1: hundred babies a year in the UK and one hundred
Speaker 1: babies a year here in Australia. While this sounds like
Speaker 1: a terrible amount of little lives, lost before the education
Speaker 1: programs used to be so much worse. It was in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties that Roy Meadow stepped into this tragic conversation.
Speaker 1: He in nineteen eighty nine wrote a formula in his
Speaker 1: book The ABC of Child Abuse. That formula would see
Speaker 1: women like Kathleen Folbig treated as criminals rather than victims.
Speaker 1: It stated that one sudden infant death is a tragedy,
Speaker 1: two is suspicious, and three, according to his formula, is
Speaker 1: murder until proved otherwise. Quentin McDermott is an award winning
Speaker 1: investigative journalist and the author of Meadow's Law, The True
Speaker 1: Story of Kathleen Folbig and the Science that set Her Free.
Speaker 1: He has spent years investigating Kathleen Folbig's case, spending time
Speaker 1: with her and her crew of supporters who have worked
Speaker 1: tirelessly for her freedom. He sat down with us to
Speaker 1: explain just how Meadow's Law put women like Kathleen in
Speaker 1: a place where they could not possibly defend themselves, forcing them,
Speaker 1: while suffering through the worst thing that could ever happen
Speaker 1: to a mother, to fight for their lives. I'd like
Speaker 1: to kick it off with you, maybe gives an understanding
Speaker 1: of how Meadow came to his law and what dares
Speaker 1: he was basing his law off of, and how that
Speaker 1: was received by the sort of wider medical and legal
Speaker 1: communities when it started to infiltrate into those spaces.
Speaker 4: Roy Meadow came up with his theory, which, as you say,
Speaker 4: was you know, one death is a tragedy, two is suspicious,
Speaker 4: and three is homicide. Unlet's proven otherwise, following his own
Speaker 4: experience as a British pediatrician. Now he wasn't the only
Speaker 4: person to come up with this theory. There were two
Speaker 4: medical examiners in the United States who at the same
Speaker 4: time came up with a very similar theory. And what
Speaker 4: stood out for me in looking at this but a
Speaker 4: couple of things. First of all, that this was based,
Speaker 4: I think, in Roy Meadow's cases, was based simply on
Speaker 4: his practical and clinical experience as a pediatrician, but not
Speaker 4: on any kind of justified statistical analysis of the cases
Speaker 4: of infants who died suddenly and unexpectedly in families. And
Speaker 4: the second thing that stood out for me was that
Speaker 4: in the case of the medical examiner in the United States,
Speaker 4: their inclination was to blame the mothers rather than the father's.
Speaker 4: So one of these medical examiners wrote to a pediatric
Speaker 4: learned publication saying exactly that that in almost all of
Speaker 4: the cases where there'd been sudden unexpected deaths which were homicides,
Speaker 4: it was the mother who had carried out the killing.
Speaker 4: And so that of itself kind of set a framework,
Speaker 4: if you like, which suggested that in any case where
Speaker 4: there had been three or more sudden unexpected deaths of
Speaker 4: infants in a family, not only was that homicide, but
Speaker 4: almost certainly it was the mother who had carried out
Speaker 4: the homicide.
Speaker 1: When you consider Kathleen Folbig's case, why do you think
Speaker 1: suspicion then only fell on them after the death of
Speaker 1: their fourth child? Because if we look at Meadow's law,
Speaker 1: as you've suggested, they should, after the third death be
Speaker 1: really considered a homicide case. So why did it have
Speaker 1: to be four children's deaths before they looked at the
Speaker 1: phobies in that light rather than just as them suffering
Speaker 1: just immeasurable tragedy.
Speaker 4: Look, I think that's a fantastic question as well, and
Speaker 4: in fact, no one else has ever asked me that.
Speaker 4: But I'll tell you what happened in her case was
Speaker 4: that in each of the first three cases where the
Speaker 4: children tragically died, there was no suspicion raised purely and simply,
Speaker 4: I think, because in terms of the circumstances surrounding each death,
Speaker 4: the doctors and the police found nothing that was suspicious. Now,
Speaker 4: following the death of her third child, Sarah, two things
Speaker 4: happened of note. First of all, as a kind of routine,
Speaker 4: if you like, the police came to their home on
Speaker 4: the night that Sarah died, and they carried out a
Speaker 4: pretty farer kind of look at their place, and you know,
Speaker 4: I think really just as a matter of kind of
Speaker 4: routine in order to just double check that there was
Speaker 4: kind of nothing suspicious, and they didn't believe that there
Speaker 4: was anything suspicious. This is the police. And the second
Speaker 4: thing that happened with Sarah's death is that her post mortem,
Speaker 4: her autopsy, was carried out by a very eminent forensic
Speaker 4: pathologist called John Hilton, and he examined the body, he
Speaker 4: carried out the autopsy, and he came to the conclusion
Speaker 4: that she had died from Sid's sudden infant death syndrome
Speaker 4: and he couldn't see anything suspicious in her death. And
Speaker 4: so at that point you know, the death was kind
Speaker 4: of squared away as being SIDS and Caleb had been ascribed.
Speaker 4: Caleb's death had been ascribed to SIDS. Caleb was their firstborn.
Speaker 4: And so the suspicion was raised in Laura's case mainly
Speaker 4: because a police officer came to John Hilton and said,
Speaker 4: this is the fourth death in the family. And I
Speaker 4: think that kind of tipped him over the edge if
Speaker 4: you like to exclaiming, well, I mean, he's Scottish, I
Speaker 4: can't do a Scottish accent, but he said, you know,
Speaker 4: for is fucking murder. And I think the problem then
Speaker 4: was that John Hilton, who was an extremely eminent forensic
Speaker 4: pathologist and who came to believe that she was innocent,
Speaker 4: by the way, but he was working in a context
Speaker 4: where Meadow's Law was kind of in the ascendant if
Speaker 4: you like. Meadow's Law was accepted I think among many,
Speaker 4: if not all, of the forensic pathologists working at that time,
Speaker 4: and so he believed it was murder. They had a
Speaker 4: meeting and essentially, you know, the alarm was raised because
Speaker 4: it seemed to be suspicious. Now, what then happened was
Speaker 4: that the autopsy on Laura was carried out by another
Speaker 4: forensic pathologist called doctor Alan Carla, who actually found an
Speaker 4: active potential reason for her death, which was a heart
Speaker 4: condition called myocarditis, But because the whole context was tainted
Speaker 4: by Meadow's law, and because they had been three other
Speaker 4: deaths in the family, doctor Carla declared that in his view,
Speaker 4: the cause of death was undetermined, and then the police
Speaker 4: kind of at that point set off on their investigation.
Speaker 1: Well, can we talk about that investigation, because in this
Speaker 1: case it does feel very extreme when you really look
Speaker 1: at how they conducted it. They tapped the Polvig's phone,
Speaker 1: they bugged their home, they questioned them, sometimes without lawyers,
Speaker 1: sometimes for eight hours at a time, Like it seemed
Speaker 1: like a very extreme investigation in this case. Would that
Speaker 1: have been unusual for a case like this or was
Speaker 1: that standard police procedure at the time.
Speaker 4: It's very interesting you say that, Claire. Can I just
Speaker 4: take a step back. In the United States, there had
Speaker 4: been the case of a woman called Wanitahyde whose children
Speaker 4: had died. Four of them had died apparently from natural causes,
Speaker 4: and then a medical examiner and the police decided that
Speaker 4: they thought it was suspicious and they brought her in
Speaker 4: we need to hide under the guise of you know,
Speaker 4: can you please help us just to explain, you know,
Speaker 4: the circumstances surrounding the deaths of your children. And it
Speaker 4: turned into an extremely aggressive interview, at the end of
Speaker 4: which she confessed to killing the children, but she later
Speaker 4: retracted her confession because it had been extracted from her
Speaker 4: frankly under duress. Now in Kathleen Folbek's case, something similar happened.
Speaker 4: So Bernie Ryan, the detective who was heading the investigation,
Speaker 4: invited Kathy to come in and be interviewed. And as
Speaker 4: you say, no lawyer was brought in to help represent her.
Speaker 4: She was on her own completely, Craig, her husband wasn't
Speaker 4: even in the room with her, and she was interrogated
Speaker 4: for you know, well, she spent the whole day basically
Speaker 4: being interrogated. So for kind of seven or eight hours
Speaker 4: she was interrogated. And it was interesting how the interview
Speaker 4: was carried out by Bernie Ryan, because he started off
Speaker 4: just you know, in a neutral way, asking her to
Speaker 4: tell her story and the story of her children, and
Speaker 4: it was only after about seven hours that he suddenly
Speaker 4: hit her with this kind of chilling series of questions,
Speaker 4: you know, did you kill Caleb, did you kill Patrick?
Speaker 4: Did you kill Sarah? Did you kill Lauren? And he
Speaker 4: repeated this. He asked her this twice, and of course
Speaker 4: at that point she realized that she was actually the
Speaker 4: kind of prime suspect in this investigation.
Speaker 1: Well, can you tell me about the conversation that police
Speaker 1: recorded between Craig and Kathy That would sound quite condemning
Speaker 1: at the time.
Speaker 4: The investigation was intensely intrusive on Kathleen and indeed on
Speaker 4: Craig her husband. As you say, they bugged their home.
Speaker 4: And what I find particularly interesting, and I revealed this
Speaker 4: in my book for the first time, is that the
Speaker 4: only time that either parent got even close to a
Speaker 4: confession of having harmed their children was when they secretly
Speaker 4: recorded conversation where Craig came down one morning and he
Speaker 4: said to Kathy, he said, all night I've been thinking
Speaker 4: maybe I killed the kids. Now you know that must
Speaker 4: have been an absolutely chilling moment, both for Kathy and
Speaker 4: indeed for the police who the detectives who were listening in.
Speaker 4: But what I think is very striking about this is
Speaker 4: that this secretly recorded conversation was one where not only
Speaker 4: did he say that I've been thinking maybe I killed
Speaker 4: the kids. He then went into a great detail about
Speaker 4: exactly how he could have killed them and what his
Speaker 4: motive would have been. But this entire conversation, almost all
Speaker 4: of it was suppressed at her trial, and then when eventually,
Speaker 4: years and years later, in twenty nineteen, there was a
Speaker 4: judicial inquiry into her case, it was completely suppressed at
Speaker 4: that inquiry, and it was only much later on at
Speaker 4: the second inquiry, just before she was finally pardoned and released,
Speaker 4: that it was actually put on the recorder and it
Speaker 4: was kind of allowed to be seen. And I think
Speaker 4: that's very striking, and I think it's an extraordinary example
Speaker 4: of the underlying misogyny, if you like, in the investigation
Speaker 4: and in the prosecution of Kathleen Folbeck.
Speaker 1: Well, you mentioned the detective who was leading this investigation.
Speaker 1: He would not consider Craig a suspect really at any stage,
Speaker 1: it seemed during this process, and in fact, he would
Speaker 1: go and meet with Craig, sometimes at his place of work,
Speaker 1: like out of the blue, to try and convince him
Speaker 1: that mothers do kill their children like that? Is that
Speaker 1: how investigations unfold. I mean, I'm not a police officer.
Speaker 1: I don't understand how these work, but that feels like
Speaker 1: the detective is trying to lead Craig towards a conclusion.
Speaker 4: I think you're absolutely right, Claire, and speaking personally, I
Speaker 4: think it's entirely improper for the lead detective in a
Speaker 4: homicide or potential homicide investigation to be, you know, which
Speaker 4: involves both parents, who obviously are both key witnesses, to
Speaker 4: go to one parent and start talking to them. And indeed,
Speaker 4: you know, Craig Folbig in the trial revealed that Bernie
Speaker 4: Ryan had come to him and said, you know, it's
Speaker 4: not just women in housing commissions, you know. In other words,
Speaker 4: he was suggesting, you know, kind of poverty stricken women
Speaker 4: on drugs or whatever who kill their children. It can
Speaker 4: be kind of middle class women as well. So Bernie
Speaker 4: Ryan had obviously been talking to him and kind of
Speaker 4: getting into his ear. And then the other highly significant
Speaker 4: thing is that in April two thousand and one, when
Speaker 4: the investigation was still ongoing, they actually arrested Craig Folbig
Speaker 4: under suspicion of impeding or obstructing the investigation. Now, the
Speaker 4: effect of that must have been, and indeed was to
Speaker 4: put pressure on Craig Folbig to essentially say what the
Speaker 4: police wanted him to say. And it's very interesting because
Speaker 4: in this interview that followed that they brought him in,
Speaker 4: they said, you know, were arresting you on suspicion of
Speaker 4: impeding the investigation. They then interviewed him. He did a
Speaker 4: long interview in which essentially he said all the things
Speaker 4: that the police wanted him to say, and he agreed
Speaker 4: to be a witness against Kathy at her trial. I
Speaker 4: think it's incontrovertible that pressure was put on Craig Folbig,
Speaker 4: Kathy's husband, to you know, to give evidence against her,
Speaker 4: and that indeed is exactly what happened at her trial.
Speaker 1: Well, part of that pressure that Craig felt did lead
Speaker 1: him to give police some evidence which would later prove
Speaker 1: to be incredibly damning for Kathleen at her trial, and
Speaker 1: that was her diaries. But can you explain to us
Speaker 1: how those diaries were interpreted during the initial trial, because
Speaker 1: they had like a lineup of experts to discuss, which
Speaker 1: was never really refuted by the defense with their own
Speaker 1: experts at the time. But how did they interpret Athleen's
Speaker 1: diary entries to prove to the jury that she had
Speaker 1: murdered her children.
Speaker 4: Okay, Well, you're getting into a really interesting area here, Claire,
Speaker 4: because what happened at her trial was that the diaries,
Speaker 4: there was something like forty different extracts from her diaries
Speaker 4: which were kind of read out in open court to
Speaker 4: the jury, okay, And what happened was that the senior
Speaker 4: Crown prosecutor, Mark Tadeski interpreted these entries in her diaries
Speaker 4: as being virtual admissions to having killed her children. And indeed,
Speaker 4: with one or two of these entries, he actually kind
Speaker 4: of put words into her mouth. He said, you know
Speaker 4: about one entry, what could this possibly mean other than
Speaker 4: you know, I killed the children or I killed this child.
Speaker 4: So that is what he did. However, the main experts
Speaker 4: who appeared at the trial were the medical experts, and
Speaker 4: what the medical experts were saying was that in their experience,
Speaker 4: they had never come across a family where three or
Speaker 4: more children had died from natural causes. So they were
Speaker 4: essentially parroting Meadows law. Okay in terms of their own experience.
Speaker 1: Was that true? Because you've already mentioned there was another
Speaker 1: case where four children had died, So they are testifying
Speaker 1: that there's just been no other case of this happening
Speaker 1: that then is not true.
Speaker 4: Well, in fairness to the medical experts, I think what
Speaker 4: they were doing was they were saying, you know, in
Speaker 4: our experience, in my experience, I've never come across a
Speaker 4: case like that. But in fact, you're absolutely right. And
Speaker 4: this was one of the main reasons that the first
Speaker 4: judicial inquiry was called was because it was later shown
Speaker 4: to be the case that yes, indeed, of course there
Speaker 4: had been other families where multiple children had died from
Speaker 4: natural causes, so the jury was completely misled on that point.
Speaker 4: But the point I want to make about the diaries
Speaker 4: is this that although there were multiple medical experts appearing
Speaker 4: at the trial, there were no psychological or psychiatric experts
Speaker 4: who appeared at the trial to interpret the diaries. It
Speaker 4: was only after she had been convicted that psychiatrists submitted
Speaker 4: reports about her mental state and whether or not she
Speaker 4: was psychotic. And incidentally, none of the psychiatrists suggested that
Speaker 4: she had a psychosis which would have impelled her to
Speaker 4: kill any of her children. So the problem for Kathe
Speaker 4: and her defense was that there was no one standing
Speaker 4: up at her trial to say, well, hang on, you know,
Speaker 4: the senior Crown prosecutor is saying that these diary entries
Speaker 4: are virtual admissions of guilt. Well, actually there's an alternative explanation,
Speaker 4: and here it is really they were reliant on the
Speaker 4: defense and Peter Tzara, the senior public defender who appeared
Speaker 4: on her behalf, giving an alternative explanation, but without the
Speaker 4: benefit of being able to cross examine experts who might
Speaker 4: have backed that up.
Speaker 1: For people who weren't aware of Kathleen Folbigg's trial when
Speaker 1: at first done FA in the early two thousands, what
Speaker 1: was the media coverage like then, because we know that
Speaker 1: they have the ability to swagh public opinion. What picture
Speaker 1: were they painting of Kathleen Folbig.
Speaker 4: Well, it was a brutal picture essentially. Now, I think
Speaker 4: it's fair to say that as the trial went on,
Speaker 4: of course, court reporters were doing what court reporters always
Speaker 4: do and do professionally, which is to report the proceedings
Speaker 4: in court. But as the trial progressed, it was becoming
Speaker 4: clearer and clearer that the prosecution was presenting evidence which
Speaker 4: on the face of it looked very damning, particularly in
Speaker 4: relation to the diaries and the medical experts, and also
Speaker 4: in relation to the evidence that was given by Craig Folbeg,
Speaker 4: who got up in the witness box and exaggerated frankly
Speaker 4: various insignificant incidents which had happened at home, as if
Speaker 4: to suggest that his wife was actually a murderous Okay, now,
Speaker 4: it's very interesting. Cathy herself was acutely aware of how
Speaker 4: all of this might appear in the media and might
Speaker 4: appear to the public. And I include in the book
Speaker 4: this really revealing story. I think of how one day
Speaker 4: she came out of court, she was walking along the road.
Speaker 4: She spoke on the phone to one of her very
Speaker 4: best friends, Megan, and she said to Megan, I'm trying
Speaker 4: not to laugh. And Meghan said, well, why is that.
Speaker 4: You know, why what's happened? And she said, well, there's
Speaker 4: a cameraman in front of me who's kind of filming
Speaker 4: me and backing away, and he's just backed into a
Speaker 4: garbage bin. And she said, but I can't laugh because
Speaker 4: of how it'll be portrayed. And I think that is
Speaker 4: both poignant and extremely revealing. What it showed was that
Speaker 4: she was acutely aware that if she was photographed laughing
Speaker 4: outside court, that would be interpreted by the media as
Speaker 4: her being a callous bitch and a murderers. But of course,
Speaker 4: in the event what happened, it was a catch twenty
Speaker 4: two because by holding her emotions in and by not
Speaker 4: showing her emotions in public, you know, she was portrayed
Speaker 4: as a kind of cold, unfeeling bitch, you know. And
Speaker 4: then after the trial, after she was convicted, I mean,
Speaker 4: the media just descended on her like a kind of
Speaker 4: torrent really, And there had been there was one diary
Speaker 4: entry which had been ruled inadmissible at her trial, but
Speaker 4: which the media was allowed to publish following her conviction,
Speaker 4: and that was the entry where she said, just a
Speaker 4: few words, obviously, I am my father's daughter. Now the
Speaker 4: media lect on this. It kind of permeated almost all
Speaker 4: of the coverage following her conviction because of course what
Speaker 4: she was doing there where she was referring to her father,
Speaker 4: her biological father, who had murdered her biological mother by
Speaker 4: stabbing her twenty four times in a street. Okay, Now,
Speaker 4: the media obviously interprets did this as her saying when
Speaker 4: she said, obviously I am my father's daughter. You know,
Speaker 4: I am a killer like him. But she has an
Speaker 4: entirely different explanation for why she wrote that, which is,
Speaker 4: you know, I was simply comparing myself to him and thinking,
Speaker 4: you know, I'm a loser. You know, my life is
Speaker 4: a mess. I'm a loser like he was. So the
Speaker 4: media was absolutely brutal, and of course they were publishing
Speaker 4: these articles right at the point where she was being
Speaker 4: kind of transported to prison where she faced terrible, terrible,
Speaker 4: you know, vilification from the other inmates. Because when you
Speaker 4: go to prison as a mother convicted of killing one
Speaker 4: or more of your children, you are absolutely the lowest
Speaker 4: of the lure. You're the scum of the earth. You're
Speaker 4: the you know, the rock spider and so on, and
Speaker 4: you know, if you're in a public part of prison,
Speaker 4: you're in real, potential, real danger.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about her prison experience in a minute,
Speaker 1: were going I backtracked just a little to talk about
Speaker 1: Kathleen's father and her upbringing, because it was a tragedy
Speaker 1: from the very beginning for her. It seems to have
Speaker 1: followed her for the majority of her life. But did
Speaker 1: that start to life impact how she was viewed within
Speaker 1: the trial itself, because you could view that in two ways.
Speaker 1: She seemed like a person who'd taken adversity in sort
Speaker 1: of made something of her life and had kind of
Speaker 1: gone above and beyond those terrible starts. But then other
Speaker 1: people might have viewed that as well. Obviously that trauma
Speaker 1: has manifested in a way where she too has felt
Speaker 1: the need to kill another human being. Did that shape
Speaker 1: the trial itself, that start to life for.
Speaker 4: Her, I wouldn't say it did shape the trial itself
Speaker 4: for a couple of reasons. First of all, she didn't
Speaker 4: herself give evidence, and so you know, there wasn't this
Speaker 4: kind of scenario in court where she would have been
Speaker 4: in the witness box and would have described her own
Speaker 4: early life. And then the other key point about her
Speaker 4: early life, which is as I say, is the fact
Speaker 4: that her biological father murdered her mother was ruled in
Speaker 4: admissible and so that wasn't brought up in court at all. Now,
Speaker 4: you're absolutely right. I mean, her very early life was
Speaker 4: just horrific and tragic, you know, because her father murdered
Speaker 4: her mother when she was approximately eighteen months old, and
Speaker 4: then she was farmed out to a relative's family who
Speaker 4: sometime later rejected her essentially, and she was put into
Speaker 4: care the care of the state. As a state ward,
Speaker 4: she was farmed out, first of all to two separate
Speaker 4: children's homes, which in those days would have been pretty grim.
Speaker 4: And then finally she was taken on board, if you like,
Speaker 4: by a foster family and transported up to Newcastle, to
Speaker 4: the suburb of Katara in Newcastle, where she lived with
Speaker 4: his foster family. But the problem there, I think was
Speaker 4: that it was a very dysfunctional family. The foster parents
Speaker 4: were much much older than parents of a tiny girl
Speaker 4: would normally be, and indeed her foster brother and foster
Speaker 4: sister were a lot older, and they were kind of
Speaker 4: leaving home essentially. And then on top of that, her
Speaker 4: foster mother was sometimes really quite unpleasant and even cruel
Speaker 4: to her, you know, made her do lots of chores.
Speaker 4: She was a bit like a kind of Cinderella figure,
Speaker 4: I think, and if she failed to do them, or
Speaker 4: if she was blamed for something, her foster mother would
Speaker 4: beat her physically in some respects extraordinarily unpleasant difficult upbringing
Speaker 4: for her, and so of course, as a teenager she
Speaker 4: kind of rebelled against all of that. And then finally,
Speaker 4: when she was eighteen years old, she met her future husband, Craig,
Speaker 4: and they kind of went from there. I don't think
Speaker 4: it's correct to say that her early life featured in
Speaker 4: any major way in the actual trial, although it did
Speaker 4: feature in the reports written by the psychiatrist following her conviction.
Speaker 1: Can I check in with meadows law and where we
Speaker 1: were at with that when this trial was happening, because
Speaker 1: I understand that it had been used in other trials
Speaker 1: previously which were then overturned, and that it was brought
Speaker 1: up in another and then kind of refuted. And can
Speaker 1: you explain to us where we're at with meadows law
Speaker 1: and the understanding of what that meant in situations like
Speaker 1: Kathleen Folbick had found herself in while this trial was
Speaker 1: happening in the early two thousands.
Speaker 4: Yes, absolutely so. Meadows law kind of originated from approximately
Speaker 4: kind of ten or fifteen years before her trial, okay,
Speaker 4: And through the nineteen nineties it was I think accepted
Speaker 4: probably by most forensic pathologists and probably and prosecutors and
Speaker 4: police as being a kind of a general rule that
Speaker 4: was valid to go by, if you like. And in
Speaker 4: the United Kingdom there was a group of women, all
Speaker 4: unconnected with each other, but a group of mothers who
Speaker 4: were charged with and convicted of killing their children. Probably
Speaker 4: the most famous case was the case of Sally Clark,
Speaker 4: a solicitor who was convicted of killing her two sons. Okay, now,
Speaker 4: by two thousand and three, which is when Cathie went
Speaker 4: on trial, Sally Clark had actually been acquitted. So Sally
Speaker 4: Clark had two appeals. The first appeal failed and then
Speaker 4: the second appeal, which was in very early two thousand
Speaker 4: and three, succeeded, and in the process the Meadows law theory,
Speaker 4: which in her case was that the chances of her
Speaker 4: two sons coming from a well off, reasonably wealthy family
Speaker 4: dying from natural causes. Roy Meadow said he gave evidence
Speaker 4: at her trial. He said, the chances of that happening, well,
Speaker 4: one in seventy three million.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is something that a lot of people who
Speaker 1: work with stats and data have had lots of issues
Speaker 1: with over the time. Is where these numbers all came from?
Speaker 4: Right? Absolutely? Yes, yes, So in his case, from memory,
Speaker 4: he said, you know, the chances of a single child
Speaker 4: dying from SIDS is you know, one in eighty five thousand,
Speaker 4: and he from that to say, therefore, the chances of
Speaker 4: two children from a wealthy family dying from SIDS is
Speaker 4: eighty five thousand times eighty five thousand, which is seventy
Speaker 4: three million. I think my mass is correct there, but
Speaker 4: the point is actually that the opposite is the case.
Speaker 4: Sadly and tragically, if a family has a death from SIDS,
Speaker 4: that actually increases the chances of a second death from SIDS. Okay,
Speaker 4: and his statistics were completely wrong. Now, the point here
Speaker 4: in Kathy's case is that Sally Clark was acquitted in
Speaker 4: early two thousand and three, and literally just a couple
Speaker 4: of months later, Kathy was put on trial charged with
Speaker 4: murdering all four of her children. So the prosecution and
Speaker 4: the defense knew about Sally Clark's case, and indeed, through
Speaker 4: the rest of two thousand and three, following Kathy's conviction,
Speaker 4: there were multiple other cases of women in the UK
Speaker 4: who had previously been convicted and one or two of
Speaker 4: them who were serving jail time who then won their
Speaker 4: appeals on the same basis of Meadow's law. Now you
Speaker 4: know what the prosecution did at Kathy's trial, quite cleverly,
Speaker 4: I think, was not to mention Meadow's law by name, Okay,
Speaker 4: but there was a kind of a get around for
Speaker 4: me you know, the most notorious kind of get around
Speaker 4: was that the senior Crome prosecutor Mark Tadeski, in his
Speaker 4: closing address to the jury, he said, I'm paraphrasing here,
Speaker 4: but essentially he said, is it possible that the four
Speaker 4: children died from natural causes? Yes, it is. But equally,
Speaker 4: he said, it's possible that farmer Joe would wake up
Speaker 4: one morning, look out of the window and see four
Speaker 4: piglets born to a sow who had sprouted wings and
Speaker 4: flown away. Okay. Now this was utterly and completely misleading.
Speaker 4: I mean, it was just crazy. Apart from the fact
Speaker 4: that he was seemed to be, you know, metaphorically equating
Speaker 4: Kathy and her children with a sou and her piglets,
Speaker 4: which is arguably pretty offensive. Apart from that, he was
Speaker 4: essentially he was saying, you know, they did all of
Speaker 4: them die from natural cause of well, pigs might have wings, Okay,
Speaker 4: And that just turned out to be utterly misleading and
Speaker 4: just wrong, because, as I say, there had been multiple
Speaker 4: other cases of families with several infants who had died
Speaker 4: suddenly and unexpectedly and from natural causes.
Speaker 1: You're listening to true crime conversations with me Claire Murphy,
Speaker 1: I'm speaking with Quentin McDermott, Award winning investigative journalist and
Speaker 1: author of the book Meadows Law. Next, we look at
Speaker 1: the similarities between Kathleen's story and Lindy Chamberlain's and how
Speaker 1: when a child dies, the justice system and media are
Speaker 1: often a little too quick to blame. Mum, I want
Speaker 1: to ask you a little bit about We kind of
Speaker 1: touched on this when we're talking about the media's impact
Speaker 1: on creating the character of Kathleen Folbig in the press.
Speaker 1: But you mentioned that she was quite aware of how
Speaker 1: she was being perceived and so she had to act
Speaker 1: in certain ways which would sometimes backfire on her. But
Speaker 1: this for Australians watching should have seemed very familiar because
Speaker 1: we'd seen all of this happen before with Lindy Chamberlain,
Speaker 1: whose daughter Azaria was taken by a dingo in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty at LaRue. Why does it seem like we didn't
Speaker 1: learn the lesson from Lindy Chamberlain when we then applied
Speaker 1: it to Kathleen Folbig.
Speaker 2: Ok.
Speaker 4: I think that's an incredibly good question as well, Claire.
Speaker 4: Of course, Lindy Chamberlain's trial took place in the Northern territory,
Speaker 4: and of course Kathleen Folbig's trial took place in New
Speaker 4: South Wales, so there were kind of different different jurisdictions
Speaker 4: if you like. But I think you're absolutely right what
Speaker 4: I think it shows. Actually it does, I think show
Speaker 4: a kind of inherent bias within the criminal justice system.
Speaker 4: You know. In Lindy Chambalin's case, You're absolutely right. You know,
Speaker 4: as it happens, the first coronial inquest in her case
Speaker 4: absolved her of any responsibility at all. I mean, everyone
Speaker 4: at the camp site when Azaria was taken by a
Speaker 4: dingo was saying Zaria was taken by a dingo. It
Speaker 4: was the police who then came back and sought other
Speaker 4: evidence and so on, and finally she was tried and
Speaker 4: convicted and sent to jail for the bat three and
Speaker 4: a half years. But you know why the criminal justice
Speaker 4: system didn't learn the lesson? Well, I'm going to say
Speaker 4: something that may be quite shocking. I don't believe the
Speaker 4: criminal justice system, certainly in New South Wales, has learned
Speaker 4: the lessons of this even now. My opinion is that
Speaker 4: in Kathleen Folbigg's case, the criminal justice system did everything
Speaker 4: in its power following her convictions to keep her in
Speaker 4: prison when there were multiple occasions that raised significant doubts
Speaker 4: about her convictions. So I'll just give you one example.
Speaker 4: She had two appeals following her trial, the second of
Speaker 4: which was in two thousand and seven, so she'd been
Speaker 4: in prison for approximately four years. The second appeal came
Speaker 4: up because during the trial, the line that she had
Speaker 4: written in her diaries obviously I am my father's daughter
Speaker 4: was ruled inadmissible, so that meant that it couldn't be
Speaker 4: raised at all or mentioned in the trial. But when
Speaker 4: Craig Folbig came to give evidence, he referred to this.
Speaker 4: He referred to having found the diary and in it
Speaker 4: was this entry referring to her father. Now, what then happened,
Speaker 4: without anyone at the trial knowing, was that a member
Speaker 4: of the jury went outside the court room and researched
Speaker 4: Kathleen Folbig's father and found out what Thomas Britten, her father,
Speaker 4: had done, and he took this knowledge back to the jury.
Speaker 4: Now that must have had an enormous effect on the jury. Now,
Speaker 4: in two thousand and seven, her legal team appealed against
Speaker 4: her conviction. They wanted a retrial, essentially on the basis
Speaker 4: that the trial was tainted by the jury's knowledge of
Speaker 4: this line in her diary. The Crown argued at her
Speaker 4: appeal that in fact, if he had taken this, which
Speaker 4: he did, if he, if this jury member had taken
Speaker 4: this back into the jury room, the jury would have
Speaker 4: felt some sympathy for her. Now, in my opinion, this
Speaker 4: was a crazy idea, because of course the opposite would
Speaker 4: have been the case. They would have thought, ah, you know,
Speaker 4: the reason she wrote that is because she killed the children.
Speaker 4: So that appeal failed, and I think, I think it's
Speaker 4: really interesting that the judges in that appeal turned it
Speaker 4: down because there have been other examples since then where
Speaker 4: jury members in other cases where jury members have gone
Speaker 4: outside the court have researched something to do with the
Speaker 4: case which they are not allowed to do, and come
Speaker 4: back into the into the courtroom, and then those trials
Speaker 4: have been you know, have been stopped. And there was
Speaker 4: a very famous case recently. So that's one example of it.
Speaker 4: But for me, the most striking example is actually the
Speaker 4: first in the first judicial inquiry into her case in
Speaker 4: twenty nineteen, when the inquiry was presented with clear, fresh
Speaker 4: genetic evidence that pointed to reasonable doubt surrounding the deaths
Speaker 4: of Kathy's two daughters, Sarah and Laura, and the fact
Speaker 4: that they both had a cardiac genetic mutation which was
Speaker 4: likely pathogenic, and the judge who was in charge of
Speaker 4: this inquiry, Justice Reginald Blanche, decided that but essentially that
Speaker 4: evidence didn't hold. He preferred the evidence of other medical
Speaker 4: witnesses who were saying, you know, we're not sure that
Speaker 4: in a clinical environment that would you know, that would happen,
Speaker 4: that it would actually be dangerous, And he actually came
Speaker 4: back with a judgment that said that the evidence he
Speaker 4: had heard reinforced Kathy's guilt. This was in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 4: So I think this is a very long way of
Speaker 4: coming back to answer your question as to why criminal
Speaker 4: justice folk around Australia haven't learned the lessons of Linda Chamberlain. Well,
Speaker 4: I think it's just I think it's just ingrained. I'm
Speaker 4: afraid in some parts of the judicial hierarchy that you know,
Speaker 4: you don't admit to your mistakes, you don't admit that
Speaker 4: you got it wrong, and I think that's certainly the case.
Speaker 1: It sounds like you agree with Tracy, who is Kathleen's
Speaker 1: very good friend and advocate and who's essentially turned into
Speaker 1: a lawyer and scientist in the process of freeing her friend.
Speaker 1: But she did an interview where she said the criminal
Speaker 1: justice system in Australia is adversarial and it's more about
Speaker 1: who is right and who is wrong, and who wins
Speaker 1: and who loses, rather than finding the truth. Would you
Speaker 1: agree with that?
Speaker 4: Well, I think certainly in Cathy's case it has been
Speaker 4: absolutely I think you know as I say. I think
Speaker 4: that in this first the first inquiry, her entire case
Speaker 4: and the evidence surrounding her case should have been inquired into,
Speaker 4: but instead of that, it was completely adversarial, and the
Speaker 4: judge in charge of the inquiry, Reginald Blanche, invited Kathy
Speaker 4: to come in and give evidence about her diaries. Now,
Speaker 4: to any kind of reasonable objective person, I think you
Speaker 4: would assume that when she came in from prison to
Speaker 4: give evidence, that she would at least be treated, you know, politely,
Speaker 4: and she would be invited to explain what she meant
Speaker 4: by those diary entries, which appeared on the face of
Speaker 4: it to be quite contentious and some of them may
Speaker 4: be even quite troubling. But instead of that. For two
Speaker 4: and a half days, she was brutally cross examined by
Speaker 4: two Senior council and one of the senior Council, Margaret Kneen,
Speaker 4: was there to represent the interests of her former husband,
Speaker 4: Craig Folbig, but she went far beyond that. She didn't
Speaker 4: just ask questions that related to his reputation, cross examined
Speaker 4: her really, I think, quite brutally and disrespectfully, and you know,
Speaker 4: use sarcasm in some of her questions and some of
Speaker 4: her comments, and you know, multiple, multiple times Kathy was
Speaker 4: challenged by the Senior Council to admit that she had
Speaker 4: killed her children, and every single time, as she has
Speaker 4: throughout this entire saga, she professed her innocence. She said, no,
Speaker 4: that's not right. You know this, this diary entry doesn't
Speaker 4: mean that I killed Sarah. So, you know, I think
Speaker 4: there is a kind of I think the adversarial system,
Speaker 4: certainly in the first inquiry, was deeply unhelpful, and it
Speaker 4: was deeply unhelpful not just to Kathy, but it was
Speaker 4: also deeply unhelpful to those scientific experts who came on
Speaker 4: board voluntarily to give evidence and who were not treated
Speaker 4: respectfully at all either, you know, they were treated as
Speaker 4: if maybe they weren't really expert in in their field,
Speaker 4: or they weren't expert in a clinical field for example,
Speaker 4: and that happened to you know, a scientist called Professor
Speaker 4: Corolla Vuisa, who in my eyes is really the kind
Speaker 4: of scientific hero in this story. She was treated most
Speaker 4: disrespectfully at the first inquiry, rather than simply being asked
Speaker 4: to explain what she had discovered in relation to the
Speaker 4: genetic mutation and what its implications were. Because the discovery
Speaker 4: of the genetic mutation clearly raised doubt about how the
Speaker 4: two daughters died, and that on its own, quite frankly,
Speaker 4: in my opinion, should have been enough to refer the
Speaker 4: case to the Court of Criminal Appeal, but that didn't happen.
Speaker 1: Can we go back a little because in two thousand
Speaker 1: and three was that when Kathleen was sentenced. She's sent
Speaker 1: us to forty years behind bars, which is a very
Speaker 1: big sentence. But then, as you mentioned, she's going into
Speaker 1: prison as probably one of the most hate types of inmates.
Speaker 1: The inmates who killed children or who hurt children are
Speaker 1: considered the worst of the worst. So what is her
Speaker 1: experience like in prison? Then from the beginning, which I
Speaker 1: know evolved and changed over time, but at the very
Speaker 1: beginning it must have been incredibly difficult for her.
Speaker 4: Yes, I think it must have been unbearable. Quite frankly.
Speaker 4: I think it must have been unbearable. Quite frankly. I think,
Speaker 4: you know, she did have one person at her trial
Speaker 4: who stood by her the whole time, and that was
Speaker 4: his Salvation Army Major Joyce Harma, and you know, she
Speaker 4: kind of helped to shield her from the media at
Speaker 4: the trial when they were going to and from court
Speaker 4: and so on. And then when Kathy was sentenced, as
Speaker 4: you say, to forty years, which was thank god, you know,
Speaker 4: reduced later at the first appeal to thirty years, but
Speaker 4: it was still a twenty five year non parole period.
Speaker 4: But Joyce would visit her in prison, and I think
Speaker 4: that was a great comfort to her. But essentially she
Speaker 4: was in isolation because the danger of you know, being
Speaker 4: bashed or literally being killed by other inmates, I think
Speaker 4: was very high, and of course it must have been
Speaker 4: an incredibly isolating experience for her. I mean, here she was,
Speaker 4: you know, she was an innocent woman who had been
Speaker 4: convicted of the most heinous crimes. Possible and convicted as
Speaker 4: you say, and sentenced, as you say, to forty years
Speaker 4: in prison. And she was taken to this women's prison
Speaker 4: where she was just regarded as the lowest of the low.
Speaker 4: And I think she was afraid that she would be
Speaker 4: kind of poisoned, you know, her food would be poisoned.
Speaker 4: She was afraid that she might be bashed, and she
Speaker 4: was bashed on occasion, at least a couple of times
Speaker 4: during her time in prison, she was bashed by other inmates.
Speaker 4: One has to say, in tribute to the prison staff,
Speaker 4: I think they try to ensure that from a medical
Speaker 4: point of view, she was kind of closely monitored and
Speaker 4: so on. And it's interesting that by the time I
Speaker 4: produce an Australian story in twenty eighteen which questioned her
Speaker 4: guilt and actually pointed to real doubt over her convictions,
Speaker 4: we went to film outside a prison and I spoke
Speaker 4: to one of the prison staff who was escorting us around,
Speaker 4: and I said, what do you think and what do
Speaker 4: the staff here think? And he said, well, you know,
Speaker 4: we all believe she's innocent. So I think that's very interesting.
Speaker 4: And I think eventually after the media started to change
Speaker 4: its tune and started to raise absolutely valid questions about
Speaker 4: her guilt. I think at that point finally the inmates
Speaker 4: in the various institutions where she was incarcerated began to
Speaker 4: see a different side to her story. And I think
Speaker 4: by the time of there were two petitions on her behalf,
Speaker 4: and by the time of the second petition, which was
Speaker 4: an extraordinary petition signed by two Nobel laureates and ninety
Speaker 4: scientists and science advocates calling for her pardon and release,
Speaker 4: I think once that happened, she was kind of in
Speaker 4: the clear, if you like, inside the prison walls as
Speaker 4: far as the inmates were concerned, and probably as far
Speaker 4: as the staff were concerned as well. So by that
Speaker 4: point it was I mean, she was still incarcerated, you know,
Speaker 4: but it was at least at that point it was
Speaker 4: very very clear, I think, to everyone that there were
Speaker 4: real questions surrounding her guilt and that something had to
Speaker 4: be done on her behalf.
Speaker 1: After the break, what happened on the day that Kathleen
Speaker 1: was finally released from jail stay with us. I'd love
Speaker 1: to get your theory on why Kathleen Folbig was released
Speaker 1: so quickly, Like it was less than an hour. She
Speaker 1: got up that morning, not realizing today would be the
Speaker 1: day I'm out of jail. Her lawyer didn't know what
Speaker 1: was happening. Her friend Tracy, who's been by her side
Speaker 1: the whole time, I had no idea what was going
Speaker 1: to happen that day. She literally wakes up, goes about
Speaker 1: her business. Someone comes in and says, pack you'r stuff,
Speaker 1: you're leaving, and then she's kind of shuffled out the door.
Speaker 1: And that whole process took less than an hour. What's
Speaker 1: your theory as to why that was done so quickly?
Speaker 1: Was it to keep her out of the spotlight? Was
Speaker 1: it a political thing? Like why did that happen so fast?
Speaker 4: Well, can I take a step back if I may,
Speaker 4: and then I'll absolutely tell you what I think about that.
Speaker 4: So to take a step back, I think politics definitely
Speaker 4: came into the whole question of what was going to
Speaker 4: happen once medical experts, scientists and others had raised questions
Speaker 4: about her guilt. And I think it's very interesting that
Speaker 4: Mark Speakman, who was previously Attorney General of New South Wales,
Speaker 4: when he announced a second inquiry, he did so in
Speaker 4: the knowledge. This must have been in the knowledge that
Speaker 4: if she was cleared by the inquiry, or if the
Speaker 4: inquiries proposed that her case go to the Court of
Speaker 4: Criminal Appeal, that that announcement and any announcement of her
Speaker 4: pardon and release would be made by the next state
Speaker 4: government's attorney general. And indeed that's what happened. So the
Speaker 4: next state government, he was a you know, coalition liberal
Speaker 4: attorney General. Michael Day, who was the Labor Attorney General
Speaker 4: who came in after him, was the one who was
Speaker 4: tasked with actually saying, okay, I've ordered you know, or
Speaker 4: the governor, the Governor of New South Wales and my
Speaker 4: recommendation has ordered that she'd be pardoned and released. And
Speaker 4: you know, there were several points in fact, during the
Speaker 4: first inquiry and the second inquiry where Senior Council were
Speaker 4: making it clear that any delays that occurred in those
Speaker 4: inquiries unfolding, that they could be to her disadvantage, to
Speaker 4: Kathy's disadvantage, because you know, if she was found at
Speaker 4: the end of all of it to be worthy of
Speaker 4: you release, then the longer it was delayed, the worse
Speaker 4: it would be. So what happened in twenty twenty three
Speaker 4: was that right at the end of the hearings of
Speaker 4: the second inquiry, Tom Baffurst, who was the former Chief
Speaker 4: Judge who was in charge of the inquiry, he declared
Speaker 4: that in his view, there was enough evidence to suggest
Speaker 4: reasonable doubt in her case. The problem then was that
Speaker 4: he had to write a report on the entire inquiry,
Speaker 4: giving his reasons and everything else, and that, as it
Speaker 4: turned out, and he knew this at the time, Everyone
Speaker 4: knew this at the time, was going to take months
Speaker 4: and months and months. So the question was, you know
Speaker 4: what happens to Cathy. You know, is the Attorney General
Speaker 4: Michael Daily going to wait for Tom Bafferst to hand
Speaker 4: down his report, in which case he's going to be
Speaker 4: behind bars, probably for at least another six months, or
Speaker 4: can he release her now? So what Tom Bathurst did,
Speaker 4: which I think was fantastic, was he wrote a memorandum
Speaker 4: summarizing his reasons why and his conclusions, saying, you know,
Speaker 4: the children died from natural causes and you know this
Speaker 4: is going to be my recommendation in my full report,
Speaker 4: sent that to Michael Daily, and Michael Daily then had
Speaker 4: no choice but to arrange for her to be released immediately.
Speaker 4: But what is also interesting is is that kind of
Speaker 4: leading up to this, Tracy Chapman and others had been
Speaker 4: kind of lobbying furiously for her to be released. So
Speaker 4: I think there was an enormous pressure on Michael Daily,
Speaker 4: the Attorney General, to actually act quickly, and so so
Speaker 4: he obviously, you know, he did that, and as you say,
Speaker 4: she was released kind of within an hour, and without
Speaker 4: even knowing that was going to happen earlier that day.
Speaker 4: I don't think there was any kind of sinister reason
Speaker 4: behind the speed, to be frank, I think at the
Speaker 4: end of the day, Michael Daily quite quite rightly decided that,
Speaker 4: you know, having received this recommendation from Tom Bathurst, and
Speaker 4: having made the recommendation to the Governor of New South Wales,
Speaker 4: that she should indeed be pardoned and released, and given
Speaker 4: how long she'd been in prison, that that had to
Speaker 4: happen very speedily, and so that's what occurred.
Speaker 1: John, I think is quite shocking when you aren't in
Speaker 1: your world, so you had spoken to Kathleen, you knew her,
Speaker 1: people like you were involved in her story by this stage.
Speaker 1: But when she was released, I think for many of
Speaker 1: us who hadn't seen her in a long time, we
Speaker 1: were stunned. At how young she still is, and I
Speaker 1: think we forget that everything that happened to her, both
Speaker 1: the tragedy or all of the tragedy, from her mother's murder,
Speaker 1: through her losing her four children, through all these trials
Speaker 1: and prison life, all of this happened to a very
Speaker 1: very young woman.
Speaker 4: Yes, that's absolutely right, And so following on from that,
Speaker 4: of course, the tragedy is that, you know, she lost
Speaker 4: the best, arguably the best years of her adult life
Speaker 4: behind bars, you know, after being incarcerated. But you're right,
Speaker 4: you know, she had this incredibly tragic, very early childhood,
Speaker 4: and then she had this very difficult, in my opinion,
Speaker 4: very difficult upbringing in quite a dysfunctional family. She married,
Speaker 4: she fell in love and married very young, had the
Speaker 4: four children, each of whom died suddenly and unexpectedly and tragically,
Speaker 4: and then she went through this ordeal, you know, from
Speaker 4: nineteen ninety nine when Laura died, until two thousand and three,
Speaker 4: so four years where the police were kind of digging
Speaker 4: and digging and digging, you know, and the prosecution was deciding, yeah, well,
Speaker 4: I think, well, you know, we'll try and do it
Speaker 4: this way. And it could all have been so different
Speaker 4: because there was another case in Victoria several years later
Speaker 4: of a woman called Carol Matthew who was charged with
Speaker 4: murdering four of her five children. And this case came
Speaker 4: to a preliminary hearing in Victoria and the judge at
Speaker 4: that hearing basically threw the case out. I mean, he
Speaker 4: ruled most of the prosecution's evidence as being inadmissible, and
Speaker 4: the prosecution the end of that decided. And this was
Speaker 4: a case where the prosecution had asked most of several
Speaker 4: of the same medical experts who appeared at Cathy's trial
Speaker 4: to appear at Carol Mathey's trial if it was going
Speaker 4: to take place, so they were using the same experts,
Speaker 4: and this Victorian judge, to his credit, said no, you know,
Speaker 4: there's just not enough here. He ruled most of the
Speaker 4: evidence in admissible and she was released. Now, if that
Speaker 4: judge had been the judge at Cathy's trial, maybe she
Speaker 4: wouldn't have lost the next twenty years of her life.
Speaker 4: Or if tragically her children had died in Victoria, maybe
Speaker 4: she wouldn't have lost the next twenty years of her life.
Speaker 4: So I do think that that Kathy was uniquely unlucky
Speaker 4: in you know, the location of this investigation and prosecution,
Speaker 4: and also, maybe more more importantly in the fact that
Speaker 4: Sally Clark had already been acquitted and then in the
Speaker 4: first year following Kathy's convictions, there were at least three
Speaker 4: other women in the UK who had been convicted off
Speaker 4: the back of Meadows Law who were then acquitted on appeal.
Speaker 1: What does Kathy's life look like now. I know that
Speaker 1: she's mentioned that she's copped a bit of flak for
Speaker 1: selling her story, which is really interesting because I was
Speaker 1: reading in your book how Michael Craig's brother had at
Speaker 1: one stage tried to cash in on this by opening
Speaker 1: up bids to the media to buy photos of the
Speaker 1: children during the trial, and then offering up Craig's story
Speaker 1: for a fee too. So it's interesting that this has
Speaker 1: now come back on Kathy and not Craig and Michael
Speaker 1: at the time. But she is, you know, talking a
Speaker 1: lot about what happened to her and hoping that this
Speaker 1: doesn't happen to anyone else again. But I guess for
Speaker 1: her like this is the only way she can make
Speaker 1: money at this stage, she's fresh out of jail. Her basically,
Speaker 1: as you mentioned, entire adult life is behind bars.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think it needs to be noted that
Speaker 4: at her trial, although Michael, as you say, appeared to
Speaker 4: be suggesting that the media should bid for these photos
Speaker 4: of the children, that was kind of withdrawn later on
Speaker 4: and the photos were kind of handed out. But the
Speaker 4: facts of the matter of these that when Kathy was convicted,
Speaker 4: she lost everything from a kind of financial point of view.
Speaker 4: She lost her home, basically everything went to her then husband, Craig,
Speaker 4: And indeed Craig was awarded a kind of victim's payment
Speaker 4: or payments for the deaths of the children. He was
Speaker 4: judged to be the victim in all this, which is
Speaker 4: quite ironic in the light of what occurred after that,
Speaker 4: because clearly Kathy herself was the main the chief victim.
Speaker 4: So when she emerged from prison in June twenty twenty three,
Speaker 4: Kathy didn't have a single cent to her name. I mean,
Speaker 4: she was completely kind of poverty stricken. So Tracy Chapman,
Speaker 4: who is a wonderful, wonderful person, incredibly generous, incredibly loyal,
Speaker 4: and you know who, like Kathy herself, has shown unending
Speaker 4: stubbornness and persistence.
Speaker 1: This is someone she met in primary school, right, So
Speaker 1: that is a lifelong friendship.
Speaker 4: That's right, it's a lifelong friendship. And there are other
Speaker 4: very close friends of hers at Megan for example, who
Speaker 4: she met in primary school as well. But the point
Speaker 4: here is that, well, actually there are two points. If
Speaker 4: she hadn't had these incredible friends around her, arguably she
Speaker 4: might not have survived her incarceration. But she did. And
Speaker 4: you know, Tracy Chapman would ring her every day, go
Speaker 4: and visit her, and so on and so forth. She
Speaker 4: would ring Tracy. But when she emerged from prison in
Speaker 4: June twenty twenty three, she did so without assent to
Speaker 4: her name. So Tracy Chapman put her up at her
Speaker 4: farm for a while. And yes, you know she has
Speaker 4: an agent. Kathy has an agent who was acquired for her,
Speaker 4: not by herself, but by the team known as Team Folbeg,
Speaker 4: who were looking out for her and wanted to ensure
Speaker 4: that she would emerge from prison able to actually live
Speaker 4: a life and pay for all the necessities of life
Speaker 4: that she would need. So yes, she was paid a
Speaker 4: sum of money for an exclusive interview that she gave
Speaker 4: to Channel seven. And I don't see how anyone can
Speaker 4: object to that. Quite frankly, the real disaster here, in
Speaker 4: my opinion, and this goes back to the way in
Speaker 4: which the criminal justice system in New South Wales has behaved.
Speaker 4: The real disaster is that even after her convictions were
Speaker 4: quashed in December twenty twenty three and verdicts of acquittal
Speaker 4: were entered against all of the charges against her, no
Speaker 4: one in the criminal justice system, in the judicial hierarchy
Speaker 4: has offered an apology to her for what occurred. And
Speaker 4: even now, even now, more than what a like fifteen
Speaker 4: eighteen months later, she is still awaiting an offer of
Speaker 4: compensation from the State of New South Wales.
Speaker 1: You might know better than those of us looking in
Speaker 1: on this from the outside, as a woman who has
Speaker 1: suffered unimaginably in her time, you know, from her childhood
Speaker 1: to losing four children, which you know could have been
Speaker 1: the end of anybody. That is in itself the most
Speaker 1: heartbreaking and terrible thing that any mother could face at
Speaker 1: any stage of life. To then go through what she's
Speaker 1: gone through, she seems like a very pragmatic woman like
Speaker 1: she you know, in the face of adversity, she seems
Speaker 1: to pick herself up and just kind of march on forward.
Speaker 1: But I can't imagine that that doesn't leave you with
Speaker 1: you know, PTSD or some kind of mental health issue
Speaker 1: after all that she has faced, Like how is she
Speaker 1: coping out in the real world trying to put this
Speaker 1: behind her.
Speaker 4: You raise a really really important point, and my answer
Speaker 4: to that would be this that I think it's clear
Speaker 4: that from her very earliest life she acquired the ability,
Speaker 4: if you like, to kind of keep her emotions wrapped
Speaker 4: up inside and to kind of move on and be pragmatic.
Speaker 4: I mean, she had to deal, as I say, with
Speaker 4: you know, being being, if you like, abandoned in reality
Speaker 4: by her biological father and mother because her father had
Speaker 4: killed her mother, and then he was sent to prison,
Speaker 4: and then he was kind of deported overseas back to
Speaker 4: Wales where he came from, so she never saw him again,
Speaker 4: and then you know, living in children's homes and then
Speaker 4: in the foster family. So I think she acquired an
Speaker 4: ability to kind of hold her emotions in. That's the
Speaker 4: first thing, but also to kind of I think it
Speaker 4: toughened her probably in terms of, you know, whenever something
Speaker 4: bad would happen, she acquired the ability to kind of
Speaker 4: deal with it and move on, and as you say,
Speaker 4: to become very pragmatic. But you are also right that,
Speaker 4: of course the deaths of her four children profoundly traumatized her,
Speaker 4: as they would any mother. And indeed, in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 4: Michael Diamond, a psychiatrist who examined her, concluded that she
Speaker 4: was suffering from complex post traumatic stress disorder. This was
Speaker 4: in twenty nineteen, very recently. What you also have to
Speaker 4: take into account is that when she was behind bars,
Speaker 4: you know, it's not the ideal environment in which to
Speaker 4: deal with your grief over the loss of four children,
Speaker 4: and particularly if the environment is perceived as being antagonistic
Speaker 4: towards you. And so I think, yes, you know, I
Speaker 4: can't imagine that she won't be processing her grief and
Speaker 4: her trauma for the rest of her life. But what
Speaker 4: she does have, which is amazing, is she has an
Speaker 4: incredibly close circle of friends who kind of surround her metaphorically,
Speaker 4: who are in touch with her, you know, every day.
Speaker 4: And I think, you know, she's appeared at one or
Speaker 4: TiO to public events since her release, where she's been
Speaker 4: almost unbelievably I think, kind of Carmen cool, Carmen collected,
Speaker 4: and she's you know, extremely articulate when she talks about
Speaker 4: her story, and she's very much focused as well on,
Speaker 4: you know, the law and the justice system kind of
Speaker 4: setting things right for other women who might find themselves
Speaker 4: in this position. And one of the key things that
Speaker 4: she and others, Tracy Chapman and others have kind of
Speaker 4: argued for is the introduction of an entirely independent, well
Speaker 4: resourced body such as they have in the UK, in
Speaker 4: New Zealand and elsewhere, known as a Criminal Cases Review Commission,
Speaker 4: because you know, in Sally Clark's case, for example, and
Speaker 4: in multiple other cases of these mothers who were wrongly
Speaker 4: convicted in the UK, their cases were some of their
Speaker 4: cases were reviewed in the UK to a Criminal Cases
Speaker 4: Review Commission, which, being in highly independent of government, was
Speaker 4: able to come back and say, well, yes, potentially a
Speaker 4: terrible mischaracter justice has eventuated here, and then to refer
Speaker 4: it to the courts of appeal in the UK. Now Here,
Speaker 4: in New South Wales, what has happened is that these
Speaker 4: petitions which were lodged on her behalf were only considered
Speaker 4: by the Attorneys General of New South Wales who are
Speaker 4: politically appointed, and so the problem there, in my opinion
Speaker 4: and in the opinion of others is that this is
Speaker 4: not a fair or just way to deal with cases
Speaker 4: of this kind where self evidently you know there are
Speaker 4: questions being raised about a person's guilt.
Speaker 1: So Kathleen fhear a big story maybe not over just yet,
Speaker 1: there might be a little bit more still to come.
Speaker 4: We think, we hope, well absolutely, I mean what I
Speaker 4: hope for for her, and obviously what everyone hopes for her,
Speaker 4: I think is for her to be awarded substantial compensation
Speaker 4: and equally importantly for her to be offered an absolutely heartfelt,
Speaker 4: sincere apology for what has turned out to be probably
Speaker 4: the greatest miscarriage of justice since Linda Chamberlain.
Speaker 1: Craig Folbig sadly passed away after suffering a heart attack
Speaker 1: in March twenty twenty four. He died still believing his
Speaker 1: ex wife was responsible for the deaths of Caleb, Patrick, Sarah,
Speaker 1: and Laura. Despite the heartbreak, though, Kathleen says she doesn't
Speaker 1: regret having a single one of her children. She says
Speaker 1: if she'd known about her genetic condition, maybe she might
Speaker 1: have rethought how she became pregnant. But back in the
Speaker 1: late eighties and nineties, this kind of testing wasn't as
Speaker 1: easily accessible as it is now, As many women who
Speaker 1: want to have children know too, Sometimes the pool to
Speaker 1: become a mother overrides all else and since but she's
Speaker 1: made it very very clear she will never write in
Speaker 1: a diary ever again. Thanks to Quentin for helping us
Speaker 1: tell this story. True Crime Conversations is a podcast hosted
Speaker 1: by me Claire Murphy. The producer is Charlie Blackman, with
Speaker 1: audio designed by Jacob Brown. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 1: You'll be hearing from Jemma Bath next week with another
Speaker 1: True Crime Conversation