SYDNEY, Australia – Australian tabloids have called Kathleen Folbigg the killer of innocent babies – the country’s “worst female serial killer”. In 2003, a court sentenced her to 40 years in prison for suffocating her four children before each turned 2.
But all the while, Mrs. Folbigg insisted that she is innocent, and that her children were victims of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
Now, 90 renowned scientists say they are convinced that she is right. New genetic evidence, the scientists say, suggests that the children died of natural causes, and they are demanding their forgiveness.
In a petition sent to the governor of New South Wales last week, the group of scientists, which includes two Nobel laureates, called for Folbigg’s immediate release and an end to “judicial error”.
The public challenge creates a tense stalemate between some of the world’s leading medical minds and a criminal court system that rarely overturns convictions. It is a story of judges putting more weight on ambiguous reflections in a mother’s diary than on rare genetic mutations, and scientists who are determined to make the legal system respect cutting-edge expertise.
In the middle is Mrs. Folbigg, who is now 53 years old. More than 30 years after the death of her first child, her story has not changed and she says it will be justified.
A troubled mother and her children
Mrs. Folbigg’s life has been troubled almost from the moment she was born.
She was only 18 months old when her father, Thomas Britton, murdered his mother in 1968. His wife abandoned them because of a money dispute. He stabbed her on a public trail in Sydney in drunken fury.
Approximately 28 years later, Mrs. Folbigg wrote in her diary: “Obviously, I am my father’s daughter”.
At that point, in 1996, she married a miner, Craig Folbigg, moved to a working-class suburb, Newcastle, a coal capital north of Sydney, and lost three of her children.
Mrs. Folbigg’s first child, Caleb, died on February 20, 1989, at the age of 19. His death was classified by doctors as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SMSI.
The next child, Patrick, died almost two years later, at 8 months. He was blind, had epilepsy and died of suffocation, according to his death certificate.
A girl, Sarah, died on August 30, 1993, at 10 months of age, and her death was also classified as SMSI. Mrs. Folbigg’s last daughter, Laura, died in March 1999 at the age of 18 months, with the cause initially listed as “undetermined”.
The deaths seemed, at first, a simple and horrible tragedy. But Mrs. Folbigg’s husband turned her over to the police after reading one of his notes in his diary. It said that Sarah had left “with a little help”.
Mrs. Folbigg told the authorities that what she wrote simply captured the anguish and despair of the young motherhood and that “a little help” referred to her hope that God had taken her baby home.
At his trial, the doctor who had considered Laura’s death to be indeterminate, Allan Cala, testified that he had never seen the case of four children dying in the same family. He was admitted as an expert witness and, although he did not provide independent data, prosecutors relied on his account to argue that lightning strikes and flying pigs were more likely than four babies dying so young in the same family over a period of 10 years. years old.
“Never, never has there been a case like this in the history of medicine,” said a prosecutor in his closing arguments. “It is not a reasonable doubt, it is absurd.”
The jury agreed. Mrs. Folbigg, 35 at the time, was found guilty of the murders of Patrick, Sarah and Laura and of Caleb’s manslaughter. She burst into tears as the verdicts were read.
The science that could set her free
But there was never any medical evidence of suffocation, say the scientists – that was a shortcoming in the case. It is the first thing mentioned in your request for forgiveness to Mrs. Folbigg.
None of the children, they go on to say, was healthy when he died. Laura, the last to die, had a respiratory infection and an autopsy revealed an inflamed heart.
With these tips in mind, their lawyers asked geneticists to examine the case, looking for a mutation that could explain the family’s experience.
Carola Vinuesa, an immunologist at Australian National University in Canberra, and another doctor, Todor Arsov, visited Kathleen in prison on October 8, 2018 and received consent to sequence her genome. Both found that Mrs. Folbigg had a rare mutation in what is known as the CALM2 gene.
The genetic defect essentially creates cardiac arrhythmias that can cause cardiac arrest and sudden death in childhood.
Only about 75 people in the world are known to have the mutation, said Professor Vinuesa, including some parents with no symptoms. But children died in at least 20 of these cases and, in many others, suffered cardiac arrest.
This was especially true when there were triggers that boosted adrenaline – and a known trigger is pseudoephedrine, a drug that Laura was taking when she died.
Using blood and tissue samples from all four children, collected shortly after birth, Professor Vinuesa and Dr. Arsov found that Sarah and Laura had the same mutation as their mother.
At that point, Folbigg’s lawyers, who had already exhausted formal remedies, were able to secure a formal investigation into the case. Professor Vinuesa presented a long report in December 2018.
But there were signs of resistance. Dr. Cala reappeared, telling the judge that when Laura’s body arrived, after three deaths, you “have to have it in the back of your mind, is there anything else going on in relation to a possible trauma?”
Bob Moles, a law professor at Flinders University, said the admission of such statements showed a major flaw in Australian justice.
“One of the main problems we have is the courts’ willingness to admit scientific evidence that is not really scientific,” he said.
Sensing that the evidence was not being taken seriously, Professor Vinuesa wrote to Peter Schwartz, a leading genetic researcher in Milan. He responded and said he was studying a family in the United States with the same mutation, including two children who died of attacks heart attacks.
He sent a letter to the inquiry with his findings. In July 2019, the judge reached a decision. He said he considered the scientific evidence, but found Mrs. Folbigg’s diary quite convincing – and that he had no reasonable doubts about her guilt.
Refusing to Give Up
Frustrated but more determined, the network of scientists gradually expanded.
Several of the people involved, including Dr. Arsov, sent their findings to an international peer-reviewed journal. The newspaper was published in November.
Additional research on Caleb and Patrick’s genomes revealed that they had a separate rare genetic variant, which in studies with rats was associated with early lethal epileptic attacks.
Altogether, 90 eminent scientists agreed that medical evidence proves Folbigg’s innocence. Signatories to the forgiveness petition include Dr. Schwartz; John Shine, president of the Australian Academy of Science; and Elizabeth Blackburn, a 2009 Nobel laureate in medicine, who teaches at the University of California, San Francisco.
“We would be happy for Kathleen if she were forgiven,” said Professor Vinuesa. “It would send a very strong message that science needs to be taken seriously by the legal system.”