Woman convicted of killing her four children breaks silence
The woman once labelled the “most despised” in Australia has broken her silence after 15 years behind bars.
In 2003, Kathleen Folbigg was convicted of killing her four infant children.
Patrick, Laura, Sarah and Caleb Folbigg all died before they turned two – the youngest, Caleb, was just 19 days old.
It was a crime that shocked the nation, but when Folbigg walked into court to be sentenced for killing her children, she gave no reaction.
In May 2003, a NSW Supreme Court jury found her guilty of the murder of three of her children and the manslaughter of another, while Folbigg claimed each child died of natural causes.
She was sentenced to 40 years in jail, which was later reduced to 30 years.
Now halfway through her sentence, Folbigg has broken her silence in a push for a judicial appeal that has been stalled for the past three years.
“I do feel incredibly frustrated,” she says in an audio recording aired by Australian Story on Monday.
“For three years now we’ve been clinging on to that little bit of hope.”
Barrister Isabel Reed said the amount of time it had taken was “extraordinary”.
Now, for the first time, Folbigg is revealing her thoughts in her own words.
“Absolutely shattered. I might have had every wall up trying to protect me but there’s nothing that can protect you from that,” Folbigg said of the death of her children.
In the recordings, she tries to explain away the diaries that helped convict her.
On baby Sarah, she had written: “I knew I was short-tempered and cruel sometimes to her, and she left. With a bit of help.”
But in her audio interview, Folbigg says the “help” she was referring to was “God, or to some higher being, higher power”.
Folbigg, whose father stabbed her mother to death, also wrote in her diary: “I am my father’s daughter.”
“Those diaries are written from a point of me always blaming myself,” Folbigg said.
“I blame myself for everything. It’s just I took so much of the responsibility, because that’s, as mothers, what you do.”
The centrepiece of Folbigg’s judicial review is a 120-page forensic report that finds there was no medical basis for a conviction.
In the report, forensic pathologist Professor Stephen Cordner concludes that there was no forensic evidence to prove Folbigg’s children were murdered.
Professor Cordner concluded in the report that Caleb and Sarah died from SIDS , while Patrick most likely died from complications brought on by epilepsy.
But a spokesman for her former husband says they are still convinced she is guilty.
“She’s never challenged the conviction, only the length of the sentence,” former brother-in-law John Folbigg said.
NSW Attorney-General Mark Speakman said the petition “raises complex questions to which I am giving appropriate consideration and have taken extensive advice”.
“I hope to be in a position to make an announcement in the near future,” he said in a statement.
