Inside Kathleen Folbigg's 20 years in jail over four babies' death

Twenty years in jail is unimaginable, but there were many factors that made this term even more complex for Hunter woman Kathleen Folbigg.

"We threw her in jail, locked her up, called her Australia's worst serial killer ... and put her in solitary," Ms Chapman said upon her friend's release this week.

"It's unimaginable, and none of us can put ourselves in Kathleen's shoes. We can't inhabit her grief, no one can, and that's what makes it so hard to believe."

Ms Folbigg was jailed in 2003 for killing her four babies - Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura - between 1989 and 1999.

During her time in prison, Ms Folbigg did not have it easy. At a court appearance in 2017, over an assault on a fellow inmate, the outside got a glimpse into her prison world.

It was a "very stressful" time, her lawyers say, as her first petition to the governor regarding her conviction was live.

She had been the subject of taunts, and lashed out. "Snapped", was the word used by the prosecution to describe how she reacted, and the subsequent assault..

She was later embarrassed and "immediately remorseful", the court heard. The magistrate was told, and accepted the fact she had an exemplary record with corrective services, and it was out of character.

Ms Folbigg was said to have been so surprised at herself that she couldn't believe her punch to the other woman's stomach "had even connected" and asked to see the CCTV footage.

It started over a fight for the toaster.

Documents tendered to court at the time said Ms Folbigg had angrily snatched a communal toaster away from the victim, a woman named Tara Mammen.

Mammen had started to taunt her, saying she knew why Ms Folbigg was in jail.

"[Folbigg] expressed that she believed the victim had targeted her with her ranting and raving about her alleged crimes and had expressed that she had read about her case in books and in papers.

"[Folbigg] believed the victim was trying to incite others to participate in supporting her attack."

Ms Folbigg was sentenced to four months in prison over the assault. She later appealed the severity of that sentence, but lost.

An assault in prison had the potential to "escalate and destabilise the entire custodial environment", the sentencing magistrate found.

Throughout her adult life, Ms Folbigg kept diaries, which were ultimately used to aid conviction for the deaths of her babies.

"Obviously I am my father's daughter," she wrote in her diary in 1996.

She was pondering whether she had turned out like her father, an underworld criminal who stabbed her mother to death in a jealous rage when Kathleen was a toddler.

Thomas John "Taffy' Britton murdered her mother, Kathleen May Donovan, on January 8, 1969, by stabbing her 24 times, and was arrested the following day.

He went on to serve 15 years in prison before being deported to England.

Ms Folbigg, who was 18 months old when her mother died, became a ward of the state.

She was placed into foster care with a couple, only to be abandoned to Bidura Children's Home, before moving into a permanent foster care placement.

She left school at the age of 15 and married Craig Folbigg five years later.

Their children, Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura, were born in 1989, 1990, 1992 and 1997 respectively, dying at the ages of 19 days, three months, ten months, and 18 months.

Ms Folbigg was not arrested until April, 2001. She was convicted in 2003, with diaries used at the time of her trial. The diary entries included "She left, with a bit of help"; "With Sarah all I wanted was her to shut up. And one day she did"; "After everything that's happened. I suppose I deserve to never have kids again" and "What scares me most will be when I'm alone with baby. How do I overcome that? Defeat that?"

The campaign for Ms Folbigg's freedom began in earnest after a 2011 book by an Australian academic lawyer, Emma Cunliffe, Murder, Medicine and Motherhood, which concluded Ms Folbigg had been wrongly convicted.

Helen Cummings, the first wife of a man who went on to kill his second family and himself, and the daughter of former Newcastle lord mayor Joy Cummings, warned the then NSW Attorney-General Greg Smith about the danger of history repeating itself Lindy Chamberlain style in an emotional appeal to free Folbigg from jail in early 2013, after a year of corresponding with and visiting Ms Folbigg and concluding she had "no doubt at all about her innocence.''

''The groundwork of an appeal for a review of the case has already been done in Emma's book,'' Ms Cummings said at the time.

''I contacted Emma because I always had an uncomfortable feeling during Kathleen's trial that it was actually her mothering that was on trial.

''She was totally hated and despised by society, and locked away.

''We saw that with Lindy Chamberlain, and the same thing has happened to poor Kathleen.''

Another Newcastle supporter, University of Newcastle legal centre director Shaun McCarthy, then entered the fray along with a host of fourth-year students and three barristers.

Together, they trawled through the transcripts from Ms Folbigg's trial and researched "similar wrongful conviction cases" in England, as well as exploring the advances in medicine and science over the ten years between the 2003 trial and 2013.

In June of 2015, then NSW governor David Hurley received the first petition for a review of her convictions, and an inquiry led by former judge Reginald Blanch began in October of 2018.

While Justice Blanche found no reasonable doubt as to Ms Folbigg's convictions, the fight went on, eventually culminating in a second inquiry in 2022 headed by former NSW chief justice Tom Bathurst KC.

In a memo to NSW Attorney General Michael Daley on Friday, June 2, 2023 the former NSW chief justice Tom Bathurst, described the prosecution's case in this way: "The Crown case was that Ms Folbigg smothered her children, either intending to kill them during a fit of anger, resentment or hatred against her child, alternatively, she deliberately sought to render them unconscious in an attempt to put them to sleep either so that she could get to sleep herself, or that she could have some time to herself".

It was his job, Mr Bathurst said, to consider whether, in all of the circumstances including new scientific and DNA evidence which had since come to light, there was any "reasonable hypothesis" other than Ms Folbigg's guilt.

He found there was "a reasonable possibility that three of the children died of natural causes". In the cases of Sarah and Laura, due to a genetic mutation, further in the case of Laura, he found a "reasonable possibility she died from myocarditis identified at autopsy and in subsequent investigations".

In the case of Patrick, there was a "reasonable possibility" that an underlying neurogenic disorder caused his death.

The jury was, regrettably, invited, at least implicitly, to accept the assumption that the four then unexplained deaths could only be due to unnatural causes, Mr Bathurst's memo says, citing Meadow's law.

The now discredited Meadow's 'law' states that the unexplained deaths of infants are a rare phenomenon and difficult to explain by natural causes, therefore, "One is a tragedy, two is suspicious, and three is murder unless there is proof to the contrary".

It was engineered by a controversial British paediatrician, Roy Meadow, who was later struck off the medical register (although reinstated).

Meadow's 'law' ignored the fact that it would similarly be a remarkable coincidence if, over ten years, a mother smothered four children without leaving any trace of evidence, and in circumstances where two of them carried an "extreme rare, potentially life-threatening genetic variant, of whom one also had myocarditis, and a third presented, at the least, atypically for a case of suffocation" Mr Bathurst said.

He also said he was "unable to accept the proposition that the evidence established that Ms Folbigg was "anything but a caring mother for her children".

That made me cold comfort for Ms Folbigg, who found herself lashing out at a fellow inmate 14 years into a 25-year minimum jail term, in the Willett Wing of Silverwater Women's Correction Centre.

The Willett Wing is reserved for the small number of female prisoners in the state who need to be protected from the rest of the jail population.

Fewer than 12 inmates are in the maximum security section at any one time, their only social contact with jail staff.

Inmates spend 22 hours a day inside their cell, and are allowed into a small caged yard adjoining the cell for two hours a day to get some fresh air and possibly try to exercise.

In that environment, Ms Folbigg says she grieved for her four dead children every day.

Her release was a "victory for science", she said in a recorded statement released on Tuesday.

"Today's a victory for science, and especially truth, and for the last 20 years I have been in prison I have forever and will always think of my children, grieve for my children, and have missed them and loved them terribly. Thank you."

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