Australian who spent 20 years in jail for killing her children is acquitted

Kathleen Folbigg was reviled as a baby killer and Australia’s “most hated woman” when she was convicted in 2003 for the murder of three of her children and for the manslaughter of another.

- Jordyn Beazley

But Folbigg’s convictions were quashed yesterday by an appeals court after an inquiry examined new scientific evidence and found there was reasonable doubt of her guilt.

She had previously been pardoned and released from prison in June after 20 years behind bars.

The case could result in the biggest compensation payout for a wrongful conviction in Australia – and a reckoning for the nation’s legal system.

“For almost a quarter of a century, I faced disbelief and hostility,” Folbigg said after she was acquitted. “I suffered abuse in all its forms. I hoped and prayed that one day I would be able to stand here with my name cleared. I hope that no one else will ever have to suffer what I suffered.”

Folbigg’s original guilty verdict was not based on medical evidence that explained how her four young children – Caleb, Patrick, Sarah, and Laura – died between 1989 and 1999 aged between 19 days and 18 months.

Instead, the prosecution relied on her diary entries as admissions of guilt. No trauma, journalling or grief experts were called to give evidence.

The case against Folbigg also relied on Meadow’s law – a now discredited precept that three or more sudden infant deaths in one family were murders until proven otherwise.

In one diary entry written in 1998 about Laura, the last of her children to die, Folbigg wrote: “I yelled at her so angrily that it scared her, she hasn’t stopped crying. Got so bad I nearly purposely dropped her on the floor & left her … Went to my room & left her to cry. Was gone probably only 5 mins but it seemed like a lifetime. I feel like the worst mother on this earth. Scared that she’ll leave me now. Like Sarah did .”