Australian woman Kathleen Folbigg who spent 20 years in jail over deaths of her children is pardoned and freed
5 June 2023, 08:21 | Updated: 5 June 2023, 08:37
A woman who was once branded the "worst female serial killer" in Australia has been pardoned 20 years after a jury found her guilty of killing her four children.
Kathleen Folbigg, 55, was released from prison in New South Wales on Monday after the state's attorney general gave her an unconditional pardon.
New evidence found in 2018 showed that her four children may have died naturally, as Ms Folbigg had previously insisted.
New South Wales attorney general Michael Daley said: "There is a reasonable doubt as to Ms Folbigg's guilt of the manslaughter of her child Caleb, the infliction of grievous bodily harm on her child Patrick and the murder of her children Patrick, Sarah and Laura.
"I have reached a view that there is reasonable doubt as to the guilt of Ms Folbigg of those offences."
Ms Folbigg had been serving a 30-year sentence, which was set to expire in 2033. She would have become eligible for parole in five years.
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Ms Folbigg's four children died over the course of a decade aged between 19 days and 19 months.
Caleb, who was born in 1989, died after 19 days, which was deemed to be manslaughter.
Ms Folbigg's second child Patrick was eight months old when he died in 1991, while her daughter died two years later at 10 months old.
In 1999, her fourth child Laura died aged 19 months.
New evidence suggests that both of Ms Folbigg's daughters carried a rare CALM2 genetic variant which was one of the reasons a second inquiry into her guilt was called, calling prosecutors to accept there was reasonable doubt about her guilt.
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Lawyer Sophie Callan said expert evidence in the fields of cardiology and genetics indicated that the CALM2-G114R genetic variant "is a reasonably possible cause" of the daughters' sudden deaths.
Myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, was also a "reasonably possible cause" of Laura's death, she said, adding there was "persuasive expert evidence that as a matter of reasonable possibility, an underlying neurogenetic disorder" caused Patrick's sudden death.
Prosecutors had previously told the jury at her trial the similarities among the deaths made coincidence an unlikely explanation.
She was the only one at home or awake when the young children died and prosecutors told the jury her diaries contained admissions of guilt.
Her former husband, Craig Folbigg, said in submissions to the inquiry that the implausibility that four children in one family would die of natural causes before the age of two was compelling grounds to continue treating the diary entries as admissions of his former wife's guilt.
But her lawyer said Ms Folbigg had been suffering a major depressive disorder and "maternal grief" when she made the entries.
A final report from the second inquiry into her guilt could recommend the state Court of Appeals quash her convictions.
