After serving 20 years of her 25-year prison sentence over the deaths of her four children, Kathleen Folbigg has been pardoned and released without delay.
On Monday, NSW Attorney-General Michael Daley announced he’d received the preliminary findings of a recent inquiry headed by retired chief justice Tom Bathurst.
Daley said Bathurst had concluded he was firmly of the view that there was reasonable doubt about Folbigg’s guilt.
Folbigg, 55, has always denied killing her children, Caleb, Patrick, Laura and Sarah but was convicted of smothering them in a trial that relied on circumstantial evidence.
In the inquiry, however, evidence suggested the children’s death could have been due to natural causes.
Expert witnesses to the inquiry revealed a rare gene mutation may have caused the deaths of Laura and Sarah. There was also evidence that the first-born child, Caleb, could have had an underlying genetic disorder that predisposed him to epilepsy.
In the memorandum outlining Bathurst’s findings, the key points included “the reasonable possibility” that three of the children died of natural causes, and that in the case of Sarah and Laura there was “a reasonable possibility a genetic mutation known as CALM2-G114R occasioned their deaths”.
Bathurst is now preparing a final report for the NSW governor, which could be finished this month.
At the time of Folbigg’s trial in 2003, this pathology evidence wasn’t available and prosecutors argued she smothered her children during periods of frustration and called her diary entries admissions of guilt.
The memorandum made note of these diary entries saying “they were the writings of a grieving and possibly depressed mother, blaming herself for the death of each child, as distinct from admissions that she murdered or otherwise harmed them”.