When Kathleen Folbigg was pardoned and released from jail yesterday after twenty years, it was a moment that had been a long time coming and especially made possible thanks to a number of key supporters, as well as women in science.
Today, we highlight the women who contributed to Folbigg’s release. It is thanks to their tireless advocacy, resilience, and unwavering determination to see an innocent woman freed, that eventually resulted in Monday morning’s announcement.
Folbigg’s supporters work across different sectors of society — including immunology, law, advocacy and media.
Professor Carola Vinuesa, lead scientist
In August 2018, while she was studying Lupus and other auto-immune diseases at the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra, Professor Carola Vinuesa received a call from a former student, telling her about the Kathleen Folbigg case.
Prof Vinuesa had won two top awards from the National Health and Medical Research Council the previous year, and was intrigued about Folbigg’s case.
When she started to investigate, she teamed up with then-fellow ANU immunologist Todor Arsov to chart Folbigg’s DNA in the hopes of identifying any mutated genes that might explain a genetic susceptibility for sudden infant deaths.
Over the next several years, Prof. Vinuesa led a large team of genetic scientists from across the world. Eventually, they found that Folbigg carried a mutant gene — known as CALM2-G114R, which is what likely caused the deaths of two of her daughters — Sarah Folbigg and Laura Folbigg.
Since September 2021, Prof. Vinuesa has been the principal group leader at London’s Francis Crick Institute, though she maintains a fractional appointment at ANU.
Speaking to ABC Breakfast this morning, she described Folbigg’s release as “very special”.
“As a scientist, you don’t always get to do things that really make a difference in someone’s life,” Prof. Vinuesa said.
“And it wasn’t just for Kathleen’s life, it was really, you know, a celebration of science.”
Tracy Chapman, high school friend
Tracy Chapman met Kathleen Folbigg in the 1980s, when they were both students at Kotara High, a public high school in the suburbs of Newcastle.
The friends lost touch throughout the years. Chapman reached out to Folbigg after hearing she had been arrested for the murder of her four children in the early 2000s.
Since 2003, Chapman has been fighting to free her friend from prison. Without legal knowledge or qualifications, she began approaching lawyers to ask questions. She needed to know exactly how the justice system operated.
“I remember annoying the hell out of the solicitors, asking them questions, I was trying to be helpful,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald.
After years of advocacy and research, Chapman and her lawyers lodged a petition for a judicial review in May 2015, asking for the case to be reviewed.
Around the same time, Chapman established the Animal Assisted Growth & Learning Australia — an outdoors centre based near Coffs Harbour that offers therapeutic-focused, animal-assisted learning programs for trauma survivors, grief-healing, and people suffering from chronic pain.
Chapman had worked as an education and environmental manager since the early 1990’s, and was an active wildlife rescue volunteer with WIRES.
Nevertheless, she made time to speak with Folbigg over the phone — almost daily.
She made it her full-time mission to fight for her friend’s release. “This has well and truly consumed me for over a decade,” she told the Herald.
Now, as Folbigg learns to settle into her new life as an innocent and free citizen, Chapman will host her friend in a small flat near the Animal Assisted Growth & Learning Australia farm, supporting her in administrative tasks, such as opening a bank account, and re-obtaining a driver’s licence.
“At the moment, we’re just focusing on keeping her healthy, happy and mentally well,” she told reporters this morning.
Chapman has been anticipating Folbigg’s release from Grafton’s Clarence Correctional Facility for weeks.
Last month, she spoke to the media about creating a unit on her property for Folbigg when she is finally released from prison.
“What we’ve done for her is give her a sanctuary that she’s always wanted,” Chapman said. “Peaceful, quiet, she’s surrounded by animals. She’s got colour in her life because she’s had anything but colour.”
“[The] place is a little bit quirky, a little bit fun, a little bit bright. She’s got a very comfortable bed because she’s got a very bad back and she’s been sleeping on a foam vinyl mattress for 20-odd years.”
Megan Donegan
Fellow Kotara High alumnus Megan Donegan has also been a vocal advocate for the release of her friend, Kathleen Folbigg for decades.
Donegan was present at the funeral of Folbigg’s fourth child, Laura, in 1999.
Since the conviction in 2003, Donegan has managed online campaigns to free Folbigg, as well as support fundraising efforts.
During Folbigg’s imprisonment at the Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre, Donegan visited her friend a few times a year. In 2018, she told news.com that she’d phone Folbigg every week too, describing her as a “well-respected” prisoner who “still laughs and finds amusement in the mundane”.
“We spent so much time together she became like an extra person in my family,” Donegan said, reiterating that she’d never once doubted her friend’s innocence.
“She came to my nieces’ and nephews’ christenings. And we’d go for a drive on Sundays and have a picnic. She was always with us. Even now, she is the godmother of my eldest child.”
Dr Emma Cunliffe, author of Murder, Medicine and Motherhood
In 2011, Australian law academic Emma Cunliffe published a ground-breaking book that explored the intricacies of Folbigg’s conviction from a legal standpoint.
Murder, Medicine and Motherhood analysed medical and social understandings around sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and its shifting conceptualisation in the legal context.
It also considered a range of filicide literature while interrogating exisiting assumptions in criminal law and medicine alongside gendered presumptions of parenthood ideals.
Dr Cunliffe’s book significantly bolstered the confidence of many of Folbigg’s champions, including Tracy Chapman, who said the book encouraged her to continue to fight for her friend’s release.
Speaking to 2BG’s Luke Grant yesterday, Dr Cunliffe addressed the errors of Folbigg’s trial, which lead to her conviction in 2003.
“If being a criminal law professor teaches me anything, it’s that, people do the darnedest things…but what the legal system promises us is that if you’re charged, or accused of a crime, that the process will be fair and will look carefully to make sure that the allegations are truthful and there’s no reasonable doubt,” she said.
“The medical expert evidence that was led by the prosecution in Kathleen’s trial was incorrect in 2003 and it was unreliable in the terms of the best evidence available at that time.”
“In other words, medical researchers showed that the belief that multiple unexplained infant deaths in a single family were necessarily suspicious, had no good basis in the research — and that the likelihood of natural explanations for a series of unexplained infant deaths was higher than the likelihood on the side.”
Dr Cunliffe now supervises graduate students at the University of British Columbia in the fields of evidence and the criminalisation of women.