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17 March 2019 Channel 9 60 Minutes Tara Brown and the case of Kathleen Folbigg

Part One 13 mins

Tara Brown: Is there a more hated woman in Australia than Kathleen Folbigg? Over ten years, one by one she killed her four babies. Her crimes are so inconceivable its still hard to fathom how and why she did it. That is until you consider this – maybe Kathleen Folbigg was wrongly accused. She’s always maintained her innocence and tomorrow a judicial inquiry reviewing her conviction begins. It might lead to her freedom after fifteen years in prison. Hoping that’s true is Carol Mathey. More than anyone she knows what Kathleen’s endured because incredibly she too was accused of murdering four of her babies.

The two cases are remarkably similar, right down to the expert witnesses called upon to determine the truth. Yet while Kathleen was convicted as Australia’s worst female serial killer the prosecution against Carol was thrown out.

Carol Mathey stands accused but never convicted of killing her four babies. While this mother believes she deserves overwhelming sympathy for her loss, instead she’s dogged by suspicion that she killed them all – four murders in five years. This is the first time Carol’s spoken publicly about the sudden death of her children.

Sitting here opposite you today I am looking at somebody who has suffered unimaginable grief and loss or I am sitting opposite a deeply disturbed person who is capable of committing the most monstrous things, committing murder four times over. Who am I sitting opposite?

Carol Mathey: Someone dealing with an unimaginable amount of grief. I’d do anything to have all my babies back.

Tara: At the heart of this tragedy is the question of what to believe. One medical expert says its homicide.

Ophoven: There’s no question in my mind.

Tara: So, you’re saying Carol Mathey got away with murder? Ophoven: Yeh, I think so.

Tara: Another expert says there’s no proof of foul play.

Ransom: I think it would be too simple to suggest that just because there’s been a series of deaths that we can use that evidence and that evidence alone to say that someone is guilty of serial murder.

Tara: Four deaths in one family was enough to convict NSW woman Kathleen Folbigg yet nowhere near enough to convict Carol Mathey. Strikingly similar cases, even the same experts, but one woman walks free, the other is sent to jail. Now Carol has given up her anonymity joining forces with the Folbigg supporters to help free Kathleen.

Supporter: I’m trying so hard not to cry but it means so much

Tara: A woman she fears was falsely accused and wrongly convicted.

Supporter: Its concerning that in one place a judgment can be made to keep someone technically in prison for thirty years, and then after that in Carol’s case, it didn’t even make it to trial in the end because the judge himself said no, we’re not accepting that expert’s findings.

Carol: This is Jacob and Shaniah and Chloe and Joshua.

Tara: It’s a terrible roll call of death, from 1998 to 2003 Carol had and lost four babies. Such a big smile.

Carol: He’s always happy.

Tara: His smile giving no hint of what was to come, Jacob was the first to die at seven months. How did he die?

Carol: We just found him one morning. Yeh, he wasn’t breathing

Tara: Two years later nine week old Chloe was found lifeless in her cot. Forensic pathologists said both she and Jacob suffered Sudden Infant Death Syndrome known as SIDS. Two years on Joshua at three months stopped breathing. At the time, his death was thought to have been caused by a blood infection.

Carol: We were actually shopping at the time and came back out to the car and picked him up from the pram and he wasn’t breathing. Tara: Less than a year later, Shaniah was found dead in her bed. She was nearly three and a half.

Carol: I can’t remember exactly what I was thinking but yeh, the main thing was it can’t be happening again.

Tara: Too old for SIDS pathologists were unable to say what caused Shaniah’s death. Four tiny siblings lost in five years was shocking and remains extraordinarily rare.

Tara: Looking at the photos of your children here its like an album of grief.

Carol: They still my babies and even though they’re gone they’re still gonna be my babies. No matter what happens you just you can’t forget anything.

Tara: The children’s section of any cemetery is its saddest part. Its heartbreaking to think of mourning one dead child. Inconceivable to lose four. But over five years Carol buried two sons and two daughters. She says she welcomed the autopsies of her children, wanting answers as to why their lives had ended so prematurely. But it was the unexplained death of Shaniah which finally raised questions for police and launched a murder investigation.

Ransom: If you have an object like a pillow or a cushion or something like that then you may see no signs at all. Leading forensic pathologist Dr David Ransom is Deputy Director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine based at Melbourne’s morgue. It was here that he conducted the autopsy on three and a half year old Shaniah. What did you determine her cause of death to be?

Ransom: Unascertained. I could not find a cause of death.

Tara: Did that raise suspicion?

Ransom: Of itself, it doesn’t raise suspicion. It just added to the overall issue of why had her children died and we were looking for what concrete evidence to let us know that there was something other than a natural process in order to give the investigators something to actually start investigating. And we simply were not able to find it.

Tara: Despite no evidence of foul play in any of the four children, the police were still convinced they’d been murdered by their mother Carol. To prove their case they sought the opinion of other interstate and international experts including American pathologist Dr Janice Ophoven. Ophoven: As far as I’m concerned their aren’t any conditions we know that could cause four children to die without any evidence.

Tara: Her opinion of Carol Mathey was damning.

Ophoven: There clearly was in my opinion consistent with suffocation or smothering.

Tara: Would you accept that there is no evidence of that?

Ophoven: I don’t disagree that there is no evidence of smothering because its well recognized that you can smother an infant without leaving a trace.

Tara: In trying to determine the innocence or guilt of a parent accused of murdering their baby the greatest challenge for investigators is the lack of concrete physical evidence of what really caused that baby’s death. Whether the baby has died of natural causes or has been deliberately smothered the evidence is the same, no marking nothing to distinguish between SIDS and homicide and while there is no forensic proof there will always be lingering doubt.

Ransom: I thing the thing your’re faced with in infants is that they often do not show at autopsy significant degrees of natural cause of death that might have been present.

Tara: Nor do their tiny bodies bear the marks of murder if they’ve been smothered.

Ophoven: I don’t know how you would ever hold a mother accountable for killing all of her babies by suffocation if you required evidence that you know would never be there. So, its in essence the perfect crime.

Tara: Have you committed the perfect crime?

Carol: No. I don’t know why anyone would want to murder their children especially four.

Tara: Did you try to suffocate Jacob?

Carol: No.

Tara: Did you kill Chloe?

Carol: No.

Tara: Did you smother Joshua in the car park?

Carol: No.

Tara: In the back of your car?

Carol: No. Tara: Again, Carol, did you do anything to hurt Shaniah?

Carol: No.

Tara: But armed with the opinion of three medical experts police arrested Carol in 2005 and charged her with the murder of all of her four dead babies.

Carol: I got arrested – just came out of the blue.

Tara: What was that moment like?

Carol: Scary.

Tara: But what is the mindset – if you haven’t done anything, do you think this is going to go on for some time or do you think that this is going to be cleared up pretty quickly.

Carol, Well look ok, they’ll question me and then I’ll be home at night but no, that night I was in jail.

Tara: Carol was held in remand for two months. The charges against her came at the same time New South Wales mother Kathleen Folbigg lost her appeal. She too had been charged with killing her four babies. And like Carol, it was the damning opinion of Dr Janice Ophoven that was critical to the police case against her.

Ophoven: Do I think that Kathleen Folbigg or Carol Mathey killed their children, yes, I don’t have any question.

Tara: In the case of Kathleen Folbigg, a jury agreed and she was sent away for thirty years. The parallels with Carol’s case were striking – which had her terrified. What was your greatest fear?

Carol: Not being let out. Yeh, being in that situation for the rest of my life potentially, and why am I here, I’ve done nothing wrong and we just had to prove I was innocent.

Tara: How do you do that?

Carol: Yeh, not having anything to hide.

Part Two ten mins

Tara: So, is Geelong a sad or happy place for you?

Carol: A bit of both, both happy and sad because this is where I had my babies and spent the time … Tara: Their time here was too short. Within five years, Carol Mathey lost four babies. That number alone, four children from the one family was enough to make her guilty of murder in the eyes of many. What was the reaction from the community after the deaths of your children?

Carol: People would call me ‘kiddy killer’ and yeh, just names like that and it hurt a lot, and its made me not want to go out and I just sheltered myself from everyone and just stayed at home.

Tara: Carol wasn’t just guilty in the court of public opinion. But in paediatric circles so many unexplained infant deaths confirmed a common belief. The saying was one SIDS death was a tragedy, two is suspicious and a third is murder until proved otherwise. At Carol’s committal hearing the prosecution relied on the evidence of three key experts, including American forensic pathologist Dr Janice Ophoven. She said the fourth death in Carol’s family cast serious suspicion over the deaths of the other three, even though none of those deaths had raised red flags to the pathologists who had conducted the original autopsies, including Dr David Ransom. Simply, they found no sign of murder.

Ophoven: The question here is do you give the benefit of doubt to an imaginary disease or do you look at the case that there is a condition that no one has ever seen except in these really suspicious cases where no one’s ever seen a sign or a symptom of illness and only the moms are present when they die. If that isn’t enough combined with all of the rest of the information which is available in the investigation, then so be it.

Ransom: Absence of any evidence does not give you the right to go down another pathway for which you have no evidence.

Tara: Even if it happens four times in the one family?

Ransom: Even if it happens four times in one family simply because you don’t know what you don’t know. The case against Carol didn’t only rely on medical evidence. Prosecutor’s alleged Carol’s children were eventually killed as part of an escalating campaign of attention- seeking behaviour to save her rocky marriage of Stephen.

Carol: The police said a lot of things that weren’t true.

Tara: Like what?

Carol: That I’d done this to get my husband’s attention.

Tara: What was the state of your marriage? Carol: It was alright, it wasn’t exactly the perfect marriage but who’s is these days?

Tara: Well, were you trying to get his attention and his affection?

Carol: No,

Tara: Were you trying to keep him in the marriage?

Carol: No, no.

Tara: Were you trying to seek attention for any other reason?

Carol: No.

Tara: Police say Carol’s first attempt at winning back her husband came in 1998 four months before the first death in the family. A mysterious fire started in one of the children’s bedrooms. As the only adult in the house at the time, Carol got herself and the kids out safely. Did you start that fire?

Carol: No. No I didn’t and I’d had no reason to have lit a fire. Why would I want to burn down my house?

Tara: I don’t know. Unless you’re trying to hurt someone or unless again, you’re trying to seek attention.

Carol: No.

Tara: What other explanation could there be for how it was lit or who lit it?

Carol: I have no idea. All I know is that my children and I made it out.

Tara: But aspects of the children’s deaths continue to baffle. Carol had already lost two babies when Joshua stopped breathing. They were out shopping. Joshua was sleeping in his pram. And despite being provided with a sleep apnoea monitor he wasn’t connected to it.

Carol: It wasn’t until we got back to the car and I put Shania in the car and I went to lift Joshua out and he was all limp and blue round the mouth so I yelled out.

Tara: As Carol waited for an ambulance she says she started CPR on her lifeless son in the back of her car. Neither she nor the paramedics could save him.

Tara: Can I ask why was Joshua not connected to his monitor at that point?

Carol: It used to go off a lot at random times. It would just start beeping and so I never, I didn’t think I’d ever need to use it in the pram just going to do grocery shopping. Tara: How do you feel about that decision now?

Carol: I regret not using it but then think because of how it used to go off all the time, would it have gone off at the right time? Its hard to say.

Tara: So, you believe that Carol Mathey smothered Joshua in the supermarket car park?

Ophoven: Of all of the cases, that one would fit the criteria of a staged crime.

Tara: In what way? Ophoven: That its set up in order to mislead.

Tara: The death of Shaniah remains just as confounding. The day before she died, Shaniah fell from a coffee table. Carol called for the ambulance telling the operator her daughter had stopped breathing and was unconscious. But the operator said she thought she could hear whimpering in the background. The suggestion is those sounds were coming from Shaniah.

Tara: Police say, listening to that first call you made to the ambulance service when Shaniah fell off the table that they could hear a child in the background. Their telling of it is that they could hear you smothering your child.

Carol: Yeh, that isn’t true.

Tara: What could they hear if that’s not what they heard?

Carol: I don’t know, I don’t know. I do remember the tv was on, I was crying,

Tara: when the ambulance arrived Shania had regained consciousness and seemed healthy. The ambos advised Carol to take the three and a half year old to the doctor for a checkup. But the very next morning she was found dead by her mother. Again, Carol, did you do anything to hurt Shaniah?

Carol: No.

Tara: Did you smother her with a pillow?

Carol: No.

Tara: Did you smother her in any other way?

Carol: No.

Tara: For Dr Ransom, no matter how bad the circumstantial case against Carol appeared, he could not find evidence she or anyone murdered the babies. Ransom: If you start with nothing, if you start with an autopsy finding which is I do not have a medical answer, for what has gone on, then falling back on information which may be unreliable which may be something somebody else said, somebody else’s inference, somebody else’s interpretation of the circumstances can be an incredibly dangerous thing to do.

Tara: And so agreed Victoria’s Supreme Court in 2007. The murder trial was over before it began. The judge threw out much of the medical evidence of the star witnesses ruling their conclusions of foul play were not supported by facts. The case against Carol Mathey was dropped and she walked free.

Reporter: [news footage file tape] For a mother to be accused of such crime, it must have been hideous?

Carol: [news footage file tape] No comment.

Tara: Did you feel at that moment that you’d been let off on a technicality or did you believe that you were believed that justice had been done?

Carol: Yeh, I was just glad I had a good legal team, and a judge that seen that most of this case was based on assumptions, and that medical experts can be wrong and are wrong and I’m proof of that.

Part Three 9 mins

Tara: [One leaving the Supreme Court building with Carol] On that last day when you were told you don’t have to come back here anymore, that this will not go to trial, what were you thinking, what were you feeling.

Carol: A sense of relief that we didn’t have to come back anymore,

News reporter file footage: You must be incredibly relieved?

Tara: 24 October 2007 and Carol Mathey walks free. The charges of murdering her four babies sensationally dropped.

Carol: Yeh, it was always still overwhelming and I guess I was kind of glad it was over, but still, I don’t know, it hadn’t sunk in yet.

Tara: The judge found there was no evidence that Carol was a serial murderer but for many the suspicion against her remained. Tara: People interpreted that smile of yours [upon leaving court] as someone who thought they’d got away with it, who thought they’d tricked everybody.

Carol: I guess it was just relief that I didn’t have to come back to court every day, and it was over and we could go home and grieve and try to get on with our lives and … Tara: The case against Carol Mathey in Victoria fell apart when the judge refused to allow the evidence of the key medical prosecution witnesses. He found their assumptions of smothering were not based on fact. But it was a very different story in New South Wales. The testimony of the very same experts including Dr Janice Ophoven was heavily relied on to help convict Kathleen Folbigg, sentenced in 2003 to thirty years jail for killing her four babies. A conviction close friend Tracey Chapman still can’t accept.

Tracey: I believe they’ve made a very big mistake, but I also know equally, there’s forces that would like to keep her behind bars, because nobody wants to admit anyone made the wrong decision.

Tara: Fifteen years ago it was expert findings that helped put Kathleen behind bars. Tomorrow following intense public and legal pressure, those findings will be put under the microscope as a fresh inquiry into Kathleen’s conviction begins.

Tracey: I know its not going to be easy, but knowing that we’ve just done the impossible, is in itself amazing.

Tara: Is she nervous, is she scared?

Tracey: Oh yes, she’s nervous, scared, definitely, she knows that the odds are stacked against her and I guess its almost a David and Goliath battle really. The Kathleen Folbigg and Carol Mathey cases are eerily and tragically similar.

[Footage of Kathleen playing with baby]

Like Carol, Kathleen lost four babies, two boys and two girls.

[File tape of Kathleen Folbigg emergency call] Folbigg: My babies not breathing, I’m not getting any heartbeat or anything Operator: Pardon Folbigg: I’ve had three go already

Operator: OK Tara: And like Carol Mathey, it wasn’t until the death of Kathleen’s fourth child Laura that suspicion was raised by a pathologist, Dr Allan Cala, that all the children had been deliberately smothered by their mother.

Dr Cala: When Laura died she was aged about eighteen to twenty months and that’s just far too old for that death to be called Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Tara: And so began a two year serial murder investigation.

[File footage of police interview]

Police officer: Kathy, did you kill Caleb?

Kathy: No,

Police officer: Did you kill Joshua?

Kathy: No.

Police officer: Did you kill Sarah?

Kathy: No.

Police officer: Did you kill Laura?

Kathy: No.

Tara: With no physical evidence her children had been smothered, it was Kathleen’s disturbing diaries that were considered the smoking gun of the case by police and the prosecution.

Reading from diary: with Sarah all I wanted was for her to shut up and one day she did;

Dr Shamilla Betts Clinical Psychologist: The diaries reveal a tortured mind and I’d be very surprised if there are not millions of mothers who think like that.

Tara: Clinical Psychologist Dr Shamilla Betts examined Kathleen Folbigg’s entries. In 2013 she told me in her opinion, not even Kathleen’s darkest writings were enough to convict her.

Reading from diary: She’s a fairly good-natured baby, thank goodness, it has saved her from the fate of her siblings. I think she was warned.

Tara: So, when she writes about her moods making her think and do terrible things, you don’t think that’s an admission? Betts: She never said anywhere in the diary of having any murderous rage – she never felt hate for those kids – unless there’s an explicit confession, that I have smothered the children, with a pillow, it isn’t a confession.

Folbigg police interview:

Folbigg: And yes, I would have an angry thought, but it was never to harm her.

Ophoven: From a pathologist’s standpoint, based on my experience and my in-depth work with children who have been hurt and killed this case is a serial homicide.

Tara: So today you still believe that Kathleen Folbigg is a serial killer?

Ophoven: Yes, I do.

Michael Nott lawyer: Kathleen should never have been charged and brought to trial, originally, and I think it’s a gross injustice that needs to be rectified.

Tara: Why should she have never been charged?

Nott: There’s no evidence.

Tara: Social justice lawyer Michael Nott has extensively researched the Folbigg case, written an academic report, on how a controversial and now discredited theory permeated the evidence.

Nott: The case is based on Meadow’s cot-death theory. One cot death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three murder, and that has been shown to be totally erroneous, and without any foundation, its unscientific and the case is based on that.

Tara: The so-called ‘cot-death’ theory was a saying made famous by this man, British Professor Roy Meadows. It was thanks to his theory that a number of mothers were sent to jail in the UK in the years leading up to Kathleen’s trial.

File tape Professor Meadows: It does seem absolutely extraordinary that parents could be so brutal or so cruel to their own children.

Tara: But a fundamental statistical error in Meadow’s Law eventually saw the theory discredited, and multiple murder convictions overturned.

File tape news Sally Clarke: Sally’s nightmare is over because the Court of Appeal decided she’d been wrongly convicted of killing her two boys. Tara: In the UK alone, four grieving mothers falsely accused and wrongly convicted walked free.

File tape news: Finally today, a justice has been done and my innocence proven …

Tara: But back in Australia the same flawed argument was being used against Kathleen Folbigg. Dr Ophoven relied upon Meadows Law at a pretrial hearing claiming that the chance of four unexplained infant deaths from natural causes in the one family was one in a trillion. How do you respond to criticisms that you poisoned the waters of the trial against Kathleen Folbigg?

Ophoven: I don’ know how I could do that.

Tara: That criticism refers to the fact that you’d declared that there was less than a one in one trillion chance that four deaths in the one family could be attributed to SIDS.

Ophoven: That was incorrect, I was citing previous literature …

Tara: Roy Meadow …

Ophoven: Roy Meadow, I would never say that now but I wouldn’t change my diagnosis now, I would just say that its .. it would be impossibly rare, but I wouldn’t put a number on it.

Nott: The consequences of using these theories is we’re putting innocent people in jail and that in our society is abhorrent.

Tara: How big is the risk that Kathleen Folbigg is one of those innocent people who is in jail?

Nott: I think there’s a high risk, I think there’s a high risk that she’s totally innocent.

Part Four 10 mins

Carol: To wonder every day what happened. Pretty much not a day goes by when you don’t wonder what happened.

Tara: Two women accused of the same heinous crime. One is free, the other behind bars. Plagued by guilt or otherwise, both are imprisoned by a mother’s grief. And a community’s enduring suspicion. To be accused of murdering those children, to be seen in that light, what is that like for you?

Carol: Its very upsetting and you’re just constantly questioning yourself, and why you couldn’t have done more to find out to try to stop it and if they’d found anything could they have prevented it. Tara: Its extraordinary the parallel circumstances and yet the drastically different results. Carol Mathey’s court case was dropped for lack of evidence. But incredibly, similar evidence saw Kathleen Fobligg found guilty of three counts of murder and one of manslaughter. Lawyer Michael Nott believes, just as it was for Carol, there is so much reasonable doubt in the Folbigg case, she should never have been convicted.

Nott: From all indications, she was a good mother and the problem you get with these types of cases is, there’s no evidence, there’s no forensic evidence, there’s no DNA evidence, there’s no video-taped evidence, there’s the denial of the charges, and all you have eventually is speculation by medical practitioners and consequently the police and we know that speculation is just not good enough.

[File footage of Kathleen Folbigg playing with baby]

Tara: Kathleen Folbigg, does she deserve the benefit of the doubt?

Carol: Yeh, she does, everybody does, as we learned with my case, medical experts can get it wrong and do get it wrong.

Tara: Do you believe in the Carol Mathey case that there was sufficient doubt?

Ophoven: Oh no, Oh I don’t think there was doubt at all.

Tara: But the judge in the Mathey case so doubted Dr Janice Ophoven’s testimony he wouldn’t allow it to be heard. He said the conclusions of three of the Crown’s forensic pathologists were not based on fact. Do you find it frustrating that your conclusions are still speculative because of the lack of proof?

Ophoven: Well, it depends upon what you mean by proof.

Tara: Well, as you said yourself, if a young child is smothered, there is very rarely evidence of that. So, until there is proof, that that child is murdered, it’s still speculative isn’t it?

Ophoven: I agree with you, if all you have is the physical body of a suffocated baby, you would usually see nothing, even when it’s a confessed suffocation. So, either you get a confession, or you can sequentially murder your babies and not have any justice for those little lives.

Tara: Or you didn’t suffocate them?

Ophoven: Well that’s the whole question here. Tara: Kathleen Folbigg, sentenced to thirty years in jail is a stark reminder to Carol of where she could be today. How close do you feel you got to going to jail of being found guilty when you consider that those experts who were ready to testify against you still believe today that you were guilty?

Carol: Like the judge said in his report, they based everything on assumptions and not facts and that just proves that they can’t just make up things and their theory of losing more than three children is murder is wrong.

Tara: The inquiry reviewing the Kathleen Folbigg conviction, which begins tomorrow will be focussing on medical evidence, specifically the occurrence of three or more deaths in one family due to natural causes. At the time of the Folbigg trial there had been at least eight such cases around the world. But the jury was told by medical experts, that they’d never heard of such a tragedy. For Follbigg’s close friend Tracey Chapman, that omission was a terrible injustice.

Tracey: I think its important to understand this does happen.

Tara: The notion that four babies dying in your care in an unexplained and unexpected way is too big almost to comprehend. Its too big to accept.

Tracey: Well its horrific, its unacceptable like you say, but the sad thing for me is that people shoot first and ask questions later and there is reasons for this medically that we just don’t know enough about yet.

Tara: Tracey believes, in Carol Mathey, Australia had its own unique chance to understand the complex and unknown medical forces at play in cases of multiple infant deaths. But more personally Carol offers Kathy something no one else can, a deep understanding of her loss.

Tracey: Well she said no one knows what she’s feeling the way Carol Mathey does the grief the pain. For Kath its more to say that somebody else has gone through this, its not as unusual as it sounds and this lady knows all too well how much pain one feels for those unfortunate children.

Tara: If the special inquiry goes her way, Kathleen may have a retrial or may have her convictions overturned.

Tracey: All I can do publicly is stand up and support her and say I’ve got you and hopefully I don’t need to catch her if she falls. Tara: Has there ever been crack in your belief in Kathleen Folbigg, a crack in your support of her?

Tracey: No

Tara: Its at this critical time for Kathleen Folbigg that Carol Mathey has come forward for the first time. A mother who was also accused of killing her four babies. Unlike Kathleen, the medical case against her collapsed.

Carol: She could very well be innocent and yeh, sometimes medical experts get it wrong, police get things wrong,

Tara: These are the words Kathleen Folbigg has wanted to hear for a long time. But its only now Carol has emerged from the seclusion she chose in 2007 when the case against her was dropped.

Tracey: I’m trying not to cry but it means so much

Tara: On Kathleen’s behalf, Tracey meets Carol for the first time.

Tracey: You know when it happens you read it and I just thought how do we get in contact with you and you just walked away and never surfaced again so we’ve never actually been able to trace you so I’m so grateful this is happening.

Carol: If I can help in any way, that’s why I’m here.

Tara: Tracey comes with words of gratitude from Kathleen Folbigg.

Tracey: I guess this is our way of touching base and saying she’d really like to connect with you because you are someone who’s been with us; you don’t know that but you’ve been with us for a very long time, so this is her way of telling you that.

Tara: From within jail Kathleen offers Carol her support.

Kathleen from letter: You suffered feeling trapped in prison at times, I’m sure of that.

Tara: And shows a determination to keep fighting.

Kathleen from letter: To be persecuted as we were and I still am, this should never have happened. Maybe together our voices may help change that. Sincerely, thank you so much, Kathleen.

Tracey: With a smiley face. Carol: When you lose someone, its not just one thing you miss most, its just everything. You think about how would they have been now and what would they have been doing, you wonder what they’d look like.

Tara: While Carol Mathey does have her freedom, what she’ll never have are her children. Its an emptiness she feels every day, a loss that will be with her the rest of her life. When you go through this much pain, you would hope for sympathy wouldn’t you, caring and understanding?

Carol: Yeh, but then you hope to be just left alone, and to just grieve and everyone deals with grief differently, so we all have our own ways, but it never stops, it doesn’t get any easier.

Lawyer says Folbigg convicted over ‘moral panic’ about baby deaths 3 mins

Nott: I think there’s a community moral panic in respect of these type of cases. You have the deaths of four children, and the community would want to hold someone responsible even if we don’t know that caused their deaths, but when you get back to law, that’s not sufficient. One of the issues in relation to Kathleen Folbigg’s case is that the idea that four deaths in one family could not occur comes through quite strongly. Now, just because people have not seen it, it doesn’t mean it can’t occur.

Tara: Why should she have ever been charged?

Nott: There’s no evidence. There’s no substantial evidence of any nature that Kathleen caused the deaths of any of her children.

Tara: How much moral outrage do you think there should be that Kathleen Folbigg may be wrongly accused, wrongly convicted and wrongly jailed?

Nott: You only need to go back to the media coverage at the time of Kathleen Folbigg and have a look at what was being said in the media at that particular time. You only need to have a look at other cases of which there’s a baby death in the community at this stage. Or a mother’s accused of killing a child in a medical context. You only have to look at some of the media coverage that occurs in those types of cases and of course, you’ve already got the initial moral outrage and it continues even to this day with what is being said about Kathleen Folbigg in the community. Now I’m quite sure that even if this inquiry quashes her convictions there will be people out there in the community who will believe that Kathleen Folbigg killed her four children, just the same as they have doubts about the quashing of the conviction of Lindy Chamberlain, it’s the same type of scenario. People will believe what they want to believe despite the facts.

Tara: So, what do you think should be the result of this hearing, this inquiry?

Nott: I would like the inquiry to actually fully investigate the cause of death of the children, look at the medical research, look at the failures in the system, the police investigation, the way medical practitioners use erroneous theories in the way they bring about their allegations, and the system failures in the way that the conviction was brought about, and I would hope at the end of the day, that they would hopefully come to a conclusion that I have and the whole conviction should be quashed.

Expert explains condition that causes mother to harm or kill their own children 5 mins

Tara: So do you believe that Kathleen Folbigg should be free or should be behind bars?

Ophoven: In my opinion there is no known medical condition that explains their deaths. And there is a condition that does explain their deaths and that is that they died at the hands of their mother.

Tara: Do you conclude as to why Kathleen Folbigg did that to her children?

Ophoven: Well, we’re referring to a condition that in the past was known as Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy, was called facetious illness or medical child abuse where the caregiver, typically the mother, creates illness in the child, secretly, and presents the child as ill or describes an illness or creates an illness without apparently considering the consequences and the suffering that it causes the child. And I’ve had cases where the child had been admitted to hospital over 200 times, had suffered thirty surgical procedures all on the basis of a factitious illness. So, for me when people say well how could you just jump to a conclusion that these women had just killed their children. Well I’m not jumping to a conclusion.

Tara: Well the fact that SIDS is a cause or reason for death indicates that we don’t know, we still don’t know.

Ophoven: Well I don’t disagree with that statement but I would say that SIDS is not really a diagnosis, it’s a situation, it’s a syndrome, it’s a circumstance, its not a physical finding, its not a metabolic disease so what we’d have to be saying is that there is some unknown that has struck these children down, that has never been identified, has never been seen or observed, and there’s no physical reflection of that in the tissues, but we do know that mothers do kill children repeatedly, in families. So, it is a diagnosis, that exists, and has been confirmed repeatedly in investigations over and over and over again. So, you’d have to say, here is an imaginary disease, that has absolutely no physical findings, has no abnormalities of any kind, either before or after death, but there is this condition that causes multiple fatalities that we know exists. Many of the mothers who have created very serious chronic diseases in their children have been nominated for mother of the year and have convinced their physicians that they are the best mothers and oftentimes in the hospital they will be playing the role of the best mom the most caring mom and the most bringing in the cookies and the brownies and the putting Valium on their child’s pizza or injecting toilet water in their iv. You just have to understand that there is a population of individuals that are not like the rest of us. And that’s the decision that has to be made by the courts. My job is simply to say that’s a very legitimate and real possibility in this case and I have no alternative diagnosis to offer you. I have no alternative diagnosis but foul play.

Reporter reflection: Tara Brown on Kathleen Folbigg 5 mins

Tara: Sitting opposite somebody who’s been accused of such terrible crimes is confronting. I respect the fact that they’re telling me about a great tragedy, but to have to go through that loss is really difficult. What makes it also more difficult is that while in the case of Carol Mathey she has not been found guilty, she was never convicted that there is still debate around the case by experts so I’m not certainly suggesting that Carol Mathey should have been convicted, but while there is this debate, this argument, about proving the case or otherwise, that you can’t help but wonder, imagine if this was the case and so I guess that’s what goes through your mind.

Did you try to suffocate Ajaiga?

Carol: No

Did you kill Chloe?

Carol: No.

Tara: Did you smother Joshua in the car park?

Carol: No.

Tara: In the back of your car?

Carol: No.

Carol: Did you do anything to hurt Shania? Carol: No.

Tara: There are no easy answers in this and I think that’s perhaps one of the more surprising aspects of the story and certainly one of the more difficult aspects of the story.

Ophoven: As far as I’m concerned there aren’t any conditions that we know that could cause four children to die without any evidence.

Tara: When covering a story like this, as it must be for anyone investigating this case, anyone sitting on a jury, in a case like this is that the evidence from experts can be so conflicting.

Tara: You can talk to one expert who is so well recognized, so experienced, who is adamant that this is deliberate. And you talk to another expert who is equally well recognized and is equally well experienced and they’re adamant that this was of natural causes or at least there is no evidence of deliberate smothering. I think the public are very quick to judge women like Kathleen Folbigg and Carol Mathey because it is inconceivable that each of them, and other women around the world can lose four babies through natural causes. The loss if so great there has to be an answer. There has to be an answer. Somebody has to be accountable for these deaths. And it seems beyond instinct and it seems beyond science that there can be four unexplained deaths, that perhaps there is no one responsible for this and I think that many people find that very hard to accept and there is a need for blind justice in some way. And while there is doubt I think that people cannot accept that these lives fail in some way in getting some kind of justice. When Kathleen Folbigg became known to the world for this terrible terrible tragedy, four babies lost, the view was that this was incredibly rare and in fact the figure which we now know to be false that this can happen only one in a trillion, that’s the chance of it happening, that in fact was not correct and in fact there had been at least eight similar cases around the world at the time of the Folbigg trial, so it is still incredibly rare, but it is not as rare as people imagined, that only Kathleen Folbigg could be guilty of this. So, you know, I think people are horrified to imagine that babies can die sequentially for no known reasons and that is still incredibly rare.

Carol: Like the judge said in his report, they based everything on assumptions and not facts, and that just proves they can’t just make up things and their theory of losing more than three children is murder is wrong. Tara: Carol Mathey who has not been heard of since her court case collapsed has really spoken out to show support for Kathleen Folbigg. She wants the world to know through her eyes that this can be a terrible tragedy for both sets of families. She doesn’t think that Kathleen Folbigg is a cold-blooded killer and she wants the world to know that and she wants the world to know that she’s not and she wanted to express the fact that while no one knows what the natural disease or illness was that afflicted her children, that it exists, and that it could well exist in Kathleen Folbigg’s case. So she’s lending her voice, lending her support to the Kathleen Folbigg cause.

Carol: She could very well be innocent and yeh, medical experts get things wrong

End of Transcript