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Authors: Xanthe Mallett
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life by having different medical problems, not initially appearing to have the same breathing difficulties as some of her siblings? And the first part of the sentence – maybe it just means what it says, that she would have struggled to cope, not that she would have intentionally harmed the child.
Kathleen’s entry on 1 January 1997 – that ‘stress made me do terrible things’ – does not necessarily mean that she hurt her children. That is just one interpretation. Is it possible that she felt guilty because she had failed to protect her children from dying?
It’s really difficult to interpret these entries, as no one except Kathleen knows what she was thinking when she wrote them, and it’s not possible to get inside her mind as the diaries are not available in full and the quotes are being taken from those in the official court documents, the context is lost.
Although purely circumstantial, Ryan began to build a case against Kathleen for murder. It took him two years, buton 19 April 2001 Kathleen Megan Folbigg was arrested at her home and charged with the murder of her four children, the allegation being that she intentionally smothered them all. This is where I start to get really concerned. During the bail hearing at Maitland Local Court, Police Prosecutor Daniel Maher told the court that he would use contents taken from Folbigg’s diaries, medical evidence from forensic pathologists, and testimony from her estranged husband, Craig, to prove that Kathleen had murdered her children. Maher notes that no death in isolation had caused concern – it was the cumulative effect of the four deaths that could only mean that the children had been suffocated. He went further, saying that the deaths were not consistent with SIDS, and presented evidence from a forensic pathologist, Dr Janice Ophoven, which gave the chances of all the children dying of cot death as one in a trillion. To reach this figure, it appears Ophoven used the same discredited statistical method as the (previously) eminent British paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow, in the infamous Sally Clark case in the UK, of simply multiplying the chance of one SIDS death in families comparable to the Folbiggs (one in 1000 in a non-metropolitan New South Wales region) and multiplying it by itself with each new death as though they were independent occurrences. In the case of Sally Clark, a thirty-five-year-old solicitor, her first son died suddenly within a few weeks of birth in 1996. His death was not considered suspicious; it was the occurrence of her second son’s death in a similar manner that led to her arrest and trial for the murder of both babies.
At the trial in Clark’s case, the prosecutor stated that the likelihood of an infant dying of SIDS was one in 8543, and therefore the probability of two infants from the samefamily dying of SIDS was simply the square of this figure: 8543 2 = approximately one in 73 million. This method, of course, presumes that the two deaths are independent – an assumption which cannot be made in cases of cot death. This is because SIDS, although an extremely rare event, is a diagnostic category for a cause of death when all possible alternative causes have been eliminated. As it is not yet known why some children suddenly and unexpectedly die, the possibility exists that some families are predisposed to losing children to SIDS for a number of reasons, both environmental and genetic. An informed statistical analysis would have offered different findings – and different evidence for the jury to digest.
Meadow was also an advocate of the maxim – known in Britain as ‘Meadow’s law’ – that one cot death is a tragedy, two are suspicious, but three cot deaths is murder until proven otherwise. There can be little doubt that this premise played a part in the charging of Clark.
The evidence from Professor Meadow was described at Clark’s second appeal in 2003 as ‘manifestly wrong’ and ‘grossly misleading’.
Kathleen’s entry on 1 January 1997 – that ‘stress made me do terrible things’ – does not necessarily mean that she hurt her children. That is just one interpretation. Is it possible that she felt guilty because she had failed to protect her children from dying?
It’s really difficult to interpret these entries, as no one except Kathleen knows what she was thinking when she wrote them, and it’s not possible to get inside her mind as the diaries are not available in full and the quotes are being taken from those in the official court documents, the context is lost.
Although purely circumstantial, Ryan began to build a case against Kathleen for murder. It took him two years, buton 19 April 2001 Kathleen Megan Folbigg was arrested at her home and charged with the murder of her four children, the allegation being that she intentionally smothered them all. This is where I start to get really concerned. During the bail hearing at Maitland Local Court, Police Prosecutor Daniel Maher told the court that he would use contents taken from Folbigg’s diaries, medical evidence from forensic pathologists, and testimony from her estranged husband, Craig, to prove that Kathleen had murdered her children. Maher notes that no death in isolation had caused concern – it was the cumulative effect of the four deaths that could only mean that the children had been suffocated. He went further, saying that the deaths were not consistent with SIDS, and presented evidence from a forensic pathologist, Dr Janice Ophoven, which gave the chances of all the children dying of cot death as one in a trillion. To reach this figure, it appears Ophoven used the same discredited statistical method as the (previously) eminent British paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow, in the infamous Sally Clark case in the UK, of simply multiplying the chance of one SIDS death in families comparable to the Folbiggs (one in 1000 in a non-metropolitan New South Wales region) and multiplying it by itself with each new death as though they were independent occurrences. In the case of Sally Clark, a thirty-five-year-old solicitor, her first son died suddenly within a few weeks of birth in 1996. His death was not considered suspicious; it was the occurrence of her second son’s death in a similar manner that led to her arrest and trial for the murder of both babies.
At the trial in Clark’s case, the prosecutor stated that the likelihood of an infant dying of SIDS was one in 8543, and therefore the probability of two infants from the samefamily dying of SIDS was simply the square of this figure: 8543 2 = approximately one in 73 million. This method, of course, presumes that the two deaths are independent – an assumption which cannot be made in cases of cot death. This is because SIDS, although an extremely rare event, is a diagnostic category for a cause of death when all possible alternative causes have been eliminated. As it is not yet known why some children suddenly and unexpectedly die, the possibility exists that some families are predisposed to losing children to SIDS for a number of reasons, both environmental and genetic. An informed statistical analysis would have offered different findings – and different evidence for the jury to digest.
Meadow was also an advocate of the maxim – known in Britain as ‘Meadow’s law’ – that one cot death is a tragedy, two are suspicious, but three cot deaths is murder until proven otherwise. There can be little doubt that this premise played a part in the charging of Clark.
The evidence from Professor Meadow was described at Clark’s second appeal in 2003 as ‘manifestly wrong’ and ‘grossly misleading’.
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