Baby killer Kathleen Folbigg testifies at inquiry
Australia’s worst female serial killer broke down in tears on Monday as she was finally cross-examined on the diary entries that helped jail her for killing her four young children.
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Australia’s worst female serial killer broke down in tears on Monday as she was finally cross-examined on the diary entries that helped jail her for killing her four young children.
Kathleen Folbigg, 51, cried in the dock as the father of the children, her former husband Craig, watched impassively from the public gallery of Lidcombe Coroner’s Court 16 years after she was jailed for a minimum of 25 years.
Department of Public Prosecutions lawyer Chris Maxwell QC asked Folbigg what she meant by a diary entry in which she wrote the stress of looking after the babies while Craig slept “made me do terrible things”.
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Folbigg argued terrible things could be something as minor as a frustrated thought.
Mr Maxwell said: “What I am suggesting is that terrible things is far more consistent with killing your children than having an angry thought.”
The inquiry was announced by Attorney-General Mark Speakman last year to look at specific medical and genetic evidence relating to Folbigg’s 2003 conviction.
Former Chief Judge of the District Court Justice Reginald Blanch increased the scope of the inquiry to include the diary entries.
It was the first time the former Hunter Valley housewife has ever given evidence. She had allowed her diaries to speak for her at her trial, where she was found guilty of the manslaughter of her first child, Caleb, who was 19 days old, and of the murders of her children Patrick, eight months, Sarah, 10 months, and Laura, 18 months.
Mr Maxwell asked her why several crucial diaries from the period her children died were missing.
“You got rid of the diaries because there was significantly incriminating evidence in the diaries,” he said.
Folbigg denied the allegation and said: “I only recall getting rid of the one.”
In one of the diary entries recovered by police she wrote how she was calmer with her last child, Laura, than with Sarah. “I take the time to figure what is wrong now instead of just snapping my cog.”
Mr Maxwell asked if “snapping your cog” suggests “losing control”.
Folbigg said: “At the time I didn’t differentiate between them. If I was slightly frustrated that was the same as snapping my cog.”
Another entry said: “Laura is different totally she doesn’t push my button anywhere near the extent she (Sarah) did, which is good for her is all I can say.”
Folbigg said in that entry, “I am simply comparing my children”.
She said she was battling depression and that her diary entries were all written with her doubts of being a good mother at the top of her mind.
An entry about Laura said: “Wouldn’t of handled another one like Sarah.
“She’s saved her life by being different.”
Folbigg explained that “alludes to the difference in my children and the characters they were’’, adding: “I felt at the time I didn’t handle her well, I was constantly doubting my ability as a mother.”
In a January 1998 entry, she wrote that Sarah “left, with a bit of help”.
Mr Maxwell said: “You’re saying there that you were that ‘bit of help’.”
Folbigg replied: “I’m saying that God, a higher power or another decision or even my children and Sarah deciding that she didn’t want to stay was the ‘bit of help’, not me.”
In another entry she said she knew there was nothing wrong with Laura, “nothing out of the ordinary anyway because it was me not them”.
Mr Maxwell said: “I suggest you are blaming yourself because you killed three children that had nothing wrong with them and that’s what that means.”
Folbigg denied that. And she said an entry that read, “all I wanted was for her to shut up and then one day she did” was not “heartless”.
“Well she did … she died,” she told the inquiry.
Folbigg said she had visited a clairvoyant who told her that her dead children were happy. She said she believed in a “higher being” and felt her first three children had communicated with Laura while she was still alive.
“Thank goodness it has saved her from the fate of her siblings,” she wrote in her diary.
She told the inquiry she was still trying to understand what happened.
“I am always searching for why, it never stops.”
Mr Maxwell said: “I suggest you know why; because you smothered them and that’s what you are talking about in that entry.”
He said that was reinforced by a diary entry where Folbigg said, “obviously I am my father’s daughter”.
Folbigg’s father killed her mother when she was a child.
Mr Maxwell said the diary entry meant “he was a killer when he was angry and you are concerned about that quality in you”.
Folbigg said her father had ruined her life and that she very seldom thought of him. She said she wrote the entry as she was “preparing to have another child and my father happened to pop into my head and I merely reflected on that”.
Margaret Cunneen, QC, represented Craig Folbigg at the inquiry and put to Folbigg that she had killed the children.
Folbigg replied: “I don’t know why any of my children died but I didn’t kill them.”
Her evidence will continue at the hearing on Tuesday.
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