Folbigg has been silent witness to debate over her fate

As dozens of lawyers, scientists and researchers have fiercely debated the fate of the convicted baby-killer, she has been watching along silently from the Clarence Correctional Centre.

Kathleen Folbigg at a NSW Coroners Court inquiry in 2019. Picture: AAP Image/Joel Carrett

Convicted baby-killer Kathleen Folbigg has been watching silently as dozens of lawyers, scientists and researchers fiercely ­debate her fate throughout a long inquiry into her murder conviction.

Alone in a secure room at NSW’s maximum security Clarence Correctional Centre, the 55-year-old, imprisoned for killing her four young children, has listened to nearly 80 hours of hearings.

No one inside the courtroom could see Folbigg, but she could see all of them.

She watched closely, trying not to get her hopes up as more evidence indicative of her innocence was handed to the inquiry. Occasionally she would stand up and pace around the tiny room.

“She told me she just kept walking,” Folbigg’s best friend and staunch advocate Tracy Chapman said. “On some days she reckons she walked miles around that room. She just couldn’t sit still.”

Folbigg is waiting to hear whether the inquiry – the second into her guilty convictions – will exonerate her from her crimes, and the “baby-killer” tag she has carried for decades.

In first signs that Folbigg could be freed, counsel assisting the ­inquiry and the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions announced on Wednesday they believed there was reasonable doubt as to Ms Folbigg’s guilt, following new genetic and neurological evidence proving the children Sarah, Laura, Patrick and Caleb likely died from natural causes.

On Thursday, former NSW chief justice Tom Bathurst KC, who is presiding over the inquiry, said he, too, had seen “significant” evidence that “suggests reasonable possibilities” of Folbigg’s innocence.

Tracy Chapman leaving the Kathleen Folbigg inquiry in Sydney on April 22. Picture: Flavio Brancaleone/NewsWire

But as she awaits Mr Bathurst’s ruling, Folbigg remains inside the prison, spending her days working as a cleaner, doing puzzles, and watching movies.

“She just said to me yesterday, she had a handful of magazines she had bought on buy-up, and so she just said ‘I’m sitting here doing puzzles’,” said Chapman, who speaks to Folbigg several times a day.

“One of my friends paid for her to have movie access. It’s $25 a month, and so one of my friends paid for it because I said it would be good for her to have a distraction at the moment while she waits.”

For her first five years in prison, Folbigg was held in solitary confinement, only allowed to leave her cell for one hour a day. “That was for her own protection,” Chapman said. “People really didn’t like her when she first went in there.”

In early 2005, while still in solitary, Folbigg wrote Chapman a letter which was released to the public during the inquiry.

She said she cried after a February 2005 Court of Criminal Appeal trial, which did not accept her bid to overturn her convictions. Folbigg claimed she didn’t believe “they even really considered anything”.

In another 2005 letter, she ­admitted “some of my (diary) entries sound atrocious”, referencing the journals that were instrumental in the Crown prosecutor proving her guilt in 2003.

In one diary entry, for example, she wrote of Laura’s death: “She’s a fairly good natured baby – Thank goodness, it has saved her from the fate of her siblings. I think she was warned …”

She told Chapman in a letter: “I probably exaggerated on my thoughts about them warning her. I still had weird thoughts stuck in my head about any possible reason why she would of left me. I grasped at anything Trace.

“If it wasn’t physical, medical, genetic what was it. I thought I was to blame, I blamed myself.”

Always a target in jail, Folbigg worked hard to gain the respect of fellow prisoners over the 20 years she has served, many of them in Sydney’s Silverwater. But just ­before New Year’s Eve 2021, when she was transferred to Clarence, she was assaulted.

Just one month ago, a similar situation occurred.

“A new inmate was moved to Clarence out of Silverwater and started making threats that she wants to take Kath out,” Chapman said. “This person was then punished and locked down into her area. Kath feels terrible about this, because she doesn’t want anyone’s liberties taken away from them.”

Chapman said the pair haven’t broached the topic of compensation. Lindy Chamberlain, whose name came up multiple times during the inquiry, received $1.3m after she was wrongfully convicted of killing her daughter Azaria and imprisoned for four years.

“We haven’t even gotten there yet, because how do you put a price on it?” Chapman said. “I don’t even know how you put a price on 20 years of liberty. The stuff that I’ve had to deal with. And Kath had to deal with inside as well. You can’t put a price on that.”

What Chapman does guarantee, however, is if Folbigg is ­released she will live with her on the Mid North Coast.

“I can keep her at my property; we’ve got a wonderful place here for her,” she said.

“She’s going to have a lovely life with all the animals that she loves. I will keep her as safe as I can.”