Kathleen Folbigg’s last-ditch bid to contest convictions for killing children knocked back by court

Kathleen Folbigg loses last-ditch bid to contest convictions for killing her four infant children.

Kathleen Folbigg has lost her appeal against a judicial review that reinforced her convictions for killing four of her infant children and will have to serve out the rest of her 25-year sentence unless granted a pardon.

The NSW Court of Appeal today rejected her claim that new evidence showed a mutant gene linked to sudden death in ­babies and carried by two of the Folbigg children caused “a strong presumption” that they died from natural causes.

Folbigg was convicted in 2003 of smothering her four children — Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura — over a 10-year period from 1989 to 1999.

Much of the evidence against her was based on entries in her diary, that the jury was told amounted to confessions of guilt, something she denied. She has ­always maintained her innocence but her conviction has been upheld through several legal challenges.

The NSW Court of Appeal was considering Folbigg’s latest attempt to clear her name by overturning the results of a 2019 judicial ­inquiry by retired District Court judge Reginald Blanch that found no reasonable doubt as to Folbigg’s convictions.

However, the Appeal Court has found that “this was not a case in which [Justice Blanch’s] conclusion was at odds with the scientific evidence.”

“The scientific evidence raised a theoretical possibility that there were innocent explanations for the deaths of the two girls. However …, their circumstances departed from the reported cases of deaths associated with CALM abnormalities.”

In particular, the judges said, the change in the Folbiggs’ genome was hereditary; the girls died at younger ages; the girls apparently died suddenly when asleep and not during exertion; there was an absence of prior symptomatology; and Ms Folbigg did not have the cardiac manifestations commonly associated with it.

“The girls’ deaths were thus “outliers” when compared with those reported in the literature,” the appeal judges said.

“Further, the boys’ genomes provided no common cause. When these matters were weighed with the inculpatory inferences derived from Ms Folbigg’s diary entries and her evidence in seeking to present innocent explanations of them, there was an ample basis, consistent with the scientific evidence, for [Justice Blanch] to conclude that there was no reasonable doubt as to Ms Folbigg’s guilt.”

Ms Folbigg recently revealed she was attacked in jail by a fellow ­inmate, a beating that left her with a black eye and bruises, after being transferred to a new prison in northern NSW.