PASSAGE ONE OF THE DAY: " Author and legal academic Emma Cunliffe, who
has written a book about the case, said: "I found the diaries
distressing and difficult to interpret when I first read them. Kathleen
Folbigg used her diaries to record her anxieties about herself and her
mothering. She articulates her own sense that she carries some
responsibility for her children's deaths, and when you read some of the
entries that she puts, it sounds very much like she is hinting at having
harmed the children." Gradually, her opinion changed. "I
read the diaries now as Kathleen Folbigg blaming herself for getting
frustrated, for losing her temper with her children, and feeling as if,
if she had only been a better mother, perhaps the children would not
have died. But that's very different from admitting that she killed the
children."
------------------------------------------------------------
PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "For Ms Cunliffe, there are identifiable
parallels between Folbigg's case and Lindy Chamberlain's. Both are women
who, at trial, were portrayed as mothers who had failed. "Like
Lindy Chamberlain, every aspect of Kathleen Folbigg's motherhood has
been held up for scrutiny and many have been found wanting," she said. "But
like Lindy Chamberlain, many of the things that have been used to
suggest that Kathleen Folbigg was a bad mother, are entirely mundane. So
for example, her desire to stay fit, to go to the gym with her friends,
her desire to earn a little extra money in the early days of Sarah's
life, her desire that her husband contribute a little bit more around
the house. These are the battles that women face every day, in every
kitchen in Australia. And yet, in the context in which a mother is
suspected of having killed a child, they become reason to suspect that
she is dangerous to the children in her care."
--------------------------------------------------------------
STORY: "Kathleen Folbigg to give her version of what diary entries about her dead children meant," by reporter Quentin McDermott, published by ABC News on April 27, 2018. (Quentin McDermott is a senior investigative reporter at Australian story.)
KEY POINTS:
- A judicial inquiry resumes on Monday and will hear from Folbigg about what her diary entries meant
- She has been convicted of murdering three of her children as well as the manslaughter of her first-born
- Her friend Tracy Chapman says Folbigg is nervously awaiting the opportunity to put her diary entries into context.
GIST: Early tomorrow morning, prison guards at Silverwater
Women's Jail in New South Wales will escort one of their most
high-profile inmates out of prison and drive her seven kilometres down
the road to a brand-new court complex in Lidcombe, western Sydney. There, at 10 o'clock, Kathleen Folbigg will step into
the witness box in a bid to clear her name, and — for the first time in a
court of law — give her version of what she meant when she wrote in her
diaries about her four infant children who died. She will face
detailed questioning from Gail Furness, SC, counsel assisting a judicial
inquiry into Folbigg's convictions for murdering three of her children,
Patrick, Sarah and Laura, and the manslaughter of her first-born baby
Caleb. Previous hearings have debated and re-evaluated the
forensic pathology evidence presented at the trial; researched the
incidence of reported deaths of three or more infants in the same family
attributed to unidentified natural causes; and considered fresh
evidence relevant to the Folbigg family's genetics, cardiology and
neurology. Folbigg's fourth child Laura was born on August 7, 1997
and died on March 1, 1999. On July 23, 1999 Folbigg was interviewed by
the detective leading the investigation into Laura's death, Detective
Senior Sergeant Bernie Ryan. At his request, she read an entry in her
diary from January 1, 1997 when she was pregnant with Laura: "Another
year gone and what a year to come. I have a baby on the way which means
major personal sacrifice for both of us, but I feel confident about it
all going well. This time I am going to call for help, this time I'll
not attempt to do everything myself any more. I know that that was my
main reason for all my stress before and stress made me do terrible
things…" "What terrible things?" the detective asked her. "Just
the stress and frustrations and the odd growling and anything of that
sort of nature," Folbigg replied, adding: "As in have an angry thought
here or there. I don't think I've met a parent that doesn't have an
angry thought every now and again if their child's arguing with them or
something's not going quite right or it's just not happening, as in …
well take Sarah for example, when she wouldn't go to sleep, sure the
battle of wills would kick in, the frustration would kick in and yes I
would have an angry thought, but it was never to harm her, it was
always, 'Why wasn't Craig here to help me', you know? Or something along
those lines, yeah."
At Folbigg's trial in 2003, the diary entries
were presented by the prosecution as incriminating evidence that she
had deliberately killed her children by smothering them. She herself
chose not to give evidence at the trial. At her appeal in 2005,
Justice Brian Sully said the entries "make chilling reading in the light
of the known history of Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura". Author and legal academic Emma Cunliffe, who
has written a book about the case, said: "I found the diaries
distressing and difficult to interpret when I first read them. Kathleen
Folbigg used her diaries to record her anxieties about herself and her
mothering. She articulates her own sense that she carries some
responsibility for her children's deaths, and when you read some of the
entries that she puts, it sounds very much like she is hinting at having
harmed the children."
Gradually, her opinion changed.
"I
read the diaries now as Kathleen Folbigg blaming herself for getting
frustrated, for losing her temper with her children, and feeling as if,
if she had only been a better mother, perhaps the children would not
have died. But that's very different from admitting that she killed the
children."
Last year,
Australian Story re-examined the case, and spoke to those who knew Folbigg well. Her lifelong friend Tracy Chapman said that, at trial, the diary entries were presented out of context.
"Everything
that we read, we were just shocked. I remember just reading it going,
'This can't be so. This is the person I know, and the person I know
would never do that'. And surely, these are being taken out of context
because I just always remember reading about these damn diary entries
and just going, 'No, that doesn't sound like Kathy. That doesn't sound
like Kathy at all'. I was troubled by what I was reading. But later on,
actually talking to Kathy, you realised that they've been taken out of
context," she said. In a series of telephone conversations from
Cessnock jail outside Newcastle, broadcast on Australian Story, Folbigg
spoke openly for the first time about her state of mind when she fell
pregnant with her fourth child Laura. "I was so stressed, and so
scared, and so feeling vulnerable and so not understanding and so not
just dealing or coping with the whole concept that we might be doing
this again, so I started writing in those diaries. And that's where I
dumped everything. I dumped anything and everything that was negative,
or anything and everything that was troubling me," she said. "There
was a desperation throughout these diaries, if anyone bothered to read
the actual whole diaries. They're full of nothing but pain, angst,
torture; trying to figure out things, understand the un-understandable.
Thinking, I've lost these three, why have I lost these three? Laura has
to stay, and I was so desperate to grasp at anything, so there were a
few comments in there that probably didn't make any sense whatsoever." One of the entries read: "I feel like the
worst mother on this earth. Scared that she'll leave me now like Sarah
did. I knew I was short-tempered and cruel sometimes to her, and she
left. With a bit of help." "That quote, that was a reference to
God or to some higher being or a higher power or a something, going on
that I didn't understand," Folbigg told Ms Chapman. "I was
thinking about, why was I not allowed to have the other three, but now
I've fallen pregnant again, am I going to be allowed to keep this one?" Ms
Cunliffe said: "Kathleen Folbigg in her diaries articulates regret at
the fact that she lost her temper with her children occasionally. She
uses the word cruel to describe in particular how she occasionally
interacted with Sarah. When you read those entries fully it's very
apparent that losing her temper or being cruel consists of perhaps
growling, perhaps shouting, perhaps leaving a child in a room and
walking away when they're crying. It's very, very clear that she never
makes any admission in the diary to ever having physically harmed one of
the children." In another entry, Folbigg wrote: "My guilt of
how responsible I feel for them all, haunts me." And elsewhere: "What
sort of mother have I been — a terrible one, that's what it boils down
to." "Those diaries are written from a point of me always blaming
myself. I blamed myself for everything. I took so much of the
responsibility, because that's, as mothers, what you do," Folbigg
explained to Ms Chapman. In a further diary entry, from November
9, 1997 Folbigg wrote: "Craig was pretty drunk Friday nite [sic]. In his
drunken stupor he admitted that he's not really happy. There's a
problem with his security level with me — he has a morbid fear about
Laura … well I know there's nothing wrong with her, nothing out of the
ordinary any way. Because it was me, not them. Think I handle her fits
of crying better than I did with Sarah. I've learnt to, once getting to
me, to walk away and breathe in for a while myself. It helps me cope and
figure out how to help her. With Sarah all I wanted was her to shut up.
And one day she did." Ms Cunliffe said: "Kathleen Folbigg expresses
a lot of guilt about her mothering in her diaries, and that's an
example of an entry in which she is expressing that guilt. What's
strikingly absent from that and the other entries, in which she makes
troubling statements, is any active suggestion that she physically
harmed or threatened a child. There's a vast difference between wanting
your child to shut up and then regretting the fact that she did so in a
very final sense; and suggesting that you shut your children up, for
example, in some final sense." Ms Cunliffe suggests that in her
trial, "the diaries were used, as if they said the latter, when, in
truth, they said the former". She added: "If I had a trenchant
criticism of how the defence conducted this trial, it is that they
didn't do nearly enough to help the jury understand how normal Kathleen
Folbigg's struggles with her marriage and her role as a mother were, in
the context of the pressures that parenting puts on everybody. Let
alone, a family who are dealing with the grief of repeat, unexpected
deaths." In late October 1997, Folbigg wrote about she had watched a video of Sarah, who had died. "Looking
at the video," she wrote, "Sarah was boyish looking. Laura has definite
feminine features. They are chalk and cheese. And truthfully just as
well. Wouldn't of handled another one like Sarah. She's saved her life
by being different." And on New Year's Eve 1997, when Laura was
four months old: "She's a fairly good-natured baby. Thank goodness, it
has saved her from the fate of her siblings. I think she was warned." Speaking
by phone to Ms Chapman last year, Folbigg said: "That one was me just
grabbing at even the remote possibility that hopefully her being
different will save her life. It's a concept or an idea that's so far
out there it's nonsensical. There's nothing attached to it in any way
whatsoever. There's certainly nothing insidious attached to it. It's
just here I am thinking, 'Okay, I've lost my last three, but, no, here's
Laura, and oh, my God, she's just perfect, and everything seems to
going very well,' and she was, personality-wise, different to the other
three. She was more settled and calmer and all sorts of things going
around in my head. So, yeah, I just simply wrote, 'Is that the
difference? Will she stay because she is different?' It was just an
out-there thought." For Ms Cunliffe, there are identifiable
parallels between Folbigg's case and Lindy Chamberlain's. Both are women
who, at trial, were portrayed as mothers who had failed.
"Like
Lindy Chamberlain, every aspect of Kathleen Folbigg's motherhood has
been held up for scrutiny and many have been found wanting," she said.
"But
like Lindy Chamberlain, many of the things that have been used to
suggest that Kathleen Folbigg was a bad mother, are entirely mundane. So
for example, her desire to stay fit, to go to the gym with her friends,
her desire to earn a little extra money in the early days of Sarah's
life, her desire that her husband contribute a little bit more around
the house. These are the battles that women face every day, in every
kitchen in Australia. And yet, in the context in which a mother is
suspected of having killed a child, they become reason to suspect that
she is dangerous to the children in her care." Arguably most contentious of all was the
diary entry Folbigg wrote in October 1996, before she fell pregnant with
Laura: "Children thing still isn't happening. Thinking of forgetting
the idea. Nature, fate and the man upstairs have decided I don't get a
4th chance. And rightly so I suppose. I would like to make all my
mistakes and terrible thinking be corrected and mean something though.
Plus I'm ready to continue my family time now. Obviously I'm my father's
daughter. But I think losing my temper stage and being frustrated with
everything has passed. I now just let things happen and go with the
flow. An attitude I should of had with all my children. If given the
chance I'll have it with the next one." Folbigg's father Thomas Britton had stabbed
her birth mother, Kathleen Donavan, to death, when the young Kathleen
was only 18 months old. Later, she was placed in foster care. At
her police interview in 1999, Folbigg was asked to explain what she
meant by the phrase "Obviously I'm my father's daughter". But those
words were excluded from the evidence at her trial, and the jury never
considered it. Following her conviction, the phrase was widely
interpreted as an admission by Folbigg that she, like her father, was a
killer. But, in conversation with Ms Chapman, Folbigg denied this
saying: "I remember I told [Detective Senior Sergeant] Ryan this at the
interview, that I always thought my father, was pretty much this giant,
big loser who'd stuffed up his own life and stuffed up my life. It
wasn't saying, 'I am my father's daughter', as in he's a murderer that
was in prison for 15 years. That didn't even equate to me, that wasn't
even on my radar. Because you know, I didn't even find that out till I
was 15, 16 years old. That side of him wasn't what I was thinking about.
The side of him that I was thinking about, was, what my life may have
been, if he hadn't have gone and stuffed it up." Notably, one person who agrees that Folbigg's
diaries do not amount to confessions of killing her children is
Nicholas Cowdery who, as NSW Director of Public Prosecutions in 2003,
was ultimately responsible for her prosecution. In an interview with Australian Story last year, Mr Cowdery said he was "not persuaded that the jury got it wrong". He
said: "The diary entries were Mrs Folbigg's record. They were words
that she had deliberately committed to paper, and one may infer I think,
expressed her views." But, he conceded: "The diaries are not
confessions. They're not admissions of physically harming any children.
They are more expressions of her state of mind about certain issues. But
that has to be put in the context of when the words were written, the
events that preceded the words, and the situation that she was in when
she wrote the diaries." He added: "There's not really evidence of
motive in this case, unless inferences can be drawn from the
interpretation one puts on diary entries that were put together during
Laura's lifetime." Mr Cowdery said: "Defence counsel put to the
jury that there was an entirely reasonable alternative explanation for
the words in the diary." But, he argued: "You must not make the
mistake of taking the diary and considering it divorced from all of the
other circumstantial evidence in the case. All of it had to be taken
together. You can't just take the diary by itself, say there is a
possible interpretation of what Mrs Folbigg wrote that is consistent
with innocence. Therefore, I must have a reasonable doubt. You can't do
that. You have to take all of the circumstantial evidence into account." He
added: "If you boil it down, the only person who really knows whether
or not Kathleen Folbigg killed one or more of her children, is Kathleen
Folbigg. But, the criminal process doesn't put itself in anybody else's
mind. It looks at the evidence that is able to be considered. And in
this case, it includes some evidence from Mrs Folbigg's mind in the form
of the diary entries and how they are to be interpreted." That
context of the diaries, and how they should be interpreted, will be
closely examined tomorrow, when Folbigg faces an array of barristers
keen to question her about what exactly she meant when she committed her
own, most private thoughts to paper, more than 20 years ago. She at
last will have her say in court. Her former husband Craig Folbigg,
who handed some of Folbigg's diaries to police and who gave evidence
against her at her trial, will also be represented, and his lawyer too
has been granted leave to cross-examine her.
Folbigg's own
evidence and her cross-examination will be restricted to the diary
entries, possession of the diaries and her disposal of the diaries. Ms
Chapman, who is in daily contact with Folbigg, said her friend "is
nervously awaiting the opportunity to be speaking for herself, and
putting her diary entries into context". "She is thrilled to have
been afforded the chance to lay to rest any confusion about what others
have previously interpreted her diaries to mean.""
The entire story can be read at:
http://www.newslocker.com/en-au/region/sydney/kathleen-folbigg-to-give-her-version-of-what-diary-entries-about-her-dead-children-meant/view/
PUBLISHER'S
NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the
Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my
previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put
considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles
Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's
forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic"
section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles
Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.
