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."
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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."
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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.
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/c
