INTERVIEW: Daily Telegraph reporter Jane Hansen November 19, 2022 interview of fellow News Corp reporter Natalie O'Brien about the first week of the latest Kathleen Folbigg inquiry - which has taken a very unexpected turn. (Thanks to Dr. Bob Moles of 'Networked Knowledge' for drawing this important interview to our attention. Link below); HL);
GIST: "On 19 November 2022 Jane Hansen of the Daily Telegraph is interviewed by fellow News Corp reporter Natalie O'Brien.
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Natalie O'Brien: Today we look back at the first week of the latest Kathleen Folbigg inquiry, which took an unexpected turn. We are talking this week about Kathleen Folbigg and the inquiry that’s unfolding about the murder of her three children and the manslaughter of a fourth. Jane Hansen our reporter has been there all week listening to the evidence - and she’s had some interesting days. Tell us about those Jane. There’s been some explosive new evidence hasn’t there?
Jane Hansen: That’s right. So, the inquiry was set down for two weeks to hear this ‘science’ – to hear more about the science which suggests that two of the girls, Laura and Sarah, inherited a genetic mutation from their mother, which causes cardiac arrythmia and sudden death. So, on day two, when the Danish professors came all the way over from Denmark, they gave their evidence on Tuesday.
The original evidence was that the mutation that they had isolated and recreated - they could show in a test tube that it basically stopped calcium binding - and that’s an ion that tells your heart to contract. So – and there had been some criticism about that original science, which was published in 2021, and which forced the inquiry to begin with because it was so impressive that 151 scientists signed a petition to release Kathleen Folbigg.
But some of the criticism that first came out from cardiologists was that the children were too young - that that didn’t fit the clinical experience of children dying of cardiac arrythmias at that age. It usually happened much older you know when they were eight years old, nine years old - and those cases were more associated with sodium channel binding.
So, the Danish professors put it through more tests, only two weeks ago, and found that this mutation also affected sodium channel binding which causes heart arrythmias of another type. So, if anything else, it solidifies the science and made it stronger.
But the inquiry then had to be adjourned so that all the other experts could get their heads around the new science.
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Natalie O'Brien: So, you’re saying that they did some additional testing just two weeks ago and presented it to this inquiry which was sort of a bit of a shock and so now we’ll have to wait for the next instalment? When will that be?
Jane Hansen: Well, the inquiry was always going to be split into two. Two weeks in November to listen to the scientific evidence - and two weeks in February to listen to all the other evidence including the diary entries. So, you’ll remember back in 2003 it was a very circumstantial case. There was absolutely no forensic evidence that any of the children has been suffocated - and it was the diaries and the suggestive nature of that that they argued proved her guilt. Highly circumstantial. The diary entries were open to interpretation, there was no blatant ‘I killed the children’. And so, the new science and the diary entries and the other evidence will now be heard in a three-week block in February.
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Natalie O'Brien: That’s really interesting, isn’t it? The diary entries as you say don’t say ‘I killed the children’. They do talk about her mental state at the time when she had the children. Is it possible that if you look at the diaries in their entirety, this is just a woman talking about the tribulations of life as a mother with young children, and she’s getting those things off her chest and it may not have anyhing to do with the deaths of the children?
Jane Hansen: Yes, well several people much smarter than me, have analysed them and one is professor Emma Cunliffe who’s a professor of law and she wrote Murder Medicine and Motherhood and she analysed the diaries and she said some of those entries were disturbing.
And when she took them all into account in their entirety, she said it becomes plainly obvious that this is just a woman looking for answers where there’s – like why did my children die?
And she also went into maternal bereavement science and this is a very common thing for mothers that lose children, they blame themselves.
They also blame themselves for things that they’ve not been able to control, and feel guilty about that. So, we also in the podcast, we speak to professor James Penneybacker who put those diaries through his AI computer program which looks for patterns of language that indicates guilt. He found nothing – nothing.
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Natalie O'Brien: That’s really interesting, isn’t it? So, are we hearing all of this evidence at the inquiry?
Jane Hansen: In February you’ll hear all of that evidence about the diaries – in February. That lot was put down to listen to psychologists, psychiatrists which weren’t really listened to in the last inquiry in 2019.
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Natalie O'Brien: Right. So just to recap how we got here. This is the second inquiry, isn’t it? She’s been called all sorts of things, and she’s been in jail for how long?
Jane Hansen: 19 years,
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Natalie O'Brien: Right, ok and due to serve another ...
Jane Hansen: Six years, she gets out in 2028.
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Natalie O'Brien: So, it’s been a very long time. So, during that time she’s been appealing her conviction?
Jane Hansen: So, what happened after she appealed, she lost her appeal, lawyers for Folbigg started looking into the case and hired some other pathologists that would test the case against her because there were holes in the original case because the fourth child Laura, her autopsy showed evidence of myocarditis which can kill you, but the pathologist, Dr Alan Cala, marked her death undetermined purely because three other children had died in the family.
In that autopsy report Dr Alan Cala said I would be looking to exclude homicide because there could be smothering here because nobody’s heard of four children in one family suffering from sudden infant death syndrome.
What we know now after the genome was mapped is that if you have one sudden infant death in the family, you are four times more likely to have another one because of the role of genetics because sudden infant death now, can be blamed in up to one in three cases on genetics.
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Natalie O'Brien: Well, that’s extraordinary, isn’t it? It throws open the possibility that maybe this is the case that maybe she didn’t do it? So, I guess, there’s a lot to come. How’s it been in the inquiry, are all the family there?
Jane Hansen: No, just her friends who have steadfastly stood by her.
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Natalie O'Brien: Right.
Jane Hansen: , Craig Folbigg, her ex-husband does not want anything to do with this inquiry. I mean he’s lost four children too, let’s not forget that and I think he’s well and truly over it.
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Natalie O'Brien: I’m sure he is and it keeps being dragged up and for him it must be a nightmare after a nightmare. What do you find the most interesting part of this case do you think? You’ve done a podcast on it, you’ve really taken that deep-dive, where most of us are just skimming the surface, I guess.
Jane Hansen: If she’s innocent, I can’t imagine how it’s been for her and how horrific this would have been. But what’s been really interesting for me, is to find out about her past which was very traumatic. She was born into a domestic violence family. Her father had already slashed the throat of a previous partner and spent time in jail. And then he took up with Kathleen’s mother Kathleen Donovan and stabbed her 24 times, when Kathleen was only 18 months old. In that time, she was left with him alone. Child protection reports back then suggest that she was sexually abused as well. So, here’s a kid that’s been terribly damaged at a very young age that has probably learned to shut down, and disassociate. So, some of the reports I’ve read about her, because she came across as cold and unemotional, and in fact Craig had described her grieving as weird. But you know psychiatrists that have assessed her have said well, she has complex post-traumatic-stress-
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Natalie O'Brien: We’ve been down this path before in judging people about their grieving process in public, haven’t we? I think Lindy Chamberlain sort of springs to mind and we got it very wrong, I think as a nation, when people thought that she wasn’t grieving for her child?
Jane Hansen: Its very judgmental, isn’t it?
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Natalie O'Brien: Very judgmental! And she was just doing it in a different way.
Jane Hansen: Yeh, well she was possibly in shock.
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Natalie O'Brien: Of course.
Jane Hansen: Well, I think that nowadays we’re a lot more trauma-informed, I would hope. But you know, I’ve experienced that myself, I lost a child at 8 months of age and I – you don’t know how to grieve - and there are expectations that you’re either supposed to be a blubbering mess or ways I don’t know how you cope - or if you do express your horror, people are sort of frightened of that so, it’s a very complex area.
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Natalie O'Brien: Well, it certainly is, we’ll have to stay tuned to Jane’s reporting and to her podcast ‘Mother’s Guilt’."
The entire interview can be read at:
http://netk.net.au/Folbigg/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resurce. 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/
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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