Kathleen Folbigg didn’t kill her four children. The children had all died before the age of two, between 1989 and 1999, and the finger was immediately pointed at their mother. Today it was discovered that their hearts had actually stopped beating due to a gene that favors cot death. The 55-year-old woman accused of multiple homicide served 20 years in prison before being pardoned and released from prison today by Sydney court. She has also been rehabilitated from allegations, circulated in Australia’s media, that she is “the worst serial killer” in the country. There was actually no evidence against her, only the belief that four children could not have died one after the other by accident.
Advances in genetics, DNA tests and the appeal in 2021 of dozens of scientists and Nobel laureates have led to the discovery that the woman, and at least her two daughters, are carriers of the Calm2 gene, which disturbs the electrical signals of the heart and favors sudden death. “With the evidence available today, we can conclude that there is reasonable doubt as to Ms. Folbigg’s guilt,” the prosecutor said. Sally Dowling a few days ago, at the end of the hearings. Today came the pardon sentence. And release from Grafton Jail.
“The genetic disease caused by the Calm2 gene is called calmodulinopathy and fortunately it is very rare”, reassures the professor Peter Schwartz, director of the Center for cardiac arrhythmias of genetic origin of the Irccs Auxologico in Milan, one of the world‘s leading experts on these conditions. There are 134 cases surveyed in the world and if diagnosed, the disorder can be kept under control.
Kathleen Folbigg’s four children had all died suddenly while in cradles. Her mother had been accused of smothering them, but she had never stopped pleading innocent. Her husband, far from defending her, had strengthened his suspicions about her even before her judges. Caleb he had stopped breathing suddenly at 19 days. His brother Patrick, who also suffered from epilepsy, two years later, at the age of 8 months. After another two years it was Sarah, aged 10 months, who died, followed by the youngest Laurawho lost her life in 1999 at 18 months, also while sleeping.
Back then, genetics was in its infancy. The year of Folbigg’s 40-year sentence – 2003 – is the same in which the first reading of human DNA was completed. “Today we learned that mutations in the Calm2 gene affect electrical signal transmission in the heart and can lead to sudden death in children,” said Schwartz, who served as scientific advisor to the Sydney trial. The stubbornness of the lawyers and the listening given by the judges to the reasons of medicine today led to the pardon and release of Folbigg, not by full acquittal but by “reasonable doubt”.
Retired judge Tom Bathurst, who reviewed the sentence, called the woman “a caring mother, with no other definition possible”. The Australian Academy of Sciences, which had fought for the deepening of the investigations, has finally expressed its relief. “It is one of the first cases in the world in which a scientific academy has acted as a consultant during a criminal trial”.
The case of Kathleen Folbigg in 2021 had also been treated by a scientific article in the journal of cardiology Europace. Its authors are, among others, the two Italian researchers of the Auxologico Lia Crotti and Peter Schwartz. “I can’t know whether the woman is guilty or not,” Schwartz says. “But the death in sleep of at least the two girls is entirely compatible with the mutation from which they unfortunately suffered”.