Danish research could lead to acquittal of Australian woman for the deaths of her four children - she has served 18 years in prison

This debate is raging across Australia, and research with funding from the Lundbeck Foundation plays a significant role in an attempt by 90 eminent scientists to secure her acquittal. She is a victim of a miscarriage of justice, say the scientists, who also accuse the justice system of the Australian state of New South Wales of ignoring scientific facts.

It is almost inevitable that a woman accused of deliberately killing her baby will be pilloried.

She will most likely be presented, in the media as well as at trial, as heartless, in keeping with the picture of ultimate evil that springs to mind when we think of infanticide.

Because how can a woman take the life of a baby she has carried under her very own heart, a baby she is meant to protect and guide through life with her motherly love.

If she declares herself innocent of this charge, and if there is no actual evidence, the prosecution must, of course, prove her guilt probable beyond any reasonable doubt in order to convict her.

However, the phrase ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ is open to interpretation. And it certainly does not help the woman’s case if the charge is not “merely” one murder but four!

Kathleen Folbigg was charged with four counts of infanticide when she appeared at trial in 2003 in the Australian state of New South Wales.

She was 35 when she was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison. The court ruled that she had killed her four children, born between 1989 and 1999: Caleb in 1989 when he was just 19 days old; Patrick in 1991 at eight months; Sarah in 1993 at 10 months; and Laura when she was 18 months old in 1999.

All of the children were found dead at home. Their post-mortems were unable to provide a satisfactory explanation, and there were no circumstances that reinforced a suspicion of murder.

As a result, the New South Wales prosecutor was unable to prove in 2003 that Kathleen Folbigg had killed her children. Nevertheless, the prosecutor claimed that she had smothered Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura.

This claim, which the court cited in Folbigg’s conviction for infanticide, was partially based on an interpretation of the highly emotional notes in her diary, which had been handed over to the police by her then husband, father of the four children, Craig Folbigg. The case then gathered momentum.

In addition to the diary entries, the prosecutor based their opinion on the so-called Meadow's Law, which states the following in relation to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, SIDS: ‘It is a tragedy when one baby dies suddenly. If a family loses two children in this way, it begins to look suspicious. And if three children die, it must be considered murder until there is evidence to the contrary.’

This so-called law, which today is considered rather disingenuous, is ascribed to British paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow (b. 1933), whose scientific work was seriously discredited at the turn of the millennium, partly due to his testimony in a British SIDS case in 1999. His statement led to the conviction of an innocent woman, Sally Clark, for murdering her two babies.

Sally Clark, who was acquitted in 2003, died in 2007, mentally broken.

I'm innocent

Kathleen Folbigg consistently claimed in court in New South Wales in 2003, and her 18 years in prison have not changed her view of the matter one jot. She insists that all four of her children died of inexplicable causes.

The Australian legal system will now have to try to put on a bold face because it will soon be required to address the hard scientific facts that support Kathleen Folbigg’s claim.

These are partly provided by an international study with the participation of four Danish researchers from the universities of Aarhus and Aalborg and funding from the Lundbeck Foundation.

You've got mail

A few days ago, the authorities in New South Wales received a petition signed by 90 eminent scientists.

In no uncertain terms, it calls on Margaret Beazley, the state governor, to order the immediate release of Kathleen Folbigg because:

‘The entire time that Kathleen Folbigg has been in custody is a result of a miscarriage of justice.’

‘A reasonable person should have doubt about Ms Folbigg killing her four children.’

‘Deciding otherwise rejects medical science and the law that sets the standard of proof.’

The 90 scientists are a representative cross-section of Australia’s leading scientists and eminent scientists from a range of other countries, including the USA, the UK, Italy, Israel and Denmark.

A few Nobel Prize winners and the Chair of the Australian Academy of Science appear on the list, as do four Danish scientists: Helene Halkjær Jensen, postdoc, Malene Brohus, postdoc, and Professor Michael Toft Overgaard, all from the Department of Chemistry and Bioscience, Aalborg University, and Associate Professor Mette Nyegaard from the Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University.

A life-threatening mutation

The four Danish scientists are on the list for obvious reasons. They provided a considerable proportion of the scientific material Kathleen Folbigg and her lawyers are now asking the governor to look at more closely.

Two of these scientists, Mette Nyegaard and Michael Toft Overgaard, and a team of their colleagues made the initial discovery around ten years ago – completely unaware of the Kathleen Folbigg case.

They studied a Swedish family which, for decades, had shown a pronounced – but hitherto unexplained – incidence of fainting fits and sudden cardiac death in its young members.

With the help of blood samples, the Danish researchers were able to prove that the members of the Swedish family had a mutation in a calmodulin gene.

This gene produces the calmodulin protein that plays a key role in regulating cardiac function, not only in humans and other mammals but also in, for instance, frogs and fish. Mette Nyegaard explains that this is a protein which nature does its utmost to protect against mutation because changes to the protein can have very serious consequences – in the worst case, life-threatening consequences:

‘After a great many DNA analyses of blood samples taken from the Swedish family, we were the first in the world to be able to demonstrate that calmodulin mutations can cause sudden cardiac death. The explanation is that calcium signalling in the heart is derailed – and, in the worst case, arrhythmia can be so severe as to cause death. Nature fights so hard against mutations in this vital protein that there are only 76 examples of patients with a calmodulin mutation in scientific literature.’

Kathleen Folbigg has one of these extremely rare mutations.

This became clear when Australian Professor Carola Garcia de Vinuesa, who is highly committed to the case, analysed Folbigg’s DNA.

She then did the same for the four children Folbigg was convicted of smothering. The analyses were based on tissue samples and the blood recorded on hospital heel-prick cards at birth.

It turned out that two of the dead children – Sarah and Laura – had inherited the calmodulin mutation from their mother. Professor Overgaard explains: ‘If a baby with a calmodulin mutation suddenly dies, with the knowledge we have today, we would consider it likely to be the cause of death.’

Back to court

In 2019, Kathleen Folbigg was back in court. Her lawyers had succeeded in forcing a hearing to elucidate whether the four children could have died of natural causes after all – meaning that Folbigg was innocent.

During the hearing, it came to light that Kathleen Folbigg has an extremely rare – and hitherto unrecorded – calmodulin mutation, and that she passed this on to her two girls.

With reference to the Danish research article from 2012, among others, it was also stated that there is a scientifically proven correlation between calmodulin mutations and severe cardiac arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death.

However, this changed nothing because the conclusion of the hearing was that, based on consideration of all elements of the case, the original 2003 sentence should stand.

The fact that the petition by the 90 scientists has captured the Australian news agenda – and even found its way to major international media such as the New York Times – is thanks to new scientific data that emerged after the hearing in 2019.

One source of new data is a study conducted in 2020 by the four Danish researchers, with funding from the Lundbeck Foundation. This was published a few months ago in the international science journal EP Europace.

The scientific article, which was written in collaboration with scientists from Australia, Italy, the USA, Canada and France, analyses with the help of laboratory tests the effect of the calmodulin mutation Sarah and Laura Folbigg inherited from their mother.

And the article concludes that this mutation can be associated with cardiac arrhythmia and sudden cardiac death in infants.

Furthermore, the scientific article contains the results of the DNA analyses of Caleb and Patrick, the two male babies Kathleen was also convicted of killing.

Contrary to their sisters, the boys had not inherited the calmodulin mutation. However, Caleb and Patrick had two other, exceedingly rare mutations in a gene known as BSN.

In studies with mice, these mutations have been linked to lethal epileptic seizures in young animals.

The boys inherited one of these mutations from their mother. It must be assumed that the second mutation comes from their father, Craig Folbigg – although he has so far refused to provide a DNA sample to help identify the cause of the four infants’ deaths.

The 90 international scientists conclude their petition to the governor of New South Wales by saying that the scientific data currently available – and not least the 2020 Danish study – provide ‘credible medical and pathological evidence that points towards natural causes of death in all four Folbigg children’.

And they add that Kathleen Folbigg – who has been called “Australia’s worst serial killer” by the tabloids and has been physically assaulted by fellow inmates over her 18 years behind bars – ‘should immediately be released from jail’.

Not only out of consideration for her legal rights but to prevent a precedent meaning that ‘cogent medical and scientific evidence can simply be ignored in preference to subjective interpretations of circumstantial evidence’.

The governor of New South Wales is currently mulling over all of these issues.