Folbigg's four children died between 1989 and 1999 in New South Wales: Caleb at nineteen days, Patrick at eight months, Sarah at ten months, and Laura at nineteen months. Each was found unresponsive at home. She had herself been left motherless at eighteen months, her father having killed her mother, and was raised in foster care.
The four children were Caleb Gibson, nineteen days; Patrick Allen, eight months; Sarah Kathleen, ten months; and Laura Elizabeth, nineteen months.
She was tried in 2003. There was no physical evidence of smothering in any of the four deaths. The prosecution's case rested on the improbability of four sudden infant deaths in one family, argued through what was called Meadow's law, the proposition that one is tragedy, two suspicious and three murder, and on entries from her private diaries, which were read to the jury as admissions of guilt. She was convicted of three murders and one manslaughter and sentenced to forty years, reduced on appeal to thirty with a twenty-five-year minimum.
The case unravelled over the following two decades. Meadow's law was discredited internationally, having already produced the wrongful convictions of Sally Clark and Angela Cannings in England. In 2018 and 2019 an inquiry reviewed the case and upheld the convictions. Then genetic sequencing found that Sarah and Laura carried a novel variant in the CALM2 gene, associated with sudden cardiac death in infancy, inherited from their mother, and that the two boys carried a separate variant linked to lethal epilepsy in mice. In 2021 ninety scientists, including two Nobel laureates, petitioned for her release.
A second inquiry, under former chief justice Tom Bathurst, reported in 2023 that there was reasonable doubt as to her guilt in each case; it also found that the diary entries were the writings of a grieving, self-blaming mother and had been misread. She was pardoned and released on June 5, 2023, and on December 14, 2023 the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed all four convictions. In 2025 the New South Wales government agreed to pay her compensation.
She spent twenty years in prison. In 2025 the New South Wales government agreed to pay her compensation. The record should be read as one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in Australian history, and this entry exists to say so: the fields above carry no victim count, because there were no victims.