Four of Kathleen Folbigg's children died in the Hunter region of New South Wales between 1989 and 1999, each found unresponsive at home: Caleb Gibson at nineteen days, Patrick Allen at eight months, Sarah Kathleen at ten months, and Laura Elizabeth at nineteen months. After Laura's death, police looked at the four together. Folbigg was arrested on April 19, 2001, and after a seven-week trial in 2003 a jury convicted her of murdering Patrick, Sarah and Laura and of the manslaughter of Caleb. She spent twenty years in prison before the courts accepted that there was reasonable doubt that anyone had killed them.
She had been born Kathleen Britton in Sydney on June 14, 1967. On January 8, 1969, when she was eighteen months old, her father, Thomas John "Taffy" Britton, stabbed her mother, Kathleen Mary Donovan, twenty-four times and killed her. He was arrested the next day, served fifteen years for murder and was deported to England. She was raised in foster care.
There was no physical evidence of smothering in any of the four deaths. The prosecution's case rested on two things. The first was the improbability of four sudden infant deaths in one family, argued in the spirit of what was known as Meadow's law, the proposition that one such death is a tragedy, two suspicious and three murder. The second was a set of entries from her private diaries, read to the jury as admissions of guilt. On May 21, 2003, she was convicted and sentenced to forty years with a non-parole period of thirty; on appeal the sentence was reduced to thirty years with a non-parole period of twenty-five.
The case against her came apart over the following two decades. Meadow's law was discredited internationally after it had helped produce the wrongful convictions of Sally Clark and Angela Cannings in England. An inquiry in 2018 and 2019 reviewed her case and upheld the convictions. Then genetic sequencing found that Sarah and Laura carried a novel variant of the CALM2 gene, associated with sudden cardiac death in infancy and inherited from their mother, and that the two boys carried a separate variant linked to lethal epilepsy in mice. In 2021 ninety scientists, among them two Nobel laureates, petitioned the Governor of New South Wales for her release.
A second inquiry, under the former chief justice Tom Bathurst, reported in 2023 that there was reasonable doubt as to her guilt on each count. It also found that the diary entries were the writings of a grieving, self-blaming mother and had been misread. On June 5, 2023, the Governor, Margaret Beazley, granted her an unconditional pardon, and she walked out of prison. On December 14, 2023, the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed all four convictions.
She applied for compensation in 2024, with a claim that included a long statement of her twenty-four years with the case, submissions on errors by agents of the government, and an expert assessment of her losses. On August 7, 2025, Attorney-General Michael Daley granted her an ex gratia payment of $2 million. Her solicitor, Rhanee Rego, called it "a moral affront" and "woefully inadequate and ethically indefensible," and Folbigg herself called it insulting. Emma Cunliffe, one of the first lawyers to argue she had been wrongly convicted and by then a law professor at the University of British Columbia, said the offer did not reflect the gravity of the government's wrongdoing or its slow response to the evidence of her innocence. Premier Chris Minns defended the figure as the most the state could justify and said her lawyers were free to sue.
The case is one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in Australian history. By the courts' final judgment, no crime was ever committed: four children died, and their mother was imprisoned for two decades for deaths that the genetic evidence indicates were natural.