Prof Peter Schwartz’s genetic research was instrumental in securing Kathleen Folbigg’s release after 20 years behind bars
By Nick Squires
IN ROME
THE TELEGRAPH
10 June 2023
Prof Peter Schwartz played a vital role in casting reasonable doubt over Kathleen Folbigg’s original convictions
CREDIT: Italian Institute for Auxology
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On the morning of June 5, Prof Peter Schwartz, a world-renowned cardiologist, was sitting at his table enjoying his breakfast of tea and kippers.
It was then that the British-born doctor’s phone rang and he heard the news that Kathleen Folbigg, an Australian woman convicted of murdering her four small children, had been granted an official pardon and released after 20 years behind bars.
He immediately felt “goosebumps” – it was his expert opinion that had played a key role in casting doubt over Ms Folbigg’s original conviction, which led to her being described as “Australia’s worst female serial killer”.
“I was having breakfast and I received a message from a dear friend in London who knew that I had been involved,” Prof Schwartz told The Telegraph.
“It was not unexpected, but it generated a lot of emotion in me. It gave me goosebumps. It makes a big impression on you when you realise the woman has been released from jail largely because of what you have done. I’m really proud of it.”
The geneticist had submitted what he called a “rather strong and direct and blunt” deposition to an Australian review of the case which helped secure Ms Folbigg’s liberation.
He said: “I’ve saved the lives of a few people with CPR, but this was a different story. It was really against the odds.”
Along with other prominent scientists, Prof Schwartz played a vital role in casting reasonable doubt over Ms Folbigg’s original convictions.
Those findings brought to an end a nightmare for the Australian woman. Not only did she witness all four of her children die at a young age, she then spent two decades in jail, wrongly accused of murdering them and reviled by society as a monster.
On the morning of June 5, Prof Peter Schwartz, a world-renowned cardiologist, was sitting at his table enjoying his breakfast of tea and kippers.
It was then that the British-born doctor’s phone rang and he heard the news that Kathleen Folbigg, an Australian woman convicted of murdering her four small children, had been granted an official pardon and released after 20 years behind bars.
He immediately felt “goosebumps” – it was his expert opinion that had played a key role in casting doubt over Ms Folbigg’s original conviction, which led to her being described as “Australia’s worst female serial killer”.
“I was having breakfast and I received a message from a dear friend in London who knew that I had been involved,” Prof Schwartz told The Telegraph.
“It was not unexpected, but it generated a lot of emotion in me. It gave me goosebumps. It makes a big impression on you when you realise the woman has been released from jail largely because of what you have done. I’m really proud of it.”
The geneticist had submitted what he called a “rather strong and direct and blunt” deposition to an Australian review of the case which helped secure Ms Folbigg’s liberation.
He said: “I’ve saved the lives of a few people with CPR, but this was a different story. It was really against the odds.”
Along with other prominent scientists, Prof Schwartz played a vital role in casting reasonable doubt over Ms Folbigg’s original convictions.
Those findings brought to an end a nightmare for the Australian woman. Not only did she witness all four of her children die at a young age, she then spent two decades in jail, wrongly accused of murdering them and reviled by society as a monster.
Kathleen Folbigg has always protested her innocence against her convictions
REDIT: Pool via AP
It was an ordeal from which Ms Folbigg, now aged 55, has only just been liberated.
In 2003, she was jailed for 40 years for the murders of three of her children – Sarah, Laura, and Patrick – and the manslaughter of the fourth, Caleb.
The infants all died suddenly in the period between 1989 and 1999, aged between 19 days and 18 months.
Prosecutors, basing their evidence in part on highly selective extracts from Ms Folbigg’s diaries in which she wrote of her struggles with motherhood, insisted she had smothered them.
There was no forensic evidence linking her to the deaths and she always protested her innocence. However, she became a figure of hate, a woman who had committed the unthinkable act of killing her own offspring.
After spending much of her sentence in solitary confinement, she received an official pardon this week and was released from jail in the town of Grafton, 200 miles south of Brisbane.
In a brief video message, she said she would grieve for her children “forever, and that she “missed them and loved them terribly”.
It was an ordeal from which Ms Folbigg, now aged 55, has only just been liberated.
In 2003, she was jailed for 40 years for the murders of three of her children – Sarah, Laura, and Patrick – and the manslaughter of the fourth, Caleb.
The infants all died suddenly in the period between 1989 and 1999, aged between 19 days and 18 months.
Prosecutors, basing their evidence in part on highly selective extracts from Ms Folbigg’s diaries in which she wrote of her struggles with motherhood, insisted she had smothered them.
There was no forensic evidence linking her to the deaths and she always protested her innocence. However, she became a figure of hate, a woman who had committed the unthinkable act of killing her own offspring.
After spending much of her sentence in solitary confinement, she received an official pardon this week and was released from jail in the town of Grafton, 200 miles south of Brisbane.
In a brief video message, she said she would grieve for her children “forever, and that she “missed them and loved them terribly”.
Pain of losing children and being jailed
Rhanee Rego, Ms Folbigg’s lawyer, said: “It is impossible to comprehend the injury that has been inflicted upon Kathleen Folbigg – the pain of losing her children and close to two decades locked away in maximum security prisons.”
A fresh inquiry led by Tom Bathurst, a retired Australian judge, accepted that cutting edge research on gene mutations had cast serious doubt over her conviction.
The case illustrated how revolutionary advances in science can make all the difference, coming up with new evidence that can overturn criminal convictions.
An international team of scientists found that Ms Folbigg’s two daughters and two sons suffered from incredibly rare genetic mutations that most likely led to their deaths.
The chances of four children from the same family having such mutations seemed infinitesimally small – and yet scientists showed that it existed.
They found that Ms Folbigg’s daughters shared a genetic mutation called Calm2 G114R, which can cause sudden cardiac death.
Laura and Patrick Folbigg, two of Kathleen Folbigg’s four children she was wrongly convicted of killing
CREDIT: New South Wales Supreme Court/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
They also discovered that her sons possessed another genetic mutation which in mice has been linked to sudden-onset epilepsy.
One of her sons, Patrick, suffered from epileptic seizures in the months before his death.
In what has been described as one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in Australian history, scientists concluded there was reasonable doubt that Ms Folbigg had nothing to do with her children’s deaths – simply that she had been dealt an unbelievably bad genetic hand.
Born in Huntingdon during the Second World War to an Italian mother and a Hungarian father, Prof Schwartz is a prominent scientist at the Italian Institute for Auxology, based in Milan, where he studies genetic disorders that can lead to sudden cardiac deaths in children.
In particular, he has devoted 50 years to a condition called the long QT syndrome (LQTS), a disorder that can cause fast, chaotic heartbeats, also known as arrhythmias.
It is very similar to the mutations in the Calm gene that Ms Folbigg’s baby girls suffered from.
Asked how long it took him to realise that there could be a natural explanation for the deaths of the Folbigg children, Prof Schwartz said: “It was immediate. We know that if an infant dies suddenly and they don’t have a knife in the back and they have this genetic mutation, then this is the cause of death.”
He was brought in on the case in 2019 after being contacted by Prof Carola Garcia Vinuesa, a Spanish scientist who had become convinced of Ms Folbigg’s innocence.
They also discovered that her sons possessed another genetic mutation which in mice has been linked to sudden-onset epilepsy.
One of her sons, Patrick, suffered from epileptic seizures in the months before his death.
In what has been described as one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in Australian history, scientists concluded there was reasonable doubt that Ms Folbigg had nothing to do with her children’s deaths – simply that she had been dealt an unbelievably bad genetic hand.
Born in Huntingdon during the Second World War to an Italian mother and a Hungarian father, Prof Schwartz is a prominent scientist at the Italian Institute for Auxology, based in Milan, where he studies genetic disorders that can lead to sudden cardiac deaths in children.
In particular, he has devoted 50 years to a condition called the long QT syndrome (LQTS), a disorder that can cause fast, chaotic heartbeats, also known as arrhythmias.
It is very similar to the mutations in the Calm gene that Ms Folbigg’s baby girls suffered from.
Asked how long it took him to realise that there could be a natural explanation for the deaths of the Folbigg children, Prof Schwartz said: “It was immediate. We know that if an infant dies suddenly and they don’t have a knife in the back and they have this genetic mutation, then this is the cause of death.”
He was brought in on the case in 2019 after being contacted by Prof Carola Garcia Vinuesa, a Spanish scientist who had become convinced of Ms Folbigg’s innocence.
The scientific breakthrough
Prof Vinuesa is now at the Crick Institute in London, but at the time was the head of the immunology department at the Australian National University. She became involved in 2018 after being contacted by David Wallace, a former student who had since gone into law and was working on the Folbigg case.
She began to investigate the deaths of the children, sending Dr Todor Arsov, a colleague, to visit Ms Folbigg in prison and obtain a DNA sample from her.
They sequenced the Australian woman’s genome and found that she had a mutation in the Calm2 gene that could cause sudden infant death syndrome.
They then found the same mutation in Ms Folbiggs’ two daughters.
“As evidence, I think this finding would carry the same weight as having a confession or an eyewitness to a crime,” Dr Arsov told El Pais newspaper.
Patrick and Caleb were found to carry two rare variants of the BSN gene, which causes lethal epilepsy in mice.
“The theory that she had killed her children had no evidence. The only evidence was circumstantial because she was the one finding them dead,” said Prof Vinuesa.
The science was “irrefutable” in terms of casting doubt over the convictions.
Breaking the stigma
For many people involved in the case, Ms Folbigg was emblematic of how women whose children die in unclear circumstances are often stigmatised and judged.
Dr Hayley Cullen, an associate lecturer in psychology at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and Dr Celine van Golde, a senior lecturer in forensic psychology at the University of Sydney, wrote an opinion piece on the subject for The Conversation website.
They said: “Women who have been wrongfully convicted of murdering their children will not only endure the stigma and discrimination… but they may also be battling with the tremendous grief of losing their child. Prison can stunt the grieving process, which is a necessary psychological response to loss.”
They said data from the US revealed that among wrongfully convicted women, one in three were convicted of crimes that involved harming children.
And women are “three times more likely than men to be wrongly convicted for crimes that didn’t occur”.
Ms Folbigg’s 20 years of wrongful imprisonment followed a deeply traumatic childhood. She was just 18 months old when her father, a criminal and underworld enforcer, murdered her mother, stabbing her 24 times with a carving knife.
As a child, she shuttled between the homes of relatives before finally ending up with foster parents in Newcastle, Australia.
“She came from a very troubled family – her father killed her mother. She was the ideal monster for the public, the ideal scapegoat,” said Prof Schwartz.
The Folbigg case drew parallels with that of Lindy Chamberlain and the dingo baby death
CREDIT: National Museum of Australia/Channel 5
In Australia, parallels have been drawn with another notorious case of a mother accused of killing her child.
Lindy Chamberlain was sentenced to life in prison in 1982 for allegedly murdering her baby daughter, Azaria, despite insisting the child had been carried off by a dingo while the family were camping near Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock.
She was eventually freed years later when a jacket that had been worn by the little girl was found near a dingo’s lair.
Ms Folbigg’s conviction came at a time when much credence was given to a theory called Meadow’s Law, named after Roy Meadow, the British paediatrician who coined it.
According to his maxim, one sudden death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three must be murder unless there is proof to the contrary.
However, Mr Meadow was later discredited and for a time was struck off the medical register.
Doubt was also cast on the convictions by Prof Peter Fleming, a leading British paediatrician and world-renowned expert on sudden infant deaths.
He was asked by Mr Bathurst whether children could be smothered to death with no signs of injury being left, as had been argued during the trial in 2003.
He said that children who are smothered “wriggle” and “fight vigorously”, with their teeth causing injuries to the inside of their mouths. The Folbigg children did not have such injuries, Prof Fleming said.
“I would find it very hard to believe that somebody could suffocate them by putting something over their face or obstructing their airways and leaving no marks,” he told the inquiry. “I would find that extraordinary.”
In Australia, parallels have been drawn with another notorious case of a mother accused of killing her child.
Lindy Chamberlain was sentenced to life in prison in 1982 for allegedly murdering her baby daughter, Azaria, despite insisting the child had been carried off by a dingo while the family were camping near Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock.
She was eventually freed years later when a jacket that had been worn by the little girl was found near a dingo’s lair.
Ms Folbigg’s conviction came at a time when much credence was given to a theory called Meadow’s Law, named after Roy Meadow, the British paediatrician who coined it.
According to his maxim, one sudden death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three must be murder unless there is proof to the contrary.
However, Mr Meadow was later discredited and for a time was struck off the medical register.
Doubt was also cast on the convictions by Prof Peter Fleming, a leading British paediatrician and world-renowned expert on sudden infant deaths.
He was asked by Mr Bathurst whether children could be smothered to death with no signs of injury being left, as had been argued during the trial in 2003.
He said that children who are smothered “wriggle” and “fight vigorously”, with their teeth causing injuries to the inside of their mouths. The Folbigg children did not have such injuries, Prof Fleming said.
“I would find it very hard to believe that somebody could suffocate them by putting something over their face or obstructing their airways and leaving no marks,” he told the inquiry. “I would find that extraordinary.”
‘Australia’s greatest miscarriage of justice’
The Australian Academy of Science, which also played a key role in clearing Ms Folbigg’s name, said her original conviction was “Australia’s greatest miscarriage of justice”.
Anna-Maria Arabia, the academy’s chief executive, said: “What this case has absolutely shown is there’s an absence of a mechanism for the justice system to consider new information, particularly scientific information.”
Halfway across the world, in his house in Milan, Prof Schwartz agreed: “The case shows that errors can be made and that they can and should be corrected.
“It demonstrates the importance of judges relying not on generic experts like cardiologists but on experts on the specific disease that is under investigation. And judges should be open to reviewing cases if new scientific evidence comes to light. I hope it will create a precedent.”
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