“What’s she like, and do you think she did it?”
Those words kept coming at me for months.
WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE: Natalie Barr goes one-on-one with Kathleen Folbigg.
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It started as soon as the word was out that I was doing the interview with Kathleen Folbigg, the woman who’d served 20 years for killing her four young children.
Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura were aged from 19 days to 18 months when they died.
Their Mum, Kathleen, had been labelled Australia’s worst serial killer, convicted of smothering them one by one over a 10-year period between 1989 and 1999.
She was hated.
A mum who’d been convicted of the unimaginable, who’d walked into court each day of her trial and looked to most people as cold and uncaring.
She’d been convicted largely because the court heard four babies in one family don’t just die, and in her personal diaries she’d written things that sounded like she’d killed them.
But 20 years is a long time.
And since a court locked up Kathleen and threw away the key, the world changed.
Lawyers began looking into why there wasn’t more time dedicated to discrediting some of the theories used to convict her.
There was no evidence at all that she’d smothered the children.
Experts said if you read her diary entries in their entirety, they were more like the ramblings of a depressed woman mourning her children, not of a killer.
Then, the very possible clincher: the science.
Through an incredible detective mission, Australia’s most brilliant scientists discovered Kathleen’s two daughters had a genetic mutation that was likely to have caused their deaths.
And her two sons had a different genetic mutation that may have been the cause of their deaths.
Investigations, two inquiries.
Still, years more in between, and she was pardoned and out of jail.
Australia watched as a prison van drove into a winding driveway near Coffs Harbour in NSW and Kathleen threw herself into the arms of the old school friend Tracy who’d stood by her childhood mate for years.
Not long after that, I met her.
I walked into her friend Tracy’s farmhouse and Kathleen was in the lounge room sipping on a glass of Coke.
I’m not exactly sure what I expected but I know it wasn’t this.
She didn’t seem broken after two decades in jail.
She appeared strong, articulate, determined, thoughtful and happy.
But as she sat there and told us what it was like when it dawned on her that she was the main suspect in her children’s deaths, how she felt when the guilty verdict was read out and what the years in prison were really like, I couldn’t help but count back.
She was sent to prison the year I started on Sunrise.
She was open to speak to and spend time with.
I think I expected her to be bitter.
I kept trying to put myself in her position and think about how I’d be, but of course none of us ever will be.
She’ll only tell her story once and then she will go and live the rest of her life out of the spotlight.
She has a lot of time to make up.
She was nervous before the big interview.
She was determined to tell her story… all of it.
And I wouldn’t have been doing my job if I didn’t ask her …‘Did you do it’?
7NEWS Spotlight: Unbroken – The Kathleen Folbigg Story airs Sunday at 7pm on Channel 7 and 7plus.
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