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- [00:00]
Chloe Hegemotheo
Hello, I'm Chloe Hegemotheo. I'm a narrative editor at the observer and the host of the Tortoise Investigates podcast. Lucky boy. I'm popping up here to say thank you all for continuing to listen and to support Tortoise Investigates from the observer, if you like what you've heard already. The good news is there are more observer podcasts that you may not know about yet. There's the news meeting where Tortoise journalists and special guests battle it out to see whose story will lead the news. The sense maker, one story every weekday to make sense of the world. And the Sloan Newscast, a weekly investigation into a story we think you should know about. We're proud to bring you our journalism in audio, so make sure you follow all our shows so you don't miss a single observer podcast episode.
- [00:56]
Rachel Sylvester
The Observer Last time on the Lab Detective there's that.
- [01:05]
Kathleen Folbig
It's a millisecond of non belief. It's a, you know, it's sort of like, I don't believe this is happening. This is ridiculous.
- [01:10]
Todor Aarsoff
The assumption was that if there was more than one of these deaths in.
- [01:14]
Kathleen Folbig
A family, that you were sort of.
- [01:15]
Todor Aarsoff
Basically looking at a woman who was.
- [01:17]
Kathleen Folbig
Having babies and then killing them. The whole thing was circumstantial. There's not one ounce of actual evidence. They relied on the diaries as to create a, a so called window into my mind. So 2003 was when I was convicted and put inside.
- [01:38]
Rachel Sylvester
So you're mourning your children and then you're in prison. That must have just been horrific. What was it like when the door shut?
- [01:48]
Kathleen Folbig
I am not sure how to answer that. He led downstairs. It all clangs. I said it's all very. A cold. It's, it's. I, I pretty much just switched off. It was all just a daze and you're just walking around going through the process.
- [02:02]
Rachel Sylvester
It's a big news story in Australia when Kathleen Folbig is convicted in 2003. The trial generates reams of coverage and headlines that stick.
- [02:13]
Emma Cunliffe
Australia's worst female serial killer, Kathleen Folbig, has broken.
- [02:17]
Rachel Sylvester
By now, Kathleen's been labeled Australia's worst female female serial killer, Australia's most hated woman. And how are the other prisoners with you?
- [02:27]
Kathleen Folbig
To begin with, when you go into a prison for something like that, it's dangerous. Yeah. There's no other word for it because, you know, other inmates, if they were to get their hands on you are likely to want to do some serious damage because, you know, you get called a child killer. You're on the lowest rung other than a pedophile.
- [02:46]
Rachel Sylvester
For her own safety, Kathleen is isolated from the other women in prison. She's all alone, left to grieve for her children and come to terms with her new reality. The only certainty is that she'll be spending most of the rest of her life in prison. Did you have a sense of despair yourself or did you. Were you determined to fight for justice?
- [03:09]
Kathleen Folbig
I've always been determined, yeah. I was always like, you know, you got this wrong. I said, so that was basically how I live my life. Did I go and crow and constantly say so? Not whilst I was inside, no. Because it falls on deaf ears. No one wants to know.
- [03:22]
Rachel Sylvester
Throughout the trial, Kathleen maintained her innocence and her lawyers had plans to appeal the conviction. But it felt futile. Kathleen didn't see the point in making a noise about her case. She was just focused on surviving.
- [03:38]
Tracey Chapman
I will never forget the look on her face as she was being put into that prison van. I still, even as I talk to you, I see that face. It was broken. And when you feel that because you know that person, I just could not imagine not reaching out to her and saying, what do you need? How can I help you? I see you. I see you.
- [04:05]
Rachel Sylvester
Amongst the many people who'd watched Kathleen's life unravel in public was someone who'd known her since she was very young, an old school friend called Tracy Chapman, who just couldn't believe that she was a murderer.
- [04:18]
Tracey Chapman
I wrote her a one page letter or whatever it was, and I sent it to the jail.
- [04:24]
Rachel Sylvester
Tracy was determined to prove Kathleen's innocence and she stuck with her until eventually they reached the lab detective.
- [04:33]
Kathleen Folbig
My best friend, Tracey Chapman. She decided to become the advocate for it all. Big decision for her because it sacrificed a lot in her life to do so. As far as she was concerned, what was being presented was not right and not correct. She was just as determined as me to, yeah, to help get me out and do what needed to be done.
- [04:52]
Rachel Sylvester
I'm Rachel Sylvester and from Tortoise Investigates, this is the lab detective. Episode 2 the Eureka Moment.
- [05:10]
Tracey Chapman
I mean, we all knew she'd lost the children, but not once did that meet my mind with suspicion. So I was horrified.
- [05:18]
Rachel Sylvester
Tracey first met Kathleen when they started school together. They were kind of opposites. Kathleen was a bit of a tomboy. She told me she always looked messy in photographs. Tracy, on the other hand, was pristine and blonde.
- [05:35]
Kathleen Folbig
She had coke bottle glasses because her sight was really bad.
- [05:38]
Tracey Chapman
I was always pretty insecure because a lot of kids used to pick on me. I had really thick glasses, so I get called names like four eyes a lot.
- [05:47]
Rachel Sylvester
Tracey was bullied at school, and she didn't have the confidence to stand up for herself. So one day, Kathleen decided to do something about it.
- [05:56]
Kathleen Folbig
I don't like bullies. I never have. And I think I just marched up and was pretty much going to leave the girl alone.
- [06:02]
Tracey Chapman
Cath. Yeah, she would definitely go over there with the hands on the hips and stand there and tell them off, you.
- [06:07]
Kathleen Folbig
Know, I said, so we were pretty much inseparable after that.
- [06:09]
Rachel Sylvester
You felt she had your back?
- [06:11]
Tracey Chapman
Yes, absolutely. I always felt like she had my back.
- [06:15]
Rachel Sylvester
It was a case of opposites attracting. It wasn't just their personalities that were different. They lived just across the train tracks from each other. But the contrast in their home lives was stark. Tracy had a busy, loving home filled with siblings. Kathleen's family was much more complicated and traumatic. When she was a toddler, her father fatally stabbed her mother, and she ended up in care. By the time she met Tracey, she was living with cold and cruel foster parents. And Kathleen was drawn towards the loving family unit she didn't have.
- [06:53]
Kathleen Folbig
I used to love going over there. I think I spent more time over there than I did in my own house.
- [06:59]
Rachel Sylvester
As is often the way they drifted apart as they got older. But they'd still hear things about each other through the grapevine. And the foundations of the friendship they'd built in those formative years were solid. So it didn't matter that when Tracy watched Kathleen being led away in handcuffs, they hadn't spoken in a few years. She felt compelled to do something. And now Tracy was able to stand up for Kathleen. And what made you so sure she was innocent?
- [07:27]
Tracey Chapman
Well, I just. I know people are going to give you a serve on this one, but I asked her. I asked her straight up, and I asked the really hard questions. I asked her to explain the diary entries. I asked her explain the state of mind. I asked her to explain why people would think you were guilty enough to have a detective investigate you. I asked all of those questions, and she answered them one by one.
- [07:57]
Rachel Sylvester
What did she. What did she say?
- [07:59]
Tracey Chapman
She was really straight up about it. And the thing that got me over the years, it was consistency, you know, I always said, and it was, over the 20 years I've said this, she had to be. She either had to be a savant or she was telling the truth.
- [08:16]
Rachel Sylvester
After Kathleen received that letter from Tracy, they started speaking on the phone call almost every day. Apart from her lawyers, Tracy was almost the only person supporting Kathleen beyond the prison gates. At the time, Tracy was working as an environmental manager. She was a wildlife rescue volunteer and she had her own family to look after. Even so, she didn't just want to be a shoulder to cry on over the phone, she wanted to do something more significant. So she started speaking with Kathleen's solicitors. She found out they had a stack of boxes full of documents to do with the case. Some of them they'd never managed to get through.
- [08:56]
Tracey Chapman
I went into a raving panic because I just thought, if you can't actually, even though you were a solicitor at trial and stuff, you can't actually get to that. Who knows what's in there? That might be the answer.
- [09:08]
Rachel Sylvester
So Tracey wants to dig.
- [09:09]
Tracey Chapman
I've always said with this case, the devil's in the detail and it absolutely is. So anything that people might have kind of skimmed over at times, if you look at it again, then there's usually something there. So I was annoying and I said, do you want me to come in? And I only work four days a week full time.
- [09:28]
Rachel Sylvester
Tracey offers to come in on Fridays, her day off. She says she could spend the hours that her child is in nursery going through all the documents, but her offer is politely declined.
- [09:40]
Tracey Chapman
I just remember him saying, like, it doesn't work like that. That's really lovely of you, but it doesn't work like that. So I was sort of like, okay, what do I do?
- [09:51]
Rachel Sylvester
What do I do instead? She reads and researches a lot. She has no legal qualifications at all, but she starts asking questions about anything and everything related to the case. She learns how the justice system works and how to get people to listen.
- [10:09]
Kathleen Folbig
You know, we always say and joke now that she's pretty much an expert in every field. Like, she's an expert in genetics, she's an expert in legal, she's an expert in this, she's an expert in that because she learns and she. Yeah, and she took it all on board.
- [10:20]
Rachel Sylvester
Tracey made it her full time mission to prove Kathleen's innocence. For years, she beavered away exploring things that might exonerate her friend, updating her all the time, trying desperately to keep Kathleen's morale up.
- [10:34]
Kathleen Folbig
When I was in Sydney prisons, those phone calls were only six minutes long. And of course you had to. There's a bit of competition for the phone because you only had so many of them. So Tracey and I would have six minutes and be talking incredibly fast.
- [10:46]
Rachel Sylvester
In six minutes, Tracey would fill her in on who she'd been speaking to and what the strategy was.
- [10:51]
Kathleen Folbig
I Just had to do my thing day by day and, you know, get on with doing time, so to speak. But, yeah, so there's a marked difference between what I could know and what I could do inside as to what everyone else was doing outside.
- [11:04]
Rachel Sylvester
So when did people first start raising serious questions about your conviction?
- [11:08]
Kathleen Folbig
Probably not. I think I would have spent. I don't think it was until nearly 2012, maybe. So, you know, I'd already spent pretty much 10 odd years.
- [11:18]
Rachel Sylvester
For years, Tracey's campaign seemed to be going nowhere. Even though multiple women had been exonerated in the UK for similar crimes, there was no quick fix for Kathleen. She lost her appeals. And for almost a decade, there was very little movement on her case.
- [11:38]
Emma Cunliffe
And I can vividly remember having a conversation with a lawyer who was a colleague about the Folbig trial where, you know, he commented on Australia's worst female serial killer and saying to him, well, hang on a second, you know, it might not be that simple.
- [11:55]
Rachel Sylvester
And.
- [11:55]
Emma Cunliffe
And he responded with a degree of bafflement, it's fair to say, to my suggestion that her guilt may not be as manifest as the press was reporting it to be.
- [12:07]
Rachel Sylvester
This is Emma Cunliffe. She's a professor of law at the University of British Columbia, and she wrote a book called Murder, Medicine and Motherhood. It's all about Kathleen's case.
- [12:20]
Emma Cunliffe
I began my work thinking, actually, in many ways that the Folbigg case was different because Kathleen Folbig had kept diaries about her experiences of her children's life, her ambivalence about them, and her grief and bereavement at their deaths, which contained passages that I found difficult to understand, troubling. I felt that perhaps Kathleen Volbig's case was different and perhaps she was guilty where these other mothers appeared to have been wrongly convicted. And so I really set out on the research with this puzzle, with the question of, you know, was this in fact the case that Roe Meadow was concerned about? Was this the case where a mother had murdered her children and almost gotten away with it?
- [13:08]
Rachel Sylvester
She was curious about why Kathleen was still in prison when so many other women had had their convictions overturned. And just why did you think that? What was it that made you realized that that might not be as simple?
- [13:23]
Emma Cunliffe
The ways in which the press was reporting the trial, and in particular the evidence about Kathleen Folbig's mothering seemed.
- [13:34]
Chloe Hegemotheo
To.
- [13:35]
Emma Cunliffe
Fit too neatly into a set of stereotypes about suspicious and dangerous mothering, but without any real proof. And what I mean by that is no one could point to any instance where Kathleen Folbig had harmed a child. No evidence was found of physical harm to the children on autopsy, and these children were examined very carefully after their deaths.
- [14:02]
Rachel Sylvester
So did you feel that the prosecution had misrepresented the evidence?
- [14:07]
Emma Cunliffe
I feel that the prosecution used misogynistic tropes to ridicule and diminish the behavioural evidence that suggested that Kathleen Folbig was innocent of the crimes with which she was charged. And so, for example, a number of friends of Kathleen Folbig were called to testify at her trial. They testified uniformly, positively about her motherhood and about her relationship with her children. The Crown Prosecutor referred to those women in his closing address as the girls from the gym and suggested that they couldn't possibly have any idea of Kathleen Folbig's true motherhood. Similarly, he suggested that the prospect of natural explanations for the deaths of four children in the Volbig family could be analogised to the prospect of pigs flying.
- [15:17]
Rachel Sylvester
The more she dug into the case, the more she recognised similarities with the trials in the UK and the attitudes of the paediatrician and expert witness, Roy Meadow, that had become pervasive in those cases.
- [15:30]
Emma Cunliffe
And I was concerned that that dogma lacked a good medical research basis.
- [15:37]
Rachel Sylvester
The dogma Emma is referring to is Meadows law, the idea that one infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder unless proven otherwise.
- [15:49]
Emma Cunliffe
I think it's really important to identify that. Roe Meadows papers were extremely controversial within their own field. So at the time when Meadow was publishing his papers, there was an active debate playing out, for example, in the British Medical Journal, in the Lancet, about the appropriateness of his reasoning. And there were paediatricians and pathologists who pointed to the dangers implicit in the Meadows dogma and to the risk that innocent mothers might be wrongly accused of murdering children. And that is, of course, exactly what played out. So while that debate was playing out actively in the medical research, the courts were another story. The challenge was that what was playing out in courtrooms in England, in Canada and in Australia was quite disconnected from the medical debates that were playing out in the medical research journals themselves. And yet I think it's a compelling human need for us to find an explanation. And so we had a situation in these cases where the prosecution was offering a compelling and a unitary explanation. These children have been murdered. And the best that defence could do was say, well, we're not so sure they have been, but nor can we explain how they died. And I think that just As a matter of psychology, that was not a compelling alternative explanation for juries.
- [17:13]
Rachel Sylvester
She describes Meadow's Law and as a shape shifter.
- [17:18]
Emma Cunliffe
What I mean is that the concept of rarity and the prosecutor's fallacy that it enables continues to appear in other cases elsewhere across the common law world today. And so what I mean by prosecutor's fallacy is a line of reasoning that says that because infant death is rare in contemporary society, the existence of recurrent infant death is intrinsically suspicious. So, so it's. It's a logic that takes the. The rarity of these events and turns that into a basis for suspicion, rather than thinking about the rarity of these events as requiring very, very careful analysis and the prospect that we may not yet have solved all the medical problems that face us.
- [18:09]
Rachel Sylvester
Emma's book explores how the criminal justice system, medical knowledge and expectations of motherhood all work together when a woman is charged with killing her infant children, and how that combination sometimes leads to disastrous results. She takes Kathleen's trial as a detailed case study and concludes that, like Sally Clark and Angela Cannings, she's been the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice.
- [18:38]
Emma Cunliffe
When the trial judge wrote his sentencing judgment, he was very careful, in fact, to emphasise the medical evidence that suggested that a pattern of infant deaths could not possibly be natural and to really kind of locate the significant evidence that led to conviction as being the medical evidence. The work of Dr. Carolla Vinuesa and the team that she assembled offered an alternative explanation for the deaths.
- [19:10]
Rachel Sylvester
By the time Emma's book is published in 2011, Kathleen's been in prison for eight years. The book lays the groundwork for serious doubt over her convictions. In the background, Tracy's still working away, trying to free her friend, and more people have joined her campaign. But ultimately, it takes a phone call in 2018 for there to be a breakthrough.
- [19:39]
Emma Cunliffe
The idea of losing four children and then being wrongly accused of having killed those children is simply unbearable.
- [19:48]
Rachel Sylvester
A young lawyer called Dave Wallace is at home watching an ABC News documentary about. About the Kathleen Folbig case.
- [19:56]
Dave Wallace
I knew about that case dating back to when I was in law school in 2008, 2009. And my father's actually a statistician, so he always grumbled about that case from what he'd heard about the statistics involved in it, and I hadn't really thought much of it after finishing law school and working as a lawyer.
- [20:14]
Rachel Sylvester
But then he watches the film.
- [20:16]
Carola Vinuessa
Cathy, did you kill Caleb?
- [20:20]
Rachel Sylvester
No.
- [20:21]
Unknown
Did you kill Kathleen?
- [20:23]
Rachel Sylvester
No. Did you try? It features the first in depth Interview with Kathleen from prison and raises serious questions about whether she's guilty.
- [20:32]
Emma Cunliffe
Essentially, the logic of the prosecution case falls apart.
- [20:38]
Rachel Sylvester
Emma Cumberliff is one of the experts interviewed in it. And Dave is gripped. He's working as a lawyer, but his passion is, is science.
- [20:47]
Dave Wallace
And so when I saw that 2018 story, my immediate thought was, oh, the nature of genomic or genetic testing has progressed a lot since when Kathleen's trial occurred in 2003. There's potentially a genetic explanation for the deaths of the children. I wonder if they've looked at that.
- [21:09]
Rachel Sylvester
By the time Dave was watching that documentary, it had been 15 years since the human genome had been sequenced for the first time. This landmark moment allowed scientists to create a genetic map of an individual. And since 2003, the price of testing had dropped enormously, making it possible to analyse somebody's whole genome for under £1,000. That hadn't been an option during Kathleen's trial. Now it was. Dave wondered whether anyone had considered doing a whole genome sequencing of Kathleen and her children. He had no idea if that would even be possible and even if it was, there would likely be hurdles. Could samples be taken from a prisoner? Did DNA even exist for children who died years previously?
- [22:04]
Dave Wallace
It was kind of idle curiosity watching the TV and I kept thinking about it and then I decided I'd reach out to Kathleen's then lawyers and just ask the question. And I thought that's sort of essentially where it would end. I didn't realise that that was going to be the start of, you know, a five year journey into getting involved with the case.
- [22:24]
Rachel Sylvester
The lawyers were interested, it wasn't something they'd explored but they needed to find an expert.
- [22:30]
Dave Wallace
And most scientists that I reached out to were, you know, they thought it was maybe interesting but didn't want to be involved in a legal matter, you know, either. They'd heard from other colleagues that had done legal work and found it really unpleasant and scarring experience and didn't want to go anywhere near it, or they thought it was, you know, politically too hot a topic for their careers and didn't want to risk it.
- [22:54]
Rachel Sylvester
David being a student in the immunology department at the Australian National University. So he had one other idea to call the leading geneticist there, Carola Vinuessa, hoping she would take his call.
- [23:09]
Dave Wallace
I said, look, I don't know if you remember me, I studied in a lab near yours a number of years ago. There's this legal case. Would you be interested in it? And she did remember me. So Carolla was the first one to jump at it.
- [23:28]
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- [24:27]
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Rachel Sylvester
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Todor Aarsoff
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- [24:56]
Rachel Sylvester
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- [24:59]
Todor Aarsoff
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- [25:02]
Emma Cunliffe
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Rachel Sylvester
Too many to say here.
- [25:05]
Emma Cunliffe
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Rachel Sylvester
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- [25:20]
Rachel Sylvester
So can you just start by explaining a little bit about yourself? Why did you become a scientist and were you always very curious as a child?
- [25:29]
Todor Aarsoff
Look, it's difficult to know. I first did medicine and I had some working experiences in Ghana, in India. And part of the frustrating thing as a doctor is that you see at the time, for example, quite a few very young children suffering from severe infections with malaria, right? Cerebral malaria, meningitis, quite a lot of them dying as well. And medicine didn't have the answers. We just didn't understand why children succumbed to these infections and also why the vaccines didn't work.
- [26:07]
Rachel Sylvester
So.
- [26:07]
Todor Aarsoff
So I did feel intrigued that perhaps, you know, science could have some of the answers.
- [26:13]
Rachel Sylvester
Her father was a religious man, an austere lawyer who came from a long line of Spanish judges. He believed in serving society and he instilled in Carolla a strong sense of duty. She felt compelled to right wrongs. And speaking to her, you can feel that drive, that determination to work out whether science might hold the key to unlocking a mystery. How would you describe what you do?
- [26:43]
Todor Aarsoff
Look, a lot of what we do, part of it is very fundamental, very basic, trying to understand how their immune system works. But then we also have, you know, a little bit more of a translational angle in that we look at children with severe diseases like lupus, for example, we sequence their genome, the 20,000 genes in the genome, and we try and find if we can identify a single gene variant, a letter in the 3 billion letters in the human genome that might explain the disease in that child.
- [27:19]
Rachel Sylvester
These investigations can uncover novel causes of disease. They can piece together how a gene works and how a particular variant or mutation changes the function of the gene. Once you've done that, you can look at new forms of treatment, even cures for previously life threatening conditions by editing the gene. It's groundbreaking work. And it turns out there are also implications for the legal system. Do you almost think of yourself as a detective rather than a doctor?
- [27:53]
Todor Aarsoff
It's a good question. Yes. Sometimes I think I would have liked.
- [27:55]
Tracey Chapman
To be a detective.
- [27:58]
Todor Aarsoff
But you could say it has a bit of an aspect of doing detective work, right, Trying to find these variants in the. It's like a needle in a haystack, right? A single letter change in these 3 billion letters or, you know, one gene amongst 20,000 genes. And it's very satisfying when you actually identify the cause of a disease in a child or in a family that, you know, might have lost children to a severe disease.
- [28:26]
Rachel Sylvester
Normally you're doing that detective work for medical reasons. How is it different when you're transferring it to a criminal case?
- [28:36]
Todor Aarsoff
Well, it is very different. I actually did not realize it was going to be so different when I first started, accepted to help in this Australian case. There is a different understanding in the courtroom about uncertainty or certainty than there is in science. In science, we like to deal with uncertainty. In the court, things turn out to be quite different, particularly in the area of genetics.
- [29:06]
Rachel Sylvester
Carolla had been living in Australia since 2000, but Kathleen's case hadn't been on her radar. It wasn't until that call from Dave Wallace that she became involved. And what intrigued you about the case? Did you think there was something suspicious about it?
- [29:22]
Todor Aarsoff
Look, first of all, I was already primed because just a few weeks before, the month before, we had been referred a case of a family where four children had died, all of them in the first year or two of life and within a few years of each other. And, you know, we had managed to find a genetic cause for these disease. And, you know, the beauty was that because of having a genetic diagnosis, the couple, which was quite young at the time, was able to have a live fifth child through pre implantation genetic diagnosis. So, I mean, for us then, for deaths in a family, yes, it's quite rare, but it could be genetic. Right?
- [30:09]
Rachel Sylvester
Carolla had realised that a parent can pass a dangerous gene to their child without even realising they have it. That can then lead to a sudden and unexplained infant death when the gene is activated in the child. Dave sent her pathology reports, death certificates and medical records from the Fulbig case. And as she skimmed the documents, she noticed various details that made her think there could be a. An innocent explanation for the children's deaths. There was enough there to take it seriously. So how did you start investigating Kathleen's case? What did you do first?
- [30:47]
Todor Aarsoff
So when we first were contacted then by the formal lawyers of Kathleen, because Dave Wallace was not even working for the case, he was interested. He contacted Kathleen's lawyers, Kathleen's lawyers then contacted me and we had a discussion of how to go about it. Now, the lawyers told us it was going to be very difficult to access DNA from the children. And we then thought, well, there is a chance because some of the causes of sudden, unexpected death in childhood are cardiac or are conditions that are inherited. There's a chance that one of the parents could carry a variant that could be pathogenic. So we decided to start with the mothers. We thought it was important to take first a clinical history because it's easier to justify, even from a research perspective, the exercise of sequencing if there are any symptoms in an individual.
- [31:41]
Rachel Sylvester
This is a big undertaking and no one's paying Carolla for her to do this research. All her time will be pro bono. So she asks her trusted colleague to help. He's a geneticist called Todor Aarsoff.
- [31:55]
Carola Vinuessa
One afternoon, I remember vividly, Carola rang and asked whether I had heard anything about this case.
- [32:05]
Rachel Sylvester
They talked about how they would go about their investigation and decided that Todor should visit Kathleen in prison, the first step to uncovering potential evidence. So one day he takes the ferry past the harbour in Sydney out to Silverwater Correctional Facility.
- [32:25]
Carola Vinuessa
And I remember, you know, having all of these thoughts going through my head. You know, what am I going into? What am I going to see you know, I tried not to read too much around this because I didn't want to have any preconceived idea. I just wanted to treat this as if it were a patient or somebody that I've seen for the first time and they're coming through the door and I'm, you know, completely unbiased and trying to, you know, learn what happened.
- [32:52]
Rachel Sylvester
He has to go through the process of getting inside the prison, but before long, it's just him and Kathleen in a small room.
- [32:59]
Carola Vinuessa
I mean, I didn't know what to think of a person that had spent the last 20 years in a jail. What would that be like?
- [33:06]
Rachel Sylvester
He starts asking questions about the health of her children, her family, and her own medical history. And as they're talking, she tells him about an incident that happened when she was in high school. And a clue reveals itself.
- [33:21]
Carola Vinuessa
She described this situation where there was a swim race and she fainted during the swim race. And that is quite interesting, you know, because when these things happen with physical exertion, it sometimes is a telling sign.
- [33:38]
Rachel Sylvester
It turns out this wasn't an isolated event. When Kathleen was pregnant, she'd fainted in prison. She collapsed in the shower, falling face first into the ground.
- [33:50]
Carola Vinuessa
So there were these unusual episodes.
- [33:54]
Rachel Sylvester
Todor made one more crucial visit to Kathleen. This time he took with him a simple swab kit, not much more than a little wooden stick with some cotton wool on the end of it. And with that, he took saliva samples from Kathleen and. And swabbed the inside of her cheek. The next step was to send it off to a technician in Carolla's lab. When the samples arrived, they extracted her DNA and put it through a genetic sequencing machine.
- [34:27]
Carola Vinuessa
And then, you know, I just remember calling Carola then, and we had this very long conversation saying, well, look, I mean, it looks as if there may be something, you know, A few months.
- [34:39]
Todor Aarsoff
Later, we had the sequences and then we met. I remember we were told on 30th October, 2018 that the sequences were ready. They had gone through the pipeline. And, you know, the day later, it was a weekend and we met in my house.
- [34:54]
Rachel Sylvester
Carolla and Todor wanted to comb through the results together so they could compare notes. Immediately. They sat at the kitchen counter and in Carolla's home and both opened the DNA file on their laptops. They were searching for anything unusual, genetic mutations that might suggest disease. This might be a complete wild goose chase. They had no idea whether they were going to find anything that might help explain the children's deaths.
- [35:27]
Todor Aarsoff
Both Todo And I decided to run the sequencing or the analysis independently so that we wouldn't miss anything. So each of us put our own list of candidate genes together. And this took going through the literature, finding out all of the possible causes of sudden unexpected death. And of course, they come under different fields. Some could be cardiac, but, you know, this epilepsy, sudden death in epilepsy, there could be metabolic disorders, mitochondrial disorder. So that took a lot of digging up and reading because a lot of these areas were outside of our areas of expertise. But, you know, somebody had to put all these lists of genes together. So each of us put these lists of genes which more or less were around just over 300, right around 350.
- [36:10]
Carola Vinuessa
I mean, this is a little bit of art. You know, there is no one way, you know, when you face the genome, it's, you know, a lot of information, a lot of data that you need to go through in some way. So everybody develop their own, I suppose, way of doing things.
- [36:26]
Todor Aarsoff
And we just, you know, sat down and decided to do it, do it, each of us on our own laptops again, just so as we wouldn't miss anything.
- [36:36]
Carola Vinuessa
And then we were sitting next to each other and everybody, you know, mining through the list that we thought was inclusive. And then, you know, we would go one gene, oh, but, you know, ba this or bad that, or she would suggest another gene. And I would kind of have a look. Oh, but you know, this something doesn't.
- [36:57]
Todor Aarsoff
Fit in, you know, within potentially probably just 10 minutes. I remember looking at each other and saying, have you seen this? Right. Both of us were looking at this variant in calmodulin.
- [37:10]
Carola Vinuessa
And then there was a little bit of silence and we were both, you know, busy. We just turned to each other saying, what about Calm2? It was just Calm2.
- [37:21]
Todor Aarsoff
That was the word, Calm2. Because it was one of perhaps three dozen genes that had already been proven to be linked with sudden cardiac death in infancy.
- [37:35]
Rachel Sylvester
It was an astonishing lead. The genetic test had revealed a mutation in the carmodulin 2 or CALM2 gene that helps keep the heart working properly. If this variant had been passed on to the children, it could explain their deaths.
- [37:51]
Carola Vinuessa
The eureka word was CALM2 calmodulin 2 gene.
- [37:55]
Todor Aarsoff
So for us, that was very intriguing. It was probably the best thing we could have found. Right, because it meant that it could be very harmful.
- [38:04]
Rachel Sylvester
So did you look at each other and you realized you had the same gene on your list of potential suspects?
- [38:09]
Todor Aarsoff
Yes. And that from the ones that we had scrolled through, it was the only.
- [38:13]
Rachel Sylvester
Novel variant the two scientists searched the medical literature looking for any mention of the mutation they'd just discovered. They found nothing.
- [38:24]
Kathleen Folbig
And they came back and said, we found something that was like, wow, okay, now we're getting somewhere.
- [38:33]
Rachel Sylvester
This wasn't unusual. New genetic variants are created all the time, and often these new mutations are the most dangerous. They're like a surprise attack that evolution hasn't had a chance to weed out. Carolla and Todor had no idea whether their discovery was significant for Kathleen's case, but they knew they had to dig deeper. The next step was to try and discover whether Kathleen's children had inherited the genetic mutation that they'd found. This was going to be complicated. It meant finding DNA samples from children who died decades ago.
- [39:10]
Carola Vinuessa
That was not very straightforward. Didn't just happen.
- [39:14]
Rachel Sylvester
They knew it would be possible to extract DNA from two of the children.
- [39:18]
Carola Vinuessa
So it was subject to negotiations and conversations. But ultimately there were biological samples kept from tissues in the freezer from two of the children. And so we could extract DNA from. From those.
- [39:38]
Rachel Sylvester
But for the other two, that wasn't the case. The only thing they could think of was to try and track down the blood from the heel prick samples which had been taken from the babies at birth. They had no idea whether it would be possible to find these for Kathleen's children or whether they'd be in a good enough condition to extract DNA. And without that, their discovery about the genetic mutation in Kathleen would do nothing to prove her innocence. Coming up in episode three.
- [40:11]
Todor Aarsoff
So I remember thinking, well, what can we do? We need to do something about how the legal system deals with complex science in the courtroom.
- [40:20]
Kathleen Folbig
So I did have quite a bit of despair after that because I just sort of thought, I've got nowhere to go now and I'm stuck.
- [40:27]
Todor Aarsoff
We still know that in most countries, anything that looks unusual still could lead to an accusation of murder.
- [40:36]
Rachel Sylvester
The lab detective is reported by me, Rachel Sylvester. It's written by me and the producer, Gary Marshall. Fact checking is by Ada Barume. The music supervisor is Carla Patella. Sound design is by Rowan Bishop. Podcast artwork is by Lola Williams. The executive producer is Basha Cummings, the Observer.
- [41:17]
Unknown
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Chloe Hegemotheo
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Unknown
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Todor Aarsoff
Wayfair.
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Rachel Sylvester
Every style, Every home.
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Unknown
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Rachel Sylvester
Upgrade your Sundays with a subscription to the print edition of the paper delivered right to your door.
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