Kathleen Fulbig served 18 years of her 30-year sentence
Medical scientists try to acquit a woman wrongly convicted of killing her 4 children
Craig Fulbig speaks to the media outside the Supreme Court in May 2001. From the source
The "court" did not take into account new scientific evidence confirming Volbig's innocence.
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Fulbig is under investigation again in 2019 for the deaths of her children.
From the source
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Australian Kathleen Fulbig spent 18 years in prison, as part of her 30-year sentence, for the murder of her four children.
However, recent scientific evidence indicates that she may not have been involved in what happened.
Genomic tests show that at least two of her children have likely died from a previously undiscovered genetic mutation that led to heart complications, called Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which is a term given to children who die suddenly from unexplained causes, which means that they may You have been in prison unjustly for nearly two decades.
The discovery prompted 90 scientists - including two Australian Nobel Peace Prize winners - to demand that the governor of New South Wales pardon Fulbigh and allow her to leave prison freely.
If that happens, the Fulbigh case would be one of the worst delinquencies of justice in Australian history.
A troubled childhood
Volbeg's life has been tragic since her childhood. When she was 18 months old, her father stabbed her mother to death and spent 15 years in prison for murder before being deported to England.
The child continued to have behavioral problems, and a medical official believed she may have been abused as a child by her father, according to a 2019 investigation into Volbig's convictions.
In the late 1980s, she married Craig Fulbig, whom she met at a nightclub in Newcastle, Australia.
She gave birth to her first child, named Caleb, when she was 21 years old.
Caleb died when he was only 19 days old.
The cause of death was explained mainly as "sudden infant death" syndrome, with no evidence of any other cause.
Fulbig soon became pregnant again, and in 1990 she had another son, whom they named Patrick.
The tests showed that he was normal and in good health.
But after he was four months old, he suffered brain damage and epileptic seizures.
Four months later, he died of seizures.
Her third child, Sarah, died in her tenth month - and the cause of her death has been attributed to SIDS.
When her fourth daughter, Laura, died at the age of 18 months on March 1, 1999, her marriage suddenly collapsed.
Before he left the house, he found her diary, read a note in which he claimed made him feel vomit, and took the notes to the police on May 19, 1999. From this point the police began an investigation.
On April 19, 2001, Volbig was arrested, and charged with four counts of murder.
Her best childhood friend, Tracy Chapman, described Fulbig as an animal lover and "a really good mother."
She described herself in the investigation that "she felt that her life was complete, with a husband, a house and a child."
However, at trial in 2003, prosecutors said Volbeg strangled her children.
There was no conclusive forensic evidence, and instead the prosecution relied on a quote attributed to the British pediatrician, Roy Meadow: "The death of one infant constitutes a tragic surprise, two criminal suspicions, and three murders, until proven otherwise."
Comparison
The public prosecutor compared the chance of the children dying from natural causes and the chance that they were killed by another person.
“Never before in the history of medicine have our experts been able to find any such case, it is unreasonable, it is not a reasonable doubt, it is a fiction, and of course the court does not have to refute a fanciful idea,” the attorney general told the jury during the 2003 trial. ».
The prosecution referred to Volbig's memoirs, which he said contained hypothetical confessions of guilt: “I feel like the worst mother on earth, afraid that she (Laura) will leave me now, just as Sarah did, I admit that I was temperamental, and sometimes tough on her so she died, with A little help, ”Wolbig also wrote in her diary:“ It can't happen again, I feel ashamed of myself, I can't tell (my husband) that, because he will worry about leaving her with me. ”
Fulbig never explicitly admitted to killing her children, there was no clear motive, and no one claimed to have seen her kill her children.
But a jury found her guilty of the willful killing of three children, and a fourth by mistake.
Fulbig was ultimately sentenced, on appeal, to 30 years' imprisonment with parole after serving 25 years.
By the time you qualify for parole, you will be 60 years old.
New developments
In 2015, with her appeals exhausted, Volpegg's attorneys petitioned the New South Wales governor, asking him to direct an investigation into her conviction.
The lawyers argued that new evidence has come to light since the appeals failed, including a growing understanding of "sudden infant death" syndrome, leading to a "sense of anxiety" about her convictions.
If the New South Wales District Court Chief Justice Reginald Blanche, who presides over the investigation, agrees, he can return the case to the Criminal Appeals Court.
Last November, scientists published more convincing evidence.
A team of experts from six countries, led by Danish professor Michael Tuft Overgaard, revealed that the CALM2 variable, which controls the proportion of calcium entering and leaving the heart, in the case of Volpegg and her children, could cause disease, just like the other variants.
They concluded that the variable changed the children's heart rhythm, which made them vulnerable to heart disease, especially given the medication that was administered to them.
Sarah was taking antibiotics for her cough, while Laura was being treated with paracetamol and pseudoephedrine for a respiratory infection shortly before her death.
Laura had a heart infection when she died, so much so that three professors said they were going to classify it as the cause of her death.
"We consider that the variable may have precipitated the natural death of the two girls," the researchers wrote in a study published in November 2020 in the medical journal "Europe Peace".
Even if Volpegg were released, her legal battle might not be over.
She would need to go to the criminal appeals court, to have her conviction revoked if she wanted her name cleared, and there would be another legal issue if she wanted to get compensation for the years she spent in prison.
Wrong use of the flag in the courtroom
The Volbeg case is part of a larger picture of a growing understanding of SIDS, a shifting understanding of what serial deaths in the family mean, and a broader criticism of how science is wrongly used in the courtroom.
Much of Volbig's conviction was based on a saying attributed to Doctor Meadow, that the death of three children was murder, unless proven otherwise, a saying that is already starting to raise suspicion.
Two women were convicted in the United Kingdom on the basis of the Meadow Doctrine, and their convictions were lifted in 2003.
In one of those cases, the appeals judge said: "Unless we are certain of what happened, the horrific possibility remains that the mother is indeed responsible for the unintentional death of her children, and she will remain in prison for life on charges of killing them at a time when she should not be there at all." .
"In our society, and in any other civilized society, this is abhorrent," he adds.
In a case similar to that of Fulbigh, an Australian woman named Carol Matthey was accused of killing her four children between 1998 and 2003, but the case against her was dropped due to insufficient evidence, although the same experts who testified against Fulbig were appointed in the case against Matthey.
"(Volbig) can be very innocent, because medical experts get it wrong in such matters, and the police get things wrong," Matthey said on the "60 Minutes" TV program.
University of New South Wales law professor and expert in empirical evidence and forensic science, Gary Edmund, said it was regrettable that Fulbig was on trial at the time.
He added that if she had been tried a few years later, when doubts began to swirl about Mido’s wisdom, the courts might have been more cautious about recognizing the expert’s evidence that was used to convict her.
Edmund said Australian courts are so far dealing with outdated evidence, lagging behind the United States, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
While other jurisdictions assess whether the science is reliable before the case reaches the court, the Australian system leaves it up to the juries to decide what is valid, and the problem is that juries do not have enough knowledge to make complex scientific judgments.
Fulbigh's attorney, Rani Rigaud, who has been on her case for nearly five years without pay, agrees that courts need to be careful about the experts allowed to testify.
"I think one of the biggest lessons we can learn from this case is that we need to listen more carefully in the legal system for evidence-based review, science and evidence-based medicine," she said.
Sudden infant death syndrome
The term "sudden infant death" syndrome appeared in 1969 as a way to classify sudden, inexplicable death.
By the 1980s, cases that may have been classified as homicides in the past were attributed to this syndrome, and as UK pediatrician John L Emery pointed out in a 1985 paper. By the 1990s, scientists had developed a model showing that a group of Factors that lead to "sudden infant death" syndrome, including exposure to smoke and sleeping position.
However, over the past two decades, there has been an increasing understanding of genetic factors.
One of the first studies on this matter came in 2001, when a pediatric cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic, Michael Ackerman, and a team of scientists linked this syndrome to a mutation in the SCN5A gene.
Since then, genetic variants in more than 30 different genes have been linked to sudden infant death syndrome, a term for children who die when they are more than one year old.
Studies now indicate that up to 35% of cases of this syndrome can be attributed to genetic factors, although the cause of most cases is still not clear.
On April 19, 2001, Volbig was arrested and charged with 4 counts of murder.
Volbig's life has been marked by tragedies since her childhood, when she was 18 months old, her father stabbed her mother to death, and spent 15 years in prison for murder before being deported to England. The child continued to have behavioral problems, and a medical official believed that she may have been abused as a child by her father, according to a 2019 investigation into Volbig's convictions.
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