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Kathleen Folbigg

"She's a fairly good-natured baby," Folbigg wrote about Laura. "Thank goodness. It has saved her from the fate of her siblings. I think she was warned." Another entry: "I feel like the worst mother on this Earth. Scared she'll leave me now like Sarah did. I knew I was short-tempered and cruel sometimes to her, and she left. With a bit of help." And potentially most damning: "I am my father's daughter."

:jaw-dropp

That is about as close to an outright confession of murder as you can get.
 
rockinkt said:
"She's a fairly good-natured baby," Folbigg wrote about Laura. "Thank goodness. It has saved her from the fate of her siblings. I think she was warned." Another entry: "I feel like the worst mother on this Earth. Scared she'll leave me now like Sarah did. I knew I was short-tempered and cruel sometimes to her, and she left. With a bit of help." And potentially most damning: "I am my father's daughter."

:jaw-dropp

That is about as close to an outright confession of murder as you can get.
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Well that’s my view, but I’m appatantly a hanging judge....
 
rockinkt said:
"She's a fairly good-natured baby," Folbigg wrote about Laura. "Thank goodness. It has saved her from the fate of her siblings. I think she was warned." Another entry: "I feel like the worst mother on this Earth. Scared she'll leave me now like Sarah did. I knew I was short-tempered and cruel sometimes to her, and she left. With a bit of help." And potentially most damning: "I am my father's daughter."

:jaw-dropp

That is about as close to an outright confession of murder as you can get.
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My thanks for highlighting what you think are the relevant bits.

I had missed the "with a bit of help". I suspected I might have overlooked something.
 
rockinkt said:
"She's a fairly good-natured baby," Folbigg wrote about Laura. "Thank goodness. It has saved her from the fate of her siblings. I think she was warned." Another entry: "I feel like the worst mother on this Earth. Scared she'll leave me now like Sarah did. I knew I was short-tempered and cruel sometimes to her, and she left. With a bit of help." And potentially most damning: "I am my father's daughter."

:jaw-dropp

That is about as close to an outright confession of murder as you can get.
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Those extracts only suggest that it is possible that she murdered her children. I doubt that it rises to the standard of "balance of probabilities" let alone "beyond reasonable doubt"
 
psionl0 said:
Those extracts only suggest that it is possible that she murdered her children. I doubt that it rises to the standard of "balance of probabilities" let alone "beyond reasonable doubt"
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Yes, I agree that a conviction on those statements alone would be impossible without some sort of corroborating evidence. That is why I did not make any assertion about guilt or innocence in my post.

Any confession to murder must have unassailable corroborating evidence. Given that there seems to be dissenting positions from a couple of well respected pathologists gives me pause. However, those opinions have not been debated in open court so I am reserving my judgement until I see what is asserted and what the counterpoints are.
 
Darat said:
...The new evidence is that there were only 3 "unexplained" deaths and those three deaths do not show any signs of smothering.

That to me seems to very much undermine the prosecution case.
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C'mon Darat, this is no more "evidence" than "it looks like a controlled demolition to me." It's an opinion -- by someone who apparently makes a living from offering such opinions -- that a death could have happened in a way other than as originally assumed. There's a whole industry devoted to coming up with stuff like this, designed to help budge the needle from "guilty" to "reasonable doubt" and get convictions overturned. Looks like it didn't work in this case (at least not yet).

As for the case overall, the alternative to the children being murdered appears to be at best a surpassingly improbable cause. Combine that with a mother whose extremely disturbing diary entries appear to express open hostility for her children and in places fall only a bit short of "yep, I did it." In my opinion, this should be considered a safe conviction by anyone who can distinguish the difference between reasonable doubt and conceivable doubt.
 
psionl0 said:
Those extracts only suggest that it is possible that she murdered her children. I doubt that it rises to the standard of "balance of probabilities" let alone "beyond reasonable doubt"
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Oh, it's a hell of a lot more than that. It's possible you or I murdered them. Thing is, neither of us recorded our musings for posterity in a diary, words whose simplest interpretation is that she had a part in her kids deaths. Combine that with the vastly more gruesome fact that he children actually did die, with the alternative to their being murdered an extremely unlikely event, and in my view we're several times zones past "possible" and deep in the heart of "comfortably certain."
 
3point14 said:
My thanks for highlighting what you think are the relevant bits.

I had missed the "with a bit of help". I suspected I might have overlooked something.
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But what does she mean "with a bit of help"? Maybe she was put to bed a bit too early, so she died. Or so the mother thought. There are other totally plausible explanations for what she wrote.
 
forensic bias

Stellafane said:
There's a whole industry devoted to coming up with stuff like this, designed to help budge the needle from "guilty" to "reasonable doubt" and get convictions overturned. Looks like it didn't work in this case (at least not yet).
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In a comment earlier today Lionking had written, "Which doubts? One media-hungry person after a payday or a jury which no doubt went to great lengths to decide this case?"

Integrating over time and a number of cases, I sometimes notice a certain strain of thought, namely that the defense expert witnesses are not to be trusted because they have a financial or other motive to suggest things that are dubious. Why this sort of bias should only be true of expert witnesses for the defense but not the prosecution has never been explained to me. Empirically, evidence of bias on the part of the latter is not difficult to find, nor are the reasons for it difficult to understand.
 
Chris_Halkides said:
In a comment earlier today Lionking had written, "Which doubts? One media-hungry person after a payday or a jury which no doubt went to great lengths to decide this case?"

Integrating over time and a number of cases, I sometimes notice a certain strain of thought, namely that the defense expert witnesses are not to be trusted because they have a financial or other motive to suggest things that are dubious. Why this sort of bias should only be true of expert witnesses for the defense but not the prosecution has never been explained to me. Empirically, evidence of bias on the part of the latter is not difficult to find, nor are the reasons for it difficult to understand.
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There is a huge difference between giving expert testimony in a courtroom and standing up to full cross examination and just giving a sound bite to a media outlet and refusing to answer any questions or defend your opinion.
Why don't we wait to hear the actual evidence and how well it stands up to scrutiny before we make any judgements?
 
experts before the court

I agree that cross-examination is important. This is from a link I gave in my first post in this thread: "For example, similarly qualified experts disagreed as to whether myocarditis could have caused Laura's death. Although the main proponent of the possibility of myocarditis as an explanation was called by the defence, he exercised greater caution and informed the court about the uncertainty inherent in infant death autopsies, more than did the prosecution experts." Betts S, Goodman-Delahunty J, Australian J. Forensic Sciences 2007 39(1):11-24.
 
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Darat said:
Have a look at the infamous case I linked to in my opening post, tragically multiple infant deaths can and do occur in a single family with no one to blame.

And as Chris points out above - to me what makes this case stick out is that we now know that for at least one of the claimed murders the cause of death was not what she was accused of in court.
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This is incorrect. In the case of the last death, there is an alternative possible explanation.

Here's the diary entry that clinches it for me:

Looking at the video, Sarah was boyish looking. Laura has definite feminine features. They are chalk and cheese. And truthfully just as well. Wouldn't of handled another one like Sarah. She saved her life by being different.
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rjh01 said:
But what does she mean "with a bit of help"? Maybe she was put to bed a bit too early, so she died. Or so the mother thought. There are other totally plausible explanations for what she wrote.
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Agreed
 
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