Kathleen Folbigg was found guilty of killing her babies. One scientist suspected the real culprit was mutant DNA—and went on a tireless quest to prove it. (From 2021)
morning in August of 2018, Carola Garcia de Vinuesa was on her feet at a paper-strewn standing desk in her light-filled office in Canberra when the phone rang. The caller was a former student in the immunology department at the Australian National University, where Vinuesa worked. She hadn’t known him well, but she knew he was bright. And he had a story to tell.
At 3 pm, Vinuesa climbed into her car and drove through the tree-lined streets of Canberra’s suburbs to pick up her two daughters from school. A single mother, Vinuesa spent the next three hours shuttling them to and from soccer practice. Later that night, once the girls were doing their homework, Vinuesa sank into a sofa, opened her laptop, and reread the Folbigg family’s medical records, this time more carefully.
In 1987, when Kathleen was 20 years old, the couple got married. A year and a half later, in early February 1989, Kathleen gave birth to their first child. They named the boy Caleb. On February 20, Kathleen remembers getting up to feed the baby at 1:00 am and then going back to sleep. About two hours later she woke to go to the bathroom and went to check on him. Caleb was not breathing. "My baby, there is something wrong with my baby," she.
The day Laura died, detective senior constable Bernard Ryan, a clean-shaven 31-year-old, got assigned to the case. Before that day, there had been virtually no conversation about infanticide. Autopsies of the first three Folbigg children determined that each baby died of natural causes. Caleb’s and Sarah’s deaths were attributed to sudden infant death syndrome—meaning the deaths were unexplained but didn’t appear suspicious. Patrick’s was designated as asphyxia caused by an epileptic seizure.
After the interview, Craig drove to see Kathleen at her new apartment and told her what he had done. He accused her, for the first time, of killing their babies. She slammed the door in his face. Later, she jumped in her car and drove to his house. “How could you say those things about me,” she said. “You know I loved them … You’ve got to tell the truth.” When Craig returned to the police station for his second interview, he recanted.
Kathleen Folbigg's four children all died as infants. Her diaries became a focus in an investigation.2001, officers arrived at the Folbigg’s house and took Kathleen to a police station, where she was charged with the murder of Caleb, Patrick, Sarah, and Laura. She was granted bail in May. Two years later, the case went before a judge and jury at the New South Wales Supreme Court in Sydney.
For months, Folbigg's story remained a constant in Sydney's newspapers. Journalists dug up intimate details about Folbigg's childhood, including the tragic story of her mother’s death at her father’s hand—information that had been excluded from the trial so as not to sway the jury. A childhood friend of Folbigg’s named Tracy Chapman, a counselor, told me that Craig’s extended family and Folbigg’s own foster sister had renounced her, publicly.
By the time the book was published, Folbigg had been in prison for nine years. She had exhausted her rights of appeal in the court system. But she still had another option: directly petitioning New South Wales' attorney general to open an official inquiry into her murder convictions. To overturn the ruling, Folbigg and her legal team would need to raise doubts about the evidence presented in her original trial.
Vinuesa thrived on this detailed and creative work; she didn’t mind that she was doing it all unpaid and on her own time. According to Arsov, searching a genome for undiscovered variants and matching them to mysterious diseases is as much an art as a science, requiring a mind that is tenacious and open to oblique possibilities. Vinuesa, he told me, has a unique talent for such painstaking investigations. But there was something more at play than the joy of scientific discovery.
In December, Vinuesa finished her report on the CALM2 variant and sent it to Folbigg’s lawyers. They passed it on to inquiry officials in the government. Soon, Vinuesa was traveling to Sydney to meet with a handful of other scientists who had been assigned to the case. Officials with the New South Wales attorney general’s office had asked these scientists—some of whom worked for the government—to conduct a separate genetic investigation.
In February 2019, the teams received the sequenced DNA of the four children, derived from blood pinpricks at their birth. The geneticists scoured the data. By March, both teams found in Laura and Sarah precisely the same CALM2 mutation. A little while later, a pediatric cardiologist named Jonathon Skinner, who had assessed the cardiac health records of Folbigg and her children, was called to testify. At one point, Furness asked him about the CALM2 gene. Skinner responded that because Folbigg showed no evidence of cardiac disease, to suggest it had killed her daughters was “stretching credibility.” The hearing adjourned for lunch. When it resumed, Furness again questioned Arsov.
Vinuesa had the opposite reaction. As a mother, she could not bring herself to ignore this new evidence, which suggested that at least two of Folbigg’s children might have died of natural causes.