FREEDOM FIGHTERS

For 20 years Kathleen Folbigg's closest friends believed she'd been wrongly jailed for the murder of her four children. In 2023, they had her conviction quashed. Now Kathleen and her fiercest champion, Tracy Chapman, share their courageous story with The Weekly.

- GENEVIEVE GANNON

The world is good, thought Kathleen Folbigg in 1988. The curly-haired 21-year-old was settling into marriage with a man she adored and she had just learnt she was pregnant. All the angst and uncertainty that had darkened her life so far was dwarfed by this happy truth. She was going to be a mother, and in doing so, would fulfill the dream she had nurtured through her tough and confusing upbringing.

Tragedy had marred Kathleen's life early. Orphaned before toddlerhood when her father was jailed for killing her mother, she was passed to an aunt, and then a children's home, before being fostered into a family with a strict and volatile mother.

"I wanted the opposite of my life for my kids - a family full of love and happiness, laughter and joy," Kathleen writes in her book Inside Out.

When she met Craig Folbigg, Kathleen saw a chance for a better life. After their son, Caleb, was born on February 1, 1989, she enjoyed 19 days of contentment. But on February 20, she woke in the middle of the night to find him lifeless in his cot. She screamed. It was the worst possible thing that can befall a parent, but for Kathleen, it was just the first in a series of unthinkable events, including three more harrowing infant deaths.

Eventually, she was arrested, jailed for murder, publicly vilified, dehumanised, beaten, and after a decades-long battle, pardoned, released, exonerated and redeemed. The NSW state government has approved an ex gratia payment of $2 million.

Through everything, she was able to keep putting one foot in front of the other thanks to a small group of supporters, most notably Tracy Chapman, her “number one hero”, whose faith has meant “absolutely everything” to Kathleen.

"I wouldn’t have even probably bothered trying at all. I would have just rolled over, legs in the air, accepted the fate," Kathleen says.