Five Women Serial Killer Profiles (12 page)

Kathleen Megan Marlborough was born on the 14th
of June in 1967 to Thomas John Britton and Kathleen Mary Donavan in Sydney, Australia. On January 8
th
, 1969 Thomas Britton fatefully stabbed Kathleen Donavan twenty-four times in Annandale, a suburb of Sydney, for having walked out on him and their eighteen-month-old daughter Kathleen Megan. Kathleen was made a ward of the court and placed into Bidura, a church Children's Home. Thomas Britton was found guilty of murder and imprisoned. After serving twelve years, Thomas Britton was deported to the United Kingdom. Kathleen Megan remained in the orphanage until the age of three and was then adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Marlborough, a foster family who lived in the suburb of Kotara, Newcastle, New South Wales. Her eldest foster sister, Lea, who was seventeen at the time of Kathleen’s adoption, remembered her as a picture-perfect child with curly blonde hair. She also remembered that Kathleen kept her inner feelings to herself.

In Kathleen’s diaries that were later used against her in
her court case she had written:

“Things I remember are not good about my upbringing but the fact remains I had a safe home, food
, and clothing. I am a person who had a choice of that or state orphanages all her life-can’t expect much more.”

She,
in fact, found life with Mrs. Deidre Marlborough intolerable and left home and school at the age of fifteen in 1982. Other extracts from her diary illustrate her unhappy childhood.

Kathleen then began working at poorly paid jobs until she met and married
, in May of 1987, twenty-five year-old Craig Folbigg, a car salesman. It was shortly before she met Craig that she learned the truth about her real parents which caused her, as one could imagine, quite a shock.

FROM KATHLEEN’S DIARY:
“I was 16 before I found out any of this. So, yes, I’ve had questions about who I was for a very long time.”

At another point on the
subject of her father she wrote:

FROM KATHLEEN’S DIARY: “The only thing left undone in my life is my real father. Unless someone decides to be compassionate and tell me about him one day, it will remain unknown.”

After Kathleen and Craig got married, they bought a house in Mayfield, which was a suburb of the city of Newcastle, New South Wales. Within twelve months of being married, Kathleen was delighted to find herself pregnant and gave birth on February 1
st
, 1989, to a healthy baby boy they named Caleb. Kathleen remained in the hospital for five days before returning home with the baby.

One morning back home, as Kathleen was feeding Caleb
, she noticed he was having trouble breathing. She rushed him to the hospital emergency department where the medical staff diagnosed a lazy larynx.

On February 19th, 1989, at about eight o’clock in the evening, Kathleen tucked Caleb in
his crib to sleep. In the middle of the night, at around 3.00 a.m. Craig Folbigg awoke startled by his wife screaming. He leapt out of bed and ran to the baby’s room. Here, he saw his wife standing by the crib screaming hysterically,

“My baby, something is wrong with my baby.”

Little Caleb was dead. He was barely twenty days old. The death was attributed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Just over six months later, Craig and Kathleen were delighted when Kathleen became pregnant again. On the 3rd
of June in 1990, Patrick, another son, was born to Kathleen. Craig Folbigg took three months off work to help Kathleen with the baby.

On October 18th, 1990, Kathleen tucked Patrick up in his
crib. His father, Craig, checked on Patrick at around 10 p.m. and found him peacefully sleeping. In the middle of the night, at around half-past three in the morning, Craig was awoken by his wife Kathleen’s screams. Craig rushed into baby Patrick's room where he saw Kathleen standing over the crib, where baby Patrick lay. Craig picked Patrick up and heard labored faint breathing. He began resuscitation while Kathleen called the ambulance. Patrick was rushed to the hospital where he recovered consciousness. However, medical staff diagnosed him as blind and suffering from epilepsy.

Four months later on February 13
th
, 1991, Craig received a call at work from his distraught wife crying,

“It's happened again.”

Alarmed Craig arrived home at the same time as the ambulance. When baby Patrick arrived at the hospital, he was dead. The autopsy concluded that Patrick’s death had been caused by asphyxiation caused by epilepsy.

Following Patrick’s burial
, Craig and Kathleen were unable to live in their house where two of their babies had died and relocated to Thornton, a suburb of the City of Maitland, north-west of Newcastle.

Twelve months later
, Kathleen found herself to be pregnant again. And on October 14
th
, 1992, Craig and Kathleen had their first daughter Sarah Kathleen.

When Sarah was eleven
-months-old, she caught a cold. This was causing Sarah difficulty in sleeping and caused her to cry a lot. In the early hours of the morning of the 29th of August in 1993 at about 1:30a.m., Kathleen awoke to use the bathroom. On the way back to bed, she checked on her daughter and saw her lifeless form. She screamed and awoke Craig. Their first born daughter, Sarah Kathleen, was dead.

A post-mortem was conducted by the chairmen of the sudden infant death syndrome organization. He concluded that Sarah
Kathleen’s death was consistent with SIDS.

Devastated, the Folbiggs relocated again. This time they moved to the wine producing area of Singleton in the Hunter Valley.

Here, Craig and Kathleen lived for two years and then Kathleen found herself pregnant for the fourth time. Laura Elizabeth was born on the 7th of August in 1997. Kathleen spent three days in the hospital before returning home with her small daughter. The hospital checked on Laura closely for a number of weeks following her birth, checking on her sleep patterns and breathing, but everything appeared well.

When Laura was nineteen
-months-old, she developed a cold. On March 1
st
, 1999 at around midday Kathleen telephoned for an ambulance reporting her daughter was having difficulty in breathing.

When the ambulance crew arrived at the house, they found Kathleen giving her daughter CPR on the kitchen table.
On examination by the ambulance crew, they found that Laura had no pulse and had stopped breathing. She was dead.

An autopsy was performed
and in the coroner’s opinion he thought that Laura Elizabeth was too old to die from SIDS. He recorded her cause of death as unknown and requested a police inquiry.

SIDS or Sudden infant death syndrome or
crib death is the unexpected, sudden death of a small child, which cannot be resolved even after an autopsy. Such deaths typically happen in apparently healthy infants who appear well when placed in their beds but are later found dead. The death of a baby from SIDS is an extremely distressing experience. Grief may manifest itself in a variety of ways, ranging from withdrawal and anger to physical symptoms. There may be feelings of intense guilt, and family relationships may be badly strained by misplaced blame and by severe and persistent grief.

The strains on the Folbigg marriage must have been immense, and the police inquiry into the death of Laura cannot have helped. The policeman assigned to make inquiries into Laura Folbigg’s death, Detective Sergeant Bernard Ryan, once learning that three other children had died in a similar fashion,
immediately began to suspect Kathleen of murder. He was a believer in Professor Roy Meadows and what was known as ‘Meadow’s Law’ that:

"One sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious
, and three is murder until proved otherwise." 

And as he began to investigate Kathleen’s background, he discovered the fact that Kathleen’s father, Thomas Britton, was a murderer. For Detective Ryan
, that was another deciding factor in his pursuit of finding Kathleen guilty of the murder of her four children.

Kathleen left Craig shortly after Laura’s death. She left the marital home taking
remarkably little with her. One can only presume that anything she took from the home would remind her too painfully of all that she had lost.

In a letter to her foster
sister, Lea Bown, Kathleen wrote:

“Us as a married couple has run its course. There’s too much pressure, sadness, depression, etc, for a relationship to bear.
”

A little while after leaving, Kathleen moved back with Craig for a short time before leaving him again for
good and moving into a flat, still not taking all of her possessions with her. She found a job as a waitress and began to see another man named Tony Lambkin. Kathleen and Tony moved in together in October of 1999.

When Craig discovered that Kathleen was now living with another man, he was upset and angry. He began sorting out Kathleen’s possessions and came across her diaries that she kept in a bedside drawer, pages filled with Kathleen’s secret thoughts and insecurities. The content
s of, he later told the court, made him want to vomit.

Craig took Kathleen’s diaries to the police and despite his earlier statements to the police about what a caring mother Kathleen was, he now told Detective Bernard Ryan that he’d had,

“
The odd suspicion but after finding the diaries, his suspicions became horribly real.”

Craig made a new statement to the police and unlike his earlier statement, it was extremely detrimental to Kathleen.

The diaries were the crucial turning point for Detective Bernard Ryan and his partner Detective Sergeant Dave Frith. Armed with the pages and pages of Kathleen’s secret thoughts and insecurities in her own handwriting, they spent the next two years assembling a case against Kathleen. On April 19th, 2001, Kathleen Folbigg was arrested at her home and charged with murdering her four children.

Following Kathleen’s arrest
, she was taken to a police station for questioning. The interview was video-taped and later used as evidence against her. Most of the questions hinged on notes she had written in her diaries.

At one point she had written:

“When I think I’m going to lose control like the last times, I’ll just hand the baby over to someone else.”

The detectives asked her what this entry meant
. Kathleen replied,

“
That on occasion she had felt frustrated but never in a way that was detrimental to the children.”

Speaking about the death of Sarah
, her third child, Kathleen said that she had woken in the night and had gone to the bathroom first before checking in on Sarah and said that was,

"
A day I'll probably recriminate for the rest of my life."

The detectives also questioned her about her style of grieving, and Craig’s claim that she appeared to recover from each infant’s death easier than he did
. Kathleen replied:

"That's just the persona of me, I suppose. I tend to maybe not deal with it, but I tend to put it away or lock it somewhere and choose just to move on and try to go forward..."

Kathleen Folbiggs
’ trial had tones of Lindy Chamberlain’s Dingo case. Like Lindy Chamberlain, Kathleen was accused of lacking emotion and being cold and not showing enough emotion. It was a trial by media. As in Lindy Chamberlain’s case, the public had decided Kathleen was guilty even before the trial had begun. But unlike the Lindy Chamberlain case, the majority of the public still maintain that opinion.

It would seem from looking at various cases such as Lindy Chamberlain’s and Madeline McCann’s, that if the police and media cannot find
an easy explanation for a child’s death it is simpler to blame the mother, and newspaper sales soar. The Tabloid newspapers have a tendency to rely on the fact that their readers always want someone to pay, and this is particularly true when it’s seen as a moral betrayal of human nature.

Kathleen’s trial took place in Sydney at the Darlinghurst Supreme court. The prosecutor
, Mark Tedeschi, Q.C., in his opening statement said that although the prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial as no one had actually seen Kathleen kill her children, they would submit evidence from world experts, testimony from Craig, her estranged husband, and evidence from Kathleen’s own handwritten diaries to prove that Kathleen had murdered her four children. Mark Tedeschi said that while each of her children’s individual deaths had not produced alarm, their deaths, as a collective, could only be due to being suffocated. He paraded and quoted in front of the jury a group of international experts who unanimously testified that they had never heard of four children within the same family dying of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. They claimed that the odds of SIDS occurring in the same family were an astounding one in one trillion. (Both of these claims have since been disproven.) He also claimed that Kathleen had avoided investigation because none of the infants had displayed any signs of abuse and because of this fact the cases were never reported to Child Protective Services for examination.

During the seven week
trial, the prosecution also alleged that Kathleen did not give the appearance of grieving her children’s death. Her estranged husband Craig testified that following the deaths of Caleb, Patrick, and Sarah Kathleen up boxed all of their belongings, including photos from their frames, and that Kathleen would never mention their names again. A nurse from a hospital reported that she was detached, and a neighbor described her as being straight-faced following Laura's death, with no trace of tears in her eyes. Kathleen’s foster sister Lea testified that Kathleen’s behavior changed all of a sudden at Laura's funeral. One minute she was crying and then she became a happy, laughing person enjoying the party.

As the prosecution delivered their evidence
against, Kathleen who was sitting in the court room was calm, almost aloof. In the trial’s fourth week, as the prosecution showed a video police recording of her interview in 1999, Kathleen broke down uncontrollably and attempted to flee the court room. She was forcibly restrained and removed to a hospital for sedation. The hearing was delayed for a few days while Kathleen recovered.

Once court resumed, the prosecution continued with their case using Kathleen’s diaries as evidence. The prosecution tried to introduce Kathleen’s tragic family history as proof that she was capable of willfully murdering her four children as her father had murdered her mother.

Her diary entry:

“
Would like all my mistakes and terrible thinking be corrected and mean something, though. Obviously, I'm my father's daughter.”

This entry, written after three of her children were already dead, was seized by the prosecution as an important link to her guilt. The
prosecutor claimed the entry indicated Kathleen was a violent murderous woman just like her father and suffered from an attachment disorder that prevented her from bonding with her four children
.
The judge ruled that this diary entry was prejudicial and was not disclosed to the jury.

However,
other parts of the diary were used by the prosecution to demonstrate that she was a woman totally engrossed with herself and looks and more concerned with going to nightclubs and the gym rather than caring for her own children. Mark Tedeschi told the court that Kathleen was continuously preoccupied with her weight gain and resented the fact that she couldn’t get to the gym because of her children.

The prosecution wound up their case by admitting that
, although the diary entries were circumstantial, they contributed to her partial admission of guilt. Mark Tedeschi stated that Kathleen smothered her four infants because she had a sparse tolerance for stress and had begrudged her children’s encroachment into her life and despite any factual evidence supporting the theory, he told the jury that Kathleen suffocated her children,

"
In a flash of anger, hatred, and resentment."

Peter Zahra, the head of Kathleen’s defense team
, told the court the children’s deaths were a coincidence. He said that all the children were, in fact, ill at the time before their deaths as had been diagnosed by hospital staff. He argued that Caleb, Patrick, Sarah, and Laura all died from SIDS. They said Caleb’s death was caused by a floppy larynx, Patrick’s death was caused by an epileptic fit, Sarah’s death was caused by an inflamed uvula, and Laura’s death was caused by myocarditis, a heart disease. They also brought up the fact that the children’s father Craig suffered from sleep apnea, a possible genetic fault that could be linked to SIDS.

He told the court that the medical experts the prosecution had called as expert witnesses had reached their conclusions after being shown Kathleen’s Folbigg's diaries and other statements.

He emphasized the fact that Kathleen was a caring mother and that at no time was she suspected of ill treatment of her children who were always well-nourished, clean, and tidy and was always attentive to their doctor’s appointments and that at no time did anyone think it was necessary for Child Protective Services to be called in. Peter Zahra read out loud some of the diary extracts to demonstrate Kathleen’s care and concerns as a mother and that Kathleen had appeared genuinely distraught to ambulance and police crews who had come into contact with her.

The defense portrayed Craig Folbigg as a dubious character, who had lied to the police, a car salesman who had used his children's deaths to sell cars, and who intended to hire Harry M. Miller, one of Australia's best known public relations consultants, promoter
s, and media managers to handle the media for him. They claimed that his testimony was colored to make the domestic and mundane look sinister.

As to Kathleen’s preoccupation with weight, they demonstrated from her diaries that it was Craig’s preoccupation rather than hers. They showed that her diaries reflected that Kathleen worried that her husband would leave her as she felt intimidated when he joked about her weight, and she wrote about how this made her feel and how she felt threatened by his continuous flirtations
.

Extracts from the diary about weight and insecurity:

The defense
denied that the contents of Kathleen’s diary related to the killing of her children and that any entries indirectly giving the impression of her responsibility could be put down to a normal grief stricken mother.

The defense pointed out that there was no physical evidence that could link Kathleen to
the murders that the entire prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial, and that none of the doctors had come to a consensus on the cause of death for any of the children.

On
the 21st of May in 2003, seven weeks after the trial began, the judge, after giving guidelines to the jury, directed them to retire to the jury room to consider their verdict. In slightly less than eight hours, the jury returned and announced they had reached their verdict. The jury found Kathleen Megan Folbigg guilty of one count of manslaughter, three counts of murder, and one count of grievous bodily harm. As the verdicts in the hushed court room were read out, Kathleen broke down and cried, crashing forward with her hands clutching her head.