Mothers Who Murder (22 page)

As a result of his HPS, Joshua was admitted to the Royal Children’s Hospital for corrective surgery. The initial surgery was successful; however, the child suffered a cardiac arrest a few hours post-surgery while in the intensive care unit. Joshua survived but was critically ill, and as a result he required re-intubation and ventilation (the use of a tube and a machine to assist in moving air in and out of his lungs) for five days. Although the cause of Joshua’s heart failure was not absolutely determined, his treating physician, Dr Peter McDougall, Director of the Department of Neonatology at the hospital, speculated that it might have been caused by him being given intravenous morphine. As noted in the court documents, there was no suggestion that his mother, Carol Matthey, had anything to do with this incident.

Joshua survived this event and went home. He was next seen by Dr Anderson on 25 May 2002 when he was eight
weeks old, at which time he was doing well. He was no longer having problems feeding and his development was normal. In addition, although the family had been issued with a sleep apnoea monitor as a result of the earlier deaths, there had been no genuine alarms. The only clinical sign that something may not have been quite right was that Joshua seemed a little pale; a blood test indicated the baby had been suffering slight anemia. Joshua continued to be a mildly unhealthy baby, and his next medical review took place the day before his death when his mother took him to see Dr Cindy-Lou Nelson at the Kunatjarra Medical Clinic, North Geelong, Victoria, where he was diagnosed as suffering from acute otitis media with a subsequent perforated tympanic membrane (or ruptured eardrum). To treat this condition, Joshua was prescribed Amoxicillin, a penicillin-based antibiotic that is a standard treatment for infants.

On 10 July 2002, the day of Joshua’s death, Carol had driven the family to a local shopping centre to buy groceries. Joshua had been placed in a pram and his sister Shania in a baby seat attached to the front of the pram. Their brother Dylan was also with them. Joshua had been crying but had settled when his sister gave him his dummy. Presumably because there had been no incidents, Joshua was not wearing his apnoea monitor. The family only spent about fifteen minutes shopping, and once back at the car Carol first put the older children in their car seats before trying to get Joshua out of his pram. It was then that she noticed he was limp and was not breathing. Prior to this he had shown no sign of being unwell or in any distress, bar the crying, which had stopped when he was given his dummy. Carol immediately called for an ambu
lance and then called her husband, before commencing CPR in the back of the car. She kept going until the ambulance crew arrived, but although they tried to revive him, Joshua remained unconscious without a pulse and was not breathing. His body was warm to the touch, but his extremities were cold and he was cyanotic (the abnormal blue or purplish discoloration of the skin which results from lack of oxygen in the blood) around the mouth and at his fingertips. Joshua had died at age three months and eleven days.

Two days later, Dr Michael Burke performed a post-mortem on Joshua and noted mild inflammatory changes in his lungs with evidence of a low-grade infection. There was also purulent material in his right ear, no doubt left over from his ruptured eardrum. An ear swab was taken and when cultured grew Klebsiella pneumoniae – a deadly super-bug responsible for severe inflammation in the lungs, which is resistant to the majority of antibiotics, including Amoxicillin. Dr Burke gave the cause of death as septicemia (blood poisoning, often caused by bacteria or micro-toxins). During the committal hearings, when the judge was tasked with deciding if there was sufficient evidence to send the accused to trial, the pathologist highlighted the relevance of the location of death, being a supermarket car park. In his experience, and that of other forensic practitioners, non-accidental injuries tend to occur in private. The implication was that if Carol Matthey intended to harm or even kill Joshua, she was unlikely to have chosen to do it in a very busy, very public, place.

The last Matthey child to die was Shania, who had been born on 18 November 1999. The third child born to the Mattheys, Shania was the fourth child to die, at three years
and five months. Her medical records from birth indicate no major problems, except acute conditions that would be expected in the life of any toddler, including bouts of colic and three separate incidents of upper respiratory tract infection when Shania was a few months old. On 9 July 2001, Carol Matthey contacted Dr Cindy-Lou Nelson and reported that Shania had suffered two counts of apnoea, lasting for thirty seconds, with associated cyanosis. Matthey was advised to take the child to Accident and Emergency immediately for assessment. Nelson saw Shania and Carol again on 3 September 2002, at which time Matthey described the child as being more ‘clingy’ and as crying more often since the death of her brother Joshua in July. The doctor found no medical abnormalities.

At 1.07 pm on 28 February 2003 Matthey contacted the emergency services saying that Shania had fallen off a coffee table while playing. Carol told the emergency telephone operator that Shania initially screamed and then held her breath (a common occurrence when the child became distressed) after which she fell unconscious for about sixty seconds. She could not tell if Shania had a pulse at this time, although she did say the child went slightly purple. The operator gave evidence that during this call she could hear a child crying and gurgling or snuffling in the background. When queried about the noises, Carol said that they were coming from the television. What the operator heard was a point of contention at the pre-trial hearing. An ambulance crew arrived at 1.19 pm, at which time Shania was conscious. She became unsettled by the presence of the medics; as a result they were unable to examine her but were satisfied that Shania was uninjured and that she didn’t need any medical intervention. Throughout the rest of the
evening Shania seemed fine and was put to bed at around 8 pm. During the early hours of 9 April, as Stephen was preparing to go to work, he checked in on his daughter who was sleeping soundly. This was at 1.15 am. Carol Matthey gave a statement that at 2.15 am Shania requested a drink of milk, which was provided to her. Carol had her usual shower at 6 am on the morning of 9 April, and when Shania did not join her – as was her habit – she went to check on the child. She found Shania in bed, not breathing, and cyanotic around her mouth. She was still warm to the touch. Carol called immediately for an ambulance and began CPR. When they arrived, the ambulance crew tried various methods of resuscitation, none of which were successful. Shania was taken to Geelong Hospital, where the attending emergency physician, Dr Bruce Bartley, said the cause of death was unclear, but when he examined the child externally there was no sign of non-accidental injury.

A post-mortem was carried out the same day by Dr David Ranson, a very experienced and well respected forensic pathologist and Deputy Director of the famous Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine in Melbourne.
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His evidence supported the initial observations made when Shania was first received at the hospital, in that he found no evidence of any recent trauma that might have contributed to her death. Nor was there any indication of natural disease that could have been the cause of death. The only unusual finding at autopsy was the presence of a small number of petechial hemorrhages on the surface of Shania’s lungs and heart, and a moderate number on her sinuses.

Three forensic odontologists
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from the Institute of Forensic Medicine also examined Shania’s head and neck, and none noted any evidence of trauma. This was a key
finding when we consider that her mother would later be accused of intentionally suffocating her, as due to the fact that at over three years old Shania would have had teeth, there would be an increased chance of finding bruising injuries on the inside of her mouth where the teeth had been forcibly pressed against the soft tissues during deliberate asphyxiation. If you push your own mouth against your teeth, even with something soft, you can easily cause minor abrasions on the inside of your mouth. The pathologist and odontologists would have specifically looked for these types of injuries, but in this instance they didn’t find any. The importance of the negative evidence of trauma found inside Shania’s mouth by any of the experts who analysed her remains post-mortem cannot be exaggerated. Dr Ranson gave the cause of death as ‘unascertained’.

In a later statement dated 11 March 2003, Dr Ranson added that further post-mortem examinations had failed to reveal any information relating to a recognised and identifiable natural disease that could account for the deaths of Jacob, Chloe or Shania. This did not mean they had not died of a natural disease, just that the examinations had failed to find evidence of one. Perhaps most importantly, the pathologist also stated that a review of the pathological material did not support the inference that any of the children had died ‘as the direct or indirect consequence of the deliberate or inadvertent infliction of an injury or dangerous act by a third party’.
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Although Dr Ranson had not examined all of the children’s remains himself, he did review all of the post-mortem findings and made it clear in his statement that he found no sign of significant or recent injuries that supported the hypothesis of any form of physical abuse, and equally there was no evidence of substantial accidental injury.

According to the prosecution, Carol Matthey had little time or regard for her children and was more interested in getting them out of the way in order to maintain a relationship with her husband, Stephen. The Crown wanted to include this as part of their case against her – what they referred to as ‘relationship evidence’. Based on comments by the couple’s friends, relatives and neighbours, as well as remarks by Carol and Stephen at interview, it was asserted that around the time of their children’s deaths or life-threatening episodes the couple were on the verge of separating. In July 2003 there was an argument between the couple that did become physical, when Carol called the police after Stephen Matthey punched her in the face and damaged her car. According to the attending officer’s statement, Carol told him that the argument arose over a woman at Mr Matthey’s place of work. The Crown sought permission to include this incident as evidence that their marriage was falling apart. The defence pointed out that this event happened almost four months after the fourth Matthey child’s death, a time when it was generally understandable that their relationship would have been under considerable strain. No other events like this were noted in evidence, making the Crown’s assertion that their relationship was ‘tempestuous’ quite a stretch. This was also the conclusion Judge Coldrey reached as he decided that this evidence would not be allowed should the case progress to trial.

Other information was gathered from friends and family, which indicated that the marriage was far from perfect. However, it should be remembered that this evidence was collected five or six years after the events, and so the information gleaned should be treated with caution. Mr Matthey was allegedly unfaithful, and Carol knew of the affairs. This,
understandably, caused her distress. Stephen worked long hours that kept him out of the house and Carol felt neglected. She had threatened to leave him and there were a number of periods during which they lived apart, apparently because of Stephen’s alleged affairs. Stephen Matthey is reported as being controlling and kept a close eye on Carol’s movements. The Crown wanted to draw a pattern from these events, and tried to say that Carol was using the children’s life-threatening episodes and deaths as a way of bringing her philandering husband home. However, it was not Stephen who left, but Carol, and only Joshua’s death coincided with a period during which the couple were separated, so the argument just didn’t stack up. No specific marital incident could be linked to one of the children’s deaths. The judge ruled that there was no evidence supporting the Crown’s suggestion that the instability of the Mattheys’ marriage was the trigger for Carol to murder her children.

Next the prosecution’s attack on Carol Matthey’s relationship and feelings towards her children were dealt with by Judge Coldrey. The Crown stated that, after Dylan, all of the Matthey’s children were unwanted, apparently supported by the fact that Carol was using contraception, as demonstrated by her medical records. Consequently, the remaining children were unplanned – although I would argue that unplanned does not equal unwanted. Hilary Robinson, the maternal and child health nurse who attended Carol after all of her children’s births, was called as a witness for the Crown. She admitted under cross-examination that although Carol Matthey was not exuberant after the births, the new mother behaved appropriately with all of the babies and was interested in their health. She also said she had not seen any sign of neglect
or maltreatment. Other witnesses, including friends and family who saw Carol shortly after the births, said Carol and Stephen were happy, although Carol had been apprehensive about falling pregnant again after Chloe’s death, as by that time she had lost two children, and was worried about the baby’s health. Some of the witnesses gave evidence saying Carol would on occasion shout at the children, but no one ever saw any sign of violence, abuse or neglect. The children were always kept clean and taken for medical treatment when required. Carol was, by all accounts, a perfectly adequate mother.

Carol was accused of being devoid of emotion when her children died, but again the evidence from the witnesses did not support the Crown’s assertions. Carol Matthey was noted as a quiet young woman, shy and reserved. While still at home when the ambulance crew attended Joshua, both Carol and Stephen were visibly upset, and at the hospital after Jacob’s death Carol was described by a witness as being too upset to talk. Another witness gave evidence saying that Carol had called her from the hospital following Chloe’s death and she was very distressed. The medics who attended saw nothing unusual in her demeanour. Other medics who attended following Shania’s death also remember Carol as being distressed. One friend of the family, Geraldine Taylor, described Carol as going through ‘intense heartbreak and grief’ after each of the children’s deaths. Judge Coldrey felt a substantial body of the witness statements painted the picture of a caring and loving mother during the children’s lives, and a distraught and grieving mother after their deaths. He concluded that the evidence given caused the Crown some problems when trying to convince anyone Carol Matthey was a selfish, callous child-killer. Some of
the ‘demeanour’ evidence was ruled admissible, but it was limited. For example, the judge would not allow evidence that Carol Matthey was seen talking on her mobile phone, happy and smiling, the day after Shania’s death – which may have given the jury the impression she was happy at the child’s death – as there was no way of knowing why she appeared happy or if indeed she was happy.