Kathleen Folbigg woke up on the morning of June 6, 2023, and did something she’d been unable to do for 7000 days.
She did her makeup routine in the comfort of a friend’s house.
Folbigg received an unconditional pardon and was released from Grafton jail after an inquiry heard new scientific evidence which pointed to reasonable doubt about her guilt following her 2003 conviction for the deaths of her four children, Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura – who all died in mysterious circumstances between the ages of 19 days and 19 months.
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She’d been in jail for the past 20 years.
7NEWS Spotlight has been granted an exclusive insight into her life since her release, in a ground-breaking interview which will air on Sunday October 15, 2023 at 7pm.
Folbigg’s been staying at her friend and advocate Tracy Chapman’s property on the NSW mid-north-coast since her release.
Known for years as prisoner 323130, she admits it has been an enormous transition.
“It probably will be a while before I sort of go, ‘OK, yeah. That Kathleen person’s actually me.’ So yeah,” she says.
“I always see myself just as a very simple Novacastrian, Newcastle girl, who, though I might have lost four children, led a very normal life.”
Folbigg was jailed for killing her four children — an accusation she has always denied.
An inquiry into her convictions found scientific and psychiatric evidence that led inquiry chair Chief Justice Tom Bathurst to hold the “firm view that there was reasonable doubt as to the guilt of Ms Folbigg for each of the offences for which she was originally tried”.
When she was released from prison, Chapman was one of the first people to greet her.
Sitting around the dinner table, the schoolmates talk about redecorating the living room to “Kathify” it.
She says she’d never drank champagne before but allows herself a glass on this evening as Chapman and others toast: “To Kath.”
“I’m going to say a big, incredible thank you to this side and this side because without everybody around this table, we wouldn’t be sitting here having my champagne and my first toast,” she says.
“I firmly believed that family was everything.
“So therefore, if you take that step forward and you take the risk, I would say that’s why I lost four children.
“Because I always, after Caleb, it was, no, no, surely we can get this right. Let’s go Pat. So Patrick was born and then it was after Patrick, it was sort of like, ‘Oh, well that didn’t work, so let’s have a little Sarah’.”
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She admits she almost didn’t have her fourth child Laura, who died at 18 months, because she was afraid she’d lose her.
“For me … I’d like to think that people can take away a message that you can survive it, you can move on from it. And that, for me, the future is everything. And your future is anything.”
Folbigg knows she has an important story to tell and in this exclusive 7NEWS Spotlight interview on Channel 7 and 7plus, Australians will finally hear the full story from Folbigg herself, as she sits down with the Seven Network’s Natalie Barr.
7NEWS Spotlight: Unbroken The Kathleen Folbigg story, 7pm (AEST), Sunday on Channel 7 and 7plus.
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