WHY MORE MUMS ARE KILLING THEIR KIDS

In April this year, the woman known as ‘Australia’s worst female serial killer’ sat quietly in a courtroom in Sydney, waiting to testify at a judicial inquiry that she and her supporters hoped would overturn her convictions for the deaths of her four babies. In 2003, Kathleen Folbigg was sentenced to a minimum of 25 years’ jail for killing Caleb, 19 days old, Patrick, four months, Sarah, 10 months, and Laura, 19 months, over a 10-year period from 1989 to 1999.

Folbigg, who has always maintained her innocence, wore a neatly buttoned cardigan as she faced a panel of lawyers and a bank of reporters with laptops and notebooks in hand. Now 52, her soft face was framed with grey curls. At one point she wept as she was cross-examined about a collection of diaries that she had kept during her children’s short lives, and after their deaths. She wrote of her “dark moods”, her feelings of failure and her lack of support. “In my most dangerous mood I’m not nice to be around,” she wrote on July 6, 1997, after her first three children had already died, and a month before her fourth and final child, Laura, would be born. When pressed at the inquiry, she insisted that she didn’t believe herself to be a danger to her children, exactly, but that she was simply depressed and overwhelmed. “A dangerous mood to me