NSW: Oh for a window into a child-killer's mind
By Doug Conway, Senior Correspondent
SYDNEY, Aug 29 AAP - What goes through Kathleen Folbigg's mind as she listens to thecrown prosecutor describe how she suffocated her four babies to death?
Horror? Disbelief? Denial?
She pleaded not guilty, after all, and still maintains her innocence.
Does she have flashbacks of the children?
Does she contemplate only the bleakness of her own life, and the possibility of spendingthe rest of it behind bars?
Does she care?
Only she knows, it seems.
The 36-year-old brunette sits impassive and heavy-lidded in the Supreme Court, 100days after being found guilty, knowing that her fate rests with the judge several metresaway.
She spends 22 hours in an isolation cell these days, and the other two out of the cellbut still out of contact with others.
She hears a forensic psychiatrist say she needs weekly or fortnightly psychotherapyfor several years with the same doctor, and that's not going to happen in prison.
She has an unspecified personality disorder, the psychiatrist says.
She is a "potential critical risk" to any children she might have, or have in her care,he says, but she is not a risk to the general community.
The crown prosecutor mentions the phrase from Folbigg's incriminating diaries - "Iam my father's daughter" - which Justice Graham Barr had excluded at the trial.
Folbigg was 18 months old when her alcoholic father murdered her mother, and threewhen she went to a foster home.
The psychiatrist is at a loss to explain why behavioural problems of her early childhoodwere largely missing from her teenage and adult years.
It's an "enigma", he says.
"It's almost impossible to explain."
Folbigg's husband Craig, who was present throughout her trial, is not in court.
But her stepsister Lea Bown, who testified against her, is.
Folbigg wrote her a letter from jail which ended up in a daily newspaper.
In it she expresses outrage at the crown's use of her personal diaries.
"They were a place for me to offload and then wipe my hands and move on," Folbigg saysin the letter.
"There's a huge difference from inferring murder to doing it.
"They are not literal, definitely not a window to my brain."
Yet the diaries were central to her trial, and are central to this sentencing process.
Everyone quotes from them all the time.
In the absence of any testimony from Folbigg herself, they are about the only window available.
Without them, she probably never would have been charged.
A society likes to think it can learn from disasters, use them as a stepping stoneto greater understanding and enlightenment.
Yet the first killing took place 14 years ago.
After all this time, no-one seems to fully understand what went through Kathleen Folbigg'smind then, or what is going through it now.
AAP dc/ldj/de
KEYWORD: FOLBIGG SCENE
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