Introducing ... The Lab Detective

Interactive Transcript

spk_0 The Observer

spk_0 Do you remember the moment the police knocked on the door?

spk_0 I'd been, you know, pouring in the house just cleaning

spk_0 and they'd detect if knocked on the door and as soon as I saw her, my face just just dropped

spk_0 You gotta be... you're not serious here

spk_0 When Kathleen Fulby opens her front door and finds a police officer standing in front of her

spk_0 she has a reaction I suspect a lot of us would

spk_0 There's a creeping anxiety as she tries to figure out why this man has turned up at her home

spk_0 It's quite confronting

spk_0 It was sort of like, you know, good grief something's going horribly wrong here

spk_0 It's 2001 and Kathleen is 34

spk_0 She's a young woman who likes hanging out with her friends, going to the gym

spk_0 the usual kinds of things

spk_0 but she's also endured unfathomable loss

spk_0 Over the past 10 years, she's faced the trauma of losing not just one but four of her infant children

spk_0 The youngest was just 19 days old when he died

spk_0 the oldest was 18 months

spk_0 They all died unexpectedly in their sleep, one after the other

spk_0 So she's already living a nightmare

spk_0 She's a grieving mother struggling to cope

spk_0 And now she's trying to process what this detective is telling her that she's being arrested on suspicion of murder

spk_0 She's being accused of just about the worst crime possible

spk_0 killing her own children

spk_0 And then everything was just so fast after that

spk_0 In the chaos, she's clinging to a basic human instinct

spk_0 that the truth will protect her

spk_0 I was believing highly 120% that the system was going to do the right thing

spk_0 But in 2003, Kathleen is convicted of murder

spk_0 She's sentenced to spend 40 years in prison

spk_0 All for a crime she says she didn't commit

spk_0 I've always said I would want my worst enemies to have gone through this sort of stuff

spk_0 It is something that will be with me for the rest of my life

spk_0 Then, after spending more than a decade in prison

spk_0 a different kind of detective enters her life

spk_0 Do you almost think of yourself as a detective rather than a doctor?

spk_0 It's a good question

spk_0 Sometimes I think I would have liked to be a detective

spk_0 This detective doesn't work for the police

spk_0 In fact, she's got nothing to do with a criminal justice system

spk_0 She's a scientist called Corolla Vinuesa

spk_0 And she specialises in genetics

spk_0 Working at the frontier of science

spk_0 She spends her days combing through the genes all of us humans have

spk_0 Looking for clues that others miss

spk_0 And what Corolla uncovers changes everything

spk_0 She finds evidence that Kathleen has been wrongly imprisoned

spk_0 And her research might just change the lives of more mothers too

spk_0 So do you think there are other mothers in prison who have been wrongly accused?

spk_0 I think there needs to be a fundamental change in the way some of these legal cases are assessed

spk_0 There are mothers in prison that haven't had the full genetic investigation

spk_0 And where natural causes of death haven't been excluded

spk_0 And I think that's it, for me that's worry

spk_0 This isn't just a story about a single miscarriage of justice

spk_0 It's also a story about how science can shape and reshape the law

spk_0 And about all the ways that our ideas of women, of mothers, of motherhood, shape the law too

spk_0 Often in ways that are invisible but intractable

spk_0 So that even when the science points in a different direction

spk_0 We fail to see where it's leading us until it's too late

spk_0 Where somehow, losing your infant child is only the beginning of the horror

spk_0 I'm Rachel Silvester, I'm the political editor of The Observer

spk_0 And from Tortoise Investigates, this is The Lab Detective

spk_0 Episode 1, 3, is Murder

spk_0 I mostly write about British politics, so it might seem strange for me to be reporting on a murder case on the other side of the world

spk_0 But for me, politics isn't just about who's up and who's down at Westminster

spk_0 It's about how the systems that govern us work

spk_0 And when it comes to mothers accused of murder, something has clearly gone wrong

spk_0 I was intrigued by Kathleen's case when I first heard about it

spk_0 It's a fascinating blend of murder, mystery and scientific discovery

spk_0 So I started to speak to the lawyers, pathologists and pediatricians who know the details of her trial

spk_0 And to my surprise, they were all saying the same thing

spk_0 That Kathleen's story isn't a terrible anomaly

spk_0 Look beyond Australia and you start to see that her case actually fits into a troubling pattern

spk_0 Of mothers accused of murder when their children die

spk_0 Often on the basis of scant, circumstantial evidence

spk_0 So there was a bigger question to investigate

spk_0 A most concerning of all, I was being urged to look at the case of another mother, who's only just been sentenced to life in jail in 2024

spk_0 A case where science could still solve a mystery and change the narrative

spk_0 It's so interesting to look at the context of the time

spk_0 Because, Rachel, there was a sort of sense in which you were almost having to prove that the women were innocent

spk_0 But it wasn't, you know, proof beyond reasonable doubt

spk_0 There have been a number of these cases around the world

spk_0 And Helena Kennedy, the human rights barrister, watched many of the British trials up close in the late 1990s

spk_0 And a apparently healthy baby would go to sleep

spk_0 And by the time the parents next checked on them, they would discover them dead

spk_0 There would be no obvious reason and the parents were often left with more questions than answers

spk_0 At the time, these were label-cotteths

spk_0 Science was still getting to grips with how or why a child would suddenly die

spk_0 And into that vacuum of information poured suspicion, aimed almost always at the mothers

spk_0 And ghastly things happened where people were treated as if they must have been responsible

spk_0 That you were suspicious first and then, you know, the sympathy might come later if the suspicion fell away

spk_0 In that period, in the 90s, I became a Queen's Council

spk_0 And, you know, there weren't that many of us particularly and working at that level in the criminal law

spk_0 Helena Kennedy was busy with her own cases

spk_0 But she also started to observe something that was happening around her in the courts

spk_0 What was interesting about this period then was that there came to be a series of cases

spk_0 Cases of women who were accused of killing babies

spk_0 In the space of only four years, four mothers were charged with killing their children

spk_0 Trupti Patel, Angela Cannings, Donna Antony

spk_0 And perhaps the best known case, Sally Clarke

spk_0 These women were all over the front pages

spk_0 There was an almost ghoulish fascination with the idea of murderous mothers

spk_0 All charged with murdering their babies, all claimed they were victims of cop deaths

spk_0 A key witness at their trials, the pediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow

spk_0 And scrolling through the archive footage and newspaper articles

spk_0 It's the photographs of the mothers that stay with you

spk_0 They all have the same haunted bewildered looks on their faces as they're taken into court

spk_0 These are the images that were splashed all over the media under headlines about baby killers

spk_0 Each one bears an almost identical hallmark

spk_0 A grieving mother turned into a monster

spk_0 And that's who the public, the media, the prosecutors focused on two

spk_0 All demanding an answer that the mothers couldn't provide

spk_0 If you didn't kill them, then who did?

spk_0 But if you zoom out of those pictures of the mothers arriving at court, there's a man just outside the frame

spk_0 He's present either in person or in spirit at all of the trials, the connective threat that ties them all together

spk_0 Roy Meadow, here we are, we're still talking about him, what is it, 30 years later? I mean, so long after the events

spk_0 His name is Roy Meadow

spk_0 I think I was doing another case in the old barely at the time, I think it was probably a terrorism case or something

spk_0 We would all be up in the barmace, you know, in the lunchtime thing

spk_0 And so you'd hear the lawyers talking and the expertise of Roy Meadow, it was impossible to undermine his authority, his sense of authority

spk_0 And so he had a story about mothers, there's a male doctor at the centre of it

spk_0 He's in his 90s now, long retired, and his name is no longer referenced in courts in the way it once was

spk_0 You could almost leave his name to the history books, but that would be a mistake

spk_0 In the late 1990s, Sally Clark lost her two young boys

spk_0 When Christopher died at just 11 weeks in 1996, the forensic pathologist who examined him determined the cause of death was cids

spk_0 or sudden infant death syndrome, the scientific name for cop death

spk_0 It was, he said, a tragic and unexplainable event

spk_0 But almost a year later, a very similar thing happened, this time to their newborn Harry

spk_0 The same pathologist who'd examined Christopher carried out a post-mortem on Harry

spk_0 He found injuries that he believed to be non-accidental

spk_0 and concluded that there was evidence that Harry had been shaken several times

spk_0 It was his belief that shaking had caused his death

spk_0 And that made him reconsider his conclusion about Christopher

spk_0 At the time, the injuries he'd found on Christopher's body seemed consistent with resuscitation attempts

spk_0 But with a second infant death in the family, the interpretation changed

spk_0 Now he thought it was more likely from intentional suffocation

spk_0 Sympathy turned to suspicion

spk_0 And I remember that Sally Clark, one of the first questions asked of her when she was giving evidence in the witness box, was about her career

spk_0 And the suggestion was being made that she was a career woman and therefore she wasn't made from other hood

spk_0 Throughout her career, Helena Kennedy is focused on the treatment of women in the courts

spk_0 Calling out the prejudices of judges, the misconceptions of jurors, the inequalities and the law

spk_0 And she is convinced that misogyny was woven through these trials

spk_0 So it was a poison in the courtroom

spk_0 And at the heart of it all was Roy Meadow

spk_0 He was called as an expert witness

spk_0 Meadow had been professor of pediatrics and child health at St James's University Hospital in Leeds

spk_0 Walking into the court, he had considerable pedigree behind him

spk_0 He'd been awarded a prize by the British Pediatric Association for his work and knighted for his services to child health

spk_0 Through his work, Meadow had become convinced that many apparent caught deaths were actually something else

spk_0 Murder

spk_0 He used to say there's no evidence that caught deaths run in families but there's plenty of evidence that child abuse does

spk_0 By the time he gave evidence as an expert witness at Sally Clark's trial, he claimed to have found 81 caught deaths that were in fact murder

spk_0 And he said, and said what other people thought, which was that one sudden infant death was a tragedy

spk_0 But two was suspicious, but three is murder until proved otherwise

spk_0 The assumption was that if there was more than one of these deaths in a family that you were sort of basically looking at a woman who was, you know, having babies and then killing them

spk_0 This theory he used became known as Meadow's law

spk_0 It's the murder trials that have brought the pediatrician into the public eye

spk_0 But Sally Clark's trial, he said two caught deaths and one family was a one and 73 million chance

spk_0 When Meadow gives evidence to the jury, he tells them that the chance of two caught deaths happening in a family like Sally's

spk_0 Non-smoking middle class is vanishingly rare

spk_0 The statistically delivers is one in 73 million

spk_0 It's a staggering figure and in the courtroom it's taken on trust

spk_0 It's a sort of tugging of the four locked in and of course the defense also had an expert to call

spk_0 But not an expert who had a knighthood and whether judge deferred to him and said, oh, so Roy, do you need a seat?

spk_0 Please, you know, meet yourself comfortable and there was that chatting as between men of a certain class background

spk_0 And so I think that there was a sort of, you know, bowing to the grandeur of so Roy

spk_0 Meadow says the chances of two caught deaths occurring in the same family are the same as backing an 80 to one outsider

spk_0 four years running and winning each time

spk_0 How significant do you think Roy Meadow's evidence was?

spk_0 Oh, I think Roy Meadow's evidence was critical

spk_0 I think the conviction was secured by having such a grandee from the medical world holding forth was such confidence

spk_0 about what he perceived to be the guilt of the person in the dark

spk_0 After a 17-day trial, Sally Clark was convicted by a majority of 10 to 2

spk_0 She was sentenced to life imprisonment

spk_0 What did you feel when you heard that statistic being used against Sally Clark?

spk_0 I was horrified, absolutely horrified

spk_0 While Sally was in prison trying to appeal against her conviction, Roy Meadow became the go-to expert

spk_0 He would go on to provide expert testimony in multiple cases

spk_0 And his evidence steeped in the logic of Meadow's law, helped to secure the convictions of at least six other women

spk_0 The thing is, even at the time of Sally Clark's trial, people like Peter Fleming knew he was wrong

spk_0 It's total rubbish, absolute complete errant nonsense

spk_0 There is no evidence whatsoever to say that, in fact it's a complete travesty of the truth

spk_0 So I knew him, I mean, you know, pediatrics is not a big field

spk_0 But in the way Meadow, Peter Fleming is a pediatrician

spk_0 So, and for the past 40 years I've been involved in research into trying to understand and prevent infants and children dying unexpectedly

spk_0 Over the years, he's worked in hospitals in Bristol and as a professor at the university

spk_0 The thing he's best known for is the Back to Sleep campaign

spk_0 It was a public health initiative which encouraged parents to lay their babies on their backs instead of their stomachs when putting them down to sleep

spk_0 It's still used today because his research discovered that by doing this, you significantly reduce the chance of caught death

spk_0 In the 1980s around 2000 babies a year died from unexpected death

spk_0 Now, thanks to Peter's work, that number is approximately 150

spk_0 It's an incredible achievement

spk_0 At the other end of the country Roy Meadow was doing his own research

spk_0 You know, he was a professor in Bristol, he was a professor in Leeds, so we knew each other

spk_0 He was never involved in research into unexpected deaths of infants

spk_0 He was a kidney doctor really, he did a lot of work on children's kidney function and a number of other things

spk_0 But he became interested because of this concept that mothers sometimes harmed children to get attention for themselves

spk_0 Which certainly occurs, it's very rare, but it does occur

spk_0 If you like, took the assumption that if mothers sometimes harmed their children, sometimes they would kill their children

spk_0 Peter's work is fascinating, I could have talked to him for hours

spk_0 But there's a very specific reason I wanted to hear from him

spk_0 And it's how his professional relationship with Meadow came to an end

spk_0 In 1993, Peter and his team were commissioned by the government to do a study of unexpected deaths in infancy

spk_0 Over three years, they investigated infant deaths in roughly half a million births in England

spk_0 And by the end of the decade, they were pulling together their research so that they could publish it

spk_0 We got to close to the final draft of the book

spk_0 And it occurred to me that I would invite Roy Meadow to write the foreword to this book

spk_0 Because it was well known everywhere that he had a very different view to me

spk_0 We were both reasonably well known in the field and we were polite about it, we didn't dislike each other

spk_0 We just had very different views

spk_0 So Peter shared the draft with Roy

spk_0 Under the usual conditions for material that hasn't been published yet

spk_0 Do not share and do not reproduce, essentially

spk_0 This is for your eyes only

spk_0 It's strictly confidential until it actually comes out

spk_0 And he read the book

spk_0 And in one point in the book there was an information about risks

spk_0 Which was put in to point out that for young mothers who smoked and living in deprivation

spk_0 The risk of a second or third baby dying was not that low

spk_0 It was quite a significant risk

spk_0 And as a reducto out of surgeon, we put in the risk for these young mothers

spk_0 Might be for a second baby dying, might be as low as one in eight thousand

spk_0 Which is not rare at all

spk_0 Whereas for the others it was one in 73 million

spk_0 Talked away on page 92 of Peter's book

spk_0 There's a table of figures

spk_0 It's a detailed breakdown of how very specific factors

spk_0 Impact the chance of sudden infant death syndrome

spk_0 Things like does anyone smoke in the family?

spk_0 Is there at least one person earning a wage?

spk_0 And below the table, Peter's team writes that for a family with none of the risk factors they were looking at

spk_0 The chance of two Sid's deaths is approximately one in 73 million

spk_0 But Peter told me that that number is a reducto at absurdum

spk_0 In Latin, it means a reduction to absurdity

spk_0 The purpose of the statistic was purely illustrative

spk_0 It was not an accurate measurement, still less a predictive tool

spk_0 And there was a bigger problem

spk_0 We weren't looking at any of the other factors which we know to be important

spk_0 I've seen the page that Roy Meadow read

spk_0 It clearly states that the figures in the report do not take into account other factors

spk_0 Factors like genetics

spk_0 You had no idea he was going to use that at the trial

spk_0 Absolutely no, no, I mean in fact the day after when obviously he hit the news

spk_0 I contacted Michael Mackey who was Sally's solicitor

spk_0 And said look, this is completely wrong

spk_0 What Peter didn't know at the time he shared it

spk_0 Was that Roy Meadow was giving evidence at Sally Clark's trial

spk_0 And that figure he'd used in his book was now being splashed in newspapers

spk_0 Used to suggest that the actual risk for someone with Sally Clark's background would be that low

spk_0 I'm the senior author on this book and this is just not right

spk_0 And I offered to give evidence

spk_0 In fact one of my co-editors was already giving evidence on behalf of the defence

spk_0 Which was Professor Jim Berry who is a pathologist from Bristol

spk_0 But when he tried to give evidence and point out the error in this

spk_0 The judge stopped him because he's not a statistician he's a pathologist

spk_0 But neither is Roy Meadow

spk_0 No exactly, but it was terrible, it was awful

spk_0 And because of that, almost immediately Sally Clark was convicted

spk_0 Despite Peter's efforts they failed to effectively challenge their own statistic

spk_0 It should never have been in the courtroom

spk_0 Let her own use to wrongly accuse an innocent mother

spk_0 Suppose I told you a story that I walked into a shop the other day

spk_0 And I was amazed to find an Arsenal football jersey from 1987 when they won the lead cup

spk_0 And I said it's incredibly rare

spk_0 And then if someone else said to you

spk_0 Actually I walked into that shop Peter was talking about

spk_0 And I found a Liverpool football shirt from when they won the lead in 1990

spk_0 You'd probably go from thinking this was just a random shop that happened to have second hand clothes to thinking

spk_0 This is shop to sell is roughly a football old vintage football jersey

spk_0 So you'll be aware of how likely the second thing to happen is the changes with the first piece of information

spk_0 Peter Donnelly has a particular skill

spk_0 He can make statistics understandable

spk_0 He's now professor of statistical science at Oxford University

spk_0 And chief executive of a company called Genomics

spk_0 And he uses a lot of analogies to turn the numbers into words

spk_0 At the time of the Sally Clark trial in 1999

spk_0 He was a world leading specialist in applied probability

spk_0 Rising rapidly at the academic ladder

spk_0 There might not have been a statistician in the courtroom

spk_0 But there was one following the trial

spk_0 And Peter was drawn towards that one in 73 million figure

spk_0 I remember thinking this doesn't feel quite right

spk_0 The fundamental issue of a mistake that the pediatrician made was

spk_0 There weren't any factors that we weren't aware of

spk_0 That the chance for second-class was exactly the same as the first-class

spk_0 It's a very worrying thing to hear

spk_0 Because implicit in that is the idea that the only possible thing that makes second and third-class deaths

spk_0 More likely is a mother who's murdering her child

spk_0 And it completely ignores the possibility that there are other factors that might make multiple-class deaths likely

spk_0 So what exactly was wrong with what he did?

spk_0 So modified those two numbers together

spk_0 One in 8000 times one in 8000

spk_0 It needs to be the case that if you have one popped-ass in a family

spk_0 The chance of a second popped-ass is exactly the same as if you'd never had one

spk_0 That's what statisticians would call an assumption of independence

spk_0 It's like when you toss a coin

spk_0 If you toss a coin the first time you get a head

spk_0 Actually when you toss a coin the second time is as likely to be a head or a tail

spk_0 It's not influenced by what happened the first time

spk_0 That tossing coins are independent

spk_0 But many many other things in life are not

spk_0 Peter Fleming's findings on that table on page 92 were only looking at specific factors

spk_0 They didn't consider things like sleeping positions or genetics

spk_0 And that was not intended to say the risk is actually that for these families

spk_0 If we look at only these factors and ignore everything else

spk_0 That would, however, he misinterpreted that

spk_0 And used it to suggest that someone with Sally Clark's background

spk_0 The risk would be that ridiculously low risk

spk_0 And when Roy Meadow presented the alarming one in 73 million figure to the jury

spk_0 He didn't take this into account

spk_0 At the time genetics was in its infancy

spk_0 Lawyers and juries were not well versed in science or maths

spk_0 And neither it seems was Meadow

spk_0 Do you think he was the right person to be providing that expert opinion?

spk_0 I think there's a funny thing where we often

spk_0 Except that certain things need expertise

spk_0 If I told you I was going to build a bridge over the next six weeks

spk_0 And you would then go to drive your car over it, you'd ask for that

spk_0 I had any engineering qualification

spk_0 You wouldn't just assume that something someone could do

spk_0 But with statistics, it's much more common for a wide range of people

spk_0 From different backgrounds

spk_0 I think they have the expertise and knowledge and statistics

spk_0 And often for very simple things, that's true

spk_0 But in more complicated situations that could be misleading

spk_0 So there's definitely an issue that it's not seen as an area that requires specialist expertise

spk_0 Another factor in my experience is that lawyers

spk_0 who are often extremely smart and capable people

spk_0 Some of them have as a badge of honor, the fact that they can't understand mathematics or statistics

spk_0 So while they have a lot of experience of challenging experts on these sorts of cases

spk_0 On medical evidence and so on, that's something that they've many years of practice in doing

spk_0 I think they feel less comfortable on the statistical side

spk_0 And hence less naturally able to ask the right questions of an expert

spk_0 Earlier this year, Sally Clark walked free on a peel after Professor Meadow had said there was a one at a loss

spk_0 Sally Clark was eventually freed in January 2003

spk_0 Her conviction was overturned after a peel caught judges found that Roy Meadow's evidence was unreliable

spk_0 The Royal Statistical Society had expressed its concern about the misuse of statistics in court

spk_0 Sally Clark, an innocent mother, had spent three and a half years in jail for a crime she didn't commit

spk_0 After her release, she struggled to cope and eventually she died from alcohol poisoning

spk_0 The implications ricocheted through the justice system

spk_0 Two other women who'd faced similar allegations were cleared

spk_0 Angela Cannings had her conviction overturned after spending more than a year in prison for the murder of her two sons

spk_0 Tonight Angela Cannings is a free woman, another mother proved innocent of killing her babies

spk_0 Donna Anthony was freed after more than six years in jail for killing her two babies

spk_0 Donna Anthony was jailed on Meadow's evidence, her lawyer believes she now

spk_0 And five months after Sally Clark was released, another mother, TripTip Attell was acquitted of murdering three of her children

spk_0 Professor Meadow had said at her trial it would be very unusual to have three caught deaths in one family

spk_0 Her maternal grandmother had lost five of her children

spk_0 Her grandmother had testified that she herself had lost five children in infancy

spk_0 It was another indication that there could be a genetic cause of such deaths

spk_0 An alternative explanation to murder by the mother

spk_0 Over this period there had been astonishing developments in genetics

spk_0 In the same year as Sally Clark's conviction was overturned, the entire human genome was sequenced for the first time

spk_0 It was the genetic equivalent to mapping the world and open the door to new ways of diagnosing and preventing disease

spk_0 It made it possible to identify potentially life-threatening conditions that might be able to explain things like sudden infant deaths

spk_0 But the implications were still unclear and the science was not advanced enough to be used in criminal trials

spk_0 Instead, Meadow and his misleading law had been allowed to dominate the criminal justice system leading to multiple miscarriages of justice

spk_0 In the UK, Roy Meadow was totally discredited

spk_0 But there's a reason we've started the story here because a narrative took hold back then

spk_0 Mothers are supposed to be nurturing, loving, selfless

spk_0 Throughout history those who appear to transgress those ideals have been an endless source of fascination and fear

spk_0 In Greek mythology there's Medea who murders her own sons in revenge against her husband

spk_0 And despite all good reason in parts of the system around the world, the murder myth stuck

spk_0 Kathy, did you kill Carla?

spk_0 There's that, it's the millisecond of non-belief

spk_0 It's sort of like I don't believe this is happening, this is ridiculous, you know, it's the thing

spk_0 But the same time I was also telling myself I'd be fine

spk_0 There's nothing else but to say here it's all good

spk_0 Just as Sally Clark's conviction was being overturned, on the other side of the world history seemed to be repeating itself

spk_0 After my last child Laura when she died there was instant suspicion, you know, because she was the fourth one

spk_0 In the space of 10 years between 1989 and 1999, Kathleen Fulbig and her husband Craig lost four children

spk_0 All of them died suddenly

spk_0 Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura

spk_0 For every child that died there was an autopsy

spk_0 And for Caleb, Patrick and Sarah it was determined that each baby died of natural causes

spk_0 But it was different for Laura

spk_0 Heraldopsy discovered evidence of myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle

spk_0 But in his conclusion the forensic pathologist described her death as undetermined

spk_0 This was crucial because it left open the possibility of foul play

spk_0 And the new South Wales police opened a murder investigation

spk_0 I was in shock, I'd only just lost my child

spk_0 So I was craving an in shock from that without, you know, really concentrating on what the police were doing

spk_0 Suspicion was mounting, not just around Laura's death but for all four of her children

spk_0 The results of the original post mortems were now in question

spk_0 When you go through something like that you're surviving, that's how I talk it anyway

spk_0 It was a case of waking up and just deciding whether you were going to survive that day or not

spk_0 The police and others were starting to connect the deaths

spk_0 And now her case was headed for trial

spk_0 The process was basically them going around me on the outside talking to friends, family

spk_0 You know, trying to build a case that I had no idea what sort of case they were trying to build

spk_0 Kathleen might not have been focused on what the police were doing, but Craig was

spk_0 My ex-husband was sort of like, I was in La La land really until I was too late and realised that he'd been working with them

spk_0 So that was a big destructive sort of thing

spk_0 What could happen?

spk_0 He came across a diary, like my whole case was circumstantial because of the diaries

spk_0 The police always found, but they didn't actually find them, he actually handed mine in

spk_0 Because he found one, and he read it, and he was a bit not liking what was in it

spk_0 So he went and handed it in rather than talked to me about it, and that started the whole thing

spk_0 Kathleen had a deeply traumatic childhood

spk_0 Her father was a violent man who in a drunken rage ambushed her mother in the street and stabbed her 24 times with a carving knife

spk_0 He murdered her mother, so at the age of three, Kathleen was put into foster care

spk_0 Her foster mother was tough, and according to court documents, hit Kathleen with the handle of a feather duster when she misbehaved

spk_0 Her foster father was a distant and cold man

spk_0 In her isolation, she discovered a coping mechanism

spk_0 She told me that from the age of eight, she started to keep her diary

spk_0 And so, college is, when the very beginning said, you know, Catherine, if you ever got a thought, you just write it down one of these books

spk_0 So I pretty much did that, I was always writing something down somewhere

spk_0 My diaries were, there was nothing organised or sensible about them

spk_0 You know, I could have a page that would be starting off with

spk_0 What a great day I'm having to tease in the middle and talking and swearing and carrying on at the end

spk_0 So yeah, and the language I used was just sort of, was a pouring of emotions

spk_0 Just like she'd done in other difficult moments of her life, when she lost her children, Kathleen started to write

spk_0 She had diaries spanning four years between Sarah's death and her pregnancy with Laura

spk_0 When the police were gathering evidence, Kathleen's relationship with Craig had ended

spk_0 And when she moved out of the family home, she left the diaries behind

spk_0 These deeply personal diary entries ended up forming a key part of the prosecutor's case

spk_0 So they picked, picked, picked, but in doing so you remove all the context out of what it is that you're writing

spk_0 Out of more than 50,000 words, the prosecution honed in on less than a thousand

spk_0 A tiny crucial percentage

spk_0 There was one line in particular that proved to be damning

spk_0 You know, there's infamous lines where I think I say something about Sarah and my third child

spk_0 Where she went with a bit of help

spk_0 The critical entry which was read out in court was dated January the 28th, 1998

spk_0 In it, Kathleen described how she becomes so angry at Laura that she nearly purposely dropped her on the floor and left her

spk_0 She went on, I feel like the worst mother on this earth

spk_0 Scared that she'll leave me now, like Sarah did

spk_0 I knew I was short-tempered and cruel sometimes to her and she left with a bit of help

spk_0 Now I was referring to God as in I didn't have a choice about this, some man upstairs or something decided that she was leaving

spk_0 No, that that became weaponized and turned into a, that means she must have did something

spk_0 In another passage, Kathleen had written about some of her past mistakes saying, obviously I'm my father's daughter

spk_0 This was held up by the prosecution as some kind of a mission of guilt

spk_0 But Kathleen told the police that what she meant was that she thought her father was a loser and she took after him

spk_0 She explained that the journals were an expression of her own inadequacy and guilt, compounded by the trauma of losing her babies

spk_0 By the time I went to trial I was so totally isolated that I had no one supporting me whatsoever

spk_0 I was feeling like I was pretty much doing it all alone and that's extremely hard

spk_0 Throughout the trial, Kathleen maintained her innocence

spk_0 My whole thing was circumstantial as not one ounce of actual evidence

spk_0 They relied on the diaries as to create a so-called window into my mind

spk_0 As with Sally Clark a few years before, the prosecution painted a picture of a woman who was never fit to be a mother

spk_0 It's believed that this supposed to be this ideal mother

spk_0 He stayed at home, sold it looks after their children and the children's needs are met 150%

spk_0 And the wives' needs are not met at all

spk_0 You have someone who works or might like to go for a dance with some girlfriends every now and then

spk_0 Or goes to the gym because they want to look good or be healthy or do whatever

spk_0 That's not fitting this ideal mother picture

spk_0 Because I did all those things

spk_0 I therefore was not an ideal mother

spk_0 If they had reports that a mother is becoming frustrated with their child

spk_0 So that's not an ideal mother either

spk_0 So I'm not like I haven't met a mother yet

spk_0 That does not get frustrated with their children

spk_0 But the misogyny wasn't the only familiar aspect from the British cases

spk_0 It also got

spk_0 Meadows law

spk_0 Roy Meadow wasn't there giving evidence in person he didn't need to be

spk_0 The misleading narrative he'd set out in the UK had travelled to Australia faster than it could be challenged

spk_0 Anybody who gets passed at number two

spk_0 It's sort of like you're in trouble because that was their stupid dog with thinking back then

spk_0 The Crown prosecutor told the jury

spk_0 It has never been recorded that the same person has been hit by lightning four times

spk_0 My eyes think I found guilty

spk_0 I said it's been reported that I just fainted and collapsed

spk_0 And I had to wait till I was conscious before they could leave me downstairs

spk_0 So then after that I switched off

spk_0 Kathleen has sentenced to 40 years for the deaths of her children

spk_0 For murdering Sarah Patrick and Laura and for the manslaughter of Caleb

spk_0 As the cell door slams behind her, Kathleen is all alone

spk_0 She has no reason to believe that slowly a team of people will form around her

spk_0 All asking the same question

spk_0 Is this a wrongful conviction

spk_0 And that the answer will come from a detective sitting in a lab building the knowledge that will eventually free her

spk_0 This might be a story that taps into the deepest fear of every parent that your child will suddenly be snatched away from you

spk_0 But it's also a story of hope

spk_0 About the power of science and human inquiry and the determination of those searching for the truth

spk_0 Coming up in episode two

spk_0 I will never forget the look on her face as she was being put into that prison van

spk_0 My immediate thought was you know there's potentially a genetic explanation for the death of the children

spk_0 And saying have you seen these right both of us

spk_0 And they came back and said we found something that was like wow okay now we're getting somewhere

spk_0 The lab detective is reported by me Rachel Silvester

spk_0 It's written by me and the producer Gary Marshall

spk_0 Fact checking by Ada Barumi

spk_0 The music supervisor is Carla Patella

spk_0 Sound design by Rowan Bishop

spk_0 Podcast artwork is by Lola Williams

spk_0 The executive producer is Basha Cummings

spk_0 That was episode one of the new series from Tortoise Investigates the lab detective

spk_0 To listen to the rest of the series search for the lab detective wherever you listen to your podcasts

spk_0 And follow the feed to make sure you don't miss an episode

spk_0 You can listen to the entire series by subscribing to the observer plus on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or by downloading the Tortoise app

spk_0 The observer

Introducing ... The Lab Detective

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