Kathleen Folbigg by Matthew Benns

Author:Matthew Benns [Benns, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760896706
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

From America Detective Ryan flew across the Atlantic to England. Upon arrival he travelled three hours south-west from London to meet with Professor Peter Berry, a consultant pathologist at the Bristol Royal Hospital for Sick Children and Chair of Paediatric Pathologists at the University of Bristol. Professor Berry had been instrumental in getting the ‘Back to Sleep’ campaign started in the Northern Hemisphere in 1989, resulting in a dramatic decrease in cot deaths. The professor had come to Detective Ryan’s attention for his work as co-editor of one of the largest studies of SIDS ever undertaken. The study examined the unexpected infant deaths in five healthcare regions over a period of three years. It was equivalent in size to a study of every infant death in England and Wales over a year and involved studying 450 post-mortem reports. When Detective Ryan met the professor he was told that during that entire study Professor Berry had found no ‘multiple lightning bolts’ striking the same family as had happened with the Folbiggs.

Detective Ryan handed over slides containing tissue samples from the four dead children, post-mortem reports, medical records and files of background details. He asked the British expert to look into the Folbigg deaths and prepare a report.

Professor Berry told the detective that it was very difficult to differentiate on the mortuary slab between a baby that had died from SIDS and one that had suffocated. In a minority of cases of suffocation there might be marks, pinpoint haemorrhages, or fresh blood coming from the nose and mouth, for example, but he stressed that such signs were only evident in a minority of cases of suffocation. He told the detective that it was often only by examining the history of the family and the circumstances of the death that those examining the body could be alert to the possibility that a particular baby might have died from suffocation, rather than SIDS.

In the case of Caleb Folbigg Professor Berry firstly dismissed the suggestion that the loose tissue around the opening of the larynx was the cause of the baby’s death. ‘I have searched the world literature to see if I could find any cases of death at all attributed to floppy larynx, and I came up with none . . . The natural history of floppy larynx is that it is a benign condition and just gets better with time.’

What he found far more interesting was the result of a test performed on a slide of Caleb’s lung tissue that Detective Ryan had given him. ‘It is believed that when some children are smothered they may bleed into their lungs and they then may recover. What happens to the blood that was in the lungs is that it is picked up by scavenger cells and turned into a substance called haemosiderin, which stains blue with this magic stain called Perl’s Prussian Blue. So, a period of . . . complete occlusion of the airways leads to bleeding into the lungs. The blood is

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