Mothers Who Murder (23 page)

The Australian legal system is based on precedent – that is, if an act or judgement has happened before it can be used as an example of how to deal with similar circumstances – and in prior cases the defendant’s relationships with a partner or child have been used to help establish motive for a crime. This can be an important inclusion, as research has shown that over 20 per cent of all murders occur between intimate spouses. Clearly, in those cases the relationship between the offender and victim is key in reaching a decision as to why an event happened. However, for evidence of a relationship to be admissible, it has to be probative.
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The Crown was also using against Carol Matthey the fact that she had been hospitalised for undiagnosed medical episodes – possibly seizures – after which she lost consciousness. The prosecution’s submission was that these medical incidents were relevant to their case as they somehow exemplified her attention-seeking behaviour, in an attempt to gain Stephen’s attentiveness as a result of their ‘unstable relationship’. However, the Crown failed to admit any evidence in support of their assertion that Carol had faked these events in an effort to secure her husband’s devotion. The medical notes associated with them did not indicate that the doctors thought she was pretending. This evidence was deemed inadmissible by Judge Coldrey.

Again, to try and undermine Carol Matthey’s charac
ter in the mind of the jury and strengthen their argument that her actions were driven by her trying to get her husband’s attention, the prosecution claimed that a fire at the Mattheys’ home in 1998 had been started by Carol Matthey. This is unfounded, as the original firefighter’s report gave the cause as a newly installed central heating unit. This was later contested, but nonetheless the house insurance company paid out on the claim, and before the accusation that she had murdered her children no one had ever accused her of arson. The Crown, again, also failed to offer evidence to support this hypothesis – simply basing their proposition that Carol was involved on the fact that the event took place. Again, Judge Coldrey ruled that this had no probative value as part of what the Crown alleged was some sort of behavioural trend.

A REVIEW OF THE FORENSIC EVIDENCE

The Crown sought to challenge the conclusion drawn by the forensic pathologists who undertook the post-mortems on the Matthey children, seeking experts that were willing to offer alternative opinions. They found these experts at the interstate level, and even overseas in one case. Justice Coldrey was very conscious of not letting the expert witnesses step outside their areas of expertise or rely on matters that were extraneous to their proficiency. The defence also called into question the admissibility of some of the Crown witnesses’ evidence.

One of the prosecution witnesses was Dr Susan Beal, a consultant pediatrician and SIDS researcher (but not a pathologist) who reviewed the findings of each of the Matthey children’s post-mortems. Dr Beal agreed that Jacob’s death was most suitably attributable to SIDS,
adding however that the life-threatening episode Jacob experienced around five weeks before his death increased the likelihood that he had suffered non-accidental injury. In relation to Chloe’s death, Dr Beal stated that the fact that the infant was found in the supine position (face up) raised the possibility that the mother had killed the child. To explain Joshua’s death she gave the cause as ‘undetermined’ – as she did not regard the final event of his death as being consistent with either SIDS or from a Klebsiella infection or an accident. She went further, implying that despite the complete lack of any evidence, Carol Matthey may have played a part in the post-surgical cardiac arrest Joshua suffered in hospital. I find this difficult to reconcile with the fact that the child had been in an ICU and was surrounded by medical personnel, none of whom reported anything suspicious or untoward. She also stated that filicide was the most likely cause of death in Joshua’s case. Finally, in relation to Shania’s death, Beal denounced Carol’s claim that the child held her breath when she became distressed as a ‘faint possibility’. Beal listed Shania’s death as occurring as a result of an undetermined cause, most damningly concluding her report by stating that ‘all the evidence points to all the children having been killed by non-accidental suffocation’.
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I was most surprised by this comment from the court documents:

I find this extraordinary, as the leap from poor parenting to multiple filicide is huge. Nonetheless, to support these claims the Crown was relying on Dr Beal, the medical witness who had prepared some sort of psychological profile for Carol Matthey – and had reached the conclusion that she was a child-killer.

The Crown also relied on the expertise of Dr Alan Cala, a forensic pathologist who also reviewed each of the post-mortem findings. Dr Cala generally agreed with Dr Beal, although he also thought Jacob’s death was unexplained, as opposed to resulting from SIDS. Dr Cala continued in the same vein as his comments in the Folbigg case (detailed in
Chapter 3
) when reviewing Chloe Matthey’s death, which he did not agree could be attributed to SIDS either. His reasoning, as highlighted in the court documents, drew on occurrences beyond the child’s death. In particular, the court file contains the following comment:

As a result of this reasoning, he returned a finding of ‘undetermined’ cause of death for Chloe. Dr Cala accepted that the cardiac arrest Joshua Matthey suffered in hospital
was the result of the administration of intravenous morphine; however, he supported Beal’s unsubstantiated allegation that Carol Matthey was somehow involved in this event. Dr Cala refuted Dr Burke’s diagnosis that Joshua died of a Klebsiella septicemia infection, disputing that this could have killed the child, as he did not show any clinical signs of infection on the day he died. Again, he proffered ‘undetermined’ as the cause of death. The worst was yet to come. When Dr Cala reviewed photographs and histology slides from Shania Matthey’s post-mortem he allegedly found several areas of recent injury to her nose and mouth, which he said had not occurred as a result of the attempted resuscitation. He stated that Dr Ranson had failed to describe these in his post-mortem report, and gave the cause of death as ‘smothering’. Both Drs Beal and Cala had been unaware of the examinations by the three forensic odontologists, none of whom had found any of the facial injuries described by Cala from his assessment of post-mortem photographs. Dr Cala suffered under cross-examination, and had to admit on numerous occasions that photographs were not the ideal medium for making diagnoses. Nonetheless, he maintained in reexamination that there was no identifiable natural cause of death for any of the four Matthey children, and that the deaths were in fact consistent with smothering.

The final witness for the Crown was Dr Janice Ophoven, a pediatric forensic pathologist, who was also employed by the prosecution in the Folbigg case. She began her report with a general summary of the Matthey family history, as she had in Folbigg’s case, although judge Coldrey noted that not all of the information Ophoven offered was relevant. The pathologist then went on to review
the post-mortem findings for each of the four children. Unsurprisingly, Ophoven came to the conclusion that Jacob’s death was consistent with intentional suffocation, not SIDS. In relation to Chloe’s death, Ophoven again did not agree with the original post-mortem’s findings and diagnosis, instead offering the opinion that the cause of Chloe’s death was ‘un determined’, even though she conceded that the medical conditions that were present were all found in SIDS deaths. Ophoven stated that Chloe’s death was a case of ‘obvious homicidal violence’ and the death consistent with suffocation. In regard to Joshua’s death, Ophoven considered the diagnosis of Klebsiella septicemia infection as inconsistent with the child’s clinical history, and the cause of death in Joshua’s case as ‘homicidal suffocation’. More importantly, Ophoven repeatedly relied on circumstantial evidence when reaching her diagnoses of cause of death for the four children – namely, that other siblings from the same family had died and that Carol Matthey had been caring for the children at the time of their deaths.

Drs Beal, Cala and Ophoven had been involved in the successful prosecution of Kathleen Folbigg in 2003. One of the quotes from Dr Beal that struck me during that case was this:

This publication by Pollanen in 2005
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really puts to rest any argument that multiple unexplained natural child deaths cannot occur in one family:

In 2004, Professor Stephen Cordner was asked by the Director of Public Prosecutions to review the information available and provide an opinion on the four Matthey children’s deaths. Professor Cordner, an undisputed world leader in the field of forensic medicine, has been the Director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine for twenty-five years, during which time the Institute has become widely renowned in forensic medicine and science. His report, dated 28 January 2005, stated that Cordner found that the cause of death diagnosed as a result of each of the children’s post-mortems was compatible with natural causes, and that he did not disagree with any of the pathologists involved in the original classifications on any major point. He indicated that each of the pathologists that undertook the original post-mortems were advantaged over those who tried to review the information from case files alone, and that they had been bound to report their findings in such a way that another pathologist could reach their own conclusion as to cause of death. Professor Cordner was particularly critical of Ophoven’s ‘homicidal smothering’ hypothesis, stating that it was ‘flawed in its assumptions, reasoning and conclusions’. This is about as damning an appraisal as one expert will level at another professional, and speaks to the level of disagreement that Cordner felt towards Ophoven’s comments.

Professor Cordner drew attention to the fact the Shania in particular showed no evidence of any trauma inside her mouth, which might be expected had she been intentionally suffocated. One of the key statements Professor Cordner made, which I hope will influence other cases of this nature and prevent further damaging evidence being heard against innocent mothers, was this:

While the New South Wales courts had accepted these same experts with the same line of reasoning in the Crown’s case against Kathleen Folbigg in 2003,
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in Victoria Justice Coldrey was scathing. He noted how Dr Cala said one of the deaths was not SIDS simply because there had been earlier deaths in the family. Asked if he had a medical reason for not calling it SIDS, Dr Cala replied: ‘No, I don’t.’ Beal, famous for having been the first to publicly tell mothers to sleep babies on their backs, found the causes of death of two of Matthey’s children to be undetermined and that another was SIDS. But the fourth child was too old for SIDS, therefore ‘murder should be considered’. She then took a surprising leap in logic, concluding ‘all the evidence points to all the children having been killed by non-accidental suffocation’.

Dr Ophoven didn’t escape Justice Coldrey’s disapproval either. While the judge accepted that there was the possibility that the Matthey children died of manual asphyxiation, and that their mother intentionally killed them, he did not accept that a pathologist was in a position to reach this determination based on the information available to them in this case. He commented that prosecutors and courts may not like coincidences of this nature, where multiple unexplained deaths occur in one family, but that should not affect judgements; and he remained open-minded that medical conditions which are currently not well understood or easy to diagnose may have been the cause of the Matthey children’s deaths.

Coldrey concluded that while suffocation could not be excluded from the medical findings at autopsy, he relied on Professor Cordner’s comment that ‘if this case is to result in prosecution, I want to clearly state that there is no pathological basis for concluding homicide’.
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Powerful stuff. None of the Crown’s three key medical expert witnesses – Beal, Cala or Ophoven – had examined any of the children post-mortem; they based their evidence solely on photographs and post-mortem reports.

Carol Matthey’s mental state was called into question. This would have to be part of the Crown’s case as people who are of balanced mind do not intentionally suffocate four of their children. The medical evidence indicated that during the period in which the children died, Matthey was not suffering from post-natal depression. Carol was clinically depressed at times during the relevant four years and four months, as she was diagnosed and treated by a general practitioner in mid-September 2002. However, as this was two months after Joshua’s death, Justice Coldrey suggested
that this was in response to the loss of her children, as opposed to having an influence on their deaths. There was nothing in Matthey’s medical history that suggested any psychiatric illness at any time.