Kathleen Folbigg spent 20 years in prison for the deaths of her four children before an inquiry cleared her name in 2023, and now she is speaking for the first time about a relationship she kept hidden throughout her time behind bars – a romance with a fellow inmate whose own past had made headlines.
Folbigg was once branded Australia’s worst female serial killer, a label that followed her through two decades of wrongful imprisonment. Since her exoneration, she has rebuilt her life and married her childhood friend Bob Muir, a union that has given her the stability she was denied for so long.
But even after the wedding, old rumours about her prison years kept resurfacing. Rather than let the speculation continue, Folbigg has decided to address it directly, opening up about a bond she formed with another woman inside prison walls.
“When you are facing decades behind bars for crimes you didn’t commit, the concept of a normal future disappears,” Folbigg told news.com.au.
That loss of any imagined future, she said, shaped the choices she made inside. The relationship she formed with her fellow inmate became a source of comfort during years when hope for anything beyond prison walls seemed impossible.
Folbigg has chosen to discuss the relationship now on her own terms, rather than let others define it for her. After decades of being characterised by strangers who never knew her, she is finally the one telling her own story.
Her marriage to Muir, a friend she has known since childhood, stands as the clearest sign of how far she has come. Where once the future held nothing but a cell, she now has a partner, a home and the freedom to speak on her own terms about everything that came before.
For a woman who lost 20 years to a conviction she never deserved, that freedom to simply tell the truth may be the most ordinary gift of all – and the one she values most.
