In June 2017, at the age of 24, when most young people are drinking too much, dating the wrong people and otherwise avoiding adulthood, Rhanee Rego, a fourth-year law student at the University of Newcastle, took up a part-time placement with a barrister named Robert Cavanagh. Tall and lanky, with the lugubrious manner of a country undertaker, Cavanagh is well known for campaigning against wrongful convictions.
Cavanagh believed Folbigg was innocent, but Rego was determined to come to her own conclusion. “I didn’t want to help a woman who’d potentially killed four of her kids, especially pro bono,” she explains. But as she made her way through the material, she became increasingly alarmed. “There was simply no direct evidence anywhere to say Folbigg was guilty,” she says. “The case was entirely circumstantial. It was like clouds.
social science at the University of Newcastle. “She was a deep thinker,” says Professor John Anderson, who taught her criminal law. “She’d contribute to discussions, which a lot of students don’t.” Cavanagh was similarly impressed. “She was extremely bright,” he tells me. “And she didn’t give up easily.”Credit:In 2017, when Rego began her placement with Cavanagh, Folbigg’s case was at a standstill.
In September 2017, Rego visited Folbigg at Cessnock Correctional Centre, in the NSW Hunter Valley, with barrister Isabel Reed. It was Rego’s first time in a prison. “There was lots of noise,” she says. “People yelling, and doors opening and clanging.” They were led through a series of heavy steel doors to a tiny room, little more than a metre square, with three chairs squeezed around a small desk. Folbigg was already there, sitting facing the door, dressed in prison greens.
Rego and Cavanagh started preparing Folbigg, who was then an inmate at Silverwater Correctional Complex in Sydney’s western suburbs, for the inquiry. The pair began visiting her three times a week, driving from Newcastle in Cavanagh’s rattling black RAV4. “We’d leave at 5am, in the dark,” Rego says. “We’d get to Silverwater at about 7.30am. There was a little cafe opposite the jail where we’d have a toastie and coffee before heading in to see Kath.
Rego, as a consequence, had to grow up fast. She enjoyed uni, working in pubs and sharing a love of pet fish with her then-boyfriend, with whom she went travelling through South-East Asia. But she also developed, either by accident or design, an air of casual authority, a deep voice and scalpel-like diction. This has served her well as an advocate, but there is a sense that it came at a cost, as if she leapfrogged from early adolescence to middle age.