October 12, 2025 • 22 mins
It is one of the most unspeakable crimes a parent can be accused of – shaking their vulnerable baby so badly, that they sustain brain damage, or in the worst cases, die.
Diagnosing Murder is a new investigative podcast by senior writer Michael Bachelard, and producer Ruby Schwartz, that questions whether we can trust the science behind shaken baby syndrome.
Today, Bachelard explains why the diagnosis is in question and whether innocent people are being locked up for a crime they never committed.
And just a warning, some listeners may find the contents of this episode distressing.
Diagnosing Murder is out now. Listen on Apple, Spotify and wherever you listen to your podcasts.
- This episode mentions the case of a Texas man who was due to be executed this week. Since we recorded this interview, the man - Robert Roberson - has been granted a reprieve.
Subscribe to The Age & SMH: https://subscribe.smh.com.au/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:01):
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
This is the morning edition. I'm Samantha Cylinder Morris. It's Monday,
October 13th. It is one of the most unspeakable crimes
that a parent can be accused of. Shaking their vulnerable
baby so badly that they sustained brain damage or, in
(00:25):
the worst case, die. Diagnosing murder is a new investigative
podcast by senior writer Michael Bachelard that questions whether we
can trust the science behind shaken baby syndrome. Today, Bachelard
explains why the diagnosis is in question and whether innocent
(00:45):
people are being locked up for a crime they never committed. So, Michael,
to start us off, can you tell us what shaken
baby syndrome actually is and why you even wanted to
investigate this. I mean, obviously many listeners would feel like,
I'm sure you do, and I know I do, which
(01:06):
is it is such a grim topic.
S2 (01:09):
So Shaken baby syndrome is really kind of started in
the early 1970s with a northern English doctor called Norman Guthkelch,
and he saw some of these injuries in children are
subdural hematomas, particularly bleeding over parts of the brain. And
he was talking to the parents and they were saying, well,
(01:30):
we just kind of give them a bit of a
shake if they've been naughty. And he'd also at the
same time been watching car crash research, which at the
time was being done by the car companies to try
and make their vehicles safer, where they were finding that
whiplash injuries in the monkeys that they were testing could
come without external injury to the brain. And so he
(01:50):
sort of put two and two together and guessed or
theorized that shaking a baby could produce those kinds of injuries.
And people really took that and ran with it. And shaking,
not shaking a baby became, you know, something that really
entered the lexicon. It was initially really done as an
(02:11):
educational message. Don't shake your baby. And I think we
can all get behind that. You shouldn't. They're fragile things.
It's a terrible thing to do, but it really morphed
from there into this kind of legal prosecutorial thing, which actually,
Norman Guthkelch later was horrified by when he when he
(02:32):
really looked into it. But and it kind of was
narrowed down, I guess, to three specific symptoms that very
often is called the triad. Subdural hemorrhage, bleeding under the
dura matter of the brain, retinal hemorrhage, bleeding at the
retina in the back of the eye, and brain swelling,
which actually can be fatal. So this triad of injuries
(02:53):
is seen as a as a pointer to abuse to shaking.
And that's really that's where the controversy lies. I mean,
I think anybody who is seen to be deliberately harming
or killing a child or doing actions that could deliberately
harm or kill a child is seen rightly as a monster.
(03:14):
We take child abuse nowadays. We take it very seriously,
and so we should. But the question here is whether
the medical signs that are taken to make up shaken
baby syndrome do actually point to abuse or not, or
whether there are these miscarriages of justice going on. And
that's really the question we look at in this podcast.
S1 (03:39):
So how has the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome been
playing out in Australia? Like how often are we seeing cases?
S2 (03:47):
Well that's a it's a good question. And it's actually
a hard question to answer because nobody officially seems to
be keeping count of of how many cases there are.
There is some statements from from one of the forensic
paediatricians in Australia, prominent activists in this space, who says
that perhaps 20 children in Australia die per year from
(04:09):
what is called abusive head trauma. So that's shaking with
or without impact on the head. And there's perhaps, you know,
20 odd cases in the state of Victoria, a year
that that seemed to come to the hospital. But, you know,
if the if the diagnosis is contentious, then some of
those cases are potentially contentious. So it's very hard to tell.
(04:31):
What we do know is that, you know, what we
see emerging into the criminal courts is is described as
the tip of the iceberg, because a lot of this
is happening more or less out of sight in the
children's court, where reporting is very difficult. And that's where
child protection applications are take place, children are taken from
their parents and so forth, but they may never emerge
(04:52):
into criminal charges.
S3 (04:54):
And now you and our.
S1 (04:55):
Colleague Ruby Schwarz, you've been investigating whether the science this
diagnosis can actually be trusted at all, or whether parents.
And they generally seem to be fathers or stepfathers or boyfriends,
whether they're actually being wrongfully accused of hurting their baby.
So I think perhaps it's helpful to start with what's
actually been happening internationally in terms of this diagnosis being
(05:16):
thrown into question.
S2 (05:17):
Well, look, globally, and particularly in the United States, the
disagreement about this has become so belligerent that people have
actually described it as a war. They've described each other as,
you know, members of cults or, you know, they talk
about it as dogma. And, and these insults really are
thrown back and forth between the two sides. It's played
(05:40):
out most in America, but in the UK this also
plays out there. One of the reasons for doing this podcast, actually,
is that we just don't seem to have that conversation
very much in Australia. And I wanted to say, well,
there is this global controversy and we we just kind
of proceeding down this track without really asking any questions. But,
you know, in America, for example, at the moment we
(06:01):
have a guy who's in prison in Texas on death row,
and he's due to be executed this week on October
the 16th, the first shaken baby case to go to execution.
At the same time, a court in Illinois a couple
of months ago said, we're not going to hear this case.
This the science isn't strong enough. And a couple of
(06:21):
years ago in new Jersey, it was described in a
court as junk science. So it's very much a live
controversy in the US. It just isn't talked about that
much in Australia.
S1 (06:33):
And so who is questioning this diagnosis in Australia?
S2 (06:36):
Well, for the first time ever, one of our most
renowned forensic pathologists, a guy called Professor Stephen Cordner, the
former long time head of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine,
is speaking out about this, and he's calling for an inquiry.
He's come to doubt the diagnosis over the years, and
some of the cases which have been tried on this basis,
(07:00):
and a couple of expert reports that he's given have
actually resulted in cases being withdrawn before trial because he's
pointing out that 20, 30, maybe up to 50 known
medical conditions can cause the same symptoms. And there's probably
more that we don't know about, because a lot, unfortunately,
(07:21):
in medical science, is still unknown. So he's a he's
a voice who's speaking out for the first time in
our podcast and our reporting. And we've also spoken to
a former intensive care pediatrician, James Tibbals, formerly from the
Royal Children's Hospital, now retired, also expressing enormous doubts. You know,
they are two voices out of a very large and
kind of consistent medical orthodoxy in Australia. But they're they're very,
(07:46):
very credible voices. And they've looked at the evidence and
they've they've got questions.
S3 (07:50):
Now, Michael, I want to turn.
S1 (07:52):
To an Australian case which has a incredibly high flying
American lawyer who has taken this on pro bono. So
can you tell us about this case and why this lawyer,
Heather Kirkwood, has taken it on pro bono?
S2 (08:06):
So this is the case of the people we're calling
them Kabir and Dipika, and their daughter is Dua. We
can't use their real names because they were subject to
child protection proceedings. So Kabir tells the story that one
night he was looking after Dua and she just had
these seizure like motions went stiff and then she went floppy.
(08:27):
He rushed, rushed her into the room where Dipika was
sleeping and they took her off to hospital and she recovered.
But while she was at hospital she had two of
the or one and a half really, I guess, of
the triad findings. And that was enough for them to
accuse Kabir of abusing his daughter, and Dua was taken
(08:50):
away from them. They went through an 18 month nightmare
where she was in foster care, and he was accused, criminally,
of violent assault against her. Heather works on these cases
all over the world pro bono. She's a former high
flying antitrust lawyer in the US. But she she started
taking on these cases. And really, she's a savant, I
(09:13):
guess she collects every piece of information she can find
from court records, medical records, whatever else. And she puts
together the story and she tries to see is it
credible that this is abuse or is there an alternative explanation?
And in the case of Kabir and Dipika, she went
right back to Dewar's birth, which happened in double quick time.
(09:38):
Dipika had terrible tear. It's what's called a traumatic birth,
a precipitous birth, and the force is generated on Dewar's head.
During that birth would have been enormous. And ultimately, when
Stephen Cordner in fact came to write his expert report
on this case, he says, well, yes, that traumatic birth
(09:59):
could be an explanation for her seizures and her later injuries.
And obviously that's an innocent explanation that does not involve
compare shaking his daughter violently.
S1 (10:10):
And tell us about what how Heather Kirkwood viewed the
case because in your piece. Well, she describes the treatment
of this couple as a lynching. So tell us a
bit more about this.
S2 (10:20):
So, Heather, as I said, collects all this information and
she got all these reports from police from the domestic
violence practitioners brought in. And they did two reports. There
was a whole bunch of material generated. And putting it
all together, she just found the conclusions that were being
drawn about Kabir's behaviour, about his character, were on the
(10:45):
thinnest of evidence, were kind of pointing towards him being
this cold, violent, controlling man despite what Typekit was saying
about him. And she stayed with him and stayed on
his side throughout this ordeal and fought alongside him to
to try and, you know, establish that he'd done nothing wrong.
(11:06):
So when this evidence came out, she said, Heather, she's
got she's a remarkable woman. Heather, in a great turn
of phrase, she said, this started out looking like a
regular old shaken baby case. You know, they get this
wrong and they get that wrong. And I've seen it
a million times before. In this case, though, she she
described it as science fiction. She said, you know, this
(11:27):
case is something else. Uh, and as you say, she said, yeah,
it's I asked her to describe what she, what it
did look like to her, and she said, yeah, it's
a lynching.
S1 (11:40):
We'll be right back.
S4 (11:48):
And you've actually.
S1 (11:49):
Spent time with this couple and their baby, who thankfully
survived this incident. So was there anything in your opinion
that could have suggested that they could have done this?
S2 (11:59):
Look. Absolutely nothing. I interviewed them extensively as a couple
and I asked each of them individually questions. Their relationship
is warm and loving, loyal. Dipika is full of life
and beans. She is not, as she was described in
some of the reports, a victim survivor of family violence.
(12:21):
It really does come down to these medical findings. One
and a half of the triad findings and ultimately their
inability to explain that. So they were asked repeatedly over years,
you know, what happened? And they say, well, she went limp.
And it's not the answer the authorities were looking for.
The answer to the authorities were looking for was I
(12:42):
shook her, and he says that that didn't happen and
everything cascades from that. It's, you know, in my mind,
almost like being asked, well, prove you're sane, prove you're sane,
and you go, well, I'm sane and well, no. Prove it.
It's like, I can't. I can't prove that I can
act sane. I can show you my good behavior over
(13:03):
all this time. You can talk to everybody around me
and my wife and my, you know, people who love me,
and they can say I'm sane. But if you don't
believe that, what am I going to do? And and
they found themselves in that kind of catch 22 for
18 months. They were without their daughter. And then the
day after she's finally returned to them, he he's charged
(13:25):
with recklessly causing serious injury.
S4 (13:28):
And so what actually happened to.
S1 (13:29):
Kabir and Deepika? Like, what was the result of this suspicion?
S2 (13:33):
Well, in the podcast we do cover that, but we
don't cover it till later on in the series. So
I think I'd like our listeners to be able to
allow to play this out. But it's an extraordinary story
and they're incredible people. And it's a highly emotional story.
S1 (13:49):
And safe to say, though, that the parents are traumatized, right?
I mean, you mentioned in your story that was published
over the weekend that this has stopped them, I think,
from them entertaining the idea of having another child.
S2 (14:00):
Yeah. They say they've completely changed as a result of this.
They their trust in you know what, in my view
is a very good health system in Australia. Their trust
in the police again I think very good. We have
very good police in Australia, but their trust in those
systems has diminished and they are too scared to have
(14:24):
another child. I think, you know, the effect on their
lives will be life long. I certainly don't want to
say and I really want to emphasize this, that child
abuse exists. It's a scourge. You know, there is clear, uh,
all of the stuff that's emerged out of child abuse
(14:44):
medicine since the 1960s, suggests that it's a real and
incredibly damaging thing that happens. All we are really doing
here is saying, can you diagnose child abuse from these
medical findings? And if the link there is weak or
(15:09):
even questionable, then should we really be taking people with
this profile of injuries to court and charging them with
these serious things and putting them in jail? And we,
you know, here in Topeka is not the only case
study we're following in this podcast. There are a number
(15:30):
of others, and there are some quite shocking stories.
S4 (15:33):
Okay, so I'd love to know.
S1 (15:35):
What the people who do support the shaken baby diagnosis
and they do support these people taking these parents to
court and so forth. You know, what do they say
in response to the criticism of the evidence that you've uncovered?
You know that sometimes the evidence, according to some people,
is not reliable and is incorrectly charging people of child
abuse when you know they would suggest the evidence doesn't
(15:58):
back that up, what do they say?
S2 (15:59):
Well, they insist that the evidence does back them up. Uh,
they talk about, uh, you know, hundreds of case studies and, and,
and medical literature, which which proves it. And, you know,
they are in the majority. Uh, that's the kind of
the medical orthodoxy. It's what's taught in our in our
medical curriculums. But the problem they face is that the
(16:23):
evidence base is not strong, and you can't go around
shaking babies to test it. Everybody agrees with that, of course. So,
you know, there's been biomechanical models. There's, you know, essentially
crash test dummies. They've tried shaking animals of various kinds.
All of those things prove. Oof! Well, they prove inconclusive
(16:44):
or they certainly don't prove it to the to the
satisfaction of both sides of this incredibly belligerent debate. So,
you know, and each side has become very entrenched in
their belief systems. And that's kind of where this debate
comes from. But it's very much the case that they
would argue that this is good science and based on
(17:05):
on good studies.
S1 (17:07):
Okay. Now, obviously, the features that you've written and your
podcast shows how there are people who are questioning this diagnosis.
They say that the science behind it is not solid,
and that parents like Kabir and Dipika are being incorrectly
accused of child abuse. So if this diagnosis as a
whole is chucked out, I guess, is that a scary
(17:29):
possibility as well, that there could be a risk that
cases of child abuse then could be missed?
S2 (17:33):
Look, I think already the the diagnosis has morphed somewhat
as a response to some of these criticisms. So they
now look for other conditions, some other conditions, and they
look for other signs of abuse. But it's still, you know,
in the case studies we've looked at and there's there's
several of them, it still seems to come back to, okay,
(17:56):
they've got these conditions, these signs. In response to this controversy,
the medical orthodoxy has shifted a bit. And, uh, even
the name is shifted. They're uncomfortable now with calling it
shaken baby syndrome. Um, and they don't like the triad either. Um,
although they still use both. It's the preferred term now
(18:19):
is abusive head trauma or even inflicted head trauma. And
that differs a bit between different different countries. And the triad,
they tend to say, is a part of a constellation
of broader constellation of symptoms and signs. And the critics,
people like Cordner and so on, say that's you're getting
it the wrong way round. Um, you know, there's no
(18:40):
other external evidence of abuse. And this particular and questioning
whether this these this particular triad of signs is enough to,
to to get you over the line for a criminal
prosecution or a child removal. That's perhaps a little bit
of a complicated way of putting it. But I think
the tests for abuse, um, fractures, bruising, you know, burns, assaults,
(19:07):
those kinds of things are, are much more, I think,
uncontested and and widely accepted. So if a child turns
up with, for example, a bruise or a, or a, um,
you know, a fracture in the skull, you can, you
can say, well, okay, it's there's been some impact of
(19:28):
some kind. So it's either accidental or deliberate. Let's try
and figure out that. But it's when children, particularly when
children turn up with no external signs at all, and
only these brain injuries, this triad of injuries, that's when
this diagnosis is most contested.
S4 (19:50):
And finally.
S1 (19:52):
What do specialists such as, for example, retired forensic pathologist
Stephen Cordner say should happen here in Australia?
S2 (19:59):
Stephen Cordner wants an inquiry into what we can reasonably draw,
in a legal sense, from the triad of symptoms. He
wants the best legal, medical and scientific minds to ask
that question and try and find out if there's an answer.
(20:19):
A Swedish group did this a few years ago and
found out that the link was very weak. That was
presented in an Australian Appeal Court case in 2021, and
the judges sort of found against those scientists. Um, but
Cordner would like Australian people to be doing that work
because he fears that what's going on here is wrongful
(20:43):
convictions are not necessarily on an industrial scale, but too
many to be comfortable with. And I think, um, the
idea that we accept this without question is something that
he really wants to put his professional reputation and his
(21:03):
credibility on the line to say that needs to be quizzed,
needs to be questioned. And I think he hopes, as
I do, that this podcast and him speaking on this
podcast will raise those questions and generate a debate that
we haven't really had in Australia yet and that is
(21:25):
being held robustly in other jurisdictions.
S1 (21:31):
Well, your podcast Diagnosing Murder, it's out now. Got a
lot of listeners know that they can find it wherever
they listen to their podcast. So thank you so much, Michael,
for your time.
S2 (21:41):
It's always a pleasure. Thank you.
S1 (21:53):
Today's episode of The Morning Edition was produced by Josh towers.
Our executive producer is Tammy Mills. Tom Mackendrick is our
head of audio. To listen to our episodes as soon
as they drop, follow the Morning Edition on Apple, Spotify,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. Our newsrooms are powered
by subscriptions, so to support independent journalism, visit The Age
(22:15):
or smh.com.au. Subscribe. And to stay up to date, sign
up to our Morning Edition newsletter to receive a summary
of the day's most important news in your inbox every morning.
Links are in the show. Notes. I'm Samantha Selinger. Morris,
thanks for listening.
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
This is the morning edition. I'm Samantha Cylinder Morris. It's Monday,
October 13th. It is one of the most unspeakable crimes
that a parent can be accused of. Shaking their vulnerable
baby so badly that they sustained brain damage or, in
(00:25):
the worst case, die. Diagnosing murder is a new investigative
podcast by senior writer Michael Bachelard that questions whether we
can trust the science behind shaken baby syndrome. Today, Bachelard
explains why the diagnosis is in question and whether innocent
(00:45):
people are being locked up for a crime they never committed. So, Michael,
to start us off, can you tell us what shaken
baby syndrome actually is and why you even wanted to
investigate this. I mean, obviously many listeners would feel like,
I'm sure you do, and I know I do, which
(01:06):
is it is such a grim topic.
S2 (01:09):
So Shaken baby syndrome is really kind of started in
the early 1970s with a northern English doctor called Norman Guthkelch,
and he saw some of these injuries in children are
subdural hematomas, particularly bleeding over parts of the brain. And
he was talking to the parents and they were saying, well,
(01:30):
we just kind of give them a bit of a
shake if they've been naughty. And he'd also at the
same time been watching car crash research, which at the
time was being done by the car companies to try
and make their vehicles safer, where they were finding that
whiplash injuries in the monkeys that they were testing could
come without external injury to the brain. And so he
(01:50):
sort of put two and two together and guessed or
theorized that shaking a baby could produce those kinds of injuries.
And people really took that and ran with it. And shaking,
not shaking a baby became, you know, something that really
entered the lexicon. It was initially really done as an
(02:11):
educational message. Don't shake your baby. And I think we
can all get behind that. You shouldn't. They're fragile things.
It's a terrible thing to do, but it really morphed
from there into this kind of legal prosecutorial thing, which actually,
Norman Guthkelch later was horrified by when he when he
(02:32):
really looked into it. But and it kind of was
narrowed down, I guess, to three specific symptoms that very
often is called the triad. Subdural hemorrhage, bleeding under the
dura matter of the brain, retinal hemorrhage, bleeding at the
retina in the back of the eye, and brain swelling,
which actually can be fatal. So this triad of injuries
(02:53):
is seen as a as a pointer to abuse to shaking.
And that's really that's where the controversy lies. I mean,
I think anybody who is seen to be deliberately harming
or killing a child or doing actions that could deliberately
harm or kill a child is seen rightly as a monster.
(03:14):
We take child abuse nowadays. We take it very seriously,
and so we should. But the question here is whether
the medical signs that are taken to make up shaken
baby syndrome do actually point to abuse or not, or
whether there are these miscarriages of justice going on. And
that's really the question we look at in this podcast.
S1 (03:39):
So how has the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome been
playing out in Australia? Like how often are we seeing cases?
S2 (03:47):
Well that's a it's a good question. And it's actually
a hard question to answer because nobody officially seems to
be keeping count of of how many cases there are.
There is some statements from from one of the forensic
paediatricians in Australia, prominent activists in this space, who says
that perhaps 20 children in Australia die per year from
(04:09):
what is called abusive head trauma. So that's shaking with
or without impact on the head. And there's perhaps, you know,
20 odd cases in the state of Victoria, a year
that that seemed to come to the hospital. But, you know,
if the if the diagnosis is contentious, then some of
those cases are potentially contentious. So it's very hard to tell.
(04:31):
What we do know is that, you know, what we
see emerging into the criminal courts is is described as
the tip of the iceberg, because a lot of this
is happening more or less out of sight in the
children's court, where reporting is very difficult. And that's where
child protection applications are take place, children are taken from
their parents and so forth, but they may never emerge
(04:52):
into criminal charges.
S3 (04:54):
And now you and our.
S1 (04:55):
Colleague Ruby Schwarz, you've been investigating whether the science this
diagnosis can actually be trusted at all, or whether parents.
And they generally seem to be fathers or stepfathers or boyfriends,
whether they're actually being wrongfully accused of hurting their baby.
So I think perhaps it's helpful to start with what's
actually been happening internationally in terms of this diagnosis being
(05:16):
thrown into question.
S2 (05:17):
Well, look, globally, and particularly in the United States, the
disagreement about this has become so belligerent that people have
actually described it as a war. They've described each other as,
you know, members of cults or, you know, they talk
about it as dogma. And, and these insults really are
thrown back and forth between the two sides. It's played
(05:40):
out most in America, but in the UK this also
plays out there. One of the reasons for doing this podcast, actually,
is that we just don't seem to have that conversation
very much in Australia. And I wanted to say, well,
there is this global controversy and we we just kind
of proceeding down this track without really asking any questions. But,
you know, in America, for example, at the moment we
(06:01):
have a guy who's in prison in Texas on death row,
and he's due to be executed this week on October
the 16th, the first shaken baby case to go to execution.
At the same time, a court in Illinois a couple
of months ago said, we're not going to hear this case.
This the science isn't strong enough. And a couple of
(06:21):
years ago in new Jersey, it was described in a
court as junk science. So it's very much a live
controversy in the US. It just isn't talked about that
much in Australia.
S1 (06:33):
And so who is questioning this diagnosis in Australia?
S2 (06:36):
Well, for the first time ever, one of our most
renowned forensic pathologists, a guy called Professor Stephen Cordner, the
former long time head of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine,
is speaking out about this, and he's calling for an inquiry.
He's come to doubt the diagnosis over the years, and
some of the cases which have been tried on this basis,
(07:00):
and a couple of expert reports that he's given have
actually resulted in cases being withdrawn before trial because he's
pointing out that 20, 30, maybe up to 50 known
medical conditions can cause the same symptoms. And there's probably
more that we don't know about, because a lot, unfortunately,
(07:21):
in medical science, is still unknown. So he's a he's
a voice who's speaking out for the first time in
our podcast and our reporting. And we've also spoken to
a former intensive care pediatrician, James Tibbals, formerly from the
Royal Children's Hospital, now retired, also expressing enormous doubts. You know,
they are two voices out of a very large and
kind of consistent medical orthodoxy in Australia. But they're they're very,
(07:46):
very credible voices. And they've looked at the evidence and
they've they've got questions.
S3 (07:50):
Now, Michael, I want to turn.
S1 (07:52):
To an Australian case which has a incredibly high flying
American lawyer who has taken this on pro bono. So
can you tell us about this case and why this lawyer,
Heather Kirkwood, has taken it on pro bono?
S2 (08:06):
So this is the case of the people we're calling
them Kabir and Dipika, and their daughter is Dua. We
can't use their real names because they were subject to
child protection proceedings. So Kabir tells the story that one
night he was looking after Dua and she just had
these seizure like motions went stiff and then she went floppy.
(08:27):
He rushed, rushed her into the room where Dipika was
sleeping and they took her off to hospital and she recovered.
But while she was at hospital she had two of
the or one and a half really, I guess, of
the triad findings. And that was enough for them to
accuse Kabir of abusing his daughter, and Dua was taken
(08:50):
away from them. They went through an 18 month nightmare
where she was in foster care, and he was accused, criminally,
of violent assault against her. Heather works on these cases
all over the world pro bono. She's a former high
flying antitrust lawyer in the US. But she she started
taking on these cases. And really, she's a savant, I
(09:13):
guess she collects every piece of information she can find
from court records, medical records, whatever else. And she puts
together the story and she tries to see is it
credible that this is abuse or is there an alternative explanation?
And in the case of Kabir and Dipika, she went
right back to Dewar's birth, which happened in double quick time.
(09:38):
Dipika had terrible tear. It's what's called a traumatic birth,
a precipitous birth, and the force is generated on Dewar's head.
During that birth would have been enormous. And ultimately, when
Stephen Cordner in fact came to write his expert report
on this case, he says, well, yes, that traumatic birth
(09:59):
could be an explanation for her seizures and her later injuries.
And obviously that's an innocent explanation that does not involve
compare shaking his daughter violently.
S1 (10:10):
And tell us about what how Heather Kirkwood viewed the
case because in your piece. Well, she describes the treatment
of this couple as a lynching. So tell us a
bit more about this.
S2 (10:20):
So, Heather, as I said, collects all this information and
she got all these reports from police from the domestic
violence practitioners brought in. And they did two reports. There
was a whole bunch of material generated. And putting it
all together, she just found the conclusions that were being
drawn about Kabir's behaviour, about his character, were on the
(10:45):
thinnest of evidence, were kind of pointing towards him being
this cold, violent, controlling man despite what Typekit was saying
about him. And she stayed with him and stayed on
his side throughout this ordeal and fought alongside him to
to try and, you know, establish that he'd done nothing wrong.
(11:06):
So when this evidence came out, she said, Heather, she's
got she's a remarkable woman. Heather, in a great turn
of phrase, she said, this started out looking like a
regular old shaken baby case. You know, they get this
wrong and they get that wrong. And I've seen it
a million times before. In this case, though, she she
described it as science fiction. She said, you know, this
(11:27):
case is something else. Uh, and as you say, she said, yeah,
it's I asked her to describe what she, what it
did look like to her, and she said, yeah, it's
a lynching.
S1 (11:40):
We'll be right back.
S4 (11:48):
And you've actually.
S1 (11:49):
Spent time with this couple and their baby, who thankfully
survived this incident. So was there anything in your opinion
that could have suggested that they could have done this?
S2 (11:59):
Look. Absolutely nothing. I interviewed them extensively as a couple
and I asked each of them individually questions. Their relationship
is warm and loving, loyal. Dipika is full of life
and beans. She is not, as she was described in
some of the reports, a victim survivor of family violence.
(12:21):
It really does come down to these medical findings. One
and a half of the triad findings and ultimately their
inability to explain that. So they were asked repeatedly over years,
you know, what happened? And they say, well, she went limp.
And it's not the answer the authorities were looking for.
The answer to the authorities were looking for was I
(12:42):
shook her, and he says that that didn't happen and
everything cascades from that. It's, you know, in my mind,
almost like being asked, well, prove you're sane, prove you're sane,
and you go, well, I'm sane and well, no. Prove it.
It's like, I can't. I can't prove that I can
act sane. I can show you my good behavior over
(13:03):
all this time. You can talk to everybody around me
and my wife and my, you know, people who love me,
and they can say I'm sane. But if you don't
believe that, what am I going to do? And and
they found themselves in that kind of catch 22 for
18 months. They were without their daughter. And then the
day after she's finally returned to them, he he's charged
(13:25):
with recklessly causing serious injury.
S4 (13:28):
And so what actually happened to.
S1 (13:29):
Kabir and Deepika? Like, what was the result of this suspicion?
S2 (13:33):
Well, in the podcast we do cover that, but we
don't cover it till later on in the series. So
I think I'd like our listeners to be able to
allow to play this out. But it's an extraordinary story
and they're incredible people. And it's a highly emotional story.
S1 (13:49):
And safe to say, though, that the parents are traumatized, right?
I mean, you mentioned in your story that was published
over the weekend that this has stopped them, I think,
from them entertaining the idea of having another child.
S2 (14:00):
Yeah. They say they've completely changed as a result of this.
They their trust in you know what, in my view
is a very good health system in Australia. Their trust
in the police again I think very good. We have
very good police in Australia, but their trust in those
systems has diminished and they are too scared to have
(14:24):
another child. I think, you know, the effect on their
lives will be life long. I certainly don't want to
say and I really want to emphasize this, that child
abuse exists. It's a scourge. You know, there is clear, uh,
all of the stuff that's emerged out of child abuse
(14:44):
medicine since the 1960s, suggests that it's a real and
incredibly damaging thing that happens. All we are really doing
here is saying, can you diagnose child abuse from these
medical findings? And if the link there is weak or
(15:09):
even questionable, then should we really be taking people with
this profile of injuries to court and charging them with
these serious things and putting them in jail? And we,
you know, here in Topeka is not the only case
study we're following in this podcast. There are a number
(15:30):
of others, and there are some quite shocking stories.
S4 (15:33):
Okay, so I'd love to know.
S1 (15:35):
What the people who do support the shaken baby diagnosis
and they do support these people taking these parents to
court and so forth. You know, what do they say
in response to the criticism of the evidence that you've uncovered?
You know that sometimes the evidence, according to some people,
is not reliable and is incorrectly charging people of child
abuse when you know they would suggest the evidence doesn't
(15:58):
back that up, what do they say?
S2 (15:59):
Well, they insist that the evidence does back them up. Uh,
they talk about, uh, you know, hundreds of case studies and, and,
and medical literature, which which proves it. And, you know,
they are in the majority. Uh, that's the kind of
the medical orthodoxy. It's what's taught in our in our
medical curriculums. But the problem they face is that the
(16:23):
evidence base is not strong, and you can't go around
shaking babies to test it. Everybody agrees with that, of course. So,
you know, there's been biomechanical models. There's, you know, essentially
crash test dummies. They've tried shaking animals of various kinds.
All of those things prove. Oof! Well, they prove inconclusive
(16:44):
or they certainly don't prove it to the to the
satisfaction of both sides of this incredibly belligerent debate. So,
you know, and each side has become very entrenched in
their belief systems. And that's kind of where this debate
comes from. But it's very much the case that they
would argue that this is good science and based on
(17:05):
on good studies.
S1 (17:07):
Okay. Now, obviously, the features that you've written and your
podcast shows how there are people who are questioning this diagnosis.
They say that the science behind it is not solid,
and that parents like Kabir and Dipika are being incorrectly
accused of child abuse. So if this diagnosis as a
whole is chucked out, I guess, is that a scary
(17:29):
possibility as well, that there could be a risk that
cases of child abuse then could be missed?
S2 (17:33):
Look, I think already the the diagnosis has morphed somewhat
as a response to some of these criticisms. So they
now look for other conditions, some other conditions, and they
look for other signs of abuse. But it's still, you know,
in the case studies we've looked at and there's there's
several of them, it still seems to come back to, okay,
(17:56):
they've got these conditions, these signs. In response to this controversy,
the medical orthodoxy has shifted a bit. And, uh, even
the name is shifted. They're uncomfortable now with calling it
shaken baby syndrome. Um, and they don't like the triad either. Um,
although they still use both. It's the preferred term now
(18:19):
is abusive head trauma or even inflicted head trauma. And
that differs a bit between different different countries. And the triad,
they tend to say, is a part of a constellation
of broader constellation of symptoms and signs. And the critics,
people like Cordner and so on, say that's you're getting
it the wrong way round. Um, you know, there's no
(18:40):
other external evidence of abuse. And this particular and questioning
whether this these this particular triad of signs is enough to,
to to get you over the line for a criminal
prosecution or a child removal. That's perhaps a little bit
of a complicated way of putting it. But I think
the tests for abuse, um, fractures, bruising, you know, burns, assaults,
(19:07):
those kinds of things are, are much more, I think,
uncontested and and widely accepted. So if a child turns
up with, for example, a bruise or a, or a, um,
you know, a fracture in the skull, you can, you
can say, well, okay, it's there's been some impact of
(19:28):
some kind. So it's either accidental or deliberate. Let's try
and figure out that. But it's when children, particularly when
children turn up with no external signs at all, and
only these brain injuries, this triad of injuries, that's when
this diagnosis is most contested.
S4 (19:50):
And finally.
S1 (19:52):
What do specialists such as, for example, retired forensic pathologist
Stephen Cordner say should happen here in Australia?
S2 (19:59):
Stephen Cordner wants an inquiry into what we can reasonably draw,
in a legal sense, from the triad of symptoms. He
wants the best legal, medical and scientific minds to ask
that question and try and find out if there's an answer.
(20:19):
A Swedish group did this a few years ago and
found out that the link was very weak. That was
presented in an Australian Appeal Court case in 2021, and
the judges sort of found against those scientists. Um, but
Cordner would like Australian people to be doing that work
because he fears that what's going on here is wrongful
(20:43):
convictions are not necessarily on an industrial scale, but too
many to be comfortable with. And I think, um, the
idea that we accept this without question is something that
he really wants to put his professional reputation and his
(21:03):
credibility on the line to say that needs to be quizzed,
needs to be questioned. And I think he hopes, as
I do, that this podcast and him speaking on this
podcast will raise those questions and generate a debate that
we haven't really had in Australia yet and that is
(21:25):
being held robustly in other jurisdictions.
S1 (21:31):
Well, your podcast Diagnosing Murder, it's out now. Got a
lot of listeners know that they can find it wherever
they listen to their podcast. So thank you so much, Michael,
for your time.
S2 (21:41):
It's always a pleasure. Thank you.
S1 (21:53):
Today's episode of The Morning Edition was produced by Josh towers.
Our executive producer is Tammy Mills. Tom Mackendrick is our
head of audio. To listen to our episodes as soon
as they drop, follow the Morning Edition on Apple, Spotify,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. Our newsrooms are powered
by subscriptions, so to support independent journalism, visit The Age
(22:15):
or smh.com.au. Subscribe. And to stay up to date, sign
up to our Morning Edition newsletter to receive a summary
of the day's most important news in your inbox every morning.
Links are in the show. Notes. I'm Samantha Selinger. Morris,
thanks for listening.
Popular Podcasts
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com