A mother convicted and later cleared of murdering her two baby sons, whose case led to a fundamental rethink of the system of expert witnesses in UK courts, died suddenly last week at the age of 42.
A coroner was told this week that preliminary results of a postmortem examination of Sally Clark indicated death from natural causes, but more tests will be done to try to establish definitively why she died four years after she was cleared on appeal of killing babies Christopher and Harry.
Mrs Clark, who was a solicitor but had not resumed her career, was found dead by a friend after her remaining son, now aged 8 years, had been taken to school. Her husband, Stephen, also a solicitor, was away on a business trip.
She had struggled to adjust to life after the ordeal of her conviction and three years in prison during which she lost her first appeal. She was cleared on a second appeal after it emerged that microbiological results for baby Harry, which had not been disclosed by the Home Office pathologist Alan Williams, showed the presence of Staphylococcus aureus, which might indicate a death from natural causes.
The Court of Appeal said that it would probably also have allowed the appeal on the basis of flawed statistical evidence from the eminent retired paediatrician Roy Meadow, who told the jury that the chance of two cot deaths in such a family was one in 73 million. The General Medical Council ordered Professor Meadow to be struck off the medical register, but the order was overturned on appeal.
Dr Williams was banned by the GMC from doing pathology work for the Home Office for three years.
Last November the chief medical officer for England, Liam Donaldson, recommended that the NHS set up teams of paediatric expert witnesses, with mentoring and training for the job.
Mrs Clark had a drink problem that started after the death in 1996 of her first baby, Christopher, which was initially attributed to a respiratory infection. It was after her second child died in 1998 that she was arrested and charged with murdering both babies.
Her husband said in a television interview in 2000 that a psychiatrist who had assessed her after conviction said she might have temporal lobe epilepsy as a result of drinking.
The autopsy was done by Home Office pathologist David Rouse, with a second pathologist, Nathaniel Cary, observing on behalf of the family.