This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (19 page)

But wasn’t the whole point of this, I thought, to explore the occurrence of cough
syncope in people who didn’t have lung disease?

How was it that Dr Steinfort disagreed so fundamentally with the two Crown medical
witnesses, Dr King and Professor Naughton, about the rarity of cough syncope? This
was due to a referral bias, said Steinfort, a filtering system. Because of seniority,
King in particular, as a neurologist, would tend to have very complex cases referred
to him, rather than patients who merely coughed till they keeled over. But Steinfort,
down at Geelong, worked at the coalface. Back in the year 2000 one of his patients,
while doing a lung function test, had actually blacked out from coughing right in
front of him. The man buckled at the knees. Steinfort grabbed him just before he
hit the ground. From that day on, the doctor always kept a grip on a patient’s shoulders
when he administered such a test.

Since May 2006, Dr Steinfort had seen Farquharson five times. He had taken a detailed
history, and run his patient through a battery of tests. Farquharson said that he
smoked up to twenty cigarettes a day—three times the number smoked by the ‘hypothetical’
driver Rapke had described to Professor Naughton. Farquharson told Steinfort that
he had had ‘multiple dizzy spells’ at work and at home, and that he had coughed,
at times, to the point where his
vision darkened; Steinfort called this a ‘grey-out’.
He had reported to Steinfort a ‘witnessed’ coughing fit at work during which he had
lost consciousness. He had been for years what Steinfort described as ‘a horrendous
snorer’: his throat was reddened by it. He was overweight. Steinfort had advised
him to lose ten kilos, which he had been unable to do, and to sleep on his side rather
than on his back. A diagnostic sleep study showed that on average his sleep (and
no doubt that of his former wife, I thought with a pang) was disturbed twenty-six
times an hour, which put him in the moderately severe category of sleep apnoea. But
he did not report sleepiness during the day, so Steinfort had discounted falling
asleep as a cause of the accident.

…

Mr Rapke’s cross-examination was courteous and leisurely. He pointed out that Dr
Steinfort was not only an expert witness for the defence but also Farquharson’s treating
doctor: that he ‘had Farquharson’s interests at heart’. With the delicate scalpel
of a literary critic, he worked his way through Steinfort’s clinical notes on his
consultations with Farquharson. He stressed from every possible angle that cough
syncope is diagnosed on history, and that if the patient’s truthfulness is in doubt
then the diagnosis cannot be trusted. Then he shone a glaring light on Farquharson’s
account of his coughing fit at work, witnessed by his supervisor Susan Bateson—an
account that for Steinfort’s benefit Farquharson had exaggerated, giving him to understand
that in Bateson’s office he had blacked out. Yet Bateson herself, before this court,
had stated that he had sat down,
recovered at once, and worked the rest of his shift.
Rapke piled up the contradictions between this embroidery of the facts and the testimony
of other witnesses to whom Farquharson had clearly stated that he had never before
passed out from coughing. He got Steinfort to agree, in a rather small voice, that
in Farquharson he might have been ‘dealing with a man who was not a reliable historian’.
He did the maths and presented Steinfort with the fact that, for all his claims to
broad experience, only an incredibly small percentage of his patients—lower than
.008 per cent—had cough syncope without underlying lung disease. And surely, he suggested,
a loving father
would not drive his children down the highway at night if he really
was suffering from an untreated condition that made him liable to black out without
warning.

Listening to this suavely reasoned dismantling was giving me a pain in the stomach.
Morrissey objected to what he called an ‘oppressive cross-examination’, but Steinfort
stayed calm. He was an excellent witness, steady and thoughtful. His manner, when
he restated his firm belief that Farquharson had experienced an attack of cough syncope,
was undefensive, even humble. I remembered the greengrocer slumped across his steering
wheel on the freeway. What if, despite everything, Dr Steinfort was right?

When I glanced at Louise, I found her gazing at Rapke in silent admiration.

…

That lunchtime, at the coffee cart, I ran into an old ratbag of a lawyer I had known
since the seventies. The years had not been kind to him.
His smoking fingers were
stained yellow, and his cheeks were scored with vertical lines. I introduced Louise.
He studied her bright, wary face with pleasure.

‘So,’ he said. ‘How did Farquharson strike you, on the stand?’

‘They didn’t call him,’ I said. ‘And they’re not going to.’

His jaw dropped. ‘They’re not calling him? What’ll the jury think? “What? You’re
not gonna look us in the eye?” The only thing you can do, when you’ve got nothing,
is put the guy in front of the jury and let him eyeball them!’

We watched him skulk away in his sagging suit and unpolished shoes, muttering cynically
to himself.

‘Would you have called him?’ I asked Louise.

‘No way.’

‘Neither would I.’

…

David Axup, the defence’s second witness, was a traffic analyst who had visited the
dam—even Mr Morrissey had slipped by now into using the term ‘crime scene’ without
correcting himself—and come up with his own scale plan. Axup had spent ‘thirty-one
years and one month’ as a member of Victoria Police, and retired in 1992, at the
rank of Chief Superintendent commanding the Traffic Support Group. His bulky CV was
studded with the names of university courses and Asian countries. Some of the officers
currently working in Major Collision had been supervised in their academic work by
him. He now ran his own traffic analysis consultancy, with expertise in collision
investigation and reconstruction.

The jury sat up and paid Axup full and serious attention. He was a wiry, well-turned-out
fellow in a beautiful blue-grey tweed jacket, with delicate hands and a Kiplingesque
moustache. When he smiled his face wrinkled dramatically: in a western he would have
been addressed as ‘Oldtimer’. He must have had experience as an expert witness: he
had brought with him to the stand a small wheeled suitcase such as lawyers trundle,
out of which, to illustrate a point, he would extract a child’s palm-sized toy car.
He seemed a figure of benign authority; but under the softly drooping moustache his
mouth had a pugnacious set to it, and his voice was as grating as a dragged chain,
loud yet oddly hard to hear.

Morrissey dived in crisply, and within minutes Axup had made a categorical statement:
Urquhart’s famous two-hundred-and-twenty-degree turn of the steering wheel? Impossible.
At sixty kilometres per hour a car steered like that would have spun out. ‘It didn’t
happen. It didn’t leave the marks.’

Marks.
The light went out of the jurors’ faces. A reporter scrawled on my pad, ‘Yellow
paint mark syncope! Instant and total blackout.’ We snorted behind our hands, but
soon, while Axup confidently set sail on a sea of
steering ratio
,
friction value
,
critical radius
,
cord
,
middle ordinate
, tapping at times on a big black calculator
and pouring out figures in his harsh voice, a familiar stupor enfeebled me. A visible
wave of resistance rolled through the jury. Their eyes dulled. Their backbones went
limp. Yawns tormented them. Two of the younger ones leaned their shoulders together
weakly. Justice Cummins took his glasses off and scrubbed at his eyes and forehead;
he clenched his jaw, rubbed his cheeks with both hands. I thought, he is sick to
death of this, and so is the jury. Louise passed me a note:
‘This witness is deeply
unpleasant. Inflexible and pedantic. Makes Urquhart look more engaging, thus, convincing.’

Farquharson’s family was made of sterner stuff; this was their man and they sat straight-backed.
Once, when Axup grudgingly allowed Morrissey’s estimate of a crossfall—‘It’s…close’—Kerri
Huntington flashed me an indulgent smile. But even when Morrissey made sharply telling
critiques of Major Collision’s surveying methods at the scene, Axup blunted their
point with his long-winded replies. He was most at ease when asked a question to
which he could respond with a lecture.

Hadn’t Major Collision been remiss in not collecting the pieces of the broken fence
and keeping them for analysis? What was the potential relevance of the fence? ‘It
may be,’ said Axup, ‘that if in an investigation it becomes relevant to determine
a possible force…in terms of doing that damage with the fence…which could be equated
with…a velocity when we know the speed of the vehicle…or when we know the weight
of the vehicle…’ Several times he seemed to lose his thread, or to miss the point
of Morrissey’s question. Offered a protractor, he fumbled with it in a growing silence,
then held it up awkwardly and rasped, ‘It’s not a very good one.’ Everybody laughed.
Morrissey skated airily past the embarrassing moment—‘They don’t make ’em like they
used to!’—but the witness suddenly looked fragile. His harsh voice began to seem
poignant, a shield whose metal had worn thin.

Morrissey toiled away, drawing from him an attack on Urquhart’s calculations. If
the reconstructionists had used the geodimeter to measure and record the rolling
prints as distinct from the yellow paint marks, could they have produced a diagram
showing
the course of any other visible marks? Yes, said Axup, but in fact their
scale plan showed only the yellow paint marks. If the geodimeter had been used to
record faithfully the path of any visible rolling print, would it have been possible
to calculate the angle of departure of those prints off the bitumen edge? Yes, it
would, said Axup—quite easily.

This did not sound good for Major Collision. The uniformed officers seethed in their
seats behind the Crown end of the bar table. Urquhart scowled down at his notes,
scribbling, his face crimped with suppressed fury. Senior Sergeant Jeffrey Smith,
one of the men who had interviewed Farquharson in Geelong Emergency on the night
of the crash, sat with elbows on knees, his lined, black-browed face dark and closed.
Shoulder to shoulder in their firm-fitting blue tunics, they presented a wall of
dense male power. They looked hard, tired and angry; mutinous, deeply fed-up.

…

In the rush to the door at the morning break, Kerri Huntington grinned at me.

‘Can you understand this technical stuff?’ I said.

She raised her eyebrows and nodded.

‘Were you good at maths?’ I said. ‘I can’t follow it at all.’

Slowly and clearly, with exaggerated lip movements, she spelled it out: ‘He’s going
against what the
other
bloke said.’

Morrissey strode past us, rambunctiously cheerful. ‘They should just admit they made
a mistake,’ he roared, ‘instead of rubbing it out with their
boot
!’ He paused to
mime a scrubbing action with one
outstretched foot. ‘There shouldn’t even
be
accident
reconstructionists at
all
!’

Twenty minutes later, on my way back in, I walked past a small interview room off
the echoing hallway and glanced through its glass-panelled doors. The whole Crown
team was crammed in there, Rapke and Forrester seated at a laptop, the others standing
behind them and craning in over their shoulders: a cinematic arrangement of figures
in buzz cuts and wigs, emitting a crackling aura of purpose.

…

When Mr Rapke rose to tackle Axup, his opening questions sent a surge of adrenalin
coursing through the thick stupor of the room. What was the
issue
that existed in
this case? What was the actual area of
dispute
between the prosecution and the defence?
At last, at last—the point! The jurors’ eyes cleared; they sat up.

Rapke cross-examined with hands in pockets, eyes down on his papers, so that, when
he did raise his head, squinting, lifting his top lip off his teeth, his gaze would
hit the witness in the face, like a slap. He shot Axup’s persona full of holes. He
filleted his CV, bringing out the fact that his training in accident reconstruction
consisted of a six-week intensive course in Illinois twenty-one years ago, and that
he had no tertiary qualifications in either maths or physics. Did Axup understand
the Crown’s hypothesis about the car’s progress, and had he developed an alternative
to it? In a series of silvery manoeuvres, Rapke coaxed the erstwhile cop to a position
almost identical to that proposed by his former student, Acting Sergeant Urquhart:
that the car could not have travelled from the road to the dam on the arc
of those
rolling prints without three distinct steering inputs. In its elegant way, it was
a massacre.

Morrissey, re-examining, could only attempt damage control. Would the terrain
necessarily
move a vehicle in that situation? No. Would the impact with the fence
necessarily
move the vehicle? No.
Must
there have been three steering inputs? No: it was only
hypothetical. Axup climbed carefully down from the stand and left the court, towing
his wheeled suitcase behind him.

Between witnesses, Morrissey made a little legal jest to Justice Cummins. The judge
laughed, then sat smiling down on the barrister, fondly, like a father.

…

Cam Everett owned the property on which the dam lay. He was a tall, slim, smiling
fellow with a head of greying curls. He was a professional firefighter, he said,
not a farmer. His sheep were ‘just lawnmowers’.

In the last eight years, seven cars had come off the highway and through the fence
on to Everett’s land. At least two of them had been heading from Geelong to Winchelsea.
One bloke’s vehicle had landed upside down under a tree; Everett thought he had fallen
asleep at the wheel.