This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (2 page)

…

A year passed between the committal hearing and the trial. When Farquharson’s name
came up in conversation, people shuddered. Tears would spring to women’s eyes. Everyone
had a view. The coughing fit story provoked incredulity and scorn. The general feeling
was that a man like Farquharson could not tolerate the loss of control he experienced when his wife ended the marriage. Again and again people
came up with this explanation. Yes, that must have been it—he couldn’t stand to lose
control of his family. Either that, or he was evil. Pure evil. I don’t get these
guys, said a feminist lawyer. Okay, so the wife dumps them. Men don’t have biological
clocks. Why can’t they just find a new girlfriend and have more kids? Why do they
have to kill everyone? Whether he did it on purpose or not, said an older woman,
a Christian, how is he going to atone? Countless men declared in anger and distress
that it couldn’t possibly have been an accident; that a loving father would never
leave the car and swim away. He would fight to save his kids, and, if he failed,
he would go to the bottom with them. Rare were the ones who, after making such a
declaration, paused and added in a lower voice, ‘At least, that’s what I hope I’d
do.’

When I said I wanted to write about the trial, people looked at me in silence, with
an expression I could not read.

…

On 20 August 2007, two years after his car went into the dam, Robert Farquharson’s
trial opened in the Supreme Court of Victoria. As a freelance journalist and curious
citizen, I had spent many days, solitary and absorbed, in the courtrooms of that
nineteenth-century pile in central Melbourne, with its dome and its paved inner yards
and its handsome facade along William and Lonsdale Streets. I knew my way around
it and how to conduct myself inside its formal spaces, but I could never approach
its street entrance without a surge of adrenalin and a secret feeling of awe.

This time I had brought with me a close friend’s daughter, a pale, quiet sixteen-year-old
with white-blonde hair and braces on her teeth, dressed in jeans and a sky-blue hoodie.
Her name was Louise. She was in her gap year. I would come to be grateful for her
company, and for her precocious intelligence. We squeezed into the press seats of
Court Three with a gang of cheerful journalists. From the tone of their gossip, Farquharson
was already hung, drawn and quartered.

The court was beautiful. It had a soaring ceiling, pale plaster walls, and fittings
of dark, ponderous timber; but, like all the courtrooms in that grand old building,
it was cramped, and awkward to move around in. The dock ran along the rear wall,
and in it, behind a red velvet rope, sat Robert Farquharson in a glaring white shirt
with a stiff collar and tie. He had entered a free man, but now his bail had ended
and he was in custody. Though the room was packed with his supporters, he looked
scared, and small, and terribly lonely.

Jeremy Rapke QC, Acting Chief Crown Prosecutor and soon to be appointed Director
of Public Prosecutions, had appeared for the Crown at Farquharson’s committal hearing.
He was a lean, contained-looking man, with a clipped grey beard and a mouth that
cut across his face on a severe slant, like that of someone who spent his days listening
to bullshit.

‘Wow,’ hissed Louise. ‘He looks like a falcon.’

Lawyers I knew said he was formidable in trials, and at the committal he had been
enthralling to watch: he did not seem to exert himself, and he spoke sparingly, in
a low, courteous voice, as if his words were only the upper layer of some more crucial
process that was going on inside his head. But his final submission that day, delivered
in the same conversational tone, had flowed out of him in
a scorching stream, elegant
and devastating. Now, beside his shiny-faced, brown-haired young junior, Amanda Forrester,
who had clattered into court in ankle-strap stilettos, Rapke sat with curved spine
low in his swivel chair, his wig tilted forward, his cheek resting on the palm of
one narrow, dry-looking hand.

The narrow, glass-paned timber doors at the back burst open and Peter Morrissey SC
came barging in, with his black gown hanging off one shoulder and his wig pushed
back from a shiny forehead. He was big, fair and bluff, Irish-style, with the bulk
and the presence of a footballer: as he strode towards the defence end of the bar
table, dwarfing his junior, Con Mylonas, he whistled through exaggeratedly pursed
lips the provocative anthem ‘Good Old Collingwood Forever’. He veered close to the
dock and called out in a hearty, man-to-man voice, ‘G’day, Rob!’ If Farquharson replied,
I did not hear him. Morrissey, people said, was just back from the International
Criminal Court in The Hague, where he had won his case. His stocks were high. He
looked a spontaneous, likeable man. Farquharson’s family seemed to share this view.
Out in the lobby they would crowd around his massive, robed figure, looking up at
him with trusting smiles that filled me with anxiety.

Justice Philip Cummins entered, a silver-haired man in his sixties with an open,
good-humoured face. He wore a scarlet robe, but no wig. A tiny diamond stud flashed
a point of light from the lobe of his left ear. Cummins was well known in the city.
I did not need the journalists to tell me that his nickname was Fabulous Phil. But
he was reassuring to look at, not lofty or threatening; behind his high bench he
would lean forward on his elbows and address the court with genial warmth.

A jury was empanelled, ten women and five men, the requisite dozen plus three spares:
this trial would not be short. By the next morning one of the women had already been
excused. The jurors filed into the box and sat with hands folded, looking about nervously.
Their shoulders were bowed, as if their new duties were pressing them into their
chairs. From now until the end of the trial, every time they entered the court, Farquharson
would spring to his feet in the dock and remain standing until they were seated—a
protocol that seemed to say
my fate is in your hands
.

…

On the evening of Sunday 4 September 2005, Father’s Day, two young Winchelsea men,
Shane Atkinson and Tony McClelland, left their dogs to be minded overnight by a lady
they knew, and set out in Atkinson’s Commodore for a barbecue in Geelong, to celebrate
the birth of a baby that Atkinson’s fiancée had, that day, brought home from hospital.

As Atkinson, the Crown’s first witness, negotiated the narrow aisle past the family
seats, two women who, from the shape of their eye sockets, could only be Farquharson’s
sisters raked him with cold stares. Dark-haired, tall and thin, he was dressed from
head to toe in black. He stood in the box, facing the Crown’s Ms Forrester with the
stooped, appeasing posture of a kid expecting to be told off. Speech was labour for
him. He drawled and fumbled, writhed and bowed his head. Whenever a coarse word escaped
him he would drop his face and grin with an embarrassed, goofy sweetness.

It was about 7.30, he said, and already dark, when he and his
mate Tony approached
the railway overpass, four or five kilometres east of Winchelsea. They saw several
cars ahead of them suddenly swerve and keep going, as if dodging something. Then
a bloke stepped out into their headlights, vigorously waving his arms. Shane’s nerves
were raw: his brother had taken his own life only a few months earlier. He slammed
on the brakes and jumped out. The man ran towards him.

‘I said to him, “What the fuck are you doing, standing on the side of the road? Are
you trying to kill yourself, mate?” We couldn’t get no sense out of him. He was swearing,
like, “Oh no, fuck, what have I done? What’s happened?”’

The man jabbered that he had put his car into the dam—that he had killed his kids,
that he had done a wheel bearing, or had a coughing fit. He had come to and found
himself in water up to his chest. All he wanted, he said over and over, was to be
taken back to his missus’ house, so he could tell her he’d killed his kids.

The bloke was short and chunky, panting and wringing wet, covered in slime and mud.
What was this crazy story? Was he all there? Shane thought he might have Down syndrome
or something: they got some weird cunts out that way. Tony was a relative newcomer
to the township. Until this moment he had barely registered that there was a dam
at the foot of the overpass. Shane was a Winch boy, and had driven past the dam countless
times, yet even he had no idea it was deep enough for a car to vanish into it without
leaving so much as a bubble. He stood up in the doorframe of his Commodore and strained
for a better view of the water. He and Tony walked off the road as far as the fence.
The night was very dark, but dry and clear. Every time a truck roared down the overpass,
they followed the
sweep of its headlights to scan the dam’s surface. The water looked
like glass. Surely nothing had happened here.

Shane had credit on his mobile. He tried to give it to the man so he could ring the
ambulance, the police. The man refused. Again and again he begged them to take him
to Cindy’s.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Shane, ‘if you’ve just killed your kids! We’re two
skinny little cunts—we can get in the water and try to swim down!’

But the man kept saying, ‘probably a hundred times, “No, don’t go down there. It’s
too late. They’re already gone. I’ll just have to go back and tell Cindy.”’

Farquharson, who had wept helplessly right through the terrible accusations of the
prosecutor’s opening address—‘a shockingly wicked and callous act’—listened to all
this in the dock with his head tilted and his small eyes narrowed in a sceptical
expression.

‘And,’ said Ms Forrester gently, ‘did you take him back to Cindy?’

In the front row of the public seats, accompanied by their quiet husbands, Farquharson’s
sisters sat still, their mouths stiffly downturned.

Shane Atkinson hung his head. ‘Yes,’ he said, in a low, miserable voice. ‘I done
the stupidest thing of my whole life, and I did.’

Shane made the sodden man sit beside him in the front, with Tony in the back ‘so
he could punch him in the head if he went nuts’. He spun the car round and headed
back to Winchelsea. Just as they reached the outskirts of the town, Shane flicked
on the interior light and took a proper look at their passenger. The penny dropped.
It was Robbie Farquharson. Since Shane was a little fellow, he had
seen Robbie mowing
people’s grass and driving the same sort of Commodore as Shane had now, except that
Shane’s had mag wheels. And suddenly he twigged which Cindy he was raving about,
this wife he was so keen to see—Cindy Farquharson, his ex, who everyone in Winch
knew was on with another bloke, Stephen Moules.

They pulled into Cindy’s drive, all three men panicking and yelling. Farquharson
and Shane ran to the back doorstep and shouted for Cindy. One of Stephen Moules’
kids came to the screen door. Cindy followed him. Where was Rob’s car? Where were
the kids?

Farquharson gave it to her straight. There’d been an accident. He’d killed the kids.
Drowned them. He’d tried to get them out, but he couldn’t. Cindy started to scream.
She called him ‘a fucking cunt’. She went to hit him. Shane stepped between her and
Farquharson and tried to take her in his arms. Then he leapt back into his car and
drove so fast to the police station that when he pulled up outside he did a doughnut.

The station was locked. He ran to the sergeant’s house next door. Nobody home.

By now every man and his dog was out on the street. Somebody dialled 000 and Shane
told the ambulance where the car had gone into the water. A bloke called Speedy from
the State Emergency Service rushed off to get his truck. Shane got into his car with
Tony and a couple of strangers who had jumped in. He drove back to Cindy’s but her
car was gone, and so was she, with Farquharson and the kid from the kitchen door.
Shane roared out on to the highway.

He pulled up near the overpass. Farquharson was standing against the fence, nodding,
lurching, wheezing. He was ‘smoking cigarette after cigarette’, and begged the new
arrivals for another.
Tony McClelland threw a whole packet at him, climbed through
the fence and ran stumbling across the dark paddock. Shane hung back. ‘I didn’t wanna
go near the dam,’ he told the court, hanging his head as if ashamed of his dread.

Cindy had got through to 000 on her mobile and was rushing back and forth on the
bank in the dark, sobbing and shrieking directions to the operator, but she kept
calling it the Calder Highway instead of the Princes. She must have rung Stephen
Moules earlier. He was already there, stripping off to wade into the dam. The water
was black and terribly cold. Moules took a few steps in from the edge and the bottom
dropped away under his feet. Tony had to grab his arm to save him. This was the moment
they all realised how deep the dam was.

But not until the police gave their evidence in court would its true dimensions become
clear. It was not an ordinary farm dam with sloping sides. It was the pit left behind
when the road-makers dug out the soil to build the overpass, and it went straight
down for seven metres.

…

Tony McClelland stalked past the Farquharson family to the witness stand with a self-possession
that looked like anger. He too had dressed in black. He was thin and tousled, with
sharp cheekbones and high eyes, a face of striking beauty. He had no memory of Shane
offering his mobile to Farquharson, but he recalled that, on the wild drive back
to Winch, Farquharson had mumbled, ‘My wife will kill me.’ When Farquharson announced
to Cindy that the boys were in the
water, she cried, ‘Why didn’t you stay there?’
Farquharson replied, ‘They’ve already died.’

At this, Farquharson lurched forward in the dock and covered his whole face with
his handkerchief.

At the dam it was McClelland who enfolded the shrieking Cindy in a bear hug and grabbed
the phone from her hand. He gave the 000 operator coherent directions. It seemed
only moments then until the emergency services arrived. Shane moved his car to make
way for the ambulance. He and Tony gave the police their details.