This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (20 page)

On the night of Farquharson’s crash Everett had stayed at the scene for an hour,
then gone home and sat on the veranda to watch the rescue. Later, when he heard all
about what had happened, he drove his Nissan Patrol down the overpass at a hundred
kilometres per hour and took his hands off the wheel at three different
spots—‘just
a curiosity thing.’ On each occasion his car drifted to the right, as far as the
central white line, before he corrected it. ‘The whole road,’ he said, ‘goes to the
right.’

Loping out of the court, he flashed a warm grin at Farquharson, who met his eye with
a wry grimace.

…

Last up on the Friday of the trial’s fifth week was an expert in medical and forensic
photography from RMIT University, a good-humoured American in a reefer jacket and
elastic-sided boots. Associate Professor Gale Spring was asked, first, to compare
stills from the Channel Nine video footage of the yellow paint marks with certain
of Sergeant Peters’ aerial photos, and to confirm the degradation of the marks that
the defence argued was visible. Second, he was to pronounce upon the reality or otherwise
of some mysterious ‘pale marks’ in the long grass—possible tyre tracks that Morrissey
accused the police of having purposely ignored in the ‘tunnel vision’ of their investigation.

Spring stunned us with a lecture on the different provenances of the photos—video
and still digital camera—and the effects of compression on these two formats. We
struggled to evaluate his comparisons of the intensity of daylight, the positions
of the sun, the angles of shadow in the different images—of black marks, pale marks,
black dots, yellow dots, a splodge and a smaller splodge, bits and pieces of grass.
From his laptop he manipulated the images on the high screen, zooming in, blowing
them up, shrinking them down, until we did not know whether we were coming or going.
He compared pairs of photographs—‘gee, the screen is bad’—and made
declarations of
such audacious certainty about what was ‘really there’ and what was ‘an artefact
of the photographic process’ that I stared at him in wonder.

‘Are they there, whatever they are,’ asked Morrissey about the strange pale marks
in the grass, ‘or are they a trick of the camera?’

‘They’re not a trick of the camera at all. They’re as real as any of the other areas
we’ve seen.’

But how real was that? Morrissey’s long bow strained close to snapping. Why didn’t
the whole court burst out laughing? When I looked at the judge I thought for a second
that he was working to keep a straight face; but no doubt it was a trick of the light.

And as the cheerful photography expert clomped out of the court in his Cuban heels,
the spectre I had been trying to ignore for five weeks rose up before me. Sergeant
Exton’s famous paint marks in the gravel were a red herring. The angle of them did
not matter at all. Whether they had been scuffed out or degraded was neither here
nor there. The only things that mattered in all this technical palaver were the steering
inputs, and all the rest was noise.

…

When I stumped home at the end of that fifth week, I was surprised to find that the
world beyond the trial was still carrying on its humble existence. Rain must have
been falling while I sat in court: my tanks were more than half full. The big pittosporum
tree over the back fence was about to burst into blossom. Junkies had held up the
corner shop. Kids from the flats had crashed a stolen car on to the railway line.
And my grandchildren reported that a runaway horse from
the racecourse had been recaptured
in our street by a neighbour, an old strapper, who had approached it with a carrot
in one hand and an apple in the other. The modest glow of these facts filled me with
gratitude and relief.

CHAPTER 11

The defence had one last arrow in its quiver: a social worker and grief counsellor
from Geelong named Gregory Roberts.

As it happens, a close friend of mine worked for years as a grief counsellor at the
Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. She is a subtle and serious person, and the things
she told me about her work made it clear to me that she and her colleagues performed
an essential and deeply humane service. But Roberts, said Morrissey, was apparently
something more than an intelligent comforter. He would testify that Farquharson’s
unnatural-seeming conduct after he got out of the dam, his bizarre responses to the
calamity, lay ‘within the normal grief/trauma reactions of a suddenly bereaved parent’.

The only witnesses who are permitted to express opinion before a jury are people
acknowledged to be experts in their field. Before the jury entered the court that
morning, and before Gregory Roberts was called, Justice Cummins questioned Morrissey
on Roberts’ formal qualifications. They seemed, he said, rather sparse for an expert
witness. What gave him more authority than an ordinary member of the community?

An ordinary person might find it surprising, argued Morrissey, that Farquharson had
left the dam, declined an offer of help and kept asking people for cigarettes. An
ordinary person might well be…
put off
by Farquharson’s insistence on being taken
straight to his ex-wife. But Roberts, it seemed, had a breadth of experience with
people in the grip of sudden bereavement, and he had two concepts—‘traumatic grief
’ and ‘hyper-focus’—that would sweep these odd behaviours back into the fold of the
normal. ‘Traumatic grief ’ was a relatively recent concept, and only very limited
research had been done on it, yet it was already listed as a diagnosable condition
in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual–IV
.

Justice Cummins looked askance. He allowed Morrissey to call Mr Roberts, but excluded
a second grief counsellor, Leona Daniel, an older woman who had been summoned to
Farquharson’s bed in Geelong Emergency at 10 p.m. on the night of the crash. Daniel
had observed his terrible distress and done her best to console him.

‘The prosecution,’ said the judge, ‘has never suggested that your client hasn’t exhibited
grief. What is said is that he killed his children. He’s not charged with not crying.’

Farquharson listened, his face darkening. He did not enjoy hearing his psychological
state discussed. He looked older; his hair was longer, and turning grey. From time
to time he would glance at his family with a crooked frown of indignation.

In came Roberts, a small, fragile-looking man with the bird-like head and dark, trimmed
beard of a Renaissance courtier. He worked, he said, for Hope Bereavement Care, as
well as SIDS and Kids in Geelong, a service that offered support for anyone affected
by the
sudden and unexpected death of a child. When Morrissey used the phrase ‘bereaved
fathers’, Kerri Huntington began silently to cry, wiping her eyes with her fingertips.
Her sister Carmen went pale and wept, and Farquharson himself pulled out his hanky,
blinking and blinking, his mouth upside down. In full view of the sisters, one of
the journalists folded her newspaper into a pad and started on a crossword.

Four days after the boys died in the dam, Gregory Roberts had been called to give
support to Farquharson. Morrissey would ask the counsellor, now, to work his way
through the events of the fatal night, starting with Farquharson’s escape from the
dam and ending at the police interview in Emergency. Roberts would name and interpret
each stage in the language of ‘traumatic grief ’, the emerging field in which he
was researching his PhD.

Getting out of the dam, said Roberts, the person would be disoriented. There would
be elements of shock, a high level of fear. His adrenal levels would be rising. The
fight mode
would be his efforts to get the children out of the car. When that was
unsuccessful, the
flight mode
would have kicked in—he would seek to flee.

Though Rapke had shot down the phrase, Morrissey resurrected it: what did it mean
that witnesses described him as ‘a babbling mess’?

That would be the effect of disorientation, especially when one remembers that he
had been unconscious. When your adrenalin is surging, you don’t make a lot of sense.
Even if you are able to give information, you can come across as robotic and emotionless.
Workers experienced in this field, said the grief counsellor, do not find it at all
strange for a person to make the blunt statement ‘I’ve
just killed my kids’. It is
part of the
surrender mode
, even though the reality of the statement might not have
quite hit home.

His obsession with being taken to Cindy?

When a child dies in the presence of only one parent, said Roberts, regardless of
whether the parents are together or separated, there is very strong urge to contact
the other parent. People in trauma often suffer from information overload. They can
become what’s called
hyper-focused
. Very single-minded. They disregard any other
information that is put to them. Trained people know that in such a situation someone
has to take charge—to acknowledge what the hyper-focused person is saying, but guide
him firmly towards what really needs to be done. Shane Atkinson and Tony McClelland,
the two young men who stopped for Farquharson on the road, could not have been expected
to know this. They succumbed to his hyper-focused demands.

The fact that Farquharson refused their offers to dive down after the car, and would
not use their phone to call 000?

Farquharson’s system was already overloaded. He was unable to absorb or even register
any extra inputs. By the time they had taken him to Cindy, when he appeared to her
to be delirious, he had entered what was called in the literature
the outcry phase.
Some of the reality of what had happened was starting to become apparent. The presence
of Cindy, ‘a key attachment figure’, was likely to bring up more emotion.

Farquharson’s failure to join in the rescue attempts at the dam showed that he was
already quite exhausted. Adrenalin levels do not stay high for long. He had moved
into
dissociation
, a state in which he started to block out what had happened, to
become detached, and to step back.

His repeated demands for cigarettes, so enraging to the other men at the scene?

Trauma experts know that under stress the body craves stimulants. This is not rational
or conscious. It is a physiological fact, and Roberts had witnessed it many times.

How was it that Farquharson had been seen in tears by two civilian witnesses, while
various police officers, particularly the two who had interviewed him in Emergency,
had been taken aback by his lack of distress?

This, too, was standard—well within the typical range of trauma and grief. Most civilians
faced with a police officer, paramedic or doctor (figures Morrissey called
men in
uniform
) will fall into a very respectful way of talking; and people dealing with
an overload of information tend to resort to behaviours already ingrained in them.
Plus, in a state of ‘traumatic grief ’, and in what Roberts further called ‘complicated
grief ’, people go emotionally numb. Their moods fluctuate. There is a shrinkage
in their ability to think rationally: a condition called ‘cognitive constriction’.
Things they do can seem illogical to observers.

…

This testimony filled me with scepticism, yet I longed to be persuaded by it—to be
relieved of the sick horror that overcame me whenever I thought of Farquharson at
the dam, the weirdness of his demeanour, the way it violated what I believed or hoped
was the vital link of loving duty between men and their children. And, as I listened,
the phantom of failed suicide shimmered once more into view. Nobody
in this whole
five-week ordeal had yet said anything that could lay it to rest.

…

Perhaps Morrissey had warned his witness that the judge had been reluctant to acknowledge
him as an expert in anything, for Roberts’ analyses were offered in the faintly piqued
tone of someone whose amour-propre has been stung. When Rapke got to his feet, he
did not temper the wind to the shorn lamb. Before the blast of his cross-examination,
the witness’s spine seemed to ripple and his head to bob and tilt on the slim stalk
of his neck.

Yes, Roberts was aware that Farquharson had a history of depression and that he had
been taking anti-depressants for a time. Roberts’ impression was that the Farquharson
marriage break-up had been ‘amicable’, and that their focus had been on the welfare
and happiness of the children. Farquharson, he said, showed no animosity at all towards
his former wife. Yes, Roberts had heard the allegation that Farquharson had made
threats to kill his children in revenge against Gambino, but he had not taken this
into consideration, because his opinion was ‘around traumatic grief ’, a condition
that he had noted in Farquharson from their first contact. He had made no presumption
of guilt or innocence.

It soon came to light that since 9 September 2005, Roberts, in his role as grief
counsellor, had seen Farquharson, weekly or fortnightly, seventy times.

‘Did you say seventy?’ asked Rapke.

The judge leaned forward on both elbows: ‘Seven
oh
?’

Yes.

‘In those seventy counselling sessions,’ said Rapke, ‘you, for the purpose of requiring
him to confront what had happened and deal with his grief and his bereavement and
his “traumatic” grief and his “complicated” grief, had him talk about the events
of the night?’

Well, no, said Roberts. If Farquharson had gone into detail, he would have steered
the conversation away from it—in fact, he would have brought it to a halt. From the
beginning he had had instructions from the victim liaison people in Victoria Police
that his brief was to focus on grief and bereavement. He was to avoid any in-depth
conversation about what had happened on the night.

In the wry silence of the court somebody clicked her tongue. A thought-bubble floated
above the jurors’ heads: ‘What the hell
did
you talk about?’