This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (32 page)

But Morrissey really shot himself in the foot by screening, twice, a grotesque little
video of an elderly gentleman, wheelchair-bound with lung disease, his head sprouting
electrodes, who demonstrated that he was able to cough himself unconscious at will.
At a signal he gave three determined croaks and went limp. His false teeth flew out
and were deftly caught in one hand by a plump, exuberant nurse. In a few moments
he came to. He uttered word-like sounds, replaced his teeth, and was given a cup
of tea.

Thus, for all the eminence and the conflicting hands-on experience of the medical
experts, for all Tinney’s long, battering
cross-examination of Dr Steinfort—under
which that excellent witness lost his temper and got defensive and poured out torrents
of technical explanation that made the jurors’ eyes go dull and their heads droop
left and right—the cough syncope evidence hung once more in a balance that neither
side could weight to its advantage.

Later, in his charge to the jury, the judge would lay down their duty very clearly:
‘If you can’t resolve the conflict between expert witnesses, the benefit of the doubt
must
go to the accused.’ I wondered what chance there was that this would happen.

…

Leona Daniel was the social worker and grief counsellor whose name Farquharson had
mentioned many times—the person who first suggested to him the word ‘pressure’. Now
she took the stand. She was a woman of mature years, with a dry, warm, deeply appealing
manner and a face that opened when she smiled. At ten o’clock on the night of the
crash, she had walked into the Geelong Emergency ward and found Farquharson thrashing
about in his bed. He was tremendously flushed, she said, sweating, at one point coughing,
rolling his head from side to side, and very dishevelled: ‘the bedclothes were everywhere’.
He was ‘clearly in great anguish about his children’. Her role was not to challenge
or question him about what had happened. She simply accepted what he said at face
value. She placed her hands on his forearms and spoke to him gently. He was not Superman,
she told him. He would not have been able to open the doors because the water pressure
would have been so great. The car would have sunk quickly. There was nothing more
he could have done. She even told him that
his children might be ‘up in heaven with
his mum’. But nothing could comfort him. He kept saying that he shouldn’t be there.
He wanted to go home. He wanted to go for a long walk. Everyone would blame him,
he said, and he blamed himself. He said, ‘I should have done something. I should
have done more. I should be with them.’

Several times, without interpreting them, Leona Daniel quoted his words. ‘I shouldn’t
be here. I should be with them. I shouldn’t be here.’

…

A bunch of eager young men and women, friends of the fiancé of Farquharson’s niece,
had recently gone to the overpass and shot amateur videos of each other driving four
ordinary sedans down the slope. ‘Drive-by, rough-and-ready experiments’, as Morrissey
called this volunteer contribution, would clearly show that the crossfall of the
road, unmeasured by Major Collision in its lapse of attention, did cause vehicles
to drift to the right, instead of moving to the left or maintaining a straight line
as Senior Constable Urquhart’s own video tests had demonstrated. Justice Lasry seemed
to be humouring Morrissey when he allowed these new videos to be shown, with their
faint, giggling soundtracks and rain-spattered windscreens. But it was true: the
cars did appear to diverge slightly to the right. The crossfall did have meaning.
The police were shown to have been remiss in not measuring it.

Farquharson watched all this with his head tilted back, his little eyes glaring.
Once he glanced at the jury with his chin out, as if to say, ‘
See that
?’

The defence expert witness on this matter was David Axup, the former member of Victoria
Police who now ran his own private traffic consultancy. In the original trial, Mr
Rapke had skilfully backed the gravel-voiced, Kiplingesque oldtimer into a corner:
he was obliged to acknowledge that in order to have left the rolling prints between
the gravel and the dam’s edge, the car’s trajectory must have included three ‘steering
inputs’—a term that Morrissey had gradually beaten back to the more neutral ‘changes
of direction’. But Axup’s concession had drastically weakened the possibility that
Farquharson could have been unconscious at the wheel.

In the retrial Mr Morrissey concentrated on what Axup’s crossfall diagrams showed
about terrain. Just about everything Axup had measured at the scene showed, he said,
that a car rolling down that slope without a conscious driver would have had a tendency
to bear right. The middle section of the rolling prints in the grass, as Axup saw
them, lay in a curve, not a straight line as Urquhart had claimed. And this time
Axup asserted that there had been not merely three changes of direction or steering
inputs, but an unknown number of much lesser ones, due to something called ‘bump
steer’: small changes of angle when the front wheels of the car had encountered objects
on the rough terrain—tussocks, the fence, invisible grooves perhaps left in the dirt
by tractors or livestock and disguised by grass.

When Axup was asked to use the Smart Board, I slipped out of my side seat and into
the centre row. From there, seen full face instead of in profile, he looked markedly
older and more fragile than he had seemed three years ago. Often now he had to ask
counsel to repeat a question. Sometimes, under cross-examination by Amanda Forrester,
his whole person radiated alarm: his head would rear back,
and he would show white
all round his irises like a startled horse. Later I noticed with a sharp pang the
hearing aid on the arm of his spectacles.

Forrester took him on with a leisurely, teasing confidence. She was completely at
ease in the territory of arcs, radii, percentages and degrees. Axup addressed her
as ‘Ma’am’, but it must have been galling to be roughed up by a woman young enough
to be his daughter. Each time he threw in a technical correction or a piece of jargon,
she would pause to let him think he had got the upper hand, then tilt her head and,
with a twinkling smile that showed her white teeth and swelled her rosy cheeks, scoop
up his point and enlist it into her larger argument. At every coup, the faces of
the younger women in the jury would flicker with what I read as relief—or perhaps
it was a version of the general exhilaration outside the court in those same weeks
of June 2010, when the country’s first female prime minister took office: the heartening
spectacle of a woman who was not afraid, who was out there in her natural sphere
where she would proceed to kick arse as she pleased.

In Forrester’s hands the confusing mists of the defence case dissipated and left
a prospect of clean, dry lines. If the car was not being steered, then it would follow
the lie of the land. Thus, the car could not have gone down the slope as Axup had
measured it and still have followed the arc of the rolling prints through the grass
to the dam unless some leftward pressure had been exerted against the rightward drop
of the terrain.

Was this, at last, the nub of the matter?

…

In a slow cascade of pathos, the defence case narrowed down to a handful of witnesses
with personal knowledge of Robert Farquharson at work and at home.

One of these was Wendy Kennedy from Birregurra, a housewife and part-time receptionist
in her thirties with a clear brow and dark curly hair. On her way past the dock she
flashed Farquharson a warm smile. She had been friends with him and Gambino when
they were a couple. Her son was close to Tyler, and she had spent a lot of time at
their house. She had delivered the eulogy at the boys’ funeral.

Rob was angry about the separation, yes. Upset, yes. But like other defence witnesses
Kennedy seemed to sidestep the word ‘angry’. When pressed on this point, she let
fall a nervous silence, as if she had been told to downplay it. Frustrated, she said
at last. Gutted, maybe. Like, venting. Frustrated and hurt. This was as far as she
wanted to go. She had to be urged to tell the court the word she had heard Farquharson
use about Moules: ‘Should I say it here?’

‘You can speak,’ said counsel. ‘Whatever it is, you can say it in court.’

She whispered it, with a girlish laugh and a rising intonation: ‘Dickhead?’

Still, when people criticised Cindy, Rob would always stick up for her: ‘She’s a
good mum. It’s just a patch she’s going through. She’ll settle down.’ And he certainly
did not want to go for custody. Rob worried, though, about the effect on his kids
of the comparative looseness of Gambino’s domestic life with Moules. When Rob and
Cindy were together the kids had routine. They went to bed at a regular time. But
in their new household things ran…differently. For Rob ‘it wasn’t good enough’.

What was Farquharson’s daily routine, asked Morrissey, when he and Gambino were still
a couple? What contribution did he make to the running of the household?

Kennedy outlined the extra hard work that Farquharson faithfully did, full-time and
part-time, both before and after the separation, and his determination to put aside
money for Jai to go to university. Then she sketched in an artless way what she called
a routine person: ‘That’s Rob. He just does the same thing, really. Get up in the
morning, go down the hallway, shut the sliding door. Get ready for work, go to work,
come home from work. As soon as he walked in, he would put his lunchbox down and
unpack everything. He used to take his own bowl and cup and spoon even though there
was a kitchen at work—it’s just Rob. Then he would usually take the kids to kick
the footy, come back in, feed the cats. Cindy would cook the tea, Rob would do the
dishes. One of them would run the bath, one of them would bath the kids, the other
one would dry the kids. Then put the kids to bed and then after the kids were in
bed you would see Robert come out, and if you were sitting on the corner of the couch
you would have to move across because he laid his work clothes, like the trousers
and the jumper, over the corner of the couch. And then he would sit down.’

Farquharson listened to this with his brows high, keeping his eyes on her face and
blinking fast. Morrissey had wanted a picture of an industrious, well-organised husband
and father, and it pleased Kennedy to provide one, but inadvertently she had played
right into the classic paradigm of a man whose sense of domestic order and personal
control is wrested from him when his wife breaks up their marriage.

…

Soon after the boys’ funeral, when the miserable Greg King visited Farquharson with
a voice recorder down the front of his pants, Farquharson told him a garbled tale
about a secret business plan he had been discussing with his mate Mark in Lorne:
a yogurt-distributing outfit worth $300,000 a year. I had thought of ‘Mark’ as a
figment, a name Farquharson had pulled out of the air in a moment of panic. But now
this phantom walked into court and took the stand: a big, shy, agreeable-looking
fellow of forty or so in a short-sleeved blue shirt. Mark Barrett was a self-employed
window cleaner from Aireys Inlet who used to work with Farquharson at the Cumberland
Resort and knew how he adored his kids. Barrett liked working there, but the money
was so bad that he had to leave. As for the yogurt, it was the Greek sort, called
Evia, made in a big factory in Sydney by Mark’s brother-in-law’s brother-in-law,
and it was selling so well that they couldn’t keep up with the demand. They were
looking for a distributor along the Surf Coast. Barrett didn’t want to take it on
himself so he told Farquharson about it, because he knew Farquharson ‘wanted to start
new roots’. But, as far as Barrett knew, Farquharson had never made any moves towards
investigating the opportunity. It was never, he said, anything more than talk.

Gary Davis, a houseman at the Cumberland, was a thin, stooped, haunted-looking man
with long arms and big hands. He had always been surprised that Farquharson took
every second Sunday off work. ‘Sunday is where you make your money, you know. That’s
where the money is. It’s a low-paid job.’ He mimicked his own amazement when he found
out that Farquharson had been taking his boys to play
football at Auskick and working
the Monday instead, for much less pay. About a fortnight before the children died,
Davis was wheeling a trolley back to Housekeeping at the Cumberland when he came
across Farquharson hunched over the steel grate of a stormwater drain. ‘He had his
hands on top of his kneecaps, and his whole face was just like a tomato, cheeks blown
out—he was coughing violently non-stop into the grate. You could see like spit spray
coming out. I thought it was a virus and I didn’t want to go near him so I went round
him and waited for it to end.’

…

On my way home I went to the shopping strip near the station. The greengrocer who
had told me about his own blackout on the freeway said he could not get past the
evidence of the car’s path into the dam. I asked whether he thought Farquharson might
have wanted to kill himself as well. The greengrocer would not wear this. ‘If he’d
tried that, he’d be more of a mess now. He looked really healthy in the photo I saw.
He didn’t look like a man whose three children were dead.’

But what is a man supposed to look like when all his children are dead?

…

On the last day of the defence case, Farquharson’s sister, Carmen Ross, in a soft
grey cardigan with pearl buttons, gave a vivid and convincing description of the
blackout her brother had suffered at
her house halfway through the retrial. When
he started coughing, she was in the kitchen cooking the tea and he was in the lounge
room with his back to her. He made a sound like ‘shhhhh’, and ‘dropped like a sack
of spuds’. By the time she had turned off the hotplates and got to him, he was sitting
half upright on the floor, wedged between the chair and the drinks cabinet. His eyes
were open and he was staring at her, but without recognition or response. She could
not feel a pulse. He was clammy and pale. She shook him and called his name. His
hands began to twitch and his head to move from side to side. Then his eyes blinked.
She helped him up on to his hands and knees, and into a chair. He mumbled, but was
not aware of his surroundings until he had sat still for a good minute.