This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (18 page)

‘Went into meltdown?’ I said.

‘Yeah. If Rob really said, “I hate ’em, I’m gonna kill ’em,” well, those are hard
words. Why would he need to be wired? How could you misinterpret
those
words?’

He scanned the street, at his leisure. We waited.

‘They’ll appeal,’ he said at last. ‘If there’s a guilty verdict they’ll appeal. They
need a good reason. More evidence turnin’ up. Or the sev—the severity of the sentence.’

We looked at him, confused. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his feet wide
apart, like a farmer.

‘Couple o’ people on that jury,’ he said, with his vague, beneficent smile, ‘look
like people we know!’

‘Hard to tell what they’re thinking,’ I said. But I was only trying to make conversation.

…

For two whole days Acting Sergeant Urquhart was mauled on the stand. Morrissey blazed
away at him, shouting, whispering, sledging, sometimes merely arguing in an ordinary
tone of voice, working to wring some shred of reasonable doubt from the mass of technical
information that Urquhart had laid down.

What on earth was the point of surveying the crime scene—sorry, Morrissey meant the
potential
crime scene—if the scanner Major Collision used was not capable of computing
the
slope
of the terrain? What use were its measurements if all it could do was calculate
the terrain as if it were
flat
? Why didn’t Urquhart measure the camber of the road?
Why didn’t he collect the wire or the posts from the flattened fence? Why had he
changed his tune about which of the famous
Exton marks
he had used as a starting
point for his calculations? First he said he used the left one, then later he said
he’d used the right one. He was incompetent, wasn’t he? Negligent? Wasn’t he supposed
to have an
honours
degree? And how ridiculous and outrageous was it that he had stopped
the traffic in both directions on the Princes Highway for—how long? Fifteen minutes?
Did he mean to say that
the whole of Victoria
was held up while he shot his pointless,
meaningless steering-test videos? He took his hands off the wheel, yes, but what
was to show he hadn’t been steering with his knees? And why didn’t he conduct his
steering tests on Farquharson’s actual car? He didn’t drive Mr Farquharson’s car,
did he?

‘No,’ said Urquhart. ‘It wasn’t driveable. It was caked in mud and water. It was
beyond salvage.’

‘Being caked in mud and water,’ snapped Morrissey, ‘doesn’t set
it apart from many
vehicles in the city of Melbourne.’

The court rocked with laughter. Men in the jury lowered their grinning faces. It
was impossible to tell if their masculine empathy was directed at Morrissey, or Urquhart,
or Farquharson himself.

Urquhart was obliged to acknowledge various police mistakes. Not only were the Exton
paint marks on the wrong angle, but they were not even parallel. The wheelbase of
Farquharson’s car was too wide to have left both tyre marks in the gravel. Only one
of them could be correct. Urquhart dug in, though, when Morrissey urged him to agree
that Farquharson’s vehicle could have left the road at ‘a much gentler angle’ than
the one he had calculated. On this point he would not give way.

‘What about a series of tiny little steering inputs?’ said Morrissey.

Urquhart smiled wearily and shook his head.

Figures were scattered about like confetti: angles, arcs, radii. The word
infinity
was mentioned. Every now and then Justice Cummins would protest: ‘We did all of that
this morning, Mr Morrissey. Let’s not start again. We’ve gone over this, Mr Morrissey,
for a day and a half.’

Then Morrissey screened a five-second segment from Channel Nine news of the roadside
gravel, shot in daylight on the Tuesday after the crash, which showed the yellow
paint marks clearly present. He compared this footage with the Peters and Courtis
photos of the gravel that were taken on the Tuesday, in which the marks appeared
smudged, and forcefully alleged that one of the police officers, in an attempt to
conceal Exton’s mistake, must have scuffed out the paint with his boot.

The jury was sent out.

‘From the Sunday night to the Tuesday,’ said Justice Cummins, ‘it was not a controlled
scene. Paint can disappear for a hundred reasons, but the TV on the Tuesday, on a
clear calm day, showing the lines of paint, and then the photograph not showing them,
clearly ups the ante. An allegation has been put that needs to be met.’

‘What is shown in number one of the Peters photos,’ said Rapke, ‘is a photographic
distortion of what you see in the Channel Nine footage. There has been degradation
in the two days since the night of the crash, but there has been no interference.’

‘It’s not merely a matter of police corruption for the sheer joy of doing so!’ cried
Morrissey. ‘It’s—’

‘No,’ said the judge sarcastically, ‘it’s just police corruption to frame a man wrongly
for the murder of his three children.’

Morrissey raised his voice. ‘I’m not going to back away from putting to them that
somebody’s interfered with it! I’ll be putting it very strongly!’

‘You’ve already put it,’ said Justice Cummins. ‘You’ve had a long, hard day. There’s
a nice old saying—“Appeal judges are men who in the cool of the evening undo work
that better men do in the heat of the day.” Let’s have the cool of the evening to
think. Let’s do it tomorrow.’

…

As the Crown case worked its way into the home straight, some of Farquharson’s supporters
seemed possessed by a cheerful confidence that verged on the manic. After lunch one
day, when Morrissey swept past her through the narrow glass-paned doors, heading
back
into the fray, Kerri Huntington sang out after him, ‘Go, tiger!’ She turned
to the rest of us with a cheeky giggle. ‘That man,’ she said, ‘makes me laugh.’

On and on went the gargantuan struggle between the two big men. Morrissey accused
Urquhart and his fellow officers of all manner of trickery and dishonesty. He challenged
him on complicated slabs of what he had said in earlier evidence. He dragged him
back and forth across fields of minuscule detail. Hour after hour, while cop and
counsel danced like medieval angels upon the head of a pin, I grew stupider and stupider.
Surely one did not need a science degree to understand how the car had gone into
the dam? I kept glancing at the older men in the jury, the ones who looked like retired
tradies or maths teachers in their loose, comfortable T-shirts or plain zipper jackets.
Did they too feel this thickening of the brain, this blunting and blurring of mental
capacity? Could it be that some atavistic force in me was trying to sabotage my intellect,
to block its access to calculations that might demonstrate Farquharson’s innocence?
What on earth could one take seriously here? Did a modest manner, an air of patient
seriousness, the ability to crack a gentle joke, mean that a witness was trustworthy?
What if I were one of those tired, frightened jurors, sequestered by an oath from
the comfort of work and family, browbeaten by oratory, craving the release of laughter
or tears? Would I be dreading the moment when this tinnitus-like racket would have
to be disentangled, unpicked, coaxed into a pattern of meaning, so that we could
see what was really there, weigh it up, and arrive at a judgment on a fellow human
being? What if Farquharson’s guilt or innocence was a mystery beyond reckoning? Was
anyone going to explain the meaning of the
words ‘beyond reasonable doubt’? And,
if they did, would I still have the nous to grasp it? Or had these five gruelling
weeks stripped me of every vestige of native wit?

Calm down. I was not on the jury. I had made no vows. I was only an observer. Nothing
life-altering would be required of me. If sitting here became completely intolerable
I could pack away my notebook and pen, make my bow at the door, and rush back into
the world, where it was spring, where the sun was mild, and the plane trees on Lonsdale
Street were putting out their pale fuzz of green.

…

Indeed, as soon as Rapke rose to re-examine Urquhart, a window seemed to open in
the courtroom and a stream of fresh air to pass through. I could not tell if it was
the simple clarity of what he was saying or the light, dry timbre of his voice, but
things flung about in disarray by Morrissey’s mighty blitzkrieg quietly resumed their
proper places in the landscape. A calm settled, a sense of proportion. No, I did
not need to be a scientist in order to picture what had happened between the road
and the dam that night.

…

Near the very end of the Crown case, while Detective Sergeant Clanchy was still on
the stand, Morrissey screened again the passage from the formal interview at Homicide
in which Farquharson, in a voice thickened by tears, denied the detectives’ direct
accusation and gave his finger-snapping account of how he ‘tried and tried and
tried’
to save his boys. ‘I believe I’m a very good citizen in life. I’m a family man who
looked after his kids and everything like that. I’m not lying to you. I’ve got no
reason to.’ For a second time we saw his indignant tears, his protestations, his
strange, emphatic hand gestures on the tabletop. Could Morrissey possibly think this
looked good? Yet women in the family seats were crying. Noses were blown, quivering
breaths drawn.

Years later, when I read Marilynne Robinson’s novel
Home
, I found a description of
that moment: ‘It was the sad privilege of blood relations to love him despite all.’

…

The jury left the court, and Mr Morrissey made a second no-case submission: he argued
that the Crown case was so weak and so circumstantial that it was incapable of reaching
the standard of proof required. While he argued on in a low voice, murmuring, sometimes
almost whispering, Justice Cummins listened with his head propped on one fist at
a dreamy, attentive angle. When he reasoned with Morrissey, his voice too was very
soft. Farquharson strained forward to hear, his face dark and clenched above his
neatly knotted tie. Kerri Huntington kept changing position in her seat, irritable
and frustrated. At the other end of the bar table, Mr Rapke lay back in his tilting
swivel chair, one hand clasped around his jaw, watching and waiting.

Justice Cummins spread in front of him several sheets of paper, from which he read
a summary of the evidence so far. He brought out of it a narrative that turned the
blood to ice. As a matter of law, he ruled, there was sufficient evidence to make
a case.

Mr Morrissey would have to gird his loins and launch his defence.

The Crown, in its duty to lay all relevant facts before the court, had called forty
witnesses. Its case, swollen by Morrissey’s exhaustive cross-examinations, had stretched
out over five whole weeks. Morrissey must have done the bulk of his work in those
marathon sessions; the defence, he said, had a mere five witnesses lined up. He would
lay out its case in two and a half days.

CHAPTER 10

Next morning, before the judge and jury entered, Morrissey got up from the bar table
and turned his big body to the seats into which the journalists were filing.

‘I know what
you
want!’ he shouted with a challenging grin, hitching up the shoulders
of his black robe. ‘But my client’s not going to be called to give evidence. Nope.
Mr Farquharson will
not
be called to give evidence!’

He swept his eyes with satisfaction along the row of faces. It was a point of honour
for us not to betray surprise or disappointment. We took our seats with decorum,
and he plumped back into his swivel chair.

Everyone by now was very tired. The group dynamic of the jury seemed to have stabilised.
They entered less formally, sometimes with the fading smiles of people who had been
laughing, but they arranged themselves always in the same configuration. Was it a
pecking order, or an urge to seek comfort in habit?

As he did every day, for the comfort of counsel, the tipstaff set out along the bar
table several tall, clear plastic jugs of water. The
eye rested with relief on those
evenly spaced columns of purity.

…

The first defence witness was a big, smooth-headed, solemn man in his fifties, Dr
Christopher Steinfort. He practised in Geelong as a consultant physician in thoracic
and general medicine. He was the Director of the Geelong Hospital’s lung function
laboratory, and of the Geelong Private Hospital sleep laboratory. Unlike the Crown’s
medical experts, Dr Steinfort was across cough syncope in a hands-on way. He was
here to challenge the accepted view of it as a condition of almost mythological rarity.

Since 1995 he had been keeping a documented database of everyone he saw in his private
practice. A search of the 6500 patients currently on his database, he said, had turned
up thirty-odd cases of syncope, and among those, about fifteen of cough syncope.

Already this year several cases of it had come to his attention.

A GP had rung him about a chap in Geelong who, while driving his kids to a football
match, was overcome by coughing. His car ran off the road, turned over, flipped on
to its side, then flipped back and finished up wedged against a fence post.

One woman was sitting having a cup of tea in front of her TV when she started to
cough. Next thing she knew she was flat on the floor, with very nasty bruises to
the face. Steinfort had admitted her to hospital. She did have pulmonary fibrosis,
he added.

And since the Farquharson case became known, quite a few people had come forward
to say they had been diagnosed with cough syncope over the last ten or fifteen years,
often after a car accident.
Legal Aid had passed them on to Steinfort, who had interviewed
them at length. They had all been suffering from a flu-like illness. They had taken
time off work and gone to bed with aches and pains, coughing, sore throat and runny
nose. They were all men, aged between thirty-five and sixty-five. Two had mild, untreated
asthma. One had vascular disease connected with his smoking, so he probably had lung
disease as well.