This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (21 page)

‘Fair enough,’ said Rapke, pressing forward. ‘What did he tell you he did on the
night?’

‘He told me he was driving home from Geelong, had a coughing fit and blacked out.
He woke up, found himself in the dam. He tried to save the children several times.
He got out of the dam, flagged down a car, got to Cindy, went back to the dam, then
found himself in Geelong Hospital.’

‘What did he tell you he did, to try and save the children?’

‘Again, I would have stopped the conversation if it went into detail. But he said
he made several attempts to save the children. It involved diving down.’

‘Did he tell you that he tried to get the boys together?’

‘No. I heard that on the taped interview with the police.’

‘He’s suggesting,’ said Rapke drily, ‘that as part of his rescue
attempts he tried
somehow to
marshal
the boys in the car for the purpose of getting them out?’

‘It appeared to be, yes.’

The journalists slid their eyes sideways in expressionless faces.

Rapke bounded on. Would Roberts expect Farquharson’s responses to trauma on the night
to have been the same, whether he had killed his children deliberately or by accident?

In a person who had done such a thing on purpose, said Roberts, yes, the same trauma
reactions would have been expected, but that person would also have shown more agitation,
more angry outbursts, more allocating of blame to others—and perhaps a complete flight
from the scene.

And what about the fact that at no stage did Farquharson ask what had happened to
his children? If they had been found? If they were safe? Had they been rescued? Were
they dead? And the fact that all he did ask about was himself? What’s
my
position?
What’s going to happen to
me
? All that was normal too, was it?

It was.

The jury sat rigid. Nobody breathed.

Rapke spread his fingertips on the bar table. ‘I have to ask you this question, Mr
Roberts, and I hope you’ll forgive me—but has there been any event in your life which
has made you particularly empathetic towards Mr Farquharson?’

Roberts’ head wavered on his thin neck. ‘No.’

Rapke raised his chin, squinted his eyes, and said in a low, polite, clear voice,
‘Have you lost a child?’

‘I have.’

‘Thank you,’ said Rapke, and sat down.

Morrissey let the ghastly pause stretch out and out.

‘No questions arising, Your Honour,’ he said at last.

The defence case was over.

While the court’s attention swung to the judge, Roberts crouched down in the witness
box to gather up his things. He walked out, holding his head high, a wounded, discarded,
yet suddenly dignified figure.

…

‘How’d you like that last question?’ shouted Morrissey at the journalists, as we
filed out for lunch. I did not hear anybody answer.

Louise and I darted across Lonsdale Street.

‘God,’ she said, ‘that was brutal.’

‘Yeah, but the guy had obviously taken everything Farquharson told him at face value.
Rapke had to blow that open, surely?’

‘Couldn’t he have asked him, “Was there anything you saw in his post-offence conduct
that struck you as indicative of innocence?”’

‘Oh, come on! They can’t ask a witness that, can they?’

But we were shaken. Rapke, our hovering falcon, had swooped into the muck with the
rest, and savagely drawn blood.

From the queue at the coffee cart we saw Kerri Huntington walking down the Supreme
Court steps with Gregory Roberts. Surely, I thought, a counsellor has to do more
than feel empathy for a client and teach him ‘techniques’. Doesn’t a counsellor have
to take it up to him? Tackle him right where he lives? Even across four lanes of
traffic and a row of parked cars, we could see him nodding, the placating tilt of
his small, fine head.

…

The ideal closing address, I imagine, is a brilliantly condensed recapitulation of
the trial, a sparkling argument with a spin that clears the jurors’ heads and engages
their hearts.

For that, you have to watch TV.

In this court, the exhausted jurors sat in their box for four more days, some still
dutifully taking notes, while first Rapke, then Morrissey, ran a précis of the evidence
past them.

Rapke addressed the jurors quietly, as if he considered them his intellectual equals.
He proposed two possible views of the matter, both classed as murder: first, that
the killings were the product of a sudden, aberrant impulse, perhaps triggered by
a psychological disturbance and exacerbated by Farquharson’s despair, anger, frustration
and loneliness; and second, that they were the culmination of a desire and a plot,
hatched months earlier, to take revenge on the wife who had rejected him.

He laid out the evidence in categories, with a level efficiency. He gave full weight
to Farquharson’s anger, his humiliation and depression after the breakdown of his
marriage, but then turned them to his own purpose: the darkening of the accused man’s
thinking. He pointed out the lack of fit between Farquharson’s differing accounts
of the events to different people, his calculated embroideries with their wonky hems
and ragged edges.

He made the excruciating suggestion that, while Farquharson was refusing offers of
help from the two young men on the road, his children might still have been fighting
to unbuckle their seatbelts in the sinking car, surviving for brief moments in an
air lock. At this,
Farquharson covered his face with his handkerchief and sobbed.

Rapke read out passages from the Homicide interview. Even in the barrister’s unhistrionic
rendition, Farquharson sounded flustered, hollow, terribly evasive and woolly. He
kept glancing across the court at his sisters. He shook his head. He scowled. Kerri
Huntington’s sharp profile, under the fleece of curls, remained attentive and still.

But not even Rapke, with his sinewy syntax and his steel core of logic, could inject
adrenalin into the most soporific material of all: the engineering evidence, the
physics of the way the car had left the bitumen and gone into the dam. It had been
worked to death. While he reasserted with vigorous clarity the propriety and competence
of the Major Collision investigation, the jury sagged and flagged. Some of them blatantly
yawned, as did Morrissey once or twice, leaning back in his leather chair.

During the summary of the medical evidence, a dark-haired young juror in the front
row of the box rested her head, in a posture of unendurable fatigue, on the shoulder
of the woman beside her. Just when I thought she had fallen asleep, she roused herself,
and exchanged a tiny private smile with the other woman. It shocked me. They looked
like people who no longer needed to put on a show of concentrating, people who had
already made up their minds.

But when Rapke turned to the testimony of Farquharson’s mate Greg King, when he defended
that witness’s integrity, his mental stability and his motives, the whole jury snapped
back to life. Plainly they cared about King, or, at the very least, found in him
a crucial strand of the story. Rapke took apart the material in King’s secretly recorded
conversations; he guided the jury through the escalating
urgency of Farquharson’s
utterances with a psychological sophistication that made the heart quail.

And when he surged into the final curve of his argument—the sheer statistical improbability
of the defence version of events—the jury sat engrossed. What were the odds, asked
Rapke, that a man without lung disease would suffer an attack of cough syncope, this
condition so rare and so unprovable? That a paroxysm would overcome him at the one
spot, on that thirty-seven-kilometre journey, where a car could leave the highway,
slip neatly past the end of the guard rail, and travel across almost flat terrain
into one of the only two dams in the immediate area? Then, that a car with an unconscious
driver could miraculously maintain a steady arc, flatten without changing course
a fence strong enough to rip its front panel, and swerve to clip a tree? And most
extraordinary of all, ladies and gentlemen, what were the odds that these things
could happen to a man who, only two months earlier, had confided in his mate that
he had dreamed of having an accident that involved a dam?

…

Next morning I was sitting in the front row of the media seats when Farquharson was
brought past me into the dock. He glanced up. Our eyes met. Startled, I smiled. He
tried to return the greeting, but managed only a teeth-baring grimace that did not
reach his eyes. I remembered the day at the Geelong committal hearing, a year earlier,
when he had held open the heavy court door for me. The smile he had offered me that
day was awkward and shy. Now he was a man accustomed to being stared at, and sketched
by court artists, and
hustled along in handcuffs. I was shocked to catch myself thinking:
You poor bastard
. Was there something about him that called up the maternal in women,
our tendency to cosset, to infantilise? Perhaps he had made use of this all his life.
Or perhaps he was trapped in it, helplessly addicted to being coddled. A tough American
public defender I know, a woman, on first hearing the charges against Farquharson,
had said to me, ‘If I was appearing for him, I’d try to make his family see that
loving him doesn’t mean they have to believe he’s innocent.’ As he shuffled past
me into the dock and sat down with a guard on either side, a wild thought came to
me. What if he could turn to his sisters, right here in front of everybody, and shout
to them across the court, ‘Okay. I did it.
Now
can you love me?’

…

While the Crown in its closing had taken a dry, intellectual approach, the defence
lunged straight for the heart. For two whole days, with his back to the press seats,
Morrissey yarned to the jury in his warm, matey way, like a man buttonholing a stranger
in a pub. Throughout this loosely constructed address, Farquharson gripped a big
blue hanky in his hand. At direct mentions of his boys he covered his distorted face
with it, and shed bitter tears.

A benign light bathed the world that Morrissey conjured up: Winchelsea, a sun-splashed
hamlet whose residents were focused on family and work, on sport, on the schooling
of their kids. It was a
nice
community, populated by decent, law-abiding folk who
loved their children and shared an attitude of respect for authority. Sometimes ‘a
circle of pals’ drank together quietly in one of the town’s few pubs, or
at a makeshift
bar in a neighbour’s back shed. Farquharson, he said, was one such Winchelsea bloke—‘an
Anglo-Saxon country-town man’.

Anglo-Saxon? Surely the name Farquharson could only be Scottish. Then it dawned on
me. Anglo-Saxon is code for stiff upper lip. An Anglo-Saxon bloke might well appear
emotionally repressed at a time of great trauma.

Morrissey complimented the jury on their deep knowledge of the case. They were now
equipped, he said, to understand details that the ignorant newspaper reader out there
would find ‘a bit funny’—the car’s ignition and headlights being turned off, Farquharson
leaving the dam and going to his wife. In a clever rhetorical move he praised the
police for the ‘hardness’, the ‘toughness’ of their interview with Farquharson.
They were experienced officers. They had brought psychological pressure of a perfectly
legitimate kind to bear on Farquharson. The defence was glad they had pushed him,
because look at the answers he so honestly and cooperatively provided! Those answers
had completely undermined the case against him—and now the Crown was stuck with them.

Marital separations are always difficult but, as separations go, he said, the Farquharsons’
was ‘the least aggressive and nasty ever on record’. Cindy Gambino, though she had
lost her love for her husband and left him, was ‘magnificent at all times’. Never
once did she use the kids against him.

He brushed aside the import of depression. To distinguish Farquharson’s sadness at
his mother’s death in 2002 from the genesis of blacker moods, he called sentimentally
upon the jurors’ own experience of family loss: ‘Everyone’s got a mum and all of
those
mums are going to die one day. And anyone who’s lost a mum knows that it will
be a sad day when it happens.’

Thus Morrissey drained the darkness from the background of the story. All its mythic
shadows were dispelled. He airbrushed out Farquharson’s anguish and humiliation,
his wounded jealousy, his angry fear that he would be ousted as a father by Stephen
Moules. Farquharson’s sadness was real, sure—but it was the sort of sadness that
Avanza could help with. Everybody around him saw that he was coming good. The man
with
real
mental problems was that tormented soul Greg King, who at the behest of
the police had so appallingly manipulated and betrayed his friend.

Time and again, to describe what he called the Crown’s ‘theories’ as distinct from
the defence’s ‘facts’, Morrissey used the word
weird.
This weird, nasty theory that
Farquharson could have pre-planned the crash—it was ludicrous, ‘a crock’. All Farquharson’s
actions with his boys implied a future. Two nights before Father’s Day, at the footy
awards, didn’t King see Farquharson cuddling little Bailey in his arms? This doomed
baby he was supposedly going to drown in a dam? And Mr Rapke’s horrible picture of
the children fighting for breath in an air pocket as the car sank? It was a fantasy.
There were no air bubbles. The rear window popped out. That car went down like a
stone.

As for Professor Naughton, the Crown’s medical expert—he was so ignorant of the reality
of cough syncope that it was incredible he had ever been called as a witness! In
a sinister macho voice Morrissey mocked the Crown’s claim that Farquharson was in
a seething rage about getting ‘the shit car’: ‘A man can only take so much. Now I
am going to murder three children.’ The threat that
Greg King heard Farquharson make,
in the ‘innocuous’ fish-and-chip-shop conversation, he parodied in a gangster snarl:
‘No one does that to
me
and gets away with it.’ The investigation on the night was
a farce. He pilloried the Major Collision officers by adopting a Mr Plod the Policeman
voice when he quoted them or summarised their evidence. Acting Sergeant Urquhart
was Buzz Lightyear, a nice sort of bloke who had no idea. Sergeant Peters had lied
through his teeth. There was absolutely no evidence of conscious steering. Indeed,
there was every chance that ten-year-old Jai might have grabbed the wheel—he was
a responsible, alert kid, capable of reacting to a crisis by trying to help.