This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (26 page)

‘A fire?’ I said to the
Age
reporter beside me. ‘That’s new.’

‘I came across a bad car crash once,’ she whispered. ‘I was the first person there.
There were people in the car, they were unconscious, and the motor was still running.
The first thing I did was reach in and turn off the ignition. I didn’t think. It
was automatic.’

Outside the house the rooster is squalling. They pay it no
attention. Each of them
confesses to thoughts of suicide. They don’t use the word. They call it ‘giving up’.
But people tell them the kids would be beside themselves if they knew. She assures
him that there is no evidence, that they have nothing on him. They compare griefs.
He can’t smile, he says; he can’t laugh. If she laughs she feels guilty in seconds.
She defers to him: his suffering, she says, is tenfold of hers. She has lost three
children, but unlike him she doesn’t have that guilt behind it—not that she’s saying
he should…

Gambino in the court got a fingertip grip on the gold cross round her neck, and cried
in great gaping silent sobs. Tinney and Forrester flashed her glances of anxious
inquiry. The tall blonde woman from Victim Support shifted to a seat behind her,
watchful, ready to move.

But the voices on the tape slide into the dull, rambling familiarity of two people
who have once been husband and wife, parents together. Farquharson tells her he has
a new phone. They marvel that the SIM card of the one that went into the dam still
works. Many pauses fall. Their silences are more comfortable than speech. Neither
of them seems ready to break the contact. Perhaps, I thought, the children can still
exist as long as their parents are in each other’s company.

Then she tells him that, though it has hurt them, she has left her parents’ house
and gone to be with Stephen Moules. She used to be confident, but she has turned
into a ‘timid, mild, insecure little being’ who doesn’t want to be left alone. Stephen
is now her security.

At the mention of his victorious rival, Farquharson slips back into a doleful, guilt-tripping
mode: ‘And
I
gotta ride this stuff out on my own.’

Still, she draws the conversation to an end with something like tenderness: ‘I know
in my heart of hearts you would never harm those boys.’

‘Ohhh, no way known.’

‘You got to keep on fighting for the boys’ sake.’

‘I keep thinking of you,’ he says.

‘I think of you, too. I defend you. I do defend you.’

…

Morrissey rose. Gambino sat regarding him with narrowed eyes, her jaw set hard.

‘Are you very angry with Robert Farquharson?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you bare your teeth at him?’

‘Possibly.’

‘For the state you’re now in, do you blame Robert Farquharson?’

‘Correct.’

‘You hate him?’

A pause.

‘I hate him for what he’s done to my life.’

‘And it’s your wish that he be convicted of murder?’

A long, long pause.

‘Correct.’

At that moment the audio-visual technician who was trying to cue Gambino’s
60 Minutes
interview hit the wrong key. Tinkling music rang out and on the high screen we saw
the three little boys naked in their bath, moving and smiling in clean water. Gambino
let
out a stricken cry. I saw Amanda Forrester drop her head into her hands. Justice
Lasry’s face went very long and grey.

As soon as Gambino had got herself in hand, Morrissey hauled his gown on to his shoulders
and opened fire.

He invited Gambino to list the psychiatric and medical conditions for which she
was being treated—severe major depressive disorder, chronic adjustment disorder,
chronic anxiety, heart palpitations, calcified shoulder, neck and back pain caused
by stress—and the medications she had been prescribed: Effexor, Clonazepam and, for
her physical pain, the Codalgin Forte on which she had accidentally overdosed when
Stephen Moules was away. Quoting page after page of transcript, he forced her to
contrast her statements at the first trial with things she was now alleging. She
had changed her evidence, hadn’t she? Did she not tell
Woman’s Day
in 2007 that she
didn’t blame Farquharson? Was she not now deliberately exaggerating the bad things
about her marriage, putting a bad spin on things which in the past she had viewed
as perfectly innocent? The way she described him at the dam, for example—that was
just a deliberate piece of spite, was it not?

Gambino squared up to him. She answered with rudeness and aggression. She drew heavy,
affronted sighs. She widened her eyes and sarcastically wobbled her head. She frowned,
glared, muttered under her breath as if cursing. The judge sent her out for a moment’s
break. When she returned, he leaned forward and said to her gently, ‘You must grapple
with what’s put to you.’ Chastened, she replied, ‘I’ll do my best, Your Honour.’

Next Morrissey announced that he would play something horrific: the audiotape of
the 000 calls that Gambino had made
from the water’s edge. It was heart-breaking,
he said, it was highly destructive and dangerous to the witness. But it had to be
done, to show her unreliable state of mind when she accused Farquharson at the dam
of behaving like someone who had lost his pushbike. Justice Lasry urged Gambino to
leave the court while the tape was played to the jury. She rebuffed his concern and
insisted she would stay and hear it. Morrissey flashed Lasry a look that said
I told
you so.

Frightful screams, hoarse babbling. Gambino chokes and shrieks:
Ambulance! Police!
Three ks out of Winchelsea! I can’t see a thing!
The operator’s deep male voice:
Where are you? I’m sorry, I don’t understand the problem. Where are you?
In the background
Farquharson is jabbering at her: he blacked out, he woke up in water, he doesn’t
know where the car went in. And all the while, behind her in the dark, Moules’s boy
Zach is shrilly piping, his voice thin and sharp as a piccolo.

Farquharson’s face, in the dock, was fat with horror. Gambino sat hunched with her
hanky over her mouth, uttering a high, weak whimpering sound. When they helped her
to the door at the end of the tape she staggered along, bowed over, clutching herself
with both arms like someone who had been shot in the belly. Court rose.

Outside in the courtyard, with his father, Stephen Moules, the little boy Hezekiah
was rolling on the ground with a dummy in his mouth, laughing and playing, bored,
waiting for his mother, while she huddled in a side hall, surrounded by attendants,
letting out long cries of pain.

…

By four o’clock Gambino’s turnaround was on the news. I got myself to the bar where
I had arranged to meet a magazine editor I worked for. He chattered away gaily, not
noticing that I sat there mute. I longed to tell someone, anyone, about the 000 tape;
but a line had been crossed in court that day. I had heard something obscene, something
it would have been indecent to speak of: a grown man gabbling like a child who, in
a fit of angry spite, has broken a thing precious beyond price and, panicking now,
has led his mother to the wreckage to show her what he has done.

…

‘For what purpose,’ texted my gallant old barrister friend next morning, ‘is Mr Morrissey
so hard on Ms Gambino? Should not he be gentle with her? I cannot believe what I
am reading.’

Gentle? Gambino was a woman so crazed with loss and pain that she was beyond caring.
Cross-examination was trauma, said Morrissey to the judge next morning, but it was
the only weapon his client had—and Morrissey was fed up, he said, with being constantly
reminded that he was dealing with a grieving mother. Yet Morrissey was no sadist.
Behind the lachrymose tabloid drama queen he sensed—and, I thought, respected—not
only his client’s nemesis but a wild and worthy adversary who was spoiling for a
fight. He gave her both barrels. She crawled away wounded, came back head high and
faced him again. He goaded her and she bit.

It was under pressure that she had changed her position, was it not? Pressure from
the police? And her family? And her psychiatrist? People who kept telling her she
would never recover
from her grief until she admitted she was ‘in denial’?

‘I have a mind of my own,’ she ground out. ‘I am a very intelligent person. I can
make up my own mind.’

Hadn’t she and Farquharson, after the accident, worn twin lockets containing the
children’s pictures?

He
bought them. She no longer wore hers because she no longer believed in him.

Morrissey depicted Farquharson on the dark bank of the dam as an isolated, forlorn
and rejected figure, bereft of consolation. Had she offered him a single word of
kindness, or a blanket for his shoulders? Invited him to sit in the car with her?
Did he not approach Gambino to offer comfort? Did she not push him away?

‘Why wouldn’t I?’ she snapped. ‘He’d just drowned my kids.’

And how come
she
didn’t jump into the water? Did anyone attack
her
on the night?
Tick her off for not jumping in? Tell her she was weak for not diving down after
her kids? Rob was attacked for having left the accident and gone straight to her—but
who was the first person
she
called? Her new partner, Stephen Moules! And Moules’
parents!

He ranged more widely. Was she not the boss of the marriage?

‘The boss? Huh. If I didn’t do a lot of what I did in our relationship there wouldn’t
be much done. Controlling the bills, controlling the groceries, controlling the children.’

Who got their way?

‘I did.’

When she said Farquharson had left the disciplining of the kids to her, why didn’t
she say what
her
techniques of discipline were? Didn’t
she
ever go over the top?
Did she not hit them with
the wooden spoon? Did she ever slap any of the boys to
the head?

‘My children had respect for me,’ she said sharply. ‘I would count to three, and
if I got to three then consequences would happen. I would be lucky to get to two.’
In a couple of vivid sentences that made me look at her with fresh regard, she described
a clash with a rebellious and destructive Jai, and demonstrated the three-fingered
slap to the cheek she had given him to jolt him out of his insolence.

Morrissey wheeled in the heavy artillery. What did she have to say about her role,
if any, in the chiselling of Farquharson’s name off the children’s granite headstone?

She exploded in a passion of sobs: ‘You disgust me. My children’s resting place!
I paid for that headstone! He owes me money for that headstone! How dare you!’

He showed her a press photo of herself and Farquharson at the church door, weeping
in each other’s arms as the pallbearers carried the three white coffins out to the
hearse. She hissed like a snake, made as if to hurl the photo at Morrissey, then
screwed it up and dashed it to the floor. He held it up to the judge, a trophy. When
Lasry told her she must identify it, she refused to touch it. Later, in the absence
of the jury, Morrissey insisted on tendering the crumpled page as an exhibit. Lasry
ruled against him: it would only remind the jurors of her emotional outburst.

The battle swept this way and that. The court air thrummed with the trauma of it,
as if people longed to shout, or even to barrack, but sat wincing, tight-lipped,
swinging their heads in unison.

And in the end, exhausted, backed into a corner, Gambino flung at Morrissey the reason
she had turned against Farquharson. It was because he had refused to let her visit
him in prison. It was
the ‘pathetic letter’ she had received in response to her pleas.
It was the promise he made two years ago, to see her after Jai’s fourteenth birthday—the
promise he broke when, once again, he changed his mind.

‘And
that
,’ she said, her lips stiff with loathing, ‘was when I decided I was no
longer supporting him.’

It was exactly what Morrissey was after: a deeply ‘feminine’ shift, inspired not
by reason but by wifely grievance and the bitter desire to settle a score. He stood
and let it radiate its static. Then he thanked her for her patience, and sat down.

…

Out on Lonsdale Street I bumped into another barrister I had known in the Carlton
pubs of our youth. I sketched the day’s wild carnage. He let out a little moan of
commiseration.

‘That sounds disastrous. Disastrous. I hesitate to take on a woman. Especially one
as wounded as she is. Three kids! Beyond comprehension. When a wounded man’s in the
box, he’ll cower. But a woman’—he bared his teeth and clawed with one hand—‘a woman’ll
come
back
at you.’

…

I texted my old barrister friend. ‘Does it matter what Cindy feels towards Farquharson?
In the end it doesn’t prove anything, does it?’

‘My very thought,’ he replied, ‘at first. But I see the wisdom in Mr Morrissey’s
approach. The strongest evidence that would put paid
to the coughing fit theory would
be that of MOTIVE. Gambino’s new slant provides motive loosely defined, id est, reasons
consistent with wanting to offend. Mr Morrissey has no option but to meet it head
on.’

…

In the third week a new witness, a woman in her forties, entered the court, wearing
very high heels and a chic black skirt-suit that showed discreet cleavage. In her
hand she pressed a neatly folded pad of tissues. Her face was broad and pleasant,
ready to smile. When she spoke she revealed a clear New Zealand accent. This was
Dawn Waite, an accounts manager and dairy farmer from the Western District, down
Warrnambool way. She had an important story to tell and some hard explaining to do
about why she had only now, at the retrial, come forward to tell it.

She had spent the weekend of Father’s Day 2005 in Melbourne, shopping with her teenage
daughter and the daughter’s friend. Soon after dark on the Sunday evening, carrying
gifts for the girls’ respective fathers, they were flying along the Princes Highway
west of Geelong, sitting on a hundred, nearly halfway home. There was hardly any
traffic on the road, and Waite had the lights of her Falcon on high beam.