This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (31 page)

‘Are you seriously suggesting that one of your children, in the moments before they
died, would have had any reason to turn off the ignition of that car?’

‘I’m trying to answer it the best way I can.’

‘Why did you turn off the headlights?’

‘They could have been bumped or anything, I don’t know.’

‘Bumped? Bumped? Did you have some reason for wanting it to be dark out there?’

‘No, I did not.’

Tinney pressed him hard on why he had wanted so desperately to be taken from the
dam straight to Cindy Gambino—wasn’t it his negative feelings towards her that made
him want to tell her straightaway that her children were dead?

‘No.’

‘What was she going to be able to do, to help?’

‘All I know is that I had to see her. That’s all I know.’

‘To do what?’

‘I just had to see her.’

‘To do
what
?’

‘I don’t
know
.’

‘What were you intending to do when you saw her?’

‘Tell her that I’d had an accident.’

‘Tell her you’d killed the kids?’

‘No. That I’d had an accident.’

‘And what was she going to be able to do about it?’

‘I don’t know, but I had to see her. Like I said, she’s the mother of my children.’

‘So you left the dam? And, when you left, your children were in a motorcar somewhere
submerged in the dam? There was no one else there at the dam, and you just went off
in a car and left them there?’

‘Well, that’s what happened, yes, but not in the terms you’re trying to put it.’

‘And you were a loving father, were you?’

‘I’m a
very
loving father,
thank
you.’

When Tinney pointed out to him the surprising haste with which he had assumed his
children were dead, Farquharson uttered an aggrieved, angry laugh, thrust out both
hands palms up, and protested, ‘I’d just lost me children in front of me eyes!’

He would not acknowledge that he had been angry about the whole set-up after Gambino
ended the marriage. ‘Upset’ or ‘annoyed’ was as far as he would go. Tinney prised
open this denial with a
needling little manoeuvre that I wished young Eggleston had
still been there to see.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘Mr Moules would have had a perfect right to drive your wife’s
car if he wanted to, wouldn’t he?’

Five years had not healed this wound. Farquharson flared up. ‘Well, why? Drive our
car? It was
our
car still, at the time.’

‘It wasn’t your car, was it, once you were separated?’ said Tinney. ‘It was your
wife’s car, your ex-wife’s car.’

Farquharson flushed with old anger. ‘It was still
both
our car.’

But by then there had been no more ‘our’. Everything that had been ‘ours’ was wiped
and gone.

Except the children.

…

Years later, a man I knew who had been in the upstairs gallery that day said to me
with a groan, ‘It was like watching some poor animal dying. You wanted to call out,
“For God’s sake, shoot him!”’

Yet all the while, Farquharson’s person of comfort, the pretty, motherly woman with
her hands folded in her lap or pressed as in prayer under her chin, seemed immune
to the awful effect of his demeanour. She gazed up at him from her seat with a wonderfully
tender-hearted expression of approval and encouragement. She tilted her head, she
nodded it slowly, thoughtfully, as if pondering the incontrovertible truth of everything
he was saying. Once or twice she gave a tiny wink. While the wretched man blundered
his way across the scorched earth of his story, she poured out upon him great streams
of love from some inexhaustible Christian store.

That Sunday evening I went to the Evelyn Hotel in Fitzroy to hear my sister sing
in the Melbourne Mass Gospel Choir. I hardly expected a big crowd for gospel in that
hip part of town, but the bar was packed shoulder to shoulder. The first song was
about the water of salvation reaching the feet, rising up the body…In shock I looked
behind me, half expecting to see Morrissey and Tinney and Farquharson and his sisters
rocking alongside the pierced and tattooed locals on the swell of the brilliant harmonies.
Atheists and believers swayed in unison, surprised by joy. By the time the sixty-strong
choir burst into ‘Jesus Dropped the Charges’, I had air-lifted the whole mighty throng
of them plus the band and the audience and the entire dramatis personae of the court
out through the roof, away from the city and along the Princes Highway to the banks
of the nameless dam, where we threw down our swords and sang and shouted and testified
together, while the three children in pure white robes were raised gasping and dripping
from the depths and restored all perfect to their mother’s arms.

Next morning, sobered, I ran the gauntlet of the defence team’s hostile faces and
took my seat in Court Eleven, where the Old Testament spirit of retribution still
reigned. But when the tipstaff called us to our feet and ceremonially opened proceedings—‘All
persons having business before this honourable court are commanded to give their
attendance, and they shall be heard’—I had to bite my lip to keep from shouting ‘Amen!’

CHAPTER 17

Farquharson endured three days on the stand. The defence case never recovered. The
edifice that Morrissey would go on to erect with such labour and concentration and
loving devotion was weak at its foundations, for, toil as he might, he could not
make the jury like or trust his client. From then on, the final fortnight of evidence
was like watching, in ghastly slow motion, a man slither down the face of a cliff.
Sometimes his shirt would snag on a protruding branch, or his fall would be arrested
by a tiny ledge, a fragile outcrop; but the fabric would stretch and snap, the narrow
shelf would crumble, and down he would go again, feet first, eyes wide open, arms
outstretched into the void.

A clinical psychologist from Box Hill named Dr Rob Gordon seemed likely to offer
a landing place. He had white hair and the quiet, rather bureaucratic manner of someone
accustomed to spending long hours being patiently coherent in meetings. His expertise
lay in the diagnosis and treatment of trauma-related disorders. Unlike Farquharson’s
loyal grief counsellor, Gregory Roberts, on whose authority as an expert witness
Justice Cummins had cast stern shade,
Gordon had decades of respect-worthy experience
in his field.

Morrissey led Dr Gordon through the whole story: Farquharson on the roadside, in
the car to Gambino’s, and back at the dam where the would-be rescuers were infuriated
by his affectless manner and his failure to take part. At first (as with many a psychological
expert witness) I was tensed in expectation of insulting dot-point diagrams of the
mental processes that life had taught me were complex and mysterious; but instead
Dr Gordon delivered an extended, fascinating lecture, quite beautiful in its clarity,
about the mechanisms of trauma, its physiological effects on the brain, and what
it can do to human behaviour. His eloquent discourse—the kicking in of the reptile
brain, dissociation, numbing, detachment—reframed Farquharson’s experience on the
night in a deeply sympathetic and convincing way. Farquharson in his fall had come
to rest, trembling, on a stable ledge.

Without a struggle, Tinney got Dr Gordon to acknowledge that many of Farquharson’s
actions on the night were ‘at the unusual end of the spectrum for a person in a traumatic
situation’—for example: that within minutes of the crash he had accepted and resigned
himself to the deaths of his children; that he had left his children in the dam and
departed the scene; that he had refused offers of help or the use of a telephone;
that he took no interest in the rescue attempts and gave no help to the rescuers
regarding the likely whereabouts of his car in the water; and that at Emergency,
without making even cursory inquiries about the fate of his children, he pressed
police for information about what would happen to him.

But when Tinney took the next step, and began to ask Dr Gordon to give his opinion
on such odd behaviours if they had been
seen in a person who had not had an accident,
but who had deliberately driven into the dam with intent to kill, Justice Lasry
pulled him up short, and sent the jury out with the tipstaff. In their absence, Tinney
dug in. Lasry challenged him. Morrissey fought him. In the end Lasry, in a thoughtful
(and, I sensed, reluctant)
ex tempore
ruling, decided against Tinney: he was not
to pursue this line of questioning.

Dr Gordon was flying to the Middle East that very afternoon and had to be at the
airport by two; it was getting on for one o’clock and he was still waiting outside
in the hall. But before he could be dismissed, the tipstaff re-entered the court
and formally handed up to the judge a scrap of translucent paper. It was a message
from the exiled jury. Lasry scanned it. He could not suppress a smile. He read it
out. It contained the very questions that he had just denied Tinney permission to
put to the psychologist. The jurors had sensed the drift of the argument and were
determined not to be shut out.

‘Your Honour,’ said Mr Tinney drily, ‘I can only say that they are the two best jury
questions I’ve ever heard.’

There was not much humour in this retrial, but for once the whole court burst out
laughing.

Dr Gordon was called back. Justice Lasry put the questions to him: ‘1. Can trauma
exist regardless of whether an event is intentional or unintentional? 2. If yes
to question one, is there any distinct behavioural difference between someone who
has had an accident as opposed to someone who has planned the event?’

‘It would be hard,’ said Dr Gordon, ‘to predict exactly what behavioural differences
there would be. But the structure of the trauma will be different. In the first case—an
accident—the trauma is the tragedy that’s happened. In the second case—intentional—the
trauma will be, “This is what I’ve done.”’

And while a large chunk of cliff with a man on it peeled off behind him, away went
the psychologist, in his dark-green suit, to catch a plane to Israel.

…

I found it easy to believe that Farquharson had no clear memory of the two men who
found him on the roadside, of the police interview in Emergency, of many of the things
that happened or that he did after he crawled out of the dam. But listening to Dr
Gordon’s clear explanation of the brain under terrible stress, I recalled from the
first trial a discussion, in the absence of the jury, when Farquharson’s Colac psychologist,
Peter Popko, was about to take the stand. Judge and counsel had to work out a way
to introduce certain material that had sprung from intercepted phone calls between
Popko and Farquharson, after the crash. Farquharson had expressed to the psychologist
a strong fear that the police investigation might ‘push him into a nervous breakdown’.
The particular focus of his fear was the looming lie-detector test that he had volunteered
to take, despite the fact that these tests are not admissible in Australian courts.
His insistence on subjecting himself to a test seemed a sign of his transparency.
But if he knew that he was innocent, I had thought then, why would he be racked with
such terror? Now it hit me. It was not that he feared being found out in a lie. What
he dreaded, what drove him half-demented with fear, was that the polygraph machine,
with its nasty electrodes and its computer power immune to all human appeal, might
reveal to
him
the truth of what he had done that night
on the road, the facts that
he had blotted out, or convinced himself he did not know, or genuinely did not remember.
And he was right to fear the test, for he failed it.

…

The Crown produced again, and lavishly garlanded, its expert witness from the first
trial, Professor Matthew Naughton from the Alfred Hospital. Naughton had never seen
with his own eyes an attack of cough syncope. He attested to its extreme rarity with
a high-level physiological expertise that seemed, the longer he spoke, to become
more and more remote from coarse, solid, grassroots experience.

To counter this professor in what the defence made out to be his ivory tower, Morrissey
called again the physician Dr Christopher Steinfort, Farquharson’s treating doctor
and the keeper of a database of cough syncope sufferers. It seemed that Steinfort
was building himself a cough syncope empire down in Geelong. People from the community,
hearing of Farquharson’s successful appeal against his first conviction, had approached
Legal Aid with stories of their own coughing fits and blackouts, and had been referred
to Dr Steinfort. One of these, an intelligent and articulate middle-aged man, took
the stand and gave an account of the frequent fits of hard coughing that rendered
him briefly unconscious. His wife described the blackouts as she had witnessed them.
Their testimony was unnervingly convincing. The authority of this personal testimony
arrested Farquharson’s downward slide for several breathless minutes. But then Morrissey
delved further into the witness’s medical history—no doubt to keep Tinney away from
it—and revealed that, when doctors investigated
a stroke the man had suffered, it
was found that he had a hole in his heart, thought to have been undiagnosed since
childhood. How on earth could a jury be expected to evaluate a medical case so complex?

Another citizen who had come forward when he read about Farquharson’s troubles, and
had been sent to Dr Steinfort in Geelong, was a sixty-one-year-old security guard
with a red face, popping eyes and a blustery manner—formerly a heavy smoker, who
had suffered from asthma and had also been diagnosed with emphysema and high blood
pressure. He reported, over several years, up to a dozen blackouts after coughing.
His first witnessed fit of cough syncope had been brought on at home by his laughter
at a Billy Connolly DVD. His next attack, unwitnessed, was not so funny. Driving
home one morning from a night shift at the Melbourne Stock Exchange, he blacked out
on the Western Ring Road, veered across the carriageway, and was collected by a
semi-trailer. At first he and the attending police thought he must have fallen asleep
at the wheel. A charge of dangerous driving was dismissed when he remembered he had
been coughing before he passed out.