This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (3 page)

Then they sat in the car for a little while, Tony McClelland, twenty-three, apprentice
carpenter, and Shane Atkinson, twenty-two, new father, currently unemployed. They
had a smoke, and tried to talk. They told each other that they should have looked
for the car. They were distraught because the kids had died, and because they were
the ones who had taken Farquharson away.

…

A big plasma screen had been set up facing the jury, in the narrow space between
the press seats and the pews where the families were sitting. Displayed on this Smart
Board were digital photographs of the road, the paddock and the dam. Mr Morrissey,
cross-examining, asked Atkinson and McClelland to make marks on the images with a
special pen, to show the relative positions of various vehicles on that night of
the crash. Farquharson’s family continued to gaze faithfully at Mr Morrissey, but
the purpose of his complex manoeuvre was a mystery to me.

The young men too looked baffled, but strove to cooperate. To
sketch cars and trucks
and ambulances with their little markers, they had to leave the witness stand, edge
along the aisle, and reach up past the journalists’ heads to the screen. We could
see the gel that messed up their hair, the fineness of their skin, the tremors of
their facial muscles, the details of McClelland’s piercings. On the stand, inarticulate
and awkward, they could have been misread as off-hand. Up close, they radiated a
troubled solemnity, a jaw-grinding guilt and sorrow. When Atkinson was finally excused,
when he trudged out of the court followed by the glares of Farquharson’s sisters,
Louise, the gap-year girl, said to me in a shaky whisper, ‘You feel you should at
least be able to give him a hug.’

Next morning I opened the
Herald Sun
and saw a photo of the young men crossing the
road outside the Supreme Court. Tony leads the way, scowling, gripping a bottle of
water in one hand, his knees flexed, his torso bending forward as if he is about
to break into a run. Behind him strides the taller Shane, with a wool beanie pulled
down to his brow, shoulders back, arms along his sides, his face broad and sombre.
They are thin, dark-clad figures with haunted eyes: two souls fleeing before the
blast.

…

Farquharson may not have plunged into the water to search for his boys, but other
men did.

One of the Winchelsea SES members who headed for the dam as soon as Shane Atkinson
raised the alarm had rushed out the door barefoot in track pants and a singlet. His
level-headed wife gathered up an armload of dry clothes and towels, and drove out
the highway after him. She told the court that she pulled up beside the dam and saw
Farquharson standing on his own, soaking wet, with a blanket round him. ‘Robbie!’
she said. ‘It’s not you?’ She threw her arms around him and he began to sob. Then
he stepped back and looked her in the eye. He said, ‘I’ve had this flu. I had a coughing
fit and blacked out. Next thing I knew, the car was filling up with water.’ He told
her he had tried and failed to get the kids out. Then he said, ‘How can I live with
this? It should have been me.’

Two volunteer fire-fighters from the Country Fire Authority, one of them a high-school
student of sixteen, took the stand. They had arrived at the dam towards 8 p.m. and
heard a woman sobbing somewhere in the dark, crying out that she would not be able
to bury her children. They stumbled round with their torches, following tyre marks
in the grass, looking for the spot where the car had gone in. Was it here, where
a piece of a tree had been snapped off and broken glass was scattered on the ground?
By then a police chopper was hovering over the dam, shining a spotlight on to its
surface. There was no sign of the car. Someone would have to get into the water.

Tethered by ropes to other firemen, the two CFA volunteers and the owner of the property
waded into the dam. Not far from the edge, the bottom drastically dropped away. They
began to swim. The water was shockingly cold. They put their heads under and were
blinded by murk. They could not feel the bottom with their feet. Had the car floated
before it sank? Had it drifted sideways? Without equipment, shallow diving was the
best they could do. They floundered about in the water for fifteen minutes, gasping
and shivering, until the paramedics shouted at them to get out. Of the car they found
no trace.

…

When the paramedics had pulled up on the shoulder of the road, they found Farquharson
standing near the fence, wet through, with a blanket round his shoulders. His skin
was cold and he was shivering. His pulse rate was up, his blood pressure normal.
Neither of his lungs was wheezing or crackling. They asked him to cough. He brought
up no phlegm. Breathalysed, he blew zero. He had no history of blackouts, he said,
but had had a dry cough for the past few days.

He told the paramedics that his oldest son had opened the door, causing the car to
fill up with water and sink; that he himself had got out, flagged down a vehicle,
and gone to Winch to tell the police and his ex-wife what had happened.

On the drive to Geelong Hospital the paramedics considered that their patient was
more stunned than in shock. They heard him give vent to several more unproductive
coughs. As the ambulance sped along the dark road, Farquharson, from his stretcher
in the back, asked one of the paramedics, ‘Did I do the right thing? How am I going
to live with myself after all this has happened?’ Perhaps these questions were merely
philosophical. Perhaps Farquharson was murmuring to himself. Either way, the paramedic
in the witness box, badged and epauletted in his dark blue uniform, did not say whether
he had replied or tried to offer comfort. He told the court only that Farquharson
then fell silent, and lay in the ambulance shaking his head.

…

Just across Lonsdale Street from the Supreme Court, outside the glass façade of the
County Court, stands a shiny metal caravan that houses an espresso machine and a
pair of gun baristas. Everyone from the world of the law seems to patronise it: the
loftiest silk in wig and rosette; Homicide detectives with their sinister black folders;
road police in bomber jackets; constables in caps and tunics; irritable tipstaffs
smoking over the turf guide; all the way down to the lowly drifters from the Magistrates’
Court in William Street with spider webs tattooed on their necks and hinges in their
elbow crooks. Even the occasional judge has been seen to throw back a short black
at that democratic counter.

On the Monday morning of the trial’s second week, a couple in the coffee queue struck
up a conversation with the gap-year student and me. Hadn’t they seen us in court,
with our notebooks? They introduced themselves: Bob and Bev Gambino, the parents
of Cindy, Farquharson’s former wife—the drowned boys’ grandparents. We looked at
them in awe, but they chatted on in their unguarded country way, drinking the good
coffee, watching the lawyers come and go. Bob was short and round-faced and solid,
Bev slender with fine-rimmed glasses and straight, greying hair. They told us they
lived near Winchelsea, in the town of Birregurra. Since Bob was a CFA volunteer and
one of their three sons a full-time firey, the firefighters’ union had offered them
free use of a flat above the Fire Services Museum for the duration of the trial.
Everything about the city seemed to please them: the hospitals, the trams, the fresh
food you could buy at the Victoria Market. Bob rambled on unprompted, in his drawling
voice.

‘The court people kept asking us “Which side are
you
on?” First
I didn’t know what
they meant. Then I realised they didn’t want to make us sit with Rob’s family if
we didn’t want to. So I said to the bloke, “Listen, mate, there aren’t two sides.”

‘Rob and I used to work together on the shire,’ he went on, jerking his head in the
direction of the Supreme Court. ‘He was a lazy little bugger. If he didn’t want to
do something, well, he didn’t. Not motivated. He was—you know—a sook.’

These unflattering estimations he delivered with an indulgent grin, as if teasing
someone he was fond of or had at least learnt to put up with. His wife made little
contribution, apart from her friendly attention.

It was nearly 10 a.m. On the other side of the road I spotted Farquharson’s sisters
and their husbands heading for the Supreme Court entrance in a phalanx: ordinary,
reputable working people, self-effacing in their comportment. The woman I picked
as the elder sister, identified by the Gambinos as Carmen Ross, had a soft, intelligent
face and a serious demeanour. Kerri Huntington, the younger, more flamboyant one,
wore her hair in a big bleached perm that flowed back over her shoulders. On my fridge
door at home I had a newspaper photo of Farquharson leaving the court with the curly-headed
blonde on the summer day he got bail after his arrest. What made me clip the photo
and keep it was the way she is hauling Farquharson across the pavement. He trots
beside her. She has an impatient, double-fisted hold on his left wrist that yanks
his hand like a toddler’s across the front of her hips. As the eldest of six children
I recognised that hold: it was a bossy big-sister grip. Now I watched her charge
up the steps into the court, her hair bright as a banner in the grey street.

‘Today,’ said Bob, draining his paper cup and chucking it into the bin, ‘it’ll be
the cops.’

…

Victoria Police contains a highly respected outfit called the Major Collision Investigation
Unit. Its officers drive out at all hours from their bases in Brunswick and Glen
Waverley to attend traffic accidents in which people have been killed or suffered
life-threatening injuries. These are the cops we see on the TV news, standing pensively
on the freeway edge around a pile of gashed and smoking metal.

Sergeant Geoffrey Exton was the MCIU officer who had first taken command of the chaos
on the night of the crash. He was a tough-looking fellow in his late fifties, with
a thick moustache and a cannon ball of a skull that bristled with short grey hair.
‘Another perfect buzz cut,’ whispered Louise. ‘They must have a barber in there 24/7.’
He took the oath in a hoarse, smoker’s voice, holding the Bible away from him with
a rigid arm.

When Exton got to the dam towards 10 p.m., and found that a Search and Rescue Squad
diver was already preparing to enter the water and that the coroner was on his way,
he and Senior Constable Jason Kok set off to do a walk-through of the scene.

Stooping and crouching to shine their torch beams along the ground, the two police
officers worked their way down the right-hand verge of the sealed carriageway on
the Winchelsea side of the overpass. Part way down the slope they found marks in
the roadside gravel that they thought must have been made by the tyres of a vehicle
leaving the bitumen in the direction of the dam, at an angle of about
thirty degrees.
Then, in the grass beside the road, they spotted some rolling tyre prints that seemed
the natural extension of the marks in the gravel, angled in a general westerly direction
and curving slightly to the right. With no sign of braking or skidding, the rolling
prints continued across the longer grass, through a broken post-and-wire farm fence,
and all the way to the dam’s edge, where debris from a side-mirror housing suggested
that the vehicle had clipped a small tree on the bank before it plunged into the
water. From the bitumen edge to the bank of the dam the car appeared to have travelled
about forty-four metres.

From there, the men turned and retraced their steps, following in reverse the same
long, linear indentations in the grass back to the point where they had first seen
the tyre marks in the roadside gravel.

These marks Sergeant Exton outlined with stripes of yellow paint from a spray can.

…

On the face of it, this was a brutally simple account of the car’s trajectory. Now
it would be Mr Morrissey’s job to complicate it. In fact, to defend Farquharson against
the Crown’s claim that, in order to get into the dam on that arc, he must have made
‘three steering inputs’ and thus could not possibly have been unconscious at the
wheel, Morrissey would have to blast the police evidence full of holes. He would
have to make the jury doubt the accuracy and even the integrity of the Major Collision
investigation. He set about his onerous task with a will, aided by certain errors
and miscommunications the police had made on the night and later.

Of these there were quite a few.

For example, Sergeant Exton’s yellow paint marks in the aggregate turned out, even
before the sun rose on the Monday morning and the investigation continued, to be
not quite parallel with each other. Nor were they correctly aligned with the rolling
tyre prints in the grass; and the reconstruction team from Major Collision, when
they arrived at the dam, had apparently based their entire mapping of the crash on
one of these imperfectly angled paint marks. Furthermore, twenty-nine photos that
Sergeant Bradford Peters, one of the police investigators, took at the dam on the
Monday and Tuesday—some from a helicopter, some at ground level—had been brought
back to Major Collision HQ on a memory stick, downloaded into a job file, and forgotten
for two years. It was only now, a fortnight into the trial, that the Crown, let alone
the defence, had been made aware of their existence.

Morrissey brought these errors to light with glee. For the next few days, he challenged
police witnesses to defend their methods and to pronounce upon a bewildering array
of photographs, both terrestrial and aerial. On the Smart Board he put up images
sprinkled with dots and lines and arrows that purported to show the relative whereabouts
of cars and emergency vehicles, of scuff marks on gravel and pale marks in lush grass.
Police were confronted with booklets of photos, with their own diagrams and scale
plans, with 3D mock-ups of the scene. They were tackled on road cambers, on steering-wheel
turns, on terrain, on tussocks. And always, always, Morrissey dragged their attention
back to the burden of his song: the mistakenly angled yellow paint marks that Exton
had sprayed that night on the verge of the road.