This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (5 page)

She gave a harsh
gulp. ‘I think I had him over to tea once. And that was for the children’s sake.’

I did not risk a glance at the journalist who had forbidden pity. But surely mine
was not the only heart to ache, at that moment, for the hunched and humiliated figure
in the dock.

…

Cindy Gambino was at pains to stress that the concreter, Stephen Moules, had not
been the cause of her marriage break-up. They met in the winter of 2004. In September
she engaged him to pour the slab for the new house. By November she had sent Farquharson
back to his father.

Moules was still extricating himself from a child-custody mess with his former wife.
He needed to maintain things with Gambino
on a friendly footing, and for quite some
time he kept her at arms’ length. It was not till after she ended her marriage that
their relationship grew more intimate. When they began to sleep at each other’s
houses that summer, Farquharson took it badly, but he claimed not to care what she
and Moules were doing. His jealousy focused on the children. It bugged him that his
boys had to associate with Moules’ two unruly sons. Jai Farquharson, at ten, became
a very different little boy: he believed he would never be happy again. His parents,
in turns, took him to see a counsellor for help in managing his anger and sadness.
In spite of Gambino’s assurances, Farquharson was afraid of being edged out of his
children’s lives. He feared that Moules was going to take his place as their father.

It took a while for Farquharson to get the hang of being a part-time dad in his own
father’s house, which Gambino found so cold and child-unfriendly that she called
it ‘the morgue’. He was not confident with Bailey, the toddler. At first he had the
boys to sleep over only rarely. But football was their shared obsession and, once
the season started, they stayed with him every second weekend.

Farquharson had agreed, without need of Family Court involvement, to pay maintenance
at the monthly rate laid down by the Child Support Agency. Half of it he put straight
into the mortgage payments on the house, and the rest he gave to Gambino, who as
a supporting mother was receiving her own government cheque. He liked to buy his
children gifts of clothes and toys, but financially he was struggling. He could not
see how to get his life back on track. In the winter of 2005 his wages went up, and
his maintenance payments were about to be raised accordingly. The letter announcing
this increase did not arrive until after the boys
had died, but he knew it was coming,
and he was very angry with the Child Support Agency. He thought they ‘didn’t give
the guy a fair go’. On what would turn out to be the last Wednesday of their children’s
lives, Gambino suggested to Farquharson that he should stop paying her the non-mortgage
part of the maintenance, and put that money towards a house of his own, so that when
the boys wanted to see their dad they could hop on their bikes and go. But he said
no, because it was not legal.

And then there was the sore point of the two cars. At the time she ended the marriage,
Gambino had pressed Farquharson to take from their house whatever he liked. Many
a rejected spouse has heard that rush of guilty generosity at the door, ‘I’ll give
you everything!’—with its unspoken rider—‘except what you really want: my love’.
The only thing she asked for, because she would have the kids full-time, was the
newer of their two cars—a 2002 VX Commodore. The dejected Farquharson went along
with it, but he did not like it one bit.

…

Father’s Day 2005 did not fall on one of Farquharson’s scheduled access weekends,
but at Jai’s football presentation on the Friday evening, Gambino suggested to Farquharson
that she should bring the boys to him on Sunday afternoon for a special visit. They
arrived just as Farquharson got home from work. They brought gifts they had chosen
for him: a framed picture of themselves, and a set of saucepans. Jai, the eldest,
was upset because he had forgotten to bring a wooden back-scratcher that he had bought
especially. The boys asked if they could stay with their father for tea. He was not
expecting them for a meal, and had no food in the house. The children saw the chance
for a rare treat: Kentucky Fried Chicken in Geelong. Farquharson agreed to have them
back at Gambino’s place by 7.30 p.m.

‘It was three o’clock,’ she told the court. ‘Bailey said, “Cuddle, Mum”. I gave them
a cuddle.’ Her voice rose to a register almost beyond audible. ‘That was the last
time I saw my children.’

…

Gambino and Stephen Moules spent the rest of the day in Geelong, where Moules had
to inspect the progress of a job. They got back to his house in Winchelsea by 6.30
p.m. and he started to cook the tea. Just before the appointed hand-over time, Gambino
drove to her own house, taking with her Moules’ younger son Zach, who was keen to
see her boys. Ten minutes later, while she was drawing the curtains against the dark,
she saw a white Commodore pull in. ‘Here they are now,’ she thought.

But on her doorstep she found Farquharson with two men. He was saturated, delirious,
and he kept saying, ‘The kids are in the car. They’re in the water.’

In the witness stand Gambino began to rock on her feet, a rhythmic swaying.

She called Moules on her mobile, then jumped into her car, with Zach beside her and
Farquharson in the back seat, and headed out on to the Princes Highway. ‘Where? Where?’

‘Near the overpass!’ Farquharson shouted. ‘Keep going. Keep going!’

The boy screamed, ‘Slow down! You’re frightening me!’

She looked at the speedo. She was doing 145. She pulled up near the guardrail of
the overpass.

‘We couldn’t see the dam. It was so dark, we couldn’t see anything.’

Moules and his cousin arrived in another car, and ran into the paddock.

‘We were trying to find out where the car had gone in,’ said Gambino. She began to
sob. ‘The wire was down. It was spread across the paddock. Rob asked Stephen for
a cigarette. Stephen said, “What? Where are your kids? Get out of my face before
I kill you.
Where are your kids
?” Rob didn’t know. He kept going like
that
.’ She
mimicked a flat-handed pointing gesture. ‘I said to him, “What happened?” And he
said, “I blacked out.” He tried to comfort me, but I pushed him away.’

Farquharson between his guards was weeping soundlessly, without shame, his mouth
gaping, his eyes locked on hers. A great knotted current of agony surged back and
forth between the dock and the witness stand: a flood of terrible compassion. Something
was happening to Gambino’s voice. It dissolved, it thickened, it throbbed and took
on colour; it rose and fell in octaves, like a chant.

‘It was dark. It was so
dark
. I was running up and down the paddock, trying to ring
000, but I was so hysterical I couldn’t press the numbers properly. Stephen was in
the water. I remember sitting in the front seat of his parents’ car. Rob was standing
in front of the car with his arms crossed. He was soaking wet. He was like a person,
but there was no movement. He wasn’t doing anything. He was like in a trance.’

There was a helicopter over the dam. A paramedic walked up to her. She asked him,
‘How long has it been?’ ‘Forty minutes.’ ‘What are their chances?’ ‘Very slim.’

One of her brothers arrived. He took her away to his house in Winchelsea and called
a doctor. It was a very long wait. Her socks were wet. At last the doctor came. He
drove them through fog to the Winchelsea hospital. She staggered through the doors
and someone came to her with the needle.

…

All Mr Morrissey wanted from Gambino, in cross-examination, was her assurance—which
she gave earnestly and without hesitation—that Farquharson had loved his children
very deeply. He was such a softie with them that the role of disciplinarian had fallen
to her. The football side of things was his forte. After the separation he grew much
closer to the boys. She had done everything in her power to foster this closeness.
He was proud of them, especially of Jai, who at ten was intelligent, mature, responsible,
a good sportsman, a very good big brother.

‘Everybody loved my kids,’ said Gambino, her voice thinning to a soft wail. ‘They
were so
popular
.’

In the dreadful days after they died, asked Morrissey, had her family written Farquharson
a card? Had she and Rob spoken to each other on the telephone? Had they offered each
other words of comfort? Yes, she said, with an anguished gentleness, yes—they had.

Gambino left the stand with a wad of wet tissues held to her cheek. As she stumbled
towards the exit, Farquharson’s head swung
to follow her, and I caught the full blast
of his distress. His face was ravaged, beseeching: his teeth bared, his cheeks streaming.
The doors thumped shut behind her. Masonry, glass and timber could not muffle the
rending sobs and cries that echoed in the cold hall outside.

The sleeve of Louise’s hoodie was black with tears. ‘Did she look at him on the way
out?’ she whispered. ‘Did she
look
at him?’

‘She turned her head a little bit,’ I said. ‘I think she looked at him.’

Out on the street, seeing me wipe my eyes, the veteran journalist snapped at me,
‘
I
was at the
funeral
.’

Years later, when we befriended each other, I would see that she had been forcing
me back to the point, but now she made me feel like a sentimental amateur. I was
afraid of her, and it shocked me that she would not hold her fire, even for a moment,
in the face of what we had just witnessed: two broken people grieving together for
their lost children, in an abyss of suffering where notions of guilt and innocence
have no purchase.

…

No sooner had we steadied ourselves after the spectacle of Cindy Gambino’s loyalty
to the husband she was no longer in love with, than the prosecution called to the
stand her new partner—and father of her eleven-month-old son, Hezekiah—Stephen Moules.

He faced Rapke’s junior, Amanda Forrester, in a grey suit, lavender shirt, and white
tie. His hair was thick and fair. He had an upright posture, and a smooth, open face
with the all-seasons tan of the outdoor worker. I was not the only woman in the court
who shot
at Farquharson a furtive glance of comparison. He sat with shoulders slumped
and eyes downcast.

Moules described himself to the court as a former concreter turned full-time father.
The water in the glass he sipped from trembled; but still he gave off that little
buzz of glamour peculiar to the Australian tradie. Surely the month of September
2004, when the Farquharsons hired him to pour the slab of their new house, had marked
the beginning of a period of exhilaration and fantasy for Gambino, while to Farquharson
it must have brought nothing but suspicion, jealousy and pain.

Everything Moules said about himself suggested a figure of resolute virtue. His own
family may have collapsed into chaos, but he seemed determined to haul it back to
the light, and to establish himself in full view as a decent citizen. When the Farquharsons
engaged him, he already knew their eldest, Jai, from the Cub Scout troupe he led.
He was an active member of the Bayside Christian Church, an evangelical outfit formerly
known as the Assemblies of God, and taught Sunday School there. The name of his concreting
company was God’s Creations.

His initial dealings with the Farquharsons, he said, were only ‘a business relationship’.
But, having recently watched a bunch of blokes pour a concrete slab in my own backyard,
I was equipped to imagine the effect of this sight on a young woman in Cindy Farquharson’s
stifling situation. A concrete pour is a dramatic process. It demands skill, speed,
strength, and the confident handling of machinery; and it is so intensely, symbolically
masculine that every woman and boy in the vicinity is drawn to it in excited respect.
Spellbound on the back veranda between my two small grandsons, I remembered Camille
Paglia’s coat-trailing remark that if women were running the world, we’d still be
living in grass huts. Could it be that Farquharson’s days as a husband were numbered
before that slab had set?

…

Late in 2004 Gambino offered, in a neighbourly spirit, to pick up Moules’ two boys
from school in the afternoons and look after them at her place until he finished
work. Moules saw no harm in it, and was grateful for the help. It made me flinch
to think of Farquharson stumping home sore-footed from his cleaning job, only to
find his house thundering with another man’s kids and his wife flushed and enlivened
by her new friendship with their father.

Across the dying months of the marriage, though, Farquharson naively confided in
Moules his anxiety and distress. Even after his wife had called the whole thing off
and he had moved back to his father’s—which chanced to be only five doors along from
the house Moules was renting—Farquharson would often turn up at Moules’ place looking
for somebody to talk to. He took the break-up very hard. He was distraught when Cindy
did not want to reconcile. ‘He did not know what to do,’ said Moules, ‘in any way,
shape or form.’ Moules ran a Christian line with him. He ‘counselled’ him on how
to get his marriage back together. ‘I tried to sort of steer him,’ he said, miming
the two-handed motion of driving a car. He gave Farquharson advice both spiritual
and worldly, and recommended he see a counsellor from Bayside Christian Church. Finally
he realised his efforts were falling on deaf ears. He gave up.

But Moules’ role as his neighbour’s counsellor must have been
uncomfortably compromised,
for Cindy Farquharson too, over the same period, was a frequent visitor to his house.
She used him as an ear, said Moules, to ‘vent to’. They would ‘just sit there talking’.
According to Moules’ police statement, she told him that Farquharson had spoken of
moving up to Queensland, that he wanted to ‘wean himself off his boys, because that
was how it would end up anyway’.