This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (6 page)

Once Farquharson had moved out of their house, Cindy made it apparent to Moules that
she had feelings for him. Next, she changed her name back to Gambino. Her signals
were unmistakable. Moules had to struggle, he said, to keep their relationship platonic.
He declined to be used as a scapegoat. He wanted Gambino to ‘have all her business
clear-cut’ before anything further developed between them. But Farquharson, he said,
was beginning to hold him responsible for the failure of the marriage.

‘It’s got to be your fault,’ he said to Moules. ‘I can’t understand any other reason
why the marriage shouldn’t be.’

And Moules replied, ‘Your wife is your wife, okay? I’ve got custody of my kids. I’m
starting my life again. I don’t need any more dramas.’

…

When he spoke about the night of Father’s Day, Moules’ voice became low and husky.
Tremors flickered in the skin around his eyes. To control the trembling of his hands
he had to clasp them on the timber rail of the witness stand. He mimed his incredulity
at Farquharson’s first words to him when he arrived at the dam:
‘Where’s your smokes?’
He described his helpless diving into the bitterly cold water, his repeated requests
to Farquharson to tell him where the car had gone in, and Farquharson’s answer: ‘I
don’t know. I had a coughing fit and blacked out.’ Two young men—they must have been
Shane Atkinson and Tony McClelland—shouted guidance to him from the bank: ‘I think
I see bubbles. Try there. Try there.’ Moules tried to dive in the direction of any
movement he thought he could sense in the water. But it was too dark and too cold,
and he was shuddering too much and swallowing too much water. It got to the point
where he said to himself, ‘This is ridiculous.’ One of the men yelled to him, ‘Come
on, mate. Get out or you’ll be next.’

Moules’ teenage cousin, who shared his house, drove him home to get dry clothes.
Mistakenly believing Gambino to have been taken to Geelong Hospital, Moules set out
with a friend at the wheel to find her there. On the way past the dam he asked the
driver to stop so he could let the police know he had been, as he put it in his witness
statement two days later, ‘first at the scene’. In that statement, Moules said he
had been asked whether he had told an officer or anyone else that night that Farquharson
had killed his kids. He was very angry on the night, he said, and he might have said
something like it, but he did not remember it.

…

Kerri Huntington, the younger of Farquharson’s big sisters, took the stand, her flamboyant
blonde hair massing on her shoulders. Although at times she wept, she looked like
the extrovert of the family, someone who would know how to throw a party, a warm
person with laugh-crinkles radiating from her small, deep-set Farquharson eyes.

When Rob’s marriage had crashed, Kerri and her husband, Gary, opened their home to
him and his sons. The Huntingtons’ house was kid-friendly. They had a pool. Their
two daughters loved Rob’s boys, who would often come to stay with them on his access
weekends. The Huntingtons would even have asked Rob to move in with them, but their
house lacked an extra bedroom, and anyway they lived at Mount Moriac, halfway to
Geelong; what Rob needed was a house in Winchelsea, so the boys could come to him
off their own bat.

Kerri, who worked part-time at Kmart in the Geelong suburb of Belmont, kept an eye
on real estate. She spotted the perfect house, right across the road from the Winch
footy oval. But the Daintree Drive house still wasn’t sold; Rob couldn’t afford to
buy. The Huntingtons offered to lend him what they could, and to help him get a better
car. He didn’t want to be in debt to them. He said no.

Around six on the evening of Father’s Day, Kerri was about to go on her break at
Kmart when Rob and his kids wandered in. She was surprised. His normal fortnightly
access date had been the previous weekend; she remembered it because he had been
so sick, with his lingering chest cold, that he had rung and asked her for help with
the boys. When they had got to her place, Rob was lethargic with a nasty cough. It
didn’t make him pass out, but it took his breath away. She had made him lie on the
couch and sleep, while she looked after the boys.

Now, on the wrong weekend, here they were in her store, pestering Rob to buy them
a cricket ball and some DVDs. They told her
they were going to stop off at her place
on their way home to collect a football that Tyler had lost in her garden the weekend
before. Kerri and Rob made a plan to get their kids together the following Saturday,
and away the four Farquharsons went.

Gary Huntington testified that boys and father did rock through the Mount Moriac
house half an hour later. They picked up the footy, and towards seven, all correctly
buckled into their seats, they set off for Winchelsea.

…

Outside on Lonsdale Street at lunchtime, while Louise and I were standing in a patch
of sun against the Supreme Court’s honey-coloured stone wall, Bob Gambino drifted
up to us.

‘You girls still here?’

‘Oh yes. We’ll be here till the end.’

He looked pleased, and stuck his hands into his coat pockets. His natural expression
seemed to be a small, lopsided smile. ‘Some of those jurors,’ he said, without apparent
animus, ‘aren’t even there. That dark one. She’s just eatin’ chewy and lookin’ round.
She’s in a dream.’

I burst out, ‘Cindy was incredible. I couldn’t believe how she kept going.’

‘Nah,’ he said, looking into the stream of traffic. ‘You never expect to have to
sit through this. I’ll certainly never forget that night. This arvo it’ll be the
divers.’

Louise turned a whiter shade of pale.

‘They asked us if we wanted not to be here for that,’ said Bob.
‘But we know it already.
We know it all.’

We stood there, keeping him company, in the bent rectangle of sun.

…

Before the jury was called in that afternoon, Mr Morrissey asked the judge for permission
to show them two photographs.

The first was of Jai and Tyler jumping into the Huntingtons’ swimming pool. This,
he said, would demonstrate that the two older boys were so confident and enthusiastic
in water, so ‘not hopeless’, that it would have been ‘a risky proposition’ to try
to drown them.

I was too embarrassed to look at Morrissey. Could he really believe that there was
a meaningful connection between a joyful daylight leap and a violent plunge into
the dark?

The second photo showed two-year-old Bailey on his father’s lap in an armchair, both
of them sound asleep. Morrissey particularly wanted the jury to see the poignant
shot of the slumbering father and son: it would counter what he said was the Crown’s
suggestion that Bailey had been, to his father, an unwanted child.

The Crown declared it had made no such suggestion. Justice Cummins jibbed at the
sleeping picture. ‘Naked sympathy is just as inappropriate as naked prejudice. Are
you going to introduce a family album? Why pick this one out?’

‘I’m seeking,’ said Morrissey doggedly, ‘to demonstrate that he loved that child.’

There it was again, the sentimental fantasy of love as a condition of simple benevolence,
a tranquil, sunlit region in which we are
safe from our own destructive urges. Surely,
I thought, Freud was closer to the mark when he said, ‘We are never so defenceless
against suffering as when we love.’

A pause. Justice Cummins shook his head. He gave Morrissey leave to tender the swimming
pool picture, but he would not admit the second photo. So little Bailey was left
to dream on, forever unregarded, curled in his sleeping father’s lap.

…

It was a woman who finally got deep enough into the dam, that night, to find the
car.

Crop-haired and wiry in her dark blue uniform, a huge diver’s watch on her wrist,
Senior Constable Rebecca Caskey of the Search and Rescue Squad stood in the witness
stand with her hands clasped loosely behind her. Something in her easy posture reminded
me of nurses I had seen at work: women of few words, unflappable, alert and calm.

Search and Rescue figured out, from the scattered debris their torch beams located
near the dam, the car’s likely departure point from the bank. By 10.30 p.m. that
night, Caskey was fully kitted up, with an attendant on the bank holding her lifeline.

In she went, all the way down. Compared with a farm dam, it was clean: there was
no entangling vegetation. But the bottom was pure mud. The water was black and very
cold. She could not see at all. A torch would have been useless in water so full
of sediment. They used an arc search pattern: the man on the bank let out a length
of line, and Caskey, keeping it tight between them, searched the
available curve.
He let out another arm-length and swept her back the other way.

She started feeling bits of metal and plastic on the bottom. Then she bumped into
something with her head, something that moved. She touched it with her hand. It spun
freely. A wheel. On the witness stand she squeezed her eyes shut, put her long-fingered
hands out in front of her, and mimed blind groping gestures up and down an imaginary
wall. ‘What was facing me,’ she said, ‘was the underside of the car. It was vertical.’

She backed away, and surfaced. They calculated the car’s position: wedged nose down
in the mud, twenty-eight metres from the bank, in seven and a half metres of water.
Standard procedure for Search and Rescue is to remove bodies from a submerged vehicle
before they haul it out. But they agreed with Major Collision that Farquharson’s
car should be sealed and brought up intact.

Oh God. This could only get worse. I sneaked a look at Farquharson. His lips were
white, his mouth very low on his face. Like a child he ground his knuckles into his
eyes.

Caskey dived again. In the mud at the bottom, working blind, she felt her way to
what she guessed was the driver’s side of the vertical car.

‘The first thing I noticed on the driver’s side was an open door, just above the
level of my head. Its window was closed. I felt around the edge of the door.’

Again, eyes shut and palms exposed, she mimed her fumbling search.

‘And then,’ she said, ‘I felt, slightly protruding from the car, a small person’s
head.’

On the witness stand she cupped both hands before her face, and delicately moved
an imaginary object sideways.

‘I pushed it back in. And I shut the door.’

She swam up the driver’s side of the car and down the passenger side, checking the
windows and doors. All were closed.

Soon after midnight Caskey clambered out of the water for the last time. A police
4WD winched the Commodore to the edge of the dam, and a commercial tow-truck dragged
it, still full of water, up on to the bank. Caskey had been in the water for several
hours. She was cold. She was keen to get changed and go home.

Before she left, she took a quick look into the car. She saw three children. Two
were in the back. Lying in the front was the one whose head she had touched and,
for a moment, held in her hands.

…

The men from Major Collision looked into the recovered car before they opened it
to drain the water out. Ten-year-old Jai was lying face down across the front seats
with his head towards the driver’s door. When he was taken out of the car he showed
signs of rigor mortis. Seven-year-old Tyler lay on his right side behind the driver’s
seat. His head was near the door and his legs were between the two front seats. Two-year-old
Bailey was lying across the top of the baby seat, facing rearwards and still tangled
in his safety harness.

The police took careful note of the positions of the car’s controls. The key was
in the ignition, off and locked. The automatic gearshift was in drive. The handbrake
was off, as were the headlights and parking lights. The heater was off: its knob
was at ten o’clock, in
the blue part of the dial. All three seatbelts were unbuckled.
The windows were all shut. The two rear doors were locked. When Sergeant Exton tried
to open the driver’s side rear door, the exterior handle snapped off in his hand.

At two in the morning, the children’s bodies were formally identified by Stephen
Moules.

…

Dr Michael Burke, a small, grey-haired, bespectacled forensic pathologist, was taken
through his evidence fast and light, as if in mercy, but Farquharson’s face as he
listened was contorted with anguish. He gasped and sobbed in silence, wiping at his
eyes again and again. His sisters’ faces were flushed. They too wept without sound.

Apart from the surrounding circumstances, there is no definitive test to show that
a person has died of drowning. A particular kind of foam, however, a plume of white
matter, is often seen in drowned people, and this was found around the children’s
mouths and noses. Toxicology tests revealed no evidence of alcohol, carbon monoxide,
or other drugs or poisons. All three bodies showed minor abrasions and bruises here
and there, marks that could have been caused either by the impact of the crash or
by ordinary childhood play. Jai, who had been riding in the front beside his father,
was marked above his left eyebrow; the left side of his face was discoloured; the
soft tissue at the back of his neck was bruised in a way that suggested whiplash.
A tiny flap of skin had been scraped from one of Tyler’s fingers. As for Bailey,
the pathologist had found only a scratch on his elbow, with a bandaid on it.

…

At the end of the gruelling day the jury looked older, weary and sad. The men’s brows
were furrowed, the women were stowing sodden handkerchiefs. Out in the courtyard
we passed Bev Gambino. She gave us a small, shaky smile. Her face was thin, her eyes
hollow behind the pretty spectacles. A puff of wind would have carried her away.
Louise and I were beyond speech. We parted in Lonsdale Street. On the long escalator
down to Flagstaff station I could not block out of my mind those small bodies, the
tender reverse-midwifery of the diver. The only way I could bear it was to picture
the boys as water creatures: three silvery, naked little sprites, muscular as fish,
who slithered through a crack in the car’s rear window and, with a flip of their
sinuous feet, sped away together into their new element.