This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (7 page)

…

At the coffee cart, early next morning, Louise rushed up to me in a fluster.

‘One of the jurors was on my train. That tall one with the nerdy fringe. He spoke
to me.’

‘He
what
?’

‘He said “Are you Zach?” I had no idea what he was talking about and I couldn’t
believe
he’d spoken to me. I said no, coldly, and walked away. What did he mean?’

‘Zach. Isn’t that Stephen Moules’ son? The one who was in Cindy’s car when she drove
to the dam—remember? Who begged her to slow down?’

We looked around nervously. No one was in earshot.

‘Don’t let’s tell anyone,’ she said. ‘I’d hate the trial to be aborted and for it
to be my fault.’

It would hardly have been her fault. Surely the juror knew the rules, even if he
could not tell the difference between a girl and a boy. But I felt for him. Starved
as he was of human facts, restricted to the narrowest version of the evidence, his
curiosity must have overwhelmed him. Like his fellow jurors, like us, he was striving
to construct for each stranger an identity and a meaningful place in the mysterious
web of the story.

CHAPTER 3

Robert Farquharson did not know, when he gave in to his wife’s pressure and took
his gloom to the family GP on 12 October 2004, that his marriage would be over within
a month. But perhaps he sensed its end approaching, for the long list of complaints
he produced that day sounded to me like a classic description of what used to be
called, before the medicalisation of our sorrows, a broken heart.

Dr Ian Robert McDonald, a slender, faded, gentle-looking man who had been treating
Farquharson since he was a child, ran through for the court the symptoms his patient
had reported. Farquharson was anxious. He had mood swings and paranoid feelings,
emotional ups and downs. He couldn’t sleep. He dwelt on things. He was teary. He
had no interest or motivation. He was tired, stressed and irritable. And he was finding
it hard to cope with his children.

Farquharson did not strike me as the sort of bloke who would spend hours on the internet,
but he told the doctor he had been ‘looking things up’, and that he thought he might
‘have depression’. He did not volunteer an explanation of his state, and Dr McDonald
showed surprisingly little curiosity about it. He simply accepted the self-diagnosis,
and prescribed Farquharson the anti-depressant, Zoloft.

Three weeks later, on 3 November, Farquharson returned and announced that his wife
had, that very day, ended the marriage. She could no longer cope with his moods.
McDonald referred him to a psychologist in Geelong, a Dr David Sullivan. But Sullivan
charged $142 a session. Farquharson came back from Geelong saying he couldn’t afford
to see him again. Around this time Cindy Gambino and a woman friend got in touch
with the receptionist at Dr McDonald’s surgery. They were worried that Farquharson
might try to overdose on sleeping pills. McDonald arranged for him to be seen ‘urgently’
by Psychiatric Services in the smaller town of Colac. This body felt that Farquharson
was ‘not within their scope’, and referred him on to Colac Mental Health.

The court did not hear what had happened in Colac, but when Farquharson came back
to the GP three weeks later, still angry, still waking at two in the morning, McDonald
sat him down for a long counselling session. His patient’s state, he thought, was
due less to depression than to his marital troubles. He changed his medication from
Zoloft to Avanza, an anti-depressant with more sedative qualities.

By mid-December Farquharson told Dr McDonald that his hopes of saving his marriage
had been dashed. He was upset, but did not strike the GP as angry. He went away with
a fresh script for Avanza and a sample pack of the sleeping pill Stilnox.

Something must have kicked in. Farquharson did not return for five months. In May
2005 he told McDonald that he was regularly
seeing a counsellor in Colac who was
helping him make sensible plans for his future. The strongest emotion he admitted
to was ‘annoyance’ with his wife: he felt manipulated by her demands that he should
get the Daintree Drive house to lock-up stage so they could sell it.

Annoyance
. The numbness, the breathtaking shallowness of this word. What deeper rage
did it paper over? It is tempting, in retrospect, to think, with Freud, that ‘unexpressed
emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier
ways.’

In August 2005 Farquharson turned up at Dr McDonald’s clinic several times, first
complaining of a bad cold, then later of a chesty cough that came on in the night
air and made his ribs ache. The GP listened to his chest. His lung fields were clear.
His temperature was normal. He did not cough in McDonald’s presence, nor did he
mention feeling dizzy or passing out, and it did not occur to McDonald to ask him
about such symptoms, for he regarded them as an extremely rare complication of coughing.
He changed Farquharson’s antibiotic and told him to come back for blood tests if
he was not better in a couple of days.

Farquharson never returned for the blood tests.

Twelve days later, his children drowned.

On his way out of the court Dr McDonald glanced at his former patient in the dock.
Farquharson kept his eyes down.

…

A large chunk of potential insight—if insight is what courts are after—had fallen
between the cracks of Dr McDonald’s testimony.

Before the GP took the stand that morning, Justice Cummins delayed calling in the
jury so he could have a discussion with counsel. ‘It’s better to think out loud while
the jury’s not here,’ he said, ‘so we can all look ahead.’ Apparently a piece of
information had just surfaced, something that the judge thought had ‘a real bite
to it, a real sting’. Was it to be admitted into evidence, or not?

On his sole visit to Dr Sullivan, the Geelong psychologist whose fees he could not
afford, Farquharson had said that he had been thinking about and planning suicide.

Hearing this word, Farquharson recoiled extravagantly in the dock. Whenever suicide
was mentioned during the rest of the wrangle about this evidence, he would turn to
his sisters, knit his brows into an indignant scowl, and furiously shake his head.

It was Dr Sullivan’s professional duty to inform Dr McDonald immediately, in writing,
of what Farquharson had said; and he did so. Rapke read part of his brief report
aloud: ‘I explained to Mr Farquharson the importance of his continuing use of anti-depressant
medication…and his responsibility to adopt a new role in his interaction with his
wife, Cindy. I am concerned about the potential for Mr Farquharson to behave impulsively,
and accordingly I have asked him to consider making a commitment to seek out and
speak with someone he trusts when he feels vulnerable.’

The arrival of this report was what had caused Dr McDonald to send Farquharson straight
to Colac Psychiatric Services. But the rules of evidence—so bizarrely counterintuitive
to the layperson—classed the information in Sullivan’s report as hearsay: Farquharson
had never spoken directly to the GP about suicide, so Dr McDonald could not be questioned
about it in front of the jury. The suicide
conversation could be raised in court
only if Dr Sullivan himself gave evidence about it.

‘I would have thought,’ said Justice Cummins, ‘that an expression by the accused
that he was contemplating suicide would be relevant to the issues?’

Surely the prosecution could clear this up in a simple, direct way? Why did the Crown
not call Dr Sullivan? Months after the trial was over, I would learn that Sullivan
had declined to make a statement to the police. The Crown considered it too risky
to subpoena a witness in those circumstances: what might he have said? But now, Morrissey,
before whom lay a battered copy of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders-IV
that bristled with yellow Post-Its, announced that he intended to question
Dr McDonald about the final sentence of his witness statement: ‘
At no time did Robert
express to me any suicidal tendencies or anger to any person that I can recall
.’

Rapke’s narrow hands moved restlessly among his papers. He got to his feet.

‘I’m putting my friends on notice,’ he said, in his light, ominous voice, ‘that if
this issue is opened up, then Sullivan
will
give evidence, and this will become a
much more significant issue in the trial.’

Should Morrissey put his toe in the water at all, about this doctor? ‘It seems to
me,’ said Justice Cummins, ‘you would be well-advised not to.’

The judge gave counsel a short break to work this out, and left the bench. We waited
in our seats, frustrated, imagining the barristers slugging it out in whatever private
chamber they had retired to. I remembered my sister, when she was on a jury, bursting
into tears
one night at the dinner table: ‘We know there’s heaps they’re not telling
us! How can we make up our minds?’ Ten minutes later the barristers returned, demure.
Morrissey had decided not to put McDonald’s final sentence before the jury. By common
consent they let the subject rest. It was never mentioned again. The jury was called
in, and the trial was back on the rails.

‘WTF?’ scribbled Louise. ‘Is somebody bluffing?’

The last thing Morrissey wanted, I supposed, was for the whole story to swing around
into a failed suicide attempt. Forget the coughing fit. A wounded, bitter man decides
to obliterate himself and his children in one blow. Driving down the overpass he
swings the wheel and plants his foot. But the cold water shocks the death wish out
of him. He flounders to the bank and runs away, leaving his boys to drown.

Jurors are not permitted to speculate. This possible scenario was withheld from them.
It disturbed me to watch them file out of their room and into their seats unenlightened,
with their bowed shoulders and serious, trusting faces.

…

Dr McDonald’s witness statement contained another haunting detail that was never
raised in court. On the day his wife asked him to move out, Farquharson had asked
the GP to refer him for a vasectomy. McDonald did not record his response, and nobody
asked him about it. The request, I thought, struck a discordant note: hasty and self-punishing,
full of bitterness about the past and despair of the future. On the simplest level,
it could be dismissed as the wild notion of a
man who at that moment experienced
the very idea of children as a source of pain. But perhaps it might be seen, rather,
as a fantasy that sent a surge of destruction in both directions: refusal of whatever
was to come and, retrospectively, a symbolic cutting-off of the fact that his three
sons existed—an urge to amputate his fatherhood, to annihilate everything that he
and Gambino as a couple had brought into being.

…

On the night of 4 September, while the police, the emergency service crews and the
townspeople of Winchelsea were struggling in the dark at the dam, Farquharson arrived
by ambulance at Geelong Hospital. The duty consultant in Emergency that night was
Dr Bruce Bartley. A bulging-browed young man with a tiny beard on the tip of his
chin, he entered the court briskly, wearing an anachronistic three-piece suit.

When the paramedics brought Farquharson in, Bartley gave him a routine road trauma
examination. Temperature, oxygen saturation, chest and neck X-rays, blood and, over
the following twenty-four hours, a heart monitor—all the tests came back normal.
Bartley made a provisional diagnosis, based on what his patient told him, of cough
syncope: Farquharson had coughed to the point of passing out.

Syncope (pronounced
sing
-c’-pee)—a brief loss of consciousness caused by a sudden
drop in blood pressure—commonly crops up in emergency departments, but cough syncope
is so rare that most doctors have only read about it. No, Bartley had never before
diagnosed it, or even come across a patient who had reported an attack of it. No
test exists to prove retrospectively that a person has blacked out as a result of
a paroxysm of coughing. Like all diagnoses of this elusive and extremely rare medical
event, Bartley’s was based solely on the assumption that everything Farquharson had
told him was true.

Another GP flashed briefly through the court, Dr Christopher Gore, a chunky grey-haired
man who worked in a bulk-billing clinic in Belmont. On 30 September 2005, some three
weeks after the crash, Farquharson presented himself at Dr Gore’s surgery, in the
company of a woman ‘said to be his sister’, complaining of a persistent cough. His
companion mentioned a recent accident that had involved a coughing fit, but nothing
was said about a blackout, and Dr Gore simply prescribed Farquharson a new antibiotic.
He had never seen Farquharson before, and he never saw him again.

One person was able to describe Robert Farquharson in the throes of a coughing fit:
she had seen it with her own eyes. Susan Bateson, a trim little sparrow of a woman
in a coffee-coloured blouse and silver nail polish, was a supervisor at the Cumberland
Resort in Lorne. She had first met Rob through Cindy Gambino’s parents, her neighbours.
Once she had even babysat Jai and Tyler.

Farquharson had worked under her for five years, as what she called a houseperson.
He cleaned the public areas and did the heavier cleaning in guests’ apartments. He
was a good, hard worker. He didn’t take sickies or complain about his wages. After
he and Cindy split, he would pass up lucrative weekend shiftwork so he could spend
time with his boys. He loved them and was dedicated to them.

In mid-2005, the winter before the boys died, he was off work for ten days with flu.
He came back still not a hundred per cent, but worked his normal shifts on the seven
days leading up to the crash. On the Friday before Father’s Day he came into Bateson’s
office at lunchtime, opened his mouth to speak, and was overtaken by ‘a very dry,
grabbing cough’ that took his breath away. For ten or fifteen seconds he gasped and
wheezed. His face turned an alarming shade of bright red. He did not black out, but
Bateson wondered if he was having a stroke. She made him sit down and drink a glass
of water, and advised him to get hold of a ventolin inhaler from the chemist. That
day, despite the paroxysm, he worked right to the end of his usual 6 a.m.-to-2 p.m.
shift.