This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (8 page)

Outside the court I spread a discarded newspaper on a cold concrete bench and sat
on it while Louise queued at the cart. I was familiar with Lorne. As a child I was
taken on family drives to the handsome old village on the Southern Ocean, with its
famous jetty and huge cypress trees. Wealthy people had holiday houses there. These
days it was favoured by barristers and judges. Cindy Gambino had described Farquharson’s
work at the Cumberland as ‘the male side of cleaning: windows’. Waiting for coffee
in the noisy street, I remembered a German friend of mine telling me that when he
was a student in the sixties he had worked as a window cleaner at a European seaside
resort. It was hard work, he said, solitary, and it could make you melancholy. You
had too much time to brood on things. You couldn’t help looking into the rooms where
holidaymakers, richer and luckier and happier than you, were loafing about and having
fun. You felt bitterness, and envy. Also, he said, there was the Sisyphus thing.
You never got anywhere. No sooner had you
finished laboriously polishing a sheet
of glass than the wind came in off the sea and sprinkled salt all over it.

…

In October 2004, not long before she called a halt to her marriage, Cindy Farquharson
went to see a psychologist called Peter Popko, who practised at the Otway Natural
Medicine Centre in the nearby town of Colac. He must have gained her trust, for in
January 2005, several months after the split, when ten-year-old Jai became disruptive
in his pain and sadness, she brought Farquharson and the three boys to Popko for
a special family consultation. The psychologist dealt with the family members in
various combinations, then, in February 2005, he started seeing Farquharson on his
own.

Like other secondary characters in this story, Popko must have passed many a sleepless
night since Father’s Day 2005. He took the stand in a dark suit and open-necked shirt,
a quiet, slow-talking man with a big fair head.

Farquharson, he said, had struck him as a fairly sensitive, if only moderately articulate
man. As a husband he had played a traditional provider’s role; when Popko met him,
he was grieving for the end of his relationship and the breakdown of his family.
Popko had done no formal testing, since Farquharson was plainly not seriously depressed:
he took care of himself, dressed appropriately, held down a job, and was actively
and keenly engaged with his kids. The depression for which his GP had put him on
medication fluctuated, Popko thought, between moderate and mild.

But the psychologist did not hesitate to apply to Farquharson’s
state the word ‘despair’.
Certain painful incidents would exacerbate this hopeless feeling. He and Cindy would
quarrel on the phone. He would run into her new partner Stephen Moules. Jai would
clash with Moules’ elder son. Farquharson was furious when Moules came round to his
place one evening and ordered him to discipline Jai for having used an offensive
word about one of the Moules boys. Farquharson did have a few money worries, but
they were not the main things bothering him. What caused him the most agitation was
his fear of the influence Moules would have on Jai, Tyler and Bailey.

When Popko asked him if he felt he wanted to harm anyone, Farquharson expressed strong
anger towards Moules. He had entertained thoughts of retribution. Retribution? Yes—he
thought of getting into an argument and provoking Moules to throw a punch at him,
so he could take him to court.

This passive-aggressive fantasy—set up, dob, and stand back to watch the thunderbolt
fall—would have been funny if it had not been so pathetic: a manipulative child’s
way of getting a bigger, stronger, more popular kid into trouble. Farquharson sat
frowning in the dock. I remembered his former father-in-law describing him as ‘a
sook’, and the photo of his big sister towing him along the footpath with a two-handed
grip on his wrist. Later, Cindy Gambino would remark to the court that as his wife
she often used to feel like a single mother with four kids. What had happened to
him, or failed to happen, that kept him stuck in childhood?

If the psychologist had broached this territory with his client in private, he did
not say so in court, and nor, of course, was he invited to. Perhaps his theoretical
focus was elsewhere. Perhaps he did not believe that Farquharson was equipped, by
temperament or
education, to have any insight into such questions. Farquharson’s
anger he saw, in the bleakly managerial jargon of cognitive behaviour therapy, as
‘a predictable and key phase in the grief and loss process’. Popko’s task was to
‘offer strategies’ that would help Farquharson to live the single life, to care for
his kids ‘outside the parental dyad’, to deal with his ‘depressed mood’, and to ‘establish
future goals’. Popko did not say, and was not asked, what these strategies were.

In his witness statement Popko had said that Farquharson had never shown any signs
of ‘suicidal ideation’. Nor had he mentioned wanting to hurt Cindy and the boys.
On the contrary, he was grateful to her for letting him see the children as often
as he wanted. Towards the end of the seven or eight solo sessions he had with Popko,
which were spaced further and further apart, Farquharson was coming to terms with
the fact that he and Cindy would never get back together. Encouraged by his friends,
he was even planning to ask another woman out on a date.

Indeed, Popko thought Farquharson was travelling so well, handling his new situation
with such integrity and maturity, that he suggested their work together might be
done. But Farquharson wanted the sessions to continue. He said he was getting a lot
out of his time with Popko and was thankful to have an outlet for his emotions. Is
it impertinent to wonder if he might have meant, ‘We haven’t even scraped the surface
yet.’?

On 4 September, exactly a month after his final session with Popko, the car went
into the dam.

Here again, before the witness entered the court, startling evidence had been discussed
in the absence of the jury, and ruled inadmissible. Several times, after the night
the children drowned,
Popko and his former client spoke to each other on the phone.
These conversations were picked up by a bug that the Homicide investigators had
put on Farquharson’s line. He was seized by a panicky fear of an impending lie detector
test that he had volunteered to take. But the jury was not to hear this tape, or
even to know that there had been phone intercepts, let alone a lie detector test.
All they were permitted to hear from Popko on this matter, when he took the stand,
was that Farquharson feared the stress of the police investigation—that it might
push him over the edge into a nervous breakdown.

Popko was excused from the court with this final remark still hovering in the air.

…

Out in the windy courtyard a bunch of journalists stood yarning.

‘What’s this about a lie detector test?’ asked a shy young man who said he had not
covered a murder trial before; his eye whites were as pure as a child’s.

‘They’re not admissible in Australian courts,’ said a TV reporter.

‘Did he have a brain snap?’ said one of the older tabloid blokes. ‘Of a thick, childish
kind?’

‘Cindy’s got a bit of style,’ said another. ‘She’s clearly not stupid. People must
have thought, shit, she’ll make mincemeat out of him. How come she had three kids
with a dumb-fuck?’

‘Rebound,’ said two of the women in chorus.

‘If you ask me,’ said a thoughtful young woman who usually only listened, ‘Cindy’s
testimony’s about the only thing Morrissey’s got going for him, so far.’

CHAPTER 4

Towards ten o’clock on the night of the crash, two police officers from Major Collision
carried a handheld tape recorder through Emergency at Geelong Hospital and into a
cubicle where Farquharson lay under a sheet, taking the occasional suck of oxygen
through a mask. They introduced themselves—Senior Sergeant Jeffrey Smith, who was
head of Major Collision, and Senior Constable Rohan Courtis—and pressed the record
button.

At last we were to hear Farquharson speak.

The voice of the bereaved father is dull and muffled at first, but grows firmer as
he begins to answer the bite-sized questions: who he is, where he lives and works.
Then, when the officers ask him what happened on the road, his voice fills with energy,
gains clarity and strength. He sounds surprisingly young and eager, almost boyish
in his speech patterns.

‘I think I just went up the overpass, and I started
coughing
…then, I don’t remember
anything
, and then all of a sudden I was in this
water
, and me son screamed at me—he
opened up the
door
, and we
nose
-dived. I shut the door on him, and I tried to get
them
out—I tried to get out and get help, thinking I was only just in off the road,
not realising I was…I was trying to get up near the road, get people to hear me,
to help, and people just drove past, I don’t know exactly whereabouts it was, and
it’s just a big blur, like, you know—it happened so quick.’

‘Mate.’ Smith, the senior officer, lays it down gently. ‘Do you realise that the
children didn’t—make it? Out of the car?’

Farquharson expels a short breath, and says in a low, flat tone, ‘I gathered that.’

His questioners do not pause. What speed was he doing?

‘Oh, it was under a hundred.’ His voice brightens again and becomes emphatic. He
offers his credentials as a father, poignantly still in the present tense: he never
drinks with the kids, he never goes over a hundred with them, he’s always very cautious,
he’s never had an accident before.

Once the policemen twig that Farquharson and his wife have parted, and that he was
bringing the boys home from an access outing, their antennae begin to quiver. How
long has this been going on? Twelve months. What’s his ex-wife’s full name? He gets
it out—Cindy Louise Gambino—but with a heavy sigh. He produces her address and date
of birth, then, like a sick person reminding a visitor he has good reason to be horizontal,
he emits a muffled grunt of discomfort.

‘You realise we have to ask these questions,’ says Courtis, the younger officer,
politely, in his light, rapid voice. ‘Is everything sort of okay with you and your
wife? Any dramas?’

‘We’re building the house,’ says Farquharson, in a conversational tone. ‘There’s
a few hassles selling it, but other than that,
I mean, look, how good does a divorce
go, so to speak? Of course you have your disagreements and arguments, but the kids
have always been put first, and everything like that.’

Pressed for details of the drop-off of the boys that afternoon, Farquharson complains
that his arm is sore. Give it a move, mate, says the cop. No, it really is sore,
there, just in one spot. He relates the Father’s Day arrival and the arrangement
to have tea in Geelong and visit Kmart in Belmont. On the road the little one, who
was only two and a half, fell asleep in his car seat. So father and sons sat a while
in the Kmart car park and listened to the footy on the radio. When the toddler stirred
they roused him and went up to Kentucky to eat. Farquharson always had to deliver
them back to their mother by 7.30, so, after a look around in Kmart and a quick stop
at his sister’s place in Mount Moriac, they got back on the road.

He trails off. Courtis nudges him forward. ‘Just getting back to the crash. Was there
anyone else in the traffic, or…?’

Again Farquharson’s voice firms up. ‘No. I can’t remember nothing.’ With growing
vehemence, his volume rising and falling with the drama of it, he tells the story
a second time: the coughing, the waking up in a lot of water, Jai in the front passenger
seat opening the door. He adds that, when he leaned across to slam Jai’s door, all
the kids were screaming. He tried to unbuckle Jai’s seatbelt and to get the other
two out of the back, but because Jai had opened the door, the car nosedived. ‘Just
a nightmare,’ he says. ‘I’m gettin’ distressed.’ His voice goes dull again, without
expression.

This is the moment the officers choose to caution him. Yeah, he knows he doesn’t
have to say anything, and that anything he says could be given in evidence.

They surge on. Did he go under the water at all? He falters. ‘Yeah, we sort of did,
as I—I tried to get up—thinking I was in foot-deep, to try and get round and open
the doors and drag ’em out. I’m getting really distressed.’ He sounds like a child
calling for respite in a game that is getting too much for him. A pause. Then, out
of a jumble of hospital white noise, his voice rises again.

‘But sir. Can I ask one question?’

‘You can ask any question you like.’

‘I’ve never been in trouble before. So what’s the likely scenario, for me?’ On the
word
likely
he gives a tiny, matey breath of a laugh.

Startled, I glanced at the uniformed Courtis sitting behind the bar table. A document
dangled from his right hand. The stapled sheets were quivering.

‘Well, mate,’ says Courtis on the tape, his voice tuneful with surprise, ‘at this
stage all we know is that you’ve been in an accident, where you’ve driven off the
road, and your kids have been in the car.’

Farquharson pushes it. ‘So what sort of scena—’

Courtis cuts across him. He seems to be controlling himself. ‘Mate, it’s so early,
we’re not looking at you for doing
anything
wrong.’

‘It’s something I’ve got to live with for the rest of me life,’ protests Farquharson.
The stress he lays on the word
life
, the complex intonation he gives it, makes him
sound plaintive, even petulant—a person with a legitimate grievance that is not being
taken seriously. ‘What I’m trying to say, you can go through and check that I’ve
got no record—’

Courtis picks up on his anxiety. ‘Is there anything you want to tell us?’

‘No! That’s exactly as it happened. I’ve got no reason to lie, or anything of that
nature.’