This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (23 page)

That night, at bedtime, I found the unfinished green wool scarf on the floor where
I had dropped my bag. I picked it up and saw that, when the call for the verdict
had come, I had stopped halfway along a row. It occurred to me to preserve in some
way the moment of decision. I marked it with one red stitch. Then I knitted to the
end of the row, and cast off.

CHAPTER 12

After the high-pitched drama of the verdict, the plea hearing three weeks later,
on 26 October 2007, was quiet and slow. The air in the court seemed thick, almost
gluey. Mr Rapke argued that a crime so cruel, by a man who showed no remorse, could
be fitly punished only by three life sentences with no chance of parole. Remorse,
replied Mr Morrissey, could hardly be expected from a man who had pleaded not guilty
and still maintained his innocence. Justice Cummins listened patiently to the submissions,
but the heart had gone out of the thing. Every word spoken rang with a weary, perfunctory
note.

Then Carmen Ross—a registered nurse, we now heard, who worked in aged care—took the
stand to sketch the life story of her wretched brother. A sweet-faced figure in a
white embroidered blouse, dark pants and a large, practical watch, she was clearly
the matriarch of the family, and she spoke with authority, twisting a small white
hanky in her hands. Rob was the youngest of four, she began, and he was born three
months premature.

Twelve weeks early, forty years ago. Doted on, coddled. Was this the missing piece?

He was a treasured baby, she said: lucky to survive, fragile, overprotected, smaller
than he should have been. He had trouble with his eyesight. He was not robust, not
smart, but a battler; not much good at school, but a struggler. He grew up to be
a ‘quiet, patient person’, a team-player in sport. With a smiling affection that
at times almost tipped over into tears or laughter, she painted a picture of a faithful,
decent, hard-working man, passionately devoted to his children. ‘I
like
him,’ she
said, ‘as a person.’ All the while Kerri Huntington sat grim-faced, a hard block
of introverted rage and pain.

…

On the evening of 28 October 2007, between the plea hearing and the sentencing, Cindy
Gambino appeared on
60 Minutes
. I taped the program. It was a riveting and complex
piece of television, and in the years that followed, I watched it many times.

Gambino sits in an armchair in a living room, wearing a pretty rose-pink blouse and
stroking a framed photograph of her children. Her interlocutor, a young man, seems
awe-struck in the presence of a woman so bereaved; and indeed there is something
majestic in Gambino’s demeanour, the slow flood of her tears, her sighs and stubborn
refusals, the long pauses she allows to fall while she considers her replies.

‘Most parents who’ve never lost a child,’ she says, ‘can’t fathom the thought of
it. They get to a certain point in their thoughts and they just go, “Nuh. Not goin’
there.”’

‘What she can’t fathom, can’t accept,’ declares the interviewer in voice-over, ‘is
the truth:
Robert Farquharson, the man she
married, the father of their children,
is a convicted killer, and is now in gaol.’

‘This is too incomprehensible,’ says Gambino. She starts to cry. ‘I can’t believe
that this person would hate
me
that much to want to murder his own children, who
he worshipped the ground they walked on. I don’t
believe
that…He loved me. I know
he loved me.’

The interviewer risks it: ‘Did you love him?’

Complex expressions flitter across Gambino’s face. She comes up at last with a pellet
of popular wisdom. ‘I think there’s a difference between love and being in love.
I loved him, but I was never truly
in
love.’

A few seconds from a wedding video: against the sun-yellow interior walls of a country
church, the newlyweds peel away from the altar and parade arm-in-arm down the aisle.
A beaming Gambino glides like a princess in full fig, head high, her veil flowing
back from a Russian-style coronet. Alongside her scurries Farquharson in a dark suit
and mullet, round-shouldered, unsmiling, a little tame bear.

We see home videos of the three boys playing together in a bath. They blow out birthday
candles, crawl among wrapping paper on Christmas morning. In a labour ward Gambino
holds out to the camera the newborn Bailey, a wobbly, cloth-wrapped parcel that she
handles with consummate authority. In these unstaged moments she is simply a young
mother: her face, without make-up, shows the fragility of a woman fresh from an encounter
with the numinous, her cheeks scoured, her skin pearly with fatigue.

‘After fourteen years together,’ intones the voice-over, ‘they separated.’

Gambino quotes herself: ‘I don’t love you, and I can’t do this any more.’

‘How did Rob take it?’

‘He took it hard. He felt like he’d walked away with nothing. He basically took his
pillow, and a television, and his clothes, and went back to his father’s house. He
was devastated, of course.’

The program gives a careful version of the transition. ‘Just as Cindy was breaking
up with Robert, another man came into her life—Stephen Moules. He was a concreter
who met the couple while working at their house. He became confidant to a miserable
Robert, but at the same time he was falling in love with Cindy.’

Fair-haired Moules, looking younger and finer-featured than he had in court, describes
his attempts to ‘counsel’ the troubled couple; but once Cindy made it ‘blatantly
clear’ that she didn’t want the marriage any more, and when he saw that Farquharson
wasn’t prepared to put in ‘the correct efforts’ to put it back together, Moules ‘saw
it as a lose–lose situation’.

In the blue-tinted
60 Minutes
re-creation of the events at the dam, Moules is a furious
hero. While Farquharson in his blanket begs him for a cigarette, Moules curses him,
strips off, and begins to dive.

‘He nearly died,’ says Gambino to camera, ‘just doing what he did.’

‘Very brave, what you did,’ says the round-eyed interviewer to Moules. ‘Very brave.’

Impassive Moules deflects the praise. ‘That word would be a lot more justified if
I had’ve found them…I know if I was in that situation, I believe if
my
children
weren’t here today,
I
wouldn’t be here today, ’cause if I couldn’t save them, I’d
huddle around them’—he
makes an eloquent gathering gesture—‘and I’d say, “Well, we’re
goin’ together, kids. And that’s all there is to it.”’

‘When the verdict came,’ says the interviewer to Gambino, ‘you wailed.’

Her tears begin to flow. ‘I wailed ’cause—’

‘For Robert or for the kids? What?’

‘Both—the honour of my children. I don’t want my children to be remembered as “those
three little Farquharson boys murdered by their father”…That’s not honouring my children.
I wailed because it was not the verdict I wanted.’

‘How do you want the world to see him?’

A long, hard-working silence. The tears stream down her polished cheeks. In a curious,
graceful movement she places her hands palm to palm across her chin. She tips her
head to one side with a sob and a strained smile, and murmurs, ‘Free?’

‘Cindy,’ says the interviewer sternly. ‘All the evidence that was presented in the
court—that the ignition was off, the lights were off, that Rob was in control of
the car as it left the road—’

She shakes her head. ‘Means nothing to me.’

‘A jury of twelve unanimously found him guilty.’

‘Means nothing. They don’t know Rob. They don’t know him from a bar of soap.’

‘In your mind,’ says the interviewer, with the ponderous solemnity for which the
program is famous, ‘
did he do it?
’

She tips up her chin, lets her heavy eyelids droop. ‘No,’ she says, very softly.

‘He’s innocent?’

She pauses. Something like a shadow brushes her face, and
is gone. ‘I believe he
is.’ Her voice is barely more than a whisper. ‘I believe this is a tragic accident.’

…

Gambino did not come to court on 16 November 2007, the day Farquharson was sentenced.
His family and supporters arrived in force, with large badges pinned to their lapels:
ROBBED, they read, and IN ROB WE TRUST. But no sooner had Justice Cummins begun to
read from his slender document—‘You had a burning resentment…You formed a dark contemplation’—than
the people with the badges got to their feet and marched out of the court in a body,
leaving Farquharson forlorn in the dock. His hair was greyer and his cheeks thinner.
He looked pale, even ill. As he listened to the judge’s harsh telling of his story,
and to the fierce moral condemnations it laid down, he made grimaces of the kind
one would see on a teenage boy being called to account in front of the class: he
threw himself back in his chair, flexed his eyebrows ironically, shook his head,
blew out air between pressed lips. At the phrase ‘no remorse’ he let his jaw drop
and his mouth hang wide open. His responses were so inadequate to the gravity of
the situation that it hurt to look at him.

And in the end, the sentence wiped all expression from his face. There was no mercy.
Three life terms, one for each dead boy, and no parole.

In the deep, shocked silence, a young man rose in his seat at the back of the court
and started a slow clap. He had beaten his palms together no more than three times
before the big tipstaff was on him and hustling him out through the glass-paned door.

The court was stood down. People got to their feet and moved in two dense streams
towards the outside world. Dazed, I stayed in my seat. All I could think of was the
fact that Robert Farquharson would never again get behind the wheel of a car.

Late that evening a text came from my old barrister friend. ‘Too much,’ he wrote.
‘It will not survive appellate scrutiny.’

…

Presuming upon our friendly encounters at the coffee cart, I sent a letter to Bob
and Bev Gambino. I asked them if they would introduce me to their daughter, so that
I could request an interview. In the most delicate way Bev gave me to understand
that this was out of the question. But she said that she and Bob would always be
glad to see me if I was ever down Birregurra way.

I wrote to Carmen Ross and Kerri Huntington, asking if they might be prepared to
speak to me. Carmen Ross declined in a firm but gracious card. The Farquharson family,
she wrote, was putting all its energies and efforts towards the appeal process and
the welfare of their brother. When Rob was found to be an innocent father who had
had a tragic accident, they might perhaps consider my offer.

An email came from Louise. ‘I saw Justice Cummins having a coffee up in Bourke Street,
and Carmen Ross in Degraves Street. I may or may not have violently blushed. I felt
a strange rush of guilt for even existing. It was the same awe and fascination I
had in court, like they’re very sacred and mysterious people.’

…

A month or so later, driving home from Anglesea, I took the inland route through
Birregurra. Bob and Bev welcomed me warmly and sat me down at the kitchen table for
a toasted sandwich and a cup of tea. I stayed an hour or two. We talked of this and
that. Their discretion was faultless. Nobody cried. Sometimes we laughed. They would
not let me leave without a bag of silver beet and potatoes from their garden.

‘We don’t work out there much any more,’ said Bev. ‘Jai and Tyler used to help us
with the mowing and the digging. It’s just too painful without them.’

Bob told me that on the day of their grandsons’ funeral in Winchelsea, twenty-five
kilometres from Birregurra, three white doves were released into the sky. Days later,
a tired and bedraggled white bird flew into their yard and took refuge under the
eaves of their back veranda. They fed it. It was there for a fortnight. One morning
they went outside and it was gone.

CHAPTER 13

On 1 April 2008 I heard that Farquharson had lodged an appeal against his conviction.
I picked up the phone and called Mr Morrissey. He was in a fluster, halfway through
another trial, but boomed in his matey, rackety voice that he had come up with fifty-one
grounds. The judge had definitely made errors in his charge to the jury. Plus, what
about the violent brawl Greg King had got into, at a Winchelsea pub, in the December
before Rob’s trial? This would have reflected on King’s credibility as a witness—but
the coppers had delayed charging him for ten months, until the Farquharson trial
was over. I mean come on, ten months’ delay in hearing a pub brawl? And by the way,
who was that really clever-looking fair-haired girl who sat beside me at the trial?
Gap year! She was smarter than the whole bloody jury put together. If she ever wanted
to do work experience she should give his office a call.

…

A pub brawl in Winchelsea? That peaceful village full of law-abiding
citizens? Eventually
I saw the charge sheet. After a ‘heated discussion’, in the presence of wives and
children celebrating Christmas Eve, two men set upon two others, and half a dozen
more joined in. It sounded like the sort of free-for-all where blokes run across
pool tables to get amongst it. The investigating police officer observed that the
assault followed a series of earlier incidents between two feuding groups of locals,
in which the victim had played no part. He was not known to his assailants; his mistake,
while he consumed ‘approximately five cans of Jack Daniels and Coke’, was to be seen
talking to the wrong man at the bar. He was punched and headbutted, even after he
had run from the building. ‘It would appear,’ wrote the police officer fastidiously,
‘that a pack mentality prevailed.’ Under the heading ‘Reasons’, one of the arrested
assailants told police that he had been trying to find his thong. Another said ‘I
just jumped on top.’ Greg King, charged with having punched the victim in the stomach,
said, ‘I did the wrong thing.’