This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (28 page)

I was hot in the face, almost panting. My friend deflated somewhat and sat down.

‘It doesn’t matter what she looks like in the street, though, does it,’ she said
at last. ‘All that matters is how she seems to the jury.’

A long, thoughtful silence.

‘I read in
Who
magazine once,’ I said, ‘about a woman up in New South Wales. She
lived in a flat that overlooked a big park with a bushy path running through it.
One day she’s having a cup of tea on her balcony when she sees a young girl walking
along the path. A bloke in a tracksuit comes jogging after her. The woman on the
balcony actually sees him knock the girl down, rape her and strangle her, drag her
body into the bushes and run away. And even
she
didn’t go to the police. She said
she didn’t want to get involved.’

We ate the fish and the potatoes. We drank some wine.

‘I’ve never been on a jury,’ said my friend. ‘Have you?’

‘No. Never been called. But I’ve heard stories and read books. And I’ve seen
Twelve
Angry Men
about a hundred times.’

‘How about you boil Waite’s evidence right down,’ she said. ‘Just say you leave out
all the iffy stuff about headlight angles and tinted windows. What do you get?’

‘You get,’ I said, ‘that she saw his car behaving weirdly, well before it went up
the overpass and got to where
he
says he started coughing. You get that his car was
doing sixty, moving side to side in the left lane.’

‘You get that he was distracted,’ she said, ‘in another
space—wouldn’t look at her,
probably didn’t even notice she was there.’

‘And you get that he wasn’t coughing. That part I believe, tint or no tint.
He’s
never said he started coughing before the overpass. Maybe he was just dawdling? Waiting
for there to be no traffic on the road?’

‘Or maybe you get that something was going on in his mind,’ she said. ‘Some sort
of struggle. Two parts of him slugging it out.’

‘Yes! And she saw him right on the cusp of it. The face in the back must have been
Tyler, the middle boy. She was the last person to see him alive.’

My friend asked if I had Gambino’s
60 Minutes
interview on tape. Grateful for company,
I dug it out and we settled on the couch. The boys played in the bath, shyly smiling
at the camera. Moules and Gambino sat on the grass beside a creek, declaring their
love and talking about a ‘summer wedding’. And there was Gambino competently handling
Bailey, the heavy-headed newborn, tiny enough to be swaddled in a single nappy. I
turned to tell my friend that, at the time the children drowned, Bailey was still
being breastfed once a day, that the symbiotic bond between mother and infant had
not yet been broken. But my guest’s head had dropped towards her chest. Cradling
a cushion in both arms, she was sound asleep.

Once I would have jostled her, shouted, ‘Wake up! Pay attention!’—but I had been
learning, during the second trial, that the desire for sleep does not betray only
boredom or fatigue. In these weeks of long, slow trauma interspersed with bloody
skirmishes, I had found that suddenly falling asleep was a way of defending oneself
against the unbearable.

I turned down the volume and watched the rest of the interview on my own. My friend
woke in time to see its final moments—Gambino in her crushed pink blouse, her cheeks
glossy with tears, saying, ‘I’ve got so many anniversaries throughout the year. It’s
always there. I’m never gonna be that person who used to have three children fed,
bathed, showered, and bouncing out the door at 8.30 in the morning—I’m never gonna
be that person again.’

‘You’ve got to, darling,’ murmured my friend, pressing the cushion against her belly.
‘Somehow you’ve got to find a way.’

…

The mysterious child’s face that Dawn Waite said she saw pressed to the side window,
making her think that all three children had been riding in the back seat, caused
a brief flurry. Justice Lasry sent the jury out, and Dr Michael Burke, the pathologist
who had performed the autopsies, was recalled and asked to account for two small
bruises that had been noticed on Jai’s shoulders, at the point where the collarbone
reached the shoulder joint. Was it possible that Jai had been sitting not in the
front passenger seat but in the centre of the back seat? That, at impact, he had
been vaulted forward between the two front seats, bruising his shoulder tips, before
his head hit the dashboard and incurred the injuries to his forehead and left cheek?
By the time Dr Burke came to give his evidence before the jury—when he spoke more
frankly about the distressing surgical processes of post mortem than he had at the
first trial—the only new suggestion that surfaced was that Jai might not have been
restrained by a seatbelt at the moment of impact. Waite’s observation that the
children
had all been squashed in the back could not be validated. But it left a residue of
confusion, a little jet of fresh sorrow.

…

In the three years since the first trial, Shane Atkinson and Tony McClelland, the
young men whom Farquharson flagged down on the road and persuaded to drive him to
Gambino, had lost their wild beauty, and perhaps their youth. They looked haggard:
paler, thinner, more lined. McClelland had got his carpenter’s ticket, and had done
something to the colour of his hair. Atkinson, the mill-worker, was still, or again,
unemployed; his baby, whose birth they had been on their way to celebrate that Father’s
Day, must be nearly old enough to start school. I could not tell if the two men were
still friends, but surely the experience they had shared that night would link them
for the rest of their lives, whether they wanted it to or not.

Mr Morrissey was gentle with Atkinson. ‘I’m wrong and you’re right,’ he said at one
point, and Atkinson replied patiently, ‘Thank you.’ But when pressed too hard, Atkinson’s
hackles went up. ‘I think you were here last time,’ he said to Morrissey, ‘puttin’
words in me mouth.’ A soft laugh flew along the bar table and up to the bench. I
heard it as affectionate, but the witness’s face darkened and I saw the humiliated
schoolboy behind the country battler he had become. He raised his eyes to the judge,
and stretched his long back. Then, for a few minutes, I must have nodded off. When
I came to, both he and McClelland had been dismissed, and I never saw them again.

…

Across the road near the coffee cart I came upon Bob and Bev Gambino sitting on a
cold metal bench. They shuffled along to make room. Bob wanted to show me a photo
he had taken of the defaced headstone on the children’s grave. Morrissey’s suggestion
that it could have been their daughter’s doing, or done at her behest, filled Bev
with fury.

‘Steve reckons it was a shotgun blast,’ said Bob, ‘but that can’t be right. Too dangerous
to the shooter. More likely done with a hammer and chisel.’

He held out his phone to me. On the tiny screen I saw a closeup of the name ‘Farquharson’.
Below it, where the dead children’s parents were named, the surface of the shining
granite was pitted by a splatter of matte white nicks: a rectangle of assault on
the word ‘Robert’.

…

While Mr Rapke in the original trial had been content to let the Crown case float
between two alternative versions of murder—either a head of steam that suddenly exploded,
or a carefully planned and coolly carried-out act of revenge—the Crown now plumped
for the latter theory, and Mr Tinney drove it hard, to the point of suggesting that
the sight of Gambino’s face when Farquharson personally brought her the bad news
would have been his ‘delicious reward’.

My private doubts about this gothic detail were not shared by the young journalist
who had sat beside me while the telephone intercepts were being played. When Gambino
told Farquharson that all the children’s seatbelts were found to be undone, when
he burst
into shocked sobs both on the tape and in the dock, the journalist glanced
up from the game he was playing on his phone and scribbled in my notebook, ‘Did you
see his crocodile tears?’

One day, when court rose for lunch, I took my sandwich to the Flagstaff Gardens and
lay on the grass under a tree. Why had Farquharson, during the first trial, flashed
outraged grimaces and vehement head-shakings at his sisters whenever the word ‘suicide’
was mentioned? Was there a moral register on which suicide was more disgraceful than
murder? Perhaps the most shaming thing of all, a failure of nerve that no ‘Anglo-Saxon
country bloke’ could possibly admit to, would be to launch a murder-suicide and not
complete the act. I recalled a famous Sydney story about a man who threw himself
off the Gap and was caught before he hit the rocks by a huge and timely wave. The
coastguard vessel picked him up unhurt. ‘The minute your feet leave the ground,’
the saved man said, ‘you change your mind.’ An American mother I read about drove
her car full of children into a river; she drowned and so did all her kids except
the eldest, a ten-year-old, who fought his way across her lap and out through a part-open
window. He told police that as the car began to sink his mother had cried out, ‘I
made a mistake. I made a mistake.’

Was the core of the whole phenomenon a failure of imagination, an inability to see
any further forward than the fantasy of one clean stroke that would put an end to
humiliation and pain?

Cindy Gambino had observed that Farquharson had become a better father after their
break-up. Perhaps a hard-working husband is screened from his children by the domestically
powerful and emotionally competent presence of his wife. When the marriage
ends and
access visits begin, he has to deal with the kids on his own. He is shocked at first,
finds his new duties exhausting and difficult and often tedious; but gradually, by
virtue of this unmediated contact, the children’s reality penetrates his armour and
flows into his nerves, his blood. Now that he knows them, and knows their love, his
exile from their daily life causes him a sharper suffering. To a man who is emotionally
immature, bereft of intellectual equipment and concepts, lacking in sustaining friendships
outside his family, his children may appear to be not only the locus of his pain,
but also the source and cause of it. If only he could put an end to it—amputate or
obliterate this wounded part of him that will not stop aching! As the judge in the
first trial put it in his sentencing, he forms a dark contemplation…

I watched the thought, to see what it would do. It firmed up, like a jelly setting.
And there it sat, quivering, filling all the available space.

…

As the retrial established its own momentum, as Justice Lasry bent over backwards
and tied himself in knots to make it fair, efficient and appeal-proof, my respect
for Mr Morrissey grew. He was on the ropes, but he fought gamely on. Again and again
he had to be pulled up by the judge for referring to his client as ‘Rob’ instead
of ‘Mr Farquharson’. It embarrassed him but he could not seem to help it.

The new jury looked as sceptical of his submissions as the first one had, but its
style was different. Among the ranks of the serious, the mature and the anxious sat
a scattering of student-like young people whose demeanour was relaxed to the point
of irreverence.
One would lower his chin to the desk in front of him, stretch out
a bare arm along his cheek, and blatantly doodle on his notebook or let his yellow
biro dangle from his lips. He and another languid youth became inseparable. They
entered and left the court together, exchanging whispered comments and muffling their
amusement. It was a bromance. Much later, when the journalists were herded into their
dismal office so the deliberating jurors could take the air, these two romped together
in the sunny yard like puppies.

But among their fellow members I sensed a growing anguish. A third of the way through
the trial there occurred an unexplained change of foreperson: the tough-looking older
man who relinquished the job moved along one seat and was replaced by an imposing
woman of forty or so, swathed in an elegant ruby shawl, who had previously struck
me as reticent and rather solitary. A visiting barrister sitting beside me whispered,
‘Maybe a personality clash? There’s a few mothers up there.’ The new forewoman took
the seat in the front corner of the box, nearest the judge, pale but determined.

…

It was winter, and in this courtroom coughing was what one did. Every morning when
Justice Lasry entered, exactly halfway between the door and the bench he would clear
his throat in a spasm that caused his long cheeks to puff out. At any given moment
half a dozen people would be trying to stifle their coughs in scarves or handfuls
of tissues. But Farquharson’s was the worst. Whenever it took hold of him and a guard
had to bring him water, the jurors would slide their eyes in his direction. What
if he had an attack of cough syncope here,
right in front of everyone? Would it end
the trial at once? Could we all go home? One day his hacking got so bad that a lowly
member of the defence team had to take him out at lunchtime to get a throat spray
from a chemist. He reappeared at two o’clock wearing a huge charcoal suit jacket
over his usual shirt-sleeves and tie. It must have belonged to Morrissey: its shoulders
were too wide, its sleeves too long. Child-like pathos was Farquharson’s default
mode.

…

From the day Farquharson’s imminent second trial was reported in the media, poignant
scraps and echoes had come to light from here and there to expand and illuminate
the story or simply add to it a dab of colour. Men from Winchelsea and its environs
surprised their mates by bursting into tears in back sheds and relating incidents
they had not previously thought worthy of mention. Some of these fragments made it
into the retrial. Others were scotched in Preliminary Argument as hearsay or fantasy.

But two of them that did surface in court, sad and ironic, stuck to my mind like
burrs.