This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

by Helen Garner

  …

  On the evening of Sunday 4 September 2005, Father’s Day, two young Winchelsea men, Shane Atkinson and Tony McClelland, left their dogs to be minded overnight by a lady they knew, and set out in Atkinson’s Commodore for a barbecue in Geelong, to celebrate the birth of a baby that Atkinson’s fiancée had, that day, brought home from hospital.

  As Atkinson, the Crown’s first witness, negotiated the narrow aisle past the family seats, two women who, from the shape of their eye sockets, could only be Farquharson’s sisters raked him with cold stares. Dark-haired, tall and thin, he was dressed from head to toe in black. He stood in the box, facing the Crown’s Ms Forrester with the stooped, appeasing posture of a kid expecting to be told off. Speech was labour for him. He drawled and fumbled, writhed and bowed his head. Whenever a coarse word escaped him he would drop his face and grin with an embarrassed, goofy sweetness.

  It was about 7.30, he said, and already dark, when he and his mate Tony approached the railway overpass, four or five kilometres east of Winchelsea. They saw several cars ahead of them suddenly swerve and keep going, as if dodging something. Then a bloke stepped out into their headlights, vigorously waving his arms. Shane’s nerves were raw: his brother had taken his own life only a few months earlier. He slammed on the brakes and jumped out. The man ran towards him.

  ‘I said to him, “What the fuck are you doing, standing on the side of the road? Are you trying to kill yourself, mate?” We couldn’t get no sense out of him. He was swearing, like, “Oh no, fuck, what have I done? What’s happened?”’

  The man jabbered that he had put his car into the dam—that he had killed his kids, that he had done a wheel bearing, or had a coughing fit. He had come to and found himself in water up to his chest. All he wanted, he said over and over, was to be taken back to his missus’ house, so he could tell her he’d killed his kids.

  The bloke was short and chunky, panting and wringing wet, covered in slime and mud. What was this crazy story? Was he all there? Shane thought he might have Down syndrome or something: they got some weird cunts out that way. Tony was a relative newcomer to the township. Until this moment he had barely registered that there was a dam at the foot of the overpass. Shane was a Winch boy, and had driven past the dam countless times, yet even he had no idea it was deep enough for a car to vanish into it without leaving so much as a bubble. He stood up in the doorframe of his Commodore and strained for a better view of the water. He and Tony walked off the road as far as the fence. The night was very dark, but dry and clear. Every time a truck roared down the overpass, they followed the sweep of its headlights to scan the dam’s surface. The water looked like glass. Surely nothing had happened here.

  Shane had credit on his mobile. He tried to give it to the man so he could ring the ambulance, the police. The man refused. Again and again he begged them to take him to Cindy’s.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Shane, ‘if you’ve just killed your kids! We’re two skinny little cunts—we can get in the water and try to swim down!’

  But the man kept saying, ‘probably a hundred times, “No, don’t go down there. It’s too late. They’re already gone. I’ll just have to go back and tell Cindy.”’

  Farquharson, who had wept helplessly right through the terrible accusations of the prosecutor’s opening address—‘a shockingly wicked and callous act’—listened to all this in the dock with his head tilted and his small eyes narrowed in a sceptical expression.

  ‘And,’ said Ms Forrester gently, ‘did you take him back to Cindy?’

  In the front row of the public seats, accompanied by their quiet husbands, Farquharson’s sisters sat still, their mouths stiffly downturned.

  Shane Atkinson hung his head. ‘Yes,’ he said, in a low, miserable voice. ‘I done the stupidest thing of my whole life, and I did.’

  Shane made the sodden man sit beside him in the front, with Tony in the back ‘so he could punch him in the head if he went nuts’. He spun the car round and headed back to Winchelsea. Just as they reached the outskirts of the town, Shane flicked on the interior light and took a proper look at their passenger. The penny dropped. It was Robbie Farquharson. Since Shane was a little fellow, he had seen Robbie mowing people’s grass and driving the same sort of Commodore as Shane had now, except that Shane’s had mag wheels. And suddenly he twigged which Cindy he was raving about, this wife he was so keen to see—Cindy Farquharson, his ex, who everyone in Winch knew was on with another bloke, Stephen Moules.

  They pulled into Cindy’s drive, all three men panicking and yelling. Farquharson and Shane ran to the back doorstep and shouted for Cindy. One of Stephen Moules’ kids came to the screen door. Cindy followed him. Where was Rob’s car? Where were the kids?

  Farquharson gave it to her straight. There’d been an accident. He’d killed the kids. Drowned them. He’d tried to get them out, but he couldn’t. Cindy started to scream. She called him ‘a fucking cunt’. She went to hit him. Shane stepped between her and Farquharson and tried to take her in his arms. Then he leapt back into his car and drove so fast to the police station that when he pulled up outside he did a doughnut.

  The station was locked. He ran to the sergeant’s house next door. Nobody home.

  By now every man and his dog was out on the street. Somebody dialled 000 and Shane told the ambulance where the car had gone into the water. A bloke called Speedy from the State Emergency Service rushed off to get his truck. Shane got into his car with Tony and a couple of strangers who had jumped in. He drove back to Cindy’s but her car was gone, and so was she, with Farquharson and the kid from the kitchen door. Shane roared out on to the highway.

  He pulled up near the overpass. Farquharson was standing against the fence, nodding, lurching, wheezing. He was ‘smoking cigarette after cigarette’, and begged the new arrivals for another. Tony McClelland threw a whole packet at him, climbed through the fence and ran stumbling across the dark paddock. Shane hung back. ‘I didn’t wanna go near the dam,’ he told the court, hanging his head as if ashamed of his dread.

  Cindy had got through to 000 on her mobile and was rushing back and forth on the bank in the dark, sobbing and shrieking directions to the operator, but she kept calling it the Calder Highway instead of the Princes. She must have rung Stephen Moules earlier. He was already there, stripping off to wade into the dam. The water was black and terribly cold. Moules took a few steps in from the edge and the bottom dropped away under his feet. Tony had to grab his arm to save him. This was the moment they all realised how deep the dam was.

  But not until the police gave their evidence in court would its true dimensions become clear. It was not an ordinary farm dam with sloping sides. It was the pit left behind when the road-makers dug out the soil to build the overpass, and it went straight down for seven metres.

  …

  Tony McClelland stalked past the Farquharson family to the witness stand with a self-possession that looked like anger. He too had dressed in black. He was thin and tousled, with sharp cheekbones and high eyes, a face of striking beauty. He had no memory of Shane offering his mobile to Farquharson, but he recalled that, on the wild drive back to Winch, Farquharson had mumbled, ‘My wife will kill me.’ When Farquharson announced to Cindy that the boys were in the water, she cried, ‘Why didn’t you stay there?’ Farquharson replied, ‘They
’ve already died.’

  At this, Farquharson lurched forward in the dock and covered his whole face with his handkerchief.

  At the dam it was McClelland who enfolded the shrieking Cindy in a bear hug and grabbed the phone from her hand. He gave the 000 operator coherent directions. It seemed only moments then until the emergency services arrived. Shane moved his car to make way for the ambulance. He and Tony gave the police their details.

  Then they sat in the car for a little while, Tony McClelland, twenty-three, apprentice carpenter, and Shane Atkinson, twenty-two, new father, currently unemployed. They had a smoke, and tried to talk. They told each other that they should have looked for the car. They were distraught because the kids had died, and because they were the ones who had taken Farquharson away.

  …

  A big plasma screen had been set up facing the jury, in the narrow space between the press seats and the pews where the families were sitting. Displayed on this Smart Board were digital photographs of the road, the paddock and the dam. Mr Morrissey, cross-examining, asked Atkinson and McClelland to make marks on the images with a special pen, to show the relative positions of various vehicles on that night of the crash. Farquharson’s family continued to gaze faithfully at Mr Morrissey, but the purpose of his complex manoeuvre was a mystery to me.

  The young men too looked baffled, but strove to cooperate. To sketch cars and trucks and ambulances with their little markers, they had to leave the witness stand, edge along the aisle, and reach up past the journalists’ heads to the screen. We could see the gel that messed up their hair, the fineness of their skin, the tremors of their facial muscles, the details of McClelland’s piercings. On the stand, inarticulate and awkward, they could have been misread as off-hand. Up close, they radiated a troubled solemnity, a jaw-grinding guilt and sorrow. When Atkinson was finally excused, when he trudged out of the court followed by the glares of Farquharson’s sisters, Louise, the gap-year girl, said to me in a shaky whisper, ‘You feel you should at least be able to give him a hug.’

  Next morning I opened the Herald Sun and saw a photo of the young men crossing the road outside the Supreme Court. Tony leads the way, scowling, gripping a bottle of water in one hand, his knees flexed, his torso bending forward as if he is about to break into a run. Behind him strides the taller Shane, with a wool beanie pulled down to his brow, shoulders back, arms along his sides, his face broad and sombre. They are thin, dark-clad figures with haunted eyes: two souls fleeing before the blast.

  …

  Farquharson may not have plunged into the water to search for his boys, but other men did.

  One of the Winchelsea SES members who headed for the dam as soon as Shane Atkinson raised the alarm had rushed out the door barefoot in track pants and a singlet. His level-headed wife gathered up an armload of dry clothes and towels, and drove out the highway after him. She told the court that she pulled up beside the dam and saw Farquharson standing on his own, soaking wet, with a blanket round him. ‘Robbie!’ she said. ‘It’s not you?’ She threw her arms around him and he began to sob. Then he stepped back and looked her in the eye. He said, ‘I’ve had this flu. I had a coughing fit and blacked out. Next thing I knew, the car was filling up with water.’ He told her he had tried and failed to get the kids out. Then he said, ‘How can I live with this? It should have been me.’

  Two volunteer fire-fighters from the Country Fire Authority, one of them a high-school student of sixteen, took the stand. They had arrived at the dam towards 8 p.m. and heard a woman sobbing somewhere in the dark, crying out that she would not be able to bury her children. They stumbled round with their torches, following tyre marks in the grass, looking for the spot where the car had gone in. Was it here, where a piece of a tree had been snapped off and broken glass was scattered on the ground? By then a police chopper was hovering over the dam, shining a spotlight on to its surface. There was no sign of the car. Someone would have to get into the water.

  Tethered by ropes to other firemen, the two CFA volunteers and the owner of the property waded into the dam. Not far from the edge, the bottom drastically dropped away. They began to swim. The water was shockingly cold. They put their heads under and were blinded by murk. They could not feel the bottom with their feet. Had the car floated before it sank? Had it drifted sideways? Without equipment, shallow diving was the best they could do. They floundered about in the water for fifteen minutes, gasping and shivering, until the paramedics shouted at them to get out. Of the car they found no trace.

  …

  When the paramedics had pulled up on the shoulder of the road, they found Farquharson standing near the fence, wet through, with a blanket round his shoulders. His skin was cold and he was shivering. His pulse rate was up, his blood pressure normal. Neither of his lungs was wheezing or crackling. They asked him to cough. He brought up no phlegm. Breathalysed, he blew zero. He had no history of blackouts, he said, but had had a dry cough for the past few days.

  He told the paramedics that his oldest son had opened the door, causing the car to fill up with water and sink; that he himself had got out, flagged down a vehicle, and gone to Winch to tell the police and his ex-wife what had happened.

  On the drive to Geelong Hospital the paramedics considered that their patient was more stunned than in shock. They heard him give vent to several more unproductive coughs. As the ambulance sped along the dark road, Farquharson, from his stretcher in the back, asked one of the paramedics, ‘Did I do the right thing? How am I going to live with myself after all this has happened?’ Perhaps these questions were merely philosophical. Perhaps Farquharson was murmuring to himself. Either way, the paramedic in the witness box, badged and epauletted in his dark blue uniform, did not say whether he had replied or tried to offer comfort. He told the court only that Farquharson then fell silent, and lay in the ambulance shaking his head.

  …

  Just across Lonsdale Street from the Supreme Court, outside the glass façade of the County Court, stands a shiny metal caravan that houses an espresso machine and a pair of gun baristas. Everyone from the world of the law seems to patronise it: the loftiest silk in wig and rosette; Homicide detectives with their sinister black folders; road police in bomber jackets; constables in caps and tunics; irritable tipstaffs smoking over the turf guide; all the way down to the lowly drifters from the Magistrates’ Court in William Street with spider webs tattooed on their necks and hinges in their elbow crooks. Even the occasional judge has been seen to throw back a short black at that democratic counter.

  On the Monday morning of the trial’s second week, a couple in the coffee queue struck up a conversation with the gap-year student and me. Hadn’t they seen us in court, with our notebooks? They introduced themselves: Bob and Bev Gambino, the parents of Cindy, Farquharson’s former wife—the drowned boys’ grandparents. We looked at them in awe, but they chatted on in their unguarded country way, drinking the good coffee, watching the lawyers come and go. Bob was short and round-faced and solid, Bev slender with fine-rimmed glasses and straight, greying hair. They told us they lived near Winchelsea, in the town of Birregurra. Since Bob was a CFA volunteer and one of their three sons a full-time firey, the firefighters’ union had offered them free use of a flat above the Fire Services Museum for the duration of the trial. Everything about the city seemed to please them: the hospitals, the trams, the fresh
food you could buy at the Victoria Market. Bob rambled on unprompted, in his drawling voice.

  ‘The court people kept asking us “Which side are you on?” First I didn’t know what they meant. Then I realised they didn’t want to make us sit with Rob’s family if we didn’t want to. So I said to the bloke, “Listen, mate, there aren’t two sides.”

  ‘Rob and I used to work together on the shire,’ he went on, jerking his head in the direction of the Supreme Court. ‘He was a lazy little bugger. If he didn’t want to do something, well, he didn’t. Not motivated. He was—you know—a sook.’

  These unflattering estimations he delivered with an indulgent grin, as if teasing someone he was fond of or had at least learnt to put up with. His wife made little contribution, apart from her friendly attention.

  It was nearly 10 a.m. On the other side of the road I spotted Farquharson’s sisters and their husbands heading for the Supreme Court entrance in a phalanx: ordinary, reputable working people, self-effacing in their comportment. The woman I picked as the elder sister, identified by the Gambinos as Carmen Ross, had a soft, intelligent face and a serious demeanour. Kerri Huntington, the younger, more flamboyant one, wore her hair in a big bleached perm that flowed back over her shoulders. On my fridge door at home I had a newspaper photo of Farquharson leaving the court with the curly-headed blonde on the summer day he got bail after his arrest. What made me clip the photo and keep it was the way she is hauling Farquharson across the pavement. He trots beside her. She has an impatient, double-fisted hold on his left wrist that yanks his hand like a toddler’s across the front of her hips. As the eldest of six children I recognised that hold: it was a bossy big-sister grip. Now I watched her charge up the steps into the court, her hair bright as a banner in the grey street.