This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

by Helen Garner

  By the latter half of 2004, Gambino was coming to the end of her tether. ‘I found it throughout my marriage very hard,’ she said, ‘to give my heart to my husband. You can love someone, but you can also be in love with someone, and I found it hard to be in love with Rob. He was a very secure person, he was a very good provider, but I just found it hard to give myself to him.’

  In October 2004, when Bailey was almost two, Farquharson agreed at last to see their family GP about his mood swings. Dr McDonald put him on anti-depression medication, but for Gambino it was already too late. She levelled with him the following month, and it came at him out of nowhere.

  Mr Rapke left her the silence, and she filled it, holding a handful of tissues to her eyes, her voice so high and weak that we had to strain to hear.

  ‘I didn’t want the marriage any more. I asked him to leave.’

  There it was, the unbearable blow she had dealt him—expulsion from his family and his home. Like so many emotionally numbed, inarticulate and stoical husbands, he had failed to see it coming.

  ‘He went to live with his dad,’ she said. ‘He was devastated. It was a case of you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’

  ‘Did you consent to see him,’ asked Rapke, ‘after you separated?’

  She gave a harsh gulp. ‘I think I had him over to tea once. And that was for the children’s sake.’

  I did not risk a glance at the journalist who had forbidden pity. But surely mine was not the only heart to ache, at that moment, for the hunched and humiliated figure in the dock.

  …

  Cindy Gambino was at pains to stress that the concreter, Stephen Moules, had not been the cause of her marriage break-up. They met in the winter of 2004. In September she engaged him to pour the slab for the new house. By November she had sent Farquharson back to his father.

  Moules was still extricating himself from a child-custody mess with his former wife. He needed to maintain things with Gambino on a friendly footing, and for quite some time he kept her at arms’ length. It was not till after she ended her marriage that their relationship grew more intimate. When they began to sleep at each other’s houses that summer, Farquharson took it badly, but he claimed not to care what she and Moules were doing. His jealousy focused on the children. It bugged him that his boys had to associate with Moules’ two unruly sons. Jai Farquharson, at ten, became a very different little boy: he believed he would never be happy again. His parents, in turns, took him to see a counsellor for help in managing his anger and sadness. In spite of Gambino’s assurances, Farquharson was afraid of being edged out of his children’s lives. He feared that Moules was going to take his place as their father.

  It took a while for Farquharson to get the hang of being a part-time dad in his own father’s house, which Gambino found so cold and child-unfriendly that she called it ‘the morgue’. He was not confident with Bailey, the toddler. At first he had the boys to sleep over only rarely. But football was their shared obsession and, once the season started, they stayed with him every second weekend.

  Farquharson had agreed, without need of Family Court involvement, to pay maintenance at the monthly rate laid down by the Child Support Agency. Half of it he put straight into the mortgage payments on the house, and the rest he gave to Gambino, who as a supporting mother was receiving her own government cheque. He liked to buy his children gifts of clothes and toys, but financially he was struggling. He could not see how to get his life back on track. In the winter of 2005 his wages went up, and his maintenance payments were about to be raised accordingly. The letter announcing this increase did not arrive until after the boys had died, but he knew it was coming, and he was very angry with the Child Support Agency. He thought they ‘didn’t give the guy a fair go’. On what would turn out to be the last Wednesday of their children’s lives, Gambino suggested to Farquharson that he should stop paying her the non-mortgage part of the maintenance, and put that money towards a house of his own, so that when the boys wanted to see their dad they could hop on their bikes and go. But he said no, because it was not legal.

  And then there was the sore point of the two cars. At the time she ended the marriage, Gambino had pressed Farquharson to take from their house whatever he liked. Many a rejected spouse has heard that rush of guilty generosity at the door, ‘I’ll give you everything!’—with its unspoken rider—‘except what you really want: my love’. The only thing she asked for, because she would have the kids full-time, was the newer of their two cars—a 2002 VX Commodore. The dejected Farquharson went along with it, but he did not like it one bit.

  …

  Father’s Day 2005 did not fall on one of Farquharson’s scheduled access weekends, but at Jai’s football presentation on the Friday evening, Gambino suggested to Farquharson that she should bring the boys to him on Sunday afternoon for a special visit. They arrived just as Farquharson got home from work. They brought gifts they had chosen for him: a framed picture of themselves, and a set of saucepans. Jai, the eldest, was upset because he had forgotten to bring a wooden back-scratcher that he had bought especially. The boys asked if they could stay with their father for tea. He was not expecting them for a meal, and had no food in the house. The children saw the chance for a rare treat: Kentucky Fried Chicken in Geelong. Farquharson agreed to have them back at Gambino’s place by 7.30 p.m.

  ‘It was three o’clock,’ she told the court. ‘Bailey said, “Cuddle, Mum”. I gave them a cuddle.’ Her voice rose to a register almost beyond audible. ‘That was the last time I saw my children.’

  …

  Gambino and Stephen Moules spent the rest of the day in Geelong, where Moules had to inspect the progress of a job. They got back to his house in Winchelsea by 6.30 p.m. and he started to cook the tea. Just before the appointed hand-over time, Gambino drove to her own house, taking with her Moules’ younger son Zach, who was keen to see her boys. Ten minutes later, while she was drawing the curtains against the dark, she saw a white Commodore pull in. ‘Here they are now,’ she thought.

  But on her doorstep she found Farquharson with two men. He was saturated, delirious, and he kept saying, ‘The kids are in the car. They’re in the water.’

  In the witness stand Gambino began to rock on her feet, a rhythmic swaying.

  She called Moules on her mobile, then jumped into her car, with Zach beside her and Farquharson in the back seat, and headed out on to the Princes Highway. ‘Where? Where?’

  ‘Near the overpass!’ Farquharson shouted. ‘Keep going. Keep going!’

  The boy screamed, ‘Slow down! You’re frightening me!’

  She looked at the speedo. She was doing 145. She pulled up near the guardrail of the overpass.

  ‘We couldn’t see the dam. It was so dark, we couldn’t see anything.’

  Moules and his cousin arrived in another car, and ran into the paddock.

  ‘We were trying to find out where the car had gone in,’ said Gambino. She began to sob. ‘The wire was down. It was spread across the paddock. Rob asked Stephen for a cigarette. Stephen said, “What? Where are your kids? Get out of my face before I kill you. Where are your kids?” Rob didn’t know. He kept going like that.’ She mimicked a flat-handed pointing gesture. ‘I said to him, “What happened?” And he said, “I blacked out.”
He tried to comfort me, but I pushed him away.’

  Farquharson between his guards was weeping soundlessly, without shame, his mouth gaping, his eyes locked on hers. A great knotted current of agony surged back and forth between the dock and the witness stand: a flood of terrible compassion. Something was happening to Gambino’s voice. It dissolved, it thickened, it throbbed and took on colour; it rose and fell in octaves, like a chant.

  ‘It was dark. It was so dark. I was running up and down the paddock, trying to ring 000, but I was so hysterical I couldn’t press the numbers properly. Stephen was in the water. I remember sitting in the front seat of his parents’ car. Rob was standing in front of the car with his arms crossed. He was soaking wet. He was like a person, but there was no movement. He wasn’t doing anything. He was like in a trance.’

  There was a helicopter over the dam. A paramedic walked up to her. She asked him, ‘How long has it been?’ ‘Forty minutes.’ ‘What are their chances?’ ‘Very slim.’

  One of her brothers arrived. He took her away to his house in Winchelsea and called a doctor. It was a very long wait. Her socks were wet. At last the doctor came. He drove them through fog to the Winchelsea hospital. She staggered through the doors and someone came to her with the needle.

  …

  All Mr Morrissey wanted from Gambino, in cross-examination, was her assurance—which she gave earnestly and without hesitation—that Farquharson had loved his children very deeply. He was such a softie with them that the role of disciplinarian had fallen to her. The football side of things was his forte. After the separation he grew much closer to the boys. She had done everything in her power to foster this closeness. He was proud of them, especially of Jai, who at ten was intelligent, mature, responsible, a good sportsman, a very good big brother.

  ‘Everybody loved my kids,’ said Gambino, her voice thinning to a soft wail. ‘They were so popular.’

  In the dreadful days after they died, asked Morrissey, had her family written Farquharson a card? Had she and Rob spoken to each other on the telephone? Had they offered each other words of comfort? Yes, she said, with an anguished gentleness, yes—they had.

  Gambino left the stand with a wad of wet tissues held to her cheek. As she stumbled towards the exit, Farquharson’s head swung to follow her, and I caught the full blast of his distress. His face was ravaged, beseeching: his teeth bared, his cheeks streaming. The doors thumped shut behind her. Masonry, glass and timber could not muffle the rending sobs and cries that echoed in the cold hall outside.

  The sleeve of Louise’s hoodie was black with tears. ‘Did she look at him on the way out?’ she whispered. ‘Did she look at him?’

  ‘She turned her head a little bit,’ I said. ‘I think she looked at him.’

  Out on the street, seeing me wipe my eyes, the veteran journalist snapped at me, ‘I was at the funeral.’

  Years later, when we befriended each other, I would see that she had been forcing me back to the point, but now she made me feel like a sentimental amateur. I was afraid of her, and it shocked me that she would not hold her fire, even for a moment, in the face of what we had just witnessed: two broken people grieving together for their lost children, in an abyss of suffering where notions of guilt and innocence have no purchase.

  …

  No sooner had we steadied ourselves after the spectacle of Cindy Gambino’s loyalty to the husband she was no longer in love with, than the prosecution called to the stand her new partner—and father of her eleven-month-old son, Hezekiah—Stephen Moules.

  He faced Rapke’s junior, Amanda Forrester, in a grey suit, lavender shirt, and white tie. His hair was thick and fair. He had an upright posture, and a smooth, open face with the all-seasons tan of the outdoor worker. I was not the only woman in the court who shot at Farquharson a furtive glance of comparison. He sat with shoulders slumped and eyes downcast.

  Moules described himself to the court as a former concreter turned full-time father. The water in the glass he sipped from trembled; but still he gave off that little buzz of glamour peculiar to the Australian tradie. Surely the month of September 2004, when the Farquharsons hired him to pour the slab of their new house, had marked the beginning of a period of exhilaration and fantasy for Gambino, while to Farquharson it must have brought nothing but suspicion, jealousy and pain.

  Everything Moules said about himself suggested a figure of resolute virtue. His own family may have collapsed into chaos, but he seemed determined to haul it back to the light, and to establish himself in full view as a decent citizen. When the Farquharsons engaged him, he already knew their eldest, Jai, from the Cub Scout troupe he led. He was an active member of the Bayside Christian Church, an evangelical outfit formerly known as the Assemblies of God, and taught Sunday School there. The name of his concreting company was God’s Creations.

  His initial dealings with the Farquharsons, he said, were only ‘a business relationship’. But, having recently watched a bunch of blokes pour a concrete slab in my own backyard, I was equipped to imagine the effect of this sight on a young woman in Cindy Farquharson’s stifling situation. A concrete pour is a dramatic process. It demands skill, speed, strength, and the confident handling of machinery; and it is so intensely, symbolically masculine that every woman and boy in the vicinity is drawn to it in excited respect. Spellbound on the back veranda between my two small grandsons, I remembered Camille Paglia’s coat-trailing remark that if women were running the world, we’d still be living in grass huts. Could it be that Farquharson’s days as a husband were numbered before that slab had set?

  …

  Late in 2004 Gambino offered, in a neighbourly spirit, to pick up Moules’ two boys from school in the afternoons and look after them at her place until he finished work. Moules saw no harm in it, and was grateful for the help. It made me flinch to think of Farquharson stumping home sore-footed from his cleaning job, only to find his house thundering with another man’s kids and his wife flushed and enlivened by her new friendship with their father.

  Across the dying months of the marriage, though, Farquharson naively confided in Moules his anxiety and distress. Even after his wife had called the whole thing off and he had moved back to his father’s—which chanced to be only five doors along from the house Moules was renting—Farquharson would often turn up at Moules’ place looking for somebody to talk to. He took the break-up very hard. He was distraught when Cindy did not want to reconcile. ‘He did not know what to do,’ said Moules, ‘in any way, shape or form.’ Moules ran a Christian line with him. He ‘counselled’ him on how to get his marriage back together. ‘I tried to sort of steer him,’ he said, miming the two-handed motion of driving a car. He gave Farquharson advice both spiritual and worldly, and recommended he see a counsellor from Bayside Christian Church. Finally he realised his efforts were falling on deaf ears. He gave up.

  But Moules’ role as his neighbour’s counsellor must have been uncomfortably compromised, for Cindy Farquharson too, over the same period, was a frequent visitor to his house. She used him as an ear, said Moules, to ‘vent to’. They would ‘just sit there talking’. According to Moules’ police statement, she told him that Farquharson had spoken of moving up to Queensland, that he wanted to ‘wean himself off his boys, because that was how it would end up anyway’.

  Once Farquharson h
ad moved out of their house, Cindy made it apparent to Moules that she had feelings for him. Next, she changed her name back to Gambino. Her signals were unmistakable. Moules had to struggle, he said, to keep their relationship platonic. He declined to be used as a scapegoat. He wanted Gambino to ‘have all her business clear-cut’ before anything further developed between them. But Farquharson, he said, was beginning to hold him responsible for the failure of the marriage.

  ‘It’s got to be your fault,’ he said to Moules. ‘I can’t understand any other reason why the marriage shouldn’t be.’

  And Moules replied, ‘Your wife is your wife, okay? I’ve got custody of my kids. I’m starting my life again. I don’t need any more dramas.’

  …

  When he spoke about the night of Father’s Day, Moules’ voice became low and husky. Tremors flickered in the skin around his eyes. To control the trembling of his hands he had to clasp them on the timber rail of the witness stand. He mimed his incredulity at Farquharson’s first words to him when he arrived at the dam: ‘Where’s your smokes?’ He described his helpless diving into the bitterly cold water, his repeated requests to Farquharson to tell him where the car had gone in, and Farquharson’s answer: ‘I don’t know. I had a coughing fit and blacked out.’ Two young men—they must have been Shane Atkinson and Tony McClelland—shouted guidance to him from the bank: ‘I think I see bubbles. Try there. Try there.’ Moules tried to dive in the direction of any movement he thought he could sense in the water. But it was too dark and too cold, and he was shuddering too much and swallowing too much water. It got to the point where he said to himself, ‘This is ridiculous.’ One of the men yelled to him, ‘Come on, mate. Get out or you’ll be next.’