This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

by Helen Garner

  In August 2005 Farquharson turned up at Dr McDonald’s clinic several times, first complaining of a bad cold, then later of a chesty cough that came on in the night air and made his ribs ache. The GP listened to his chest. His lung fields were clear. His temperature was normal. He did not cough in McDonald’s presence, nor did he mention feeling dizzy or passing out, and it did not occur to McDonald to ask him about such symptoms, for he regarded them as an extremely rare complication of coughing. He changed Farquharson’s antibiotic and told him to come back for blood tests if he was not better in a couple of days.

  Farquharson never returned for the blood tests.

  Twelve days later, his children drowned.

  On his way out of the court Dr McDonald glanced at his former patient in the dock. Farquharson kept his eyes down.

  …

  A large chunk of potential insight—if insight is what courts are after—had fallen between the cracks of Dr McDonald’s testimony.

  Before the GP took the stand that morning, Justice Cummins delayed calling in the jury so he could have a discussion with counsel. ‘It’s better to think out loud while the jury’s not here,’ he said, ‘so we can all look ahead.’ Apparently a piece of information had just surfaced, something that the judge thought had ‘a real bite to it, a real sting’. Was it to be admitted into evidence, or not?

  On his sole visit to Dr Sullivan, the Geelong psychologist whose fees he could not afford, Farquharson had said that he had been thinking about and planning suicide.

  Hearing this word, Farquharson recoiled extravagantly in the dock. Whenever suicide was mentioned during the rest of the wrangle about this evidence, he would turn to his sisters, knit his brows into an indignant scowl, and furiously shake his head.

  It was Dr Sullivan’s professional duty to inform Dr McDonald immediately, in writing, of what Farquharson had said; and he did so. Rapke read part of his brief report aloud: ‘I explained to Mr Farquharson the importance of his continuing use of anti-depressant medication…and his responsibility to adopt a new role in his interaction with his wife, Cindy. I am concerned about the potential for Mr Farquharson to behave impulsively, and accordingly I have asked him to consider making a commitment to seek out and speak with someone he trusts when he feels vulnerable.’

  The arrival of this report was what had caused Dr McDonald to send Farquharson straight to Colac Psychiatric Services. But the rules of evidence—so bizarrely counterintuitive to the layperson—classed the information in Sullivan’s report as hearsay: Farquharson had never spoken directly to the GP about suicide, so Dr McDonald could not be questioned about it in front of the jury. The suicide conversation could be raised in court only if Dr Sullivan himself gave evidence about it.

  ‘I would have thought,’ said Justice Cummins, ‘that an expression by the accused that he was contemplating suicide would be relevant to the issues?’

  Surely the prosecution could clear this up in a simple, direct way? Why did the Crown not call Dr Sullivan? Months after the trial was over, I would learn that Sullivan had declined to make a statement to the police. The Crown considered it too risky to subpoena a witness in those circumstances: what might he have said? But now, Morrissey, before whom lay a battered copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV that bristled with yellow Post-Its, announced that he intended to question Dr McDonald about the final sentence of his witness statement: ‘At no time did Robert express to me any suicidal tendencies or anger to any person that I can recall.’

  Rapke’s narrow hands moved restlessly among his papers. He got to his feet.

  ‘I’m putting my friends on notice,’ he said, in his light, ominous voice, ‘that if this issue is opened up, then Sullivan will give evidence, and this will become a much more significant issue in the trial.’

  Should Morrissey put his toe in the water at all, about this doctor? ‘It seems to me,’ said Justice Cummins, ‘you would be well-advised not to.’

  The judge gave counsel a short break to work this out, and left the bench. We waited in our seats, frustrated, imagining the barristers slugging it out in whatever private chamber they had retired to. I remembered my sister, when she was on a jury, bursting into tears one night at the dinner table: ‘We know there’s heaps they’re not telling us! How can we make up our minds?’ Ten minutes later the barristers returned, demure. Morrissey had decided not to put McDonald’s final sentence before the jury. By common consent they let the subject rest. It was never mentioned again. The jury was called in, and the trial was back on the rails.

  ‘WTF?’ scribbled Louise. ‘Is somebody bluffing?’

  The last thing Morrissey wanted, I supposed, was for the whole story to swing around into a failed suicide attempt. Forget the coughing fit. A wounded, bitter man decides to obliterate himself and his children in one blow. Driving down the overpass he swings the wheel and plants his foot. But the cold water shocks the death wish out of him. He flounders to the bank and runs away, leaving his boys to drown.

  Jurors are not permitted to speculate. This possible scenario was withheld from them. It disturbed me to watch them file out of their room and into their seats unenlightened, with their bowed shoulders and serious, trusting faces.

  …

  Dr McDonald’s witness statement contained another haunting detail that was never raised in court. On the day his wife asked him to move out, Farquharson had asked the GP to refer him for a vasectomy. McDonald did not record his response, and nobody asked him about it. The request, I thought, struck a discordant note: hasty and self-punishing, full of bitterness about the past and despair of the future. On the simplest level, it could be dismissed as the wild notion of a man who at that moment experienced the very idea of children as a source of pain. But perhaps it might be seen, rather, as a fantasy that sent a surge of destruction in both directions: refusal of whatever was to come and, retrospectively, a symbolic cutting-off of the fact that his three sons existed—an urge to amputate his fatherhood, to annihilate everything that he and Gambino as a couple had brought into being.

  …

  On the night of 4 September, while the police, the emergency service crews and the townspeople of Winchelsea were struggling in the dark at the dam, Farquharson arrived by ambulance at Geelong Hospital. The duty consultant in Emergency that night was Dr Bruce Bartley. A bulging-browed young man with a tiny beard on the tip of his chin, he entered the court briskly, wearing an anachronistic three-piece suit.

  When the paramedics brought Farquharson in, Bartley gave him a routine road trauma examination. Temperature, oxygen saturation, chest and neck X-rays, blood and, over the following twenty-four hours, a heart monitor—all the tests came back normal. Bartley made a provisional diagnosis, based on what his patient told him, of cough syncope: Farquharson had coughed to the point of passing out.

  Syncope (pronounced sing-c’-pee)—a brief loss of consciousness caused by a sudden drop in blood pressure—commonly crops up in emergency departments, but cough syncope is so rare that most doctors have only read about it. No, Bartley had never before diagnosed it, or even come across a patient who had reported an attack of it. No test exists to prove retrospectively that a person has blacked out as a result of a paroxysm of coughing. Like all diagnoses of this elusive and extremely rare medical event, Bartley�
�s was based solely on the assumption that everything Farquharson had told him was true.

  Another GP flashed briefly through the court, Dr Christopher Gore, a chunky grey-haired man who worked in a bulk-billing clinic in Belmont. On 30 September 2005, some three weeks after the crash, Farquharson presented himself at Dr Gore’s surgery, in the company of a woman ‘said to be his sister’, complaining of a persistent cough. His companion mentioned a recent accident that had involved a coughing fit, but nothing was said about a blackout, and Dr Gore simply prescribed Farquharson a new antibiotic. He had never seen Farquharson before, and he never saw him again.

  One person was able to describe Robert Farquharson in the throes of a coughing fit: she had seen it with her own eyes. Susan Bateson, a trim little sparrow of a woman in a coffee-coloured blouse and silver nail polish, was a supervisor at the Cumberland Resort in Lorne. She had first met Rob through Cindy Gambino’s parents, her neighbours. Once she had even babysat Jai and Tyler.

  Farquharson had worked under her for five years, as what she called a houseperson. He cleaned the public areas and did the heavier cleaning in guests’ apartments. He was a good, hard worker. He didn’t take sickies or complain about his wages. After he and Cindy split, he would pass up lucrative weekend shiftwork so he could spend time with his boys. He loved them and was dedicated to them.

  In mid-2005, the winter before the boys died, he was off work for ten days with flu. He came back still not a hundred per cent, but worked his normal shifts on the seven days leading up to the crash. On the Friday before Father’s Day he came into Bateson’s office at lunchtime, opened his mouth to speak, and was overtaken by ‘a very dry, grabbing cough’ that took his breath away. For ten or fifteen seconds he gasped and wheezed. His face turned an alarming shade of bright red. He did not black out, but Bateson wondered if he was having a stroke. She made him sit down and drink a glass of water, and advised him to get hold of a ventolin inhaler from the chemist. That day, despite the paroxysm, he worked right to the end of his usual 6 a.m.-to-2 p.m. shift.

  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.’