This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

by Helen Garner

  ‘Hard to tell what they’re thinking,’ I said. But I was only trying to make conversation.

  …

  For two whole days Acting Sergeant Urquhart was mauled on the stand. Morrissey blazed away at him, shouting, whispering, sledging, sometimes merely arguing in an ordinary tone of voice, working to wring some shred of reasonable doubt from the mass of technical information that Urquhart had laid down.

  What on earth was the point of surveying the crime scene—sorry, Morrissey meant the potential crime scene—if the scanner Major Collision used was not capable of computing the slope of the terrain? What use were its measurements if all it could do was calculate the terrain as if it were flat? Why didn’t Urquhart measure the camber of the road? Why didn’t he collect the wire or the posts from the flattened fence? Why had he changed his tune about which of the famous Exton marks he had used as a starting point for his calculations? First he said he used the left one, then later he said he’d used the right one. He was incompetent, wasn’t he? Negligent? Wasn’t he supposed to have an honours degree? And how ridiculous and outrageous was it that he had stopped the traffic in both directions on the Princes Highway for—how long? Fifteen minutes? Did he mean to say that the whole of Victoria was held up while he shot his pointless, meaningless steering-test videos? He took his hands off the wheel, yes, but what was to show he hadn’t been steering with his knees? And why didn’t he conduct his steering tests on Farquharson’s actual car? He didn’t drive Mr Farquharson’s car, did he?

  ‘No,’ said Urquhart. ‘It wasn’t driveable. It was caked in mud and water. It was beyond salvage.’

  ‘Being caked in mud and water,’ snapped Morrissey, ‘doesn’t set it apart from many vehicles in the city of Melbourne.’

  The court rocked with laughter. Men in the jury lowered their grinning faces. It was impossible to tell if their masculine empathy was directed at Morrissey, or Urquhart, or Farquharson himself.

  Urquhart was obliged to acknowledge various police mistakes. Not only were the Exton paint marks on the wrong angle, but they were not even parallel. The wheelbase of Farquharson’s car was too wide to have left both tyre marks in the gravel. Only one of them could be correct. Urquhart dug in, though, when Morrissey urged him to agree that Farquharson’s vehicle could have left the road at ‘a much gentler angle’ than the one he had calculated. On this point he would not give way.

  ‘What about a series of tiny little steering inputs?’ said Morrissey.

  Urquhart smiled wearily and shook his head.

  Figures were scattered about like confetti: angles, arcs, radii. The word infinity was mentioned. Every now and then Justice Cummins would protest: ‘We did all of that this morning, Mr Morrissey. Let’s not start again. We’ve gone over this, Mr Morrissey, for a day and a half.’

  Then Morrissey screened a five-second segment from Channel Nine news of the roadside gravel, shot in daylight on the Tuesday after the crash, which showed the yellow paint marks clearly present. He compared this footage with the Peters and Courtis photos of the gravel that were taken on the Tuesday, in which the marks appeared smudged, and forcefully alleged that one of the police officers, in an attempt to conceal Exton’s mistake, must have scuffed out the paint with his boot.

  The jury was sent out.

  ‘From the Sunday night to the Tuesday,’ said Justice Cummins, ‘it was not a controlled scene. Paint can disappear for a hundred reasons, but the TV on the Tuesday, on a clear calm day, showing the lines of paint, and then the photograph not showing them, clearly ups the ante. An allegation has been put that needs to be met.’

  ‘What is shown in number one of the Peters photos,’ said Rapke, ‘is a photographic distortion of what you see in the Channel Nine footage. There has been degradation in the two days since the night of the crash, but there has been no interference.’

  ‘It’s not merely a matter of police corruption for the sheer joy of doing so!’ cried Morrissey. ‘It’s—’

  ‘No,’ said the judge sarcastically, ‘it’s just police corruption to frame a man wrongly for the murder of his three children.’

  Morrissey raised his voice. ‘I’m not going to back away from putting to them that somebody’s interfered with it! I’ll be putting it very strongly!’

  ‘You’ve already put it,’ said Justice Cummins. ‘You’ve had a long, hard day. There’s a nice old saying—“Appeal judges are men who in the cool of the evening undo work that better men do in the heat of the day.” Let’s have the cool of the evening to think. Let’s do it tomorrow.’

  …

  As the Crown case worked its way into the home straight, some of Farquharson’s supporters seemed possessed by a cheerful confidence that verged on the manic. After lunch one day, when Morrissey swept past her through the narrow glass-paned doors, heading back into the fray, Kerri Huntington sang out after him, ‘Go, tiger!’ She turned to the rest of us with a cheeky giggle. ‘That man,’ she said, ‘makes me laugh.’

  On and on went the gargantuan struggle between the two big men. Morrissey accused Urquhart and his fellow officers of all manner of trickery and dishonesty. He challenged him on complicated slabs of what he had said in earlier evidence. He dragged him back and forth across fields of minuscule detail. Hour after hour, while cop and counsel danced like medieval angels upon the head of a pin, I grew stupider and stupider. Surely one did not need a science degree to understand how the car had gone into the dam? I kept glancing at the older men in the jury, the ones who looked like retired tradies or maths teachers in their loose, comfortable T-shirts or plain zipper jackets. Did they too feel this thickening of the brain, this blunting and blurring of mental capacity? Could it be that some atavistic force in me was trying to sabotage my intellect, to block its access to calculations that might demonstrate Farquharson’s innocence? What on earth could one take seriously here? Did a modest manner, an air of patient seriousness, the ability to crack a gentle joke, mean that a witness was trustworthy? What if I were one of those tired, frightened jurors, sequestered by an oath from the comfort of work and family, browbeaten by oratory, craving the release of laughter or tears? Would I be dreading the moment when this tinnitus-like racket would have to be disentangled, unpicked, coaxed into a pattern of meaning, so that we could see what was really there, weigh it up, and arrive at a judgment on a fellow human being? What if Farquharson’s guilt or innocence was a mystery beyond reckoning? Was anyone going to explain the meaning of the words ‘beyond reasonable doubt’? And, if they did, would I still have the nous to grasp it? Or had these five gruelling weeks stripped me of every vestige of native wit?

  Calm down. I was not on the jury. I had made no vows. I was only an observer. Nothing life-altering would be required of me. If sitting here became completely intolerable I could pack away my notebook and pen, make my bow at the door, and rush back into the world, where it was spring, where the sun was mild, and the plane trees on Lonsdale Street were putting out their pale fuzz of green.

  …

  Indeed, as soon as Rapke rose to re-examine Urquhart, a window seemed to open in the courtroom and a stream of fresh air to pass through. I could not tell if it was the simple clarity of what he was saying or the light, dry timbre of his voice, but things flung about in disarray by Morrissey’s mighty blitzkrieg quietly resumed their p
roper places in the landscape. A calm settled, a sense of proportion. No, I did not need to be a scientist in order to picture what had happened between the road and the dam that night.

  …

  Near the very end of the Crown case, while Detective Sergeant Clanchy was still on the stand, Morrissey screened again the passage from the formal interview at Homicide in which Farquharson, in a voice thickened by tears, denied the detectives’ direct accusation and gave his finger-snapping account of how he ‘tried and tried and tried’ to save his boys. ‘I believe I’m a very good citizen in life. I’m a family man who looked after his kids and everything like that. I’m not lying to you. I’ve got no reason to.’ For a second time we saw his indignant tears, his protestations, his strange, emphatic hand gestures on the tabletop. Could Morrissey possibly think this looked good? Yet women in the family seats were crying. Noses were blown, quivering breaths drawn.

  Years later, when I read Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home, I found a description of that moment: ‘It was the sad privilege of blood relations to love him despite all.’

  …

  The jury left the court, and Mr Morrissey made a second no-case submission: he argued that the Crown case was so weak and so circumstantial that it was incapable of reaching the standard of proof required. While he argued on in a low voice, murmuring, sometimes almost whispering, Justice Cummins listened with his head propped on one fist at a dreamy, attentive angle. When he reasoned with Morrissey, his voice too was very soft. Farquharson strained forward to hear, his face dark and clenched above his neatly knotted tie. Kerri Huntington kept changing position in her seat, irritable and frustrated. At the other end of the bar table, Mr Rapke lay back in his tilting swivel chair, one hand clasped around his jaw, watching and waiting.

  Justice Cummins spread in front of him several sheets of paper, from which he read a summary of the evidence so far. He brought out of it a narrative that turned the blood to ice. As a matter of law, he ruled, there was sufficient evidence to make a case.

  Mr Morrissey would have to gird his loins and launch his defence.

  The Crown, in its duty to lay all relevant facts before the court, had called forty witnesses. Its case, swollen by Morrissey’s exhaustive cross-examinations, had stretched out over five whole weeks. Morrissey must have done the bulk of his work in those marathon sessions; the defence, he said, had a mere five witnesses lined up. He would lay out its case in two and a half days.

  CHAPTER 10

  Next morning, before the judge and jury entered, Morrissey got up from the bar table and turned his big body to the seats into which the journalists were filing.

  ‘I know what you want!’ he shouted with a challenging grin, hitching up the shoulders of his black robe. ‘But my client’s not going to be called to give evidence. Nope. Mr Farquharson will not be called to give evidence!’

  He swept his eyes with satisfaction along the row of faces. It was a point of honour for us not to betray surprise or disappointment. We took our seats with decorum, and he plumped back into his swivel chair.

  Everyone by now was very tired. The group dynamic of the jury seemed to have stabilised. They entered less formally, sometimes with the fading smiles of people who had been laughing, but they arranged themselves always in the same configuration. Was it a pecking order, or an urge to seek comfort in habit?

  As he did every day, for the comfort of counsel, the tipstaff set out along the bar table several tall, clear plastic jugs of water. The eye rested with relief on those evenly spaced columns of purity.

  …

  The first defence witness was a big, smooth-headed, solemn man in his fifties, Dr Christopher Steinfort. He practised in Geelong as a consultant physician in thoracic and general medicine. He was the Director of the Geelong Hospital’s lung function laboratory, and of the Geelong Private Hospital sleep laboratory. Unlike the Crown’s medical experts, Dr Steinfort was across cough syncope in a hands-on way. He was here to challenge the accepted view of it as a condition of almost mythological rarity.

  Since 1995 he had been keeping a documented database of everyone he saw in his private practice. A search of the 6500 patients currently on his database, he said, had turned up thirty-odd cases of syncope, and among those, about fifteen of cough syncope.

  Already this year several cases of it had come to his attention.

  A GP had rung him about a chap in Geelong who, while driving his kids to a football match, was overcome by coughing. His car ran off the road, turned over, flipped on to its side, then flipped back and finished up wedged against a fence post.

  One woman was sitting having a cup of tea in front of her TV when she started to cough. Next thing she knew she was flat on the floor, with very nasty bruises to the face. Steinfort had admitted her to hospital. She did have pulmonary fibrosis, he added.

  And since the Farquharson case became known, quite a few people had come forward to say they had been diagnosed with cough syncope over the last ten or fifteen years, often after a car accident. Legal Aid had passed them on to Steinfort, who had interviewed them at length. They had all been suffering from a flu-like illness. They had taken time off work and gone to bed with aches and pains, coughing, sore throat and runny nose. They were all men, aged between thirty-five and sixty-five. Two had mild, untreated asthma. One had vascular disease connected with his smoking, so he probably had lung disease as well.

  But wasn’t the whole point of this, I thought, to explore the occurrence of cough syncope in people who didn’t have lung disease?

  How was it that Dr Steinfort disagreed so fundamentally with the two Crown medical witnesses, Dr King and Professor Naughton, about the rarity of cough syncope? This was due to a referral bias, said Steinfort, a filtering system. Because of seniority, King in particular, as a neurologist, would tend to have very complex cases referred to him, rather than patients who merely coughed till they keeled over. But Steinfort, down at Geelong, worked at the coalface. Back in the year 2000 one of his patients, while doing a lung function test, had actually blacked out from coughing right in front of him. The man buckled at the knees. Steinfort grabbed him just before he hit the ground. From that day on, the doctor always kept a grip on a patient’s shoulders when he administered such a test.

  Since May 2006, Dr Steinfort had seen Farquharson five times. He had taken a detailed history, and run his patient through a battery of tests. Farquharson said that he smoked up to twenty cigarettes a day—three times the number smoked by the ‘hypothetical’ driver Rapke had described to Professor Naughton. Farquharson told Steinfort that he had had ‘multiple dizzy spells’ at work and at home, and that he had coughed, at times, to the point where his vision darkened; Steinfort called this a ‘grey-out’. He had reported to Steinfort a ‘witnessed’ coughing fit at work during which he had lost consciousness. He had been for years what Steinfort described as ‘a horrendous snorer’: his throat was reddened by it. He was overweight. Steinfort had advised him to lose ten kilos, which he had been unable to do, and to sleep on his side rather than on his back. A diagnostic sleep study showed that on average his sleep (and no doubt that of his former wife, I thought with a pang) was disturbed twenty-six times an hour, which put him in the moderately severe category of sleep apnoea. But he did not report sleepiness during the day, so Steinfort had discounted falling asleep as a caus
e of the accident.

  …

  Mr Rapke’s cross-examination was courteous and leisurely. He pointed out that Dr Steinfort was not only an expert witness for the defence but also Farquharson’s treating doctor: that he ‘had Farquharson’s interests at heart’. With the delicate scalpel of a literary critic, he worked his way through Steinfort’s clinical notes on his consultations with Farquharson. He stressed from every possible angle that cough syncope is diagnosed on history, and that if the patient’s truthfulness is in doubt then the diagnosis cannot be trusted. Then he shone a glaring light on Farquharson’s account of his coughing fit at work, witnessed by his supervisor Susan Bateson—an account that for Steinfort’s benefit Farquharson had exaggerated, giving him to understand that in Bateson’s office he had blacked out. Yet Bateson herself, before this court, had stated that he had sat down, recovered at once, and worked the rest of his shift. Rapke piled up the contradictions between this embroidery of the facts and the testimony of other witnesses to whom Farquharson had clearly stated that he had never before passed out from coughing. He got Steinfort to agree, in a rather small voice, that in Farquharson he might have been ‘dealing with a man who was not a reliable historian’. He did the maths and presented Steinfort with the fact that, for all his claims to broad experience, only an incredibly small percentage of his patients—lower than .008 per cent—had cough syncope without underlying lung disease. And surely, he suggested, a loving father would not drive his children down the highway at night if he really was suffering from an untreated condition that made him liable to black out without warning.

  Listening to this suavely reasoned dismantling was giving me a pain in the stomach. Morrissey objected to what he called an ‘oppressive cross-examination’, but Steinfort stayed calm. He was an excellent witness, steady and thoughtful. His manner, when he restated his firm belief that Farquharson had experienced an attack of cough syncope, was undefensive, even humble. I remembered the greengrocer slumped across his steering wheel on the freeway. What if, despite everything, Dr Steinfort was right?