This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

by Helen Garner

  Getting out of the dam, said Roberts, the person would be disoriented. There would be elements of shock, a high level of fear. His adrenal levels would be rising. The fight mode would be his efforts to get the children out of the car. When that was unsuccessful, the flight mode would have kicked in—he would seek to flee.

  Though Rapke had shot down the phrase, Morrissey resurrected it: what did it mean that witnesses described him as ‘a babbling mess’?

  That would be the effect of disorientation, especially when one remembers that he had been unconscious. When your adrenalin is surging, you don’t make a lot of sense. Even if you are able to give information, you can come across as robotic and emotionless. Workers experienced in this field, said the grief counsellor, do not find it at all strange for a person to make the blunt statement ‘I’ve just killed my kids’. It is part of the surrender mode, even though the reality of the statement might not have quite hit home.

  His obsession with being taken to Cindy?

  When a child dies in the presence of only one parent, said Roberts, regardless of whether the parents are together or separated, there is very strong urge to contact the other parent. People in trauma often suffer from information overload. They can become what’s called hyper-focused. Very single-minded. They disregard any other information that is put to them. Trained people know that in such a situation someone has to take charge—to acknowledge what the hyper-focused person is saying, but guide him firmly towards what really needs to be done. Shane Atkinson and Tony McClelland, the two young men who stopped for Farquharson on the road, could not have been expected to know this. They succumbed to his hyper-focused demands.

  The fact that Farquharson refused their offers to dive down after the car, and would not use their phone to call 000?

  Farquharson’s system was already overloaded. He was unable to absorb or even register any extra inputs. By the time they had taken him to Cindy, when he appeared to her to be delirious, he had entered what was called in the literature the outcry phase. Some of the reality of what had happened was starting to become apparent. The presence of Cindy, ‘a key attachment figure’, was likely to bring up more emotion.

  Farquharson’s failure to join in the rescue attempts at the dam showed that he was already quite exhausted. Adrenalin levels do not stay high for long. He had moved into dissociation, a state in which he started to block out what had happened, to become detached, and to step back.

  His repeated demands for cigarettes, so enraging to the other men at the scene?

  Trauma experts know that under stress the body craves stimulants. This is not rational or conscious. It is a physiological fact, and Roberts had witnessed it many times.

  How was it that Farquharson had been seen in tears by two civilian witnesses, while various police officers, particularly the two who had interviewed him in Emergency, had been taken aback by his lack of distress?

  This, too, was standard—well within the typical range of trauma and grief. Most civilians faced with a police officer, paramedic or doctor (figures Morrissey called men in uniform) will fall into a very respectful way of talking; and people dealing with an overload of information tend to resort to behaviours already ingrained in them. Plus, in a state of ‘traumatic grief ’, and in what Roberts further called ‘complicated grief ’, people go emotionally numb. Their moods fluctuate. There is a shrinkage in their ability to think rationally: a condition called ‘cognitive constriction’. Things they do can seem illogical to observers.

  …

  This testimony filled me with scepticism, yet I longed to be persuaded by it—to be relieved of the sick horror that overcame me whenever I thought of Farquharson at the dam, the weirdness of his demeanour, the way it violated what I believed or hoped was the vital link of loving duty between men and their children. And, as I listened, the phantom of failed suicide shimmered once more into view. Nobody in this whole five-week ordeal had yet said anything that could lay it to rest.

  …

  Perhaps Morrissey had warned his witness that the judge had been reluctant to acknowledge him as an expert in anything, for Roberts’ analyses were offered in the faintly piqued tone of someone whose amour-propre has been stung. When Rapke got to his feet, he did not temper the wind to the shorn lamb. Before the blast of his cross-examination, the witness’s spine seemed to ripple and his head to bob and tilt on the slim stalk of his neck.

  Yes, Roberts was aware that Farquharson had a history of depression and that he had been taking anti-depressants for a time. Roberts’ impression was that the Farquharson marriage break-up had been ‘amicable’, and that their focus had been on the welfare and happiness of the children. Farquharson, he said, showed no animosity at all towards his former wife. Yes, Roberts had heard the allegation that Farquharson had made threats to kill his children in revenge against Gambino, but he had not taken this into consideration, because his opinion was ‘around traumatic grief ’, a condition that he had noted in Farquharson from their first contact. He had made no presumption of guilt or innocence.

  It soon came to light that since 9 September 2005, Roberts, in his role as grief counsellor, had seen Farquharson, weekly or fortnightly, seventy times.

  ‘Did you say seventy?’ asked Rapke.

  The judge leaned forward on both elbows: ‘Seven oh?’

  Yes.

  ‘In those seventy counselling sessions,’ said Rapke, ‘you, for the purpose of requiring him to confront what had happened and deal with his grief and his bereavement and his “traumatic” grief and his “complicated” grief, had him talk about the events of the night?’

  Well, no, said Roberts. If Farquharson had gone into detail, he would have steered the conversation away from it—in fact, he would have brought it to a halt. From the beginning he had had instructions from the victim liaison people in Victoria Police that his brief was to focus on grief and bereavement. He was to avoid any in-depth conversation about what had happened on the night.

  In the wry silence of the court somebody clicked her tongue. A thought-bubble floated above the jurors’ heads: ‘What the hell did you talk about?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Rapke, pressing forward. ‘What did he tell you he did on the night?’

  ‘He told me he was driving home from Geelong, had a coughing fit and blacked out. He woke up, found himself in the dam. He tried to save the children several times. He got out of the dam, flagged down a car, got to Cindy, went back to the dam, then found himself in Geelong Hospital.’

  ‘What did he tell you he did, to try and save the children?’

  ‘Again, I would have stopped the conversation if it went into detail. But he said he made several attempts to save the children. It involved diving down.’

  ‘Did he tell you that he tried to get the boys together?’

  ‘No. I heard that on the taped interview with the police.’

  ‘He’s suggesting,’ said Rapke drily, ‘that as part of his rescue attempts he tried somehow to marshal the boys in the car for the purpose of getting them out?’

  ‘It appeared to be, yes.’

  The journalists slid their eyes sideways in expressionless faces.

  Rapke bounded on. Would Roberts expect Farquharson’s respon
ses to trauma on the night to have been the same, whether he had killed his children deliberately or by accident?

  In a person who had done such a thing on purpose, said Roberts, yes, the same trauma reactions would have been expected, but that person would also have shown more agitation, more angry outbursts, more allocating of blame to others—and perhaps a complete flight from the scene.

  And what about the fact that at no stage did Farquharson ask what had happened to his children? If they had been found? If they were safe? Had they been rescued? Were they dead? And the fact that all he did ask about was himself? What’s my position? What’s going to happen to me? All that was normal too, was it?

  It was.

  The jury sat rigid. Nobody breathed.

  Rapke spread his fingertips on the bar table. ‘I have to ask you this question, Mr Roberts, and I hope you’ll forgive me—but has there been any event in your life which has made you particularly empathetic towards Mr Farquharson?’

  Roberts’ head wavered on his thin neck. ‘No.’

  Rapke raised his chin, squinted his eyes, and said in a low, polite, clear voice, ‘Have you lost a child?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Rapke, and sat down.

  Morrissey let the ghastly pause stretch out and out.

  ‘No questions arising, Your Honour,’ he said at last.

  The defence case was over.

  While the court’s attention swung to the judge, Roberts crouched down in the witness box to gather up his things. He walked out, holding his head high, a wounded, discarded, yet suddenly dignified figure.

  …

  ‘How’d you like that last question?’ shouted Morrissey at the journalists, as we filed out for lunch. I did not hear anybody answer.

  Louise and I darted across Lonsdale Street.

  ‘God,’ she said, ‘that was brutal.’

  ‘Yeah, but the guy had obviously taken everything Farquharson told him at face value. Rapke had to blow that open, surely?’

  ‘Couldn’t he have asked him, “Was there anything you saw in his post-offence conduct that struck you as indicative of innocence?”’

  ‘Oh, come on! They can’t ask a witness that, can they?’

  But we were shaken. Rapke, our hovering falcon, had swooped into the muck with the rest, and savagely drawn blood.

  From the queue at the coffee cart we saw Kerri Huntington walking down the Supreme Court steps with Gregory Roberts. Surely, I thought, a counsellor has to do more than feel empathy for a client and teach him ‘techniques’. Doesn’t a counsellor have to take it up to him? Tackle him right where he lives? Even across four lanes of traffic and a row of parked cars, we could see him nodding, the placating tilt of his small, fine head.

  …

  The ideal closing address, I imagine, is a brilliantly condensed recapitulation of the trial, a sparkling argument with a spin that clears the jurors’ heads and engages their hearts.

  For that, you have to watch TV.

  In this court, the exhausted jurors sat in their box for four more days, some still dutifully taking notes, while first Rapke, then Morrissey, ran a précis of the evidence past them.

  Rapke addressed the jurors quietly, as if he considered them his intellectual equals. He proposed two possible views of the matter, both classed as murder: first, that the killings were the product of a sudden, aberrant impulse, perhaps triggered by a psychological disturbance and exacerbated by Farquharson’s despair, anger, frustration and loneliness; and second, that they were the culmination of a desire and a plot, hatched months earlier, to take revenge on the wife who had rejected him.

  He laid out the evidence in categories, with a level efficiency. He gave full weight to Farquharson’s anger, his humiliation and depression after the breakdown of his marriage, but then turned them to his own purpose: the darkening of the accused man’s thinking. He pointed out the lack of fit between Farquharson’s differing accounts of the events to different people, his calculated embroideries with their wonky hems and ragged edges.

  He made the excruciating suggestion that, while Farquharson was refusing offers of help from the two young men on the road, his children might still have been fighting to unbuckle their seatbelts in the sinking car, surviving for brief moments in an air lock. At this, Farquharson covered his face with his handkerchief and sobbed.

  Rapke read out passages from the Homicide interview. Even in the barrister’s unhistrionic rendition, Farquharson sounded flustered, hollow, terribly evasive and woolly. He kept glancing across the court at his sisters. He shook his head. He scowled. Kerri Huntington’s sharp profile, under the fleece of curls, remained attentive and still.

  But not even Rapke, with his sinewy syntax and his steel core of logic, could inject adrenalin into the most soporific material of all: the engineering evidence, the physics of the way the car had left the bitumen and gone into the dam. It had been worked to death. While he reasserted with vigorous clarity the propriety and competence of the Major Collision investigation, the jury sagged and flagged. Some of them blatantly yawned, as did Morrissey once or twice, leaning back in his leather chair.

  During the summary of the medical evidence, a dark-haired young juror in the front row of the box rested her head, in a posture of unendurable fatigue, on the shoulder of the woman beside her. Just when I thought she had fallen asleep, she roused herself, and exchanged a tiny private smile with the other woman. It shocked me. They looked like people who no longer needed to put on a show of concentrating, people who had already made up their minds.

  But when Rapke turned to the testimony of Farquharson’s mate Greg King, when he defended that witness’s integrity, his mental stability and his motives, the whole jury snapped back to life. Plainly they cared about King, or, at the very least, found in him a crucial strand of the story. Rapke took apart the material in King’s secretly recorded conversations; he guided the jury through the escalating urgency of Farquharson’s utterances with a psychological sophistication that made the heart quail.

  And when he surged into the final curve of his argument—the sheer statistical improbability of the defence version of events—the jury sat engrossed. What were the odds, asked Rapke, that a man without lung disease would suffer an attack of cough syncope, this condition so rare and so unprovable? That a paroxysm would overcome him at the one spot, on that thirty-seven-kilometre journey, where a car could leave the highway, slip neatly past the end of the guard rail, and travel across almost flat terrain into one of the only two dams in the immediate area? Then, that a car with an unconscious driver could miraculously maintain a steady arc, flatten without changing course a fence strong enough to rip its front panel, and swerve to clip a tree? And most extraordinary of all, ladies and gentlemen, what were the odds that these things could happen to a man who, only two months earlier, had confided in his mate that he had dreamed of having an accident that involved a dam?

  …

  Next morning I was sitting in the front row of the media seats when Farquharson was brought past me into the dock. He glanced up. Our eyes met. Startled, I smiled. He tried to return the greeting, but managed only a teeth-baring grimace that did not reach his eyes. I rem
embered the day at the Geelong committal hearing, a year earlier, when he had held open the heavy court door for me. The smile he had offered me that day was awkward and shy. Now he was a man accustomed to being stared at, and sketched by court artists, and hustled along in handcuffs. I was shocked to catch myself thinking: You poor bastard. Was there something about him that called up the maternal in women, our tendency to cosset, to infantilise? Perhaps he had made use of this all his life. Or perhaps he was trapped in it, helplessly addicted to being coddled. A tough American public defender I know, a woman, on first hearing the charges against Farquharson, had said to me, ‘If I was appearing for him, I’d try to make his family see that loving him doesn’t mean they have to believe he’s innocent.’ As he shuffled past me into the dock and sat down with a guard on either side, a wild thought came to me. What if he could turn to his sisters, right here in front of everybody, and shout to them across the court, ‘Okay. I did it. Now can you love me?’

  …

  While the Crown in its closing had taken a dry, intellectual approach, the defence lunged straight for the heart. For two whole days, with his back to the press seats, Morrissey yarned to the jury in his warm, matey way, like a man buttonholing a stranger in a pub. Throughout this loosely constructed address, Farquharson gripped a big blue hanky in his hand. At direct mentions of his boys he covered his distorted face with it, and shed bitter tears.

  A benign light bathed the world that Morrissey conjured up: Winchelsea, a sun-splashed hamlet whose residents were focused on family and work, on sport, on the schooling of their kids. It was a nice community, populated by decent, law-abiding folk who loved their children and shared an attitude of respect for authority. Sometimes ‘a circle of pals’ drank together quietly in one of the town’s few pubs, or at a makeshift bar in a neighbour’s back shed. Farquharson, he said, was one such Winchelsea bloke—‘an Anglo-Saxon country-town man’.