This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

by Helen Garner

  Anglo-Saxon? Surely the name Farquharson could only be Scottish. Then it dawned on me. Anglo-Saxon is code for stiff upper lip. An Anglo-Saxon bloke might well appear emotionally repressed at a time of great trauma.

  Morrissey complimented the jury on their deep knowledge of the case. They were now equipped, he said, to understand details that the ignorant newspaper reader out there would find ‘a bit funny’—the car’s ignition and headlights being turned off, Farquharson leaving the dam and going to his wife. In a clever rhetorical move he praised the police for the ‘hardness’, the ‘toughness’ of their interview with Farquharson. They were experienced officers. They had brought psychological pressure of a perfectly legitimate kind to bear on Farquharson. The defence was glad they had pushed him, because look at the answers he so honestly and cooperatively provided! Those answers had completely undermined the case against him—and now the Crown was stuck with them.

  Marital separations are always difficult but, as separations go, he said, the Farquharsons’ was ‘the least aggressive and nasty ever on record’. Cindy Gambino, though she had lost her love for her husband and left him, was ‘magnificent at all times’. Never once did she use the kids against him.

  He brushed aside the import of depression. To distinguish Farquharson’s sadness at his mother’s death in 2002 from the genesis of blacker moods, he called sentimentally upon the jurors’ own experience of family loss: ‘Everyone’s got a mum and all of those mums are going to die one day. And anyone who’s lost a mum knows that it will be a sad day when it happens.’

  Thus Morrissey drained the darkness from the background of the story. All its mythic shadows were dispelled. He airbrushed out Farquharson’s anguish and humiliation, his wounded jealousy, his angry fear that he would be ousted as a father by Stephen Moules. Farquharson’s sadness was real, sure—but it was the sort of sadness that Avanza could help with. Everybody around him saw that he was coming good. The man with real mental problems was that tormented soul Greg King, who at the behest of the police had so appallingly manipulated and betrayed his friend.

  Time and again, to describe what he called the Crown’s ‘theories’ as distinct from the defence’s ‘facts’, Morrissey used the word weird. This weird, nasty theory that Farquharson could have pre-planned the crash—it was ludicrous, ‘a crock’. All Farquharson’s actions with his boys implied a future. Two nights before Father’s Day, at the footy awards, didn’t King see Farquharson cuddling little Bailey in his arms? This doomed baby he was supposedly going to drown in a dam? And Mr Rapke’s horrible picture of the children fighting for breath in an air pocket as the car sank? It was a fantasy. There were no air bubbles. The rear window popped out. That car went down like a stone.

  As for Professor Naughton, the Crown’s medical expert—he was so ignorant of the reality of cough syncope that it was incredible he had ever been called as a witness! In a sinister macho voice Morrissey mocked the Crown’s claim that Farquharson was in a seething rage about getting ‘the shit car’: ‘A man can only take so much. Now I am going to murder three children.’ The threat that Greg King heard Farquharson make, in the ‘innocuous’ fish-and-chip-shop conversation, he parodied in a gangster snarl: ‘No one does that to me and gets away with it.’ The investigation on the night was a farce. He pilloried the Major Collision officers by adopting a Mr Plod the Policeman voice when he quoted them or summarised their evidence. Acting Sergeant Urquhart was Buzz Lightyear, a nice sort of bloke who had no idea. Sergeant Peters had lied through his teeth. There was absolutely no evidence of conscious steering. Indeed, there was every chance that ten-year-old Jai might have grabbed the wheel—he was a responsible, alert kid, capable of reacting to a crisis by trying to help.

  The Crown case was ‘a fairy story—the myth of the bad daddy who killed his kids’. It was ‘glib, glib, glib’. Farquharson was not some monster. He was not an iceman, not a brooding, angry, rage-filled person at all. He was a traumatised Anglo-Saxon guy. He was just—Rob. He had been dealt a hard hit. The time had come to find him not guilty—to let him go on with whatever life he had.

  I scanned the jury. They were wide awake, sharp-eyed and concentrating, but their faces were blank. Louise studied them too. She scrawled on my notebook, ‘I don’t think this is working.’

  In the lobby, when court rose, I pushed open the door of the ladies’ toilets and found Farquharson’s sisters in there with the younger women of their party, crowding together at the hand basins and the mirror. Someone was saying, ‘He was a prince.’ ‘Yes,’ said Carmen tartly, ‘but princes can turn into frogs, you know.’ They all burst out laughing. I ducked behind them into a cubicle, and waited there while they merrily refreshed their make-up and bouffed up their hair. I wished I could stand close to them. They sounded so confident. Were they cracking hardy, working to keep each other’s spirits up, or was I the one with the wrong end of the stick?

  …

  Late that afternoon my old barrister friend and I met on the steps of Parliament House, and spent an hour drinking gin and tonic in the Regency-striped armchairs of the lounge at the Windsor Hotel.

  ‘You’ve heard the closing addresses,’ he said, neatly arranging his feet in their polished brogues. ‘Which way would you jump?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What if there’s doubt, but only a cigarette paper thick? Is that reasonable?’

  He closed his eyes. ‘What kind of answer’s that, woman? This is real life. Hard decisions have to be made.’

  I drank in glum silence. Why did lawyers always make me feel so stupid? I wanted to ask him about gut feeling. I knew he would say it had no place in a court. But what was it? Wasn’t it really a kind of semi-conscious reasoning, shaped by the many weeks of evidence? A lightning-fast, instinctual matching up of the phenomenon in question against every similar one you had ever come across, in all your life’s dealings with other people?

  …

  Everyone could see that the jurors liked Justice Cummins. He had a way of acknowledging their fear, and soothing it. Whenever he spoke directly to them, their weary faces would soften. Even the usually expressionless men would turn to him, smiling, like students of a teacher who had earned their trust. Their duty, now, was to deliberate on the facts of the case and arrive at a verdict; but first the judge would give them careful instructions about the law as it applied to the facts. This address is called the charge, and it is the part of a trial most vulnerable to the critical eye of the Court of Appeal.

  Cummins launched his charge on the final Monday morning. He spoke with energetic expression, moving and swaying on his throne-like chair, leaning forward, rearing back. He inhabited rhetorically, one by one, the conflicting testimonies, the competing submissions the jury had heard over the long weeks of the trial. Once or twice he had to pause, as if to control emotion.

  Soon Louise nudged me. ‘Look at Rapke.’ The prosecutor’s glasses were folded on the table in front of him and his cheek rested on a hand that threatened to go limp and drop his head among his papers with a crash. As we watched, he settled back into his leather swivel chair with his chin tucked into his collar and his starched white jabot poking up in a curve, and sank into a frank slumber. His junior, Amanda Forrester, swung to him, to whisper a comment. She froze, then quietly turned away. Soon she too closed her eyes and sat with head on hand, her face in repose
younger and sweeter.

  Cindy Gambino sat between her parents. Since the last time I had talked with them at the coffee cart, Bob and Bev Gambino had faded further into their quiet country selves, coming and going with a nod or a smile. I admired their reserve, their composure. What did they hope for in secret? How deep did it run, their fidelity to their daughter’s support of her ex-husband, in the bereavement they all shared? Farquharson listened keenly to the judge’s long address. At the mention of his son’s names he flinched, and his jaw swelled with stifled tears. At times he would pull an angry face, or jerk about indignantly in his chair. Meanwhile, Gambino sat in the shelter of her parents. She leaned her elbows on the rail and held a white hanky to her nose and mouth, as if her tears would never stop leaking. At painful moments of the story her face went into spasm and she put her hands over her eyes. Finally the three Gambinos got up and discreetly left the court.

  At every break, Farquharson’s family would throng into the paved courtyard, chattering and smoking, bringing take-away coffee and standing about in the patches of sunlight that narrowed as the day dragged on and shadows formed in the colonnaded corners. The journalists politely left the open spaces to them, and clustered murmuring in more remote spots. The girl from the Herald Sun, in her little black ballet slippers, opined that the verdict would come fast, and would be not guilty. A cold shudder ran through me: oh, wait! I haven’t worked it all out yet, and I don’t know how I’m going to! I shifted away from her certainty, and hid in an alcove pretending to read a magazine. When I looked up, the others had gone back in. I ran across the flagstones in my soft-soled shoes, past a woman standing near the only bench still flooded with afternoon light. It was Farquharson’s sister, Carmen Ross. Her weary husband, slumped on the bench with his arms folded on his chest, had fallen asleep in the remaining warmth. She stood facing him, watching over his rest. She raised one hand against the sun, to cast a small patch of shade on to his bare, greying head. He did not stir. As I crept by, she put out a forefinger and delicately touched his brow.

  …

  At the end of the second day, when Justice Cummins had concluded his charge and painstakingly fine-tuned it, the jury of fourteen was whittled back to the requisite dozen by means of a random ballot. The judge’s associate drew numbers out of a wooden box: two of the women were liberated. The judge expressed his regrets to them, but they hardly bothered to conceal their elation. In its final configuration, the group looked compact, business-like—a twelve-person outfit, stripped back and ready to rock.

  How terrible it must be for counsel to see the jurors’ backs as they retire. Morrissey’s lips were white. Seven weeks of struggle, and now these twelve strangers of unknown sympathies and reasoning power would take the reins.

  ‘The wait for the verdict,’ said Justice Cummins gently to Farquharson, who sprang to his feet, ‘is the hardest part of the trial. I suggest you try to bear up.’

  Farquharson nodded to him, courteous and present. For the first time I saw him as he might have been in ordinary life, at work, at school. It touched me. Again I felt shocked, as if this response were somehow illegitimate.

  …

  All Thursday we waited.

  Families and journalists drifted around the echoing corridors, staying well within call. Carmen Ross sat at the long table in the hall and laid out games of patience. Another woman worked quietly at her crochet. The word among the journalists now was acquittal, though no one could quite articulate a reason. I was glad that nobody asked for my opinion. The responsibility of making a decision seemed beyond me.

  Mid-morning the sun came over the roof of the building and we headed for the fresh air. But a door burst open on the other side of the courtyard and disgorged a bunch of people in bright casual clothes, dressed for spring. It was the jury. The frowning tipstaff shouted to us, ‘You can’t come through here!’ We withdrew to the corridor and gazed at them through the glass-paned door. They milled about in the sun, laughing, shifting from foot to foot like guests at a barbecue. Many of them were smoking. They seemed cheerful, and free. They did not look like people who might be about to send a man to prison for the rest of his life.

  Halfway through the afternoon a passing man called to us over his shoulder, ‘They’ve sent out some dry-cleaning.’

  The day ended without result.

  On the train home I texted my scornful barrister friend. ‘The jury were laughing. What’s that mean?’

  He replied at once. ‘Their laughing is unnerving. But in the end their decision is a purely rational one, devoid of sympathy and emotion. Rather like solving a maths problem. At least so they are told by the judge. And that is how it should be. In other words, the decision is made without ANY consideration of the consequences for Farquharson.’

  ‘Big ask.’

  ‘In no other way can I explain the levity of which you speak.’

  …

  On the Friday I took to the courtyard some unfinished knitting, an old green scarf, and tried to get it moving again. My hands were sweating and my tension was uneven, but it helped to have something to do. The journalists drew together, looking each other in the face more openly. There was a comradeliness. They shared food, brought each other coffees without being asked. Someone reported that Rapke was not here: it was the festival of Simchat Torah; he had to go to shul. We kicked the Farquharson story this way and that. Had Rapke made a big enough hole in the defence’s medical evidence? Would the jury give a shit about the mistakes in the yellow paint marks? We wondered about Farquharson’s mother, what kind of woman she had been, whether it was the loss of her presence alone that made Cindy Gambino call that house ‘the morgue’. Strange hours, with no end in sight, analysing and speculating in the sun, feeling our hearts beat faster than usual.

  Just after two o’clock, one of the Herald-Sun journalists beckoned wildly from across the courtyard. We ran down the hall in a pack and jostled into our seats. Morrissey forged in. He went straight to Farquharson in the dock, and high-fived him. Police officers slid into the pew behind the bar table. People we knew and others we had never seen before sat tightly crammed, upstairs and down. The judge strode to the bench. We bowed. He said, in a low voice, ‘I urge people, whichever way the verdict goes, to try to contain their emotion.’ A sickening hush. The jury entered. Their faces were grey. One woman was squeezing a fistful of soaked tissues. Another had a hand over her eyes. The foreman worked his mouth, chewing the insides of his cheeks.

  Each dead child was named and the charge of murder read. At the first ‘guilty’, Cindy Gambino let out a piercing, animal wail. Guilty. Guilty. Court officers rushed to her aid. Beside her a pale face swayed and dropped: her mother had fainted. Bev’s sons carried her to the door. The court swarmed with people turning and gasping and pressing. Screams and sobs echoed in its high white ceilings. Farquharson must have been whisked away to the cells: the dock was empty. In the uproar, Morrissey turned towards the media seats and faced us in silence. He stood like a beaten warrior, feet together, shoulders stooping, hands clasped in front of his genitals. His face was chalk, and on it was a tiny, rigid smile.

  The judge cleared the court. The tipstaff pushed the journalists out the door. In the courtyard, paramedics trundled Bev Gambino past us on a gurney, flat on her back, her face a greenish white. Gambino was already in an ambulance. K
erri Huntington crouched on a bench, elbows on her thighs, smoking hard and staring up at the crowd with loathing. I veered close to her and muttered a clumsy word. She scorched me with a look. In a corner of the yard, beside the men from Major Collision, Amanda Forrester fumbled for a cigarette. The cops, in their paratroopers’ loose pants and heavy black boots, were a study in self-command. If they were triumphant they declined to show it. But Forrester’s vivid, white-toothed face, gushing smoke, shone with a fiercely suppressed satisfaction. A man behind me said, ‘What a courageous jury!’ A prosecutor I knew squeezed past. He too was restraining jubilation, but he said to me, ‘You don’t know how much shit we cop, as prosecutors. Having to cut a path through all that lying.’

  The journalists were reluctant to part. ‘Oh,’ they cried, ‘that was the worst I’ve seen. It doesn’t get any worse than that.’ They hugged each other and rushed away. One of the young women was six months pregnant; her face had turned yellow, and she stood still with one hand pressed against her belly. The boy who was covering his first murder trial touched my arm and stared at me, white-eyed, unable to speak.

  At my elbow Louise the gap-year girl had been observing the pandemonium with her customary dry reserve, though her cheeks were faintly flushed. ‘I’m out of here,’ she said.

  ‘What? You’re leaving?’

  ‘Text you later.’ She hugged me, slid into the crowd and vanished. She knew when she had had enough.

  I found the veteran journalist, and put out my hand to say goodbye. My face must have been a sight, burning red. She looked at me hard, with an ironic smile.

  ‘You didn’t see this coming, did you. You’re shocked, aren’t you.’