This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

by Helen Garner

  ‘Yes. I’m shocked.’

  She drew me away from the others. ‘When I first came into court today,’ she said, ‘I was filled with wave after wave of rage. You see this is what these men do. This is the most appalling, savage, cruel revenge a man can take on a woman—to make out it was all her fault.’

  From the train home I sent Louise an over-emotional text: ‘Don’t be alone today after what we just saw.’

  She made no reply. I felt foolish, but not surprised. I saw that unlike Morrissey, unlike me, she was a person with sturdy boundaries. I tried to imagine what she would have said, had she answered. Probably something philosophical. Something hard-nosed, in Latin. Dura lex sed lex. The law is hard, but it is the law.

  That night, at bedtime, I found the unfinished green wool scarf on the floor where I had dropped my bag. I picked it up and saw that, when the call for the verdict had come, I had stopped halfway along a row. It occurred to me to preserve in some way the moment of decision. I marked it with one red stitch. Then I knitted to the end of the row, and cast off.

  CHAPTER 12

  After the high-pitched drama of the verdict, the plea hearing three weeks later, on 26 October 2007, was quiet and slow. The air in the court seemed thick, almost gluey. Mr Rapke argued that a crime so cruel, by a man who showed no remorse, could be fitly punished only by three life sentences with no chance of parole. Remorse, replied Mr Morrissey, could hardly be expected from a man who had pleaded not guilty and still maintained his innocence. Justice Cummins listened patiently to the submissions, but the heart had gone out of the thing. Every word spoken rang with a weary, perfunctory note.

  Then Carmen Ross—a registered nurse, we now heard, who worked in aged care—took the stand to sketch the life story of her wretched brother. A sweet-faced figure in a white embroidered blouse, dark pants and a large, practical watch, she was clearly the matriarch of the family, and she spoke with authority, twisting a small white hanky in her hands. Rob was the youngest of four, she began, and he was born three months premature.

  Twelve weeks early, forty years ago. Doted on, coddled. Was this the missing piece?

  He was a treasured baby, she said: lucky to survive, fragile, overprotected, smaller than he should have been. He had trouble with his eyesight. He was not robust, not smart, but a battler; not much good at school, but a struggler. He grew up to be a ‘quiet, patient person’, a team-player in sport. With a smiling affection that at times almost tipped over into tears or laughter, she painted a picture of a faithful, decent, hard-working man, passionately devoted to his children. ‘I like him,’ she said, ‘as a person.’ All the while Kerri Huntington sat grim-faced, a hard block of introverted rage and pain.

  …

  On the evening of 28 October 2007, between the plea hearing and the sentencing, Cindy Gambino appeared on 60 Minutes. I taped the program. It was a riveting and complex piece of television, and in the years that followed, I watched it many times.

  Gambino sits in an armchair in a living room, wearing a pretty rose-pink blouse and stroking a framed photograph of her children. Her interlocutor, a young man, seems awe-struck in the presence of a woman so bereaved; and indeed there is something majestic in Gambino’s demeanour, the slow flood of her tears, her sighs and stubborn refusals, the long pauses she allows to fall while she considers her replies.

  ‘Most parents who’ve never lost a child,’ she says, ‘can’t fathom the thought of it. They get to a certain point in their thoughts and they just go, “Nuh. Not goin’ there.”’

  ‘What she can’t fathom, can’t accept,’ declares the interviewer in voice-over, ‘is the truth: Robert Farquharson, the man she married, the father of their children, is a convicted killer, and is now in gaol.’

  ‘This is too incomprehensible,’ says Gambino. She starts to cry. ‘I can’t believe that this person would hate me that much to want to murder his own children, who he worshipped the ground they walked on. I don’t believe that…He loved me. I know he loved me.’

  The interviewer risks it: ‘Did you love him?’

  Complex expressions flitter across Gambino’s face. She comes up at last with a pellet of popular wisdom. ‘I think there’s a difference between love and being in love. I loved him, but I was never truly in love.’

  A few seconds from a wedding video: against the sun-yellow interior walls of a country church, the newlyweds peel away from the altar and parade arm-in-arm down the aisle. A beaming Gambino glides like a princess in full fig, head high, her veil flowing back from a Russian-style coronet. Alongside her scurries Farquharson in a dark suit and mullet, round-shouldered, unsmiling, a little tame bear.

  We see home videos of the three boys playing together in a bath. They blow out birthday candles, crawl among wrapping paper on Christmas morning. In a labour ward Gambino holds out to the camera the newborn Bailey, a wobbly, cloth-wrapped parcel that she handles with consummate authority. In these unstaged moments she is simply a young mother: her face, without make-up, shows the fragility of a woman fresh from an encounter with the numinous, her cheeks scoured, her skin pearly with fatigue.

  ‘After fourteen years together,’ intones the voice-over, ‘they separated.’

  Gambino quotes herself: ‘I don’t love you, and I can’t do this any more.’

  ‘How did Rob take it?’

  ‘He took it hard. He felt like he’d walked away with nothing. He basically took his pillow, and a television, and his clothes, and went back to his father’s house. He was devastated, of course.’

  The program gives a careful version of the transition. ‘Just as Cindy was breaking up with Robert, another man came into her life—Stephen Moules. He was a concreter who met the couple while working at their house. He became confidant to a miserable Robert, but at the same time he was falling in love with Cindy.’

  Fair-haired Moules, looking younger and finer-featured than he had in court, describes his attempts to ‘counsel’ the troubled couple; but once Cindy made it ‘blatantly clear’ that she didn’t want the marriage any more, and when he saw that Farquharson wasn’t prepared to put in ‘the correct efforts’ to put it back together, Moules ‘saw it as a lose–lose situation’.

  In the blue-tinted 60 Minutes re-creation of the events at the dam, Moules is a furious hero. While Farquharson in his blanket begs him for a cigarette, Moules curses him, strips off, and begins to dive.

  ‘He nearly died,’ says Gambino to camera, ‘just doing what he did.’

  ‘Very brave, what you did,’ says the round-eyed interviewer to Moules. ‘Very brave.’

  Impassive Moules deflects the praise. ‘That word would be a lot more justified if I had’ve found them…I know if I was in that situation, I believe if my children weren’t here today, I wouldn’t be here today, ’cause if I couldn’t save them, I’d huddle around them’—he makes an eloquent gathering gesture—‘and I’d say, “Well, we’re goin’ together, kids. And that’s all there is to it.”’

  ‘When the verdict came,’ says the interviewer to Gambino, ‘you wailed.’

  Her tears begin to flow. ‘I wailed ’cause—’

  ‘For Robert or for the kids? What?’

  ‘Both—the honour of my children. I don’t want my children to be remembered
as “those three little Farquharson boys murdered by their father”…That’s not honouring my children. I wailed because it was not the verdict I wanted.’

  ‘How do you want the world to see him?’

  A long, hard-working silence. The tears stream down her polished cheeks. In a curious, graceful movement she places her hands palm to palm across her chin. She tips her head to one side with a sob and a strained smile, and murmurs, ‘Free?’

  ‘Cindy,’ says the interviewer sternly. ‘All the evidence that was presented in the court—that the ignition was off, the lights were off, that Rob was in control of the car as it left the road—’

  She shakes her head. ‘Means nothing to me.’

  ‘A jury of twelve unanimously found him guilty.’

  ‘Means nothing. They don’t know Rob. They don’t know him from a bar of soap.’

  ‘In your mind,’ says the interviewer, with the ponderous solemnity for which the program is famous, ‘did he do it?’

  She tips up her chin, lets her heavy eyelids droop. ‘No,’ she says, very softly.

  ‘He’s innocent?’

  She pauses. Something like a shadow brushes her face, and is gone. ‘I believe he is.’ Her voice is barely more than a whisper. ‘I believe this is a tragic accident.’

  …

  Gambino did not come to court on 16 November 2007, the day Farquharson was sentenced. His family and supporters arrived in force, with large badges pinned to their lapels: ROBBED, they read, and IN ROB WE TRUST. But no sooner had Justice Cummins begun to read from his slender document—‘You had a burning resentment…You formed a dark contemplation’—than the people with the badges got to their feet and marched out of the court in a body, leaving Farquharson forlorn in the dock. His hair was greyer and his cheeks thinner. He looked pale, even ill. As he listened to the judge’s harsh telling of his story, and to the fierce moral condemnations it laid down, he made grimaces of the kind one would see on a teenage boy being called to account in front of the class: he threw himself back in his chair, flexed his eyebrows ironically, shook his head, blew out air between pressed lips. At the phrase ‘no remorse’ he let his jaw drop and his mouth hang wide open. His responses were so inadequate to the gravity of the situation that it hurt to look at him.

  And in the end, the sentence wiped all expression from his face. There was no mercy. Three life terms, one for each dead boy, and no parole.

  In the deep, shocked silence, a young man rose in his seat at the back of the court and started a slow clap. He had beaten his palms together no more than three times before the big tipstaff was on him and hustling him out through the glass-paned door.

  The court was stood down. People got to their feet and moved in two dense streams towards the outside world. Dazed, I stayed in my seat. All I could think of was the fact that Robert Farquharson would never again get behind the wheel of a car.

  Late that evening a text came from my old barrister friend. ‘Too much,’ he wrote. ‘It will not survive appellate scrutiny.’

  …

  Presuming upon our friendly encounters at the coffee cart, I sent a letter to Bob and Bev Gambino. I asked them if they would introduce me to their daughter, so that I could request an interview. In the most delicate way Bev gave me to understand that this was out of the question. But she said that she and Bob would always be glad to see me if I was ever down Birregurra way.

  I wrote to Carmen Ross and Kerri Huntington, asking if they might be prepared to speak to me. Carmen Ross declined in a firm but gracious card. The Farquharson family, she wrote, was putting all its energies and efforts towards the appeal process and the welfare of their brother. When Rob was found to be an innocent father who had had a tragic accident, they might perhaps consider my offer.

  An email came from Louise. ‘I saw Justice Cummins having a coffee up in Bourke Street, and Carmen Ross in Degraves Street. I may or may not have violently blushed. I felt a strange rush of guilt for even existing. It was the same awe and fascination I had in court, like they’re very sacred and mysterious people.’

  …

  A month or so later, driving home from Anglesea, I took the inland route through Birregurra. Bob and Bev welcomed me warmly and sat me down at the kitchen table for a toasted sandwich and a cup of tea. I stayed an hour or two. We talked of this and that. Their discretion was faultless. Nobody cried. Sometimes we laughed. They would not let me leave without a bag of silver beet and potatoes from their garden.

  ‘We don’t work out there much any more,’ said Bev. ‘Jai and Tyler used to help us with the mowing and the digging. It’s just too painful without them.’

  Bob told me that on the day of their grandsons’ funeral in Winchelsea, twenty-five kilometres from Birregurra, three white doves were released into the sky. Days later, a tired and bedraggled white bird flew into their yard and took refuge under the eaves of their back veranda. They fed it. It was there for a fortnight. One morning they went outside and it was gone.

  CHAPTER 13

  On 1 April 2008 I heard that Farquharson had lodged an appeal against his conviction. I picked up the phone and called Mr Morrissey. He was in a fluster, halfway through another trial, but boomed in his matey, rackety voice that he had come up with fifty-one grounds. The judge had definitely made errors in his charge to the jury. Plus, what about the violent brawl Greg King had got into, at a Winchelsea pub, in the December before Rob’s trial? This would have reflected on King’s credibility as a witness—but the coppers had delayed charging him for ten months, until the Farquharson trial was over. I mean come on, ten months’ delay in hearing a pub brawl? And by the way, who was that really clever-looking fair-haired girl who sat beside me at the trial? Gap year! She was smarter than the whole bloody jury put together. If she ever wanted to do work experience she should give his office a call.

  …

  A pub brawl in Winchelsea? That peaceful village full of law-abiding citizens? Eventually I saw the charge sheet. After a ‘heated discussion’, in the presence of wives and children celebrating Christmas Eve, two men set upon two others, and half a dozen more joined in. It sounded like the sort of free-for-all where blokes run across pool tables to get amongst it. The investigating police officer observed that the assault followed a series of earlier incidents between two feuding groups of locals, in which the victim had played no part. He was not known to his assailants; his mistake, while he consumed ‘approximately five cans of Jack Daniels and Coke’, was to be seen talking to the wrong man at the bar. He was punched and headbutted, even after he had run from the building. ‘It would appear,’ wrote the police officer fastidiously, ‘that a pack mentality prevailed.’ Under the heading ‘Reasons’, one of the arrested assailants told police that he had been trying to find his thong. Another said ‘I just jumped on top.’ Greg King, charged with having punched the victim in the stomach, said, ‘I did the wrong thing.’

  King had no prior convictions. When he came before a Geelong magistrate on a charge of unlawful assault on 20 November 2007, a few days after Farquharson got his life sentence, the police handed up a letter recognising his cooperation in the Farquharson case. The magistrate, declaring that this letter had had no effect on his decision, sent King home with a twelve-month good behaviour bond and a $750 fine.

  …<
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  Cindy Gambino was by now a public figure. During 2008 and 2009 I followed her fortunes at a distance. She drifted through Woman’s Day and New Idea, dull-eyed and overweight, helplessly acting out her grief. Her interviews were reported in the tabloid language that can reduce the purest human anguish to a pulp.

  Any woman could see that in her stubborn refusal to condemn Farquharson she was fighting to hold back an avalanche of misplaced guilt that no mother would survive. The people who loved her must have had to tiptoe around her, muffle their own emotions, cradle her in her protective delusion. How long could she hold out?

  I understood now what her mother, Bev, had told me outside court one day—an image that at the time had seemed to me topsy-turvy: ‘You’ve got this mask all over you. You get up. You drive to work. You take the mask off and do what’s expected of you. Then you drive home and on the way the mask comes back, so you can handle everything that’s happening there.’

  But the cracks in Gambino’s carapace were beginning to show.

  As long as she clung to her belief that the crash had been an accident, she could not claim Victims of Crime compensation. She lodged, and settled for an undisclosed sum, a damages claim against the Transport Accident Commission for severe psychiatric injury. Then she turned to Farquharson’s assets. These amounted to a mere $66,000, but on 14 May 2009, in a Supreme Court decision, Justice Cummins ordered him, under the Sentencing Act, to pay her $225,000 in compensation for her pain and suffering.

  …

  On 1 June 2009 I climbed the steep stairs from Lonsdale Street to the old Court of Appeal. In the vestibule Mr Morrissey smiled at me. His big face was waxen.

  ‘You must be very tired,’ I said.

  He made a wordless sound and closed his eyes.

  ‘Are you in despair?’