This House of Grief

by Helen Garner

  CHAPTER 11

  The defence had one last arrow in its quiver: a social worker and grief counsellor from Geelong named Gregory Roberts.

  As it happens, a close friend of mine worked for years as a grief counsellor at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. She is a subtle and serious person, and the things she told me about her work made it clear to me that she and her colleagues performed an essential and deeply humane service. But Roberts, said Morrissey, was apparently something more than an intelligent comforter. He would testify that Farquharson’s unnatural-seeming conduct after he got out of the dam, his bizarre responses to the calamity, lay ‘within the normal grief/trauma reactions of a suddenly bereaved parent’.

  The only witnesses who are permitted to express opinion before a jury are people acknowledged to be experts in their field. Before the jury entered the court that morning, and before Gregory Roberts was called, Justice Cummins questioned Morrissey on Roberts’ formal qualifications. They seemed, he said, rather sparse for an expert witness. What gave him more authority than an ordinary member of the community?

  An ordinary person might find it surprising, argued Morrissey, that Farquharson had left the dam, declined an offer of help and kept asking people for cigarettes. An ordinary person might well be…put off by Farquharson’s insistence on being taken straight to his ex-wife. But Roberts, it seemed, had a breadth of experience with people in the grip of sudden bereavement, and he had two concepts—‘traumatic grief ’ and ‘hyper-focus’—that would sweep these odd behaviours back into the fold of the normal. ‘Traumatic grief ’ was a relatively recent concept, and only very limited research had been done on it, yet it was already listed as a diagnosable condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual–IV.

  Justice Cummins looked askance. He allowed Morrissey to call Mr Roberts, but excluded a second grief counsellor, Leona Daniel, an older woman who had been summoned to Farquharson’s bed in Geelong Emergency at 10 p.m. on the night of the crash. Daniel had observed his terrible distress and done her best to console him.

  ‘The prosecution,’ said the judge, ‘has never suggested that your client hasn’t exhibited grief. What is said is that he killed his children. He’s not charged with not crying.’

  Farquharson listened, his face darkening. He did not enjoy hearing his psychological state discussed. He looked older; his hair was longer, and turning grey. From time to time he would glance at his family with a crooked frown of indignation.

  In came Roberts, a small, fragile-looking man with the bird-like head and dark, trimmed beard of a Renaissance courtier. He worked, he said, for Hope Bereavement Care, as well as SIDS and Kids in Geelong, a service that offered support for anyone affected by the sudden and unexpected death of a child. When Morrissey used the phrase ‘bereaved fathers’, Kerri Huntington began silently to cry, wiping her eyes with her fingertips. Her sister Carmen went pale and wept, and Farquharson himself pulled out his hanky, blinking and blinking, his mouth upside down. In full view of the sisters, one of the journalists folded her newspaper into a pad and started on a crossword.

  Four days after the boys died in the dam, Gregory Roberts had been called to give support to Farquharson. Morrissey would ask the counsellor, now, to work his way through the events of the fatal night, starting with Farquharson’s escape from the dam and ending at the police interview in Emergency. Roberts would name and interpret each stage in the language of ‘traumatic grief ’, the emerging field in which he was researching his PhD.

  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 suici
de 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 responses 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 fu
ll 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.