COURTS

A judge threw out the evidence against Carol Matthey, accused of killing four of her children, this week. But changes to the law mean a case such as this may never happen again in Victoria.
IT WAS a long death notice about a short life. Written as a letter from a mother to her three-year-old daughter, Shania Jayne, it said the child had “passed away peacefully at home” on April 9, 2003.
“Ni, my precious little baby princess, we have been through so much pain and heartache over the past five years, and then it gets worse when you decide to go at only 31/2 years. How could you leave us like this, baby?
“Now, like ‘Spirit’ ” – Shania’s favourite toy horse – “you are free to go and take care of your brothers and sister . . .
“No one will ever understand the pain I am feeling inside. I miss you so much. I don’t know if I can survive without my ‘Barbie girl’ . . . I will never forget all the fun things we used to do together. Just like you, they will remain in my heart forever. Sleep sweet Nia. Love now and forever – Mummy.”
“Mummy” was Carol Louise Matthey, of Geelong. Shania was to “look after” her brothers and sister because they had gone ahead of her – Shania was Matthey’s fourth child to die in five years. Shania’s death was not “peaceful” for long. It led to a media outcry. An exhaustive three-year police investigation led to four charges of murder against Carol Matthey. She always denied she had ever harmed her children, but the Crown claimed she smothered them one by one in attempts to bolster her troubled marriage.
That case burst like a balloon this week, with the pin wielded by Supreme Court Justice John Coldrey. In a 94-page pre-trial judgement, Coldrey threw out most of the proposed evidence against Matthey, saying it was inadmissible in court. Matthey, 27, walked away smiling – and free. The case leaves many legacies: a raft of changes to the law; a review of protocols for police called to infant deaths; and greater public awareness of the discomfiting fact that, while science can put man on the moon, it cannot always tell the difference between babies who die naturally and those who are deliberately smothered.
Investigating police first looked for natural causes that might link the deaths. Detective Sergeant Sol Solomon talked to more than 160 witnesses trying to find an explanation. Cardiac testing of Carol Matthey and her husband Stephen found no defects. Solomon spent six months just investigating the possibility that a genetic problem could have killed them. He flew to the US and had DNA tests done on blood samples from the whole family at one of the world’s leading genetic laboratories. A renowned cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic was also consulted. This all drew a blank too. What did add up for police was evidence that painted Carol Matthey as a young woman struggling in a deeply unhappy marriage who felt ambivalent about, and sometimes hostile towards, her children.
The Crown claimed the first sign of her allegedly “violent relationship” with her children was a fire that began in a child’s bedroom one night in 1998, when Matthey was the only adult in the house. Matthey had also been the only adult present when each of the children died, and when the children previously suffered ALTEs – apparent life-threatening events. Two experts reviewing the evidence strongly argued it pointed to homicide.
Four pathologists from the Victorian Institute for Forensic Medicine just as strongly disagreed. Institute director Professor Stephen Cordner warned against relying on circumstantial evidence. He said the facts were also “perfectly compatible with natural causes of death”.
Defence lawyers at Matthey’s committal argued the children might have shared a congenital defect from a metabolic or cardiac condition that was either difficult to diagnose, or as yet unknown. SIDS has been called “a diagnostic dustbin” and “a diagnosis in search of a disease”. It is given as the cause of death for babies when no other cause can be found. It is believed to cover many unknown disorders, but it can also be applied inadvertently to criminal deaths. One expert witness at the committal estimated between five and 15 per cent of SIDS cases were homicides. A British study by controversial pathologist Sir Roy Meadows described 42 cases of homicide that were misdiagnosed as SIDS.
In Britain, the “three strikes and you’re out” principle has been applied: one infant death was tragic, two were suspicious and three had to be investigated as murder. But international expert Professor Roger Byard of Adelaide University, who gave evidence in a high-profile British case in which a mother’s conviction for killing her two children was overturned, this week told The Age that unusual inherited diseases must always be explored as a possibility. He points to a US case in which a mother was suspected of having poisoned her two babies with anti-freeze. Only after exhaustive testing was it discovered that the children had died from a rare metabolic disorder.
While there are promising developments in the search to differentiate the causes of SIDS, Byard says the syndrome will continue to be a grey area. “Sure, you have concerns, but if you don’t have hard evidence, what do you do?”
You think twice about whether to proceed, according to Justice Coldrey. He threw out most of the Matthey evidence because he thought it unfairly prejudicial to the accused; because it did not prove what the prosecution argued that it proved; or because it involved experts drawing conclusions that were outside their expertise or that were not supported by the facts. He wrote: “The rarity of the phenomenon of four unexpected and seemingly unexplained deaths in one family cannot, of itself, provide a cause of death.” As for the fact that Matthey had been alone with the children during ALTEs and deaths – this was not remarkable given that she was their primary carer, Coldrey wrote. And, while prosecution witnesses might argue that ALTEs are a marker for homicide, the defence could argue they were signs of an underlying disorder.
The known record for mysterious child deaths in one family is nine, Byard says, and involved an American mother who moved interstate several times, which meant her family’s problems were not picked up by health authorities.
Victoria is less likely now to experience a case like that of the Matthey family. In what has become known informally as “the Matthey amendment”, in 2004 former premier Steve Bracks changed the law to make the death of a second or subsequent child in any family reportable to the coroner, who can then refer the matter to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine for investigation. The new laws over-ride privacy rules and allow agencies, protective services, doctors and hospitals to talk to each other and share information. Previously, it was possible for one organisation or professional to have one part of a family’s story, and for others to know other important facts, without anyone being in a position to put the puzzle together.
Matthey’s lawyer, Paul Lacava, SC, told The Age this week that no individual had “won” in the Matthey case. He said: “The only winner is the justice system itself. There was a thorough investigation and an exhaustive brief of evidence. There was a strong and independent judge, a strong and independent Office of Public Prosecutions, and a good system of legal aid. When it’s all said and done, the system has worked.”
Karen Kissane is law and justice editor. SIDS and Kids bereavement helpline: 1300 308 307

First published in The Age.

Farquharson maintains innocence

ROBERT Farquharson should spend the rest of his life in jail for murdering his three sons as revenge against his former wife, prosecutor Jeremy Rapke, QC, has told the Supreme Court.
Children trusted their parents to protect them from harm and love them, not use them in a shabby act of retribution, he said yesterday. “Mr Farquharson is to be sentenced as much for the monumental act of betrayal that the murder of his three children represents as for the loss of their young lives.”
Mr Rapke said Farquharson should receive three life sentences with no minimum term.
Farquharson, 38, of Winchelsea, was convicted of murdering his sons by deliberately driving his car into a dam on Father’s Day, 2005. Jai, 10, Tyler, 7, and Bailey, 2, all drowned. Farquharson pleaded not guilty, claiming he had a coughing fit, blacked out and found himself in the car in the water. He said he tried to save the children but failed.
The prosecution alleged that his motive was to punish the children’s mother, Cindy Gambino. Farquharson resented that she had left him, taken up with another man, kept the better car and created financial difficulties for him.
Mr Rapke said the children were not so young that they would have been immune from “fear, shock, feelings of abandonment and plain terror in the last few moments of their lives. We shall not dwell on the scene that must have played out in the car as it sank below the surface of the dam and slowly filled with water…Where was the father of these three children as they fought for their lives? He swam for his life, made (according to him) some desultory attempts to save his children, and thereafter actively discouraged rescue attempts from brave strangers and others who were prepared to dive into the icy water to try to save the children…A father does not abandon his children like that.”
Mr Rapke said Farquharson showed no remorse and had contemplated killing the children in this way off and on for months.
Defence counsel Peter Morrissey told Justice Philip Cummins that Farquharson maintained his innocence. Mr Morrissey said there was no remorse because he had pleaded not guilty. Therefore no psychological or psychiatric evidence would be called in mitigation of the offence. He asked the judge not to impose a life sentence or, if he did, to set a minimum term.
Mr Morrissey asked the judge to consider Farquharson’s previous good character, his history as a loving, attentive father, his excellent prospects for rehabilitation and his grief over the loss of his children.
Farquharson’s older sister Carmen Ross told the court that on anniversaries of the boys’ deaths she would drive him to the cemetery where he would “cry at times for his boys”.
He will be sentenced on November 16.

First published in The Age.

Carol Matthey, accused of killing her four small children, free after judge rules prosecution evidence inadmissible

CAROL Matthey entered the Supreme Court yesterday charged with murdering her four small children, one by one, over five years.
Police said she deliberately suffocated them, partly in order to sustain her troubled relationship with her husband, Stephen Matthey, the children’s father.
But yesterday, the criminal case against Mrs Matthey, who has always denied she harmed her children, collapsed.
Fifteen minutes after she arrived, Mrs Matthey left the court free, cheerfully accepting congratulations. In an extraordinary end to one of the most dramatic cases in Victorian legal history, prosecutors dropped the charges because much of the evidence gathered against her was ruled inadmissible.
A case that involved a three-year police investigation, thousands of pages of statements and 160 witnesses – and a case that dominated four years of Carol Matthey’s life – was suddenly over before it reached trial.
After she left the court, Mrs Matthey walked along William Street smiling, declining to answer reporters’ questions until this one: “Are you not guilty, Carol?”
“No,” she said firmly.
The reporter pointed out the double negative and asked for clarification. Did she mean she was innocent? “Yes,” she said, chuckling, amused at the misunderstanding. Then she walked off the public stage and into the rest of her life.
The Supreme Court case against Mrs Matthey ended as a result of pre-trial hearings before Justice John Coldrey. In a complex 94-page judgement on October 12, he found most of the proposed evidence inadmissible under the law.
The defence applied for the prosecution to drop the case on the basis there was no reasonable prospect of conviction. Prosecutor Ray Elston, SC, yesterday announced the case would not proceed.
In legal terms, this is not an acquittal. A defendant against whom charges are withdrawn is not protected by double jeopardy and, theoretically, faces the prospect of another trial if new evidence emerges.
Mrs Matthey, 27, of Geelong, lost four children between 1998 and 2003. Jacob was seven months old, Chloe nine weeks old, Joshua three months and Shania three years and four months.
At her committal hearing in March 2006, Mrs Matthey’s defence argued there was no physical evidence of harm done to any of the children. Her lawyers said it was possible the children shared an as-yet-undiscovered gene that caused a medical condition, such as a fatal cardiac arrhythmia, that led to their deaths.
Police yesterday declined to comment. The acting director of public prosecutions, Jeremy Rapke, QC, said the case was irreparably damaged when the judge deemed inadmissible much of the medical evidence.
Initially, Jacob and Chloe Matthey were found to have died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and Joshua of klebsiella septicaemia.
A police investigation began after the death of Shania, who was too old to have died of SIDS, and for whom no cause of death could be found.
At the committal hearing, experts acknowledged SIDS was a “diagnosis of exclusion” – the cause of death used for babies when no other cause can be found. They said there were often no forensic clues that would differentiate natural SIDS from deliberate suffocation.
This left much of the expert medical evidence at the committal heated and contradictory. Four local forensic pathologists strongly argued the autopsies revealed no scientific evidence of harm to any of the children.
But a pediatrician from South Australia who specialised in SIDS, Dr Susan Beal, and a forensic pediatric pathologist from the US, Dr Janice Ophoven, were equally vehement homicide was the most likely explanation.
They argued that “scientific” evidence included the lack of risk factors for SIDS in some of the children; the rarity of four such deaths in one family; the troubled marriage; and the fact that the children had experienced “ALTEs” – apparent life-threatening episodes in which they stopped breathing or were found unconscious.
Dr Beal said: “ALTEs are not a predictor for SIDS; they’re a predictor for (homicide).”
Justice Coldrey ruled out most of the evidence of these two witnesses.
The conflict between the experts meant the Crown case relied on other evidence, such as Mrs Matthey’s relationship with her husband and children.
Justice Coldrey said the Crown had submitted that, particularly at times of ALTEs or deaths among the children, the marriage was under severe strain.
“Moreover, it is asserted that the relationship of Mrs Matthey to her children, evinced by unwanted and unplanned pregnancies, mediocre parenting and indifference to their deaths, would enable a jury to infer they were the unfortunate pawns in this strategy to bolster her marital situation,” he wrote.
Justice Coldrey found there was no discernible link between the timing of marital crises and the ALTEs or the deaths: “There is no foundation for the contention that the killings were designed to win back Stephen Matthey’s love and affection.”
While there was evidence of poor mothering, the judge wrote, other reports painted a picture of a woman “who was a concerned, caring and loving mother during the children’s lives, and a distressed and grieving one when they died”.
Mrs Matthey’s lawyer, Paul Lacava, SC, said there were no winners in the case.
“Mrs Matthey and her husband have lost their children and their sadness is profound and ongoing.
“The only winner is the justice system itself.”
JACOB MATTHEY
3-5-98 to 8-12-98
Found by his mother lying in his cot and not breathing.
Autopsy result: Died from SIDS.
CHLOE 4-9-2000 to 27-11-2000
Found by her mother in her cot not breathing.
Autopsy result: Died from SIDS.
JOSHUA 30-5-2002 to 10-7-2002
Found by his mother limp and not breathing in his pram in a shopping centre car park, while being treated for an ear infection.
Autopsy result: Died from klebsiella septicemia.
SHANIA 18-11-99 to 9-4-2003
Ambulance called the night before her death by her mother, who said Shania had stopped breathing after she fell off a coffee table. When paramedics arrived, they found Shania breathing and conscious. Next morning, her mother found her in bed not breathing.
Autopsy result: cause of death “unascertained”.

First published in The Age.

CINDY Gambino has told a women’s magazine she refuses to believe that her former husband, Robert Farquharson, deliberately killed their three sons, and she lives for her new baby.
Ms Gambino said Farquharson was a kind, loving father whose conviction for murder was a travesty of justice. “It’s been trial by media all along, and I think it bears the same hallmarks as the infamous Lindy Chamberlain case.”
Cindy Gambino’s father, Bob Gambino, and Woman’s Day magazine yesterday declined to comment on whether she had been paid for her story. It takes up three pages and features photographs of Ms Gambino with her fiance, Stephen Moules, and their one-year-old son Hezekiah, whose name means “God gives strength”.
The report claimed Ms Gambino wept as she said: “I feel locked in time between heaven and earth, knowing I’ve two angels here, in Hezekiah and Stephen, when all I want to do is join my three angels in heaven.
“It’s painful looking at my new baby, who needs my love and protection, and knowing he’s the reason I get up each day. Without him, I’d have willed myself to death a long time ago.”
Ms Gambino lost her three sons – Jai, 10, Tyler, 7 and Bailey, 2 – on Father’s Day 2005. Farquharson, her separated husband, was driving the boys back to their home town of Winchelsea after an access visit.
The three boys drowned when the car went off the road and into a dam. Farquharson escaped but the three boys drowned. Farquharson told police he had had a coughing fit, blacked out and woke to find himself chest deep in water.
The prosecution at his trial argued that he had told a friend that he planned the killings, and the fact that the ignition and the headlights were turned off, supported his guilt. A Supreme Court jury convicted Farquharson of three counts of murder. He will appeal against the convictions.
Ms Gambino told the magazine that she and Mr Moules had faced financial ruin: burying the boys had cost $21,000, and Mr Moules’ business collapsed as he stopped work to care for her. He and Ms Gambino are now both in counselling.
She said: “You never get over losing a child, but losing three is incomprehensible. The real tragedy is that Hezekiah will never know the fun-loving mum my other children knew . . . because I can never be that person again.”
Farquharson’s plea hearing is scheduled on Friday.

First published in The Age.

The tragic story of a Winchelsea family culminates in a man being found guilty of murdering his three sons.

When Shane Atkinson saw the man acting strangely on the highway, he did think of death. The man leapt on to the road waving his arms; he had already caused one car to swerve past him. Atkinson’s first thought was that he was looking at an attempted suicide.

Atkinson swerved too and then braked hard and pulled over. Atkinson was a young man, then 22, and his girlfriend had only that day come home from hospital with their new baby. He was driving from his home in Winchelsea to return to her side at a family barbecue in East Geelong. This was a day for celebrating his child and tending to the little details that keep a family ticking over.

But he was also primed for a sympathetic response. “My brother had just killed himself a couple of months prior to that and I thought that this bloke was trying to kill himself,” he would explain later.

It was dark, about 7.30 on a Sunday evening in early September; Father’s Day, 2005. Not a day for imagining that three small children might be drowned in a car at the bottom of a dam. Not a day for that kind of encounter with death.

Atkinson ran down the road – the Princes Highway, east of Winchelsea – as the man ran towards him. “What the f— are you doing standing on the side of the road?” Atkinson cried. “Are you trying to kill yourself, mate?”

The man was swearing: “Oh no! F—! What have I done? What’s happened?”

Atkinson and the friend travelling in the car with him, Tony McClelland, tried to talk to the man but could get no sense out of him until his babble took a new turn: “He just kept on saying he’s killed his kids, he has to go home and tell Cindy he’s killed his kids, and he just kept saying, ‘F—, what have I done?”‘

The man said he had had a coughing fit and blacked out; maybe he had “done a wheel bearing” – somehow, his car had ended up in a dam. He said he found himself in water up to his chest. He seemed to be panicky and to have trouble catching his breath.

Atkinson was perplexed. He wondered whether the man had Down syndrome. He didn’t believe the local dams were deep enough to swallow a car. The man couldn’t even tell him which of two nearby dams he was talking about. Atkinson looked over at the nearest one, just visible in the darkness: “The water looked like glass, like nothing even had happened there.”

Atkinson finally said, “Well, I’m not going anywhere if you’ve just killed your kids. Do you want to ring the ambulance or the police?”

Atkinson would later say that he kept pushing his mobile phone towards the man and asking him to use it. The man refused: “He wouldn’t. He just kept on saying that he wanted to go back to (his former wife) Cindy’s . . . He just wanted to tell Cindy before he called the police or before anyone else had known.”

The two young men offered to jump into the dam to look for the children. “He just said, ‘No, don’t go down there, it’s too late. I will just have to go back and tell Cindy.’ That’s all he kept on saying. He said it probably 100 times.”

In the end, Atkinson agreed to drive the man back to Winchelsea. In doing that, he would later say in court, visibly distressed, “I done the stupidest thing of my whole life.”

As he reached town, he turned on the car’s interior light: “The penny dropped and I reckoned I’d known him. He used to do all the lawn mowing around Winch when I was a little feller . . . Robert Farquharson.”

Behind them, at the bottom of that now-tranquil dam, they had left Farquharson’s three sons.

Jai, 10, was the sporty one who loved his footy and cricket and karate. He also loved acting out jokes from the movies – the adult ones that he shouldn’t have understood. He was happy to earn money mowing his Poppy’s lawns but preferred the winnings from the “Tattslotto chair” on his Sunday visits to his grandparents’ house, where he would raid his grandfather’s armchair for the change that had fallen from his pockets. Jai was travelling in the front of the car and would be found face-down across the seats, part-way out of the driver’s door.

Tyler, 7, had his mother’s grin and loved hot dogs and mud cakes and his grandma’s vegie soup, strained. His mother said of him, “Have food, will travel”. He was a joker too, best known for his cross-eyed faces and the plastic dog poo he hid in his grandfather’s bed. He was found lying on the driver’s side of the back of the car. His head was near the door and his legs were between the two front seats, with his knees resting on the centre console.

Bailey, 2, called the family dog “Woofy” and the family cat “Puss”. The cockatiel was simply “my bird” and would sit on his shoulder while he fed it cereal. Bailey was old enough to protest against anything he didn’t like with “This is quack, mum!” When told that was naughty, he would play his strongest card: “But me just a baby, Mum!”

Bailey, tangled in the straps of a child seat on the rear passenger side, would now always be a baby.

This was the sort of tragedy that made parents hold their children close. It was also the sort of tragedy that made people wonder. What had happened that night? Was Robert Farquharson a loving father struck down by the dreadful mischance of a moment – or a man with ice in his veins who drowned his three children like a litter of unwanted kittens?

CINDY GAMBINO saw her three boys alive for the last time when she dropped them over to their dad at about three o’clock that Sunday afternoon. She had ended the marriage 10 months earlier and Farquharson had moved back in with his father.

She stayed while Farquharson opened the boys’ presents. Jai had forgotten one of his, a back scratcher he had bought at the Father’s Day stall at his primary school, so they were going to bring that another time.

She said goodbye: “I gave them a cuddle, and Bailey said, ‘I love you, Mum.”‘

The boys wanted to have tea with their dad because they figured it would mean KFC. They were right. Farquharson took them to K-Mart in Geelong, where he bought a cricket ball for Jai and videos for Tyler and Bailey. Then they went for fried chicken, sitting outside in the car for a while because Bailey was asleep, and for a visit to their uncle in Mount Moriac. It was on the Princes Highway, on the way back to Winchelsea from that visit, that the car went off the road.

Police later estimated that the car turned right at an angle of about 30 degrees. It crossed over into the wrong lane, went into a wire fence, travelled on through long grass, clipped a tree – and went into the dam.

Gambino had spent the afternoon with her new partner, Stephen Moules. This night, she was alone in her house with Moules’ son, nine-year-old Zach, because Zach wanted to see her boys. Gambino was just closing the curtains against the darkness when she saw a car pull in to her driveway about 7.35pm. She thought, “Here they are now.”

But it was not her boys. It was Atkinson and McClelland with her husband. He was wet and hysterical. She would later tell the court, “He kept saying ‘The kids are in the car and they’re in the water’ . . . but at the same time he was not knowing where the car was or where it had gone, or he couldn’t say it.”

Gambino rang Moules and screamed, “The boys are in the water! Meet me on the highway!” Then she bundled Farquharson and Zach into her car while Atkinson drove back into town to raise the alarm.

At one point Gambino looked at the speedometer and found “I was doing 145 kilometres an hour. Zach started getting upset, saying, ‘Cindy, you’re frightening me. Can you slow down?’

“And I said, ‘I’ve got to get to the kids! I’ve got to get to the kids!’

“And I kept saying to Rob, ‘Where? Where? Where?’ and he said, ‘Keep going. Keep going.”‘

She kept going.

BY THE TIME he arrived at the home of Cindy Gambino, Shane Atkinson was already upset with himself over his decision to drive back into town. “I knew I shouldn’t have even left the – the scene,” he would say later, stumbling over what word to use to name what he had left behind.

He left Gambino’s house to get help. But Winchelsea is a small country town of only 1200 people, and this was a Sunday night. There was no one on duty at the local police station. Atkinson pressed an intercom outside the station that put him through to police in Geelong. “The lady kept talking. I didn’t have time for that.”

He abandoned her to race around to the local sergeant’s house but he was not at home. He ran back on to the street and a local woman gave him a phone. Finally, he was able to raise the alarm. He called the ambulance and the fire brigade and fetched a man up the road whom he knew to be in the State Emergency Service, along with other locals.

Someone set off the siren at the rural fire brigade and men rolled up to be told they were needed at a motor vehicle accident. Country people rely on each other in a crisis. Four men set out for the dam in the brigade’s pumper.

Atkinson drove three men back to Gambino’s house to pick up Farquharson. No one was home so he drove back to the dam. The boys’ parents were already there.

GAMBINO finally pulled over at an overpass near the dam. “We couldn’t see the dam, it was so dark, we couldn’t see anything. Rob tried to comfort me at one point, and I pushed him away. By that time, Stephen was on the scene.”

Farquharson asked Moules for a cigarette. Moules, furious, said, “‘What! Where are your kids. Get out of my face before I kill you! Where are your kids?”‘

Gambino later recalled that at some stage Farquharson had said that he had a coughing fit and could not stop. He told her that when he woke up, “I thought we were in a ditch. I told the kids to wait there.” In court, when she retold this story, her voice became more fragile as she said, “It wasn’t a ditch.”

At the side of the dam, Moules stripped off his jacket and boots and began diving for the children. Gambino, hysterical by this time, had trouble finding the numbers on her phone to call her parents and triple 0. She ran up and down in the long grass with the phone to her ear as the emergency operator tried to get a grip on what she was saying.

Moules had already called his parents and their car arrived. A local CFA man, who was one of the first on the scene, heard Gambino screaming that she couldn’t bury her children.

Others came in a jumble – the fire brigade, ambulances, the State Emergency Service truck, police cars; lights, noise, people. So many people, so much activity, and all of it too late.

Moules kept diving. The water was so icy that he could only stay in for five minutes at a time. He had no idea where to look and took guidance from local men on the bank: “I remember they were saying things like, ‘I think I can see bubbles there’ or ‘I think I can see movement there’, and each and every time I would come out, I would go back in where they would point.”

Eventually one of the young men guiding Moules yelled, “Come on mate, get out or you’ll be next!” Moules left the water, shivering, overwhelmed with cold. Two men put their arms around him to warm him up.

Two other men secured only by rope also lowered themselves into the water in a vain attempt at rescue. The police helicopter thundered overhead, directing its spotlight on to the water.

Amid all this frantic activity was an island of stillness. Gambino cannot remember much from that time but she does remember sitting in the front seat of Moules’ parents’ car and seeing Farquharson. “Rob was standing in front of the car with his arms crossed . . . There was no movement, no nothing . . . He wasn’t doing anything. He was just like in a trance.”

Gambino was at the scene for about an hour. While she was in the Moules’ car, a paramedic walked up to her.

“How long has it been?” she asked.

He told her it was 40 minutes since he had arrived.

“What are their chances?”

“Very slim.”

Eventually, Gambino’s brother came to take her away. Later that night, he called a doctor for her. The doctor drove her slowly through gathering fog to the local hospital. She remembers the journey seemed to take forever. She remembers she had wet socks. When she arrived in the emergency ward, Cindy Gambino was sedated against the horror of it all.

THE FINDING of the car and the children would fall to a woman, Rebecca Caskey, a senior constable of police and a professional diver with the search and rescue squad.

She arrived at the dam at 9.45pm. Her first task was to help work out where the car had gone into the dam. It was hard; the night was dark, and they were working by torchlight. But police noticed the broken housing of a car mirror and broken twigs on a tree near the edge of the dam. They decided Caskey should start close to that edge and work out.

Caskey worked in a team. Another officer was her attendant; he stood on the bank holding her lifeline and directed the search. Caskey would tell the court, “I am the monkey on the end of the rope, if you like; I just go where he tells me.”

She entered the black water at 10.35pm. Black water is water with zero visibility, and this water was also cold – 10.1 degrees. Caskey dived to the bottom and searched in the darkness by feel alone. She swept in an arc: her attendant would let out her lifeline and she would go from one side to another while keeping it tight. Once she cleared a sweep, he would let her out another arm’s length and she would sweep back the other way. This method systematically covered the search area.

There was no point in taking a torch with her, she said: “Torches don’t work because there’s so much sediment in the actual water itself.” And because the vehicle would have sunk, there was no point in searching higher up in the water: “Ninety-nine per cent of our searching is grovelling around in the mud on the bottom.”

She found some metal and plastic debris and felt she was close. After 23 minutes in the water, she ran into the car – literally. She hit her head on a wheel, causing it to spin. “And then I felt upwards and realised that the underside of the car, I was actually facing that.” The car was vertical in the water with its nose pressed into the mud at the bottom. Caskey swam upwards and felt the tow bar and the exhaust. Then she swam to the surface and signalled that she had found the vehicle. The dam, an irregular rectangle, was 7.4 metres deep at that point.

She dived back in. She had to check the car was stable, for fear it might otherwise fall back on her. She tried to rock the top of the car back and forth. It stayed in position.

There would be no attempt to get the children out now. Too much time had passed. This was not a rescue but a retrieval of bodies and of a potential crime scene. Caskey said that before she went into the water, “A conscious decision was made to make sure the car was sealed and leave everything inside intact.”

Caskey got out again and returned to drop a “data marker” – an empty Coke bottle – before diving back down. She found the driver’s door was open. She felt a small person’s head. She gently pushed it back into the car and shut the door.

Caskey left the water for the last time at 12.35am. The vehicle was winched out of the dam. As it rose into the air and onto the land, water whooshed out of it. The driver’s window was open.

Caskey recalled, “I just had a brief look in the car and saw three children.”

She turned away. She wanted to get changed. She was cold.

JUST AFTER 8pm, Robert Farquharson was standing at the scene wrapped in a blanket. Paramedic David Watson noticed that he was cold and wet. Fearing hypothermia, he took Farquharson into the back of his ambulance, stripped him and towelled him dry, and wrapped him in thermal blankets.

He put Farquharson in a cervical collar – standard practice with any patient involved in a road accident – and listened through a stethoscope to his lungs. There were no wheezes or crackles, and Farquharson was conscious and coherent. He did cough several times.

Farquharson said he blacked out and lost control of his car, which ended up floating in a dam. He said his oldest son opened the car door, causing the car to fill up with water and sink. Concerned by the story of a blackout, Watson gave him an oxygen mask.

Farquharson was taken to Geelong Hospital. At 10pm, lying in emergency bay number one, attended by a nurse and still on oxygen, Farquharson told a fuller version of his story into a tape-recorder held by police Sergeant Rohan Courtis.

“I think I just went over the overpass and – um – I just started coughing and then – um – don’t remember anything and then all of a sudden I was in this water and my son screamed out and he opened up the door and we nosedived and I – I – shut the door on him and I tried to get them out and I tried to get out to help, thinking I’ve only just (gone in) off the road, not realising I was – Tried to get up to the road to get people to . . . help and people just drove past and I don’t know exactly whereabouts it was, and it’s just a big blur, like, you know, everything just happened so – so quick.”

He said that when Jai opened the door, “I just sort of leant across and shut it and I tried to unbuckle them ‘cos they were screaming and I’m trying to get the other two in the back and – ‘cos he done that we must have done a nosedive . . . It’s just a nightmare.”

A second policeman asked him gently, “Do you realise that the children are – are – not made it out of the car?”

“Ah, I gathered that,” Farquharson said.

Farquharson said he got out thinking the water was only “foot deep” and that he could get out, run around to the other side of the car, drag Jai out and then drag the other two out.

He said he went under the water three or four times trying to save the children and then decided it would be better to try to get help.

He said that he and his wife had the normal arguments involved in a marriage break-up but that they both put the children first. He had depression and was in counselling, partly over the death of his mother, but “nothing too overboard in the sense of a troubled person or anything”.

He had been on antibiotics and had had about eight days off work over a throat infection that had left him with a troublesome cough. In the car, “I think the kids were a bit cold so I put the heater on and of course it must have warmed up and I started coughing.”

He vowed his honesty – “That’s exactly as it happened; I mean, I got no reason to lie or anything of that nature” – and painted himself as an ordinary man caught up in circumstance – “I’m a normal average guy just trying to make a living and trying to do the best by my family and look what I’ve done now.” He would have to live with this, he said, for the rest of his life.

Several times, he asked police what would happen to him. “I’ve never been in trouble before, so what’s the scenario for me?” And, “What sort of thing’s going to happen to me now, like?”

Listening to that tape now, it seems notable for what it does not contain. There is no tearfulness or any other overt sound of distress. And there is not a single cough.

While Farquharson was in hospital, police from the major collision squad had been inspecting the site. When Farquharson’s 1989 white Commodore sedan was retrieved, they found the heater, the ignition and the headlights turned off. They were not able to find any physical evidence on the ground that supported Farquharson’s claim of a car out of control.

At a meeting at 8am on Tuesday, major collision police handed the investigation over to homicide.

WHEN Farquharson’s father, Don, opened his door to two homicide detectives at 12.43 that afternoon, his first comment was about the journalists staked outside his house: “The vultures are still out the front.”

“They are,” agreed acting Senior Sergeant Gerard Clanchy.

Clanchy, who looks a little like Paul Newman and has the same kind of blue-eyed charm, would be the “informant” in the case: the policeman who oversees the gathering of all the evidence and who puts together the brief for the prosecution. With him was Senior Constable Andrew Stamper.

Clanchy told the family they wanted Farquharson to come back to the homicide squad offices in St Kilda Road to do a videotaped interview. He quietly resisted repeated requests by Farquharson’s two protective older sisters that they go with them in the police car. The detectives left a card with the address of their destination.

Farquharson was not to know until later that Stamper was wearing a covert recording device. The police secretly taped their conversation with him during the 90-minute car trip to Melbourne. The two officers played warm cop/cool cop. Clanchy spoke rarely and kept his tone impersonal; he was driving. Stamper was chatty and tried to establish a rapport by talking about his own experience as a separated father.

Stamper began by asking after Farquharson’s welfare. Farquharson said he wasn’t feeling very good and had had to ask his sisters what day it was. He was wearing a Holter monitor – a portable ECG device that consisted of an electronic pack on his left hip connected by wires to patches stuck on his chest. This was to check whether he had any heart rhythm problems that might have caused him to black out.

Farquharson’s voice is soft and deep with a broad Australian accent: sometimes he addressed the police as “youse”. From the back seat, he murmured answers to their questions about his marriage; they had just drifted apart, and no, no one else was involved. Not at that stage. There “might be someone” now, but “I – I – I’m not interested.” She had not wanted to get back together, but he had, for the sake of the family: “Everything’s for the kids. They’re the most important.”

The police continued casually to advance and retreat, touching on a sensitive topic and then pulling back into unrelated chat – footy, the price of petrol – but circling, ever more closely circling, his feelings about the marriage break-up and the events of that night.

He protested that he wasn’t going to like all this questioning and insisted he had no reason to lie. Detective Clanchy said, “The boys are owed the truth. The boys, the family, the mother . . . Everybody is . . . Everybody’s got questions.”

“Mm,” said Farquharson.

Later, the police turned to cajoling; to promises that they would understand. Clanchy said, “If something horrible has happened – and I know something horrible has happened – but if you’ve made a really horrible mistake, we’ll understand.”

“No. I’m tellin’ you the truth . . . I’ve got nothing to hide.”

Said Stamper, “It’s important for me to tell you that we’re not going to judge you or anything, OK? . . . We will treat you with the utmost respect.”

Farquharson insisted that he tried everything that night: “I’ve only got two arms and two legs and I’m tryin’ to get myself around three kids and, you know, like people have reassured me, ‘You tried. You tried. You can’t blame yourself for that.’ I’ve always been responsible with my kids. You know, I’d never have a drink and have the kids in the car . . . I love my kids. They were everything to me.”

Cindy Gambino’s family had come to see him afterwards, “Her mum and her dad and her brothers. They were really good. Said they don’t blame me and it was an accident and, you know, ‘You tried’. They know how much I love the kids.”

Much of that night was a blur, he said. He didn’t know whether he could see the water at the front of the car. Or the headlights. He didn’t know when he came to, or whether the driver who picked him up had a phone, or what the driver did to help.

Said Stamper, “A lot of ‘don’t knows’, isn’t it?”

ON TELEVISION, police interview rooms are large and stylishly decorated, with the carefully thrown shadows of Hollywood mood lighting. The reality is grittier and more claustrophobic. Farquharson was led into a small room lit by fluoros. He sat at a narrow brown table. The two policeman faced him from the other side of it. They were close enough to touch.

The video camera that recorded the interview shows the back of Clanchy’s head and focuses on Farquharson’s face and upper body. He is unshaved and has shadows under his eyes. It is less than 48 hours since the car went into the dam.

Farquharson is wearing a lime green adidas T-shirt and the black pack of the Holter monitor. He has a bit of a tummy and his shoulders are narrow and sloping. He would often speak with his head slightly lowered, looking up from under his brows. He gazes at the table top as he retells the story of the coughing fit and the blackout.

He uses his hands rapidly and expressively, touching his chest as he mentions the cough, pulling imaginary straps over his shoulder as he describes how he buckled up the children’s safety seats. He becomes intense at times but his voice stays soft.

Farquharson says he thought the car might be rocking on a ledge and that the water might only be knee-deep on his side of the car. “I thought I might have just went off the road a little bit.” It was very hard to open his door: “We were – we were down.”

Twice, he retells the story of the time in the dam without mentioning diving to try to find the children: he goes straight from failing to get to the other side of the car to thinking it would be best to flag down a driver on the highway.

Clanchy asks why he had wanted to go to Cindy. “To get help. I had no phone, nothing to ring anyone or anything . . . She was probably the first thing – the first person I thought of. I don’t know. I can’t answer that.”

“What you’re saying is your first thought was to tell your wife, not to get help?”

“To get help? Well, I – I don’t know . . .”

He could not recall why the headlights would have been off. He could not recall whether he had done anything with the ignition. Told it was turned off too, he said, “Ho – honestly, I – I don’t know whether I – what happened. I mu – I must have turned the car off or something . . . I can’t recall any of that.”

He says he had had coughing fits before that were strong enough to make him dizzy, but he did not claim to have ever before had a coughing fit in which he had blacked out.

The police tell him investigators had found no evidence of any loss of control of the vehicle.

Clanchy: “Did you drive off the highway deliberately into the dam?”

Farquharson: “No. I did not.”

They talk about his depression. Had he ever thought about hurting himself? A little, at the start of the separation, “but that sort of passes and you realise that – that it’s not really you . . .” He regained perspective after he had counselling, he says.

Clanchy asks him how he feels about the death of the children.

Farquharson says, “Pretty s-house. They were my life, my world. I wouldn’t even go to Queensland for a holiday because they would miss me and I’d miss them . . . That’s why I never went and bothered meeting any other women, because I want my kids for myself . . . Everything I – I did was for them, my whole life. And I – I – ( long pause ) I couldn’t save ’em. Anyone would tell you I love my kids and I’d do anything for them. I always want to protect them. I was overprotective of them. That’s one thing Cindy always told me, ‘You’re overprotective; overprotective’.”

Clanchy: “In what way are you overprotective?”

“If we went somewhere I’m watching ’em like a hawk, you know, make sure they don’t go out the front, ‘cos there could be cars out on the road. Or if they stand up on a slide, you know, I’d be bolting over there ‘Sit down, sit down!”‘…

The police zoom in on the fact that he has not repeated his earlier claim – made in hospital on the night – that he had dived down to look for the children.

Asked about this, he now says he dived down but could do nothing because of “the pressure”. Queried again, he says that’s what the “SIDS lady” who counselled him in hospital had said: “She goes, ‘You wouldn’t have been able to do nothing because of water pressure and everything.”‘

They continue to press him: Did he dive? Did he find the car?

“I’m pretty certain I tried to di – I think I went – yeah, I did go down ‘cos I remember, I think I was swallowing a little bit of water.”

They return to the marriage. He had found breaking up traumatic, he acknowledges: “I used to be the one who’d bath ’em at night and tuck ’em into bed, and I’d wait till they were all asleep and I’d go and tuck ’em back in, you know. So it was hard for me at first but I’ve learned to live with it.”

“Were you jealous of Steve being where you should be?”

“No, because Cindy’s always maintained that ‘You’re their father and that’s it’. She’s got photos of me there with the kids and all that . . . I’ve never been pushed to the side, and I’ve felt like that at times, but they’ll always be mine.”

Questioned about time frames, he told the police the anniversary of his separation was coming up, and in another week or so his divorce was due to be finalised.

Several days after this interview, police received information that led them to contact one of Farquharson’s oldest friends, Gregory King. What he told them increased their suspicions. King agreed to wear a secret recording device in two conversations with Farquharson, a project code-named Operation Podal.

On 14 December, three months after the car went into the dam, police charged Robert Donald William Farquharson with three counts of murder.

FARQUHARSON is a small man. He stands only a little over 150 centimetres tall and is now 38. He has soft brown hair, deep-set brown eyes, and a slight paunch that seemed to shrink over the six weeks of his Supreme Court trial. While talking to relatives in court, he once lifted the waist of his trousers as if to demonstrate their looseness.

During his trial, he wore a worried expression, his eyebrows raised in a way that left his forehead lined with horizontal furrows. It gave him a look of meekness, the air of a little boy lost. He wore the knot of his tie pulled away from his collar, as if its formal embrace choked him. He was often tearful and wiped his nose or his eyes with a large cotton handkerchief.

His former wife, Cindy Gambino, has big brown eyes and an open manner. Her hair is long and glossy but her face is worn and etched with grief.

Sometimes, when listening to the evidence of others, she would sob quietly into her handkerchief and then scrub her face fiercely as if to eradicate all trace of the tears. In court, she and Farquharson exchanged glances and sometimes remarks. In her statement to police after the deaths of the children, she had said, “I believe with all my heart that this was just an accident and that he would not have hurt a hair on their heads. I don’t believe this is murder.”

Gambino barely held herself together as she gave her own evidence. Her face crumpled and her voice wavered and, at times, sank to a whisper. She walked out of the court afterwards at a funereal pace, eyes cast down, like someone walking behind a coffin. When she reached the stone-flagged ante-room outside, she broke into wails that floated back into the hushed courtroom.

The following day would be the second anniversary of the deaths of her children.

This is a marriage and a family that ended in sorrow. They also began in sorrow, and for much of their existence lurched from one trouble to another.

Gambino and Farquharson first became friends in February 1990. She was living in Birregurra, half-way between Winchelsea and Colac, and worked at a supermarket in Winchelsea. He had grown up in Winchelsea, which is 37 kilometres past Geelong, and still lived in his parents’ house there. He was 22 and she was 20. She became pregnant with Jai in January 1994, and the following month they become engaged.

Gambino would tell the court that she had trouble “giving her heart to Rob”. She was preoccupied with the death of an earlier boyfriend who had been killed in an accident. Then, when Jai was born, she developed post-natal depression, which she believed was complicated by her unresolved grief over the other man. She went into counselling.

Farquharson, meanwhile, was restive under the yoke of an employer. He wanted to work for himself. In 1996, he took redundancy from his job at the local shire. A few months later, he bought a Jim’s Mowing business. It went badly and they lost $40,000. He later told police, “I got sick of chasin’ people to pay me.”

He gave up on his dream of independence; Gambino had resented it, anyway, because of the financial hardship it had caused. He took a job as a cleaner at the Cumberland resort in Lorne. They sold their house and used the money to build another. In 2000, they married.

By 2002, they had two children and she wanted a third. She recalled, “Rob was unsure, he didn’t know if he could cope with three children . . . But Rob was pretty much a softie and always gave in to what I wanted.” Bailey was born on New Year’s Eve, 2002.

She also wanted a third house. They did not like the one they were in, Gambino told the court. She wanted to build, while Farquharson wanted an established house. She won: “Like I said, I usually got my own way.”

Others noticed tensions in the relationship even before they got married. Farquharson’s friend Gregory King saw them as “always at each other all the time, just niggling at each other, arguing”. Often the topic was money – “He’d come to me and say that she’s gone and bought this and we can’t afford it” – and there were arguments about the third house they were building: “Cindy always wanted the best of everything in the house.”

Meanwhile, Farquharson had back problems and was depressed over the death of his mother, who had been sick for two years with cancer. “He was always down and out,” Gambino told the court. “I think he grieved for his mum before she died.”‘

Because of her own depression after Jai’s birth, Gambino recognised that her husband’s mood swings and sleeplessness meant he had it now. He resisted at first, saying he was all right. By the time he agreed to accept help, in October 2004, the marriage was over for Gambino.

“You can love someone, but you can also be in love with someone, and I found it hard to be in love with Rob. He was a very secure person, he was a very good provider, but I just found it hard to give myself to him.” He sought help from a GP, who put him on anti-depressants, but Gambino had emotionally moved on: “I guess I was over it before it was over . . . I just didn’t want the marriage any more. I asked him to leave.”

For Farquharson, it was not as simple as that. He suspected his wife had feelings for a tradesman who had been working on their new house.

Stephen Moules was working as a concreter. He laid the slab for their new property and he became friendly with both Gambino and Farquharson. Moules was divorced with three children and was a cub scout leader and a Sunday school teacher. He and Gambino were platonic friends while she was with Farquharson.

Moules initially pushed her away because he feared being made a scapegoat by Farquharson or others for the break-up of her marriage. Farquharson had made it clear to him that he felt that his wife’s attraction to Moules must be why his marriage was not working. Moules said Farquharson had told him “he felt like she wanted her marriage over with him so as she and I could initiate a relationship”. Farquharson told him that, “It’s got to be your fault. I can’t understand any other (reason).”

Moules had not want to be involved in Gambino’s decision to end her marriage, he later told the court: “I wanted to … have all of that side, her business, clean cut, and then if down the track we were to go anywhere with any sort of relationship, then that would be the time.”

Soon after Gambino separated from her husband, she and Moules developed a romantic attachment. They are now engaged.

Gambino knew that Farquharson was angry about the marriage break-up. He feared he would be pushed out as the father of his children and that Moules would take his place, Gambino recalled. He was also upset over the level of child maintenance he had to pay: “He felt very angry towards the Child Support Agency because he felt like they didn’t give the guy a fair go – you know, he had to try and get his life back on track (but) because the mother had the children she would get the benefits from Centrelink, and stuff like that.”

Gambino told him not to worry about paying maintenance to her other than his contribution to the mortgage because she would rather see him set himself up nicely in a home, for the children’s sake. She had already given him gifts of a set of saucepans and a quilt and quilt cover. But he told her it would be illegal for him to hold back payment.

Farquharson also resented the fact Gambino had the family’s more expensive car. She thought that was only fair because she did more driving with the children.

In fact, according to Gregory King, Farquharson’s bitterness ran much deeper than he let on to his former wife. Murderously deep.

IN COURT, the Farquharson and Gambino families sat together in two benches at the side of the courtroom. They were warm towards each other. Farquharson’s sister Kerri Huntington chatted affectionately with Cindy Gambino. It seems their votes on Farquharson’s innocence were already cast.

The evidence in this case would be complex and exhaustive but would come down to three strands: the car, the cough and the man.

Farquharson’s car, which had 350,000 kilometres on the clock, was not a shining example of its kind, his mechanic, James Jacobs, told the court. It had a habit of cutting out. The rear locks were problematic. It showed a lot of wear and tear and the mechanic recommended he replace it but Farquharson had said he couldn’t afford that.

Jacobs had taken the car for a test run a couple of months before Father’s Day 2005 – he noticed that, on the stretch of road near the dam, it wandered to the right. The car had got close to the centre white line before he put his hands back on the wheel.

Police investigations suggested this was of no account, acting sergeant, Glen Stewart Urquhart, of the major collision investigation unit, told the court.

Urquhart drove a car of a similar make and model along that patch of road and noted what happened when he took his hands off the driving wheel. The tests were filmed from the inside of the car.

At a speed of 64 kilometres an hour, the car veered not to the right, as Farquharson’s had, but to the left: “To the point where I had to put my hands back on the steering wheel and turn it back to the right or I would have run off the road.” At 82 kmh and 10 kmh the car held its line, continuing straight inside its proper lane. In court the jury watched as, in each case, the film showed the dam in the background, slipping harmlessly by.

Urquhart concluded: “There was nothing in the road construction that would have contributed to a car veering off the road.”

Urquhart was asked about the evidence of the mechanic Jacob James, who had said he found the car wandered to the right on the road near the dam. Would that information change anything about Urquhart’s opinion?

At the lowest speed of 64 km/h, any tendency to steer right would simply have counteracted the tendency he found of the test car to steer left, he maintained. As for the higher speeds: “There is an enormous difference between a tendency to want to drift to the right . . . and a sharp angle off the road to the right.”

Urquhart said it would have taken a 220-degree turn of the steering wheel to make a car turn as Farquharson’s had.

He also used computer modelling to simulate a reconstruction of what might have happened. For the Farquharson car to have travelled from the road to the dam as it had, he concluded, three separate steering inputs would have been required: a sharp turn to the right to get it off the road, a straightening as it progressed towards the dam, and then a second turn to the right to avoid the tree.

David Axup, a traffic analyst and former chief superintendent commanding the Victoria Police Traffic Support Group, was called by the defence to contradict Urquhart’s conclusions.

He said that if a car’s steering wheel turned 220 degrees the car would spin out, leaving yaw marks until it became side on, at which point they would become sideways skid marks. There were no such marks from Farquharson’s car. He estimated that it left the road in a gentler arc. The defence argued that this wider angle was consistent with Farquharson having been unconscious.

Farquharson was not the first driver to crash through the fence on the property that contained the dam. Cam Everett, the owner of the property, told the court, “We’ve had seven people come through our fence in eight years.” At least two, like Farquharson, had crashed into the fence from the Winchelsea-bound side of the road. None had ended in the dam.

CAN A coughing fit make you black out? Did a coughing fit make Robert Farquharson black out in the car that night? Here, too, the evidence of the experts was contradictory.

The emergency room doctor on duty at Geelong Hospital that Sunday night, Bruce Bartley, examined Farquharson and on the basis of what he said, made a provisional diagnosis of “cough syncope (fainting)” – coughing that leads to brief unconsciousness.

Farquharson had no such condition but he was being treated for a chesty cough. On 18 August, Winchelsea GP Dr Ian McDonald gave Farquharson antibiotics for infection of his throat and sinuses. Farquharson returned on 23 August saying he was developing a chesty cough, particularly in the night air; his lungs were clear through the stethoscope and his temperature was normal but McDonald gave him a new antibiotic.

Thoracic physician Professor Matthew Naughton, head of respiratory medicine at The Alfred hospital and a specialist who sees 4000 patients a year, was sceptical about the existence of cough syncope in otherwise healthy people.

He said he had never diagnosed a case and had never heard of a case in which cough syncope occurred with someone who has normal heart, lungs and neurological function.

Naughton said it was “extremely unlikely” Farquharson had had it: his heart and lungs were healthy, he had not appeared on the night to be disabled by breathlessness, and he had not begun coughing when exposed to cold air while in wet clothing. He had been sitting when it allegedly occurred; faintness would be more likely in someone who was fully upright.

Farquharson’s supervisor at work had previously told the court that, two days before the children died, he had a paroxysm of coughing so severe that she feared he might be having a stroke. Would this information affect Naughton’s opinion?

He replied, “It would affect my opinion because the witnessed episode of severe coughing did not elicit syncope.” In other words, why didn’t he pass out that time?

Neurologist Dr John King told the court it was a rare condition; he had never seen an episode of it but he had diagnosed it several times based on histories given to him by patients. It was reported mostly in middle-aged men who were overweight, smoked heavily and had chronic lung disease.

Geelong thoracic physician Dr Christopher Steinfort did believe the syndrome occurred in otherwise healthy people with the flu. Steinfort searched his own database of 6500 patients and found 15 cases of people who had had cough syncope, most of whom did not have lung disease. He concluded it was “highly likely” Farquharson had had cough syncope that night.

Steinfort said he had also had a call from a GP who told of a man driving his children to a local football match in Geelong who had a coughing fit “and the next minute his car had run off the road, had turned over, had flipped onto its side, then flipped back and was wedged up against a fence post. No one was injured, fortunately, but it was a substantial accident”.

Legal Aid had since put him in touch with other people who had suffered such episodes. “The common theme amongst all of those cases has been there was at the time a pre-existing . . . flu-like illness.” He said that most of the people with syncope he had dealt with did not have advanced lung disease. His conclusion: “Mr Farquharson’s description is quite classical of cough syncope and my belief is that it’s highly likely that it was cough syncope.”

Under cross-examination, he acknowledged that the accuracy of his diagnosis depended on Farquharson having been a reliable historian.

Darren Raymond Bushell is a shearer who has known Farquharson for 30 years. On the Thursday before that Father’s Day, Farquharson told him he had had a coughing fit while he was pulling into the local roadhouse in his car. When he “came to”, he found his car had stopped.

Bushell told him he shouldn’t go driving like that: “Go and get it checked out.” Bushell told the court, “That was all, and (I) never thought any more of it.”

THE THIRD strand of evidence in the case related to what had been going on inside Robert Farquharson’s head.

GP Dr Ian McDonald told the court that he saw Farquharson in October 2004, when his complaints “included anxiety, mood swings, paranoid feelings, sleeplessness, dwelling on things, teary, emotional, ups and downs, no interest or motivation; tiredness, being stressed, irritable and finding it hard to cope with his children”.

Farquharson said he had done some research and thought he might have depression. McDonald agreed and prescribed an anti-depressant called Zoloft.

Farquharson returned on November 3 saying he and his wife had separated that day: “He stated that she could not cope with his moods and he felt that coming to see me previously had been too little, too late.” McDonald referred him to a psychologist and later to a psychiatrist.

McDonald saw him again three days later: “He said that he was still feeling down, getting angry and not sleeping, and waking in the early hours at about 2am.” McDonald changed him to an anti-depressant with more sedating qualities, Avanza.

At the next consultation, on December 13, Farquharson told him that his wife had ended the marriage and had found religion: “He stated she was having a close friendship with a member of her church and that was upsetting him. He had been hoping that (their) relationship could be reconciled.”

Farquharson did not consult McDonald again until May 2005. The doctor told the court that Farquharson “was aware that his wife was manipulating him . . . I know he was annoyed about having to finish the house they were building prior to selling it”.

Farquharson’s psychologist, Peter Popko, said his client had had mild depression. He did feel despair at times at the blended family situation and at the fact that Stephen Moules would be having an influence on his children: “At one point (he) had thought of entering into an argument with Stephen and having Stephen throw a punch at him, and then he would be able to take him to court . . . He did entertain thoughts of, I guess, retribution towards Stephen.”

Popko agreed under cross-examination that Farquharson’s attitude to his children was protective, caring, enthusiastic and encouraging; he was particularly proud of Jai.

The most favourable witness regarding Farquharson’s behaviour was Gregory Paul Roberts, a social worker and grief counsellor who has had more than 70 consultations with Farquharson since the children’s deaths. He was called by Peter Morrissey, Farquharson’s lawyer.

Roberts said all of Farquharson’s behaviour on the night was normal for someone who had been through what he had. Adrenalin would have caused Farquharson to babble in a way that did not make sense, and shock might have caused him to sound robotic, appear emotionless or fail to take in information. “If a person had been unconscious, a lot of the disorientation would be heightened,” he said.

Roberts argued that regardless of whether parents are together or separated, when one partner is present at the death of a child, that partner will have a strong urge to contact the other parent. “After emerging from the dam, that would be the next focus and, at times, people in trauma can actually become what’s referred to as ‘hyper-focused’. Because of the overload of information they lock into what they feel they need to do next and that becomes very single-minded, so the person focuses on that fact and will virtually disregard other information that is put to them.”

By the time he returned to the dam with Gambino, a person in Farquharson’s position would also have been exhausted . . .

“and starting to move into more what we refer to as dissociation, where the person actually starts to block out part of what’s happened. Other people might be running around but they seem quite detached and will actually step back.”

And the significance of Farquharson asking Moules for cigarettes?

“In stressful events the body will actually crave stimulants, and it’s not necessarily a rational or a conscious thing, it’s actually a physiological fact. It’s obviously particularly so if the person is a smoker or a heavy coffee drinker.”

The prosecutor, Jeremy Rapke, asked, “Is it your opinion that the accused’s observed behaviour on the night was within the typical range of behaviours for a person suffering from traumatic grief?”

Roberts: “I do (think so).”

Rapke said: “I have to ask you this question, Mr Roberts, and I hope you’ll forgive me for doing so, but has there been any particular event in your life which has made you particularly empathetic towards Mr Farquharson?”

“No.”

“Have you lost a child?”

“I have.”

THE MAN who painted the darkest portrait of Farquharson was one of his oldest friends. Gregory King is a bus driver, a lean, tanned man with a bony face. He wore jeans and a loose shirt and stood tensely in the witness box; much of what he had to say was difficult, and he would have to go over it again and again.

He and Farquharson grew up in Winchelsea together and got to know each other better when they both started working for the local shire. They played footy, went away together, socialised at the pub. He tried to see Farquharson about once a week when he was gloomy over the marriage break-up but sometimes it was hard; King’s wife and four children also had claims on his time.

After the separation, King heard around town that Cindy had a new relationship. He also heard it from Farquharson: “I was around there with him one night and we got talking and he said that ‘Cindy’s seeing someone else, the bitch.”‘

Once Farquharson told King he had thoughts about driving off a cliff or running into a tree. King told him, “Don’t be stupid.”

In early 2005, King saw him sitting in his car by the side of a road. Later in the week, he asked Farquharson what he had been doing parked there. “He said, ‘I was thinking about lining a truck up’ . . . Just the look on his face, he was serious.”

Two or three months before Father’s Day 2005, King ran into Farquharson outside the fish and chip shop in the main street of Winchelsea. It was about 6pm on a Friday. King parked in the angled space out the front of the shop and his children went in for their order of chips to go with the chops and vegies their mother was cooking at home.

King’s account of what was said next would be vigorously challenged by Farquharson’s defence lawyer. Here is what King told the court:

Farquharson was inside the fish and chip shop. He came out and stood beside King’s car door for a chat. Cindy Gambino pulled up two lanes over to the right. She got out of her car and greeted both of them; King said hello to her. She went on into the shop.

King reproved his friend for not having returned her greeting: “I said to Robert he had to say hello, and he said, ‘No, you don’t’. (He) got very angry.”

Farquharson was furious about Cindy pulling up in the good car, according to King, and said, “I paid $30,000 for (it). She wanted it and they are f—ing driving it. Look what I’m driving, the f—ing cheap one.” Farquharson “went on about the house and said that Cindy wanted the best of everything and they couldn’t afford it”.

“Then he said, ‘And now it looks like she wants to marry that f—ing dickhead. There’s no way I’m going to let him, her and the kids live together in my house and I have to f—ing pay for it and also pay f—ing maintenance for the kids. No way.’

“He just said , ‘I’m going to take away the most important things that mean to her’ (sic). I asked him what would that be, and he nodded his head towards the fish and chip shop window . . . I said, ‘What? The kids?”‘

Farquharson said yes. “I said, ‘What would you do, would you take them away or something?’

“He then just stared at me, into my eyes, and said, ‘Kill them’.

“I said, ‘Bulls–t. It’s your own flesh and blood, Robbie.’

“He said, ‘So? I hate them.’

“I said, ‘You would go to jail.’

“He said, ‘No, I won’t. I’ll kill myself before it gets to that.”

King told the court that Farquharson said the event would be close by; there would be an accident where he would survive and the kids would not. It would be on a special day.

“I said, ‘What kind of day?’

“He said, ‘Something like Father’s Day so everyone would remember it. When it was Father’s Day and I was the last one to have them for the last time; not her. Then she looks up and for the rest of her life, every Father’s Day . . .’

“I said, ‘You don’t even dream that stuff, Robbie’.”

The children returned from the shop and nothing more was said. When King went home, he told the court, he told his wife about the conversation. Mary King would testify that she did not recall this exchange. There was a lot of noise from the children and bustling over dinner. Her husband was late with the chips and the chops were burning.

“(We) didn’t do anything about it,” King told the court. “We just thought he was talking shit again.”

At 11pm on Father’s Day, King got a phone call saying Farquharson had had an accident and the boys had drowned in the dam. “I was just – I was speechless . . . It just all come back to me, the conversation . . . I was shattered.”

He broke down at work in front of his boss, who contacted the police. King was asked to wear a secret recording device and try to talk to Farquharson about the fish and chip conversation. He agreed. The recordings were later played to the jury.

The first taped exchange was at the house where Farquharson was living with his father. It took place on September 15, 2005, 11 days after the car went into the dam. King said urgently, “Rob, it’s been eating me up! . . . Remember when you said, when Cindy pulled up and you said to her, ‘I’ll pay you back big-time’ – I hope it’s got nothing to do with it.”

Said Farquharson: “No. No way . . . No no no no no. And then you know I would never – no.”

King said he was being interviewed by police the next day and that he was “freaking out”. That was why he had been off work: “I shook and all.”

Farquharson insisted that he had told the truth to everyone about the accident: “It was just a figure of speech me being angry, but I would never ever do anything like that.”

Police had interviewed “her”, Farquharson said: “They’ve said she said, ‘No way known would he do anything like that.’ And I wouldn’t. What, I’m not a mongrel. And I’m not a bastard, and I’m not an arsehole, and I’m not a c—. I would never ever, ever. That has never ever entered my mind. What I meant by paying her back was, when ‘One day I’ll stand here with a woman in front of you and see how you like it’. That’s what I meant.”

Farquharson urged King to tell police he had been a good father: “All you say, you say you know me, I’ve always been a good bloke. ‘He’s always spoiled his kids, used to see him riding around on the bikes with the kids, and taking them to the footy, playing footy with them . . .’ Always say all the positive things that you know.”

Of the children, he said: “I loved them more than life itself.”

POLICE SENT King on one more covert mission. On October 13, 2005, almost a month after the first taped conversation, King presented himself at the home of Farquharson’s sister, Kerri Huntington. He was again wired for sound.

In the conversation that was to follow, King’s breathing would become ragged and he would several times come close to tears. He sounded tortured by what he believed he had heard.

After initial chat about work and the weather, King again broached the topic of the fish and chip shop conversation. “Rob, I’m struggling real bad . . . You know what I’m struggling over.”

“What?”

“That conversation mate, it’s killing me.”

“It was never like that . . . you’ve got to get that out of your head.” Farquharson said it was “bulls–t talk”.

King insisted it was eating at him like a cancer – why would Farquharson have said that to him?

“I was just angry,” Farquharson said. “I just turn up and she is throwing her nose up. Like, you know, ‘Look, I’m driving this good car and look at you’, and I just meant ‘One day I’m going to be better than you, one day I’m going to have a house.”‘

He absolutely denied ever saying that there would be an accident where he survived and the children did not. He said that the “payback” he had meant was that he would start a successful business and then Gambino would regret having let him go.

He pointed out that his counsellor supported him “150 per cent”, and that Gambino did too. She had told him, “‘I do not hold any blame to you, I support you, I know you.’ And she told me that, she said, ‘If we were still married, you wouldn’t be even questioned now.”‘

Farquharson said Gambino had told police that he was a fantastic provider – he gave up Sunday shifts at $32 an hour to take his kids to the footy – and that he was too soft to have done it: “She told police she was the disciplinary (sic) in the family . . . If they had to be disciplined she’d smack them; I couldn’t do it. I was too soft.” And later, “Why would someone go from not smacking them to killing them? That’s a big gap.”

King persisted. He told him that he brushed that conversation under the carpet at the time. “Then when I heard about the accident, that’s when it hit . . . And it just comes back to me, Rob, and it just – it’s haunting me.”

Said Farquharson, “But (it) shouldn’t haunt you because it’s not true, don’t ever think that.”

King insisted that he would have to talk about the accident with his counsellor. Farquharson says, “Yeah, but for God’s sake, please don’t mention that sort of stuff . . . You misinterpret what I said. Because then they’re going to have it on file, and they’re going to have to go to the police with that. That’s going to incriminate me . . . And I don’t want that because it’s not true.”

At one point, he said, “I’m begging you not to mention anything what you think of that (sic).” The prosecution would later argue that Farquharson was exhorting King not to tell the truth to police.

IN THE WITNESS BOX, King said he was 80 per cent confident that his recollection of the talk at the fish shop was accurate. He had tried hard to recall it: “I was distressed, traumatised. I was scared.” It came back to him in pieces “and after that . . . last taping, I was 100 per cent sure”.

Peter Morrissey, on behalf of Farquharson, suggested that he had not been explicit about his fish shop claims on the tapes because his claims were false. King replied that he had not put exact quotes to Farquharson because “I was too stressed”.

King admitted that he had not rung Cindy Gambino and let her know of the alleged threats; he had not rung the police, or a teacher at the school. He did not ring Farquharson the next day to see how he was.

King agreed that since the children’s deaths he had been troubled by bad dreams and intrusive visions of the children drowning, had suffered crying jags and lost his ability to sleep. As he talked of his visions of the children’s deaths, Cindy Gambino whimpered into her handkerchief.

Morrissey suggested that when King came to write his statement, he could not distinguish between facts and visions because his memory had been distorted by his emotional trauma. Morrissey said, “Mr King, what I’m putting to you is that your memory is playing you tricks because of the terrible situation you’re in?”

“No,” said King.

He was close to tears when pressed about why his questioning of Farquharson on tape had been fuzzy. He was stressed, he said, “He’s a good mate, you know”.

King had taken four weeks off after the children’s deaths because he was emotionally distraught. He could not face going to their funeral. His family sent a card. The following year, he went into counselling and onto anti-depressants. He has made a claim for compensation as a victim of crime.

THE PROSECUTION, in its summing up, told jurors that Farquharson had looked up information on depression; it was also possible he had done the same for cough syncope. If he had hatched a plot to kill his children months earlier, then buying the children little gifts on the day was a red herring, and telling a friend that he had passed out from coughing could have been part of his plan.

The jury should look at how all the pieces of the jigsaw fitted together: the marriage break-up, Farquharson’s depression, his financial situation and his hatred of the new man in his wife’s life.

Rapke said, “If this hatred is then overlaid on a chronic depressive illness, then there is a dangerous and a volatile mix just waiting to be ignited.”

In Farquharson’s defence, Peter Morrissey argued that the murder theory took a lot of believing. He claimed King was an unreliable witness because he was a troubled person with a troubled memory telling an unlikely tale that was unsupported by anyone else, including his wife.

Morrissey said that the path the vehicle travelled did not suggest that it was being driven consciously, that the Crown had no answer to the fact that Farquharson’s mechanic knew the car tended to drift to the right, and that Farquharson was neither mad nor vindictive.

It was out of balance to argue that “in a dispute over who gets the good car, ‘A man can only take so much. Now I am going to murder three children.’ That is not proportionate or realistic . . . He’s got not-significant depression, not some crazy psychosis.”

Morrissey warned the jury against grasping for answers to human suffering that do not exist: “There’s this impetus in this case because it’s emotional, because in a sense you want there to be an answer, you don’t want it to be a tragedy because if it is a tragedy then the world’s a bit of an unkind place. Whereas if he’s a bad guy and has done it, then there’s an answer.”

And he pointed out that the prosecution, in summing up, had not relied upon King’s claims that Farquharson had used the words “hate” and “kill”: “(Rapke) left that out, and that’s because they can’t look that in the eye, that bit. They can’t look it in the eye because it’s not true . . .

“With one very glaring exception, everyone has said that it was a positive, loving attitude he had to his kids; everyone.”

ON TUESDAY 2 October, the jury of five men and seven women retired to consider their verdict.

Just after 2pm Friday, the word went out that there was a decision. Cindy Gambino was weeping even before she entered the courtroom. She sat between her mother and her father, each of her hands holding one of theirs, her eyes closed, murmuring incessantly.

Farquharson was dressed like a mourner in a dark grey shirt, black trousers and black tie. He wore his familiar worried expression.

Justice Philip Cummins had asked those present to restrain their feelings until the jurors had left. But at the first blow – “Guilty” – Cindy Gambino let out a strangled cry. By the third “guilty”, she was sobbing. Court officers, who were there in numbers, surrounded her and led her from the room. Even so, everyone present could hear her unearthly howls.

Her mother Beverley, her rock, the woman who had sat beside her every day that she came to the trial and held her hand as she ran the media gauntlets, now collapsed. She was lifted unconscious from the seat and carried out of the courtroom. Mother and daughter left the court complex an hour later in an ambulance.

Robert Farquharson, the silent eye of this storm, had paled as the verdicts were announced. He glanced over at his former wife. Later, he looked at reporters and raised his eyebrows, shaking his head from side to side in disbelief, as if to say, “How did it come to this?”

First published in The Age.

Fathers who murder their children exact the ultimate revenge on an estranged partner.

H E IS a bottler. He holds in his anger and other emotions. He might seem to be an easy-going, appeasing sort of man but he is what psychologists call “over-controlled”, a person whose silent fuming might one day explode into violence.

Add to this a marriage break-up in which he is the spurned partner — and a new partner for his wife before he has adjusted to his changed circumstances — and the rage can fester into vengeful obsession.

“Obsession deprives people of a sense of proportion to such an extent that, in the end, they can countenance their own death and the death of others they love in pursuit of that obsession,” says Professor Paul Mullen, psychiatrist and clinical director of Forensicare, the Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health.

A man who has become obsessed with revenge against his partner and who is pathologically jealous of her can allow his children to become caught up in his delusions. His feelings about her fidelity can morph into doubts about the paternity of the children.

“Men may become convinced that the children are not theirs, and part of the killing of the children is the acting out of this rage at the (supposed) infidelity, and at being saddled with children who are ‘not yours’ when in fact they are yours,” Mullen says. The killing is also about destroying the whole relationship and the products of that relationship, he says. And it is payback against the woman who has rejected him, the children’s mother. “Apart from anything else, he’s telling her essentially that she’s responsible. This is one of the ways they get back: ‘Look at what you’ve made me do.”‘

This might be part of the answer to the question now being asked about Robert Farquharson: How could he do it?

A Supreme Court jury on Friday found that Farquharson deliberately drove his three boys, aged from two to 10, into a dam near Winchelsea on Father’s Day 2005. His wife had left him 10 months earlier and had begun a relationship with another man.

Cindy Gambino told the court that her ex-husband had been a good father and was a “softie” who always agreed to do what she wanted over matters such as whether to have another baby.

The court was also told that Farquharson was angry about the break-up, child-support payments and the fact that his former wife had the better car and a new partner. One of his oldest friends said that a couple of months before the killings, Farquharson had spoken of an accident involving the children in which they would die, so that his former wife would suffer for the rest of her life. It would happen on a special day — such as Father’s Day — so that she would be tormented every year on the anniversary, he allegedly said.

Farquharson pleaded not guilty. He claimed that he blacked out in a coughing fit and the car veered out of control and into the dam. He is yet to be sentenced, and his lawyer has said he will appeal against the verdict. Dr Lynne Eccleston, director of the forensic psychology program at Melbourne University, says killing children “is the ultimate harm (angry men) can inflict on the woman that they think has wronged them, for whatever reason. It’s a higher order of revenge, because the woman is left alive to deal with the grief — that is his intention.”

She says such men often have a detailed plan that they perfect over a long period, “working up to the time when they will finally take action”. The killings are often related to relationship breakdown. A man who has pre-existing emotional problems and poor coping skills can also become angry because he feels his rights as a father have been taken away.

Forensic psychologist Professor Bob Montgomery, of the University of the Sunshine Coast, says most men who try to kill their children have distorted thinking as a result of severe depression. They believe they are failures and that they have failed their children. They see no way out other than suicide and taking the children with them so that they are not left to suffer further.

“In most cases, the guy tries to kill himself as well,” he says.

Cases such as Farquharson’s are much rarer. “If (a father is) just killing the children and making no attempt on himself, he has a different motivation, like, ‘You took my kids away from me — well, I’m going to take my kids away from you,”‘ Montgomery says.

“That’s a very much smaller group. They are sad reflections of the view that children are your possessions, your property, rather than people who have their own rights and interests.”

A psychologist who had been treating Farquharson told the court that his depression had seemed to improve.

Montgomery says it is common for deeply depressed people who have decided upon suicide or murder to experience a lift in mood because, in their disordered minds, they believe they have a way out of their problems: “Now I know what to do, I don’t feel so bad.”

Cases such as Farquharson’s arouse intense interest because they seem so rare and so unnatural as to be bizarre. In fact, says Mullen, they are not such an unusual form of homicide: “The commonest form of multiple killing is not serial killing, as you would think from watching the telly. It’s family slaying — the man who kills his partner and his children.”

It is also not uncommon for such a killer to have previously been viewed as a good parent.

“When you look at the mothers who do this, you often find they were noted by their friends and neighbours to be particularly caring, assiduous parents who spent more time with their children than other parents did.”

Ten per cent of all Australian homicides involve children as victims. If the child is under six, the killer is most likely to be in the child’s care network, says Ken Polk, professor of criminology at Melbourne University and co-author with Christine Alder of the book Child Victims of Homicide .

The most typical male killer of children is the batterer who attacks a step-child because he finds the child difficult, partly because he does not have reasonable expectations of the child’s behaviour for his or her age.

Biological fathers are much less likely to kill their children, but this does happen in an emotional game in which “the child is a pawn — you sacrifice the pawn to get to the main piece, and that’s the woman”, Polk says.

For every man who goes on to kill, there are many more who carry an angry sense of grievance that makes them want to lash out.

“We get lots of calls from men who are very recently separated and hate the world and are furious at the perceived conspiracy against them,” says Danny Blay, manager of No to Violence, the Male Family Violence Prevention Association.

“And we know that women and children are most at risk of violence from their former partner or father during the early stages of an acrimonious separation.

“There are lots of men … who, for one reason or another, are in a place where they don’t see a way out and are wanting to punish the people who they see as putting them in a predicament, rather than taking at least some responsibility for their predicament themselves and asking why it is that their partner wants to leave, or why they have been denied access to their children.”

At the same time, Blay says, most men who are violent within their family are mostly good people, aside from this aspect of their behaviour. “They are not psychopaths. They form intimate relationships and have friends, they are engaged at work, members of the footy club.”

In Farquharson’s case, he confided his thoughts of murder to an old friend who did not believe he was serious and who is now tormented by what happened. What would Blay’s advice be to anyone who finds themselves listening to a friend talking this way?

If a man is seething and looking for support, says Blay, accept his distress and express empathy for it. Ask him about his plans.

“Get them to name what’s in their heads and what they are going to do.” Has he thought about what he will do with the kids this weekend? What are his feelings for his children and what does he want for their futures — next week, next month, when they are 30?

“Convey to him that you are really concerned about him, his partner and his children. Let him know that you’d like to help him find a better way out of his situation — that there are always better alternatives to violence.

“In talking it through, there is an opportunity for the man to realise that his plans are not just a short-term fix to make him feel better, but they will potentially have long-term consequences on the people he loves, and him.”

Blay says that if, in talking to the man, you discover that he has developed a detailed plan to hurt anybody, “I would be ringing the police immediately and trying to contact the people who have been threatened. We must always prioritise the safety of people over any personal allegiance or loyalty we have to our friend, relative or client and, at the same time, we would be doing them an enormous favour (to report them).”

For telephone counselling, contact Men’s Referral Service, 9428 2899 or 1800 065 973 (free call). Women’s Domestic Violence Crisis Service,

1800 015 188. Lifeline, 13 11 14.

CHILD HOMICIDES 2005-06 ?35 children under 15 killed — 11 under 12 months.

?92 per cent killed by a family member. The killer is a parent in 32 out of 34 recorded family relationships.

?13 homicides involve the mother killing her child and 21 are committed by male family members. Only six of these men are custodial parents. Four are non-custodial parents and nine are step-parents of the child victim(s).

Source: Homicide in Australia: 2005-06 National Homicide Monitoring Program Annual Report , by Megan Davies and Jenny Mouzos, Australian Institute of Criminology

First published in The Age.

He told a friend he would take revenge on his former wife. Months later his three sons were dead.

ROBERT FARQUHARSON says the first thing he heard after discovering his car in water was the words of his eldest son, Jai.
“Dad, we’re in water,” said the 10-year-old, who was next to his father in the front of the car. Farquharson says he replied: “Just sit there, mate … Don’t panic, mate.”
That was the last time the 38-year-old cleaner saw Jai and his other sons, Tyler, 7, and Bailey, 2.
Yesterday, Farquharson was convicted on three counts of murder. His Commodore had ploughed into a dam at Winchelsea, south-west of Melbourne, on Father’s Day 2005.
Farquharson’s former wife, Cindy Gambino, screamed and sobbed as the verdicts were handed down in the Victorian Supreme Court. Amid the anguish, Ms Gambino’s mother collapsed and was carried outside to an ambulance.
Ms Gambino last saw her sons alive when she dropped them over to their father about 3pm on Father’s Day. She had separated from Farquharson, but wanted to remain friends for the sake of the children.
She said goodbye: “I gave them a cuddle and Bailey said, ‘I love you, Mum.’ ”
Farquharson’s lawyer said his client wouldappeal against the verdict of the six-week trial.
In the end, the complex and exhaustive trial came down to three strands: Farquharson’s ageing Commodore, the medical condition which saw him sometimes black out during a coughing fit, and the man himself.
Farquharson’s car, which had 350,000 kilometres on the clock, was not a shining example of its kind, his mechanic, James Jacobs, told the court. It had a habit of cutting out and showed a lot of wear and tear.
During a test drive a couple of months before Father’s Day 2005, Jacobs had noticed that, on the stretch of road near the dam, the car wandered to the right. It had got close to the centre white line before he put his hands back on the wheel.
Acting Sergeant Glen Stewart Urquhart, of the major collision investigation unit, drove a car of a similar make and model along the road and noted what happened when he took his hands off the steering wheel. At a speed of 64kmh, the car veered not to the right, as Farquharson’s had, but to the left. At 82kmh and 101kmh the car held its line, continuing straight inside its proper lane.
The second big issue was whether a coughing fit had made Farquharson black out in the car that night. On the Thursday before the car went into the dam, he told an old friend he had had a coughing fit while driving that had made him pass out.
The evidence of the experts was contradictory. A thoracic physician, Matthew Naughton, the head of respiratory medicine at Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital, was sceptical about the existence of “cough syncope” – coughing that leads to fainting – in otherwise healthy people. He said he had never heard of it in someone who had normal heart, lung and neurological function.
Professor Naughton said it was “extremely unlikely” in Farquharson: his heart and lungs were healthy, he had not appeared on the night to be disabled by breathlessness, and he had not begun coughing when exposed to cold air while in wet clothing.
The third strand of evidence related to what had been going on inside Farquharson’s head.
A GP, Ian McDonald, told the court he had seen Farquharson in October 2004 when his complaints included “anxiety, mood swings, paranoid feelings, sleeplessness, dwelling on things, teary, emotional, ups and downs, no interest or motivation, tiredness, being stressed, irritable and finding it hard to cope with his children”.
On December 13, Farquharson had told him that his wife had ended their marriage and had found religion: “She was having a close friendship with a member of her church and that was upsetting him. He had been hoping that [their] relationship could be reconciled.”
Farquharson did not consult Dr McDonald again until May 2005, when he told the doctor that “he was aware that his wife was manipulating him … I know he was annoyed about having to finish the house they were building prior to selling it.”
The man who painted the darkest portrait of Farquharson was one of his oldest friends, Gregory King.
The pair grew up in Winchelsea together.
Two or three months before Father’s Day 2005, Mr King ran into Farquharson outside a fish and chip shop in the main street of Winchelsea. It was about 6pm on a Friday. Mr King parked in front of the shop and his children went in for their order of chips.
Mr King’s account of what was said was vigorously challenged by Farquharson’s lawyer. Mr King told the court Farquharson had been inside the shop. He came out and stood next to the car for a chat. Cindy Gambino pulled up two spaces from Mr King’s car. She got out and greeted both of them; Mr King said hello to her. She went on into the shop.
Mr King reproved his friend for not having returned her greeting: “I said to Robert he had to say hello, and he said, ‘No, you don’t’. [He] got very angry.”
Farquharson was furious about Ms Gambino pulling up in the good car and said: “I paid $30,000 for [it]. She wanted it and they are f—ing driving it. Look what I’m driving, the f—ing cheap one.” Farquharson “went on about the house and said that Cindy wanted the best of everything and they couldn’t afford it”, Mr King said.
“Then he said, ‘And now it looks like she wants to marry that f—ing dickhead. There’s no way I’m going to let him, her and the kids live together in my house and I have to f—ing pay for it and also pay f—ing maintenance for the kids. No way.’
“He just said, ‘I’m going to take away the most important things that mean to her’ [sic]. I asked him what would that be, and he nodded his head towards the fish and chip shop window …
“I said, ‘What? The kids?”‘
Farquharson said yes. “I said, ‘What would you do, would you take them away or something?’
“He then just stared at me, into my eyes, and said, ‘Kill them’.
“I said, ‘Bullshit. It’s your own flesh and blood, Robbie.’
“He said, ‘So? I hate them’.
“I said, ‘You would go to jail’.
“He said, ‘No, I won’t. I’ll kill myself before it gets to that’.”
Mr King told the court Farquharson had said the event would be close by; there would be an accident which he would survive but the children would not. It would be on a special day.
“I said, ‘What kind of day?’
“He said, ‘Something like Father’s Day so everyone would remember it. When it was Father’s Day and I was the last one to have them for the last time; not her. Then she looks up and for the rest of her life, every Father’s Day … ‘
“I said, ‘You don’t even dream that stuff, Robbie.’ ”
The children returned from the shop and nothing more was said. But at 11pm on Father’s Day, Mr King got a phone call saying Farquharson had had an accident and the boys had drowned in the dam. “I was just – I was speechless … It just all came back to me, the conversation … I was shattered.”
He broke down at work in front of his boss, who contacted the police. Mr King was asked to wear a secret recording device and try to talk to Farquharson about the earlier conversation. He agreed. The recordings were played to the jury.
The first taped exchange was at the house where Farquharson was living with his father. It took place on September 15, 2005, 11 days after the boys’ deaths. Mr King spoke in anxious undertones.
He said: “Rob, it’s been eating me up … Remember when you said, when Cindy pulled up and you said to her, ‘I’ll pay you back big-time’, I hope it’s got nothing to do with it.”
Farquharson said: “No. No way … No, no, no, no, no. And then you know I would never – no.”
Just after 2pm yesterday, word flashed around the court that there was a decision. Cindy Gambino was weeping even before she entered the courtroom. She sat between her mother and father, each of her hands holding one of theirs, her eyes closed, murmuring incessantly.
Justice Philip Cummins had asked those present to restrain their feelings until the jurors had left. But at the first blow – “Guilty” – Ms Gambino let out a strangled cry. By the third “Guilty”, she was sobbing. Court officers surrounded her and led her from the court. Even so, everyone present could hear her cries.
Farquharson, the silent eye of this storm, had gone pale as the verdicts were announced.
He glanced over at his former wife. Later, he looked at reporters and raised his eyebrows, shaking his head from side to side in disbelief, as if to say: “How did it come to this?”

First published in The Age.

(EDITED VERSION)

CRIME

The tragic story of a Winchelsea family culminated yesterday in a man being found guilty of murdering his three sons.

CINDY Gambino saw her three boys alive for the last time when she dropped them over to their dad about 3pm on Father’s Day, 2005. She had separated from her husband, Robert Farquharson, but she wanted things to be friendly between them for the sake of the children.
She stayed while Farquharson opened the boys’ presents. The oldest boy, Jai, had forgotten one of his, a back-scratcher he had bought at the Father’s Day stall at his primary school, so they were going to bring that another time.
She said goodbye: “I gave them a cuddle, and (two-year-old) Bailey said, ‘I love you, Mum.’ ”
The boys wanted to have tea with their dad because they figured it would mean KFC. They were right. Farquharson took them to Kmart in Geelong, where he bought a cricket ball for Jai and videos for Tyler and Bailey. Then they went for fried chicken, sitting outside in the car for a while because Bailey was asleep, and dropped in to their uncle’s for a visit. It was on the Princes Highway, about 7.30pm, on the way home to Winchelsea from that visit, that their car went off the road.
In a few mysterious moments, unwitnessed by anyone other than its occupants, the car crossed into the wrong lane. It went into a wire fence, travelled on through long grass, clipped a tree – and went into a dam. A day for celebrating family ended with the death of this family. Farquharson escaped. His boys did not.
Jai, 10, was the sporty one who loved his footy, cricket and karate. He also loved acting out jokes from the movies – the adult ones that he shouldn’t have understood. He was happy to earn money mowing his Poppy’s lawns but preferred the winnings from the “Tattslotto chair” on Sunday visits to his grandparents’ house, where he would raid his grandfather’s armchair for the change that had fallen from his pockets. Jai was travelling in the front of the car and would be found face down across the seats, part-way out of the driver’s door.
Tyler, 7, had his mother’s grin and loved hot dogs and mudcakes and his grandma’s vegie soup, strained. His mother said of him, “Have food, will travel.” He was a joker too, best known for his cross-eyed faces and the plastic dog poo he hid in his grandfather’s bed. He was found lying on the driver’s side of the back of the car. His head was near the door and his legs were between the two front seats, with his knees resting on the centre console.
Bailey called the family dog “Woofy” and the family cat “Puss”. The cockatiel was simply “my bird” and would sit on his shoulder while he fed it cereal. At two, Bailey was old enough to protest against anything he didn’t like with, “This is quack, Mum!” When told that was naughty, he would play his strongest card: “But me just a baby, Mum!”
Bailey, tangled in the straps of a childseat on the rear passenger side, would now always be a baby.
This was a tragedy that would make parents hold their children close. It would also make people wonder. Was Robert Farquharson a loving father struck down by the dreadful mischance of a moment – or a vengeful man with ice in his veins who drowned his three children like a litter of unwanted kittens?
That night, Shane Atkinson, then 22, and a friend were driving past the dam, seven kilometres east of Winchelsea, when a man leapt onto the road waving his arms. They could get no sense out of him until his babble took a new turn: “He just kept on saying he’s killed his kids, he has to go home and tell Cindy he’s killed his kids, and he just kept saying, ‘F—, what have I done?’ ” The man, whom Atkinson would later recognise as Robert Farquharson, said he had had a coughing fit and blacked out; maybe he had “done a wheel bearing” – somehow, his car had ended up in a dam.
Atkinson was perplexed. He didn’t believe the local dams were deep enough to swallow a car. He looked over at the nearest one, just visible in the darkness: “The water looked like glass, like nothing even had happened there.” Atkinson finally said, “Well, I’m not going anywhere if you’ve just killed your kids. Do you want to ring the ambulance or the police?”
He would later say that he kept pushing his mobile phone towards the man and asking him to use it. “He wouldn’t. He just kept on saying that he wanted to go back to (his former wife) Cindy’s . . . He just wanted to tell Cindy before he called the police or before anyone else had known.”
Gambino was just drawing her curtains against the darkness when she saw the car pull up. She thought, “There they are now.” But it was not her boys. When she heard the news, garbled as it was, she became distraught. She shouted and pummelled Farquharson, demanding to know where the children were and why he had left them. But she wasted little time; while Atkinson went for help, she rang her new partner, Stephen Moules, and screamed, “The boys are in the water! Meet me on the highway!” Then she bundled Farquharson and Zac, Moules’ son, into her car. She doesn’t even remember reversing out the driveway. She does remember looking down at the speedo and realising she was doing 145 km/h.
She pulled over at an overpass near the dam and Moules arrived shortly afterwards. Farquharson asked Moules for a cigarette. Moules, furious, said, “What! Where are your kids? Get out of my face before I kill you! Where are your kids?” Moules stripped off his jacket and boots and began diving for the children in the cold, black water. Gambino ran up and down in the long grass with her phone to her ear trying to call 000. Others came in a jumble – the fire brigade, ambulances, the State Emergency Service truck, police cars; lights, noise, people. So many people, so much activity, and all of it too late.
Gambino remembers at one point sitting in the front seat of Moules’ parents’ car and seeing Farquharson. “Rob was standing in front of the car with his arms crossed . . .. There was no movement, no nothing . . . He wasn’t doing anything. He was just like in a trance.” Eventually, Gambino’s brother came to take her away. Later that night, he called a doctor for her. The doctor drove her slowly through gathering fog to the local hospital. She remembers the journey seemed to take forever. She remembers she had wet socks. When she arrived in the emergency ward, Cindy Gambino was sedated against the horror of it all.
Farquharson was taken to Geelong Hospital. At 10pm, lying in emergency bay No. 1, he told his story into a police tape-recorder.
“I think I just went over the overpass and – um – I just started coughing and then – um – don’t remember anything and then all of a sudden I was in this water and my son (Jai) screamed out and he opened up the door and we nose-dived and I – I – shut the door on him and I tried to get them out and I tried to get out to help, thinking I’ve only just (gone in) off the road, not realising I was – Tried to get up to the road to get people to . . . help and people just drove past and I don’t know exactly whereabouts it was, and it’s just a big blur, like, you know, everything just happened so – so quick.”
He said that when Jai opened the door, “I just sort of leant across and shut it and I tried to unbuckle them ‘cos they were screaming and I’m trying to get the other two in the back and – ‘cos he done that we must have done a nose dive . . . It’s just a nightmare.”
A policeman asked him gently, “Do you realise that the children are – are – not made it out of the car?”
“Ah, I gathered that,” Farquharson said.
He said he got out thinking the water was only “foot deep” and that he could get out, run around to the other side of the car, drag Jai out and then drag the other two out. He said he went under the water three or four times trying to save the children and then decided it would be better to try to get help.
He had been on antibiotics and had had about eight days off work over a throat infection that had left him with a troublesome cough. In the car, “I think the kids were a bit cold so I put the heater on, and of course it must have warmed up and I started coughing.” He vowed his honesty – “That’s exactly as it happened; I mean, I got no reason to lie or anything of that nature.”
When the car was retrieved from the bottom of the dam, police found its heater, ignition and headlights turned off. They were not able to find any evidence on the road or the grass that supported Farquharson’s claim of a car out of control. At a meeting at 8am the following Tuesday, the major collision squad handed the probe over to homicide.
On Tuesday afternoon, the police took Farquharson to St Kilda Road headquarters for a video interview. After a long exchange of questions and answers, they zoomed in on the fact he had not repeated his earlier claim – made in hospital on the night – that he had dived down to look for the children.
He now said he dived down but could do nothing because of “the pressure”. Queried again, he said that was what the “SIDS lady” who counselled him in hospital had said: “She goes, ‘You wouldn’t have been able to do nothing because of water pressure and everything.’ ”
They returned to the subject of his marriage. He had found breaking up traumatic. “I used to be the one who’d bath ’em at night and tuck ’em into bed, and I’d wait till they were all asleep and I’d go and tuck ’em back in, you know. So it was hard for me at first, but I’ve learned to live with it.”
“Were you jealous of Steve being where you should be?”
“No, because Cindy’s always maintained that ‘You’re their father and that’s it.’ She’s got photos of me there with the kids and all that . . . I’ve never been pushed to the side.”
Questioned about time-frames, he told the police the anniversary of his separation was coming up, and in another week or so his divorce was due to be finalised.
On December 14, three months after the car went into the dam, police charged Robert Donald William Farquharson with three counts of murder.
FARQUHARSON is a small man. He stands only a little over 150 centimetres tall. Now 38, he has soft brown hair, deep-set brown eyes and a slight paunch that seemed to shrink over the six weeks of his Supreme Court trial. At his trial he wore the knot of his tie pulled away from his collar, as if its formal embrace choked him. He also wore a worried expression. It gave him a look of meekness, the air of a little boy lost. He was often tearful and wiped his nose or his eyes with a large cotton handkerchief.
His former wife, Cindy Gambino, has big brown eyes and an open manner. Her hair is long and glossy but her face is worn and etched with grief. Sometimes, when listening to the evidence of others, she would sob quietly into her handkerchief and then scrub her face fiercely as if to eradicate all trace of the tears. In court, she and Farquharson would exchange glances and sometimes remarks. In her statement to police after the deaths of the children, she had said, “I believe with all my heart that this was just an accident and that he would not have hurt a hair on their heads. I don’t believe this is murder.”
Gambino barely held herself together as she gave her own evidence. Her face crumpled and her voice wavered and, at times, sank to a whisper. She walked out of the court afterwards at a funereal pace, eyes cast down, like someone walking behind a coffin. When she reached the stone-flagged ante-room outside, she broke into wails that floated back into the hushed courtroom. The following day would be the second anniversary of the deaths of her children.
THIS is a marriage and a family that ended in sorrow. They also began in sorrow and, for much of their existence, lurched from one trouble to another. The couple met in 1990 when he was 22 and she was 20. Farquharson had grown up in Winchelsea, 37 kilometres past Geelong, and lived in his parents’ house there. She was living in Birregurra, halfway between Winchelsea and Colac, and worked at a supermarket in Winchelsea. They were friends for a while before they became partners. She became pregnant with Jai in January 1994, and the following month they became engaged.
But Gambino would tell the court that she had trouble “giving her heart to Rob”. She was preoccupied with the death of an earlier boyfriend who had died in an accident. Then, when Jai was born, she developed post-natal depression.
Farquharson, meanwhile, was restive under the yoke of an employer. He wanted to work for himself. In 1996 he took redundancy from his job at the local shire. A few months later, he bought a Jim’s Mowing franchise. It went badly and they lost $40,000. He later told police, “I got sick of chasin’ people to pay me.”
He gave up on his dream of independence; Gambino had resented it, anyway, because of the financial hardship it had caused. He took a job as a cleaner at Lorne’s Cumberland resort. They sold their house and built another. In 2000, they married.
By 2002, they had two children and she wanted a third. She recalled, “Rob was unsure, he didn’t know if he could cope with three children. But Rob was pretty much a softie and always gave in to what I wanted.” Bailey was born on the last day of the year.
She also wanted a third house. They did not like the one they were in, Gambino told the court. She wanted to build, while Farquharson wanted an established house. She won: “Like I said, I usually got my own way.”
Meanwhile, Farquharson had back problems and was depressed over the death of his mother, who had been sick for two years with cancer. “He was always down and out,” Gambino told the court. “I think he grieved for his mum before she died.”
By the time he agreed to accept help for his depression, in October 2004, the marriage was over for Gambino. She had emotionally moved on: “I guess I was over it before it was over . . . I just didn’t want the marriage any more. I asked him to leave.”
For Farquharson, it was not as simple as that. He suspected his wife had feelings for a tradesman who had been working on their new house. Stephen Moules was working as a concreter. He and Gambino were platonic friends while she was with Farquharson. Moules initially pushed her away because he feared being made a scapegoat for the break-up of her marriage.
Moules said Farquharson had told him “he felt like she wanted her marriage over with him so as she and I could initiate a relationship”; that when it came to the marital problems, Farquharson had said, “It’s got to be your fault. I can’t understand any other (reason).”
Soon after Gambino separated from her husband, she and Moules developed a romantic attachment and they are now engaged. Gambino knew that Farquharson was angry about the marriage break-up. He feared he would be pushed out as the father of his children and that Moules would take his place, Gambino told the court.
He was also upset over the level of child maintenance he had to pay: “He felt very angry towards the Child Support Agency because he felt like they didn’t give the guy a fair go – you know, he had to try and get his life back on track (but) because the mother had the children she would get the benefits from Centrelink.”
Farquharson also resented the fact Gambino had the family’s more expensive car. She thought that was only fair because she did more driving with the children. In fact, according to his old friend Gregory King, Farquharson’s bitterness ran much deeper than he let on to his former wife. Murderously deep.
THE EVIDENCE in this case would be complex and exhaustive but would come down to three strands: the car, the cough and the man. Farquharson’s car, which had 350,000 kilometres on the clock, was not a shining example of its kind, his mechanic, James Jacobs, told the court. It had a habit of cutting out and showed a lot of wear and tear.
Jacobs had taken the car for a test run a couple of months before Father’s Day 2005 – he noticed that, on the stretch of road near the dam, it wandered to the right. The car had got close to the centre white line before he put his hands back on the wheel.
Acting Sergeant Glen Stewart Urquhart, of the major collision investigation unit, drove a car of a similar make and model along that patch of road and noted what happened when he took his hands off the driving wheel. At a speed of 64 km/h an hour, the car veered not to the right, as Farquharson’s had, but to the left. At 82 km/h and 101 km/h the car held its line, continuing straight inside its proper lane. In court the jury watched as, in each case, the film showed the dam in the background, slipping harmlessly by.
At the lowest speed, 64km/h, any tendency by Farquharson’s car to steer right would simply have counteracted the tendency he found of the test car to steer left, Urquhart maintained. As for the higher speeds: “There is an enormous difference between a tendency to want to drift to the right . . . and a sharp angle off the road to the right.”
Urquhart claimed it would have taken a 220-degree turn of the steering wheel to make a car turn as Farquharson’s had. He said computer modelling suggested three separate steering inputs would have been required that night: a sharp turn to the right to get the car off the road, a straightening as it progressed towards the dam, and then a second turn to the right to avoid the tree.
David Axup, a traffic analyst and former chief superintendent commanding the Victoria Police Traffic Support Group, had a different opinion. He said that if a car’s steering wheel turned 220 degrees, the car would spin out, leaving yaw marks until it became side on, at which point they would become sideways skid marks. There were no such marks from Farquharson’s car. He estimated that its steering wheel turned only 23.5 degrees, and that it left the road in a gentler arc. The defence argued this wider angle was consistent with Farquharson having been unconscious.
The second major issue was whether a coughing fit made Farquharson black out in the car that night. On the Thursday before the car went into the dam, Farquharson told an old friend that he had had a coughing fit while driving that had made him pass out.
The evidence of the experts was contradictory. Thoracic physician Professor Matthew Naughton, head of respiratory medicine at The Alfred hospital, was sceptical about the existence of “cough syncope” – coughing that leads to fainting – in otherwise healthy people. He said he had never heard of it in someone who has normal heart, lung and neurological function. Naughton said it was “extremely unlikely” in Farquharson: his heart and lungs were healthy, he had not appeared on the night to be disabled by breathlessness, and he had not begun coughing when exposed to cold air while in wet clothing.
Farquharson’s supervisor at work had told the court that, two days before the children died, he had a paroxysm of coughing so severe she feared he might be having a stroke. Would this information affect Naughton’s opinion?
He replied, “It would affect my opinion because the witnessed episode of severe coughing did not elicit syncope.” In other words, why didn’t he pass out that time?
Two other specialists, one a neurologist and the other Geelong thoracic physician Dr Christopher Steinfort, did believe the syndrome occurred in otherwise healthy people with the flu. Steinfort searched his own database of 6500 patients and found 15 cases of people who had had cough syncope, most of whom did not have lung disease. He concluded it was “highly likely” Farquharson had had cough syncope that night. Under cross-examination, he acknowledged that the accuracy of his diagnosis depended on Farquharson having been a truthful historian.
The third strand of evidence related to what had been going on inside Robert Farquharson’s head. GP Ian McDonald told the court that he saw Farquharson in October 2004, when his complaints “included anxiety, mood swings, paranoid feelings, sleeplessness, dwelling on things, teary, emotional, ups and downs, no interest or motivation; tiredness, being stressed, irritable and finding it hard to cope with his children”.
Farquharson said he thought he might have depression. McDonald agreed and prescribed an anti-depressant. Farquharson returned on November 3 saying he and his wife had separated that day: “He stated that she could not cope with his moods and he felt that coming to see me previously had been too little, too late.” McDonald referred him to a psychologist and later to a psychiatrist.
On December 13, Farquharson told him that his wife had ended the marriage and had found religion: “She was having a close friendship with a member of her church and that was upsetting him. He had been hoping that (their) relationship could be reconciled.”
Farquharson did not consult McDonald again until May 2005, when he told the doctor that “he was aware that his wife was manipulating him . . . I know he was annoyed about having to finish the house they were building prior to selling it.”
Farquharson’s psychologist, Peter Popko, said his client had had mild depression. He did feel despair at times at the blended family situation and the fact Stephen Moules would be influencing his children: “At one point (he) had thought of entering into an argument with Stephen and having Stephen throw a punch at him, and then he would be able to take him to court . . . He did entertain thoughts of, I guess, retribution towards Stephen.”
Popko agreed under cross-examination that Farquharson’s attitude to his children was protective, caring, enthusiastic and encouraging; he was particularly proud of Jai.
The most favourable witness regarding Farquharson’s behaviour at the dam was Gregory Paul Roberts, a social worker and grief counsellor who has had more than 70 consultations with Farquharson since the deaths of the children. He was called by Peter Morrissey, Farquharson’s lawyer. Roberts said Farquharson’s behaviour on the night was normal for someone who had been through what he had. Adrenalin would have caused Farquharson to babble and shock might have caused him to sound robotic, appear emotionless or fail to take in information.
Roberts argued that, regardless of whether parents are together or separated, when one partner is present at the death of a child, that partner will have a strong urge to contact the other parent. “After emerging from the dam, that would be the next focus and, at times, people in trauma can actually become what’s referred to as ‘hyper-focused’. Because of the overload of information they lock into what they feel they need to do next and that becomes very single-minded.”
By the time he returned to the dam with Gambino, a person in Farquharson’s position would also have been exhausted “and starting to move into more what we refer to as dissociation, where the person actually starts to block out part of what’s happened. Other people might be running around but they seem quite detached and will actually step back”.
And the significance of Farquharson asking Moules for cigarettes?
“In stressful events the body will actually crave stimulants, and it’s not necessarily a rational or a conscious thing, it’s actually a physiological fact. It’s obviously particularly so if the person is a smoker or a heavy coffee drinker.”
THE MAN who painted the darkest portrait of Farquharson was one of his oldest friends. Gregory King is a bus driver, a lean, tanned man with a bony face. He wore jeans and a loose shirt and stood tensely in the witness box; much of what he had to say was difficult.
He and Farquharson grew up in Winchelsea together and got to know each other better when they both started working for the local shire. They played footy, went away together, socialised at the pub. He tried to see Farquharson about once a week when he was gloomy over the marriage break-up but sometimes it was hard; King’s wife and four children also had claims on his time.
Once Farquharson told King he had thoughts about driving off a cliff or running into a tree. King told him, “Don’t be stupid.” In early 2005, King saw him sitting in his car by the side of a road. Later, he asked Farquharson what he had been doing there. “He said, ‘I was thinking about lining a truck up’. . . Just the look on his face, he was serious.”
Two or three months before Father’s Day 2005, King ran into Farquharson outside the fish and chip shop in Winchelsea’s main street. It was about 6pm on a Friday. King’s account of what was said next would be vigorously challenged by Farquharson’s defence lawyer. Here is what King told the court: Farquharson was inside the fish and chip shop. He came out and stood beside King’s car door for a chat. Cindy Gambino pulled up two lanes over to the right. She got out of her car and greeted both of them; King said hello to her. She went into the shop.
King reproved his friend for not having returned her greeting: “I said to Robert he had to say hello, and he said, ‘No, you don’t.’ (He) got very angry.”
Farquharson was furious about Cindy pulling up in the good car and said, “I paid $30,000 for (it). She wanted it and they are f—ing driving it. Look what I’m driving, the f—ing cheap one.” Farquharson “went on about the house and said that Cindy wanted the best of everything and they couldn’t afford it.
“Then he said, ‘And now it looks like she wants to marry that f—ing d—head. There’s no way I’m going to let him, her and the kids live together in my house and I have to f—ing pay for it and also pay f—ing maintenance for the kids. No way.’
“He just said , ‘I’m going to take away the most important things that mean to her’ (sic). I asked him what would that be, and he nodded his head towards the fish and chip shop window . . .
“I said, ‘What? The kids?’ ”
Farquharson said yes. “I said, ‘What would you do, would you take them away or something?’
“He then just stared at me, into my eyes, and said, ‘Kill them.’
“I said, ‘Bullshit. It’s your own flesh and blood, Robbie.’
“He said, ‘So? I hate them.’
“I said, ‘You would go to jail.’
“He said, ‘No, I won’t. I’ll kill myself before it gets to that’.”
King told the court that Farquharson said the event would be close by; there would be an accident where he would survive and the kids would not. It would be on a special day.
“I said, ‘What kind of day?’
“He said, ‘Something like Father’s Day so everyone would remember it. When it was Father’s Day and I was the last one to have them for the last time, not her. Then she looks up and for the rest of her life, every Father’s Day . . .’
“I said, ‘You don’t even dream that stuff, Robbie.’ ”
When King went home, he told the court, he told his wife about the conversation. Mary King testified that she did not recall this exchange. There was a lot of noise from the children and bustling over dinner. “(We) didn’t do anything about it,” King told the court. “We just thought he was talking shit again.”
At 11pm on Father’s Day, King got a phone call saying Farquharson had had an accident and the boys had drowned in the dam. “I was just – I was speechless . . . It just all came back to me, the conversation . . . I was shattered.” He broke down at work in front of his boss, who contacted the police. King was asked to wear a secret recording device and try to talk to Farquharson about the fish and chip conversation. He agreed. The recordings were later played to the jury.
The first taped exchange was at the house where Farquharson was living with his father. It took place on September 15, 2005, 11 days after the dam. King spoke in anxious undertones.
He said urgently, “Rob, it’s been eating me up . . . Remember when you said, when Cindy pulled up and you said to her, ‘I’ll pay you back big-time’ – I hope it’s got nothing to do with it.”
Said Farquharson: “No. No way . . . No no no no no. And then you know I would never – no.”
Police had interviewed “her”, Farquharson said: “They’ve said she said, ‘No way known would he do anything like that.’ And I wouldn’t. What, I’m not a mongrel. And I’m not a bastard, and I’m not an arsehole, and I’m not a c—. I would never ever, ever. That has never ever entered my mind. What I meant by paying her back was, when ‘One day I’ll stand here with a woman in front of you and see how you like it’. That’s what I meant.”
Farquharson several times urged King to tell police he had been a good father: “All you say, you say you know me, I’ve always been a good bloke. ‘He’s always spoiled his kids, used to see him riding around on the bikes with the kids, and taking them to the footy, playing footy with them . . .’ Always say all the positive things that you know.” Of the children, Farquharson said to King: “I loved them more than life itself.”
Police sent King on one more covert mission. On October 13, 2005, almost a month after the first taped conversation, King presented himself at the home of Farquharson’s sister, Kerri Huntington. He was again wired for sound.
In the conversation that was to follow, King’s breathing became ragged and he several times came close to tears. He sounded tortured by what he believed he had heard.
After initial chat about work and the weather, King again broached the topic of the fish and chip shop conversation. He said it was eating at him like a cancer – why would Farquharson have said that to him?
“I was just angry,” Farquharson said. “I just turn up and she is throwing her nose up. Like, you know, ‘Look, I’m driving this good car and look at you,’ and I just meant, ‘One day I’m going to be better than you, one day I’m going to have a house.’ ”
He absolutely denied ever saying that there would be an accident where he survived and the children did not. He said that the “payback” he had meant was that he would start a successful business and then Gambino would regret having let him go.
At one point he said, “I’m begging you not to mention anything what you think of that (sic).” The prosecution would later argue that Farquharson was exhorting King not to tell the truth to police.
In the witness box, King said he was 80 per cent confident that his recollection of the talk at the fish shop was accurate. He had tried hard to recall it: “I was distressed, traumatised. I was scared.” It came back to him in pieces “and after that . . . last taping, I was 100 per cent sure”.
King admitted that he had not rung Cindy Gambino and let her know of the alleged threats; he had not rung the police, or a teacher at the school. He did not ring Farquharson the next day to see how he was. He also agreed that since the children’s deaths he had been troubled by bad dreams and intrusive visions of the children drowning, had suffered crying bouts and lost his ability to sleep.
Defence lawyer Morrissey suggested his memory had been distorted by his emotional trauma: “Your memory is playing you tricks because of the terrible situation you’re in?”
“No,” said King.
ON TUESDAY October 2, the jury of five men and seven women retired to consider its verdict. Just after 2pm yesterday the word went out that there was a decision. Cindy Gambino was weeping even before she entered the courtroom. She sat between her mother and father, each of her hands holding one of theirs, her eyes closed, murmuring incessantly.
Justice Philip Cummins had asked those present to restrain their feelings until the jurors had left. But at the first blow – “guilty” – Cindy Gambino let out a strangled cry. By the third “guilty”, she was sobbing. Court officers surrounded her and led her from the court. Even so, everyone present could hear her unearthly howls.
Her mother Beverley, her rock, the woman who had sat beside her every day that she came to the trial and held her hand as she ran the media gauntlets, now collapsed. She was lifted unconscious from the pew and carried out of the courtroom. Mother and daughter left the court complex an hour later in an ambulance.
Robert Farquharson, the silent eye of this storm, had paled as the verdicts were announced. He glanced over at his former wife. Later, he looked at reporters and raised his eyebrows, shaking his head from side to side in disbelief, as if to say, “How did it come to this?”