Afterword

Collateral Damage

The very first conversation I had with Cindy Gambino in 2007 remains imprinted on my memory, but Cindy was so traumatised that she struggles to recall it.

The judge had begun his summing up in her ex-husband’s trial when I telephoned Cindy’s home, expecting to leave a message on her voicemail. I was taken aback when, midway through my message, Cindy picked up the call. I was struck by the emptiness in her voice. She sounded numb with shock. It became painfully clear during our brief chat that she was heavily sedated.

I hung up feeling sick for her. I’d never made such an uncomfortable call about a story. I promised not to bother her again, but left my telephone number in case she ever felt able to share her journey.

Shortly after the murder verdict, I received a call from Stephen Moules, arranging for me to visit. It would be a preliminary discussion only. I would take no notes, and if Cindy decided not to proceed, the contents of the chat would remain confidential.

During our discussion, I told her I’d written several other stories about mothers whose children had been murdered in the context of marital separation. Cindy studied me with sorrowful eyes. She insisted that this story would be different. Her children’s deaths were an accident.

The day after Hezekiah’s first birthday, I returned to cover the story Cindy had decided she’d share with me. Later, she insisted I join the family for dinner. While Stephen cooked, I followed the sound of squealing down the hallway to the bathroom, where his boys were frolicking in a bubble bath and splashing their tiny half-brother. It was such an ordinary moment for an ordinary family who had been thrust into the public spotlight by a single, shattering experience. Their lives would never be normal and ordinary again.

Although Cindy refused to acknowledge it, on that chilly October afternoon, she became the seventh Australian mother I have interviewed whose children have been murdered by their fathers. While neither of us knew it then, that first agonising story linked our paths. Over the coming six years, I continued to follow Cindy’s nightmare as the shattering impact of this crime unfolded.

I observed the devastation it has caused to Cindy’s stepsons, Zach and Luke, who were curiously never considered victims of Farquharson’s payback and were never entitled to crimes compensation. It is difficult to imagine their journey, growing up in a house where they have achieved all the milestones Cindy’s own children were denied.

One of my most enduring memories is of listening to Luke as he recounted his dad’s frantic search for Cindy’s missing children. He paused to ask, ‘Did I really see bubbles on the water? Could the boys still have been alive?’ He described the funeral and told me how he’d apologised to them at their grave. ‘It’s not my fault,’ he’d said. ‘My dad tried his hardest.’

It was nobody’s fault but Robert Farquharson’s, I reassured him. Luke wondered aloud if that dad had loved his children. He probably did, I thought, but the love he felt for his kids was nothing compared to the rage he harboured towards their mother. The thought troubled me all the way back to Melbourne. Farquharson’s children were collateral damage in a crime against Cindy, his true target, and Zach and Luke were secondary victims.

So too were Cindy’s two new babies, born into a house devastated by Farquharson’s crime. Cindy and I had countless discussions on her front veranda because she struggled to concentrate and battled panic attacks indoors. On one particularly cold day, she lent me her favourite purple dressing gown to wear over my coat. As Cindy cried and I took notes, Isaiah crept onto my lap, and while she made a drink, he snuggled into the dressing gown, soothed by his mother’s comforting scent. I wrapped the gown around him and continued taking notes until Stephen asked in a panic, ‘Where’s Isaiah?’ Smiling, I opened the dressing gown, and inside was a sleeping toddler. Everyone in this family was a casualty, I thought.

I discussed the issue with prominent Melbourne criminologist Judy Wright, whom I met in the early 1990s when she was a corrections officer. She said, ‘Ask any woman, “What’s the worst punishment your partner can inflict on you?” and most mums will tell you that the worst possible thing would be to have their children taken from them or harmed. It’s the ultimate hurt for any woman.’

Judy’s words returned to me in every discussion I had with Cindy Gambino and other mothers like her, who live with the aftermath of carefully targeted violence. Studies reveal that between July 1997 and June 2008, 488 children under the age of 18 were killed in a homicide in Australia. Alarmingly, 62 per cent of those were murdered by a parent.

I discussed the issue with Gerard Clanchy, who said, ‘These sorts of crimes are not as rare as people might think.’ He told me that on the day he and Andy Stamper interviewed Robert Farquharson, their homicide colleagues were attending the home of Melbourne mother Donna Fitchett, who had drugged and smothered her two little boys. She too had recently separated from their father. Fitchett had described her children’s murders as her ‘greatest act of love’, but Supreme Court judge Elizabeth Curtain, jailing her in September 2010, described her actions as her ‘greatest act of betrayal’.

Retaliatory filicide, where one parent kills the children to punish the other, is often put down to mental illness, overlooking other possible motivations such as revenge. There is limited research into this crime, since generally perpetrators kill themselves after murdering their children. Here, Robert Farquharson and Darcy Freeman’s father Arthur are exceptions.

In Cindy’s early denial, she struggled with the notion that her ex-husband would have killed his own children, rationalising it as an accident. She repeatedly insisted that Robert was no longer as depressed as he had been when they’d first separated.

But Bond University criminologist Wayne Petherick says this improvement in Farquharson’s mental state is exactly what made the time right. He told me, ‘The danger time is not when someone is deeply depressed and unmedicated. It’s well known that people in the darkest depths of depression don’t kill. They don’t do anything – they can’t.’

Depressed people lack noradrenaline, the physical motivator that enables performance. But medications like Avanza, which Farquharson was prescribed for his depression, restore the ability to act.

‘The danger time is actually when the sun starts to come up over the horizon again,’ Petherick says. ‘As the chemical levels in the brain return to normal, you start to process things you couldn’t process before. So whilst in the depths of depression you’ve been blaming yourself, suddenly it becomes, “It’s not my fault – it’s that bitch’s fault!” And instead of looking internally, their entire focus is now on the ex-partner. She’s the one that did this to me – she’s to blame.’

What Cindy has had to grapple with is that the crime against her was motivated by the deliberate intention to inflict lifelong pain. I have witnessed her suffering through a court process that never seemed to end. I have watched her reliving her pain in a first trial, through a successful appeal, a retrial and a second appeal that was rejected only to be appealed again.

I have seen her weep in despair over Farquharson’s repeated refusals to answer her letters, or to permit her to visit him in jail. I’ve rocked her new baby in my arms while she rocked to and fro, unable to accept his release from prison or cringing at the prospect of a retrial where she would have to relive her worst nightmare yet again. And I observed her slow realisation that her children’s deaths had indeed been a vengeful act designed to ruin the rest of her life and pay her back ‘big time’, just as Farquharson promised he would.

In December 2012, I sat behind Cindy and Stephen at the Victorian Court of Appeal in Melbourne. Her relief was tangible as a second tribunal confirmed Farquharson’s guilt. ‘Thank God it’s over,’ she said, leaving court. ‘Now we can move on.’

Her relief was brief. In January 2013, I received a text from Cindy: ‘The bastard – he’s appealing again.’ She was inconsolable when I rang her.

‘He’s punished me in the worst way possible,’ she said, weeping. ‘And this punishment is never-ending. Why is he doing it?’

I tried to answer honestly. ‘Because he can?’

Judy Wright suggests that Farquharson’s persistence has a more callous motivation. ‘He’s stayed around to appreciate the full effect of his rage on her,’ she says. ‘Now he’s done the ultimate, he can top it by prolonging the trials and grabbing all the media attention. There is no more he can do to her unless he fights on and makes sure she continues to suffer and pay. It’s this insidious thing of watching her pain and dragging her back to court, where she has to relive her loss. He’s milked the system for all its worth and used taxpayers’ money to do so. But this way he’s still the victim and she’s the one to blame.’

For fathers who have the sense of entitlement over their families that Cindy described in her evidence, there’s no remorse. ‘It becomes a case of “Now look what you’ve made me do”,’ Judy Wright says.

Perpetrators of such crimes are not alone when it comes to blaming their victims. Because of a wider lack of understanding about the issues that drive retaliatory filicide, mothers like Cindy Gambino often endure subtle secondary victimisation in which they are blamed for the crimes inflicted on them. This only adds to the guilt they feel as they struggle to come to terms with the knowledge that their children were killed to punish them.

Bereaved Perth mother Dr Ann O’Neill, whose two young children were shot dead by her ex-husband as they slept beside her in bed, believes there is a desperate need for education and community awareness to combat this lack of understanding about the underlying motivation for filicide during marital separation.

Since her estranged husband murdered their children and blew off Ann’s leg before turning his gun on himself, Dr O’Neill has been a frequent guest speaker at forums on family violence. She says the question she’s most commonly asked is: ‘What did you do to him to make him do such a terrible thing?’ She has a simple answer: ‘The big problem was that I was simply breathing. You don’t make someone do something like that to you.’

Since her children’s deaths, Dr O’Neill has established an organisation called Angel Hands, which has grown from a volunteer body into a professionally funded organisation that helps people through all aspects of homicide and violent crimes. She says her own experience, as well as her work with other victims of crime, has highlighted a ‘systematic victimisation’ of mothers such as Cindy that the community is often unaware of.

Dr O’Neill says, ‘I think people try to make women who’ve experienced these types of crimes different from themselves, because they then believe they will not be at risk. It’s easier to believe that the mother must have done something to her husband to make him do something like that; to tell yourself: “I’m not like her, so it won’t happen to me.” It’s subconscious self-preservation. It doesn’t make people terrible people, but it is a question of survival.’

The experts agree that society’s tendency to ‘neutralise’ crimes like Farquharson’s doubly victimises the true target of their rage. It’s the same attitude that blames victims of family violence for not escaping danger or holds rape victims accountable for the offences perpetrated against them, asking ‘Why were you out so late anyway?’ or ‘What did you expect dressed like that?’ The situation is similar for Cindy, who has had to endure public criticism for her own psychological injuries.

I have witnessed her distress after being vilified over her initial acceptance of Robert’s version of events. I have read the poison-pen letters from people unable to appreciate that her denial was essential to her survival and at the same time part of the deep psychological destruction her ex-husband intended his act of revenge to inflict on her. Most of these attacks have been from other mothers.

But ironically, perhaps her most prominent critic was the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Jeremy Rapke QC, who presented the case for the Crown in Farquharson’s first trial. In a November 2008 interview, he said that his role in that trial had been to act as the voice for three children who could not speak for themselves, and whose mother ‘would not speak for them either’. This punitive remark came at a time when Cindy was so paralysed by Farquharson’s crime that she’d been rendered effectively mute.

About the time when that story appeared, I’d spent an afternoon with Cindy watching her torment herself with a painful question: would things have turned out differently if she’d let Farquharson have the good car?

‘It was never really about the car,’ I told her.

Cindy’s story does not have a happy ending. It has been painful for her to share, and for me to write. Many of our interviews have been interrupted by Cindy’s panic attacks or delayed by the sedating effects of her medication. Her fragile state explains her request to be interviewed outside, even in the most extreme weather. I’ve become an expert in taking notes with numb fingers.

But ultimately the aim of this book is to give Cindy’s children the voice she was once publicly criticised for denying them. The trauma she has suffered has left her too damaged to do it on her own. For this reason, I have kept my own promise, to give Jai, Tyler and Bailey a voice, while communicating the words Cindy has struggled to find for so many years.

Author Megan Norris pictured with Cindy Gambino in September 2011 beside the Winchelsea dam where Farquharson drowned his three boys

 

We both hope that her story might generate some insight into these crimes and help us see them coming before the next vengeful father takes action. ‘In every act of targeted violence, there’s a warning sign, a behaviour leakage, some sort of comment that indicates they are intending to do it,’ Wayne Petherick says. ‘Guys who kill their kids have told someone, “I’m getting ready”.’

These signs aren’t easy to respond to. As a community, Petherick believes, we have a tendency to ‘err on the side of caution, to see the good rather than the bad’. Friends and family brush off the vengeful parent’s threats. So when Farquharson spoke of killing his children, Greg King dismissed it as just more of ‘Robbie’s bullshit’. Ironically, the danger is greatest when the rejected partner’s depression appears to be lifting and he acknowledges that his estranged wife will not be returning to the relationship. The problem is that these warning signs are difficult to respond to and, as Petherick puts it, ‘By the time the sun has risen over the horizon it’s too late.’ Wright agrees. ‘Did anyone see it in Farquharson or Arthur Freeman?’ she asks. ‘And will anyone really see it in the next vengeful father?’