Chapter 18

In Denial

When Cindy finally gave her first account of the tragedy, it was to the national women’s magazine Woman’s Day. The thought of Rob languishing in jail for a crime he hadn’t committed weighed so heavily on her that she felt she needed to tell her side of the tale in the hope people would understand why she was supporting her ex-husband.

I was the journalist who secured the story and interviewed Cindy at her home the day after Hezekiah’s birthday party. She explained that she hadn’t been happy with Rob, but it was incomprehensible that he would ever consider harming his children, let alone killing them. An innocent man would grow old in jail for their murders when he was the only person who understood her grief. It was a cruel, slow death sentence from which there was no escape.

‘He’s innocent – dam tragedy mum tells’ read the heading in Woman’s Day the following Monday, introducing an exclusive that captured the interest of the national press and TV networks. The crux of the story was Cindy’s belief in her ex-husband’s innocence and her torment at the prospect of his dying in prison. The magazine published a poignant photograph of the bereaved mother standing beside the shrine in her lounge room with her angels, crucifixes and snapshots.

Cindy spoke about being torn between her life on earth with her new ‘healing angel’ and wanting to be with her three little angels in heaven.

‘Rob was a kind, loving dad,’ she said, and she intended to visit him in jail.

She’d been suffering flashbacks again since the trial, reliving the events of that Father’s Day. But she didn’t want the rest of her life to be defined by this terrible tragedy. She couldn’t bear to think that she’d go to her grave being remembered as ‘the dam drowning mum’.

During the interview, we had to pause at regular intervals to allow her to compose herself and to give me a chance to wipe away my tears. It was impossible to imagine the depth of this mother’s grief.

Throughout the interview, her curious toddler scribbled on the cover of my spare notebook, oblivious to the painful subject we were discussing. On my way out of the house, I stepped over party streamers and deflated balloons, thinking how painful it must be to celebrate the life of a new child while mourning for three lost ones.

The story brought tears to the eyes of everyone who handled it on the magazine, from the subs to the new editor, Amy Sinclair, who’d only taken over the position that Monday.

‘How could she stand by him?’ the editor asked in a late-night phone call to the Geelong hotel where I was finishing my story.

‘She’s in denial,’ I explained. ‘I think that’s how she’s surviving.’

And behind the scenes, the victimised mother was being victimised all over again. Among the many kindly letters Cindy received had been anonymous hate mail. As if losing her children wasn’t bad enough, she was now under attack for supporting their father.

The anonymous writer of one angry letter told her she must be stupid to believe such a pathetic story. How could she consider supporting a man who had murdered her children in cold blood? The unidentified author said the evidence had been so overwhelming that Cindy must be out of her mind.

‘Letters like this might really send me out of my mind,’ Cindy told me as she put it away. She asked me not to mention the hate mail in the Woman’s Day story, terrified it would encourage more poison-pen writers to crawl out of the woodwork.

The following Sunday, she was interviewed on 60 Minutes and again felt under fire when the interviewer asked if she considered herself naïve for still believing in her ex-husband’s innocence when everyone around her was convinced this was a revenge murder.

While filming the TV segment, Cindy had agreed to hand over family video footage of her three children splashing in the bath at home. It had been taken just after she and Rob separated, and it was precious to her. In the years ahead, the footage would be aired time and again on TV whenever the story made new headlines.

The personal attacks continued after the TV show. A woman, recognising her in a Geelong shop, bailed her up and told her she was a ‘stupid mother’. Cindy went home in tears and hid herself away.

She was confused and hurt. Why couldn’t people see that her children weren’t dead because of anything she’d done wrong? Their deaths had ripped her life apart, and now complete strangers felt entitled to tear what was left of her to pieces. She wondered what could possibly unleash such bitterness.

Just days after the TV show aired, Rob Farquharson’s sisters, Carmen and Kerri, gave an interview to a reporter from Melbourne’s Sunday Age. They expressed their faith in their younger brother, who was as much a victim of this terrible tragedy as his three little sons. As far as they were concerned, their entire family had been victimised by what they still maintained was a terrible freak accident.

They said Robert had been treated like a criminal from the moment his children drowned, and his family had been treated like accomplices in the supposed crime.

They were an ordinary, honest, up-front family, now totally disillusioned with the Australian justice system. The three boys’ deaths had plunged them all into ‘a roller-coaster horror nightmare’.

Carmen and Kerri told of the shy, warm, easy-going brother who had raised his children with good values, teaching them to respect authority and other people’s things. From their father, they had learnt of the importance of family and of being there for one another. Now these boys, so painfully missed by those who loved them, were merely a marketable headline.

The Rob they knew was nothing like the callous man portrayed in the media. He was a loyal man with a big heart who would do anything for anyone. He was a nurturer and a carer whose children meant the world to him.

Kerri and Carmen described him as a ‘hands-on’ dad who had unlimited access to his children, saw them regularly and had high hopes for his sons’ futures. It didn’t make sense that he’d want to harm them.

The guilty verdicts had been a shock. The family had hoped throughout the trial that the jury would see the truth and justice would prevail. It had to count for something that his former wife believed him.

Kerri, who had sat through the entire committal and trial, was angry and confused by the Crown’s case. On the one hand they were claiming he’d snapped, she said – on the other they were saying that the murders had been planned for months. Which was it?

The sisters took great exception to the suggestion that their brother had faked a rare coughing condition, and they were sceptical of the claim that he’d researched the symptoms on the internet. The Rob they knew was a simple man – certainly not Machiavellian enough to dream up something so elaborate and monstrous. They’d seen him at the hospital suffering what they now knew to be post-traumatic stress. It had been horrible watching him reliving the final moments in his children’s lives over and over again.

Kerri described the distress of watching someone she loved suffering in such a cruel way – repeatedly reliving his losses, yet being denied the chance to grieve. The father who’d been labelled a killer by police, the courts, the media and the public wasn’t the Rob they knew.

Rob’s sisters were visiting him at the Melbourne Assessment Prison, though he would soon be relocated to Port Phillip Prison, where he’d continue to be kept in isolation. This compounded his ordeal as an innocent man, wrongly convicted of killing his own flesh and blood. Now, two families were standing as one, with his former wife spearheading the campaign to clear Rob’s name. Surely this was enough to convince the doubters?

In the months after the verdict, Kerri and Carmen remained in close contact with Cindy. Their fight to clear Rob’s name was gearing up, and Cindy joined in. She gave an interview to the Geelong Advertiser, which ran a prominent story accompanied by photographs of the grief-stricken mother linking arms with her two former sisters-in-law in a public show of support.

Cindy told the newspaper that, while she ultimately held Rob accountable for her children’s deaths, there was no blame or bitterness on her part. He was responsible for the accident because he drove his car while he was sick. He had a duty of care to return her children home safely and hadn’t done so, but that was negligence, not murder.

Cindy again said she intended to visit Rob in prison when she was better. She was making weekly trips to see her counsellor and travelling to Geelong each fortnight for appointments with Dr Singh. The psychia­trist warned Stephen that she wasn’t strong enough to cope with another traumatic event. A reunion with Robert might just tip her over the edge.

On 6 December 2007, just weeks after Farquharson was sentenced, Greg King was in the dock himself. He appeared at the Geelong Magistrate’s Court, where he pleaded guilty to a charge of recklessly causing injury.

Rob’s sisters sat in the public gallery as the prosecutor told the court that King had been at the Barwon Hotel in Winchelsea on Christmas Eve 2006 with his brother-in-law, Robert McFarlane, when trouble erupted. The incident appeared to be retribution for an earlier alleged assault on members of Mr McFarlane’s family in their home.

The victim of the assault, Luke Dalwitz-Jones, was at the hotel with a friend and had tried to intervene in an altercation between his mate and another man, but King had told him to stay out of it. The argument turned into a fight, in which King assaulted Dalwitz-Jones.

King’s solicitor, Ian Chappell, said the trouble had started when King was trying to calm people down. The victim yelled at King, who gestured at him to go away. ‘A fight breaks out, the victim again says something to my client, and he strikes him three times in quick succession to the stomach,’ said Mr Chappell.

King escaped without conviction. He was placed on a twelve-month good behaviour bond and ordered to pay $750 into the court’s fund. The magistrate accepted that he was a man of good character and had never been in trouble before. Gerard Clanchy wrote a letter on King’s behalf, detailing the stress he’d been under at the time of the offence as a result of the pending trial in which he was a crucial witness. His co-operation with the police had placed him under enormous personal pressure, and Clanchy urged the court to take this into consideration.

The Geelong press ran the story under the headline: ‘Farquharson Murder Trial Star Witness in Pub Punch-Up’, with a photograph of King leaving court in a suit and sunglasses. Farquharson’s sisters emerged from court sporting prominent badges with the word ‘Robbed’. Their presence reminded the world that Robert Farquharson’s conviction was being challenged. His defence team was now organising paperwork for his appeal.