Chapter 21

Rob’s on His Own

Cindy lay on a blanket beside her children’s grave and stared at the sky. Lying beside her children brought her temporary relief from a world where she felt disconnected.

‘Why did this happen?’ she asked her boys aloud. ‘What really happened to you?’

She dozed for hours, then finally gathered up her blanket and headed home. This time, she’d been gone for almost six hours. Stephen had been ringing around, but nobody had seen her.

He put his arm around her. He felt worn out too. It was draining to be continually playing peacemaker between Cindy and his boys.

At her next visit to Dr Singh, Cindy admitted she was struggling to cope with the demands of her family.

Amid all the conflict, Stephen and Cindy were preparing to move house to Trebeck Court on the outskirts of town. With four big bedrooms, the house had enough room for everyone, and there was plenty of space outside for Stephen’s two energetic older boys to kick a footy or ride their motorbikes. The house was in a semi-rural setting on five acres of land, with views towards the old Barwon Park manor.

There was plenty of work to do. The previous owners had left completion works to the new purchasers. Between school runs, nappy changes and Cindy’s doctors’ appointments, Stephen intended to use his handyman skills to finish the house himself.

But despite Stephen’s support, the stress was proving too much for Cindy. By late March, she felt positively unwell.

Her painful throat had persisted. ‘It’s permanently ulcerated,’ she told Dr McDonald as he shone his torch into her mouth. The doctor took swabs and arranged kidney and liver function tests.

A few days later, Dr McDonald’s receptionist rang Cindy’s home. ‘The doctor wants to see you urgently,’ she said.

Cindy flew into a panic. ‘Now what?’ she asked. That afternoon, she sat in the doctor’s rooms.

‘There’s something abnormal about these tests,’ said the doctor, not looking at her. ‘You either have a kidney infection or you’re pregnant. And I don’t think it’s a kidney infection!’

Cindy was horrified. She wailed to Stephen in the car, ‘He made me do another blood test to see if I’m pregnant again.’ The uncertainty was killing her, so they stopped on the way home to buy a pregnancy testing kit.

An hour later she sat silently in the bathroom and watched a blue line form – solid evidence of what her doctor already suspected.

She burst into tears. ‘I don’t want another baby. I won’t cope!’

Stephen didn’t doubt that. They both wondered how this could have happened when Cindy was on the pill.

Then she remembered. At Geelong Hospital, the doctors had stopped all her medication, and she’d forgotten about her contraceptive pill. Any trace of it would have been flushed away by the intravenous drip. Now she was pregnant again – and desolate.

Cindy cried nonstop for the next two weeks. It wasn’t that she didn’t ever want another baby – she and Stephen had discussed it, and she’d mentioned the idea to her mum. But she didn’t want a baby while she felt this bad. The timing was terrible.

She’d been experiencing nausea, which she’d assumed was a lingering symptom of her earlier overdose, but it was actually the first sign of the sickness that had dogged her previous pregnancies.

‘What am I going to do with another baby?’ she sobbed. Stephen made no reply. What was he going to do with another a baby? After all, he was the one juggling two older boys, caring for a toddler and tending to Cindy’s every need. They had two hours a week of government-funded home help, which had lifted a little of the burden, but he couldn’t imagine where he’d find time for another baby.

Anyway, there was no point dwelling on it. ‘We’ll just get on with it like we always do,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders.

A handful of friends and family offered to help them move by packing for Cindy, who was now throwing up and feeling terrible.

In April 2009, Stephen organised a van and packed their dysfunctional lives into it. This new house had to be a new beginning, he told himself.

But at Trebeck Court, visits from friends noticeably dwindled. When Stephen ran into mates in the street, they sheepishly confessed that Cindy’s pain was too overwhelming for them to cope with. They had no words for her and felt impotent to help. As time passed, more friends dropped off, leaving Cindy feeling alone.

Her isolation provided a new spark for her anger, which erupted in drawn-out arguments with Stephen and his boys.

Deep down, though, Cindy knew her anger was misdirected. The empathy she’d felt for Rob had now evaporated, and anger had taken its place. But the target of her anger was safely out of reach, so the people around her had to bear it.

She’d abandoned any hope of visiting Rob and she refused to accept the explanation that he was too fragile to see her. The person who had caused her pain, even if he’d done so accidentally, was flatly refusing to help her heal.

‘It doesn’t mean I think Rob’s guilty, though,’ she told Stephen.

Stephen shrugged. If she still believed Rob’s story, what else was she expecting him to say?

Something else Rob’s counsellor had said now caused her to rethink. He’d said Rob was protecting himself – putting himself first in order to survive.

‘He’s abandoning me to save himself, isn’t he?’ Cindy asked Stephen.

She stared at Hezekiah, fast asleep in his cot, then climbed into bed and put a comforting arm around her tummy, thinking about her unborn baby. ‘These babies need their mother,’ she said, rolling over towards Stephen.

That night, she made an important decision. ‘From now on, I’m focusing on my children and myself,’ she whispered sleepily to Stephen. ‘I’m going to do what Rob’s doing – protecting myself so that I can survive.’

Her new family came first. Rob was now on his own.

In March 2009, Rob’s sisters had phoned to inform her that his appeal had been lodged with the court. Cindy knew little about the specifics of the appeal. She didn’t care about the forensic evidence that had painted a portrait of a callous revenge murder. God was telling her this was wrong. She just knew it.

The appeal was based on 30 grounds, which Rob’s lawyers argued made the three murder convictions unsafe and unsatisfactory and meant the life sentences should be overturned. According to the defence, several pieces of evidence should not have been presented to the jury, including expert police testimony relating to the car’s steering movements and the path it travelled into the dam. Also at issue were key aspects of Greg King’s evidence, and the fact that the Crown had failed to disclose to the defence that their star witness faced criminal charges of his own. Farquharson’s lawyers further argued that his punishment was manifestly excessive. The date of his appeal was set for 1 June.

In documentation before the court, it was also revealed that Farquharson’s ex-wife, Cindy Gambino, had launched a civil action against him, claiming she was suffering nervous shock, anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from her children’s deaths. Her lawyer had advised her to take the action because if she did nothing, the government would simply seize Rob’s assets, which were currently frozen.

Cindy had already brought another damages suit against Farquharson, which had been settled out of court in January by the Transport Accident Commission (TAC). Rob’s sister Kerri had said, ‘You are entitled to it – do it.’ And with her blessing, Cindy had gone ahead.

But now, to Cindy’s dismay, the media were portraying her as greedy and self-interested.

She tried to explain. ‘No amount of money is ever going to bring my children back,’ she told journalists. If she had to choose between having her children back and having a million dollars tomorrow, she’d choose the children every time.

Cindy stared out the window at the new Holden on the driveway of her new home, which was full of new furniture and nick-nacks. They didn’t mean a thing without her kids. Money meant nothing, possessions even less. Nothing could compensate her for a loss so great.

But the media seized upon the story. Why would a mother who believed in her ex-husband’s innocence now sue him for the pain he’d caused her by killing her children? Did she believe he was guilty after all?

‘It’s not about whether he killed them or not, or whether I believe in his innocence or not,’ Cindy protested. ‘The courts have decided that this was a crime, and based on that verdict I’ve been advised to pursue a claim.’ The media had missed the point.

When the civil compensation case was heard in the Supreme Court on 1 May, Cindy made headlines again. Her lawyer, Darren Bracken, told the court that, while his client had reached a confidential settlement with the TAC, this wasn’t a case of ‘double dipping’. Her TAC claim had been for nervous shock, while this claim was for ongoing pain and suffering.

‘The notion that she will have to live with for the rest of her life is that her children were killed in order to punish her,’ he said.

Defence lawyer Con Mylonas said Farquharson hadn’t objected to the proceedings, but he could make no further submissions because his client maintained he was innocent.

Justice Philip Cummins, who had sentenced Farquharson, announced his decision on 14 May, awarding Cindy compensation of $225,000, or $75,000 for each of her sons.

The judge pointed out that the purpose of the application wasn’t to further punish her ex-husband but to compensate his former wife for her grief. He said, ‘Ms Gambino’s odyssey from belief to desolation is a constituent of her grief and suffering, and the subject of this order of compensation.’

Part of the $225,000 would come from Farquharson’s $66,000 in assets, which until now had been frozen. There was no indication of where the rest of the money might come from.

On the evening of the decision, Stephen and Cindy were putting the kettle on at home when they heard a knock on their back door. Cindy plodded over to open it in her slippers, only to find a posse of journalists on the doorstep.

What the journalists didn’t know was that they’d arrived in the midst of a crisis. Cindy and Stephen had spent that afternoon at Geelong Hospital, where the doctors had expressed serious concern about the effects of Cindy’s medication on her unborn, unplanned baby.

After Cindy’s overdose, Dr Singh had increased her medication to help alleviate her persistent low moods. Like Cindy herself, the doctor was unaware that there was any possibility of another pregnancy. She’d already told him that her ability to be a mother had vanished, and having another child would be too much for her.

But her unexpected pregnancy had changed everything. Now, to her horror, she’d been classified as a high-risk patient. Whether she wanted a baby or not, she was terrified of losing another child.

Cindy’s age alone placed her in the high-risk bracket, the doctors said, and they urged her to consider having a test for Downs syndrome. But taking samples of amniotic fluid to test for the chromosomal defect carried risks for the baby.

Despite the pregnancy, Cindy was smoking more than ever and was boosting her flagging stamina with an unhealthy diet of high-energy caffeine drinks. ‘No wonder I’m high-risk,’ she cried. ‘And what if it is Downs syndrome?’ Given her Catholic background and her loss, a termination was out of the question.

With so much on her mind, the last thing she was thinking about was the compensation decision being brought down in Melbourne that day, but it was already making news when she arrived home. That was what had drawn the journalists to her house.

Cameras captured her tear-stained face when she innocently opened her back door. She got such a fright at the sight of the news crew that she slammed the door shut without a word.

But Stephen had plenty to say. He appeared in the doorway and ordered the news crew off his property. His language was so colourful that most of what he said that night never went to air.

Cindy’s stunned expression amid the flash of cameras was enough to raise questions at the ABC’s Media Watch program, which promptly called the couple.

Stephen, still fuming, was only too happy to detail the family’s situation and the impact of ongoing intrusion into their lives. He complained about the behaviour of ‘unethical, unprofessional journalists’ who wouldn’t let anything get in the way of a good story. Not even if it involved a mother who had lost three children and now feared losing another.

As Rob’s appeal hearing approached, there was growing tension between Cindy and her good friend Wendy Kennedy. It appeared to Cindy that Wendy blamed Stephen for the breakdown of her marriage to Rob, and she resented Wendy for being on Rob’s prison visiting list when she still was not.

One day, during a visit to Cindy’s home, Wendy raised the subject of the appeal. ‘You could help,’ Wendy suggested. ‘You could put some of that compensation money from the TAC towards the legal costs for Rob’s appeal – to help him get out of jail.’

Cindy shook her head. ‘No amount of money is going to get Rob out of jail,’ she said. It was pointless. But deep down, she knew the real reason was that she was angry with Rob for refusing to see her.

Wendy was annoyed by Cindy’s refusal to help Rob. The two long-time friends had an argument, which culminated in Wendy walking out of the house.

Cindy phoned her friend later. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Both women admitted they felt badly about the argument. But Cindy wouldn’t budge. She was not prepared to fund Rob’s legal fight, no matter what.

As she hung up, she realised she was also angry with Wendy, who she was convinced had been withholding information from her visits with Rob. As far as Cindy was concerned, the trust between them had gone. A line had been drawn, and Wendy had crossed it.

But if her friendship with Wendy had died, Cindy still had a few faithful allies. Vicky Riley, her friend of some years, hand-delivered a condolence card on every anniversary of the children’s death. ‘I’m always here for you,’ she reminded Cindy, and Cindy knew it was true.

She remained good friends with Cass Van Galen, her schoolmate Sue McNaughton, and her former next-door neighbour Kathy Carter, and she’d made some new friends since the tragedy. But her faith in people was being sorely tested. It sometimes seemed that everything she believed in was melting away before her eyes.

She’d noticed that Kerri and Carmen had stopped calling her, but she didn’t care. ‘Let them support Rob,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘I’m supporting myself and my family now. This is about survival.’

Her medical tests had revealed no obvious harm to her unborn baby. Dr Singh assured her that he’d work closely with her obstetrician again to monitor the effects of her medication.

Once Cindy recovered from her initial shock about the pregnancy, she began to look forward to having another child. She’d come to believe that her three little angels in heaven were sending her a sign. ‘They’re telling me it’s time to be a mum again,’ she told everyone. ‘And this time I’m going to enjoy it.’

She’d been procrastinating, but God had taken the decision out of her hands. ‘He’s made the decision for us. We have to have faith in that.’

After her brush with death, a new life had been sent their way. Cindy now had a chance to be a real mum again, and she was determined she’d rise to the challenge.