After the high-pitched drama of the verdict, the plea hearing three weeks later, on 26 October 2007, was quiet and slow. The air in the court seemed thick, almost gluey. Mr Rapke argued that a crime so cruel, by a man who showed no remorse, could be fitly punished only by three life sentences with no chance of parole. Remorse, replied Mr Morrissey, could hardly be expected from a man who had pleaded not guilty and still maintained his innocence. Justice Cummins listened patiently to the submissions, but the heart had gone out of the thing. Every word spoken rang with a weary, perfunctory note.
Then Carmen Ross—a registered nurse, we now heard, who worked in aged care—took the stand to sketch the life story of her wretched brother. A sweet-faced figure in a white embroidered blouse, dark pants and a large, practical watch, she was clearly the matriarch of the family, and she spoke with authority, twisting a small white hanky in her hands. Rob was the youngest of four, she began, and he was born three months premature.
Twelve weeks early, forty years ago. Doted on, coddled. Was this the missing piece?
He was a treasured baby, she said: lucky to survive, fragile, overprotected, smaller than he should have been. He had trouble with his eyesight. He was not robust, not smart, but a battler; not much good at school, but a struggler. He grew up to be a ‘quiet, patient person’, a team-player in sport. With a smiling affection that at times almost tipped over into tears or laughter, she painted a picture of a faithful, decent, hard-working man, passionately devoted to his children. ‘I like him,’ she said, ‘as a person.’ All the while Kerri Huntington sat grim-faced, a hard block of introverted rage and pain.
…
On the evening of 28 October 2007, between the plea hearing and the sentencing, Cindy Gambino appeared on 60 Minutes. I taped the program. It was a riveting and complex piece of television, and in the years that followed, I watched it many times.
Gambino sits in an armchair in a living room, wearing a pretty rose-pink blouse and stroking a framed photograph of her children. Her interlocutor, a young man, seems awe-struck in the presence of a woman so bereaved; and indeed there is something majestic in Gambino’s demeanour, the slow flood of her tears, her sighs and stubborn refusals, the long pauses she allows to fall while she considers her replies.
‘Most parents who’ve never lost a child,’ she says, ‘can’t fathom the thought of it. They get to a certain point in their thoughts and they just go, “Nuh. Not goin’ there.”’
‘What she can’t fathom, can’t accept,’ declares the interviewer in voice-over, ‘is the truth: Robert Farquharson, the man she married, the father of their children, is a convicted killer, and is now in gaol.’
‘This is too incomprehensible,’ says Gambino. She starts to cry. ‘I can’t believe that this person would hate me that much to want to murder his own children, who he worshipped the ground they walked on. I don’t believe that…He loved me. I know he loved me.’
The interviewer risks it: ‘Did you love him?’
Complex expressions flitter across Gambino’s face. She comes up at last with a pellet of popular wisdom. ‘I think there’s a difference between love and being in love. I loved him, but I was never truly in love.’
A few seconds from a wedding video: against the sun-yellow interior walls of a country church, the newlyweds peel away from the altar and parade arm-in-arm down the aisle. A beaming Gambino glides like a princess in full fig, head high, her veil flowing back from a Russian-style coronet. Alongside her scurries Farquharson in a dark suit and mullet, round-shouldered, unsmiling, a little tame bear.
We see home videos of the three boys playing together in a bath. They blow out birthday candles, crawl among wrapping paper on Christmas morning. In a labour ward Gambino holds out to the camera the newborn Bailey, a wobbly, cloth-wrapped parcel that she handles with consummate authority. In these unstaged moments she is simply a young mother: her face, without make-up, shows the fragility of a woman fresh from an encounter with the numinous, her cheeks scoured, her skin pearly with fatigue.
‘After fourteen years together,’ intones the voice-over, ‘they separated.’
Gambino quotes herself: ‘I don’t love you, and I can’t do this any more.’
‘How did Rob take it?’
‘He took it hard. He felt like he’d walked away with nothing. He basically took his pillow, and a television, and his clothes, and went back to his father’s house. He was devastated, of course.’
The program gives a careful version of the transition. ‘Just as Cindy was breaking up with Robert, another man came into her life—Stephen Moules. He was a concreter who met the couple while working at their house. He became confidant to a miserable Robert, but at the same time he was falling in love with Cindy.’
Fair-haired Moules, looking younger and finer-featured than he had in court, describes his attempts to ‘counsel’ the troubled couple; but once Cindy made it ‘blatantly clear’ that she didn’t want the marriage any more, and when he saw that Farquharson wasn’t prepared to put in ‘the correct efforts’ to put it back together, Moules ‘saw it as a lose–lose situation’.
In the blue-tinted 60 Minutes re-creation of the events at the dam, Moules is a furious hero. While Farquharson in his blanket begs him for a cigarette, Moules curses him, strips off, and begins to dive.
‘He nearly died,’ says Gambino to camera, ‘just doing what he did.’
‘Very brave, what you did,’ says the round-eyed interviewer to Moules. ‘Very brave.’
Impassive Moules deflects the praise. ‘That word would be a lot more justified if I had’ve found them…I know if I was in that situation, I believe if my children weren’t here today, I wouldn’t be here today, ’cause if I couldn’t save them, I’d huddle around them’—he makes an eloquent gathering gesture—‘and I’d say, “Well, we’re goin’ together, kids. And that’s all there is to it.”’
‘When the verdict came,’ says the interviewer to Gambino, ‘you wailed.’
Her tears begin to flow. ‘I wailed ’cause—’
‘For Robert or for the kids? What?’
‘Both—the honour of my children. I don’t want my children to be remembered as “those three little Farquharson boys murdered by their father”…That’s not honouring my children. I wailed because it was not the verdict I wanted.’
‘How do you want the world to see him?’
A long, hard-working silence. The tears stream down her polished cheeks. In a curious, graceful movement she places her hands palm to palm across her chin. She tips her head to one side with a sob and a strained smile, and murmurs, ‘Free?’
‘Cindy,’ says the interviewer sternly. ‘All the evidence that was presented in the court—that the ignition was off, the lights were off, that Rob was in control of the car as it left the road—’
She shakes her head. ‘Means nothing to me.’
‘A jury of twelve unanimously found him guilty.’
‘Means nothing. They don’t know Rob. They don’t know him from a bar of soap.’
‘In your mind,’ says the interviewer, with the ponderous solemnity for which the program is famous, ‘did he do it?’
She tips up her chin, lets her heavy eyelids droop. ‘No,’ she says, very softly.
‘He’s innocent?’
She pauses. Something like a shadow brushes her face, and is gone. ‘I believe he is.’ Her voice is barely more than a whisper. ‘I believe this is a tragic accident.’
…
Gambino did not come to court on 16 November 2007, the day Farquharson was sentenced. His family and supporters arrived in force, with large badges pinned to their lapels: ROBBED, they read, and IN ROB WE TRUST. But no sooner had Justice Cummins begun to read from his slender document—‘You had a burning resentment…You formed a dark contemplation’—than the people with the badges got to their feet and marched out of the court in a body, leaving Farquharson forlorn in the dock. His hair was greyer and his cheeks thinner. He looked pale, even ill. As he listened to the judge’s harsh telling of his story, and to the fierce moral condemnations it laid down, he made grimaces of the kind one would see on a teenage boy being called to account in front of the class: he threw himself back in his chair, flexed his eyebrows ironically, shook his head, blew out air between pressed lips. At the phrase ‘no remorse’ he let his jaw drop and his mouth hang wide open. His responses were so inadequate to the gravity of the situation that it hurt to look at him.
And in the end, the sentence wiped all expression from his face. There was no mercy. Three life terms, one for each dead boy, and no parole.
In the deep, shocked silence, a young man rose in his seat at the back of the court and started a slow clap. He had beaten his palms together no more than three times before the big tipstaff was on him and hustling him out through the glass-paned door.
The court was stood down. People got to their feet and moved in two dense streams towards the outside world. Dazed, I stayed in my seat. All I could think of was the fact that Robert Farquharson would never again get behind the wheel of a car.
Late that evening a text came from my old barrister friend. ‘Too much,’ he wrote. ‘It will not survive appellate scrutiny.’
…
Presuming upon our friendly encounters at the coffee cart, I sent a letter to Bob and Bev Gambino. I asked them if they would introduce me to their daughter, so that I could request an interview. In the most delicate way Bev gave me to understand that this was out of the question. But she said that she and Bob would always be glad to see me if I was ever down Birregurra way.
I wrote to Carmen Ross and Kerri Huntington, asking if they might be prepared to speak to me. Carmen Ross declined in a firm but gracious card. The Farquharson family, she wrote, was putting all its energies and efforts towards the appeal process and the welfare of their brother. When Rob was found to be an innocent father who had had a tragic accident, they might perhaps consider my offer.
An email came from Louise. ‘I saw Justice Cummins having a coffee up in Bourke Street, and Carmen Ross in Degraves Street. I may or may not have violently blushed. I felt a strange rush of guilt for even existing. It was the same awe and fascination I had in court, like they’re very sacred and mysterious people.’
…
A month or so later, driving home from Anglesea, I took the inland route through Birregurra. Bob and Bev welcomed me warmly and sat me down at the kitchen table for a toasted sandwich and a cup of tea. I stayed an hour or two. We talked of this and that. Their discretion was faultless. Nobody cried. Sometimes we laughed. They would not let me leave without a bag of silver beet and potatoes from their garden.
‘We don’t work out there much any more,’ said Bev. ‘Jai and Tyler used to help us with the mowing and the digging. It’s just too painful without them.’
Bob told me that on the day of their grandsons’ funeral in Winchelsea, twenty-five kilometres from Birregurra, three white doves were released into the sky. Days later, a tired and bedraggled white bird flew into their yard and took refuge under the eaves of their back veranda. They fed it. It was there for a fortnight. One morning they went outside and it was gone.