A previously unreleased psychological assessment of Robert Farquharson, the convicted killer of his three sons, offers new insights into the police investigation.
Victoria police commissioned a psychological assessment of convicted child-killer Robert Farquharson and received it three weeks before charging him with triple murder, but the report remained locked away in police files until it was released recently to the Trial By Water podcast. Police wanted the analysis of Farquharson’s psyche before they conducted a second formal interview with him.
They were seeking tips on how to get him to confess to killing his three sons when he drove them into a dam on Father’s Day 2005. But consultant psychologist Michael R. Davis did not interview Farquharson or any other witness or family member, and based his report only on documents supplied by police. Because of that, he said his report was only useful for investigative purposes and should not be used in court. With those caveats, he concluded that Farquharson had likely attempted suicide by driving his three sons into a dam on Father’s Day 2005, but then changed his mind and could not save the boys. It was the favoured police theory at the time, but not the one the prosecution argued at Farquharson’s trials. Davis completed the report in November 2005, two months into one of Victoria Police’s most high-profile and controversial murder investigations, and a few weeks before police arrested Farquharson. Farquharson insisted the crash was an accident – that he’d coughed and passed out. At his trials, the prosecution argued he had been angry at the breakdown of his marriage to former wife Cindy Gambino, and her starting a new relationship. He had deliberately killed his sons Jai, Tyler and Bailey in revenge, they argued. Police based this largely on a witness, Greg King, who made three different statements, the final one saying he’d heard Farquharson outlining his plot in detail at a fish-and-chip shop several months before the crash. Farquharson was found guilty of triple murder at two trials and sentenced in 2010 to at least 33 years in jai
TRIAL MURDER PSYCHOLOGY INVESTIGATION WITNESSES
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