This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial Read Online Free Page A

bristled with short grey hair.
‘Another perfect buzz cut,’ whispered Louise. ‘They must have a barber in there 24/7.’
He took the oath in a hoarse, smoker’s voice, holding the Bible away from him with
a rigid arm.
    When Exton got to the dam towards 10 p.m., and found that a Search and Rescue Squad
diver was already preparing to enter the water and that the coroner was on his way,
he and Senior Constable Jason Kok set off to do a walk-through of the scene.
    Stooping and crouching to shine their torch beams along the ground, the two police
officers worked their way down the right-hand verge of the sealed carriageway on
the Winchelsea side of the overpass. Part way down the slope they found marks in
the roadside gravel that they thought must have been made by the tyres of a vehicle
leaving the bitumen in the direction of the dam, at an angle of about thirty degrees.
Then, in the grass beside the road, they spotted some rolling tyre prints that seemed
the natural extension of the marks in the gravel, angled in a general westerly direction
and curving slightly to the right. With no sign of braking or skidding, the rolling
prints continued across the longer grass, through a broken post-and-wire farm fence,
and all the way to the dam’s edge, where debris from a side-mirror housing suggested
that the vehicle had clipped a small tree on the bank before it plunged into the
water. From the bitumen edge to the bank of the dam the car appeared to have travelled
about forty-four metres.
    From there, the men turned and retraced their steps, following in reverse the same
long, linear indentations in the grass back to the point where they had first seen
the tyre marks in the roadside gravel.
    These marks Sergeant Exton outlined with stripes of yellow paint from a spray can.
    …
    On the face of it, this was a brutally simple account of the car’s trajectory. Now
it would be Mr Morrissey’s job to complicate it. In fact, to defend Farquharson against
the Crown’s claim that, in order to get into the dam on that arc, he must have made
‘three steering inputs’ and thus could not possibly have been unconscious at the
wheel, Morrissey would have to blast the police evidence full of holes. He would
have to make the jury doubt the accuracy and even the integrity of the Major Collision
investigation. He set about his onerous task with a will, aided by certain errors
and miscommunications the police had made on the night and later.
    Of these there were quite a few.
    For example, Sergeant Exton’s yellow paint marks in the aggregate turned out, even
before the sun rose on the Monday morning and the investigation continued, to be
not quite parallel with each other. Nor were they correctly aligned with the rolling
tyre prints in the grass; and the reconstruction team from Major Collision, when
they arrived at the dam, had apparently based their entire mapping of the crash on
one of these imperfectly angled paint marks. Furthermore, twenty-nine photos that
Sergeant Bradford Peters, one of the police investigators, took at the dam on the
Monday and Tuesday—some from a helicopter, some at ground level—had been brought
back to Major Collision HQ on a memory stick, downloaded into a job file, and forgotten
for two years. It was only now, a fortnight into the trial, that the Crown, let alone
the defence, had been made aware of their existence.
    Morrissey brought these errors to light with glee. For the next few days, he challenged
police witnesses to defend their methods and to pronounce upon a bewildering array
of photographs, both terrestrial and aerial. On the Smart Board he put up images
sprinkled with dots and lines and arrows that purported to show the relative whereabouts
of cars and emergency vehicles, of scuff marks on gravel and pale marks in lush grass.
Police were confronted with booklets of photos, with their own diagrams and scale
plans, with 3D mock-ups of the scene. They were tackled on road cambers, on