The infamous child killer was released on bail in 2009 before being sentenced to three life sentences for the murder of his sons aged two, seven, and 10
Claiming he suffered a coughing fit and blacked out, a dad horrifyingly drove his three children into a dam on Father’s Day and then saved only himself.
Robert Farquharson was later found guilty of three counts of murder in a sick act of revenge against the mother of his children and ex-wife, killing his sons, Jai, Tyler and Bailey in 2005. The mother of the three boys, Cindy Gambino left the Australian court after the retrial, knowing Farquharson would spend three life sentences behind bars. He had been released on bail in late 2009 after his initial 2005 conviction, but was locked up once again in July 2010.
Farquharson walked away uninjured when he crashed his car into a dam near Winchelsea, with the bodies of Jai, 10, Tyler, seven, and Bailey, two, found trapped inside the car with their seatbelts undone, as per ABC. They were supposed to spend the day with their father and had just given him a framed photo of them together. Farquharson, who claimed he blacked out from a coughing fit, said he initially thought he had crashed into a ditch, claiming he dived down three or four times to try to reach the boys before asking passers by to take him to his ex.
“It’s just something I had to do, I can’t explain it,” he said. “She’s the mother of my children and I wanted to tell her I had an accident.” He had previously said he would “pay his wife back big time” by taking away the children. The court heard that “payback” was the wrong word choice and he meant he intended to get on with his life.
The mother, Cindy, said though Farquharson had a “love-hate relationship” with his sons. She described Farquharson’s reaction to their children being trapped in a submerged car saying he had his arms crossed looking like “he had just lost his push bike”. In his retrial an inmate testified how he had seen Farqharson black out from a coughing fit in his cell, breaking his leg in the fall.
His sister and aged care nurse, Carmen Ross, was also recalled to explain how in the final weeks of the trial Farquharson had dropped “like a sack of spuds” from his latest attack bought on by the affliction. The explanation was inconsistent with crash reenactment tests carried out by Victoria Police, with Prosecutor Andrew Tinney SC arguing the tests revealed the car was steered three times along its path from the road to the dam.
Senior Constable Glen Urquhart from Victoria Police’s major collision investigation unit believed one distinct turn of the wheel enabled the car to dodge a tree. Eye witness Dawn Waite was the last person to see Farquharson’s car travelling before it left the road. When she overtook it she said she had not seen the driver coughing as she overtook him.
Then she said she watched in her rear-view mirror as the car veered to the right, as if the driver had found a turn-off he was looking for. It was only after she saw a car being pulled from the dam on the TV news she became concerned about what she had seen.
The prosecuting attorney said: “It’s a little bit unlucky that this shockingly unlucky event happened to a man who had threatened to pay his wife back big time, isn’t it, members of the jury, and now they’re dead, the children. What a dreadfully, shockingly, unbelievably unlucky man the accused was on that day if he was not a heartless murderer.”
“He hated her, he hated the fact she had moved on with another man, he hated his life… He hated the fact he had to pay maintenance for the children,” he said. “The accused deliberately drove his vehicle into the dam to murder his children and was not an innocent victim of an unlucky coughing fit leading to unconsciousness.”
In 2024, Robert Farquharson had his name stripped from his sons’ grave and lost all rights to be buried next to them after a Victoria government intervention. Despite the horrific crime, Farquharson’s name followed the inscription “much loved and cherished children of”. His name has now been scratched off the headstone of his three children.
Stephen Moules, the husband of the boys’ mother Cindy Gambino-Moules, who died in 2022, told ABC: “You know there’s probably numerous families out there that have been fighting the system for 10, 20, 30, 40 years over monsters that killed one of their family members, or numerous family members, that still have rights.
“It’s a remarkable feeling to know that you’ve been part of changing history. As ugly as the journey’s been, it’s always the age-old story of out of every bucket of negatives comes positives, and this is a huge positive.”
