WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT Robert Farquharson was found guilty of three counts of murder after he drove his three sons into a dam on Father’s Day in 2005, with the boys’ mother saying he had a ‘love-hate relationship’ with them
Emilia Randall GAU Writer
08:00, 11 Nov 2025
The man was convicted of three counts of murder(Image: Fairfax Media via Getty Images)
A man who claimed to have suffered a coughing fit and blacked out, shockingly drove his three children into a dam on Father’s Day, managing to save only himself.
Robert Farquharson was later convicted of three counts of murder in a chilling act of revenge against his children’s mother and former wife, taking the lives of his sons, Jai, Tyler and Bailey in 2005. The boys’ mother, Cindy Gambino, left the Australian court following the retrial, knowing that Farquharson would serve three life sentences behind bars. He had been released on bail in late 2009 after his initial conviction in 2005, but was incarcerated again in July 2010.
Farquharson emerged unscathed when he crashed his car into a dam near Winchelsea, with the bodies of Jai, 10, Tyler, seven, and Bailey, two, discovered trapped inside the car with their seatbelts undone, according to ABC. They were meant to spend the day with their father and had just given him a framed photo of them together.
Farquharson, who maintained he blacked out due to 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-wife, reports the Mirror.
“It’s just something I had to do, I can’t explain it,” he expressed. “She’s the mother of my children and I wanted to tell her I had an accident.” He had previously mentioned that he would “pay his wife back big time” by taking the children away. The court was informed that “payback” was a poor choice of words and what he meant was he intended to move on with his life.
Robert Farquharson at Geelong magistrates court(Image: Fairfax Media via Getty Images)
The mother, Cindy, stated that Farquharson had a “love-hate relationship” with his sons. She depicted Farquharson’s reaction to their children being trapped in a submerged car as him standing with his arms crossed looking like “he had just lost his push bike”.
During his retrial, a fellow inmate testified how he had witnessed Farqharson black out from a coughing fit in his cell, resulting in a broken leg from the fall.
His sister and aged care nurse, Carmen Ross, was also brought back to clarify how in the final weeks of the trial, Farquharson had collapsed “like a sack of spuds” from his latest attack triggered by the affliction. This explanation didn’t align with crash reenactment tests conducted by Victoria Police, with Prosecutor Andrew Tinney SC arguing that the tests showed 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 reckoned one distinctive turn of the wheel allowed the vehicle to swerve around a tree.
Eyewitness Dawn Waite was the final person to spot Farquharson’s motor travelling before it departed the road. As she passed it, she stated she hadn’t observed the driver coughing whilst she overtook him.
She then claimed she witnessed through her rear-view mirror as the vehicle swung to the right, as though the motorist had discovered a junction he was seeking.
It was only after she observed a car being hauled from the dam on the television news that she became worried about what she had witnessed.
The prosecuting barrister stated: “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 was stripped of his rights to be buried next to his sons and had his name removed from their grave following an intervention by the Victoria government. Despite his heinous crime, Farquharson’s name was inscribed as “much loved and cherished children of” on the headstone of his three children, but it has now been erased.
Stephen Moules, the husband of the boys’ mother Cindy Gambino-Moules, who passed away 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.”