Dad drowned his three children on Father’s Day with horror explanation

In a chilling incident, a father  drove his three children into a dam on Father’s Day, claiming he had suffered a coughing fit and blacked out. The evil father made sure to save himself, while leaving his three sons to die.

Robert Farquharson was subsequently convicted of three counts of murder in a twisted act of revenge against his ex-wife and the mother of his children, Cindy Gambino. He killed his sons, Jai, Tyler and Bailey in 2005. After the retrial, Gambino left the Australian court knowing that Farquharson would serve three life sentences behind bars.

He had been released on bail in late 2009 following his initial conviction in 2005, but was incarcerated again in July 2010. Farquharson emerged unscathed from the crash into a dam near Winchelsea, while the bodies of Jai, 10, Tyler, seven, and Bailey, two, were discovered trapped inside the car with their seatbelts undone, according to ABC. The boys 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 due to a coughing fit, said he initially thought he had crashed into a ditch. He alleged that he dived down three or four times attempting 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 said. “She’s the mother of my children and I wanted to tell her I had an accident.” He had previously vowed to “pay his wife back big time” by taking the children away. The court was informed that “payback” was a poor choice of words and he meant he planned to move on with his life.

The mother, Cindy, revealed that Farquharson had a “love-hate relationship” with his sons. She depicted Farquharson’s response to their children being trapped in a submerged car as him standing with his arms crossed looking as if “he had just lost his push bike”.

During his retrial, a fellow inmate testified witnessing Farqharson faint 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” due to his latest attack triggered by the affliction. This explanation contradicted crash reenactment tests conducted by Victoria Police, with Prosecutor Andrew Tinney SC arguing 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 believed one specific steering manoeuvre allowed the vehicle to avoid a tree. Eyewitness Dawn Waite was the final person to observe Farquharson’s car moving before it departed the road.

When she overtook the vehicle, she stated she had not noticed the driver coughing as she passed him.

She then reported watching in her rear-view mirror as the car swerved to the right, as though the driver had spotted a turn-off he was searching for. It was only after she saw a car being recovered from the dam on the television news that she became worried about what she had witnessed.

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 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 had been inscribed on the headstone as “much loved and cherished children of”. His name has now been erased from the gravestone of his three children.

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.”