On a solitary stretch of road outside Winchelsea, a town southwest of Melbourne, Australia, three white crosses mark a fence just off the highway.

The fence encloses a 7.4-meter-deep dam, once a neglected quarry owned by a local farmer. Today, the dam appears serene, with its dark waters calm and intact. The grass grows untamed and dense around its edges.

Sometimes, fresh flowers are laid beneath the crosses – the only sign to passing motorists of the tragedy that took place here 20 years ago.

On the night of September 4, 2005, three young boys lost their lives in the water.

But this wasn’t a youthful dare that went astray, nor a mischievous game gone bad. For the boys, Jai, ten, Tyler, seven, and Bailey, two, weren’t unattended that night.

In fact, they were somewhere they believed to be completely safe: travelling home in the car with their father, Robert Farquharson.

The subsequent court case would become a notable part of Australia’s criminal history, leading to Farquharson’s conviction twice for deliberately driving his car off the road to drown his three children.

Despite the numerous developments that kept this story in the Australian headlines for years, it remained largely unknown here. That is, until recently.

Owing to celebrity influence, an 11-year-old book about the case, This House Of Grief by Helen Garner, is topping global bestseller lists. Selected as Book of the Month by British singer Dua Lipa on her lifestyle site Service95, the book has gone viral among her vast audience of 88 million followers, introducing this gripping tale to a new generation of crime enthusiasts.

It’s also become the subject of countless true crime podcasts, including the investigative series Trial By Water, from the Sydney Morning Herald, which topped the Apple charts last year.

The truth is, no one but Farquharson himself knows exactly what happened on that terrible evening two decades ago – though the hours and minutes before the car veered off the road have been painstakingly pieced together by the police, author Helen Garner and others.

It was Father’s Day in Australia and the boys had spent the afternoon with their dad in nearby Geelong, where he had moved after separating from their mother, Cindy, ten months earlier.

They’d enjoyed dinner at a fast-food restaurant, and were laughing together in the car as it sped along Princes Highway towards their mum’s house in Winchelsea, just after 7pm.

Jai, a sporty, outgoing boy who looked after his younger siblings, was in the front seat beside his dad, while his brothers sat together in the back.

It was a cold, dark night and at some point before 7.15pm, just two miles from the town centre, the car left the Tarmac, swerving right down a grassy embankment and crashing through the wire fence around the dam.

It floated for 28 metres before sinking, nose first, into the murky water, with the terrified boys and their father still inside.

Somehow, Farquharson managed to escape and swim to safety. His sons, abandoned in the water, did not make it out alive.

Farquharson’s motive, the prosecution alleged, was getting back at his ex-wife, who had left him for someone else, leaving him bitter and hell-bent on revenge.

He remains, to this day, behind bars at Barwon Prison near Geelong, where he’s serving a life sentence for triple murder with a minimum of 33 years. Farquharson, now 56, will be in his 70s before he is eligible for parole.

But the sudden new popularity of This House Of Grief is not the only development that has led to a resurgence of interest in the tragic and captivating case.

Farquharson’s legal team, who have insisted from day one that he’s innocent, have announced they are preparing a new appeal.

Under the terms of a 2019 law, they need ‘fresh and compelling evidence’ to show a ‘substantial miscarriage of justice’ has occurred – and his lawyers insist they have exactly this.

Their claims are based on scientific research about how vehicles sink after entering deep water, as well as new information around ‘cough syncope’, a rare condition Farquharson claims caused him to cough so violently he blacked out before accidentally driving his car into the dam.

For the first time in 20 years, genuine doubt has been cast on his guilt. Could an innocent man, a grieving father who blamed himself for the deaths of his three sons, have been wrongfully convicted?

To his supporters, who say Farquharson was a loving man who would never have committed such an unimaginable act, the question has been a long time coming.

Friend Michael Hart, whose son played football with the Farquharson boys, has never doubted his innocence.

In fact, Robert invited him and his family to accompany them to KFC, the fast-food restaurant they visited the night of the crash, but he wasn’t able to join them.

‘He was a dedicated father and he did everything for the kids,’ he said in a recent interview. ‘That was his life, his boys. My son and I grieve those three boys terribly, and it breaks your heart, it really does.’

Farquharson’s sister, Carmen Ross, is another who has never questioned her brother’s version of events. She speaks to him on the phone two or three times a week, and visits the prison every month.

‘I’m hoping people just take the time to listen, look into things and just think about things, without already labelling him,’ she told a podcaster last year.

Much of the public opinion about Farquharson was shaped by his behaviour in both the months leading up to, and the fateful weeks after, his sons’ deaths.

A local handyman, lawn-mower and window washer, he was well-known in the Winchelsea area, as was Cindy Gambino, his wife.

The pair had been together since 1990 and married in 2000. All Cindy had ever wanted, she told friends, was ‘to be a mum’ – and her three boys brought her immense joy.

Robert, wrote Helen Garner in her account of the case, was a ‘faithful, rather dull guy’.

Though their marriage was content, Cindy’s head was turned by Stephen Moules, a concreter they had hired to do some work on their house, and she left Robert for him at the end of 2004.

The separation hit Robert hard; he was said to have become aimless and depressed, on the lookout for friends to stay with and take his side.

In the end, he went to Geelong to live with his father. Their belongings were separated; the family cars were a particular bone of contention for Robert, as Cindy got the ‘better’ of the two.

Seeing Cindy with her new partner was painful for Robert. Watching him driving around town, a small community where everyone knew each other, in the car he so desperately wanted for himself, was even more humiliating.

Having sought the help of a psychologist and later a psychiatrist to deal with the break-up, he was prescribed several antidepressants, which he was on at the time of the crash.

On the day of the tragedy, Robert had a throat infection – that much is medically documented.

What he claims happened next has been gone over time and time again in court.

‘I think we just went over the overpass, and I started coughing, and then I don’t remember anything,’ he told police interviewers.

‘And then, all of a sudden, I was in this water, and my son screamed at me, ‘Open up the door,’ and we nose-dived. I shut the door on him [to stop water getting in] and I tried to get them out.’

Farquharson had not been diagnosed with cough syncope, a rare condition that can cause sufferers to black out for 10 to 15 seconds after a violent coughing fit, before that night.

‘I blacked out,’ he insisted. ‘I don’t remember anything else.

‘I just started coughing and it got worse and worse and worse. And that was it.’

His supporters, including thoracic medical experts, insist the condition would have explained what happened. It is often associated with falls and car accidents.

Farquharson had apparently visited a local doctor with a syncope episode a few weeks beforehand, and he would go on – while in prison in 2009 – to collapse and appear to fall unconscious in front of other inmates, following a severe coughing fit.

Remarkably, for two years after her children’s deaths, Cindy Gambino supported her ex-husband.

She told his first trial in 2007: ‘I believe with all my heart that this was just an accident and that he would not have hurt a hair on their heads.’

However, she had changed her mind by 2009, the same year Farquharson’s conviction was unanimously overturned on appeal, and he was released on bail prior to a retrial.

Cindy then sued him in the Victoria Supreme Court for pain and suffering over her son’s deaths and, at his second murder trial in 2010, said she now believed he had murdered their children.

Despite what he told police, his behaviour immediately after the incident was certainly suspect.

Rather than trying to save his children, he swam to safety himself – then flagged down an approaching car on the Princes Highway.

The driver who stopped, Shane Atkinson, would remember Farquharson repeatedly refusing to call emergency services. Nor would he allow anyone into the water to search for his boys.

Instead, he insisted Atkinson and his passenger drive him to his ex-wife’s house, so he could tell her face-to-face what had happened.

He apparently said: ‘Oh no, f***, what have I done, what’s happened… I’ve killed the kids. They’ve drowned.’

Minutes later, apparently unemotional, he asked the driver for a cigarette.

Instead, it was Cindy, who drove to the dam at breakneck speed, who started the search. Her partner Stephen dived into the icy water, only to be pulled ashore by rescuers.

Police divers found the car, with the boys’ bodies still inside, around 11pm, and winched it from the water three hours later.

Jai was found face-down across the front seats, part-way out of the driver’s door, while his brothers were still in the back. Bailey was tangled in the straps of his car seat.

The 2010 trial focused on several apparently damning pieces of evidence. The lights, heater and ignition of the Holden VS Commodore Farquharson was driving that night had all been switched off before it entered the water – something he would not have been able to do if he was, as he claimed, suffering a blackout.

A witness came forward saying she saw his car braking and veering before leaving the road – yet another inconsistency in his story.

A psychological report found him to be ‘brooding’ and ‘over-protective’ towards his children; the type of man who ‘bottled up his anger’.

There was also a chilling account of a conversation he had allegedly had with Greg King, an old friend, a few months before that fateful Father’s Day. Outside a fish and chip shop in Winchelsea, King claimed, Farquharson had told him he intended to get back at Cindy ‘big time’ for leaving him.

‘I’ll pay her back, I’ll teach her,’ he is alleged to have said.

He apparently went on to say he would take away the thing that was most important to her. When King said, ‘What, the kids?’ Farquharson nodded.

When King asked, ‘What would you do, would you take them away or something?’, the reply was: ‘Kill them.’

Police covertly wired King up and, when he reminded Farquharson of the earlier conversation, Farquharson urged him on tape not to mention it again.

Doubt was cast on the incriminating exchange in court, however, as King’s story changed several times. His wife could not remember him ever telling her about it; and, crucially, he was under criminal investigation himself for another crime when he mentioned it to police.

Nevertheless, after 11 weeks of evidence and three days of deliberation, a second jury found Farquharson guilty of murder – and on October 15, 2010, he started his long stretch in prison.

Fifteen years later, much has changed, but his story has not.

Cindy, who went on to remarry and have two more sons with her partner, Stephen Moules, died in 2022 after suffering a medical episode, aged just 50.

She went to her grave believing her husband had callously murdered their three sons. Her family described her as a ‘warrior for justice’.

Cindy’s parents, Beverley and Bob Gambino, believe her untimely death was triggered by grief. ‘Our family has been completely destroyed by this,’ they said in an interview earlier this month. ‘Jai would have been in his early 30s by now,’ added Bob, 78. ‘We could have had great-grandchildren. It is a scar that never heals. It seems like yesterday; it just doesn’t go away.’

The pair, known as Grandma and Poppy to the three boys, remember fondly how they used to love visiting their grandparents on Sundays, doing Easter egg hunts in their garden, and searching down the back of their grandfather’s chair for coins that had fallen from his pockets.

They stood by their daughter as her opinion of her ex-husband’s guilt changed, and staunchly believe that justice has been done.

‘We know he is guilty,’ said Bob. ‘We knew Robbie.

‘You get to know someone over a long time… and it fits.’

Eleven days after the boys’ deaths, they, along with Cindy, Robert (still, at that time, a free man) and 500 mourners, including school friends in their uniforms, bid farewell to Jai, Tyler and Bailey at a tiny brick chapel in Winchelsea.

They are buried together in a single plot in the local cemetery, marked by a black headstone.

Robert Farquharson’s name, once etched in gold beside Cindy’s, has been scratched off the inscription.

Today he spends his days on the Hoya Unit inside Barwon Prison, a special protection unit reserved for the most violent and fearsome inmates.

Visitors are allowed, but cannot bring in food or gifts; nor can they touch him or even sit too close.

There, he likes to immerse himself in menial tasks, like washing the floors and tidying the kitchen. He writes letters, too, claiming in a recent one that his boys are ‘always in my heart’.

‘I have told the truth about what happened and that has never changed,’ he wrote, just last year. ‘My hope for the future is to have my name cleared.

‘I’m an innocent man in prison. I shouldn’t be in this situation.’

Whether the justice system, and the rest of the world, will ever believe him remains to be seen.