Listen to Trial By Water – Episode 2

In the second episode of Trial By Water, we tease apart the strands of scientific evidence that were so important in the case against Robert Farquharson, who’s serving 33 years for murdering his three children.

Listen now for free in the player below.

Subscribers can exclusively listen to Episode 3 here now.

Robert Farquharson’s trial for murder is what legal experts call a “strands of the rope case”. It describes how a prosecutor can weave a whole bunch of disparate threads of evidence together to form a single, coherent story.

In cases like this, no single strand, or thread of the evidence can carry enough weight on its own for a jury to say, “the accused is definitely guilty”. But woven together the rope is strong enough, metaphorically, to hang you.

This episode explores the first three of what I believe are six strands in the rope of the case – the science.

They are: 1) cough syncope – the idea that Farquharson had a coughing fit and blacked out; 2) whether Farquharson was actively steering the car before the crash; and 3) how long it took the car to sink once in the dam.

More from this investigation

• His story never changed, but the science has – Good Weekend
• ‘I want to believe he’s guilty, but I can’t’ – Episode 1 of the Trial By Water podcast
• One crash killed three soldiers, the other three boys. Both featured this strange detail – There is a small puzzling similarity between two unrelated fatal car crashes: why did drivers turn everything off in their sinking cars?