Robert Campbell coughed and passed out. He now thinks convicted murderer Robert Farquharson is innocent

When Robert Campbell laughed, inhaled his coffee and started coughing while driving down the highway near Bordertown in South Australia three years ago, his son thought he was messing around. It was the sort of thing he’d do.

This time, though, it was serious. Within seconds, Campbell had coughed himself into unconsciousness. His car had veered to the right, across the road, down a slope, through a fence and into an open paddock. The tyre marks it left describe a long, rightward curve.

If you superimpose the picture taken at that scene onto a similar picture of the path taken by convicted triple murderer Robert Farquharson’s car when it crashed into a dam and killed his three sons in 2005, a remarkable thing emerges: the curves look virtually identical.

Campbell thought nothing more of it – nobody was hurt and he fully recovered from the incident, which he suspects was caused by a condition called cough syncope.

Then he saw a recent story about Farquharson’s case in this masthead’s Good Weekend magazine and was startled: “I was reading his words, and, and I just felt it was almost word for word, what happened to me,” Campbell said.

“I just thought, ‘Jesus, that’s true. That does happen to people’.”

Robert Campbell and his son Spencer. The pair were in a car when Robert coughed and passed out.Credit: Chris Hopkins

Scepticism over Farquharson’s coughing and fainting story was at the centre of two prosecutions and two guilty verdicts that saw him sentenced to 33 years in prison for triple child murder.

On the night of the incident, one of the police officers at the scene, Sergeant Geoff Exton, said of the coughing story: “If he’s saying that’s what happened, that didn’t happen.” At both of Farquharson’s trials, respiratory expert Associate Professor Matthew Naughton gave evidence it was “extremely unlikely” that his story was true.

The prosecution also produced evidence from a police accident reconstruction expert, Sergeant Glen Urquhart, that Farquharson’s car could only have got from the road to the dam with three conscious steering inputs. They insisted that the car could not have drifted into the dam while Farquharson was unconscious, as the defence claimed.

Scientists are now asking questions about the quality of evidence that led to Farquharson’s conviction, and now Robert Campbell’s account, detailed in a bonus episode of this masthead’s Trial By Water podcast, suggests a car could quite plausibly drift off the road to the right, under acceleration, with an unconscious driver.

“One second I’m coughing and ... I couldn’t breathe in because I was coughing,” Campbell said. “And the next second, I was waking up with the spit dribbling out of my mouth. You know, my head was down on my chest. So I knew nothing for about eight seconds. I totally blacked out.”

Like Farquharson, Campbell cannot say what happened in those eight seconds. His son, Spencer, however, was in the front seat of the car, and his recollection is vivid.

“[My father] couldn’t breathe. So he just, you know, went limp. And his foot went down on the accelerator, so we didn’t have any control. We just went into the field. It was just a sort of just a slow turn ...

“When he started choking he still had that hand on the steering wheel. So as he was coughing, he was just slowly turning it until we were just facing to the right going off.”

Damage to Robert Campbell’s car in 2021 on the day it crashed through a fence and into a paddock.

The car stopped only when Spencer reached over, put the gearstick into neutral and then pulled the handbrake on. When he and Campbell’s partner, Olga, pulled Robert out of the car, he was disoriented and confused, Spencer said.

Like Farquharson, Campbell was a middle-aged smoker who was overweight – a set of circumstances which global cough syncope expert Professor Peter Dicpinigaitis, of New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told this masthead makes the condition significantly more likely to occur.

However, Naughton told both of Farquharson’s trials he was not convinced by those factors. He also gave evidence that it was unlikely that a person would cough and pass out when they were driving.

“Cough syncope is more likely to occur if someone is fully upright because a lot of our blood volume is in our abdomen and in our lower limbs, and if someone is seated that is less likely to be a contributing factor,” Naughton told the court.

In the United Kingdom, people who have suffered a bout of cough syncope are told not to drive for six months. Neither Naughton nor Urquhart agreed to be interviewed for the podcast series.

Campbell has volunteered to help in any way he can at Farquharson’s impending appeal.

“If what happened to him was what happened to me ... poor bugger. I feel devastated that he has to go through this and also, you know, lost his kids. The whole thing, it’s just horrendous.“

If you’re new to this podcast series, catch up on Episodes 1-5 below.

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
• The ‘strands of the rope’ that convicted Farquharson – Episode 2 of Trial By Water
• The problem with memory evidence – Episode 3 of Trial By Water
• How Robert Farquharson failed the Dad test – Episode 4 of Trial By Water
• The ‘golden thread’ – Episode 5 of Trial By Water
• One crash killed three soldiers, the other three boys. Both featured this strange detail