Family Killer

Matthew De Gruchy

The murder of a family, in the seeming safety of their home, strikes to the heart of most people’s deepest fears – especially when the danger comes from one of their own.

In 1996, a triple murder in the News South Wales city of Wollongong stunned the community and made national news. Three members of the De Gruchy family – mother Jennifer, 41, and children Adrian, 15, and Sarah, 13 – were found with fatal head injuries in their Albion Park Rail home.

Wollongong is a city by the sea, around 80 kilometres south of Sydney. Affectionately known as ‘the Gong’, the city was built on industry and coalmining and is home to Port Kembla, which has the largest concentration of industrial businesses in Australia. The city has now benefited from a diversification of businesses and is home to the University of Wollongong, which has established itself as a respected and cutting-edge education provider and hub of research. There is also a thriving arts and culture scene, and the annual Viva La Gong Festival showcases the best that ‘the Gong’ has to offer.

On 13 March 1996, Jennifer De Gruchy’s sister Liz Karhof was notified that there had been a dreadful incident at the De Gruchy house. Jennifer’s husband Wayne was away in Sydney on a business trip and Liz was asked to attend Shellharbour hospital because her nephew, 18-year-old Matthew, had been admitted. The full story for the call was not conveyed at first but when Liz explained that she could not come right away – she was babysitting two small children – the caller told her the most devastating news. Her nephew was in severe shock because he had discovered his mother and sister dead after he had arrived home from a night at his girlfriend’s house. At this stage it was not known that Adrian was also dead; when Liz arrived at the hospital she learned that her youngest nephew had been murdered as well.

Matthew had gone to a neighbour’s house around 8.30 a.m., crying and saying, ‘There’s something wrong with mum and Sarah.’ Police who arrived at the scene first observed that Matthew appeared shocked and distressed, lying on the ground and sobbing.

The brutal scene inside the De Gruchy home was at total odds with the aspirational, middle-class suburban setting at the Macquarie Shores housing estate, which was sparkling and new in 1996. Jennifer De Gruchy and her two younger children had been beaten with some sort of heavy weapon with such force that their fatal head injuries were described by a forensic pathologist as being similar to those suffered by car or air crash victims. Jennifer and Sarah were both found dead in their bedrooms. Adrian was found in the garage and had also been doused with petrol. Pieces of carpet from Jennifer’s room and a video recorder were missing from the house.

The night of the murders, Wayne De Gruchy had been in Sydney, having attended a corporate golf day. He had phoned his wife at around 6.30 p.m. to tell her he would stay at his parents’ house. This was something Wayne, a state manager for Pioneer Concrete, often did during the week.

Matthew De Gruchy told police that he had last seen his family alive the evening of the murders before he had gone to his girlfriend’s house. Matthew’s girlfriend, Alyssa Brindley, 16, told police that Matthew arrived late at around 11.30 p.m. Alyssa said that when she had asked Matthew why he was so late to arrive, he told her that his mum ‘was having prank calls and she asked me to stay’. Matthew later revealed that his mum told him one of the calls made mention of ‘three family members going to be deceased’. Alyssa told police she had spoken to her boyfriend at 8 p.m. and then tried to call him again at 10.30 p.m. that night but had received an engaged signal. She had not noticed anything particularly unusual about his demeanour when he arrived at her home – he hadn’t been upset or stressed or worried.

Matthew De Gruchy was described as a gentle and loving young man by relatives. Unemployed at the time of the murders, Matthew, from most accounts, was not much trouble. He liked to smoke Winfields and drink Jim Beam – there was also some cannabis use – but there wasn’t much else, on the surface, to suggest anything darker. However, Alyssa and his aunt, Liz Karhof, told police that he’d had fights with his mother over the use of her car.

The extended family of the De Gruchys rallied around the surviving members. Liz Karhof gave a detailed and emotional interview to the Sunday Telegraph a few weeks after the murders and described the unimaginable impact of the crime on the family. Thanking the community of the Illawarra and the police, Ms Karhof also made a plea to anyone with information on the brutal murders to come forward and help the homicide detectives. Tearfully, she told the reporter that she had been like a second mother to her niece Sarah and nephew Adrian. The bonds of sisterhood she shared with Jennifer De Gruchy were strong and the siblings lived within minutes of each other.

Liz said she and her sister had dreamed of growing old together and enjoying their children growing up and having their own families.

‘What makes their loss worse is that it has become such a public affair,’ she told the Sunday Telegraph.

Three months later on 23 June 1996, police charged someone for the murders: Matthew Wayne De Gruchy.

The act of children killing a parent or stepparent is known as parricide. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology’s Homicide in Australia 2008–09 to 2009–10 National Homicide Monitoring Program annual report, of the 185 domestic homicides in that time period, 20 were parricides.

Abuse is the main reason children kill parents, though in Matthew De Gruchy’s case, there was nothing to suggest that the killer had anything but a good relationship with his family.

Matthew also committed siblicide in killing his brother and sister. Siblicides are even rarer that parricides and between 2008 and 2010 there were just four cases, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology’s Homicide Monitoring Program.

In 2001, Sydney man Sef Gonzales, 20, murdered his parents and sister in their North Ryde home. Police searched for the intruders who massacred the family but their attentions turned to Gonzales, who was playing the part of the grieving son to the media and supporters. Gonzales was charged with the murders and went to trial in 2004 where it was revealed he had planned the killings for months.

In 2002, Matthew Wales killed his wealthy mother and stepfather and the murder case gripped Melburnians. Wales, who pleaded guilty to the murders, told investigators that he wanted to rid himself of the domineering and controlling influence of his mother, Margaret Wales-King, rather than cash in on her sizeable estate, worth millions.

Matthew De Gruchy’s father Wayne stood by his son. He simply could not believe that his whole family had been murdered by his own flesh and blood, and his eldest son was all he had left. Offering up his home – the murder scene – other property interests, and that of his brother’s as surety, Wayne was expecting to be able to take his son home with him after the July 1996 bail application.

At the Wollongong Court committal hearing, Wayne said that a few days before the murders Matthew had a disagreement with his mother over the use of her car but that it had not dissolved into an argument.

Wayne’s safety was the main reason his son was denied bail. Despite expert testimony for the defence that there were no major rifts within the family and that the defendant was not a danger to his surviving family members, Justice Timothy Studdert said he could not rule out the need to protect Wayne De Gruchy from his own son.

Police had determined that Matthew had bludgeoned his family sometime between 8.30 p.m. and 11.30 p.m. Matthew’s blood was found in various parts of the house, including a bloody palm print and blood smears in the en suite of his parents’ bedroom and another print on a can of petrol from the garage, where Adrian’s body was found.

A wheel brace and jack handle were missing from Jennifer’s Toyota Corolla and investigators strongly believed that these were used to kill the family.

Weeks after the killings, children playing at an old brickworks site, minutes from Matthew’s girlfriend’s house, found a number of items dumped in a dam. Police were alerted and when the area was searched, they found many items – loose and in a backpack and sports bag.

A torn-up note that appeared to be a checklist written by Matthew was also found, preserved in a plastic zip-lock bag. It read (in list form): ‘open gate; throw bottle down back; throw things down the wall; roof; track suit pants 1; knife 1; T-shirts 2; shoes 2; hanky; pole; towel; open blinds to see through; Sarah; Mum; Adrian; head butt bench; have shower; throw [illegible] down back; hit arm with pole; hit leg with pole; cut somewhere with knife’. This note formed a large part of the strong circumstantial case that police built on Matthew being the murderer.

Jennifer’s wallet, containing her driver’s licence was found, along with a video recorder (this VCR would feature at the trial when it would not fit in the same sports bag police claimed it was found in at the dam), scissors, a knife, handkerchiefs, video games and console, tracksuit pants, T-shirts, sheets and pieces of carpet. A sledgehammer was also found but no blood or DNA residue could be found on it as it had been submerged in water for so long.

The carpet found in the sports bag at the dam was found by a fibre expert to be a ‘highly probable’ match to carpet from the main bedroom of the De Gruchy home and to some tufts found in the Toyota Corolla. Matthew had used the car on the evening of the murders.

The teen’s murder trial began on 23 September 1998. Five men and seven women sat on the jury before Justice Michael Grove in the NSW Supreme Court.

Matthew’s father and extended family, with the exception of his aunt, Liz Karhof, supported him in court. Ms Karhof was convinced her nephew was guilty. His remaining family and girlfriend all gave evidence that Matthew was not a violent person and that he loved his mother and siblings.

Wayne De Gruchy gave evidence at his eldest son’s trial that he had received around $10 000 from an insurance policy on his wife Jennifer and denied that he had anything to do with the murders.

Wayne said his eldest child was not, to his knowledge, a violent boy. In a statement made to police on the day his wife and children were discovered dead, Wayne said Matthew had never been violent to his siblings, apart from ‘the usual brother-sister squabbling’.

The court heard of the horrific injuries inflicted on the victims. Forensic pathologist Dr Allan Cala told the court the blows were delivered with such force that the victims’ injuries were more like those seen on car or plane crash victims. Dr Cala thought the injuries could have been caused by a wheel brace or sledgehammer. He suggested the killer surprised the victims in a ‘blitz attack’ and said that it is possible they may have been asleep at the time. Jennifer De Gruchy’s head injuries were so severe that pieces of her brain had been forced out. Jennifer’s death was not instant – post-mortem examination showed that blood from her injuries had gone into her airway and had been inhaled.

Dr Cala had also attended the murder scene and said blood from Adrian’s injuries was splattered on the garage ceiling and some of his teeth were lying beside his body. A jerry can was nearby – Matthew’s fingerprint had been found on it – and Adrian’s body was doused with petrol.

Sarah, the baby of the family, had some injuries to her arm that suggested she had made an attempt to fight off her attacker.

Wayne was still backing his boy in his claims of innocence. Again, he described to the court that he believed his eldest son was not violent, was very close to his mother Jennifer and was part of a ‘happy and united’ family.

Matthew’s lawyer Malcolm Ramage, QC, introduced his client as a ‘frail, little sparrow of a man’. Matthew, who was pleading not guilty to the charges, wept in court as he gave evidence of finding the bodies of his family.

‘There was a lot of blood … I didn’t really know what to do,’ Matthew said in front of Justice Michael Grove.

Matthew said he loved his mother and got on well with her. Matthew told the court that the day before she died, they had been ‘fixing up the fish pond’ together.

‘I’ve said time and time again, I did not do it,’ Matthew said when asked by the Crown prosecutor Paul Conlon if he had murdered his loved ones.

The note found in the dam was a crucial part of the prosecution case and while Matthew admitted that the handwriting was his, he said he could not remember writing it, though the note could have related to preparations for his 18th birthday party. He denied the suggestion by the prosecution that the note was a checklist to conceal the crime.

The last three entries on the list – ‘hit arm with pole’, ‘hit leg with pole’ and ‘cut somewhere with knife’ were zeroed in on by the prosecution, who put forward that De Gruchy had originally planned to hurt himself and claim he was the only surviving victim – the ‘last man standing’ – of the attack.

On Wednesday, 14 October 1998, Matthew De Gruchy was found guilty of murdering his mother and siblings. The jury had deliberated for six hours and when Matthew was escorted from the dock, he made no eye contact with his father.

Liz Karhof’s victim impact statement was read out in the court. It was a heart-wrenching description of the horror she felt at seeing her sister and niece and nephew at the morgue and the subsequent trauma the murders had caused for her day-to-day life:

I actually put my hand over my mouth when I saw [Adrian] so that I would not scream out because his injuries were so horrific.

I went back to [the house] to clean it up so my brother-in-law could move back home … it took six hours to clean the blood from Jennie and Sarah’s bedrooms. It was one of the most painful days of my life.

The murders put a great strain on family life and personal relationships. I find it very hard to trust people.

In sentencing De Gruchy, Justice Grove said:

Nothing is known of what specifically triggered the outbreak of homicide nor has any motive for the killings been determined. Unless you choose to disclose it, it is likely that your motives will remain secret.

The destruction of your mother’s features was such that the coroner evidently required blood match samples to confirm her identity. Each of these deaths was accompanied by a brutality which beggars description.

Taking into account De Gruchy’s youth, Justice Grove sentenced him to 28 years’ jail with a minimum of 21 years dated from his arrest, making him eligible for parole in 2017.

Predictably, De Gruchy’s legal team appealed their young killer’s sentence, claiming there was no evidence that supported the guilty verdict. At the New South Wales Supreme Court of Appeals, Matthew’s lawyers presented several reasons why they believed the verdict was unsafe.

There was an issue of some strands of long hair on Adrian De Gruchy’s fingers that were found by DNA analysis not to be those of Matthew or the deceased. There were some questions of semantics – was Adrian grasping the hairs or had they simply been transferred to him from the killer’s clothes or body? But apart from the fact that the hairs were not Matthew’s, the defence could not offer any other explanation.

On the point of the hair strands, Justice J Simpson said, ‘Given the events that must have taken place in the house that night, it would not be surprising if some of Sarah’s hair attached to the assailant, who then transferred it to Adrian.’

The defence also brought up a suicide note by a vagrant man from the area, a Mr Wakehim, who wrote that he feared being blamed for the murders.

The brutal murders of David Thomas O’Hearn and former Wollongong mayor Frank Arkell were also discussed during the appeal. The defence said the trial judged had erred when he did not allow evidence about these crimes, which had occurred in the general area of the De Gruchys’ neighbourhood.

Both these murders occurred within a week of each other in 1998 – long after Matthew had been arrested – but the defence said the killings were in the general area of where Jennifer, Sarah and Adrian De Gruchy were killed and with ‘extraordinary levels’ of violence.

The killer of Mr O’Hearn and Mr Arkell was arrested in October 1998 – the same time as Matthew’s trial was underway. Wollongong man Mark Valera handed himself in to police and confessed to the murders, claiming that his alleged sexual abuse at the hands of his stepfather drove him to kill. Valera (formerly Van Krevel) said O’Hearn, who was gay, had propositioned him for sex and that was his motive for murder. Mr O’Hearn was not only killed – he was brutally mutilated by Valera. He was decapitated, his hand was cut off, and his penis was mutilated. Valera had also drawn satanic symbols on the wall of Mr O’Hearn’s Albion Park Rail home, almost two kilometres from the De Gruchys’ home.

Mr Arkell had similarly been brutalised and mutilated. His head had been smashed in with a desk lamp and ashtray and Valera had stuck pins in his eyes and cheeks. Mr Arkell, then a Member of Parliament was just weeks away from appearing in court on sex charges involving young males. He had been a person of interest of several investigations into child pornography and paedophilia over the years before his death.

Valera became one of the youngest people in NSW to be sentenced to life without parole, due to the brutality of his crimes. In a shocking twist to the case, his father Jack Van Krevel, the man he claimed had molested him, was found murdered just weeks after Valera was sentenced. Valera’s sister Belinda convinced Valera’s friend and fellow suspect in Mr O’Hearn’s murder, Keith Schreiber, to kill their father. Van Krevel said she had her father killed because he was molesting her preschool-age daughter and was the reason why her brother was in jail, never to be released.

In striving for an appeal for their client, De Gruchy’s lawyers also said that the trial judge had directed the jury to disregard a comment made by the Crown prosecutor Paul Conlon during his closing address. Mr Conlon had said the killer of the De Gruchys must have had ‘a disturbed mind’. No motive for the murders had been conclusively found by police – Matthew De Gruchy had certainly not provided one at any stage – and the defence argued that the comment by Mr Conlon was handing the jury one on a plate.

The appeal was dismissed with the judges deciding that on independent analysis of the evidence they were satisfied, with no reasonable doubt, that the Crown had established that Matthew Wayne De Gruchy was the killer.

De Gruchy appealed to the High Court for the jury’s verdict to be set aside.

His defence again brought up the ‘disturbed mind’ comment and said that the judge had made the situation worse for their client when he asked the jury to disregard the statement by the prosecution.

‘The appellant didn’t have a disturbed mind … he had a placid temperament,’ De Gruchy’s counsel Tim Game told the High Court bench.

‘In circumstances where you have a young man who had no motive to kill his family, then that makes it reasonable that he didn’t kill his family,’ Mr Game said.

His High Court appeal was dismissed and De Gruchy was left to face his lengthy sentence.

In 2009, De Gruchy faced court over the gang-bashing of one of the ‘K’ Brothers pack rapists. De Gruchy was one of four convicted killers charged over the jail-yard attack, which almost killed one of the brothers, dubbed the ‘Ks’. Their identities are secret because two of the four brothers were juveniles at the time of their offences in 2002. De Gruchy appeared at Goulburn Local Court charged with various assault offences, which were withdrawn by the alleged victim and the case was dismissed.

De Gruchy is currently serving his sentence at Cooma Correctional Centre, a medium/minimum-security jail near Canberra. His sentence will expire in 2024, but he will be eligible for parole on 21 July 2017.