‘Help me! Help me! John, John!’
Shane Hanley was watching a videotaped episode of the television comedy Friends inside his home at 5 Collins Street, North Ryde, when he heard the urgent cry.
Shane, a 44-year-old plumber, enjoyed his quiet, ordinary life with his mother in their old fibro home in Sydney’s leafy northern suburbs. Collins Street was peaceful, despite being short and intersecting a main thoroughfare, Wicks Road. The street was lined mostly with homes very much like the Hanleys’, perched on small blocks with neatly manicured lawns. Nothing much out of the ordinary ever really occurred in Collins Street, and on that cold winter’s day — Tuesday, 10 July 2001 — things appeared no different.
Shane had worked all day and been out to a friend’s house that night, returning home about 10 pm. The clouds overhead were heavy and ominous. It had already rained lightly that day, but then the rain had broken, and Shane counted himself lucky to have got home before it started bucketing down.
It was after 11.30 pm. Shane’s mother was already asleep and Shane had been contemplating retiring himself. He didn’t need to watch the end of the taped episode. That was one of the good things about Friends: you didn’t need to watch the beginning, or the ending, to pick up the plot and get a good laugh out of it. You could just switch it off when your eyelids started getting heavy.
Shane thought the screaming was coming from next door, 7 Collins Street, where John and Sue Atamian lived. The couple were getting on in years; although Shane didn’t know them very well, he judged John to be in his seventies.
The voice appealing for help had sounded high-pitched, like a woman’s. Shane assumed the voice belonged to Sue, and that John was in some kind of strife. His first thought was ‘heart attack’. His mother had suffered one two years earlier, and had survived because she got prompt medical treatment. Shane had first-aid training; maybe he could help. He yanked on his Adidas sneakers and ran out the door.
In the light spilling from his next-door neighbours’ front verandah, Shane saw two figures standing in the Atamians’ front yard. John was one of them, but the small figure with him — the source of the cries — wasn’t Sue. Vaguely, Shane recognised the son of the Filipino couple who lived directly across the road from the Atamians. Sef Gonzales, a baby-faced, diminutive twenty-year-old, was dressed in jeans, hiking boots and a blue-grey jumper.
Sef’s father (Teddy) was a lawyer, who had moved with his wife and two children into the newly built home across the street seven months before. Shane knew this because Ted had been thoughtful enough to bring over a stack of small plates as a gift for the Hanleys the previous Christmas, when he had introduced himself as the new neighbour. Shane knew him simply as ‘Ted’.
The young man was in a state of panic, and barely coherent.
‘They’re all dead, they’re all dead, they’ve all been shot!’ he wailed. ‘My whole family’s been shot, they’re all gone!’
Sef was telling Shane and John something about chasing people from his home and down towards Ryrie Street, where Collins Street ended in a T-intersection. Shane heard what Sef was saying, but his mind could not fathom it. A murder in his quiet street? He struggled to accept it.
Meanwhile, John was trying to shake off the fog of sleep after being abruptly roused when Sef banged on the outside wall of his front bedroom. His wife, Sue, wasn’t home; she was staying the night at her mother’s house. John had come to the front door and there stood Sef, yelling that his family had been killed.
Shane hadn’t yet arrived when Sef grabbed John’s hand and tried to pull him towards the house across the road, urging him to come and see what had been done to his family. John resisted. No way was he going in there. John’s father had always told him not to get himself involved in other people’s business. It was advice John had heeded well all his life.
That was when Shane had arrived and taken charge. He and John tried to ascertain if Sef had called emergency services, but couldn’t make out his answer. Shane directed John to go back inside his house and ring for an ambulance. As John explained the situation on the phone to the operator, he was informed someone had already called to report the same emergency. Help was on the way.
At this point, Shane was trying as best he could to comfort and support the distraught young man, whom he barely knew. Shane could not seem to come up with the words he wanted; how do you comfort someone who has just lost their family? So Shane walked Sef back and forth across the street, his wiry frame supporting that of the young man, who was sobbing and falling all over the place. All of a sudden, it seemed to Shane, they were standing on the driveway of the Gonzales home.
Turning his attention towards the house, Shane saw that one of the roller doors to the double garage was open, the garage dark inside. There was, however, a light on inside the house itself. The clouds still hung heavy in the sky. All was silent and still, as if the rest of the street were indifferent to this unfolding nightmare. Shane had seen enough newspaper and television reports to know that if what Sef was saying was true, this was a major crime scene. Where were the sirens? The flashing lights of emergency vehicles?
Shane squatted beside Sef, who had all but collapsed onto the driveway. Sef was making terrible sobbing noises, but as Shane ran his hands over Sef’s face, trying to comfort him, he felt no moisture there. In the panic of the moment, this barely registered with Shane; it was only much later that it would strike him as peculiar.
Then Sef jumped to his feet and said something that made Shane think there was still hope for the Gonzales family, that they might still be alive.
‘I know CPR, I know CPR!’ Sef said, and ran in through the garage door.
Shane felt a flash of anger at that point. ‘Then what the hell are we doing standing out here?’ he immediately thought. ‘Jeez, don’t tell me they’re still alive!’
Sef darted towards the house, with Shane in tow. His heart pounding, Shane vaguely noted a big white vehicle parked in the garage: Teddy’s four-wheel drive. (Beside it was a white sedan, which John didn’t have time to notice.)
‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’ Sef cried.
They passed through the doorway that connected the garage to the ground-floor study area of the house. Then the pair entered the tiled foyer to the right.
What followed — the images that Shane saw that night — would plague his sleep for a long time. He had seen dead bodies — car accident victims — before, but had never witnessed the results of murder. It seemed that after that night, every time he closed his eyes he would see those horrible visions, and his mind would tick over with unanswered questions. Despite time and trauma counselling, the terrible scene would never quite be erased from Shane’s mind. Aside from Sef and the trained emergency personnel who later attended the scene, he would be the only person to witness first-hand the full force of the violence that claimed the lives of three people.
TEDDY GONZALES LAY face up in the foyer, on a white rug just inside the front door. The poor bugger hadn’t had a chance, Shane thought.
The 46-year-old immigration lawyer was dressed in a dark business suit and still had his glasses on. His arms were angled slightly away from his body, his head towards the dining-room entrance, and his feet, clad in black shoes, stretched towards the front door, one of them resting on it. His grey metallic briefcase lay open to the right of his body, and papers spilled out of it onto the tiles.
At first Shane thought Teddy was wearing a red vest under his suit, then realised his mistake. The white business shirt was stained red with blood, and there was a huge hole in Teddy’s chest. Shane initially decided it was a bullet wound that must have been inflicted at almost point-blank range. On seeing him, Shane immediately reassessed his earlier thought that Teddy might be saved. He was still with death.
Sef ran to his father, straddling him and grasping him by the shoulders. He gently shook him, as if trying to lift him, sobbing, ‘Papa, Papa, Papa!’ Shane felt his heart go out to the young man. The scene was pitiful.
Shane dragged Sef off his father’s body, and it was then that he noticed a silver mobile phone lying about a metre to the right of Teddy’s body. The screen was lit up a bright blue, as if the phone had just been in use. (This was Sef’s phone, used to call 000, and was later seized by crime-scene officers for testing.)
Sef then snapped back into action, yelling, ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’, running past his father’s body and into the formal lounge–dining room adjoining the foyer. While the foyer had been brightly lit, the dining-room area was gloomy. Shane could make out a figure lying behind a small glass coffee table topped with a colourful flower arrangement. It was the body of Teddy’s 43-year-old wife, Loiva. She was lying in an awkward position on her side, one leg bent. It struck Shane, from the position of her body, that she had been trying to flee her attacker by running towards the front door when she was caught and flung down.
Loiva was dressed in jeans, a dark-coloured jumper and black lace-up shoes. There were dark bloody patches on her neck and shoulders, and to Shane they also looked like bullet holes.
Sef repeated what he had just done with his father, pulling at his mother’s shoulders and wailing ‘Mummy!’ over and over again.
While Shane kneeled by Loiva, he had a chilling thought. What if the killers were still in the house? ‘Jeez, I hope they’re not still here,’ he thought. ‘I don’t want to look up and see a pair of eyes up there.’
As before, Shane dragged Sef from his mother’s body, and Sef ran back to his father, flinging himself onto him again. ‘Papa, Papa, Papa!’ he cried.
Shane followed him. He immediately noticed that the mobile phone screen he had seen lit up only moments before was now dark, and he wondered if Sef, for some reason, had quickly turned it off. He wondered why Sef would bother doing that, having just discovered his parents’ bodies. It was at that point, as Shane led Sef from the house, that he began to become suspicious of the young man’s behaviour.
From what Shane had observed, the rest of the ground floor had been orderly and undisturbed. He didn’t go upstairs, where a third body lay. But Shane’s clear impression from what Sef had told him was that Sef’s sister was dead too.
While the scene inside the house had been horrific, the overwhelming feeling Shane experienced was immense sadness. Not just one life lost, but a whole family. And they had seemed such proud, happy people, so loving. To Shane, the only blessing was that Teddy, who Shane assumed was attacked just after entering the house, probably had not had the chance to discover his wife’s and daughter’s bodies before he died.
In all, Shane figured he and Sef had been inside the house for about ten minutes. In reality it was less than two, but time often seems to stretch into slow motion in such circumstances. Outside, there was still no sign of emergency vehicles.
Shane remembered that the Gonzales family owned some yappy little dogs, but there had been no noise from the dogs that night, not even when he and Sef had entered the house.
Looking across the road towards the corner of Collins and Ryrie Streets, where an elderly female relative of the Gonzales family lived, Shane noticed there were no lights on or signs of movement there.
Shane’s gut instinct told him there was more to this scene than met the eye. The dogs, and the relative across the road. Where were they? He decided it was time he called the police. He was assuming this was a family ‘hit’, so the relative across the road could be dead too.
As he and Sef emerged from the house, John was coming up the driveway. Shane asked John whom he had called, and John replied he had rung for an ambulance.
‘Well, I’ve got to go and make a phone call,’ Shane told John. He did not want to mention the word ‘police’ in front of Sef. Already he was entertaining suspicions about Sef’s possible involvement in the murders.
Shane left Sef in John’s care, warning him not to go into the house. The elderly man may not have had the heart to take it, he thought; Shane did not want to risk John’s health on top of everything else.
Shane crossed the road to his house and thought at first of ringing the nearest police station, which was three suburbs away at Gladesville. Stuff it, he thought, dialling 000.
The 000 operator asked which service he required.
‘Definitely police, homicide if possible,’ Shane told the man.
Shane told the operator that the dogs were not in the Gonzales house, and mentioned his concerns for the safety of a female relative of the Gonzales family nearby. Although Shane, at that time, was not aware of exactly what the woman’s relationship was to the Gonzales family, he was referring to Loiva’s mother and Sef’s grandmother, Amelita Claridades. (Police later discovered that she was in Melbourne, visiting relatives.)
Then Shane heard sirens and was flooded with relief. The responsibility was now out of his hands. When he went outside next, the dog squad had arrived and emergency vehicles clogged the street. And it had begun to rain again.
Shane approached a constable and told the officer he had been inside the house. The officer asked him to go back inside his home, and told him that he would be spoken to later.
Hours afterwards, when police had secured the crime scene, Shane would be interviewed at Gladesville police station about the events of that night. He would hand over the clothes and shoes he had worn into the house to police for forensic analysis, as they tried to ascertain if he had any involvement in the crime. Shane was eliminated from involvement when his description of his movements inside the house tallied with the evidence of his clothing and shoes. There was one spot of blood on one knee of his pants, and blood on both soles. Sole imprints from his shoes were taken and found to be consistent with some sole smudges left inside the house, but most of the imprints were left by another type of shoe.
Shane, the ordinary bloke from an ordinary street, had been dragged into what would become a major investigation, and he would become an important witness in the case. He took an avid interest in its progress. He would go over and over what he had done that night, feeling that he had ‘stuffed up’: that he should have felt for a pulse on the victims, that he hadn’t done enough to help those poor people. His feelings battled with rational thought: it had just been too late to make a difference.