Detective Senior Constable Paul Auglys quickly became the chief point of liaison with key family members and witnesses. That first night at Gladesville, the officers doing the original police statements really had not known what questions they should be asking. It was only in the ensuing days and weeks, when the forensic evidence was returned and witness statements were compared, that the questions the police should really be asking became apparent.
Auglys was tall, dark and handsome, with a direct kind of charm that assisted him in his dealings with people. He had been in the police force for twelve years. He got into the force not through a burning desire to save the world, but simply because his parents wanted him to get a job, and the police force seemed attractive.
Auglys started off doing general duties at Bankstown, in the days when it was one of southwest Sydney’s major crime hotspots. After eight years he became a detective, working around the Bankstown, Bass Hill and Auburn areas, before hitting the big league in 1998: Crime Agencies, the central New South Wales detectives agency based in Sydney, since renamed the State Crime Command. Auglys primarily worked on serious violent crimes such as armed robberies. He’d worked on his fair share of homicides, but had never been posted to Homicide, as such.
Auglys loved being a detective, loved the thrill of thinking of ways to crack cases. Watching the pieces of the puzzle fall into place was incredibly rewarding. Paperwork he could do without, but of course it was necessary.
If Sheehy was the good guy as far as Sef was concerned, Auglys in particular would become the bad guy. He didn’t mind; in fact he enjoyed the thrill of working in the background, being Sef’s faceless nemesis. From the start, Auglys would be kept away from Sef. Indeed, he would not meet him face to face for a good eleven months, but Sheehy and Auglys constantly consulted on investigation strategy.
It quickly became obvious to detectives of Tawas that the Gonzales family would be difficult to crack. In Auglys’s mind, they were the key to solving the whole thing, but there were numerous barriers to getting them to talk. First, there was the cultural barrier, the fact that where they came from there was a view that police could not be trusted. But there was also the fact that most of the family did not want to believe they had a killer among them, did not want to face the fact that Sef might be guilty.
Auglys immediately picked Emily out as being different. It was obvious she was the strong one in the family, and due to her presence at the house at 6 pm that evening she was a crucial witness. Reviewing her first statement, taken at Gladesville station on the night of the murders, Auglys observed the major holes, the paucity of information regarding what she had seen that night. On 13 July, he called her in to Gladesville police station to clarify her statement.
Auglys realised Emily was holding back information. It was frustrating, the way she would only give details if they were specifically requested. Sometimes, she would tell him there was more, but that she wasn’t ready to tell him yet what it was. At other times, she would start to tell him something new, realise she had said too much, and rein herself in.
Auglys knew that Emily was scared of Sef, and that if any information she told police that was adverse to her nephew got back to him she could be in danger. He felt her fear was justified. If only he could gain her trust.
Little did he know at the time that Emily wanted desperately to trust the police. She came to feel her family was not supporting her whenever she raised the question of Sef’s possible involvement in the murders. So she simply stopped talking to them about it. She felt very alone. Eventually, she would realise the police were her last card to play if she wanted justice, but it would be a long and gradual process before she would tell them everything.
That day, 13 July, two days after her first statement, Emily elaborated a little on her visit to the Gonzales home at 6 pm on 10 July. She told Auglys that what she saw that evening had led her to believe that someone was indeed at home when she arrived. This, she said, was confirmed by seeing Sef’s car in its usual location, the carport. She told him in this statement that she had said to her son, ‘Oh, kuya Sef is home.’ (Kuya is a Tagalog term for a respected elder brother.)
‘I thought this for one reason, that being that his car was in the carport and to my knowledge Sef does not leave the house without his car,’ Emily told Auglys.
She said the light she had seen on the ground floor was coming from the kitchen, confirming someone was home, as she visited her sister’s home regularly and had often seen this particular light on through the frosted windows on either side of the front door.
Emily told Auglys that Sef’s car lights were off but she didn’t see anyone inside the car. She said she wasn’t looking for anyone there, however. Nor was the engine of Sef’s car running, as she would have noticed smoke coming from the exhaust pipe.
She said that as she got out of the car she commented to her son Gerard that they would not need an umbrella, as it was only drizzling very lightly. She said that after ringing the doorbell and waiting a minute for an answer, she tried again, asking her son to listen for the doorbell ringing within the house. Her son heard it ring as she pressed the doorbell again. She said that after they got no answer she thought of walking around to the side of the house and looking through the rear glass sliding door to the family–kitchen area to see if anyone was home. Something stopped her from doing this.
Emily told Auglys that she thought maybe the family had gone out but that her knowledge of the family convinced her otherwise. Teddy would not have arrived home from work yet, but her sister always arrived home before 6 pm to prepare dinner.
Emily added that Loiva, upon arriving home, usually parked in the garage, walked into the front foyer and placed her handbag on the small table in the hallway. Then she would remove her shoes and place them under the stairs. She would never wear her shoes in the rest of the house unless she was planning to go out again very soon. Loiva had been wearing her shoes when she was killed and her handbag was on the floor of the formal lounge–dining room, near her body.
‘I cannot think of any reason or of any time when Mary [the police prosecution team would always refer to Loiva by her Christian name, Mary] would come home and take her bag into the formal lounge–living area of the house. This area was for guests of the house and the family never used this area of the house on their own,’ she said.
Then Emily hinted at her belief that Sef was involved in the murders.
‘Since the incident I have constantly wondered if Sef was home when I came to visit about 6 pm on Tuesday, 10 July 2001. I have also wondered, if he was, why he didn’t answer the door. I have been told by other relatives that Sef may have been in the car on the phone when I was at the house so this does explain somewhat why he did not hear me at the house. I have also spoken to Sam Dacillo about his movements with Sef.’
Emily told Auglys what had happened when she arrived at Gladesville police station the night of the murders, and described her anger. She said she had asked Sef: ‘Why didn’t you come to the door, I was there at six o’clock, your car was there.’
It didn’t take much reading between the lines that day for Auglys to realise that Emily suspected her nephew, but he had his work cut out to actually commit what she knew to paper. He needed her evidence.
SAM DACILLO WAS another loose end waiting to be followed up. Auglys did this on 15 July, two days after getting a fresh statement from Emily Luna.
Sam expanded on his arrangements with Sef for the night of 10 July 2001. He said that he had arranged with Sef on the afternoon of Monday, 9 July, to meet up the next day. Sef had rung him at home and asked if he wanted to lift weights in the afternoon, then go to dinner afterwards. They arranged to meet at 6 pm, but at that stage Sam had forgotten he had a basketball game organised for the following evening. Late on Monday night, Sam called Sef on his mobile phone and rescheduled their meeting for 8 pm.
About 11 am the next day, Sam got a text message from Sef asking if he was going to be home during the day, but did not reply to it. While playing basketball — the game began at 7 pm — he had a missed call from Sef. Around 7.45 pm, after finishing the game, he called Sef back and Sef asked him if they were still on for that night. Sam said yes, and asked if they were still going to lift weights, but Sef said no, they would just go out for dinner. They arranged to meet at Sam’s house at 8 pm, and Sam told Sef he would call him when he got home. Sam arrived home at about 7.50 pm and called Sef again, just to confirm arrangements, and they decided they would go into the city for dinner.
In this statement, Sam Dacillo had clarified that there was no 6 pm conversation between Sef and him. Sef had known since the previous evening that they were meeting at 8 pm, not 6 pm. He would have known he would have time to kill his family, clean up and go out with Sam for dinner. It fitted in, then, when Sam mentioned that Sef barely touched his dinner at Planet Hollywood — a cheeseburger with mushrooms — claiming he and his mother had suffered food poisoning the previous week.
Sam told police that on the way into the city Sef had mentioned driving out to find Raf De Leon’s place, and on the way home spoke of the road rage incident of the night before.
Sam also told police that as they were driving home along Wicks Road and approaching the intersection of Collins Street, Sef had slowed his car and looked up Collins Street towards his house. Sam also looked up the street; the house was in darkness. Sam asked his mate if he wanted to stop at his home before dropping Sam off at his house, but Sef said no.
It made the police think, why was Sef slowing down? Was he looking for emergency vehicles? A sign his family’s bodies had already been discovered?
Sam also mentioned another item of interest, considering the marks on the wall above Clodine Gonzales’ body.
‘I would say that Sef thinks that he can stand up for himself. I say that because he had bragged to me in the past how people have stopped in a similar manner to the road rage incident he described to me . . . On these occasions, Sef has told me he had gotten out of his car and taken a baseball bat out of the boot and scared them off.’
So Sef owned, or had owned, a baseball bat. Could this be the weapon used to bludgeon Clodine? police wondered.
POLICE HAD OBTAINED the 000 call transcript within 24 hours of the murders. The story it told did not tally with Sef’s first statement. Sef said he had discovered only his father’s body when he made the call, yet he told the operator someone had killed his family. There was no mention of Sef finding his mother during the phone call, or putting the phone down for a period to try to assist her.
The clothing Sef had worn that night during the discovery of the bodies had gone through an early analysis. There was blood on the back of the right sleeve, but other than that, no blood on the jumper. There was blood staining on the front of the right leg of his jeans, and there were a few spots of blood on the tops and sides of his boots, but none on the soles.
Most fascinating was an area of blue discolouration on the inside left lower sleeve of Sef’s jumper. Later it would be sent for analysis and found to be blue paint.
Most damning at this stage, however, were Sef’s statements about the calls he had made on the afternoon and early evening of 10 July, the period police now knew was the most likely time of the murders.
On 17 July, Detective Senior Constable Shaun Ryan got working on the phone records. He drove out to the Westmead crime laboratories, where Sef’s mobile phone, seized by police, was being stored. Police had not yet had a response to their request for call records from the phone service providers, but there was nothing to stop them from checking Sef’s phone and recording all the numbers and calls and SMS messages made and received from the handset itself.
It was quickly discovered Sef had not been telling the truth about the calls he made and received on the afternoon and evening of 10 July 2001. There was no record of a call from Sam Dacillo about 6 pm, or an SMS about a basketball game shortly before that. And he had not tried to call either his mother’s mobile telephone or his home phone in that same time period, during which he claimed he was sitting inside his car in the carport. The official phone company records for both Sef’s and Sam Dacillo’s mobile telephones would tell the same story.
Sef’s alibi was fast unravelling. Of course, this might not mean he was guilty — the statement had been made while he was in a traumatised state. But it did mean that Sef had some clarifying to do with police.
Phone records also revealed a tantalising detail that puzzled the police. They knew Sef had arrived at his father’s law firm at 1.14 pm because he had called on approach to be let into the secure car parking. At 1.22 pm, a call had been made from the Collins Street home phone — presumably Clodine was the caller — to her parents’ work. Then, at 1.38 pm, Loiva had rung Clodine from her mobile telephone. Just twelve minutes later, a call was made from Teddy’s office to the switchboard of Cumberland Psychiatric Hospital in Sydney’s west. Try as they might, though, police could not locate anyone at the hospital who remembered receiving the call.
The only person who could help reconstruct what happened between Sef and his parents at the office that day was the young secretary Patricia Tonel. She thought Sef may have had a closed-door discussion with his parents shortly after arriving at the office, but her memory was pretty hazy. This could have been the time when that call was made to Cumberland Hospital, but times also were difficult for her to recall. In the end, it was information too vague for the cops to rely on.