The funeral for the Gonzales family was held on Friday, 20 July at North Ryde’s Holy Spirit Catholic Church. There were close to 300 mourners present to say their last goodbyes. Three coffins lay side by side at the front of the church, each adorned with flowers and a photo of a smiling Gonzales family member.
The Claridades relatives sat in a front pew, with Sef. Emily was next to him, facing the photo of Loiva. The Gonzales family sat on the other side of the church, also in the front pew. The rest of the church was filled with friends of Teddy and Loiva as well as schoolfriends of Sef and Clodine. Detectives from Strike Force Tawas were present amongst the mourners. Also present as Sef’s ‘bodyguards’ were two of his friends. Sef had convinced them he needed personal protection during the funeral.
Father Janusz Bieniek, from the Holy Spirit Church had been in Cairns when his parishioners were murdered, but had flown back to comfort Sef. ‘I was so shocked I knew that I should be here and I would like to assist Sef as much as possible,’ he says.
Father Janusz had helped Sef organise the funeral. He recalls that Sef was ‘extremely emotional’ in the lead-up to the funeral. Father Janusz prayed with him, but did not offer any speeches to try to comfort him. Nothing could console someone at such a time, he thought.
He asked Sef whom he would like to have speak at the funeral and Sef requested Father Rex Curry, now a parish priest at Manly on Sydney’s northern beaches, who had met the family when they were at Chatswood. Father Janusz telephoned Father Curry and asked him if he would say the homily. Father Curry agreed.
Father Janusz remembers that he thought it would be too distressing for Sef to speak at the funeral and tried to talk him out of it. But Sef was insistent. ‘Especially he wanted to have his speech, he wanted to have his talk,’ he says.
So, on the day of the funeral, as the mourners came to pay their respects to Teddy, Loiva and Clodine, Father Janusz tried to give the boy strength to go through with it. ‘Just before the Mass he was really shaking and crying. [I said] you have to do this, you have to be strong, not to cry, there’s no time for that now.’
Father Rex Curry had not had the chance to speak to Sef before delivering the homily at the funeral. He’d just had the phone call out of the blue from Father Janusz, despite not seeing the family for years. Sef never spoke with him directly before the funeral, which he found to be unusual.
‘I couldn’t have access to him immediately after the slaying, he seemed to be shuttled from one place to another,’ says Father Curry.
Father Curry’s homily was more religious than personal in tone, revolving around the nature of Christianity, but he also made the comment that the evil forces responsible for the Gonzales murders would not triumph. ‘I was trying to be as neutral at the time and as religious as possible,’ he remembers.
Nevertheless, Father Curry observed what he describes as Sef’s ‘detached’ behaviour at the funeral. ‘He sang a song which was, again, highly unusual at the time of his father’s and mother’s death and sister’s death . . . there was very little empathy there,’ he says.
The song Sef sang at the funeral was entitled ‘One Sweet Day’. It had been a hit for pop diva Mariah Carey with the boy band Boyz II Men, the band that Sef had gone to see at the Sydney Entertainment Centre in 1998. The song spoke of being reunited with a loved one in Heaven.
Annie Paraan, in her eulogy for Loiva, told the mourners how she had last seen her sister that May, when she visited Loiva in Sydney. ‘When it was time for us to leave Sydney, [Loiva] and I hugged each other so tight for a long while and tears kept running down our eyes,’ Annie Paraan said. ‘I was crying with the thought that we would be counting the years before we can see and hug each other again. I never thought it would be the last time I would see them alive.’
In her eulogy for Clodine, Liza commented on the tragedy of a young life wasted.
For most of the funeral, Sef, smartly dressed in a dark blue suit, sat with his head bowed. When it was his turn to come to the lectern, he retained his composure.
His eulogy for Teddy was eloquent, almost poetic. He paid tribute to his father, his hero and mentor, and referred to the time Teddy had risked his life to rescue Sef from the hotel in Baguio when he was a young child.
He recalled, as a child, lying against his father’s chest and listening to his heart. ‘The rhythm of his heartbeat planted life in me and at that early moment instilled all the strength that I needed to face the life ahead of me. A man like Papa does not die. His heart continues to beat in me and in all of you who have known him,’ he said.
Sef told the congregation that his father had promised to reveal the meaning of his name when he turned 21 — which would be in September of that year — and now he would never know. ‘I will never find out the meaning of my name because it was taken away along with my father. That part of me will always be incomplete, along with many other parts of my life that only Papa can fill.’
After his eulogy was completed, Sef took a breath, and, unheralded and with no back-up music, sang in a clear, sweet voice, about a lost loved one and how he would eventually rejoin the loved one in Heaven.
Journalists had been allowed inside the church for the funeral, which was quite unusual. In fact, there was an area at the side of the church set aside for media, recalls journalist Letitia Rowlands, of the Daily Telegraph, one of Sydney’s major metropolitan newspapers.
‘From a media point of view it was bizarre,’ she says. ‘There was a media section at the side and they gave us all photocopies of all the eulogies so we didn’t have to take notes or anything. It was too easy in that way . . . Him singing was the most bizarre bit. Here’s this kid who just lost his entire family, and he gave a eulogy to his dad, which was quite touching really, but he didn’t cry and then he sings. The family were a wreck, [but] they were definitely supporting him. After he sang they were all hugging him.’
The burial of Teddy, Loiva and Clodine was a more private affair. Sef had insisted it should be attended by family members only.
The family made its way through Macquarie Park Cemetery to the three plots side by side in the Catholic burial section, to see the coffins lowered into the earth and to say their last goodbyes.
Emily would visit the graves once a week for the next three months and feel growing anger as the headstones for the family failed to be erected. Each grave simply had a temporary name tag on it. This was not good enough for her family, she felt.
Spurred by anger into action, she contacted the cemetery administration and asked why the plaques containing epitaphs had not been placed on the graves. She was told that a form had been sent to Sef some time ago, and that as he was the only immediate family member left, it was up to him to choose the inscriptions. The forms even offered him a choice of inscriptions. Emily spoke to her mother, Amelita, about this, but Amelita did not wish to bring up the subject with Sef.
A month or two afterwards, the plaques went up, and the family was happy with them. All three began ‘Always living in our hearts’. Teddy’s described him as a dearly beloved husband and father and a cherished son, brother and friend. ‘An inspiration to us all’, it read. Loiva’s described her as a beloved wife and mother and a cherished daughter, sister and friend. ‘Her sweet ways will always be part of us’ was the last line. Clodine’s described her as a dearly beloved daughter and sister and a cheerful friend to many. ‘She will always be part of our smiles’ was how Sef described his sister on the plaque.