Teddy and Loiva sold their Blacktown home around the beginning of 2000, and purchased the lot at 6 Collins Street, North Ryde. It was about 30 metres from Amelita’s house. There was an old fibro home on the block, which they demolished. They would build their dream home, although the process wasn’t without problems. Teddy became involved in a bitter dispute over payment for the demolition of the old home by a Korean contractor.
As they had already sold their Blacktown home, the family rented a house in Numa Road, North Ryde, to live in while their new home was being built. Collins Street residents would often see Teddy in the street, supervising the building of his house, which was not progressing as quickly as he had hoped. At that time, builders were in short supply in property-mad Sydney.
Nevertheless, the house was finished just in time for Christmas.
THE BLESSING OF the home is a Catholic tradition. It is meant to provide peace, wellbeing and love to all who reside there.
Father Janusz Bieniek performed this blessing of the new Gonzales home in Collins Street in January 2001. He blessed room after room, the garage, and the garden as well, consecrating the dwelling with holy water. ‘It’s a spiritual blessing elaborated with scripture readings and prayers . . . which involve the whole family,’ explains Father Janusz.
The Gonzales family attended Mass at the Holy Spirit Church several times weekly. Teddy proudly told Father Janusz that Sef had became a devotee of Opus Dei, a movement that is part of the Catholic Church. It calls on the faithful to live their lives according to the Gospel, and to let their faith be known to others. Teddy also told Father Kevin Dadswell that Sef was involved with Opus Dei, while Sef was attending the university of New South Wales. Emily confirms Sef was indeed studying under an Opus Dei tutor while at the University of New South Wales, but once he changed to a different university, he dropped his studies of Opus Dei.
Sef’s devotion impressed Father Janusz. ‘I thought that he was a nice good man and the sort of external expression of his faith seemed to be quite impressive, quite uplifting, going to church and having meaningful discussions. We would shake hands and say hi,’ he says.
Clodine had moved to Melbourne, attending Siena College, a Catholic school, from mid-2000, so it was just Teddy, Loiva and Sef living at 6 Collins Street.
Sef expressed to his mother a wish to move out, into accommodation at Macquarie University. Loiva had told him that was fine; however, if he did, he would have to support himself. She pointed out all the costs he would be up for. In the end, Sef opted to stay at home.
But increasingly, the relationship between Sef and his parents was becoming strained. Sef was going through a rebellious period, speaking back to his mother, which went against the grain of Loiva’s upbringing. But he would not do this with Teddy. Teddy had a fiery temper and the fear of being yelled at by his father was enough to rein in Sef’s rebellion when he was around his father. ‘When his dad’s angry, he’s angry. You don’t say anything,’ says Emily.
Sef went through a stage where he seemed to be rejecting the Filipino culture. According to Annie Gonzales-Tesoro, Sef shocked his paternal grandfather, William, during one of William’s visits to Sydney by saying, ‘I hate Filipinos.’
‘He saw himself as Australian,’ Annie says.
Teddy and Loiva were both concerned about Sef’s lack of attention to his studies, as Teddy once confided to Loiva’s close friend Jane. ‘I really studied hard when I was doing law and Sef is not even doing half of what I did,’ Teddy told her.
Jane recalls discussing Sef’s studies with Loiva. ‘I said to Loiva, why don’t you let him do what he wants to do . . . are you sure you’re not pushing him too much? And Loiva said no, that’s what he likes,’ Jane says.
Loiva complained to Emily that Sef was ‘lazy’. Clodine was not around any more to help with the housework, and Loiva was left to do all of it.
By October or November of 2000, a close friend of Loiva Gonzales, Madeleine Azcona, a vibrant, say-it-like-it-is kind of woman, had became disturbed by a particular problem that seemed to be recurring whenever she visited the family’s Numa Road rental house for dinner. She would place her wallet down on a bench and leave it unattended when she visited the Gonzales’ house, and afterwards she could swear there was money missing from it.
After pondering the problem, she began to suspect it may have been Sef who was stealing the money. Teddy or Loiva would hardly be doing it, she thought. Not willing to put her friendship with Loiva at risk by making unfounded accusations, she devised a plan to see whether she was right.
One morning, she went to the bank to withdraw $100, in two $50 notes, and placed them inside her wallet. That day, she drove to the Gonzales home and picked up Sef for a prearranged appointment. He was coming to her house for a haircut.
Deliberately leaving Sef alone with her wallet lying on a table near the front door, Madeleine went upstairs and made a great show of calling out, ‘I won’t be long’, so Sef knew she was still upstairs.
‘I’m coming downstairs now,’ Madeleine called out, after giving Sef sufficient opportunity to rifle through her wallet.
She was about to drop Sef home when she said she needed to use the toilet. Taking her wallet with her, Madeleine looked inside it and her heart sank. One $50 note was missing.
Madeline wasted no time in confronting Sef, explaining the trap she had set and stating that she believed Sef had stolen her money. Sef kept denying it, even holding out his arms and challenging her: ‘Search me.’
Madeline told him that of course she was not going to do that, but that she and Sef were the only two people in the house when the money went missing. She told Sef if he looked her in the eye and told her he did not steal it, she would believe him.
Sef did as she asked. ‘I didn’t take it,’ he said.
Madeleine decided to let it lie and not tell Loiva, but just be careful not to let her wallet out of her sight when she next visited Loiva’s home.
She was extremely suprised to get a phone call from Loiva the next day. Sef had told his mother about Madeleine’s accusation. Unfortunately for him, Loiva and Teddy had believed Madeleine’s version. In fact, Loiva also suspected that Sef was stealing money from her own wallet, as much as $50 at a time, as well as stealing from Teddy and even from the tiler who was working on the house at Collins Street when they moved in.
Three days later, Sef called Madeleine and said he needed to see her. He drove around to her place that evening, offered her $500 cash and admitted to stealing the money.
Madeline declined the $500 from Sef, taking $200 to cover what she believed he had stolen in total. Most of all, she wanted to know why Sef had done it. Did he have a drug problem, or a gambling addiction? she asked him.
Sef said no.
‘Then you have to have a reason — are you a klepto[maniac]?’ Madeleine probed.
‘No, I’m just an opportunist,’ Sef replied. He added that previously he had swindled a friend out of profits from dance party productions, and that his parents had been forced to shell out the missing money to pay back his friend.
The whole experience left a sour taste in Madeleine’s mouth, and seeing Sef’s discomfort whenever she visited Loiva from then on made her feel ill at ease.
IT DID NOT help when, around March or April 2001, Sef wrote off his father’s near-new Toyota Camry while he was driving out to Quakers Hill. Rather than borrow his son’s car to get to work until he replaced his, Teddy had Sef drop him at the train station so he could make the trip to Blacktown each day. Sef hated public transport, recalls Emily, and Teddy did not want to force his son to catch the bus to nearby Macquarie University.
In addition to all this, Sef was suffering, at twenty years of age, an extremely humiliating and private problem. He was wetting his bed, and of course his mother, who did the laundry, knew it. It was one of those unfortunate physiological things, a habit from childhood he had never broken.
Through family friends, Loiva heard of a child psychologist who dealt with the problem by recommending an alarm system that was attached to the bed. Sef outright refused to accompany Loiva to the psychologist, so Loiva went alone. The psychologist told her there was not much he could do if Sef did not come to see him as well.
Frustrated, Loiva got the alarm system anyway, and persuaded Sef to give it a try. This behaviour couldn’t go on, she told him; he couldn’t be wetting the bed when he was married — his wife would divorce him!
The alarm system worked by detecting the first drop of moisture on the bed and setting off a loud, old-fashioned alarm-clock sound, forcing the bed-wetter to get up and go to the toilet, and thus training the body to do this automatically after a while. Sef used it for two nights, and Loiva heard the alarm go off as well. After that, Sef refused to use the device again. He couldn’t get a decent night’s sleep, he complained.
Shortly before the murders, Loiva and Teddy discovered Sef was falsifying his university results. Sef had offered to do the same for Clodine. She had refused and told her parents. Sef got in a world of trouble, and the problem escalated into a heated argument between Teddy and Loiva. It ended with Teddy threatening to go back to the Philippines and leave the family behind. But he loved Loiva and the kids too much, and there was nothing to indicate he would ever have gone through with his threat. However, the issue contributed to tension within the Gonzales home.
By this time Sef was failing university, and failing badly. Poor results had followed him from his pre-medicine course at the University of New South Wales, to his pre-law course at Macquarie University. Whatever the case, he routinely missed classes, exams and assignments. He also appeared to be suffering from a string of illnesses during this period, and relied heavily on medical certificates to squeeze through into his next semester’s studies. He would often use these to apply for ‘special consideration’, which universities can grant in circumstances where students suffer hardship that interferes with their studies.
From January 1999 right through to July 2001, Sef was routinely ‘ill’. There were medical certificates for respiratory tract infections, mild asthma, chronic coughs, migraines, chest infections, viral illnesses, and so on. In one particular stroke of creativity, Sef told a doctor that he was training to compete in the Olympics and that this was interrupting his sleeping patterns.
As far as his first semester of 2001 subjects went, Sef had failed to complete essays in Communication and Citizenship Law Policy, and Anglo-American Constitutional History, and would get incomplete grades for both.
He had two subjects in which he had to sit mid-year exams — Law in Australian Society, and Politics. On 4 July 2001, he did not attend the Law in Australian Society exam that day. Earlier, Sef had sat for the Politics exams but failed, with a mark of 39 per cent. His parents would learn about it when the university results were posted on the Internet and mailed out on 20 July 2001.
Sef was staring failure in the face. It looked like he was going to bomb in all four subjects, unless the trusty medical certificates that he had lodged for special consideration would get him through. He was not facing expulsion — he would be allowed to continue through to the end of the year, at least — but his parents certainly would not be happy.
Loiva and Teddy had told Sef they would take away his beloved Ford Festiva if his grades did not improve. After all, Clodine was doing extremely well — why couldn’t Sef try as hard? He used to be the academic one — what had happened? They had decided to see what his mid-year results were.