One of the fascinating little snippets of information Sef had given Sheehy the night of the murders was that there was something on his laptop computer in his bedroom that might be interpreted in the wrong way by police. The family’s home computer had already been seized, on 11 July, and Ritchie Sim had taken the hard drive to the accounting firm KPMG, which had the software to copy it for analysis.
The drive revealed highly unusual Internet search activity. Reams of searches had been done on poisonous plants and plant parts, even as late as 9 July 2001, the day before the murders. Someone using the family computer had taken an intense interest in how these poisons worked — specifically, whether they could kill.
Commands to find more about certain plant poisons had been typed into the computer under various search engines, bringing up a number of web pages. The headings of the web pages were quite frightening: ‘Comparative lethality of selected toxins and chemical agents in laboratory mice’; ‘Poisonous part of “x” seed’; ‘Poisonous plants and plant parts’; ‘Poisonous house plants’; ‘Taste of “x” seed’; ‘Sprinkling the end product with soup’. And, most disturbing of all: ‘How to kill’.
The list of pages called up went on and on, and included information about how to use a particular seed to make poison, and how to mask the taste of this seed with peppermint or fruit. The searches dated back to 12 February 2001, and seemed to revolve around two particular seeds, both capable of being used to make lethal poisons. (The names of the two poisonous seeds researched extensively on the computer have been suppressed by the Supreme Court of New South Wales to prevent copycat cases.)
Police also located a flurry of e-mails that had been recently sent to and from the e-mail address sef-g@usa.net. On Wednesday, 20 June 2001, an e-mail had been sent from the ‘sef-g’ address to a seed supplier in the United States. It began: ‘hi . . . i would like to order the following, kindly let me know the total costs including shipment and handling, or let me know if my calculations are correct . . .’ The writer had ordered sixteen of a type of poisonous seed, calculating that the total cost would be US$8.50, and asked approximately how long they would take to arrive in Sydney, Australia.
The seed supplier had e-mailed back and airmailed the seeds to 6 Collins Street on 2 July, contrary to instructions from the person ordering them to hold the order for the moment. On 8 July 2001, after the person requesting the seeds rebuked her for not holding the order, and said he had just moved house, the supplier e-mailed to say she would send another packet of the seeds, free of charge, if the orderer sent her the new address.
There was also recent e-mail communication between the address sef-g@usa.net and a seed supplier on the far north New South Wales coast. On 26 June, an e-mail request had been made by a person signing off as ‘sef’ for a second type of poisonous seed. The writer stated that he had sent an Express Post envelope off the day before along with an order form and money for the delivery of the seed. The writer expressed the urgency of the delivery:
i have ordered some . . . seeds . . . as a gift for my mother’s 60th birthday this weekend. she had been looking for those particular seeds ever since she saw them in florida last year.
she lives up the coast and I will be heading there this weekend. Kindly make an exception for my order. I would like to receive it by the week’s end so that I can bring them to her.
On 28 June, the supplier promised to have the three packets of seeds in the mail the next day.
On 17 July, the police seized Sef’s laptop from his bedroom. This computer was found to contain a raft of similar Internet searches to those conducted on the Gonzales’ home computer. The laptop, along with the home computer, would be sent to police computer expert Jason Beckett for further analysis in September.
As with the family computer, numerous search engines had been used on the laptop to look up information on poisons. The words typed in to make the searches included: ‘amino + acids’; ‘murder + methods’; ‘poisonous + plants’; ‘cyanide’; ‘poison’; ‘underground + poison’; ‘poisonous + substances’; and ‘make poison’. Web pages accessed included some on biowar agents (biological agents cultivated for warfare). And there were also specific searches on the sale of the same two types of seeds that had been ordered by sef-g@usa.net on the family computer.
This information totally threw the police off-track, but began to make sense when relatives mentioned that Loiva had been hospitalised with acute food poisoning the week before the murders. Investigators got back in touch with Dr Cala, who had performed the postmortems, but had had no reason to look for signs of poisoning in Loiva’s body. However, he had examined her upper gastrointestinal tract and stomach and seen no sign of the damage ingesting one or both of the poisonous seeds would be likely to cause. Loiva’s body had since been buried, but Dr Cala had retained blood and tissue samples in case the need for further tests arose.
Tawas detectives looked at Loiva’s medical records from Sydney Adventist Hospital, where she had been admitted on 3 July 2001. Loiva had been very ill, suffering fever, severe abdominal pains and bloody diarrhoea. The hospital doctors had had no reason to suspect deliberate poisoning, or to test for the presence of anything but the various bugs that often afflict human beings and cause similar symptoms. Loiva’s illness had been put down to colitis, an inflammation of the bowel that could have been caused by a bad case of food poisoning.
During the search of Sef’s bedroom on 17 July 2001, police located a curious item wrapped in tissues and concealed under a set of drawers. It was a film canister containing a clear liquid. The liquid could not be analysed for the presence of contents of either of the two poisonous seeds researched on the computers in any Australian laboratory, so was sent to the United States, along with samples of Loiva’s liver, stomach and blood taken at the autopsy. Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) tested the liquid and advised that it contained a minute quantity of a particular poison made from a seed, one of the two poisonous seeds researched, but nothing that would be fatal if ingested. But they could not test Loiva’s tissue.
Those samples were later forwarded to Commonwealth Biotechnologies Incorporated (CBI) in Richmond, Virginia, which were able to test the tissue and the liquid. The testing detected no poison, but it was a different testing procedure, and Australian police were told the levels of poison detected by CDC would not have shown up using this different method. As for the tissue, CBI could find no sign of poisoning, but then Loiva had recovered from her illness prior to her death and the samples by that stage were very old.