As far as chat-up lines went, it certainly lacked originality. But when Sef first laid eyes on the petite and beautiful Kathy Wu (real name suppressed by the New South Wales Local Courts), a 24-year-old of Asian background, he knew he had to say something to her. He fell for her, as the saying goes, hook, line and sinker.
It was on Monday, 14 May 2001, at the Macquarie Shopping Centre at North Ryde that Kathy first caught his attention. She was browsing in the stores and was just leaving a mobile telephone shop when she was approached by Sef.
‘You look familiar. Do I know you?’ Sef asked her.
‘No,’ Kathy replied.
Undeterred, Sef continued talking. They spoke for about five minutes, then Sef asked Kathy for her phone number. Kathy was apprehensive — she did not know this man from a bar of soap, as nice as he seemed — and refused his request. So Sef handed her his business card, from T Gonzales & Associates, complete with his phone numbers and e-mail address. He asked her to e-mail him, and she said goodbye.
The brief meeting played on her mind over the next few days, and her curiosity was roused. At the time she was in a long-term relationship with another man, but, like many women, Kathy could not resist flattery when it came her way.
Two days after their first meeting, on Wednesday, 16 May, Kathy dug out the business card at work and e-mailed Sef from her office computer. The e-mail was brief and casual, simply saying hello and asking Sef to tell her a bit more about himself.
The next day as she logged in to her work computer, she saw Sef had replied. Sef, eager to impress, had told her more than just a bit about himself — and not all of it was truthful.
He was, indeed, a mixture of Filipino, Spanish and Chinese. Yes, he did study at Macquarie University, but he said he was doing law. Then he descended into the realms of make-believe — in addition to working part-time at his father’s law office at Blacktown, he also claimed he held down two other part-time jobs. He worked for a law firm in the Sydney CBD, he stated, as well as being a personal trainer at a gym. Kathy was duly impressed, having no reason to believe that what she was reading was fact embellished liberally with fiction.
The pair embarked on a modern-day flirtation, courtesy of the Internet. They continued e-mailing each other, their interest growing with every message that arrived in their in-boxes. Sef told her even more about himself: that he used to study medicine at the University of New South Wales, that his mum worked alongside his father at the Blacktown law practice, and that his family had moved recently into a newly built home at North Ryde. His sister, he told Kathy, was studying in Melbourne.
Kathy, in return, told him a little bit more about herself. She told Sef about her family and divulged the fact she had a boyfriend. Sef’s response was that it was okay with him. He simply wanted to be friends. It is unclear if either of them really believed this as they embarked on a whirlwind romance.
Kathy decided Sef was essentially a nice person. She agreed to meet him for lunch the following week, on Tuesday, 22 May. They e-mailed each other to confirm the details.
That day, Sef arrived in his green Ford Festiva, picking Kathy up at work. They drove to a restaurant, Thai Smile, on Victoria Road, West Ryde. Over the spicy food, they talked about themselves, their interests. It was all very casual, but with each word Sef was becoming more smitten. After lunch, he asked again for Kathy’s mobile telephone number, and by this stage she relented and gave it to him.
That night, Sef rang Kathy to thank her for lunch. That was it, thank you and goodnight.
The next night, he called her again, and once more the night after that. He rang her every night that week in May, though their conversations were brief, lasting about two minutes each. Kathy began to think about Sef a lot; she wanted to see him again.
At some point during this period, Sef took Kathy on a picnic to Lane Cove National Park, a short drive from his house. He took his camera, and used a whole roll of film capturing Kathy as she posed, smiling, amid the greenery.
Sef couldn’t resist showing the photos around at home, lovestruck and gloating over Kathy’s beauty to anyone who would listen. ‘Look at her, Aunty Emily, she’s very pretty, what do you think?’ he asked Emily during one of her visits to the house in May.
‘He was just excited and happy, I’ve never seen him so happy,’ Emily recalls.
Emily agreed with Sef that indeed the girl was very attractive. Sef commented on her resemblance to his mother. ‘Are you going to go to sleep with those photos in your hand?’ Emily joked, not realising that Sef had framed one of the photographs and placed it next to his bed, so he could see Kathy’s face before he went to sleep at night.
Emily knew that Loiva, who confided in her about almost everything, had a problem with the relationship. It became a source of argument between Sef and his mother, with Loiva pointing out the disadvantages of seeing an older woman, and Sef countering with reasons why Kathy’s age was an advantage. Sef complained that his mother was still jealous of his girlfriends.
Emily knew Loiva did not have a problem with Kathy as such. It wasn’t that she even knew her personally, or that she had a problem with her ethnic background, which was not Filipino. But she was concerned that the relationship was becoming too serious. The girl was older than Sef and held down a job, and lived in a place of her own. Loiva worried Kathy and Sef might move in together, and that this romance was a distraction he did not need when he was studying.
‘She felt it was getting serious, because Sef was always out at night,’ Emily says.
Sef decided that Kathy should meet his mother, a sure sign that things had progressed to a more serious level.
On Thursday, 24 May, Kathy and Sef went out for dinner. Sef asked her to drive to his house after she finished work, and leave her car there so that he could drive her to dinner. Kathy pulled up outside 6 Collins Street around 5.30 pm. She got on the mobile, calling Sef to say she was outside his house. He came out to greet her and escorted her into the tiled entry.
Loiva was waiting to meet her. She said a polite hello to Kathy, then retreated to the laundry, where she was in the midst of washing one of the family’s dogs. Kathy followed Loiva to the laundry to see the drenched little animal, before returning to the front of the house and stepping out the door with Sef. She left with no feeling either way about Loiva’s opinion of her; Sef’s mother had simply been preoccupied with washing the dog.
The pair drove to a Japanese restaurant for dinner. They spoke more about themselves and their families. Kathy thought again what a nice guy Sef was, and wanted to see more of him. The conversation rolled around to the idea that Kathy should break up with her boyfriend so she could be with Sef. That night, Kathy promised Sef she would end her other relationship, but said she had to wait for the right moment. She wanted to spare her boyfriend’s feelings as much as possible. Sef, impatient to have Kathy as his girlfriend, told her he wished they could be together straightaway, but that he understood she had to time the break-up properly.
After dinner, Kathy and Sef took a stroll in the grounds of the nearby University of New South Wales, sitting in a park and talking. When they arrived back at North Ryde, it was midnight, and Kathy did not go back inside the house. They kissed goodnight.
The following day, Sef rang Kathy at work and asked if she would come over to his place for lunch. He picked her up from work and they grabbed some McDonald’s takeaway — quarter pounders with cheese were one of his favourites — on the way to his house. Sitting in the family room at the back of the house, they ate their food, then Sef showed Kathy his neat, orderly bedroom, with its single bed and rows of tiny aftershave bottles stacked neatly on the shelves, before Kathy had to return to work.
That weekend, Kathy broke up with her boyfriend, but did not tell him about Sef. On the Monday she told Sef what had occurred and that they were now free to see each other. She arranged to see Sef after work. Sef rushed to her office that afternoon and they drove separately to a street in West Ryde, where Sef said he liked to park and contemplate things. When Kathy got into Sef’s car he gave her a necklace with a ‘G’ charm hanging from a chain. Sef told Kathy the ‘G’ stood for Gonzales, and the jewellery was a promise of an engagement. She was taken aback — it was so early in the relationship — but she smiled, not wanting to hurt Sef’s feelings.
Kathy did not see Sef again that week because she did not like to go out often on work nights, but she spoke to him every night on the phone. Sef told her he loved her, but she didn’t reciprocate. She was thinking how much she missed her old boyfriend.
At the end of that week, on the night of Friday, 1 June, Sef and Kathy went out for dinner at Oatlands House near Parramatta. At dinner, Kathy dealt Sef a crushing blow, telling him she wanted to get back together with her ex-boyfriend. Sef was devastated, but after a while said, ‘Let’s not think about this tonight and just enjoy the night.’
In Sef’s car that night, Kathy and Sef had sex. She was sad she would never be close to him again, so she wanted to make love with him once. She then broke up with him and Sef, though upset, took it on the chin. ‘You know what is best with yourself, I just want you to be happy,’ he said.
So ended their brief relationship, but Sef could not let go. That weekend, as Kathy reunited with her ex-boyfriend, Sef sent her text messages, letting her know he missed her and wanted to talk to her. The text messages went unanswered. He sent her another message on Monday, saying he wanted to talk. He rang her at home and tearfully asked her how she could make him fall in love with her, then just leave him. Then he said he had to go and hung up. He rang back half an hour later, apologising, and asking if they could still be friends. Kathy told him she did not know if she could do that, as she felt guilty about what she had done, then ended the conversation.
Later that week, Kathy e-mailed Sef asking him if he wanted her to return his Year Twelve yearbook, which he had lent her. He had wanted to impress her with the comments written in it by fellow students, saying how smart he was. Sef replied immediately, saying he had things to do but could meet up for lunch the next week.
She drove to Sef’s house the following Tuesday, 12 June 2001. Only Sef was home. Returning the book, Kathy chatted to Sef for a while, and he told her he was leaving for Brazil in a couple of weeks to be a back-up fighter in a tae kwon do tournament.
This was pure fantasy, but Kathy couldn’t have known that. In fact she received an e-mail from Sef on 8 July, saying he was having a great time in Brazil going to parties on the beach. It was another of Sef’s lies, perhaps his way of getting back at her, and indicating he didn’t need her in his life to have a good time.