By the Thursday after the funeral of the Gonzales family, Sef had been living a fairly nomadic existence. Having worn out his welcome with family members, he telephoned his friend Amanda Pedro’s mother, Belinda, and asked if he could stay at their home in Sydney’s northwest for a few days, because the media were harassing him. Belinda agreed, but would quickly come to regret the decision.
When Sef arrived at their place that evening, Belinda observed that his hands were stiff and defensive at his sides and his head was bowed, but when she looked into his face she saw there was no emotion. In her opinion, as a trained psychiatric nurse, he wasn’t just withholding emotion, it simply wasn’t there. She had learned enough in her profession about psychopaths to know that they are incapable of feeling empathy for anyone except themselves. Instantly, her intuition told her Sef was guilty of committing the murders.
Belinda had always viewed Sef as a bit of a cold fish. On 21 June 2001 — less than a month before the murders — he had visited their house for her son Alan’s 21st birthday party, which Belinda had videotaped. All the other kids were laughing and joking, but as Belinda trained the camera on Sef, she noticed he was silent and not joining in the merriment.
Belinda was always outgoing and affectionate towards the young people who visited her home, but she could not bring herself to be that way with Sef. It was as if there were some invisible emotional barrier he held out that she could not penetrate.
That first night of Sef’s stay Belinda decided she wasn’t going to be treated like a ‘nincompoop’ in her own home by this young man. After Amanda and Alan arrived home she made him aware of that. ‘You know, Sef, the first person people will suspect is you,’ she told him.
Sef immediately went on the defensive. ‘Who said that? Give me their names,’ he demanded. He said he would get straight onto his lawyers, if someone was slandering his name in such a way.
Before she went to bed that night, Belinda instructed her children to sleep in the same room and urged them to place a chair under the doorknob. Sef was to sleep on the couch.
Amanda, however, did not get to bed until about 4 am, as she and Sef sat up talking. Amanda, now a university student, had told Sef she understood if he didn’t want to talk about the murders, but Sef seemed to want to talk about them. Amanda was taken aback by the way Sef could bring himself to go into graphic detail about what he had seen in his home on the night of the killings. ‘He said, “My dad was covered in blood and stabbed, like, twenty times”,’ Amanda recalls. ‘He was able to speak, he was able to give details about it.’
The next morning, it was still dark when Belinda sat down with Sef at the table and spoke to him for more than an hour. Sef talked extensively about his parents. He said his father had left him $5 million and that he wanted to use this money to help people. He said he wanted to be like his father. Belinda tried to scrutinise him, read his emotions, but Sef’s back was facing a window and in the dawning light she couldn’t see his face properly. ‘I could not feel any empathy for him, and the sorrow I felt was for his family,’ she says.
The following night, Amanda went out in the city, while Sef remained at the Pedros’ home and watched a video with Alan and one of his friends. The movie they saw was Meet the Parents, the Robert De Niro–Ben Stiller comedy about a bumbling young suitor trying and failing miserably to impress his future parents-in-law. There is a particular scene in the movie in which Stiller’s character pops a champagne cork and it flies into the urn containing the ashes of De Niro’s character’s beloved mother, smashing it to pieces. The boys worried about Sef’s reaction to the movie, since his own family had just been buried. But according to Belinda, Sef showed no sign of being upset. He laughed at all the right parts of the movie.
During his three-day visit Sef told Amanda’s parents he felt very close to them. ‘You’re my new family now,’ he said.
Sef continued to drop into the Pedros’ home unannounced over the next couple of weeks. At first Amanda had no problem with these visits; at this stage she was convinced of his innocence. However, she became disturbed at the way Sef would just walk into the house without knocking, one time wandering straight into her bedroom to find her; she could have been getting dressed or anything. She felt it was an invasion of her privacy.
During this period Sef asked her to come out with him to see a movie, and they went to see Erin Brockovich, starring Julia Roberts. Amanda couldn’t believe it when Sef kept trying to put his arm around her and kiss her — how could he be behaving this way when his parents had recently been murdered? On the way out of the cinema, Sef told her he had been offered a recording deal due to the way he had sung at the funeral. In spite of her incredulity, Amanda kept trying to make excuses for his behaviour. ‘I kept trying to convince myself, “He’s really traumatised”,’ she says.
About two weeks after the funeral, two Tawas detectives came around to her house, looking for her cousin Dennis. At first, Amanda was indignant about the detectives’ attempts to speak to Sef’s friends. ‘You don’t know what he’s been through! He’s had cancer!’ she fired at the police officer.
It was after this that the police informed her of all the lies Sef had told her. He had never been diagnosed with cancer, they said. He did not study medicine. Amanda’s initial shock was soon replaced by genuine doubt about Sef’s proclaimed innocence.
The lies provided enough reason for Amanda’s father Vincent to decide to tell Sef not to come and visit any more. Bluntly, he told Sef he believed he had been less than honest with them about so many aspects of his life. He had betrayed their trust.
Amanda began to fear another visit from Sef. He would come around looking for her and she would drive up to her house, see his car parked outside, and keep driving around the streets until she saw that his car was gone, and that it was safe to come home.
When Sef telephoned her one morning she told him he shouldn’t be calling her. ‘He said, “Look, I just want you to know I forgive you abandoning me in my hour of need”,’ Amanda says. He also told her the police had lied to her family about him.
Despite her family’s rejection of him, Amanda would always have a place in his heart, Sef said. ‘Once this is all over, I hope we can be friends.’
THE FRIENDSHIPS SEF had before the murders — such as those with Sam Dacillo and Raf De Leon — seemed to wane around this time. Both Sam and Raf had been used by Sef as part of the alibi to divert suspicion from himself.
He took up with a new crowd, coming to rely heavily for emotional support on Dennis Pedro and Don McGregor, one of Dennis’s mates, who would later become a Crown witness and have his name suppressed by the New South Wales Supreme Court. His name has been altered in this book. Don was a legal clerk and nightclub DJ whom Dennis introduced to Sef after the murders. Don and Dennis both enjoyed the nightclub scene in the city, and Sef soon joined their circle. He would frequent clubs in the city with them, particularly Connections nightclub. According to Amanda, he would go nightclubbing virtually every weekend.
On her twentieth birthday, which fell in May 2002, Amanda was at Connections, dancing with friends. She was afraid when she saw Sef approach her. He asked to talk to her in private. She refused, but Sef persisted.
He told her: ‘In two weeks I’m going to be on television offering a six-figure reward for anyone who can offer information for a concrete conviction [of the killer]. You’ll finally see that I’m innocent.’
That was the last time Amanda spoke to Sef, her former friend. She had come round to her mother’s way of thinking: that he was a manipulative, remorseless killer. ‘I feel like I don’t hate him because I don’t have the energy to hate him. I pity him, because he’s fucked up, like, mentally,’ she now says.