In early January 2002, Paul Auglys paid a visit to Don McGregor. McGregor had become close to Sef since his family’s murder, and was something of a sounding board for him. McGregor would always try to cheer up Sef and just be there if his ‘bro’ needed a chat.
Auglys told McGregor that police did not believe Sef’s alibi because of the two separate sightings of Sef’s car at the scene, one about 4.30 pm by Teddy’s client and the one about 6 pm by Emily. Auglys told McGregor Sef would be arrested imminently for the murders of his family. Auglys knew McGregor would pass this information on to Sef. Auglys sat back and waited for the next development. Of course, McGregor reported this startling news to Sef almost immediately.
Within the next few days, Auglys noticed with growing interest, as he monitored Sef’s phone calls, that Sef, who paid occasional visits to brothels for sex, was all of a sudden very interested in the workings of the brothel industry. In particular, he was interested in the prices of various services and the rosters of brothels on Sydney’s North Shore.
On 8 January 2002, at 11.07 pm, Sef, from his home phone, called La Petite Aroma brothel at Chatswood, where he was a client from before the murders, and asked for the names of girls who worked there.
At 11.11 pm, Sef called Willoughby’s Interlude brothel. He asked the woman who took his call about the brothel’s rates. The woman told Sef they charged $60 for a half hour and $100 for a full hour for body-to-body massage. For full service it would cost $100 for half an hour and $150 for one hour.
At 11.19 pm, Sef was on the phone to the Club 350 brothel at Chatswood, enquiring about rates. He was told it was $75 for half an hour, $110 for three-quarters of an hour and $135 for an hour. Sef asked if the girls there provided full service, to which he was told that for $75 he would not get sex, and that they did not do full service, only massage.
At 11.21 pm, Sef’s fingers were still doing the walking, as he called Chandalay brothel at Roseville. Again he enquired about rates and services. Sef then asked if there were any women working that night, and was told there were four girls on shift.
Two days later, 10 January 2002, was a busy day for Sef. At 11.01 am, Sef sent an SMS text message to a prostitute at La Petite Aroma, with whom he had had sex before. He referred to her by her working name, Latisha (not her actual working name, nor her real name). It read:
hi latisha . . . happy new yr! I wish I knew ur real name:) would like to catch up with u sometime . . . lunch or dinner . . . when are u free?
The message had possibly been prompted when Sef sighted Latisha as she crossed the road at Chatswood at 10 am that morning. He had called out to her, but she had pretended not to notice him.
At lunchtime, Sef met McGregor at a chicken shop in the city, and mentioned having a matter of a sensitive nature to discuss. The pair went for a stroll in Hyde Park and Sef confided that he had a new alibi that could clear his name. McGregor was the first person to whom Sef confessed that his first alibi — about driving out to Raf De Leon’s place — was a lie. He told McGregor he had actually parked his car at home after returning from his dad’s office. Then he had walked to a service station on the main road near his home, caught a taxi to a Chatswood brothel and spent some time there, before catching a cab back home.
At 2.26 pm, La Petite Aroma’s receptionist received a call later traced to a public phone booth at Chatswood. A male voice told her he was Detective Mike Rogers, from Gladesville police station. He was investigating a murder that had taken place in July, and the main suspect claimed to have been at La Petite Aroma during the murders. Did they have surveillance camera footage and the names of the women on duty that night? The canny receptionist said she could only take his number and get the owner to ring him back. He left a false mobile number. Police later confirmed there was no Mike Rogers attached to Gladesville police.
Twelve minutes later, Sef was at his Chatswood unit, calling Interlude brothel again. He again asked how long the brothel had been open and was told only a couple of weeks. He seemed to lose interest and got off the line.
At 3.41 pm, McGregor called Sef. Their conversation revolved around the subject of their lunchtime discussion in the city. Sef said he had organised to see his lawyer the following day. He stressed to McGregor that their conversations were to go no further than the two of them. He said if he decided to commit to the second alibi, he wanted it to ‘go smoothly’.
‘So anyway, go and investigate it, but then I think you need to volunteer it to them,’ McGregor advised Sef.
Sef agreed. ‘But, but then yeah, once again, you know, I haven’t made my final decision on it, you know,’ he told McGregor. He confessed concern that volunteering this new alibi to police could come back to bite him.
‘’Cause the only thing I’m afraid of is that thing we talked about today, if it doesn’t tally. You know what I mean? Like it, it could blow up in my face again, you know. Like if it doesn’t, if it’s not solid enough as an alibi. Like you know, for one thing, if the person isn’t found or doesn’t remember. Like, there’s so many problems, you know. But that’s the only thing that worries me,’ Sef said.
After they got off the phone McGregor got to considering what Sef had told him, and his mind began to work over the potential problems with Sef’s story. He was trying to support his friend, but even McGregor could see there were too many unanswered questions in the alibi, too many holes, things Sef would need to clarify. He typed up a two-page document, full of cross-examination style questions he thought Sef should read through. It was quite comprehensive, with questions such as:
• What time did he park there [at home]?
• How long did it take to walk to the service station?
• Was the taxi he flagged down on the street or in the service station?
• Who was the girl at the brothel?
• What did he ‘have done’ at the brothel?
• Where did he hail the taxi from to go home?
• How did he intend to explain to his parents why his car was there for hours and he wasn’t?
• Why did he lie about his whereabouts that day?
• Why is he now telling the truth?
McGregor also suggested that Sef would need a statement from the girl at the brothel, a statement from the brothel management, taxi records of pick-up and delivery each way and the times of these, video footage of him in Chatswood at that time, and to chase up whether the girl’s hair and DNA were on the clothing he had given to police.
The document complete, McGregor called Sef at 5.28 pm. He said he had typed up a ‘cross-examination thing’. He offered to fax it through to Sef and Sef agreed this was a good idea. ‘You’re an angel, brother,’ Sef told his friend gratefully.
The next morning, 11 January, the fax had not come through and Sef spoke to McGregor again, saying he would try to pick it up in person.
Of course, all this activity was coming across the police telephone intercepts. Sheehy decided to pay Sef a visit at his unit, arriving there at 3.30 pm. Sheehy bluntly told Sef he believed he was not telling the truth about the murders, that he believed Sef was responsible for them, and that he would be arrested soon.
Sef, confronted with this statement from the officer he thought believed in him, replied that he did indeed have information he was holding back, because it was demeaning to him and his family. He wanted to consult his lawyers. Sheehy told Sef he should be interviewed by police about this new information.
Sef’s mind must have been spinning at this revelation. It was one thing to hear it second-hand from McGregor, but from Sheehy it must have really hit home. What could he do to protect himself? Time was running out for him.
The next day, 12 January, Sef took a stroll down to Chatswood railway station, where he approached a taxi driver, Alan Altano (not his real name), and asked him to come around the corner so he could have a chat. He would pay him $50 for his time. He then asked Altano to write a statement for him verifying that Altano had driven him from North Ryde to Chatswood in July 2001.
Sef assured Altano the statement was not regarding anything serious to do with the law, and Altano, an elderly man who spoke halting English, assumed young Sef had simply got into some strife with his girlfriend and needed the statement to sweet-talk her around. Ripping a piece of paper from his diary, Altano scrawled the words:
I declare that I picked up Sef Gonzales from Shell Service station at Wicks Road, North Ryde in the second week of July last year and dropped him at Chatswood Station.
At Sef’s request, Altano backdated the statement to 7 October 2001.
On 14 January, McGregor rang Sef. Sef seemed full of confidence, and said that he had good news about what had been happening. He said he would be able to substantiate what they had discussed. McGregor asked if he had got the necessary witnesses, and Sef said he had, at least partially. He stressed that he needed to package the whole alibi properly, so it would be ‘foolproof’. The next day, he would meet McGregor to show him the statement he had obtained, telling McGregor he’d had it since October 2001.
In the following two days, Sef would speak to Altano a number of times on the phone, and tell Altano that he would send him a copy of the handwritten statement he had provided. Detective Auglys listened keenly to the tapped phone calls, and it wasn’t long before Tawas officers paid the cabbie a visit. Altano, worried about what he had got himself involved in, would spill the beans to police on what had really transpired. Police told him to maintain contact with Sef but to take careful notes on what they spoke about. The last thing they wanted was Sef finding out they knew he was in the process of working on a second alibi.
On 18 January, while Detective Brian O’Donaghue was paying Sef an early visit at his Chatswood unit, Sef told the detective about being with a prostitute on the evening of the murders.
By 9 am, Sef was on the phone to Mick Sheehy. Sef said his instinct told him to trust Sheehy, but he was concerned about police corruption and whether the other officers on Tawas were trustworthy. Sheehy assured Sef they were all professional cops.
Sef told Sheehy that on the night of his first statement, while his relatives were present, he couldn’t tell them exactly what had happened, because they thought he was a virgin. And he originally had thought his family members had all died after 8 pm, so what did a lie about his movements before that time matter? Also, he was so terribly ashamed of having been with a prostitute the day his family was killed.
Sef said he already had a statement from one of the taxi drivers, and he had an idea who the prostitute was, but he was only about 70 per cent sure. He was confident he could recognise the other cab driver, but he had yet to find him. He was prepared to give police his full version after consulting with his lawyers.
Sef then brought up the subject of the plant poisons and admitted it was he who had researched them, but it was to kill himself, not his family. (Sef had told numerous friends he suffered cancer in the year leading up to his family’s deaths, but in reality he had never been diagnosed with the disease.)
‘When I had that episode with [Kathy], basically I was with her for two weeks. That night we slept together she basically told me that she had a boyfriend and that she was breaking up with me and that it was a one-night stand . . .
‘Every moment after that I deteriorated. I went into self-destruct mode and I was planning to take my life. My grades had gone downhill and the only thing stopping me was I could not bear the thought of the pain I’d give my parents if I committed suicide. And that’s why I did those months of research to get that plant. Because if I took that, it was a sure way of killing myself without being detected and wouldn’t look like suicide, because it would have the same symptoms as cancer.’
Sheehy asked if Sef had actually obtained the plant.
‘I had a sample and I managed to make a potion. I was just fermenting it . . . from my research I found out that [the poison] would slowly kill my organs and basically would look like cancer. So even with my friends I told them that I had cancer because I could not bear the thought of them going through the pain of me committing suicide.’
Sheehy told Sef the reason he was under so much suspicion was because he had told lies. It was important now that he told Tawas detectives the truth. He informed Sef he would be waiting to hear back from him, after he had spoken to his lawyers.
The following day, Sheehy would get an SMS from Sef. It read:
I am sorry I wasn’t completely honest at the start . . . pls give me another chance and a little more understanding. Thank you for being open-minded.
ON 28 MARCH 2002, Geoff Leonard was driving home along a freeway late one night when he received a call on his mobile phone from Sef’s uncle and godfather, Edmund Claridades, ringing from Queensland’s Gold Coast. Pulling over to the side of the road, Leonard listened to what Edmund had to say. It was very interesting indeed.
Edmund by this stage had heard via the family grapevine that Sef was formulating a second alibi, revolving around being with the Chatswood prostitute at the time of the murders. By now Edmund strongly suspected that Sef was involved in the murders, but was careful about confiding in family members because he did not want it to get back to Sef. But he could see how ridiculous it was for Sef to have maintained a false alibi for more than six months, preferring to remain a murder suspect rather than confess he had been with a prostitute. Edmund wanted to help the investigators get to the bottom of this.
On 27 March, Sef had made telephone contact with Edmund and said he was coming to the Gold Coast, and that he needed his uncle’s help to decide something. Edmund offered to wear a wire for the police to record his conversations with Sef when he came to visit.
There were two advantages to using Edmund in this regard. First, as Sef’s godfather, or ninong as a godfather is called in Tagalog, he held an important position in Sef’s life. Sef might very well confide in his godfather, when he would not confide in other relatives.
There was also another distinct advantage. In Queensland, it was perfectly legal, without a warrant, to record a conversation with another person if one party consented to that recording. Any admissions Sef made during a visit to Queensland could still be used in a New South Wales court. Edmund was a willing party, and Leonard thought it was a promising idea.
Leonard made contact with the Queensland police, requesting they pay a visit to Edmund, discussing how the scenario might go down.
Unfortunately, Sef appeared to have struck car trouble in northern New South Wales and informed his uncle later the same day that he could no longer visit. Edmund had another idea, however. As an electrician, he was able to create his own telephone recording device. By disassembling a hands-free mobile phone kit, creating two microphones, and utilising a Handycam camera, he could record both his own voice and the voice of whomever he was speaking to on the telephone.
Between 3 and 9 April 2002, Edmund had a number of telephone conversations in Tagalog with his nephew, while his recording device rolled. During these conversations Sef continued his lies about his movements on the night of the murders. Most enlightening, though, was that Sef admitted to his godfather that his life had been spiralling out of control in the lead-up to the murders.
Sef admitted his parents had been restricting his use of his car, and said that on the night of the murders he had had special permission from his mother to use the car only because it was for Sam Dacillo’s birthday celebrations. He had sneakily used his car despite his mother’s ban at other times, he admitted.
EDMUND: I don’t know, especially in that stage that you said the car is yours, that’s why you can do as you please, that [is] still not true because I know . . . you’re on the borderline that the car is to be taken from you.
SEF: At that stage I was on the borderline, po [a Tagalog term of respect], I admit that, but at that day I was given permission to take the car and I know it was selfish and it was wrong . . .
In the course of the conversations Sef also admitted just how hard he had taken the break-up with Kathy Wu.
SEF: Mama doesn’t approve of her.
EDMUND: Who, this [Kathy]?
SEF: Yes, she doesn’t, Mama does not like her.
EDMUND: Hmm.
SEF: Because she is older than me, then she has a different religion.
EDMUND: Hmm.
SEF: But at that time, I thought, I really thought, that is, I really fell in love with her, I thought, I thought, that she really is the one.
EDMUND: Umm.
SEF: That even to Mama I defended her. Papa did not say anything about it. And that even to Mama I defended her.
EDMUND: Hmm.
SEF: Then even to Grandma, I told her I think, this is it.
Sef told his uncle he lost his virginity to Kathy and went on to say he really ‘lost a lot’ when Kathy broke up with him.
SEF: Anyway, at that stage it’s hard to explain, but everything about me went downhill, all my grades failed, so basically my life went upside down. It’s like I feel I’m trapped, that I don’t know what to do, because I cannot study, then I feel like I’m getting deeper and deeper.
Sef told his uncle how he had felt suicidal and that he had researched a biological warfare drug that mimics the effects of cancer in the body. He was going to commit suicide — but not before going to a brothel. He elaborated on his brothel alibi to his uncle.
During this exercise, Edmund had probably come as close as anyone to tapping into the despair Sef had been feeling in the lead-up to the murders — although the way Sef told it, the despair caused him to feel suicidal rather than murderous. These words from Sef’s own mouth added strongly to the evidence of motive — that Sef had killed his family due to the unravelling of his life.