10 July 2001, 11.55 pm
Collins Street was dark and still as ambulance officers Greg Jones and Darren Hosking roared in. The pair, the first emergency personnel to arrive at the triple murder scene, pulled into the street exactly seven minutes after Sef Gonzales telephoned 000.
All the pair had been told as they were sent out to Collins Street that night was that there had been a shooting reported. The tableau that confronted them on the driveway of number 6 only heightened Jones’s concern for his own safety and that of his partner.
In the dim illumination of street lights and the vague light emanating from inside the house, Jones saw two people. One figure was stooped on the ground, while the second figure stood over it.
Quickly Jones assessed the scene, drawing on his thirteen years of experience as an ambulance officer. He had planned to wait until the police turned up, as the ambulance officers had no weapons to protect themselves if a gunman was still nearby. Dashing in heedlessly would go against all his training.
Yet the figure stooped on the ground could well have been shot and in need of urgent medical care. Jones and Hosking quickly decided on their course of action. They would pull into the driveway, place the wounded man on a stretcher and into the ambulance, then get the hell out of there.
Hosking ventured out of the ambulance first, approaching the figure on the ground — Sef. The person standing over him was John Atamian. As per Shane Hanley’s instructions, John was watching over Sef. Hosking quickly discovered Sef was physically unharmed but in a state of great distress. Together, Hosking and Jones decided to radio in to base and ask for back-up. They reported that so far there was one patient at the scene.
The next step was to ascertain whether the area was safe. Jones approached Sef, still concerned. ‘He told me his family had been stabbed, murdered, they were lying inside and they needed help . . . I believe that he did say that it was his mother and his father and his sister upstairs, because he wanted us to go upstairs as well,’ Jones says.
Sef told Jones he had disturbed people inside the house and chased them away, pointing down the street to a T-intersection. Jones resisted Sef’s urgent pleas that he go inside the house and help his family members. He wasn’t willing to stake his life on what this young man, a complete stranger, was telling him.
11 July 2001, 12.02 am
A LIGHT RAIN was falling as Constables Luke Mulligan and David Peters radioed in that they had arrived at 6 Collins Street. The rookie officers were on the night shift at nearby Gladesville police station, so their response had been prompt.
The uniformed officers got out of their marked police car. The ambulance officers, Hosking and Jones, had moved Sef and John Atamian into the double garage that jutted out from the house.
Sef was sitting on the garage floor, crying and shaking. Despite his miserable state, he was quick to notice the arrival of the men in blue. As the police officers walked up the driveway, Sef stood up and approached them, grasping Peters around his waist.
‘You must help me!’ Sef implored the young, clean-cut officer. ‘My mother, father and sister have been killed inside and you must help me!’
Mulligan, meanwhile, only recalled that Sef mentioned finding the bodies of his mother and father, after returning home from a night out.
Sef then described chasing people from his home.
‘I followed them and then I came back in and they [my family] were bleeding everywhere,’ Sef told Mulligan, pointing in the direction of the intersection of Collins Street and Ryrie Street, about 20 metres away.
Returning to the subject of his parents’ injuries, Sef told Mulligan he had tried to start his mum’s and dad’s hearts, mimicking the CPR motion of two hands pumping. Both officers noticed a marked lack of blood on both Sef’s hands and clothing. Sef tried to persuade them to come inside, as he had done with the ambulance officers. ‘They’re bleeding everywhere, help them please!’
Mulligan tried to pin Sef down on how many attackers the police should be casting a net for.
‘One or two, I can’t remember,’ Sef said.
‘Were they in a car?’ Mulligan probed further. This detail was extremely important; it would make all the difference to how far they could have travelled since the emergency call was made at 11.48 pm, and the descriptions to be issued to police.
‘No, no car,’ Sef replied.
Who exactly was inside the house? Mulligan asked Sef.
‘My mother and father, please help me!’
At this point, Mulligan left Sef and spoke to one of the ambulance officers, who said he believed there were three bodies inside. At this point, no emergency personnel had been inside the house. They were relying on the scrambled and contradictory information supplied by an obviously distressed young man.
Peters decided to investigate further. Entering the garage, he walked past the two white vehicles parked inside, Teddy’s four-wheel drive Mitsubishi Pajero and Loiva’s Toyota Celica sedan, and stepped onto the internal access stairs to the study.
Poking his head through the doorway and looking to the right, he saw what Shane Hanley had earlier observed. An Asian man lay on the floor of the foyer with blood around him. Peters didn’t venture in any further, but radioed this information back to his supervisors.
Peters then returned to Sef. The young man confided that he had been studying medicine but had changed his studies to law, a fact he severely regretted now. If only he had a greater knowledge of medicine, he perhaps could have saved his family, he lamented.
Sef then told Peters of a road rage incident that would become the subject of great speculation later on. Sef said that the incident had occurred the evening before, when he’d been driving his family home from dinner. Another vehicle had passed him, the occupants angrily yelling out, ‘Bloody Asians!’ The young man seemed to think that some traffic argy-bargy — not at all uncommon on Sydney’s congested roads — could be relevant to the triple murder of his family.
11 July 2001, 12.04 am
GLADESVILLE STATION’S Senior Sergeant Bob Betts, a cop with 31 years in the police force, arrived sixteen minutes after Sef’s emergency call. He had seen his fair share of murder scenes and bodies in various stages of decomposition, but what he was about to see would strike him particularly hard, plaguing his thoughts for a long time. As with Shane Hanley, it wasn’t just that the victims had been so savagely attacked, it was the fact that this savagery had wiped out almost an entire family. Betts, along with senior paramedic Jeff Gilchrist, who arrived within two minutes of the first ambulance crew, would be the first emergency personnel to properly enter the Gonzales home that night.
When he arrived at the scene, Betts found Sef sitting against the garage wall. At first, Betts didn’t speak much to Sef, except to ascertain if the attackers were still inside the house. From what Sef told him, Betts got the impression that one attacker had run out of the house and that another might still be upstairs.
Gilchrist and Betts entered the house through the internal garage door, Betts leading the way. At the sight of Teddy’s body in the foyer, Betts motioned to Gilchrist to check for signs of life. Then he pulled out his service pistol and kept it drawn. As Betts stood on lookout, Gilchrist devoted his attention to Teddy. But Teddy’s pulse had given up several hours ago. Rigor mortis — a stiffening of the muscles after death — had begun on Teddy’s face, head and neck. His skin was cold.
Betts’s gun remained cocked as he ventured further into the house. He kept one eye out for victims but most of his attention was focused on detecting a noise, a movement, any sign that an attacker was still in the house. His heart was racing at a million miles an hour, but his training kicked in as he went about ‘clearing’ each room he passed through. Aside from the darkened formal lounge–dining room on the ground floor, both floors of the house were pretty well lit, but the pair took a torch with them nevertheless.
In the neat modern kitchen at the back of the ground floor, the window above the sink was open, though the blind was drawn. Betts then ventured to the laundry at the left of the ground floor. As he opened the door, he heard a scuffling noise and his heart jumped to his throat. He almost let loose a shot, but there was only a little white dog, surrounded by new pups, cowering behind the door.
Urging himself to keep calm, he crossed to the darkened formal lounge–dining room, and the light of the torch illuminated the body of Loiva Gonzales. Betts saw a large amount of blood on and around the body.
Gilchrist went to work again. Like Teddy, Loiva’s skin was cold, indicating she had been dead for some time. She also had stiffness in her upper body and neck. Again, no signs of life.
Betts headed up the curving wooden staircase to the upper storey, finding all the lights on except that in the main bathroom. After a brief pause he called down to Gilchrist that he had found a third body. Betts had not been expecting this; he was under the impression it was only Sef’s parents who had been killed. The body was in the bedroom to the left of the landing, 18-year-old Clodine Gonzales’ room. The pitiful sight of the young girl’s body struck at Betts’s heart.
As Gilchrist followed Betts, he noted there was a cordless black telephone lying on the wooden floor of the landing at the top of the stairs, and he stepped around it on his way in to Clodine’s bedroom.
Clodine’s body was curled up in the fetal position, lying sideways on the floor, her arms across her chest. Her chin was tucked downwards, her head pressed against the wall behind her. An arc of blood smeared behind her towards the floor, indicating she must have rested her back against the wall and remained upright at some stage before sliding to the floor. There was a large amount of coagulating blood under her head, and drying blood on the floor nearby. A red jumper lay draped across her body.
Gilchrist performed the formalities — for that was all they were — feeling for the carotid arteries in her neck, those all-important, life-sustaining vessels. No pulse. Clodine, too, had been dead for some time.
Betts noticed the wardrobe doors and drawers in Clodine’s bedroom were open. In fact, they were open in all three of the four upstairs bedrooms he was able to check — Sef’s bedroom, Clodine’s and the spare bedroom at the front of the house. He tried the door to Teddy’s and Loiva’s bedroom, also at the front of the house. It was locked. This was Teddy’s and Loiva’s practice when they were both not home. Behind the door, another dog’s yapping could be heard.
When the pair re-emerged into the garage, Sef was still sitting on the floor, being attended to by ambulance officers. Sef told Gilchrist he had tried to resuscitate his parents. Still sobbing, he asked Betts for some rosary beads, saying he wanted to pray for his mother and father. He did not mention his sister at all.
Sef told Betts his father was a lawyer, and handed him a business card for his father’s practice. He told Betts he had worked that day at his father’s office at Blacktown, trying to fix a computer, and then told Betts about the road rage incident.
Later, about 2 am, Betts had a further conversation with Sef. Until that point, Betts had felt very sorry for the young man, imagining the shock of being a family member stumbling into such a horrific scene. Then Sef asked Betts: ‘Can I tell you something in confidence?’
The first thought to cross Betts’s mind was that he had been wrong about Sef and that the young man was about to confess to killing his family. Briefly, Betts considered warning Sef about the legal ramifications of a confession, before deciding against it.
‘Sef, no worries, yep,’ Betts replied.
Sef then said something so out of context it altered Betts’s opinion of him dramatically. He told Betts he had some pornography, a video, in the dresser drawer of his upstairs bedroom. Possession of such material by a young man was far from unusual, but Sef was obviously embarrassed about its potential discovery by police.
Betts couldn’t believe what he was hearing and was immediately suspicious of Sef. Why would Sef bring that up when he had just found the bodies of his family? ‘If I was in that situation, it wouldn’t even cross my mind,’ Betts thought.
11 July 2001, 12.13 am
SENIOR CONSTABLE PAUL CORNALE had cop written all over him. A fit man who had been part of the elite State Protection Group’s dog squad for five years, he was familiar with the adrenalin rush of chasing suspected criminals over fences and through bushes. His German shepherd sniffer dog, Tyson, arrived with him that night at 6 Collins Street. The dog had a sense of smell 17,000 times stronger than a human’s, and was also capable of detecting scents up to two hours old.
The conditions for tracking that night were optimum. There was virtually no breeze, and far from washing away any scent clinging to the ground, the light rain that had fallen had the capacity to enhance smells on bitumen or grass, drawing them to the surface for detection by the dog’s eager nose. Of course, sniffer dogs are not infallible. They are animals, and all animals are capable of making mistakes.
Dog-squad officers have a set of preformatted questions to ask when they arrive at a crime scene. Cornale asked the ambulance and police officers where they had walked, so the dog would not be confused by their tracks. He also conferred with Sef and asked him in which direction the attackers had escaped. Sef pointed to a 40-kilometre speed-limit sign across the road.
‘How many did you chase?’ Cornale asked.
‘I know I chased one for sure, maybe two or three, I’m not sure, but one, yes,’ Sef replied.
There was no vehicle that they escaped in, Sef told Cornale. So the dog-squad officer began his work. He covered all bases, searching for a good hour. He carefully walked down both directions of the street from the house, jumped fences into adjacent yards, painstakingly checking every possible path of escape. The dog simply did not tell him anything. It could not pick up a trail in any direction. In the end, Cornale was forced to give up.