By now, Strike Force Tawas officers were growing quite concerned at Sef’s increasingly erratic behaviour. They viewed his mention of his grandmother and where she lived in his account of the alleged abduction as a direct threat against Amelita’s safety. The police believed the more Sef felt he had to ‘prove’ his innocence, the more he would step up his charades, such as receiving threatening e-mails and experiencing an attempted break-in to his apartment. Who knew what he would do next, and who would be hurt in the process? As well, Sef had already come through with his second alibi, which police believed they could disprove, adding weight to the evidence already collected against him.
Crunch time had come. So, after eleven months of playing the waiting game, they decided to move in on their target.
At 6 am on 13 June 2002, Tawas detectives held a briefing at Gladesville police station. Then Geoff Leonard, head of Tawas, Mick Sheehy, Paul Auglys, Brian O’Donoghue, Darren Murphy and Mick O’Brien jumped in their vehicles and drove to the Bentleigh apartment building at Chatswood. They met up outside and were greeted by an independent officer from Chatswood police who would, according to protocol, observe proceedings.
At 7.35 am, Sheehy went to the unit block’s intercom and buzzed apartment 96. He and Sef had a brief conversation. Sef buzzed the police into the foyer, and went down to meet them. Sef and the police then took the elevator to the eleventh floor. When they reached the front door of Sef’s apartment, O’Donoghue told Sef that the police had a warrant to seize a computer and various items of his clothing. He handed a copy of the warrant to Sef. Sef read the warrant, then opened the front door for the detectives.
Sef was instructed to stay with Auglys during the search. It was the first time they had met face to face. Sef asked Auglys if he could fetch his wallet. He wanted to make a phone call to his solicitor, Craig Saunders. Sef tried repeatedly to telephone Saunders, but, possibly because of the early hour, was unable to contact him.
The search began in Sef’s bedroom. It lasted almost an hour, before Saunders rang Sef back. The search was halted so that Sef could confer with his solicitor. Then Sef handed Sheehy the phone and Sheehy spoke to Saunders.
At 8.31 am on 13 June 2002, more than eleven months after the murders, came the big moment. Ironically, it was Sheehy, the officer Sef trusted, the one Sef believed would save him, who delivered the blow, neutrally couched in official police-speak.
‘Sef, as you are well aware, you have been a suspect in relation to the murders of your mother, father and sister for some time now,’ Sheehy began.
‘Yes,’ Sef replied.
‘I want to inform you now that you are formally under arrest for the murder of your family, and what I propose to do, following the execution of this search warrant, is to convey you to the Chatswood police station and give you the opportunity to participate in a further interview, if you wish to do so.’
‘Okay,’ Sef said.
‘I want you to understand you are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so. Anything you do say will be recorded and may later be used in evidence. Do you understand that?’
‘Yes, I understand,’ Sef said.
After being informed of his rights by Sheehy, Sef turned to Geoff Leonard, who was coordinating the search of the unit.
‘Mr Leonard,’ Sef began politely, telling the senior cop this might be the last opportunity he had to speak to him: ‘When this chapter in my life is completed, I would like you to put the same effort into the investigation to catch the real killer.’
Leonard gave a noncommittal reply.
Sef got on the phone to his solicitor again, then Sheehy took the phone and spoke with Saunders once more. The search of Sef’s unit resumed, and took a further hour. Sef, at the request of police, took them down to the unit block’s garage. The detectives searched Sef’s car and storage area.
Shortly afterwards, police escorted Sef into a police car and took him to Chatswood police station. It was shortly after 10.15 am.
It took a while for detectives to get in touch with Sef’s barrister, Peter Kintominas.
Kintominas said he would travel to Chatswood police station, but could not be there before 1 pm. So they all awaited his arrival.
FOR SUCH A short statement, the New South Wales Police Media Unit press release caused much excitement in newsrooms across Sydney and hit the airwaves almost immediately. Apparently no journalists had been the wiser as to what was going down except for Harry Potter, who got the hot tip and managed to get footage of detectives at Sef’s apartment building.
The media release said that police had arrested a 21-year-old man in connection with the deaths of three people at North Ryde on 10 July 2001.
The throng gathering at the steel-mesh fence at the rear of Chatswood police station grew steadily once news of the arrest was released. Radio journalists filed frequent updates, with not much more to add each time. Everyone played the waiting game. Print journalists took turns doing cigarette and coffee runs. But photographers and TV cameramen stood rooted to the spot. The image of Sef being led from the station was not to be missed.
Eventually Sef emerged at 1.40 pm, having refused a police interview on legal advice. He was flanked by Mick Sheehy and Paul Auglys, both of whom towered over him. Sef wore his glasses and blue jeans, beige suede shoes and a khaki sweatshirt jacket. Unlike most suspects who are ‘walked’ in front of the media, Sef eschewed the towel or jumper over his head. He walked straight-backed with his head held high as police led him to an unmarked car.
For TV crews, the race was on. They jumped in their vans, cameras at the windows, and followed the police sedan up the road to Hornsby Local Court. It was not a long journey, and the Channel Nine crew chased the car all the way, the camera trained on the small figure in the rear of the vehicle.
Mick Sheehy and Paul Auglys were also in that particular car. Auglys turned to Sef and told him that he knew all about him, that he’d listened to all his phone calls, some 8000 of them, and although Sef did not know him, he knew Sef.
Almost an hour and a half later, Sef Gonzales walked into the Hornsby courtroom. Linda Pham sat quietly at the back of the room. The Gonzales family was represented by Loiva’s brother Joseph. Most of the onlookers were media representatives.
Sef’s barrister, Peter Kintominas, attacked the police case against Sef as ‘tenuous’ and said his client would strenuously fight the charges. ‘It is certainly in his interests to fight and clear his name, because once he is acquitted of these charges he will be able to inherit,’ he told the court.
Bail was not applied for that day, so Sef left the court to spend his first night in custody.
BECAUSE HE HAD been formally charged, Sef Gonzales’ fingerprints could be entered straightaway into the Commonwealth fingerprint comparison database, to be checked against those found during the investigation of still-unsolved crimes. Beforehand, Sef’s fingerprints could only be compared to evidence gathered as part of the Gonzales murder investigations.
The computer silently did its busy work during the night, and the result it came up with for Tawas officers the next day left them gobsmacked.
In the early days of July 2001, a major food and beverage company had received a letter alleging contamination of its products.
Three of your products have been poisoned. By now they are on supermarket shelves. This is what you get for treating employees like garbage. Good luck in finding the infected cans before somebody dies. Go to hell!!!
The company (whose name has been suppressed by the New South Wales Supreme Court) had reported the threat to the New South Wales Police, but the crime had never been solved. However, the letter-writer had been a little too clever, also sending letters to the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service (AQIS), alerting both agencies to the threat and saying the company was unwilling to act on it due to profit considerations.
From the back of the envelope containing the letter sent to the Federal Police, fingerprints had been detected. Those fingerprints were a dead match with Sef Gonzales’.
The poisoning saga now took on a new significance. Computer expert Jason Beckett was asked to go back through data from the two computers seized from the Gonzales’ Collins Street home. Sure enough, on the laptop seized from Sef’s bedroom in July 2001, Beckett found numerous searches for the food and beverage company’s website, the AFP website and the AQIS website conducted in the latter part of June 2001. Even better, Beckett recovered from the laptop copies of the letters sent to the food and beverage company as well as the AFP and AQIS. The letter to the company had been deleted, but was able to be restored.
Sef Gonzales was in even more strife now. In August 2002, in addition to three murder charges he was already facing, he was slapped with a charge of threatening product contamination.
EVEN THOUGH SEF was behind bars, Tawas detectives were not yet done with Linda Pham. They felt she was withholding information relevant to the triple murder. The officers were extremely interested in what Sef had said to Pham about his second alibi — that he had been with the prostitute Latisha during the murders.
Tawas brokered a deal with Pham’s family, who had been forced to fork out for a lawyer to represent their daughter. On 25 June 2002, Pham, her father and her lawyer sat down with Paul Auglys and Darren Murphy at an inner-city police station for an interview. Pham arrived wearing the pink diamond earrings Sef had given her, though Sef had already taken back the ring.
Auglys put it on record that Tawas investigations had led police to believe Linda had ‘actively assisted’ Sef in his attempts to manufacture evidence and coerce witnesses, to divert suspicion from himself. The police had offered an inducement for Pham to be interviewed. The deal was this: anything Pham told police that day would not be used against her in criminal proceedings. There would only be two exceptions: if she made false statements during the interview, or if she later lied in court as a witness, and her statements during the interview contradicted her testimony in court, then the interview material could be used to prove she had lied under oath.
Pham stated that she understood these conditions.
Pham outlined what Sef had told her about his previous relationships, and said that long ago Sef’s first serious relationship — before Kathy Wu — had been with a girl called Daisy. Daisy was allegedly a virgin and Sef had preserved his virginity for the girl that he probably thought he would marry, Pham said. Sef had found out after sleeping with Daisy that she hadn’t been a virgin and he was heartbroken, even though Daisy had blurted out during intercourse that Sef was the best guy she’d ever been with.
‘So he broke up with her and then he went out with this other girl, I think called [Kathy] . . .’ Linda explained.
Pham went on to describe how Kathy had broken Sef’s heart, having sex with him then rejecting him, when he had thought she would be his long-term girlfriend. Sef had gone into a deep depression, she said.
In all seriousness, she repeated the incredible story Sef had told her about how he planned to commit suicide but did not want anyone to know, how he had researched a poison that was not in any medical book and thus was untraceable. She said Sef explained he had ordered the poisonous plant part and extracted the poison using hot water at home. She confirmed the name of the poison Sef said he had created — the same poison Sef had told Sheehy he’d made. She thought Sef had told her he kept it in his bedroom. She described how the poison would collapse his lungs and heart and kill him in three days.
‘But then he had to tell his friends, like he was preparing his friends, saying, telling everyone . . . “I’ve got cancer” and, um, ’cause he was just preparing them for that time and he was ready to do it . . .’
Pham described how Sef had planned to see a prostitute to do something self-destructive and ‘totally against his morals’ before killing himself. Sef had told her he had never been to a brothel before.
‘And he made that, his confession to me . . . he asked me am I okay with that [having seen a prostitute] and I thought, well in his state, I thought, yeah.’
She said Sef had told her how he had sat for days near the Chatswood taxi stand watching taxi drivers, hoping to pick the face of the driver who had driven him to the brothel on the day of the murders, until finally he managed to recognise him. She told how Sef had asked her to hold on to a copy of the statement the cabbie had written and that she had made a photocopy and posted it to the cabbie’s address on Sef’s instructions.
Next, Pham described how she and Sef had gone out to dinner one night and he had ignored her, as he was completely preoccupied with texting someone. Sef did not show her what he was messaging, but later that night he had suddenly dragged her out to see Latisha at the café in Crows Nest. She said she remembered Latisha saying in front of her after the meeting that she recognised Sef as a person she had been with on the night of the murders.
Asked how it was that Sef got Latisha’s phone number in the first place, she said Sef had gone back to the brothel and recognised her by the perfume she was wearing, as well as by her face. He then pretended to be a drug dealer and got her number that way, Linda said.
Pham had gone along with Sef’s version of events unquestioningly. For example, during the meeting at the café with Latisha, she had patiently hung out and killed some time by going to buy a packet of cigarettes, despite the fact it was getting very close to her midnight curfew. She hadn’t wanted to break the curfew, she said. Her parents had the power to enforce it by taking away the brand-new car that had been delivered to her that very day.