Chapter 42

Moving on

Within two months of his sentencing in September 2004, Sef began casting about for a new legal team to handle his appeal. At the time, he was still at Silverwater’s MRRC, from which he would be transferred to maximum-security Goulburn jail — known for housing ‘lifers’ — in southern New South Wales.

Sef rang solicitor Dennis Miralis and asked him to visit Silverwater to discuss Sef’s case. Miralis works for the respected law firm Nyman Gibson Stewart, which specialises in defending those accused of serious organised crime or violent crime. ‘He picked me because he had heard my name from other inmates in jail,’ Miralis says.

Miralis had previously acted in a triple murder case, albeit briefly. He represented former Adelaide soccer star Adrian Michelon, who was accused of bludgeoning his wife Indis and two sons, Darian, thirteen, and Ramon, ten, with a hammer in their Chifley home in February 2002. Michelon then stabbed and slashed himself and set fire to the family home before being rescued. He committed suicide in Long Bay jail the following month.

From the beginning, there was one particular man who topped Moralis’s wish list of barristers to act for Sef on appeal. Paul Byrne, SC, is one of the most eminent appellate barristers in criminal work in Australia. Fortunately for Sef, Byrne had already taken a keen intellectual interest in the Gonzales case, having followed it closely in the media and read the sentencing judgment of Justice Bruce James of his own volition. Byrne agreed to take on the case.

But first, the issue of whether Sef would get Legal Aid for his appeal needed to be addressed. In deciding this, the Legal Aid Commission had to determine whether there was merit in Sef’s appeal against his conviction and sentence — in other words, whether Sef had any chance on appeal or whether he had no chance and would just be wasting taxpayers’ money. Sef was never going to appeal just his sentence; he still strongly maintained his innocence. Legal Aid referred the case to a public defender, Robert Hulme, SC, to review and report on whether there was merit.

Hulme immersed himself in the case and was nearing completion when he was appointed as a District Court judge. The case was then handed to another public defender, Chris Craigie, SC, who had to start all over again so he could get his mind around the complexities. What he eventually reported back to Legal Aid is unknown — except that it caused the Legal Aid Commission to reject public funding for Sef’s appeal.

Time dragged on until, as of mid-February 2006, one year and nine months after his conviction, Sef had still not lodged his grounds for appeal. But because of the unforeseen delays in assessing his case, the Court of Criminal Appeal could not refuse to grant Sef extension after extension for lodging his grounds.

Byrne completed his own review of whether Sef’s conviction and sentence were appellable. As a result, all indications are that Sef will appeal against both, and that he may well be granted Legal Aid after all. What the grounds will be are yet to be seen.

Like Miralis, it will not be Byrne’s first time in acting for a triple family murderer, but Byrne had acted on appeal. In 2000, before the Court of Crimnal Appeal, he represented a killer whose case bore some startling parallels to Sef’s. In March 1996, Matthew Wayne De Gruchy murdered his mother and two siblings at his parents’ home in Albion Park Rail, near Wollongong, south of Sydney. De Gruchy was eighteen at the time. He bludgeoned his mother Jennifer, his fifteen-year-old brother Adrian and his thirteen-year-old sister Sarah. His father had been staying in Sydney overnight for work. De Gruchy left the bodies inside the home and went to stay the night at his girlfriend’s place. He returned the next morning, ‘discovered’ the bodies and, sobbing, went to the home of a neighbour directly across the street to tell him something was wrong with his mother and sister.

Dr Allan Cala, who performed the Gonzales autopsies, also performed the autopsies on the De Gruchy family members. He found the fatal injuries could have been caused by the wheel brace or jack handle that had been missing from Jennifer De Gruchy’s hatchback, which her killer son had been allowed to drive. Also, De Gruchy tried to cover his tracks by telling others his mother had received prank phone calls, with the caller saying that three family members would die. He also staged evidence to point to an intruder, disposing of several household items to point to robbery as a motive. Like Sef, De Gruchy had no prior criminal record, and pleaded not guilty, thereby showing no remorse. It is interesting to note that, largely due to his youth and prospects for rehabilitation, De Gruchy did not get life. He was sentenced to a maximum 28-year jail term, with a minimum non-parole period of 21 years.

The De Gruchy case, like the Gonzales case, was entirely circumstantial — that is, no-one had witnessed the killings take place. However, of course no two cases are the same, and there were some marked differences between the De Gruchy and Gonzales murders. For one, De Gruchy had been stupid enough write a note, obviously in his own handwriting and later recovered by police, that included the names of his victims. It was clearly a list relating to the murders and instructions of what to do afterwards, such as ‘have shower’ and ‘hit arm with pole’. De Gruchy’s appeals against his convictions to the Court of Criminal Appeal, then to the High Court of Australia, were both rejected.

FROM LATE 2004, Sef’s appeal faded into insignificance in the public eye, compared with the controversy of the sale of the Gonzales house.

In mid-2004, Amelita, as executrix of the estate, put the house on the market through LJ Hooker North Ryde. It was always going to be difficult job selling the house, due to what had taken place there. After all she had gone through, Amelita would be brought into a windstorm of publicity surrounding its sale. And she would not even financially benefit from the sale, with the proceeds to go to Teddy’s parents in the Philippines.

According to Emily, LJ Hooker requested that the house be emptied and cleaned out before buyers moved in. Emily let a family friend, Vicky Bugayong, into the house and showed her what needed to be done. All the family’s remaining belongings were to be gathered and assembled in the garage for collection by a charity, St Vincent de Paul. Vicky and one of her girlfriends would then clean the house.

It was not a pleasant task, no doubt. Emily says that while Vicky’s friend was cleaning the upstairs area, she became aware that a tap was running in the en suite bathroom of the master bedroom. Vicky’s friend was sure that the taps had been turned off in there. Vicky herself was not in there; she was cleaning the common bathroom on the other side of the upper floor. Vicky’s friend dropped to her knees and began to pray to Loiva, whom she had known, begging that Loiva not scare her.

Whether her imagination was in overdrive or not, this is a good indication of the challenge faced by the real estate agency tasked with selling the place. The mind can sometimes conjure up things far more terrifying than reality, if you are superstitious and believe in things that go bump in the night. But there would, of course, be other buyers who would not be put off. In fact, if they felt they could comfortably live in the house, they could score a bargain.

Ellen Lin and her husband Derek Kwok, of Carlingford, a suburb about 6 kilometres from North Ryde, definitely fell into the former category. They got more than they bargained for when they made an offer on behalf of Ms Lin’s parents, who agreed to buy the home for Mr Kwok and Ms Lin to live in. Ms Lin’s parents handed over an $80,000 deposit for the house, as part of a total $800,000 sale price. Ms Lin and Mr Kwok claimed that they were oblivious to the fact the murders had occurred there, and that LJ Hooker owner Peter Hinton and his daughter Ereca Hinton, a sales representative at the agency, did nothing to enlighten them. They only became aware of it after handing over the deposit, when a local newspaper ran a story about the house and the murders.

Ellen Lin and her husband had planned to raise their three-year-old son at 6 Collins Street. But their strong Buddhist beliefs and superstitions meant living in a house where murder had occurred was impossible.

The Hintons were eventually fined $20,900 by the New South Wales Commissioner of Fair Trading for failing to disclose the history of the home to the couple. The Hintons responded by appealing the decision in the Administrative Decisions Tribunal. The Tribunal, at the time of writing, has yet to make a ruling. The Gonzales estate kept the $80,000 deposit, but the LJ Hooker organisation made a special payment of $80,000 to Lin and Kwok to recoup their losses, following the bad publicity.

Peter Hinton told the Tribunal in February 2006 that he felt it was adequate that he had instructed his staff to market the home as a deceased estate, and told buyers it had been vacant for three years and that the Filipino owners no longer had need of it. ‘What I intended to convey was that somebody had died in the property and give them [potential buyers] an opportunity to ask questions,’ Mr Hinton said.

He also argued that publicity of the murders and of the house’s whereabouts was so widespread that it was hard to believe anyone was unaware of the home’s history. ‘As far as I’m concerned there wouldn’t have been a human being within a 5-kilometre radius of that property that wouldn’t know about the murders at 6 Collins Street,’ he said.

Hinton described how the property had become the biggest ‘tourist attraction’ in town, besides Sydney Harbour.

The fascination with the morbid is an unfortunate fact of human nature. The same curiosity that urges rubber-necked motorists to slow down when passing a car accident, to better view the scene, made many people drive past 6 Collins Street to get a first-hand look at the site of the killings.

Those who did so must have been disappointed. All they would have seen was two storeys of bricks and mortar standing empty, the blinds drawn, and a garden that was going to seed.

Fortunately, according to Shane Hanley, who still lives in Collins Street, the traffic flow in his little side street has begun to abate since the new owners of number 6, an Anglo-Saxon couple and their teenage son, moved into the home in time for Christmas 2005. The family bought the home via private treaty in late 2005 for $720,000, after it failed to sell at an auction earlier that year. The highest bid had been $715,000.

The family is understandably reluctant to talk about the purchase. They just want to be left alone to get on with their lives. Obviously, to them, 6 Collins Street is not a ‘house of horrors’ as it is labelled in the media, but their home. The neat lawn shows their pride in it. But the closed blinds there are still a sign that the flow of sightseers has not dropped off entirely.

Emily is grateful that the new owners did not wish to buy for the wrong reasons, like a British man, Craig Gill, who in October 2004 told any media outlet who would listen that he wanted to buy it and turn it into a tourist attraction. The insult of that to the memories of Teddy, Loiva and Clodine was, for the Claridades family, almost too much to be borne.

‘At least it’s a family that’s moved in there. I’m happy for that,’ Emily says.

Shane Hanley agrees, saying the fact the new owners are regretful about what happened there, but do not let it unduly perturb them, is a good sign that the street may move on and heal.

Shane’s mother has met the new neighbours. ‘They’re quite nice, from what I gather,’ says Shane. But he has no plans to drop in and say hello, given his role in the Gonzales murder case. One reason is consideration for the new owners. He does not wish to burden them with any details of what he saw inside their house on the night of the murders.

‘I don’t want to be the cloud that rained on their parade,’ Shane says.

But mostly, it is because the memories are still too fresh. Time is slowly relegating them to the back of his mind, and Shane doesn’t want his memory jogged. Even now, on the odd occasion, the images he saw inside 6 Collins Street on that cloudy winter night can blindside him with terrible vividness.

‘I’m not in any great hurry to go in there,’ he says.