In the hour between midnight and 1 am on Wednesday, 11 July 2001, Loiva’s younger sister Emily Luna slept. Beside her was her husband, and in another room in their home in Lane Cove Road, North Ryde, slept the apple of her eye, her bright eight-year-old son Gerard.
Being a mother meant everything to Emily; she loved children. A youthful-looking 35, Emily retained some childlike elements herself: a free and contagious giggle and a girlish sense of humour. Like the impeccably fashionable outfits that draped her petite frame, these qualities masked, to the casual observer, her great heart.
Emily, a devout Catholic like Loiva, was extremely sensitive and felt deeply for the suffering of others. Once, she had thought she would make a good child psychologist, and had even trained for it in the Philippines before moving to Australia in 1987. But she decided hearing day after day about other people’s pain — especially that of children — would be too much for her. Instead, Emily took a series of jobs in multi-national corporations, working her way up to become personal assistant to the managing director of a large company based in Sydney’s north. It was a job that utilised her people skills in a different way. It was demanding but rewarding work, and Emily enjoyed it, even if it meant she received phone calls at odd hours.
The previous day, 10 July 2001, Emily had gone to work as usual, then at 6 pm had picked up her son at his day-care centre at North Ryde. From there, it was a five-minute trip to Loiva’s house in Collins Street, and Emily decided to drop in. She was Clodine’s godmother, her ninang, and Clodine was up on a holiday break from Melbourne, where she went to school. She lived there with Emily’s younger sister, Liza Carroll, and Liza’s husband. Clodine had arrived in Sydney in the last week of June, and was due to fly back to Melbourne on Thursday, 12 July.
Emily adored her brother-in-law Teddy, but her special bond was with Loiva and Clodine. She and Loiva were best friends, and she called Loiva her ‘twin’. Loiva, eight years older, had been her protective mother hen in the days of growing up in a household of six children. Loiva would call her at home almost every morning at 8.30 am as Emily applied her make-up and dressed for work, just to chat. It had become a ritual, like their shopping trips together, and Emily’s visits to Loiva’s house for lunch on a Saturday, after they both attended the Holy Spirit Church at North Ryde, with their families. There was next to nothing that was taboo in their conversations, including sensitive family and health problems.
However, Emily and Loiva were opposites in many regards, particularly in mannerisms. While Emily admired her sister’s tireless grace, she became a touch impatient whenever they walked anywhere, their arms linked. Loiva would take dainty, decorous steps, while Emily would just want to get to their destination as quickly as possible. Loiva would laugh delicately and speak softly, while Emily quite frankly didn’t really care if her chuckle or her voice were too loud.
In Clodine, Emily had a soulmate. Clodine, a bit of a tomboy and vivacious, was more like a younger female friend than a niece. Clodine also got along famously with Emily’s son, and during their frequent trips to the beach in summer, Clodine and Gerard would chat animatedly the whole way in the back seat, bringing a smile to Emily’s face as she listened.
Clodine was so unlike her brother Sef, who was quiet, reserved and very smart. That was not to say Emily and Sef did not have a good relationship. Sef was family, her own blood, and she loved him deeply and unconditionally. She was always there to encourage him if he had a problem. Nevertheless, Sef remained a bit of an enigma to her.
Emily was two weeks out of hospital, having had abdominal surgery, and was still sore when she arrived at 6 Collins Street just after 6 pm on 10 July. It was dark and drizzling very lightly as she pulled up outside the imposing two-storey brick home. She saw a light on in the ground floor inside, and a quick movement, travelling right to left, behind the frosted glass panel to the left of the front door. It caught her eye as she parked at the curb. Emily decided she didn’t need an umbrella as she and Gerard walked up the driveway to the front door. As they walked, Emily noticed Sef’s green Ford Festiva parked in the carport. Oh good, Sef is home, she thought.
As they reached the door, Emily pressed the doorbell, as Gerard stood beside her. Once, no answer. Again and again, no answer. She was puzzled by the lack of response. Behind the left pane of frosted glass, Emily saw a figure, standing a bit higher than her 160 centimetres (five feet three inches) on the slightly elevated foyer floor inside. Sef was the same height as Emily. Putting a hand up to each side of her face, she pressed against the glass for a better look.
‘I think that’s a man,’ she told her son.
‘Mum, it’s just a coatstand,’ Gerard said. That was all, but in that instant, she dismissed the figure from her mind.
Emily decided to head left past the carport, and through the side gate to a rear sliding door at the back of the house, to see if anyone was home. From the front door, she walked past the closed double garage door and reached the carport, stopping at the rear of Sef’s car. There was no light on inside the car, and she detected no movement.
‘Maybe I’ll just call them when I get home.’ The thought came, unbidden, into her mind, but it was a powerful one. She turned back to her son, who was waiting by the front passenger door of her car. Then Emily left Collins Street with Gerard. She had no inkling that two bodies already lay inside the silent house, or of the danger she, too, could have faced if she had investigated further. Therefore, it would be at least another six hours before her whole world, her safe, secure life, crumbled.
EMILY HAD TRIED calling the Gonzales home that night at 9.30 pm but got a busy signal. She tried a few more times before deciding someone was on the Internet. Before going to bed at 11 pm, she called Clodine’s mobile telephone, but it was switched off.
Emily was awoken by a phone call from Cecile Ferrer.
‘There’s been a shooting in North Ryde. Clodine has been taken to hospital,’ Cecile told Emily.
Immediately, Emily was besieged by shooting pains cramping her abdomen, from the recent operation. Her thoughts whirled. Cecile told Emily that Sef needed a change of clothes brought to Collins Street. Cecile was scared; she didn’t want to go. Could Emily do it instead?
Emily asked her husband to do it. She, too, could not face going there. Her husband gathered together some of his own clothes and left for the quick drive to 6 Collins Street, which by that stage was sealed off by blue-and-white checked police tape. It seemed, to Emily, just a matter of minutes before he was back.
Gently, he broke the news to his wife. Teddy and Loiva were both dead, and Clodine was in hospital, seriously wounded.
Emily became hysterical. With all her force, she pounded her fists against her husband’s chest. ‘Why? Why? Why?’ she screamed. It was all she was capable of saying, of even thinking.
‘Calm down, Emily, calm down. Your blood pressure!’ Her husband was concerned for her. She suffered from high blood pressure, like her sister Loiva.
The Lunas wanted to inform other family members, before they heard about the tragedy on the news. It presented some difficulties, though. Emily’s brother Joseph was reached at his North Sydney home, and Edmund at his Gold Coast home in Queensland. But Amelita, Sef’s maternal grandmother, was staying with Emily’s younger sister, Liza Carroll, in Melbourne. Frustrating things, answering machines, and that was all they got as they dialled Liza’s number. Such devastating news could not be left on an answering machine. Victorian police would be sent to Liza’s house to inform them in person early that morning. The family members on Teddy’s side were all in the Philippines.
Police wanted the Gonzales’ relatives to come to Gladesville police station to comfort Sef. Emily told Joseph over the phone that she was incapable of driving in her state. Could Joseph come and pick her up?
As Joseph drove Emily to Gladesville, she clung to a slim hope. She told her older brother she hoped Clodine would survive. Clodine was the only witness who could explain what had happened.
Emily didn’t know then that Clodine was not in hospital. She was never taken there. Emily’s eighteen-year-old niece was dead, just like the girl’s mother and father. How the news became so garbled could only be explained by the confusion of that night.
In her distress, it didn’t register with Emily that she had become probably the most important witness in the case. But it would hit her with full force as soon as she saw her nephew at Gladesville about 2 am on 11 July 2001.
NEVER BEFORE HAD Emily known white-hot rage. The heat started at the top of her head, burned her face and travelled down through her body like molten lava. She felt it as soon as she laid eyes on Sef.
Sef was sitting in a room at the police station, hunched over, clutching a blanket around his shoulders. Cecile and her husband were already there comforting him, and Joseph had walked in before Emily. Soon to arrive was a twenty-year-old man by the name of Sam Dacillo, one of Sef’s closest friends, whose parents were friends of Teddy and Loiva. Sam and Sef had gone out to dinner only a few hours earlier. Sam would be accompanied to the station by his father, Sammy Dacillo.
Cecile got up from the seat next to Sef, making a space so Emily could sit down. Emily didn’t want to, instantly recoiling at the thought, but forced herself. Sef was making crying noises, and they immediately struck Emily as false. Emily leaned forward to see his face. As she’d suspected, there were no tears. But in the hairline above his forehead, she noticed a single spot of blood. She didn’t comment on it to the police until later, and they told her they hadn’t seen it.
When she sat down next to her nephew Emily didn’t beat around the bush. Because of what she had seen at 6 Collins Street the previous night, she felt that Sef had something to do with the murders. The first thing that flew out of her mouth was directed squarely at Sef, and it went over like a tonne of bricks with those assembled in the room. ‘I was at the house at six o’clock. Why didn’t you answer the door?’
‘Emily!’ Her brother Joseph, who was trying to stay level-headed and neutral, admonished her for her insensitivity towards their nephew. He was interrupted by the sudden presence of police, who divided everyone up to be interviewed separately by detectives.
The question Emily had posed was the only one she wanted — needed — to be answered satisfactorily, to allay her suspicions. She would not have long to wait to hear Sef’s explanation.