Baby-Faced Killer: Looking Back At When a Fil-Aussie Brutally Murdered His Mom, Dad and Sister
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Many of us are used to seeing grisly crime reported on the evening news: bloody shootings and stabbings, premeditated murders, accidental killings. A lot of these cases are perpetrated against victims by suspects they don’t know. But occasionally, we get incidents where both parties involved have a pre-existing relationship. And, in some instances, it’s between family members.
This is the story of a Filipino-Australian man who was convicted of butchering his entire family—his mother, father, and younger sister. It’s one of the most shocking and violent cases ever in Australia, and the fact that it involved a Filipino family made it all the more disturbing and reprehensible.
Murder house
The murders happened on July 10, 2001, at No. 6 Collins Street in North Ryde, a suburb about 20 minutes from central Sydney. It was the home of the Gonzales family: 46-year-old dad Teodoro or Teddy, 43-year-old mom Loiva, and their children: 20-year-old Sef and 18-year-old Clodine. The family had emigrated in the '90s to Australia, where the patriarch then built a thriving career as a lawyer.
Based on police reports, the first victim was Clodine, who was in her room studying when the suspect attacked her with a baseball bat at around 4:30 p.m. Forensics would later report she was hit at least six times in the head and was strangled. The killer then stabbed her in the neck five times and in the stomach area twice.
The second victim—Loiva, the mom—arrived home about an hour later. The killer waited for her by the door and attacked her before she even knew what was happening. She suffered multiple stab wounds all over her chest, abdomen, face, and neck.
By all accounts, the killer remained in the house and waited for his final victim. Teddy got home from his law office around 7 p.m. Like his wife, he was viciously attacked and stabbed multiple times in the same areas—face, neck and abdomen. According to the coroner’s report, one particularly deep cut snapped his spinal cord.
On one wall of the house, police found the words “Fuck Off Asians” spray-painted in blue paint.
So where was the son, Sef, while all of this was happening?
Sef as suspect
Sef's alibi was that he was out with a friend. When police interviewed him later, he said he got to his friend's house at around 8 p.m. Afterwards both he and his friend drove to Sydney, had dinner at Planet Hollywood and then played games at an arcade. After dropping his friend back home at the end of the night, he drove home. That's when he “discovered” the lifeless bodies of his family.
Sef called emergency services at 11:48 p.m., horrified and distraught. Police came almost immediately and saw the blood-soaked crime scene with their own eyes. They quickly launched an investigation into the case. It was initially thought of as a hate crime because of the writing on the wall, but investigators said it was inconsistent with similar cases they’ve encountered in the past. A robbery gone wrong was also considered, but nothing of value was found to be missing, there were no signs of forced entry into the house, and robbers rarely ever hung around that long (the killings had been carried out within a three-hour period).
Although Sef had put on the face of a grieving and despondent son and brother, it was beginning to look like he was the top suspect in the homicides.
Sef played it up in the media in the frenzy following the murders. He begged the killers to come forward and confess and asked law enforcement officials to offer a reward for their capture. In one of the most bizarre moments of the whole sordid ordeal, Sef sang a few lines a capella of the Boyz 2 Men and Mariah Carey song “One Sweet Day” while delivering the eulogy at the funeral.
But things quickly began to unravel for the young man.
Evidence against Sef
For one thing, police discovered that Sef had asked the family accountant about the size of his inheritance just days after the murder. He had also reportedly been planning to make a deposit for a brand-new luxury car and he eventually moved to a new apartment in the major business district of Chatswood. All that plus the fact that there was no other evidence of anybody else being inside the Gonzales house led police to believe that the killer was in front of them all along.
Sef vehemently denied murdering his family. He initially stuck to his alibi of being with his friend the evening of the killings, but the timings didn’t explain what he was doing between the time he left his father’s office (where he worked as a paralegal) at 4 p.m. until he met up with his friend at 8 p.m.
In the beginning, Sef said his friend texted him to say he was going to be late so he (Sef) had stopped briefly at his home but stayed in his car and didn’t go inside. That coincided with the unexpected visit of his Aunt Emily, who had popped into the house and knocked on the front door but left soon after.
According to reports, Sef changed his story when witnesses came forward saying they had seen Sef's car parked in their home's garage. Sef then said he had actually left his car at home and taken a taxi to go to a brothel in Chatswood. Afterwards he said he went back home, picked up his car and then drove to his friend’s house.
At that point, police were finding it hard to believe his story. On June 13, 2002, they arrested Sef and charged him with three counts of murder and one count of threatening product contamination. Apparently, investigators later found out that Sef’s initial plan was to poison his family. They found evidence of Sef researching poison plants in his internet search history and a container in his bedroom that had previously held a possible plant poison.
Motive and opportunity
Throughout the trial, Sef maintained his innocence and argued, through his lawyer, that the evidence against him was circumstantial. But investigators presented an airtight case against the young man: fingerprints that matched a series of product poisoning letters sent anonymously to the Federal Police; his internet search history showing his research into poison plants, and, perhaps the most damning evidence of all—they established a clear motive for the murders. Sef was a lousy student and would likely never become the doctor or lawyer his parents wanted him to be. His parents were threatening to take away his car and other privileges. So Sef killed his family because he wanted the inheritance all to himself.
Two years later, on May 2004, Gonzales was found guilty and sentenced to three life sentences without the possibility of parole. His legal team filed an appeal in 2007 but that was dismissed. In 2018 and 2019, he also filed an application for a special inquiry into the convictions, but those, too, were dismissed. He is now serving his terms as a maximum security inmate at Goulburn Correctional Centre in Goulbourn, New South Wales.
In 2021, Sef made a third attempt for the court to look into his case, but that was, again, denied. According to a report, the court found that there were “no special facts or circumstances that would justify the taking of further action.”
Insisting on his innocence
In an interview with crime reporter Amelia Saw, Sef said he had “convincing evidence” that would prove that he was wrongly convicted. A legal team had been working on his case for over a decade and had been going through the evidence presented at his trial.
Sef said he had two major pieces of evidence that would exonerate him. The first is the spray paint used on the wall at the crime scene. Police said it matched a specimen discovered on Sef’s jumper sleeve. But Sef’s legal team is claiming the paint was planted and that there was no forensic match between the two paints.
“The paint on the jumper sleeve may not have necessarily matched the paint on the crime scene,” Saw says in her report, quoting Sef’s legal team.
The second point is the time of death. Sef and his lawyers assert that the police got it wrong, and that Sef’s father may have been killed as late as 10 p.m. That would mean Sef’s alibi of being with his friend having dinner and having a good time in Sydney would stick.
“If Gonzales is able to prove that he was wrongly convicted, it would be one of the most sensational miscarriages of justice in recent history,” Saw says in her report.
Although there’s no hard timeline, Saw says that Sef is optimistic that he could be out of prison in “six to eight months.”
Saw’s report was uploaded in September 2021. So far, there’s been no word on whether the scales of justice would tip in Sef’s favor.
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