Sef Gonzales, born on 16 September 1980, is a Filipino Australian man who received a life imprisonment sentence for the murders of his father, Teodoro "Teddy" Gonzales (46), his mother, Mary Loiva Gonzales (43), and his sister, Clodine Gonzales (18), in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, in July 2001. The notoriety surrounding the sale of the house where the crimes occurred prompted the New South Wales government to make it illegal not to disclose information about a property's history.
Sef Gonzales was born in 1980 in Baguio, Benguet, Philippines, to Teddy Gonzales, a lawyer, and his wife Loiva Claridades, who married in 1977. In 1983, Sef's sister Clodine was born. After the 1990 Luzon earthquake destroyed their family's home and business, they emigrated to Australia. Settling in Sydney, New South Wales, Teddy requalified as a lawyer, established a successful immigration law firm, and bought a plot of land in North Ryde.
Although the Gonzales family appeared close-knit, the parents were devout Catholics with high hopes and strict expectations for their children. They particularly wanted their son to excel academically and abandon his musical and singing ambitions, urging him to pursue a career in medicine or law. Sef attended Parramatta Marist High School before starting medical science studies at the University of New South Wales, but he withdrew after two years and enrolled in law at Macquarie University.
Struggling academically and facing the risk of expulsion, Sef Gonzales attempted to conceal his poor performance by falsifying his grades. When his sister revealed this to their parents, they threatened to withdraw certain privileges, including the use of his prized car, a green Ford Festiva. Additionally, Gonzales had disagreements with his mother over a disapproved girlfriend, leading to threats of disinheritance. Police later established these issues, along with Sef's desire to inherit the family's assets, as motives for the murders.
On 10 July 2001, around 4:00 p.m., Sef Gonzales left the family's law firm, where he worked part-time, and went home armed with a baseball bat and two kitchen knives. He entered Clodine's bedroom and attacked her while she was studying, strangling her, hitting her head with the bat multiple times, and then stabbing her with one of the knives. The cause of Clodine's death was a combination of neck compression, blunt force head injuries, and abdominal stab wounds. Gonzales then waited for Loiva to arrive home around 5:30 p.m. He attacked her in the living/dining room with one of the kitchen knives, causing multiple stab wounds and cuts to her face, neck, chest, and abdomen. Her windpipe was completely transected post-mortem.
At approximately 6:00 p.m., Gonzales' maternal aunt visited the house and observed her nephew's and sister's cars in the driveway. However, the house was dark and unusually quiet, even though the family kept six small dogs inside. She decided not to enter via the garage after noticing movement inside. Teddy arrived home at about 6:50 p.m., and upon entering the house, Gonzales attacked him with one of the kitchen knives, inflicting multiple stab wounds to his neck, chest, back, and abdomen. One of the stab wounds penetrated his right lung, another his heart, and another partially severed his spinal cord. Teddy's defensive wounds suggested a struggle.
After the murders, Gonzales disposed of the murder weapons, clothing, and the size 7 running shoes he was wearing. He then showered, changed clothes, and spray-painted offensive graffiti on a wall in the house, attempting to mislead investigators into believing it was a hate crime against Asians. Gonzales later visited a friend's house, and they went to the Sydney central business district, where they dined at Planet Hollywood and visited a video game arcade. After dropping off his friend, Gonzales returned home and called emergency services at 11:48 p.m., falsely claiming to have discovered the bodies. He also ran to his neighbors' house frantically and informed them that his parents had been shot.
Following the murders, Gonzales made television appearances, urging the killers to come forward and expressing his desire for justice, offering a reward of A$100,000. A few days later, he visited the family's accountant to inquire about his inheritance, estimated at A$1.5 million in Australia and ₱1.3 million in The Philippines. As a supposed victim of the crime, he was also eligible for a A$15,000 payout. Gonzales moved to an apartment in Chatswood and placed a deposit on a A$173,000 Lexus, stating he would use his inheritance to pay for it. At the trial, it was claimed that he traded in his parents' cars and pawned his mother's jewelry. He also told relatives that he had a brain tumor and requested A$190,000 from his godmother in the Philippines for alleged surgery, but she refused to give him any money. At the combined family funeral on 20 July, he delivered the eulogy and sang "One Sweet Day," which some attendees found strange.
Based on the initial evidence, the NSW Police investigators initially assumed the murders were part of a robbery attempt. However, the absence of forced entry and the lack of missing valuables, including cash, along with the extended duration of the crimes, led them to suspect Gonzales' involvement. They noticed his emotional detachment and numerous inconsistencies in his story, such as his claims of performing CPR and the absence of evidence supporting the presence of intruders. Further evidence implicating Gonzales included paint matching on his clothes to the graffiti and a shoe box in his room matching the shoes used in the attack. This prompted authorities to search Gonzales' internet records, record his phone calls, and have an undercover officer befriend and surveil him.
In December 2001, the police discredited Gonzales' first alibi that he was in his car in the driveway on the night of the murders before driving to another suburb and meeting his friend. He then fabricated a second alibi, claiming he took a taxi and visited a brothel during the murders, but both the supposed taxi driver and a sex worker discredited this claim. Other false trails included a fabricated email implicating a business rival of Teddy in the murders and staging an attempted burglary in May. A breakthrough occurred when Gonzales' fingerprint was matched to a series of product poisoning letters found on his personal computer, alongside evidence of his research into poisons, the ordering of toxic-plant seeds, and recent unexplained poisoning-like illnesses in his family. As a result, detectives from Strike Force Tawas arrested Gonzales on 13 June 2002.
Gonzales faced three counts of murder and one count of threatening product contamination. He was denied bail and held on remand in Silverwater Correctional Centre. During this time, he was unable to access the family's estate for his defense and sought legal aid for the murder trial that took place in April and May 2004. Prosecuted by Mark Tedeschi, the trial revealed that Gonzales had planned the murders months in advance, initially researching the idea of poisoning his family, leading to an elaborate contamination hoax one week before the killings. The court heard about numerous lies he told to friends, family, and the police regarding his whereabouts during the murders, suggesting a pattern of pathological lying. The motivation behind the murders was his fear that his poor university performance would lead his parents to take away his car and revoke other privileges, wanting to be the sole beneficiary of their property.
On 20 May 2004, Gonzales was found guilty on all four charges and sentenced on 17 September 2004 to three concurrent life sentences without parole for the murders. Justice Bruce James characterized the murders as heinous and found no mitigating factors to lessen their severity. Gonzales sought an appeal in June 2007, granted approval by the Supreme Court due to potentially inadmissible statements taken from him by police on the night of the murders. However, the appeal was dismissed on 27 November 2007 as no miscarriage of justice was found, and his convictions remained.
In March 2021, Gonzales failed in his third attempt to initiate a special inquiry into his convictions for the murders, following unsuccessful applications in 2018 and 2019. The house in North Ryde, built by the Gonzales family in 2000 and put on the market shortly after the murders, remained unsold for three years due to its notoriety. When prospective buyers from Taiwan agreed to purchase the property, they were not informed of the events that occurred there by the realtors, LJ Hooker, learning about it from a newspaper later on. LJ Hooker initially refused to reverse the sale as they had no legal obligation to disclose the information but eventually refunded the buyers' $80,000 deposit due to negative publicity, resulting in a A$21,000 fine by the NSW Office of Fair Trading. Consequently, the NSW government made it illegal not to disclose information that could substantially affect a property's value. In November 2005, the house was eventually sold for A$720,000 (A$80,000 less than the previous price) to a buyer who was informed of its history.
