About midnight on July 10, 2001, police were called to the scene of a suburban massacre so gruesome that even detectives hardened to homicide would require counselling in the coming months. The house at 6 Collins Street, North Ryde, a two-storey mansion with its own private chapel, was in darkness. Outside, slumped against the wall of its double garage, was a slight young man. The man was crying. He told police he had come from playing video games and dining at Planet Hollywood in the CBD back to his northern Sydney home and discovered the bodies of his family inside. Sef Gonzales appeared to be a dutiful son caught in an unimaginable horror story. In the foyer lay his father Teddy, dead from stab wounds to his neck, chest, back and abdomen, a kitchen knife having penetrated the 46-year-old lawyer's heart. He had been stabbed through his right lung, his spinal cord was partially severed and Teddy had defensive wounds, suggesting there had been a struggle. In the living room, Sef's mother Mary Loiva, 43, was dead with multiple knife wounds to her face, neck, chest and abdomen. Her windpipe had been completely transected. Upstairs in her bedroom, Sef's sister Clodine was lying face down on the floor beneath the desk where she had been studying. Her throat had been cut. The 18-year-old's head had also been bludgeoned with a baseball bat in at least six blows, and she had been strangled and stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen. The house had been ransacked, furniture overturned and police would find a race hate slogan 'F*** off Asians KKK' daubed in paint on the wall next to Loiva. As the Tuesday night ticked over into Wednesday morning and homicide detectives arrived, they found there was so much blood on the floors that special arrangements had to be made. As the then homicide squad boss Nick Kaldas reveals for the first time in his new book Behind the Badge, at certain crime scenes 'we put down stainless-steel grids raised off the ground for people to walk on, so they don’t walk on the blood and other evidence that is on the floor. 'Normally you'd have just one or two of these grids. At the Gonzales murder scene, the floor was covered in them because there was so much blood.' The Gonzales murders were an immediate sensation, not only because of the level of violence at the scene, but also because the family was incredibly well-liked. Clodine, a Year 12 student at Melbourne's Sienna Catholic College, was studious and quietly popular. She had come home to Sydney that week for her 18th birthday. Her devout Catholic parents were strict but loving. Business owners near the couple's Blacktown law office recalled how they always 'walked hand-in-hand, smiling at each other'. The family, who migrated from the Philippines in 1991, attended mass three mornings a week at St Michaels Catholic Church in Blacktown. The police formed Strike Force Tawas which, publicly at least, said Teddy had likely disturbed the killer when he arrived home early from work in his vanity plated TED11G white Mitsubishi Pajero. Kaldas put Mick Sheehy in charge of the task force. Tawas Detective Inspector Geoff Leonard said they believed Loiva and Clodine were already dead, having been killed some time in the late afternoon, but was guarded about if it was a possible home invasion or robbery gone wrong. Mr Gonzales ran an immigration law business, but police were cautious about race hate as a motive, believing the graffiti to be a ruse. After the murders, Sef Gonzales, a law student, went to stay with relatives. Three days later, the 20-year-old addressed a packed media conference. Immaculate in his suit, his hair neatly gelled, he looked 'diminutive, almost waif-like' as he read out a tribute to his butchered family. Flanked by his uncle Joseph Claridades, Sef began with 'my father, my hero in all matters' and said his 'greatest aim was to one day become at least half the man he was. 'My mother was the heart of the family, a very strong passionate character,' Gonzales said, speaking softly. 'She made it seem that nothing was impossible, no problem insoluble. 'My sister was the life of the family, an expert in smiling. It is difficult to explain the love and ties in my family. 'But if you picture the four corners of the world, in my world we were the four. The three corners of my world are gone. 'My father never got a chance to see a grandchild named after him... my sister who turned 18 on Monday night was just beginning to bloom.' Gonzales asked for the faithful to pray for the family, said thank you, and left the room. A police officer said 'thank you, Sef'. Eleven days after the murders, a burial mass for Teddy, Loiva and Clodine at the Church of the Holy Spirit, three blocks from the murder house, commenced at 10.30am. Sef took to the lectern and opened his eyes to gasp at the sight of his father, mother and sister's coffins, adorned in white, yellow and purple flowers respectively, his sister's white against her parents' dark red caskets. He closed his eyes momentarily before 250 people and then began to sing the Mariah Carey duet with Boyz II Men, One Sweet Day: 'Sorry I never told you, All I wanted to say, And now it's too late to hold you, Cause you've flown away.' Tears flowed, although some mourners found it odd. Among them were six of Clodine's schoolfriends, Sef's maternal grandmother Elie, and his mother's two brothers. In his eulogy, Sef told the crowd his father had saved his life when their hotel collapsed during an earthquake in the Philippines when he was ten, and Teddy had promised his son to tell him when he turned 21 the secret meaning behind his name. Sef said: 'The rhythm of his heartbeat planted life in me... a man like papa does not die. His heart continues to beat in me.' Despite the performance, Kaldas reveals in Behind the Badge, 'Sef was a suspect from the start' because 'there really wasn’t any other plausible explanation' for the murders. Strike Force Tawas was already uncovering some intriguing facts about Sef. His relatively tuneless rendition of One Sweet Day notwithstanding, Sef had been in a band, Definite Vibez, and wanted to be a pop star. He fancied himself as a sex symbol. Photographs emerged of him posing shirtless for a taekwondo competition, and draped himself across the laps of five young, pretty and bored-looking women. Police learned that after graduating from Parramatta Marist High School with poor grades two years earlier, he began studying medical science at the University of New South Wales. He enrolled in law at Macquarie University where he also performed poorly and risked expulsion. The task force detectives also pieced the evidence together from the murders. Traces of the paint from the 'f*** the Asians' graffiti were found on Sef's clothes. A shoe box in his room matched the shoes worn by the attacker. He had given several police interviews and his account of his movements on the day and night of the murders kept changing. Sef suggested to police that his family had been killed at the instigation of a prominent Philippines businessman, whom he named and produced a 'threatening email' from, which proved to be a fake. His aunt Emily Luna told detectives she had called by that evening and seen someone of Sef's height - the same as hers - inside the house even though no one came to the door. Ms Luna and another witness saw Sef's green Ford Festiva in the driveway when he said he wasn't there. Days after the murders, Sef had made inquiries regarding the size of his inheritance from his parents, which was estimated at $1.5million in Australia and $1.3million in the Philippines. He had also told a car salesman he was waiting for his inheritance, and put deposits on a Porsche and a $170,000 Lexus SC430. Gonzales moved to an 11th-floor apartment in Chatswood, installing it with furniture from his parents' house. He sold his parents' cars without his grandmothers' permission and tried to pawn his mother's jewellery. He told people that as a victim of crime he was eligible for a $15,000 payout. He went out clubbing. He talked constantly about his blossoming singing career, claiming he had been offered a record deal after his moving rendition of One Sweet Day at the funeral. He bought new clothes and acquired 15 bottles of aftershave. He claimed he had a brain tumour and asked his godmother in the Philippines for $190,000 for surgery. He emailed his aunt in the Philippines, who managed the Gonzales family affairs there, asking for money and trying to speed up the inheritance process with false death certificates he created on a computer. He claimed he owned a television production company, that he had a black belt in taekwondo and was training for the Olympics, and that he was starting a foundation for street kids. As his stories chopped, changed and fell apart, detectives were zeroing in on the timeline of Sef's movements on the day of the murders. He had left his father's Blacktown office at 4pm, and needed an alibi to fill in the time before he met his friend Sam Dacillo, and also to cover the fact his green car had been seen in the driveway at 6pm. His first alibi was a rambling story about driving around to visit another friend before his 8pm meeting with Mr Dacillo, but its uncorroborated inconsistencies forced Sef to abandon it seven months after the murders. In January 2002, in intercepted phone calls between Sef and a friend, he began constructing a second alibi. This entailed leaving his car in the driveway and taking a taxi to visit a prostitute at a Chatswood brothel. In a written statement to police in April 2002, Gonzales would state that as a Catholic former altar boy and purportedly a virgin, he had been too embarrassed to admit that this was what he had been doing on the night his parents were killed. Sef took steps to pressure both a prostitute and a taxi driver to give false evidence to this effect. Eleven months after the murders, Strike Force Tawas had amassed enough evidence against their first and really only logical suspect in the Gonzales family murders. They knew that it had been Sef Gonzales' desire to live on his family's considerable financial assets without having to work, and that he was a compulsive liar. Gonzales had tried to cover up his failures at university by falsifying his grades. When Clodine had told his parents, they threatened to freeze his allowance, withdraw his use of his prized green Festiva and disinherit him. As his lies about passing exams and wanting to become a lawyer were coming to a head, Sef had tired of pretending to be an obedient and studious son. He was increasingly angry that his parents wanted him to abandon his dream of becoming a singing star. Simmering resentment boiled into rage. Clodine's visit home made the perfect storm for it to explode. This is what investigators deduced: At about 4.30pm on July 10, 2001, Sef Gonzales arrived home and parked in the driveway. He removed a baseball bat from his car, and took two knives from the knife block in the kitchen and climbed the stairs. He entered Clodine's bedroom and assaulted her from behind with the bat, then tried to strangle her and stabbed her repeatedly with the smaller of the two knives. At about 5.30pm, his mother Loiva arrived home and Sef attacked her in the living room. After killing her, he cut through her windpipe after death. At 6pm, Sef's aunt Emily Luna drew up outside the house, seeing his car and her sister's distinctive white Toyota Celica with the vanity plate LOI 11V in the driveway, but the house itself dark and unusually quiet. She noticed movement inside, but decided not to enter via the garage and left soon after. At 6.50pm, Teddy Gonzales came through the front door. He only made it into the foyer when his son attacked him with the larger kitchen knife, inflicting the deep and fatal wounds to his heart and lung which the father fought back against in vain. On June 13, 2002, detectives arrested Gonzales and charged him with three counts of murder and and one count of threatening product contamination. In their almost year-long investigation, the strike force had learnt that Sef had begun researching ways to poison his family in the months before the murders, and had ordered poisonous seeds online. Weeks before the murders, Sef received the seeds and prepared a potion, which he put in a film canister under his bedside table. Realising that if he poisoned his family, he would need some kind of explanation, he wrote letters to the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Quarantine Inspection Service and to a food company. The letter said: '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 finding infected cans before someone dies. Go to hell!!!' On July 1, 2001, Loiva Gonzales was admitted to hospital with abdominal pain and diarrhoea and was diagnosed with colitis. The poison canister was found under Sef's bed, and his fingerprint on the AFP letter, as well as emails on his computer ordering the poisonous seeds. As Sef Gonzales awaited trial at the Metropolitan Remand and Reception prison at Silverwater, he was denied access to his family's finances for his defence. At his trial, which began in April 2004 in the NSW Supreme Court, his legal counsel claimed Colombian drug lords had been after him in an international conspiracy to wipe out his family. On May 4, 2004 he was found guilty of all four charges, and sentenced to three concurrent life sentences without parole. In 2007, the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal rejected his appeal on the ground of a miscarriage of justice. In 2018, 2019 and 2021, he made three failed attempts for a special inquiry into his convictions for the murders. Gonzales has continued to pretend he is innocent, quoting to others his father's supposed favourite saying: 'There's no softer pillow when you sleep at night, as when you have a clear conscience.' Nick Kaldas' squad members attended mandatory regular counselling sessions to address the trauma of attending the crime scene at 6 Collins Drive. The house itself would trigger a change in NSW property laws. Put on the market shortly after the murders, in its infamy the house remained unsold for three years. In October 2004, a Taiwanese couple made an offer on the property which was being marketed by real estate agency LJ Hooker. When the couple learned of the house's bloody history, they asked to withdraw their $80,000 deposit and LJ Hooker refused. The realtor was fined $21,000 by the NSW Office of Fair Trading, and returned the deposit. The NSW government thereafter made it illegal to 'fail to disclose information that could have a substantial impact on the value of a property', such as a murder or death at an address. In November 2005, the house sold for $720,000 - $80,000 less than its previous listing - to a buyer who had been informed of its grisly history.