Unmasked: The Gonzales Family Killer by Kara Lawrence

Author:Kara Lawrence [Lawrence, Kara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2016-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 28

Undercover

In September 2001, Tawas detectives decided to take another crack at getting a confession from Sef. Leo, an undercover operative (not his real undercover name), managed to bump into Sef at a Chatswood coffee shop while Mick Sheehy was having one of his regular informal meetings with Sef. Leo casually complimented Sef on his cool threads. In the undercover business, it is called a ‘cold start’.

Leo portrayed himself as a gangster with connections in the police force. He was a man who could solve your problems for you. This was crucial, because police believed Sef would not confess to committing the murders to someone he saw as beneath him in the criminal pecking order. Tawas detectives wanted Sef to engage in a bragging contest with Leo — which he did to a certain degree. He told Leo he was a member of the White Dragons Asian crime gang — a gang police later ascertained did not exist, at least according to their databases.

In October, Leo was the man who got Sef into the exclusive Lexus stand at the Sydney Motor Show. Once a friendship of sorts had been established, Leo informed Sef that an inmate dying in jail would confess to his family’s murders. Sef gave Leo floor plans he had sketched of the Collins Street house, indicating where the bodies had been found and where the graffiti was on the wall. He even wrote ‘Fuck Off Bloody Asians’ on the plan.

None of this meant much to police, as Sef had discovered the bodies and had been shown photos of the racist scrawl, although the wording of the racist scrawl he wrote for Leo was slightly different. But they did compare Sef’s handwriting on the paper to that on the wall.

What was most intriguing was that Sef wrote down his family’s approximate times of death on the plan. He noted that Clodine’s was 3 pm to 5 pm, Loiva’s was 5 pm to 6 pm and Teddy’s was 6 pm to 7 pm. Police had carefully guarded the times of death, knowing it was a detail only the killer would be able to pinpoint.

In the end though, Sef did not take Leo up on the offer of an inmate’s confession. He did, however, make some interesting comments to Leo. On 15 October, he told Leo: ‘People don’t suspect me, it’s just Sef with the little baby face. I have a split personality, I can hide what I do.’ On 5 December, he said that his family had been murdered by contract killers due to politicking in the Philippines: ‘I’m pretty sure it’s all over, I’ve tied my loose ends really well.’ Then, on 12 December: ‘They’ve got nothing on me . . . I’m pretty confident on what they’ve got on me, it’s all circumstantial stuff.’

Yet on 20 December, Sef told Leo categorically that he was not involved in his family’s murders. The decision was then taken to can the undercover operation.

Some investigators, Paul Auglys included, thought Leo should

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