
“Sorry I never told you all I wanted to say…
“Now it’s too late to hold you ’cause you’ve flown away, so far away
“Never had I imagined living without your smile…”
Standing before three caskets, Sef Gonzales’ voice rang through the church as he sang, eyes closed, the Mariah Carey/Boyz II Men song ‘One Sweet Day’ at his family’s funeral.
His parents — Teddy, 46, and Mary Loiva, 43 — and his younger sister, Clodine, 18, had been brutally murdered at their home in the quiet suburb of North Ryde in Sydney just a week prior on July 10, 2001.
On September 17, 2004, a day after his 24th birthday, Sef was sentenced to three concurrent life sentences without parole for the murders of his family.
This week, a Sydney judge ruled the now-44-year-old had won the right to appeal the sentence.
Listen to The Quicky discuss Sef Gonzales' appeal hopes. Post continues below.
What we know about the case.
It was Sef who found the mutilated bodies of his parents and sister that night.
He returned home from dinner with a friend just before midnight to an eerily quiet and dark house.
He opened the door and found blood everywhere.
His parents’ bodies lay in the living room — his mother’s throat slashed, his father’s spinal cord severed and body covered with frenzied stab marks. His sister was still in her bedroom upstairs, clearly caught unaware as the killer approached from behind, strangling, stabbing and bludgeoning her with a baseball bat.