A peaceful suburb is rocked by a brutal triple murder of a mother and her
two kids.
The oldest son and his father are the only family members left.
But are they survivors or suspects?
Could this seemingly perfect family have a dark and deadly
secret lurking beneath the surface?
Welcome to True Crime Recaps.
I'm Chris.
Today we're going to Albion Park Rail, a sweet little suburb
south of Sydney, Australia.
It's 8:30 a.m.
on March 13th, 1996.
Screams shatter the quiet Wednesday morning.
18 year old Matthew De Gruchy, he runs to a neighbor's
house yelling, There's something wrong with Mum and Sarah.
His mom, Jennifer, got the worst of it.
She was still wearing her pajamas
with the blankets tucked cozily around her shoulders.
That much they could see right away.
There was a surprising lack of blood on the walls for such a violent death.
Someone put a pillow over her face, then smashed her head with something
heavy and hard. Maybe a sledgehammer.
But most likely it was a tire iron based on the bruising patterns.
And the wheel brace was missing from Jennifer's trunk.
The crushing blows were so violent it forced her brain
out of her skull, leaving her so disfigured,
blood match samples were needed to say it was definitely Jennifer's body.
13 year old Sara was also attacked in bed. Just like mom,
the blood evidence indicated
a pillow was held over her face while blows rained down.
There was a Walkman found in bed next to her.
Now, if she had headphones on listening to music,
she wouldn't have heard what happened to her mother in the next room.
Adrian, 15, was fixing a chair in the garage
when he was surprised with a heavy blow to the back of his head.
He was bludgeoned 21 times, sending sprays of blood
to the ceiling and scattering his teeth all over the floor.
Then his body was splashed with gasoline.
The pathologist put the family's time of death between 8 p.m.
and 1 a.m.
Now what kind of a person could do something so heinous?
And why? The only two surviving family members,
Matthew and his father, Wayne, were immediate suspects.
But they both seemed to have ironclad alibis.
Matthew spent the night at his girlfriend Alyssa's house.
Wayne was an hour and a half away in Sydney.
Neither of them seemed to have any reason to turn on their own flesh and blood.
The De Gruchys were a nice family, not the type
to be on police radar for domestic violence or teenage rebellions.
They were just your typical suburban family of five.
There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the madness.
None of the victims
were sexually assaulted and nothing was taken from the house.
Well, nothing valuable anyway.
A few things were gone, but that's what made the case even stranger.
Someone cut out three pieces of carpet from the bedroom.
A big one near the bed where Jennifer's body was found.
A smaller one near the end of the bed, and another small piece near the door.
What do you make of that?
If it was a robbery gone bad,
the thieves either had a carpet fetish or they weren't even trying.
The VCR disappeared, but that was the only thing that had some value.
They took a few calculators and video games from the kids' rooms,
but nothing else like the stereo, jewelry and cash was touched.
This robbery was staged.
As police searched for answers, they uncovered more clues.
Someone cleaned blood off the tile floor in the hallway.
Another small drop was found on the wall behind Jennifer's bed.
Swabs were taken from the faint traces of blood left behind
and fingerprints were found on the open gas can near Adrian's body.
DNA and fingerprints matched one person and one person only.
18 year old Matthew De Gruchy.
Could there be an innocent explanation?
Slowly but surely, a timeline came together.
At 8 p.m., Matthew's girlfriend Alissa called the De Gruchys.
Mattew sounded like he always did.
He told her he'd come over soon.
At 9 p.m., Jennifer's brother called the house and spoke with her,
and she didn't sound distressed or upset in any way.
At 10 p.m., Alyssa called Matthew back.
He hadn't shown up at her house yet,
but no one answered the phone at the De Gruchys.
At 11 p.m., Matthew arrived at Alyssa's.
He wasn't wounded, not that she noticed anyway.
He certainly didn't look like a person who just murdered three family members,
Alyssa told police
Matthew had an excuse for being late.
And they couldn't
believe their ears when she told them what Matthew said.
Jennifer was afraid to be left alone.
She had gotten some crank calls, threatening her and the kids.
When Matthew got home the next morning,
his mother, brother and sister were dead.
Why didn't Matthew tell police about the threatening calls when he was questioned?
Four days after his family was slaughtered,
police brought the teenager back in
for questioning, but they already had most of the answers.
It all came back to the family car.
Matthew didn't have a car of his own, so he borrowed his mother's a lot.
They fought a lot about the number of miles he was putting on it.
And in the end, his parents told him he couldn't drive her car anymore.
He had to use his dad's instead.
But on March 12, 1996, Matthew's dad was in Sydney for the night with the car,
and if he wanted to see Alyssa, he needed his mom's car.
He took it by force.
Remember the cut up carpet in his mother's room?
Fibers from the bedroom carpet were found in her car.
Matthew's blood was on it.
Killing your mother, your sister and your brother
just so you can use the family car?
That's a crazy motive.
Two months later, police got the final clue they needed to solve the case.
A duffle bag, the De Gruchy's VCR and Jennifer's purse with her I.D.
were in the water around an old dam near Alyssa's house.
Inside the duffle were the missing pieces from the De Gruchy carpet
and a handwritten note
that was torn up and sealed in a plastic bag with some Band-Aids.
Chillingly, it appeared to be a terrifying
to do list with items like hit arm with pole, cut somewhere with knife,
have shower, and the names Adrian, Mum and Sarah.
Matthew wrote it, only he knows why he saved it.
In the fall of 1998, a jury sent Matthew to prison.
He was released in 2021.
Today, he lives with his father in Australia.
Will Matthew snap again? What do you think?
And before we say goodbye,
I just want to give a quick thanks to Tubi TV's forensic investigators
for providing some information used to put this recap together.
And that's your recap.
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