Blood all over the walls and children missing: Terrifying inside story of rugby great’s home invasion
It was the moment all hell broke loose inside rugby great Toutai Kefu and wife Rachel’s Brisbane home, when armed intruders invaded, slashing the family with knives. Now they’ve revealed what really happened inside.
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Rachel Kefu bolts out into the night, blood dripping from her slashed forearm, screaming for her kids.
She knows where her eldest, Joshua, 21, is. He’s inside the house, his back pressed up against a wall, trying to stem the bleeding from four separate, jagged hacks of a cane knife to his back.
She knows her husband, the solid, Tongan-born former Wallaby great, Toutai Kefu, is inside, too, pressing at his gut as he bleeds heavily from stab wounds to his stomach and side.
But their other four children? She has no idea.
“I didn’t know where Isaac (13) and Lucia (15) were,” says Rachel, 46. “At all. And you see, I didn’t know if there were people still upstairs.”
Her blood ran cold. What if more intruders were up there with her youngest kids?
Just minutes before, around 3.10am on August 16 last year, Rachel had left her upstairs bedroom in the Kefu home at Coorparoo, in Brisbane’s inner south, to check on a banging noise downstairs.
Half asleep, she thought it might be a possum. It had happened before: the kids still gave her stick for yelling, “I’m calling the police” down the stairs one night, only to discover it was a hapless possum.
Or maybe her daughter Olivia, 20, was baking a cake for her sister, Madison, who was turning 18 that day. “That’s the sort of thing Livvy would do,” Rachel says.
Instead, Rachel walked straight into the path of two young strangers, boys allegedly armed with a cane knife and pocket knife.
“Shut up, shut up, or we’ll kill you,” they said. The next five or so minutes were terrifying, surreal, absurd, life-threatening. But she’d survived and Toutai, 47, and Josh were wounded but alive.
But where the hell were her other kids?
“Then I heard Madi screaming in the street,” says Rachel.
She rushes to her.
Madi is bleeding, too, slashed on the hand as she escaped out the front door. By now, much of the street is awake to the mayhem and Rachel leaves Madi with her friend and neighbour, Jo Cannon.
Three to go. Rachel runs back towards the outside steps, past Jo’s husband Ben, who is sitting on one of the intruders. “I’m running up the stairs, screaming, ‘Where is everyone?’. Then Isaac pokes his head up.”
He’s above her, outside, on the roof.
The plucky kid heard the chaos downstairs, woke Josh, then went into his parent’s bedroom, opened the window and climbed out onto a lower roof level.
Rachel scans the scene above. There’s Lucia, at the window of her bedroom, waving.
“So then I’m like, ‘Where’s Livvy, where’s Livvy?’” says Rachel.
“I’m freaking.”
In her jangled mind, she fixates on the getaway car she’d seen take off down Buena Vista Ave, do a U-turn and hurtle back past the house.
“I thought they had Livvy,” she says.
“So I’m screaming for Livvy. And then she’s come out of a bush.” Olivia is on the phone to the police.
Oh, the relief!
Now Rachel runs back into the house to check on Josh and Toutai. “Josh says,
‘Get some towels, Mum, compress me’.
So, I compressed him. And that’s when he said to me, ‘Mum, get something on your arm’.” Finally, Rachel remembers her own bleeding wound.
Her left forearm has been cut to the bone by the cane knife. She grabs a towel, wraps it around her arm, then runs to Toutai.
He’s slumped on the white leather couch in the living room, bleeding profusely.
Rachel tries to get him to use a towel for compression but there’s no way the big man is removing his hand. “Because,” says Rachel, “he had his hand basically in his own stomach.”
A SCREAM IN THE NIGHT
One second, he’s asleep. The next, Toutai is hurling himself over the internal upstairs balcony like some kind of swashbuckling Mills and Boon hero, the scream from his wife jolting him awake and into action.
It’s a 5m drop onto a concrete floor.
There are stairs.
“Well,” grins Toutai, “I wanted to get downstairs really quick.”
He rolls a bit in the entranceway.
No one there.
He walks into the hallway.
There’s Rachel, confronted by two skinny kids with knives. She’s cornered at the bathroom door along the hallway and can’t see Toutai.
But she does see one boy’s face “suddenly change”.
There was Toutai, a man who put trepidation into the eyes of more than a few rugby union players as he barrelled towards them, all 1.9m and 110-plus kilograms of him.
This was the man who weaved and barged his way over the try line at the 79th minute of the 2001 Bledisloe Cup, snatching victory from New Zealand and handing his skipper, John Eales, a fairytale ending to his Test career.
He’s a bloke from the golden age of Australian rugby, the man who ran out for the Wallabies 60 times and was once called “the most damaging ball carrier in Australia’s pack and widely rated the best No.8 in the world”.
And now, here he is, puffed up and angry.
It’s a bit of a joke in the Kefu household, says Rachel, about what darted through the intruders’ minds when they saw Toutai.
“They would have thought they were laughing; they’ve got the little white woman. But next minute, this one turns up.”
Rachel can’t be sure how long she was down there, solo, with them. Maybe a minute, three. “It felt like eternity,” she says.
She’d been walking along the hallway when they came out into it from the kitchen. “Who the f--k are you?” she said. “What are you doing in my house?
“And they just pulled out their knives and they’re like, ‘Give us the keys, give us the keys’. They’re kind of forcing me to walk backwards, so I’m retreating and I end up around the corner where the bathroom is, up against a wall because I couldn’t go any further.”
One of them puts a knife on her arm. “They were really close,” she says.
They keep asking for car keys. She tells them she doesn’t have them.
“And then I started screaming,” says Rachel. “And they’re like, ‘Shut up, shut up, or we’ll kill you’.” She screamed again.
That’s when Toutai comes flying in.
“They saw me,” says Toutai, “and they kind of backed off a bit and I jumped in front of Rach and they were kind of lunging, maybe trying to scare me. We kind of retreated back together, me and Rach. I said, ‘There’s the front door, boys. Go! I won’t say anything. You go’.”
Rachel recalls Toutai telling them not to hurt her. She also remembers her husband’s voice; a deeper, more fearsome voice than she’s ever heard come out of Toutai in all the 28 years she’s known him.
By now, they’re all back near the kitchen, the yelling argy-bargy about keys and getting the hell out of there continuing.
Rachel dashes to get a knife. She hands it to Toutai.
He takes it. Then shakes his head. “Take it back, I can’t,” he says. She grabs it and places it on the kitchen bench.
Why did he reject the knife? “They were the same size as my young kids,” says Toutai. “I couldn’t stab them.”
Instead, he and Rachel tell them the car keys are in the bowl on the bench. Just take them and go.
Rachel, though, realises the knife is still sitting on the bench, unguarded.
She reaches for it. And that’s, allegedly, when the cane knife comes slicing down on her left forearm.
All hell breaks loose. Toutai grabs a bar stool and starts lunging at the duo. Rachel screams for Josh.
It’s in this part of the melee that Toutai is allegedly stabbed.
The boys are slight and quick and as Toutai fends off one with the stool, the other, says Rachel, “would come around the side and get him with the knife”.
“Until Josh came down,” she says. “Then it was a one-on-one battle.”
Says Toutai: “I was just so proud of him. He comes downstairs and straight into it.”
It’s a frenzied scene.
Josh jumps onto one of the intruders.
He tries to wrestle the cane knife from him but gets struck in the back. Toutai is wrestling with his guy.
But the blood. It’s everywhere and so slick. They’re slipping in it, blood all over the floor and up the walls.
Rachel runs to help Josh but slips over. She calls for the older girls.
“Help Josh, help Josh.”
Madi comes out of her downstairs bedroom, straight into the bloody hallway, jumping over the thrashing men to go to her mother.
As she does, her hand gets sliced by a knife. Madi opens the front door and runs.
By now, Josh has got the cane knife off his intruder who bolts, heading for the kitchen window they’d allegedly broken in through.
Josh chases him.
The kid gets his head stuck. Josh opens the window further. “Mate, just get out,” he says.
Meanwhile, the wounded Toutai has lost grip of his kid, who runs out the open front door. Toutai scrambles to his feet to chase after him and sees Ben Cannon, alerted by the screams, running towards the house.
The two neighbours sandwich the intruder and throw him to the ground. Cannon sits on him.
Toutai staggers back into the house, clutching his stomach and heads to the couch. Josh, now sitting on the hallway floor with his back against the wall, gives his Dad a serve for bleeding all over the couch.
LIFE AFTER AND RECOVERY
It’s a rainy Friday afternoon and the Kefuhousehold is a flurry of comings and goings. Isaac arrives from school, soaking wet, and makes a beeline for the fridge.
Madi pops in, says hi and heads to her bedroom, and Olivia goes to her car to pick up Lucia. Josh appears as his father is showing photographs of the damage to his son’s back after that night.
“He had a big flap just hanging off his back,” says Toutai.
At his parents’ bidding, Josh lifts his shirt to show his scars.
The worst is high up on his left shoulder, a long, deep and slightly ragged scar. His shoulder was dislocated and needed a reconstruction.
The other cuts are smaller, one on his spine, and two either side. All up, about 50 stitches.
Madi needed 15 stitches in her hand but was lucky.
“Doctors said it missed every major artery, nerve, tendon,” says Rachel. “They don’t know how.”
Toutai’s liver was nicked by a knife in the melee.
He was taken into surgery and patched up.
The weird thing was how badly his left foot hurt a couple of days after surgery.
Then he remembered he’d jumped 5m onto a concrete floor.
It turned out he’d broken two bones.
He was in a moon boot for five weeks.
Rachel had no idea of Toutai’s leaping gallantry until Olivia told her while she was in hospital. She looks at her husband.
“I said, ‘Oh, so you do love me, you heard me scream and ran’.” Toutai grins, shyly. “Imagine,” he jokes, “if I’d broken my leg and was stuck there. They’d be like, ‘What’s wrong with you, mate?’ walk past me, say, ‘Thanks for the keys, mate’ and out the front door. That would have been embarrassing.”
They laugh, the easy laugh of a couple relaxed in each other’s company. Toutai’s concern for the welfare of his wife of 21 years is obvious.
“Rachel’s injury was probably the worst, once they diagnosed us all,” he says.
“The bone stopped the blade. The doctor said if they were bigger kids, it could have gone right through.”
The nerves, tendons and ligaments in Rachel’s left arm were all cut.
She’s left-handed. It took three hours of delicate surgery to reconnect them, followed by seven weeks in a cast.
“For a long time, I couldn’t do my hair, tie shoelaces, do up my bra,” says Rachel.
She had no rotation in the arm until Christmas, meaning she couldn’t drive, and had to rely on family and friends.
The independently minded woman says being back behind the wheel has helped her spirits. Feeling in her arm and hand has returned.
She still goes for rehabilitation twice a week, and does exercises at home every day.
“They say 12 months of therapy, at least. My goal is to make a fist,” she says, bending her fingers about halfway to achieving that goal.
The mental therapy is ongoing.
In-house. Rachel and Madi received a few professional counselling sessions but the Kefu clan has decided that being together, talking about that night and finding humour amid the horror is their best medicine. And they’re staying put on Buena Vista Ave.
Rachel was hesitant about returning home.
She asked Toutai if they could sell the “big orange house on the corner” that she and the kids have lived in since 2000, when they returned from Japan ahead of Toutai who was finishing his rugby career with the Kubota Spears.
“But I said to Rach, ‘Rach, this is our home’,” says Toutai.
“We could go somewhere else and it could happen again. I don’t want to let two little idiot juveniles kick us out. This is our home, we’ll stay here and defend it.”
The couple love the southside, with both growing up nearby – the rugby and basketball-mad Toutai in East Brisbane, and Rachel, the champion swimmer and Australian water polo player, in Camp Hill.
The outpouring of kindness and care for the family by the community after the attack has only reinforced that attachment.
Working bees were set up by family and neighbours before the Kefus returned home. The blood was scrubbed and washed away inside, and pressure-hosed outside.
The rest of the house was cleaned, the fridge and cupboards filled, and a roster set up to deliver dinner to their door, four nights a week, for months.
“They just wanted us to come back to no memories of it,” says Rachel.
Just one week after the attack, the Kefus returned. Including Rachel.
To welcome them home, the Tongan community cooked a pig next door, and for a while, Rachel enjoyed being around everyone.
Then, on her own, she slipped away and up the steps to her home.
“It was actually all right,” she says.
“I came down the hallway and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s where that happened’. I just took myself through where I was and what I’d done and I went, ‘Yep, OK, I’m all right’.”
She still doesn’t sleep well and has flashbacks.
She vacillates between feeling sorry for the intruders, who were of Sudanese and Afghan descent, and angry.
It spooked Toutai, too.
For the first week or so, he would sit at the upstairs window at night and watch the street. He’s got a baseball bat nearby now.
The kids needed extra support.
The ones who weren’t injured felt guilty.
“Liv struggled because she wasn’t stabbed, so she felt guilty that she ran out. And we said, ‘No, you called the police’.
And then we’ve got Lucia upstairs, she was taking photos of the car outside but she felt guilty. And I said, ‘No, you did the right thing’. They all actually did the right thing.”
To get their head around what happened, Rachel and the kids even re-enacted the events of the night.
“We were saying, ‘Where were you when I was doing this’, because we all have different parts of the story,” says Rachel.
“We talk about it a lot, at the dinner table or in the kitchen. It’s not a taboo subject.”
One thing that is taboo, though, is Rachel going downstairs at night. That’s Toutai’s domain now.
Just a few weeks ago, she heard something. “I woke, again, to banging and this time it was banging on the security screen, and I was freaking.”
She shook Toutai awake. “You’ll have to go downstairs,” she said.
He ventured down.
This time, says Rachel, it was a possum.
Spare a thought for that possum.
Once it made the decision to come down the chimney, it was trapped. Security has been well and truly beefed up at the Kefu house.
Cameras, security doors and sensors have been added and Rachel still has a few more touches to make.
“Toutai reckons you can’t get out of the house because I’ve got so much security,” says Rachel.
“He’s like, ‘This place is a bloody jail’. But it makes me feel better.”
It’s sad that’s how she feels now, Rachel says, because a home invasion was not something she feared.
“I never had security screens and have never been scared. Never.”
Hundreds of Queenslanders know that feeling.
Queensland Police could not provide statistics on home invasions but an online Budget Direct survey last year found 4.3 per cent of Australian households had had at least one break-in in the previous 12 months, of which 11.8 per cent involved a confrontation with the invader.
It found Australia has the 7th highest rate of burglaries in the world.
One unlatched window on the wrong night and your sense of security, of being safe in your own home, can be dealt a gigantic jolt.
Four juveniles have each been charged with four counts of attempted murder, along with a range of other charges including unlawful use of a motor vehicle, break and enter and burglary.
They are yet to be dealt with in the Children’s Court over the events of that night.
August 16 has been a mixed bag of joy and heartache for the Kefus.
It was on that day in 2003 that Toutai’s Test career ended.
It was the 60th minute in a tight Tri Nations/Bledisloe Cup match against the All Blacks at a wet and windy Eden Park in Auckland.
Toutai took a monster hit from the late, great Jerry Collins, cracking his shoulder blade.
His hopes of another World Cup campaign ended on that field and he’d never run out in the green and gold again.
Rachel remembers it well. She was watching the game with some of Toutai’s mates in Brisbane, cheering on Australia while quietly dealing with a series of ever-shortening birthing contractions. Madison was on her way.
Rachel didn’t want to ruin the game. This was her third baby; she knew what to expect. She’d make it to the final whistle.
“But once he got injured,” recalls Rachel, “I said to the group of mates at the table, ‘Could someone drive me to the hospital, I need to have this baby’.”
The couple look at each other and smile, admitting that in the end, Rachel’s sister, Jane, was called to take her to hospital. Says Toutai: “Well, the boys didn’t want to miss the end of the game.”
They chuckle. Rachel jokes that she’s told Madi they’re changing her birthday.
“August 16 is no longer on the calendar; she’ll be 18 for the rest of her life.”
At least, it seemed like she was joking.
There’s a lot of high-spirited ribbing in this family, led by the couple who turned warriors to protect their kids and home.
On the wall, just beyond the cleaned, white couch that Toutai bled all over that night, is a photograph of Rachel and Toutai. They’re beaming, holding each other close on their wedding day. Look around, and there’s not a shred of memorabilia about Toutai’s great rugby career. Nuh, he says, he’s not into that sort of display.
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