The widow of MasterChef star Jock Zonfrillo has revealed the details about his final journal entry before his shock death.
The Scottish chef was best known as one of the judges on MasterChef Australia, which he joined in 2019 alongside Melissa Leong and Andy Allen.
But in May 2023 it was announced that Zonfrillo had died aged 46 during the promo tour for the show. He was found dead in a hotel room in Melbourne, with his cause of death never being revealed.
At the time his family released a statement that read: ‘With completely shattered hearts and without knowing how we can possibly move through life without him, we are devastated to share that Jock passed away yesterday.’
They added: ‘So many words can describe him, so many stories can be told, but at this time we’re too overwhelmed to put them into words.’
Two years on his wife Lauren, whom he married in 2017 and shared two young children with, has given her first TV interview speaking about Zonfrillo’s death.
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When Zonfrillo died, Lauren was in Italy with their children, where they’d relocated not long before.
Speaking to Liz Hayes in a special edition of Seven News’ Spotlight series, she revealed how her husband’s final words were about ‘how happy’ he was to have created their young family – son Alfie and daughter Isla.
In the interview, Lauren shared how she discovered Jock’s journal following his death.
‘Jock had journalled for a period of time,’ she explained.
‘He wrote in his journal how he’s so happy that we were finding our feet, and he was excited about creating these little Aussie-Italian-Scottish children…and what Isla’s accent was going to be like when she starts talking full sentences.
‘He always liked to put the kids to bed at night, he did all the voices with the books and so he just wrote about missing those thing and how he looked forward to getting there (to Italy where the kids were).’
She went on: ‘He wrote… “Lauren didn’t see herself, but I think she’s just doing so much, but she’s so capable and I’m really proud that she can do those hard things as well”, and that’s meant a lot to me now.’
Lauren explained how it ‘meant a lot’ to her reading about ‘such a normal conversation.
‘It was kind of this encouragement to say, you’ve got this Lauren, there’s been many times where I’ve (felt like) I haven’t got this,’ she added.
Lauren also spoke about the devastating lead-up to discovering her husband had died.
After struggling to get in contact with him she asked hotel staff to conduct a welfare check.
‘I was now hysterical,’ she recalled.
After police were called, Lauren was contacted and told a ‘deceased male’ had been found in her husband’s room.
Once arriving back in Australia and viewing her husband’s body, Lauren said she begged him for answers to ‘so many unanswered questions’.
In tears while speaking about this moment, Lauren said she could smell his ‘aftershave and hair product’ and it looked like he was ‘just sleeping’.
‘He was still there. I really felt he was there. I told him that it will be okay, that I’ve got this. That I will make sure the kids live big lives. And that, no matter what, we would be a family,’ she said.
However, she also battled with feelings of being ‘broken now’ following the death of ‘the person I love that much’.
Although there was significant speculation about Zonfrillo’s death – he had previously spoken publicly about past battles with drug addiction while some reports suggested he’d been diagnosed with bowel cancer – Lauren refused the proposition his ‘demons caught up with him’.
She didn’t go into further detail about how he died but relayed how she’d been told by those who found him that it appeared he’d died peacefully in his bed.
Zonfrillo is also survived by his two adult daughters Ava and Sophia from his first two marriages.
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