In the hours after Robert Xie allegedly murdered five of his family members, he cried as he told his mother-in-law about discovering their bodies, a court has heard.

The Crown alleges Xie crept into the Sydney home of his brother-in-law Min Lin and sister-in-law Lily Lin in the early hours of July 18, 2009.

They say he then killed Min, Lily, her sister Irene and their two sons Henry, 12 and Terry, nine, with a hammer-like weapon before going back to his home.

Later that morning, after Min failed to turn up to work or answer his phone, Xie and his wife Kathy went to the Lin home in North Epping to investigate.

On seeing the bodies, Xie then drove to the Merrylands home of Min’s parents Yang Fei Lin and Feng Qin Zhu and picked them up.

In a taped police interview played in the Supreme Court on Wednesday, the Lin family matriarch described the conversation she had with Xie on that car trip back to the North Epping home.

Mrs Zhu said Xie cried as he described how he and Kathy had gone upstairs and had found Lily with “blood all over her face”.

He said they had then gone into Irene’s bedroom and had seen her, before finding the two children lying on the floor, not breathing.

“When he said he saw Lily lying in blood I asked him if he saw my son and he said he did not see him,” Mrs Zhu says in the interview from September 2009.

“My husband and I, we were both in such a shock. Our minds were just blank.”

She said Xie seemed nervous and a bit scared.

“Such a big thing happened at Min’s place, so he was very nervous.”

As the interview played, Mrs Zhu held her head in her hand at the back of the court.

The trial continues.