Australian conwoman Melissa Caddick vanished before she was infamous. She was also gone before most of her clients knew they had been defrauded out of more than $23m.
Caddick almost certainly would not have become such a figure of mystery and intrigue if she’d had her day in court.
Instead, in November 2020, when many Australians had spent much of the past year in Covid lockdown, Caddick disappeared.
A new sheen of cunning was instantly applied to her crimes: not only had Caddick managed to con dozens of people out of millions of dollars, but she had escaped before she was caught.
The truth, as it often is, was less beguiling.
Caddick was not a criminal mastermind, but just someone with enough gall to shamelessly lie to clients, including family and close friends, mock up false trading statements, and use new clients’ money to pay off old ones.
And she had not fled with her ill-gotten gains to a bolt-hole on a tropical beach: three months after disappearing, her foot washed ashore on the New South Wales south coast.
There does remain some mystery, however, to Caddick.
As the NSW deputy state coroner, Elizabeth Ryan, said in her inquest findings handed down on Thursday, how and when Caddick died remains unclear.
“I regret that positive findings cannot be made as to the cause and manner of Ms Caddick’s death,” Ryan said.
“Ms Caddick’s husband, son, parents and brother must surely feel a strong need for finality. Melissa Caddick was a wife, mother, daughter and sister.
“Her disappearance from her family in traumatic circumstances must be a source of deep and ongoing sadness for them. For their sake I wish that this inquest could have provided the sense of peace that can come with answers about what has happened to a loved one.”
The finding that Caddick has died may not persuade some of her victims, who believe she amputated her own foot to evade authorities, like a fox gnawing through its leg to escape a rabbit trap.
Ryan found this unlikely, noting that while medical examinations of the foot had not been able to establish whether she had died and when or how it happened, they did “ … enable the conclusion that it is most unlikely Ms Caddick’s foot separated from her body as a result of a deliberate act to sever it, performed either by herself or with the assistance of others”.
Ryan noted police made comprehensive inquiries into whether Caddick was alive, but that perhaps the most persuasive evidence was that she had not made any contact with her son.
“She loved him and took great pride in him,” Ryan found.
“Deeply attached to him as she was, it seems to me most unlikely that she would not have reached out to him in some way, were she still alive.”
So how did Caddick die? Ryan considered scenarios including murder, misadventure and suicide.
Lachlan Gyles SC, on behalf of NSW police, urged Ryan to find that Caddick jumped from cliffs near her property on Dover Heights, describing it as “the most obvious explanation for her disappearance” and saying there was “no evidence which contradicts or is inconsistent with it” occurring.
Lawyers acting for Anthony Koletti, Caddick’s husband, made similar submissions, and Ryan noted that Caddick’s family shared the belief that this is how she had died.
But Ryan found that, contrary to these submissions, it was not possible to conclude that Caddick’s foot entered the ocean as a result of her jumping from cliffs near her house.
She said this was despite evidence from oceanographers finding that it was possible for her to have done so and her foot to have been discovered hundreds of kilometres south about three months later.
It was also despite evidence given by a forensic psychiatrist that Caddick’s “likely personality structure” meant she “could well have regarded suicide as her only escape from the personal and professional catastrophe which overtook her”.
Ryan said that more evidence about what had happened to Caddick may have been available if NSW police had investigated the case differently, including by referring the disappearance to the homicide squad earlier, and moving more swiftly to gather CCTV footage.
She also found that Koletti’s lack of credibility as a witness meant that even if it was accepted he had not harmed Caddick, that did not mean she could be satisfied he was not involved in her disappearance or knew about it.
“It may be accepted that Mr Koletti is not an intellectually sophisticated person, and that his wife’s sudden disappearance from his life was deeply disturbing for him.
“But what is striking about Mr Koletti’s propensity to inconsistency is its persistence over a significant time and across a broad range of contexts.
“Put simply the discrepancies are too numerous, and too persistent in nature, to be attributable to stress and a lack of intellectual sophistication … the inescapable conclusion is that throughout the investigation and the inquest, Mr Koletti has chosen at times to make statements that are simply untrue.”
Although it was unnecessary for her to make her findings, Ryan noted that she had read statements made by Caddick’s victims.
These victims made clear that Caddick, the personification of the Sydney eastern suburbs nouveau riche with her penchant for designer clothes, furniture and jewellery, had made them aspire for more.
Ryan noted that she created an impression of financial success that was clearly integral to the inspiring confidence in her clients, telling them she owned a condominium in Aspen, Colorado, or a block of 48 apartments in New York, some of which had been damaged during Black Lives Matter protests.
Nobody was spared.
“Her mother and father, her brother and his friends, her aunt and uncle, school friends, old friends of her parents – all had complete faith in her integrity and never imagined that she was capable of betraying it,” Ryan said.
An elderly couple who had been neighbours of Caddick when she was a girl were “flabbergasted” when they discovered she had fleeced them of almost $600,000 in superannuation.
“It just wasn’t like her,” they said.
“We loved her.”
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
