‘Inescapable’ truth of hubby’s Caddick claims
In one of his songs, part-time DJ and Melissa Caddick’s husband declared: “I’m just waiting for a coroner’s report to tell me something that I already know. My wife died as a direct result of an ASIC investigation.”
On Thursday, a coroner not only rejected his “bitter” claims against the corporate watchdog but found he had knowingly hindered the police investigation into Ms Caddick’s disappearance.
Deputy state coroner Elizabeth Ryan directed harsh criticism towards Mr Koletti, finding it was likely that when he finally got around to reporting his wife missing, he must have had some knowledge of Ms Caddick’s movements, but chose not to disclose it.
“Mr Koletti has not managed to explain the manifold contradictions within and between these accounts in any comprehensible way,” Ms Ryan found.
“IS SHE NOT THERE?”
Melissa Caddick went missing from her Dover Heights mansion on November 12, 2020 - the six-bedroom trophy home itself was a result of her ill-gotten gains.
The $9.8m it fetched at auction this year will be put towards paying back some of the $23m she fleeced from investors through her company Maliver Pty Ltd.
Ms Caddick’s house of cards came crashing down on November 11 that year when ASIC and AFP officers knocked on her door with a search warrant.
After spending 12 hours at the property, officers left about 6pm.
Her son reported hearing the door of their home close around 5.30am the next morning and she failed to appear before a Federal Court hearing on November 13.
A transcript of the hearing reveals Mr Koletti had dialled in and asked Justice Jayne Jagot: “Melissa Caddick is my wife. Is she not there?”
30 HOURS
In her findings, Ms Ryan said that in the several months after Caddick went missing, Mr Koletti gave multiple, contradictory accounts of the events of November 11-13 and failed to give clear statements about when he last saw his wife.
Mr Koletti rang an AFP agent on the morning of November 13, 2020 and told her Ms Caddick had not been seen since 5.30am the previous day.
Following a call to Rose Bay Police Station, about 11.45am, two officers came to his Dover Heights home.
By the time he contacted police, she had been missing for 30 hours.
WHAT HAPPENED ON THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 12?
He told those officers his wife was last seen at midnight and when he woke she was gone.
Mr Koletti also said that Caddick’s son had seen her leave the house for a run at 5.30am.
Sergeant Trent Riley, a third police officer, went to the Caddick house soon after and Koletti now said that her son had not physically seen her leave, but heard the door close.
In a statement to police three days later, Mr Koletti’s story changed again.
This time, he said he had last seen her around 4am, when he went to the bathroom, and he woke at about 5.30am or 6am when he heard the door closing.
He provided further versions of events in a statement in July 2021 and during an interview with Channel 7’s Spotlight program, for which he was paid $150,000.
“YOU WEREN’T HONEST YOURSELF”
As well as his delay in alerting police that his wife was missing, Sergeant Riley thought it was “extremely unusual and strange behaviour” that Mr Koletti had told officers he was “too busy” to come to the police station to make a report.
Mr Koletti told police he had delayed in reporting her missing because he had thought he had to wait 24 hours.
During his evidence, he again said he was under that mistaken belief.
Ms Ryan said it was equally “perplexing” why Mr Koletti had rung Ms Caddick’s brother, Adam Grimley, and friend Scott Little on the night of November 12 but told neither that she was missing.
“I didn’t want them to worry at that point, number one, and number two I wanted an honest opinion,” Mr Koletti said in the interview.
“And you weren’t honest yourself,” Sergeant Kyneur said.
“Exactly,” Mr Koletti replied.
EARLY MORNING RUN
Ms Ryan described his evidence as at times “incomprehensible” and filled with inherent contradictions.
She pointed to Mr Koletti’s initial statements to police in which he said that his wife would go jogging “all the time” early in the morning, and had not thought anything of it when he heard the door close.
Yet when police viewed CCTV from their house, they could not find one occasion from the previous four weeks in which she had gone for an early walk or run.
In her closing arguments, Mr Koletti’s counsel, Judy Swan, argued that “in some respects Mr Koletti’s statements were inconsistent and not always coherent”.
She attributed to them his “limited intellectual capacity” and “negligible literary and numeracy prowess”.
But Ms Ryan said: “Put simply the discrepancies are too numerous, and too persistent in nature, to be attributable to stress and a lack of intellectual sophistication.”
INESCAPABLE CONCLUSION
Ms Ryan said she reached the “inescapable conclusion” that Mr Koletti had chosen to be untruthful during the police investigation and inquest.
During the inquest he was asked by Mr Downing: “Did you delay reporting her missing until that point in order to give her time to try to go somewhere?”
“No,” Mr Koletti said, also denying he withheld information.
Ms Ryan said in her findings: “I have formed the opinion that it is likely that on 13 November 2020 Mr Koletti had some awareness of Ms Caddick’s movements over the previous two days, but chose not to disclose it.”
Importantly, Ms Ryan found that it could not be determined what Mr Koletti knew about Caddick’s movements and it remains a matter of speculation.
Ms Ryan found that Ms Caddick was dead, but said it could not be determined when, how and where she died.
During the inquest, police defended the decision not to alert the NSW Homicide Squad during the early stages of the investigation.
She said it was “premature” to dismiss the possibility that Ms Caddick was killed and that police should have referred the case to the NSW Police Homicide Squad.
She said that Mr Koletti’s “inherent unreliability” placed a burden on the police investigation, and hindered their ability to search for relevant CCTV footage.
Police have said they did not consider Mr Koletti a suspect and he has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
“BITTER”
Several months after Ms Caddick went missing, Mr Koletti made serious allegations Ms Caddick had been mistreated during the ASIC raid and “died as a direct result of ASIC’s negligence, cruelty and inhumanity.”
Mr Koletti conceded during his evidence that he made his wife several coffees, they on occasions smoked cigarettes in their backyard and she drank a protein shake during the raid.
“We weren’t denied anything,” Mr Koletti said in his evidence.
In his music, published under the name “Paws Off”, Mr Koletti made similar allegations about the conduct of ASIC investigators.
“I’m just waiting for a coroner’s report to tell me something that I already know,” he says on one track, Intelligence Artificial.
“My wife died as a direct result of an ASIC investigation.”
But the coroner found: “The conclusion I reach is that there is no credible evidence that the searching officers denied Ms Caddick medication which she required, or food and drink.”
She likewise found that allegations levelled against ASIC lead investigator Isabella Allen “are completely without foundation”.
