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26-05-2023
SYDNEY: When conwoman Melissa Caddick vanished from her luxurious eastern Sydney home in November 2020 with only her partially decomposed foot found washed up on a beach months later it set off a frenzy in Australia.
The case blindsided investors, baffled police, and captured the imagination of a nation.
The fraudster has inspired a hit podcast, a TV dramatization, and countless outlandish theories including that she had been swallowed by a shark or had severed her own foot to throw police off her scent.
A long-running inquest into the case heard of a flawed police investigation, conflicting accounts from her husband, and all the extensive speculation surrounding her fate but a coroner on Thursday ruled that exactly what happened to her would remain a mystery.
“The conclusion I have reached is that Melissa Caddick is deceased. However… I do not consider the evidence enables a positive finding as to how she died, or when and where this happened,” Deputy State Coroner Elizabeth Ryan wrote.
For most, the Melissa Caddick story began with the news that the seemingly successful financial adviser was missing but her life had actually begun to unravel months earlier when Australia’s financial watchdog was tipped off that she had been using a friend’s financial adviser’s licence, having simply pasted in her own name on the document.
Regulators suspect the 49-year-old stole up to $30m (£15.8m; $19.5m) from more than 60 clients, including many of her family and friends, to help fund a lavish lifestyle.
There were overseas trips on private jets, high-end cars, designer clothes, and expensive jewelry.
Her methods were not “particularly complicated”, the coroner said.
As new clients gave her money to invest, she would pay some out as dividends to existing clients before keeping and spending, the rest.
Coroner Ryan said she was struck by the “powerful impression of wealth and success” Caddick made on her clients and would-be investors.
“Equally significant was the trust they had in her… almost all were either immediate family members, or close personal friends of herself and her family,” she said.
One would-be investor recalled; “I wanted to model myself and our family on successful people, and Melissa appeared to be successful” but everything fell apart on 11 November 2020 when police knocked on her door at dawn.
