00:00:02.000 –> 00:00:04.000
AJ Blythe: Welcome to The DownUnder Mystery Club.
00:00:04.000 –> 00:00:10.000
AJ Blythe: I’m AJ Blythe and joining me is fellow mystery author Ava Ness.
00:00:10.000 –> 00:00:15.000
AJ Blythe: Every week we dive into curious cases, cracking good reads and all things mystery.
00:00:15.000 –> 00:00:19.000
AJ Blythe: Grab a cuppa, settle in and let’s get sleuthing.
00:00:19.000 –> 00:00:21.000
AJ Blythe: Hello dear listeners and hello Ava.
00:00:21.000 –> 00:00:23.000
Ava Ness: Hello AJ.
00:00:23.000 –> 00:00:26.000
AJ Blythe: In a moment, I’m going to outline this week’s mystery.
00:00:26.000 –> 00:00:27.000
AJ Blythe: I’ve done the research.
00:00:27.000 –> 00:00:31.000
Ava Ness: And I’m coming in 98% blind.
00:00:31.000 –> 00:00:34.000
AJ Blythe: Yes, it’s a bit hard with this one not to have some idea.
00:00:34.000 –> 00:00:40.000
AJ Blythe: After we’ve discussed the case, we’ll talk about some of the mystery novels it brings to mind.
00:00:40.000 –> 00:00:46.000
AJ Blythe: So Ava, could you imagine waking up every morning to panoramic ocean views from your $10 million Sydney mansion?
00:00:46.000 –> 00:00:50.000
AJ Blythe: Your closet is stuffed with clothing from Chanel and Christian Dior.
00:00:50.000 –> 00:01:00.000
AJ Blythe: Your garage holds luxury sports cars, your safe is overflowing with diamonds and you regularly spend hundreds of thousands on high-end international holidays.
00:01:00.000 –> 00:01:01.000
Ava Ness: I really wish I could.
00:01:01.000 –> 00:01:07.000
Ava Ness: I think I have a pretty good imagination, but sadly, I don’t think it extends to quite that level of wealth.
00:01:07.000 –> 00:01:12.000
AJ Blythe: No, I just live vicariously through the movies, I think, to experience that sort of thing.
00:01:12.000 –> 00:01:13.000
Ava Ness: Correct.
00:01:13.000 –> 00:01:20.000
AJ Blythe: To the outside world, you might be a financial genius who’s cracked the code to extreme wealth, but behind closed doors, you aren’t investing a single cent.
00:01:20.000 –> 00:01:28.000
AJ Blythe: You’re running an aggressive, systematic, multi-million dollar Ponzi scheme, and the corporate regulators are about to break down your front door.
00:01:28.000 –> 00:01:33.000
AJ Blythe: This is the real world mystery of Melissa Louise Caddick.
00:01:33.000 –> 00:01:39.000
AJ Blythe: In late 2020, the 49-year-old self-styled financial advisor vanished off the face of the earth.
00:01:39.000 –> 00:01:47.000
AJ Blythe: She left behind an empty corporate entity, dozens of broken lives, and an absolute trail of financial ruin.
00:01:47.000 –> 00:01:54.000
AJ Blythe: Months later, a truly gruesome discovery on a remote beach 400 kilometers away blew the case wide open.
00:01:54.000 –> 00:02:06.000
AJ Blythe: I’m going to start by covering the legal facts of the fraud first, just to give the background before we dive into what became wild public speculation about the mystery element, what happened to Melissa.
00:02:06.000 –> 00:02:16.000
AJ Blythe: So for eight years from 2012, Melissa Caddick stole an estimated $23 to $30 million through her unlicensed financial services firm, Malabar.
00:02:16.000 –> 00:02:21.000
AJ Blythe: Shockingly, her victims weren’t greedy Wall Street firms or ultra wealthy conglomerates.
00:02:21.000 –> 00:02:24.000
AJ Blythe: They were her closest childhood friends.
00:02:24.000 –> 00:02:32.000
AJ Blythe: vulnerable single mothers, her brother, and her own elderly parents, who handed over their life savings and self-managed super funds.
00:02:32.000 –> 00:02:40.000
AJ Blythe: To maintain the illusion of massive stock market returns, Kadik didn’t use sophisticated hacking tools in her Ponzi scheme.
00:02:40.000 –> 00:02:43.000
AJ Blythe: She used a basic home scanner and a computer printer.
00:02:43.000 –> 00:02:52.000
AJ Blythe: She painstakingly forged hundreds of bank share statements and account numbers, inventing fake profits out of thin air to keep her clients blind.
00:02:52.000 –> 00:03:08.000
AJ Blythe: On the 1st of November 2020, acting on a tip-off, the corporate watchdog, which is the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, known as ASIC, alongside the Australian Federal Police, executed a massive, surprise early morning raid on her Dover Heights home.
00:03:08.000 –> 00:03:16.000
AJ Blythe: By account at the inquest, she was surprised, shocked and embarrassed by the police presence, but not visibly anxious.
00:03:16.000 –> 00:03:18.000
AJ Blythe: For over 12 hours, the police searched her home.
00:03:18.000 –> 00:03:25.000
AJ Blythe: They opened her dressing room safe, seized luxury jewelry and systematically froze her bank accounts.
00:03:25.000 –> 00:03:30.000
AJ Blythe: At 5.30am the very next morning, her teenage son heard the front door click shut.
00:03:30.000 –> 00:03:34.000
AJ Blythe: Melissa Caddick had allegedly left for an early morning jog.
00:03:34.000 –> 00:03:37.000
AJ Blythe: She took no keys, no wallet and no phone.
00:03:37.000 –> 00:03:39.000
AJ Blythe: She never came back.
00:03:39.000 –> 00:03:41.000
AJ Blythe: For 3 months the trail was cold.
00:03:41.000 –> 00:03:58.000
AJ Blythe: Then in February 2021, beachgoers on Baunda Beach on the New South Wales South Coast stumbled across a waterlogged grey Asics running shoe, which tightly inside was a badly decomposed human foot and DNA testing confirmed it belonged to Melissa Caddick.
00:03:58.000 –> 00:04:04.000
AJ Blythe: the New South Wales Deputy State Coroner officially ruled that Caddick is dead.
00:04:04.000 –> 00:04:12.000
AJ Blythe: The coroner also found, because barnacles on the shoe were still in larval stage, it had spent between three and seven days floating in the open ocean.
00:04:12.000 –> 00:04:18.000
AJ Blythe: But the shoe itself was heavily discoloured, which meant it actually wasn’t clear how long the shoe was in the water.
00:04:18.000 –> 00:04:22.000
AJ Blythe: Had it been somewhere else or had it been somewhere that prevented it from surfacing?
00:04:22.000 –> 00:04:23.000
Ava Ness: That’s fascinating.
00:04:23.000 –> 00:04:38.000
AJ Blythe: But because marine forensics could only analyze a single limb, the court officially ruled in June this year, so that’s how long it’s taken, that the exact date, cause, location and manner of her death is an absolute mystery.
00:04:38.000 –> 00:04:45.000
AJ Blythe: And this is where the forensic evidence stops, giving way to absolute public speculation.
00:04:45.000 –> 00:04:50.000
AJ Blythe: Because only a single foot was ever recovered, the public imagination went absolutely nuts.
00:04:50.000 –> 00:04:59.000
AJ Blythe: And I think it would be pretty hard for anyone in Australia to not be aware of this case because it was headlines for a very long time.
00:04:59.000 –> 00:05:00.000
Ava Ness: It certainly was.
00:05:00.000 –> 00:05:09.000
Ava Ness: And most of that is actually new information to me because there’s a reason that I write cozy mysteries and that is because I am not very good
00:05:09.000 –> 00:05:12.000
Ava Ness: with anything gory, bloody.
00:05:12.000 –> 00:05:16.000
Ava Ness: I don’t really like anything like that.
00:05:16.000 –> 00:05:26.000
Ava Ness: And just hearing that this mystery was around a severed foot was kind of enough for me to tune out from most of the coverage entirely.
00:05:26.000 –> 00:05:31.000
Ava Ness: And everybody else was hooked on the true crime podcast about it and things like that.
00:05:31.000 –> 00:05:33.000
Ava Ness: I really have not listened in at all.
00:05:33.000 –> 00:05:36.000
Ava Ness: So I’m actually really fascinated to hear
00:05:36.000 –> 00:05:39.000
Ava Ness: what was the lead up to her disappearance?
00:05:39.000 –> 00:05:45.000
Ava Ness: And now I am actually interested in the mystery of it because I can sort of separate it from the gory bit of it.
00:05:45.000 –> 00:05:54.000
AJ Blythe: Yeah, well, there’s quite a few elements to it because the first wave of speculation focused heavily on her husband, who was a part-time hairdresser and DJ.
00:05:54.000 –> 00:05:58.000
AJ Blythe: The coronial inquest exposed massive gaps in the timeline.
00:05:58.000 –> 00:06:04.000
AJ Blythe: So why did he wait 30 hours after she vanished to finally report her missing to the police?
00:06:04.000 –> 00:06:12.000
AJ Blythe: The coroner publicly savaged his credibility, stating his court testimony was plagued with wildly contradictory accounts and shifting stories.
00:06:12.000 –> 00:06:16.000
AJ Blythe: So there was a lot of focus on him and maybe a role that he might have played.
00:06:16.000 –> 00:06:23.000
AJ Blythe: But despite the intense security, detectives found zero evidence of foul play or domestic involvement on his part.
00:06:23.000 –> 00:06:27.000
Ava Ness: You imagine they must have like tapped his phone and
00:06:27.000 –> 00:06:30.000
Ava Ness: been keeping an eye on his online presence.
00:06:30.000 –> 00:06:33.000
Ava Ness: So if there was something there, they surely would have found it.
00:06:33.000 –> 00:06:34.000
AJ Blythe: I would have thought so.
00:06:34.000 –> 00:06:42.000
AJ Blythe: And I think too, before the raid, after the police got the tip off, that they would have done some work in the lead up before they actually went and knocked on the door to start with.
00:06:42.000 –> 00:06:45.000
AJ Blythe: They would have had to have evidence for the search warrant.
00:06:45.000 –> 00:06:47.000
AJ Blythe: They would have had to have been doing things.
00:06:47.000 –> 00:06:53.000
AJ Blythe: And I’m sure as part of that, they would have been investigating him because obviously he was the husband.
00:06:53.000 –> 00:07:01.000
AJ Blythe: And after the speculation about him passed over, obviously the Hollywood style conspiracy theory started.
00:07:01.000 –> 00:07:07.000
AJ Blythe: Did Melissa Caddock deliberately sever her own foot, toss it into the ocean currents, you know, to throw off federal Asians?
00:07:07.000 –> 00:07:10.000
AJ Blythe: And has she fled the country on a fraudulent passport?
00:07:10.000 –> 00:07:12.000
Ava Ness: With A prosthetic foot.
00:07:12.000 –> 00:07:14.000
AJ Blythe: Yeah, exactly.
00:07:14.000 –> 00:07:22.000
AJ Blythe: There was all sorts of speculation, crime, podcasts and forums and websites and news articles went wild with that theory, that it was
00:07:22.000 –> 00:07:26.000
AJ Blythe: big red herring really to the fact that she wasn’t dead.
00:07:26.000 –> 00:07:37.000
AJ Blythe: But medical and orthopedic experts have said in the inquest that amputating your own foot without professional surgical equipment would probably just cause you to bleed to death on the beach.
00:07:37.000 –> 00:07:39.000
Ava Ness: Oh my God. Oh my God.
00:07:39.000 –> 00:07:49.000
Ava Ness: I feel like if this was like a movie or TV, the twist would be that she had an identical twin sister and she murdered the sister and it was the sister’s foot, not hers.
00:07:49.000 –> 00:07:51.000
Ava Ness: I don’t think that’s the case here though.
00:07:51.000 –> 00:07:57.000
AJ Blythe: No, I mean, there was speculation how could a foot float 400 kilometres S?
00:07:57.000 –> 00:08:08.000
AJ Blythe: So obviously they got marine scientists and oceanographers in to testify ocean currents and natural marine decomposition that can cause a body to do this and travel this far and so on.
00:08:08.000 –> 00:08:18.000
AJ Blythe: And the police have a, their leading forensic theory is that she walked out of her home, travelled to the steep ocean cliffs, which were just a few 100 metres from her house.
00:08:18.000 –> 00:08:22.000
AJ Blythe: and jumped to escape the impending public disgrace.
00:08:22.000 –> 00:08:29.000
AJ Blythe: But the thing is, and I don’t think this was quite as widely known, is that Melissa was a career fraudster.
00:08:29.000 –> 00:08:34.000
AJ Blythe: 20 years before she started her Ponzi scheme, she started her life of crime as a forger.
00:08:34.000 –> 00:08:37.000
Ava Ness: A forger?
00:08:37.000 –> 00:08:53.000
AJ Blythe: Yeah, When she was about 29 years old, and who knows what she’d done before this, but this is the first one that I could find, she forged about $15,000 worth of checks while working in a basic clerical position for a Sydney fund manager.
00:08:53.000 –> 00:09:01.000
AJ Blythe: And maybe if he’d reported her to the police back then, this whole Ponzi scheme would never have eventuated.
00:09:01.000 –> 00:09:02.000
Ava Ness: He must feel dreadful.
00:09:02.000 –> 00:09:08.000
AJ Blythe: Maybe some goodwill on his part or giving her a second chance, but he just asked her to leave.
00:09:08.000 –> 00:09:10.000
AJ Blythe: Didn’t report her to the police.
00:09:10.000 –> 00:09:14.000
AJ Blythe: So it does give a bit of another angle to the conspiracies about her shoe.
00:09:14.000 –> 00:09:18.000
AJ Blythe: If she spent her life cunning people, could this just be another one?
00:09:18.000 –> 00:09:27.000
Ava Ness: Well, it’s hard to sort of think about anything else because she’s obviously had such an incredible life to have such a
00:09:27.000 –> 00:09:33.000
Ava Ness: reasonably mundane ending, it’s not really something that you can wrap your head around.
00:09:33.000 –> 00:09:34.000
AJ Blythe: No.
00:09:34.000 –> 00:09:43.000
AJ Blythe: Well, the thing is, that once she left that position where she’d forged the checks, she bought a small amount into another sort of financial company.
00:09:43.000 –> 00:09:50.000
AJ Blythe: And it was while she was there, she stole the license number of a colleague or another person.
00:09:50.000 –> 00:09:57.000
AJ Blythe: And it was using that stolen credential that she set up and established the business that she used as her Ponzi scheme.
00:09:57.000 –> 00:10:07.000
AJ Blythe: And the tip off that happened was because through a series of events, this woman discovered that Melissa Caddick had stolen her credentials.
00:10:07.000 –> 00:10:09.000
AJ Blythe: And so she reported it to the police.
00:10:09.000 –> 00:10:15.000
AJ Blythe: And that was the tip off that actually was the catalyst for the whole thing happening in the end.
00:10:15.000 –> 00:10:16.000
Ava Ness: Wow.
00:10:16.000 –> 00:10:17.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, this is amazing.
00:10:17.000 –> 00:10:18.000
AJ Blythe: Yeah.
00:10:18.000 –> 00:10:24.000
AJ Blythe: I mean, and that’s a whole other story about how this woman found out, but isn’t something that is checked because
00:10:24.000 –> 00:10:29.000
AJ Blythe: She didn’t know that her credentials were being used by Melissa Caddick.
00:10:29.000 –> 00:10:39.000
AJ Blythe: And Melissa Caddick had used those credentials for eight years because she established the business in 2012 and it wasn’t until 2020 that this woman found out what she’d been doing all that time.
00:10:39.000 –> 00:10:45.000
AJ Blythe: Since she vanished, they’ve brought in court appointed liquidators and they’ve basically stripped her estate.
00:10:45.000 –> 00:10:48.000
AJ Blythe: So her mansion was sold for nearly $10 million.
00:10:48.000 –> 00:10:50.000
AJ Blythe: Her luxury penthouse was auctioned off.
00:10:50.000 –> 00:10:55.000
AJ Blythe: Her massive jewellery collection fetched over $800,000 at auction.
00:10:55.000 –> 00:11:01.000
AJ Blythe: There was a massive $3.5 million class action court settlement settled against her financial auditors.
00:11:01.000 –> 00:11:08.000
AJ Blythe: Victims have managed to get back about 50 cents on every dollar they lost, but that’s still half of their fortune.
00:11:08.000 –> 00:11:12.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, that’s terrible, particularly when it was their superannuation.
00:11:12.000 –> 00:11:13.000
AJ Blythe: That’s right.
00:11:13.000 –> 00:11:17.000
AJ Blythe: And for the friends and family she betrayed, basically all the answers went over the cliff.
00:11:17.000 –> 00:11:18.000
AJ Blythe: with Melissa.
00:11:18.000 –> 00:11:20.000
AJ Blythe: Imagine doing that to your parents.
00:11:20.000 –> 00:11:35.000
AJ Blythe: One of the things was the reason there was a class action against the auditors is because they were basically incompetent authorities, which is a whole trope, you know, for like the whole cozy genre is based on incompetent authorities.
00:11:35.000 –> 00:11:41.000
AJ Blythe: In the case of a cozy mystery that the police can’t solve the murder, it’s the amateur sleuth has to.
00:11:41.000 –> 00:11:45.000
AJ Blythe: But sadly, it’s actually the case in the Melissa Kaddick story.
00:11:45.000 –> 00:11:47.000
AJ Blythe: It has
00:11:47.000 –> 00:11:52.000
AJ Blythe: an entirely unlicensed financial business under the nose of the major regulators.
00:11:52.000 –> 00:12:03.000
AJ Blythe: They have to have annual audits and external financial auditors completely failed to spot her fraudulent documents and even her stolen credentials for nearly a decade.
00:12:03.000 –> 00:12:05.000
Ava Ness: So she just fooled everybody.
00:12:05.000 –> 00:12:06.000
AJ Blythe: She did. She did.
00:12:07.000 –> 00:12:10.000
AJ Blythe: She managed to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes, including from what
00:12:10.000 –> 00:12:12.000
AJ Blythe: the courts have shown even her husbands.
00:12:12.000 –> 00:12:13.000
Ava Ness: That’s incredible.
00:12:13.000 –> 00:12:18.000
Ava Ness: And it’s quite funny that, I say that, oh, I write cozy mystery because I don’t like gore.
00:12:18.000 –> 00:12:20.000
Ava Ness: And that’s why I tuned down on this mystery.
00:12:20.000 –> 00:12:23.000
Ava Ness: But like, literally all the elements are of a cozy mystery.
00:12:23.000 –> 00:12:24.000
AJ Blythe: Exactly they are.
00:12:24.000 –> 00:12:30.000
AJ Blythe: You’ve got the trope of the bumbling police force, incompetent authority figures.
00:12:30.000 –> 00:12:33.000
AJ Blythe: You’ve got the theft of money.
00:12:33.000 –> 00:12:36.000
AJ Blythe: You’ve got the mystery over the body.
00:12:36.000 –> 00:12:39.000
AJ Blythe: So it’s got all of the tick the box for a cozy.
00:12:39.000 –> 00:12:42.000
Ava Ness: So many people with so many motives.
00:12:42.000 –> 00:12:43.000
AJ Blythe: That’s right.
00:12:43.000 –> 00:12:44.000
AJ Blythe: There is.
00:12:44.000 –> 00:12:48.000
AJ Blythe: You’ve got all the family and friends that she stole from, if any of them became aware of it.
00:12:48.000 –> 00:12:49.000
AJ Blythe: It’s just
00:12:49.000 –> 00:12:51.000
AJ Blythe: the timing, I guess.
00:12:51.000 –> 00:13:00.000
AJ Blythe: Who else knew that the police were going to be arriving because they arrived on one day and it was 5am the next morning that she walked out the front door, never to be seen again.
00:13:00.000 –> 00:13:01.000
Ava Ness: I was going to ask you that.
00:13:01.000 –> 00:13:03.000
Ava Ness: Like, yeah, what happened?
00:13:03.000 –> 00:13:05.000
Ava Ness: They came and they did the raid, but then she was just left there.
00:13:05.000 –> 00:13:08.000
AJ Blythe: They did the raid where they gathered everything.
00:13:08.000 –> 00:13:16.000
AJ Blythe: And apparently when they were like going through the safe and the jewelry, she spent time with them helping explain, because a lot of it was custom made.
00:13:16.000 –> 00:13:19.000
AJ Blythe: She was explaining it, this is mine, this is my husband, this is what it is.
00:13:19.000 –> 00:13:21.000
AJ Blythe: And buying all the jewellery to them.
00:13:21.000 –> 00:13:23.000
Ava Ness: Can you imagine being the police?
00:13:23.000 –> 00:13:28.000
Ava Ness: They must have just been like, what the heck is going on here?
00:13:28.000 –> 00:13:30.000
AJ Blythe: I know, it would have been so surreal.
00:13:30.000 –> 00:13:36.000
AJ Blythe: There are different reports of how she acted during the time they were there and it’s very hard to know what was true.
00:13:36.000 –> 00:13:40.000
AJ Blythe: There were reports that she sat outside, you know, smoking a cigarette while they were inside.
00:13:40.000 –> 00:13:48.000
AJ Blythe: There are other reports and this one’s possibly partially believable because it was somebody who was apparently present at the time.
00:13:48.000 –> 00:13:52.000
AJ Blythe: but they said that she went and had a nap while they were doing it.
00:13:52.000 –> 00:14:02.000
AJ Blythe: The thing that was reported at the inquest was that she exhibited normal behaviour of somebody who’s got an unexpected police raid on their doorstep.
00:14:02.000 –> 00:14:09.000
AJ Blythe: There wasn’t anything surprising or different, embarrassed, surprised they were there, but she didn’t seem to exhibit any anxiety.
00:14:09.000 –> 00:14:10.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, no remorse.
00:14:10.000 –> 00:14:14.000
Ava Ness: I guess that’s true sociopath behaviour, isn’t it?
00:14:14.000 –> 00:14:15.000
AJ Blythe: Yeah, that’s right.
00:14:15.000 –> 00:14:19.000
AJ Blythe: No guilt, no emotional consequence for the actions.
00:14:19.000 –> 00:14:30.000
AJ Blythe: Although if she did commit suicide, which is how the inquest has found it, then I guess there must have been, if not remorse, I guess, not wanting to face that public humiliation, I suppose.
00:14:30.000 –> 00:14:41.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, and again, I think, you know, if it was a book or if it was a movie, you’d probably want to give the reader or the audience a little bit more satisfaction than that.
00:14:41.000 –> 00:14:50.000
Ava Ness: because she had so many schemes throughout her life that she might have had a scheme and then something’s gone wrong and she sort of got her just desserts in the end, might be how you would write it.
00:14:50.000 –> 00:14:51.000
AJ Blythe: Yeah, that’s right.
00:14:51.000 –> 00:14:56.000
AJ Blythe: I don’t think you’d be able to leave it so, well, definitely couldn’t leave it with that big question mark at the end.
00:14:56.000 –> 00:14:58.000
AJ Blythe: You’d have to have some sort of conclusion.
00:14:58.000 –> 00:15:00.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, some sort of justice.
00:15:00.000 –> 00:15:05.000
Ava Ness: Because, you know, the whole thing of justice is such a strong part of crime fiction.
00:15:05.000 –> 00:15:06.000
AJ Blythe: That’s right.
00:15:06.000 –> 00:15:10.000
AJ Blythe: And I mean, you’ve got to look to the husband because
00:15:10.000 –> 00:15:11.000
AJ Blythe: he’s been living this life.
00:15:11.000 –> 00:15:18.000
AJ Blythe: And if he was as ignorant about her fraudulent behavior as the rest of them, then potentially he might have invested his own money in it.
00:15:18.000 –> 00:15:23.000
AJ Blythe: But regardless, everything that he had and that their son had was stripped away.
00:15:23.000 –> 00:15:27.000
AJ Blythe: The housing was sold, the jewelry was sold, everything was taken away from them.
00:15:27.000 –> 00:15:34.000
AJ Blythe: In one foul swoop, she removed his whole life and obviously humiliated, embarrassed him as well.
00:15:34.000 –> 00:15:38.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, You know, I just feel like with the
00:15:38.000 –> 00:15:52.000
Ava Ness: the level of attention the case has had, all the true crime podcasts, diving into things and the police that, if there’d been any involvement from him or anyone else in the family, you would have think they would have found it.
00:15:52.000 –> 00:15:53.000
AJ Blythe: I’m sure that they would have.
00:15:53.000 –> 00:15:58.000
AJ Blythe: And as I said, the final handing down of the…
00:15:58.000 –> 00:16:00.000
AJ Blythe: coronial inquest was only last month.
00:16:00.000 –> 00:16:01.000
Ava Ness: That’s amazing.
00:16:01.000 –> 00:16:03.000
AJ Blythe: So that’s quite a number of years later.
00:16:03.000 –> 00:16:07.000
Ava Ness: Wow, okay, I probably should have been following this a little bit more carefully.
00:16:07.000 –> 00:16:09.000
Ava Ness: But yeah, I’m just not very good with true crime.
00:16:09.000 –> 00:16:17.000
Ava Ness: I think the only true crime podcast I’ve ever listened to is the one on Only Murders in the Building.
00:16:17.000 –> 00:16:19.000
Ava Ness: Maybe I should take a closer look.
00:16:19.000 –> 00:16:20.000
AJ Blythe: Definitely.
00:16:20.000 –> 00:16:22.000
AJ Blythe: I think I always find them fascinating.
00:16:22.000 –> 00:16:31.000
AJ Blythe: But in the case of Melissa Caddick, you know, a calculated exit out of professional catastrophe or the ultimate corporate escape act, we will likely never know.
00:16:31.000 –> 00:16:32.000
Ava Ness: Never know.
00:16:32.000 –> 00:16:34.000
AJ Blythe: So I think we can say case closed.
00:16:34.000 –> 00:16:38.000
Ava Ness: Yes.
00:16:38.000 –> 00:16:53.000
AJ Blythe: This mystery has so many aspects that are echoed in the novels we read, but I think for me the standout is the unreliable narrator because every great mystery fiction story features a character whose word cannot be trusted, you know, throwing the investigator off track.
00:16:53.000 –> 00:16:56.000
AJ Blythe: In this case, the role was filled by Melissa Caddick’s husband.
00:16:56.000 –> 00:16:59.000
AJ Blythe: He waited over 30 hours to report his wife missing.
00:16:59.000 –> 00:17:05.000
AJ Blythe: He was, you know, his evidence was labeled, you know, shifting, conflicting and even unreliable.
00:17:05.000 –> 00:17:12.000
AJ Blythe: And his behaviour forced the detectives and public to question whether he was a clueless bystander or an accomplice keeping a dark secret.
00:17:12.000 –> 00:17:21.000
AJ Blythe: Which then, of course, immediately takes me to the most famous, unreliable narrator story of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
00:17:21.000 –> 00:17:25.000
AJ Blythe: And I think if you’re looking to recent times, it would have to be Gone Gold by Gillian Flynn.
00:17:25.000 –> 00:17:26.000
Ava Ness: Yes, great book.
00:17:26.000 –> 00:17:35.000
AJ Blythe: And then as we’ve already said, there’s the incompetent authorities where the whole cosy mystery genre is based upon the fact that we have the
00:17:35.000 –> 00:17:42.000
AJ Blythe: whole trope of the bumbling police who can’t solve the crime and it’s the amateur sleuth who has to come in and save the day.
00:17:42.000 –> 00:17:43.000
Ava Ness: Absolutely.
00:17:43.000 –> 00:17:55.000
AJ Blythe: There’s one here that I hadn’t heard of but in doing my research for this, I’ve heard of and meant to read when it came out and then kind of forgot about but I’m going to have to come back and revisit it and it’s How to Solve Your Own Murder by Christian Perrin.
00:17:55.000 –> 00:17:56.000
Ava Ness: Oh yes.
00:17:56.000 –> 00:18:03.000
AJ Blythe: And it centers on a woman who spends her entire adult life trying to prevent her own murder after a fortune teller predicts it.
00:18:03.000 –> 00:18:13.000
AJ Blythe: And so when she’s finally killed decades later, the local small town constabulary is thoroughly out of its depth and they treat the highly calculated crime scene with clueless indifference.
00:18:13.000 –> 00:18:20.000
AJ Blythe: So her grand niece steps in to sort through literally a lifetime of compiled files and journals to find the killer.
00:18:20.000 –> 00:18:26.000
AJ Blythe: The victim has spent the whole life keeping records of everything I’m assuming and compiling everything.
00:18:26.000 –> 00:18:31.000
AJ Blythe: because they’re sure that they’re going to be one day get murdered because the fortune teller predicted it.
00:18:31.000 –> 00:18:32.000
Ava Ness: Oh, that’s such a great hook.
00:18:32.000 –> 00:18:33.000
AJ Blythe: I know.
00:18:33.000 –> 00:18:45.000
AJ Blythe: It’s got me intrigued and I remember hearing of it when it was published 2 years ago and then, you know, you just sort of slips out of mind and feel like I’m definitely going to have to get that one and revisit because I think it sounds like my sort of book.
00:18:45.000 –> 00:18:46.000
Ava Ness: Yes.
00:18:46.000 –> 00:18:54.000
AJ Blythe: Another one that I thought sounded intriguing and this one is actually, wouldn’t be historical, it was 1968 is when it’s set in Sydney.
00:18:54.000 –> 00:19:01.000
AJ Blythe: And it’s The Model Murder by Amanda Hampson, which is one of the tea ladies books I haven’t read.
00:19:01.000 –> 00:19:09.000
AJ Blythe: And a popular local man is killed and the police department pins it on his glamorous missing fiance.
00:19:09.000 –> 00:19:13.000
AJ Blythe: So the tea ladies unite to investigate and they find out.
00:19:13.000 –> 00:19:17.000
AJ Blythe: that they have to outmanoeuvre the whole police department to expose the real killer.
00:19:17.000 –> 00:19:26.000
AJ Blythe: So the very classic cozy book there, which is an Australian one and quite a good series if you haven’t read any of those books.
00:19:26.000 –> 00:19:28.000
AJ Blythe: Do you have any that you can think of?
00:19:28.000 –> 00:19:34.000
Ava Ness: So the one that came to mind is related, but perhaps in a different way.
00:19:34.000 –> 00:19:35.000
Ava Ness: And it is a cozy mystery.
00:19:35.000 –> 00:19:40.000
Ava Ness: It’s the first book in Tony Kappa’s Campers and Criminals cozy mystery series.
00:19:40.000 –> 00:19:49.000
Ava Ness: So she has a protagonist called May West and the series starts with May’s husband having gone to jail for a Ponzi scheme.
00:19:49.000 –> 00:19:50.000
AJ Blythe: Perfect.
00:19:50.000 –> 00:19:56.000
Ava Ness: She’s sort of literally given the keys to this camper and that’s all she’s got as a result of everything being confiscated.
00:19:56.000 –> 00:19:58.000
Ava Ness: And she also inherits this campground.
00:19:58.000 –> 00:20:08.000
Ava Ness: So they’re literally the only assets that aren’t taken as part of his criminal undertakings is this camper van in this campground and she
00:20:08.000 –> 00:20:15.000
Ava Ness: moves to the campground and, everybody there hates the husband because he’s run the place into the ground and stolen all their money.
00:20:15.000 –> 00:20:22.000
Ava Ness: And so it’s a real make good story where she has to, turn things around and prove that she didn’t have anything to do with it.
00:20:22.000 –> 00:20:26.000
Ava Ness: But also he turns up dead.
00:20:26.000 –> 00:20:30.000
Ava Ness: And so then she’s at the campground because he’s escaped from jail.
00:20:30.000 –> 00:20:34.000
Ava Ness: And of course, she amongst all the others are the suspects.
00:20:34.000 –> 00:20:36.000
Ava Ness: So it’s just a really fun series.
00:20:36.000 –> 00:20:39.000
Ava Ness: And that’s the premise of it, which is the first book.
00:20:39.000 –> 00:20:43.000
AJ Blythe: I haven’t read that one, so I think I’ll definitely have to add that to my list as well.
00:20:43.000 –> 00:20:47.000
AJ Blythe: Yeah, this podcast might prove quite expensive by the end of it.
00:20:47.000 –> 00:20:49.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, I think it is.
00:20:49.000 –> 00:20:51.000
Ava Ness: Yes.
00:20:51.000 –> 00:21:00.000
AJ Blythe: There’s another one that I had, a wealthy family’s teenage daughter goes missing from a summer camp decades after her older brother vanished from the exact same spot.
00:21:00.000 –> 00:21:04.000
AJ Blythe: And it’s called The God of the Woods by Liz Moore.
00:21:04.000 –> 00:21:06.000
Ava Ness: Oh yes, I know this work.
00:21:06.000 –> 00:21:13.000
AJ Blythe: And the police are under-resourced and heavily compromised by the family’s wealth and political influence.
00:21:13.000 –> 00:21:20.000
AJ Blythe: So it’s a botched and slow moving investigation and it comes down to a female camp counselor who has to bypass
00:21:20.000 –> 00:21:29.000
AJ Blythe: the bureaucracy to track down the mystery of this missing girl herself instead of waiting for the police to not get around to doing it.
00:21:29.000 –> 00:21:39.000
Ava Ness: Yes, anyone who is a Swifty knows the God of the Woods because it is the book that Taylor is listening to in her documentary series, the audio book.
00:21:39.000 –> 00:21:41.000
Ava Ness: She’s listening to it.
00:21:41.000 –> 00:21:43.000
AJ Blythe: There you go.
00:21:43.000 –> 00:21:46.000
AJ Blythe: I’ve missed the Taylor Swift one, but I haven’t missed the God of the Woods.
00:21:46.000 –> 00:21:48.000
Ava Ness: So there you go.
00:21:48.000 –> 00:21:54.000
Ava Ness: She’s listening to the audio book of the God of the Woods in one of the documentary episodes.
00:21:54.000 –> 00:21:57.000
AJ Blythe: Oh, there you go.
00:21:57.000 –> 00:22:03.000
AJ Blythe: that’s great for the author because I’m sure it meant there are a whole heap of Taylor Swift fans who probably then went out and listened.
00:22:03.000 –> 00:22:04.000
Ava Ness: Absolutely.
00:22:04.000 –> 00:22:06.000
Ava Ness: I think it went instantly to #1.
00:22:06.000 –> 00:22:09.000
Ava Ness: I think it was already quite successful before then, to be fair.
00:22:09.000 –> 00:22:12.000
Ava Ness: But yes, it definitely got a massive kick from that.
00:22:12.000 –> 00:22:19.000
Ava Ness: And I have to admit, as soon as you saw her listening to this audio book, I was like zooming in to see what it was.
00:22:19.000 –> 00:22:20.000
Ava Ness: I did go and look it up.
00:22:20.000 –> 00:22:24.000
Ava Ness: It is on my TBR to be listened to.
00:22:24.000 –> 00:22:26.000
AJ Blythe: Do you have any other?
00:22:26.000 –> 00:22:29.000
AJ Blythe: books that you want to raise.
00:22:29.000 –> 00:22:34.000
Ava Ness: Look, I think there’s probably lots that have got different elements of this story in them.
00:22:34.000 –> 00:22:40.000
Ava Ness: Key elements of Cozy Mysteries include so many things from this case.
00:22:40.000 –> 00:22:47.000
Ava Ness: right down to, as we just talked about with Tonya’s book, with the wrong spouse and having to live with the aftermath of what they’ve done.
00:22:47.000 –> 00:22:59.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, but as I said, I think if you’re writing this in fiction, you would really want to see some justice served for the victims and also that the perpetrator got their just desserts.
00:22:59.000 –> 00:23:02.000
Ava Ness: They’re the things that readers would be looking to close the loop.
00:23:02.000 –> 00:23:04.000
Ava Ness: And of course, here we didn’t get that in real life.
00:23:04.000 –> 00:23:09.000
AJ Blythe: No, unfortunately, real life doesn’t give us, you know, the big red bow that we’ve come accustomed to.
00:23:09.000 –> 00:23:13.000
AJ Blythe: with our books, which is quite disappointing because it does leave that mystery open.
00:23:13.000 –> 00:23:17.000
AJ Blythe: And again, that’s why there is so much speculation about what has really happened.
00:23:17.000 –> 00:23:27.000
Ava Ness: Well, particularly with the amount of technology and forensics involved, to still have it as an unsolved mystery, if it was engineered to be that way,
00:23:27.000 –> 00:23:30.000
Ava Ness: then she’s done a spectacular job.
00:23:30.000 –> 00:23:31.000
AJ Blythe: That’s right.
00:23:31.000 –> 00:23:44.000
AJ Blythe: I would say that because modern forensics are so good that I’m assuming that the coroner’s report from the inquest is that yes, it was sadly a suicide and that they were just fortunate enough that they did get
00:23:44.000 –> 00:23:48.000
AJ Blythe: something of her to be able to identify her and everything.
00:23:48.000 –> 00:23:51.000
AJ Blythe: Well, we’ve reached the end of this week’s episode.
00:23:51.000 –> 00:23:57.000
AJ Blythe: Spend the week in the company of a good book and we’ll see you back here for our next case, the Luna Park Ghost Train Fire.
00:23:57.000 –> 00:23:59.000
AJ Blythe: Until then, bye for now.
00:23:59.000 –> 00:24:00.000
Ava Ness: Bye.
00:24:00.000 –> 00:24:03.000
AJ Blythe: Thanks for joining the Down Under Mystery Club.
00:24:03.000 –> 00:24:08.000
AJ Blythe: If you enjoyed the show, follow so you never miss an episode and share it with a fellow mystery lover.
00:24:08.000 –> 00:24:13.000
AJ Blythe: We enjoy hearing from you, so drop us a comment at ajblythe.com/podcast.
00:24:13.000 –> 00:24:16.000
AJ Blythe: Until next time, club adjourned.
Â
