The story of Melissa Caddick still has the nation in a chokehold, particularly off the back of the two-part Underbelly series dedicated to the fraudster.
As many would recall, Caddick was accused of swindling clients out of $23 million and using the stolen money to fund her lavish lifestyle. On the 10th November 2020, ASIC froze Melissa’s accounts and properties, preventing her from leaving the country. The next day, ASIC officers raid her Dover Heights home, taking her designer clothes, shoes and jewellery. This was also the last day Melissa was seen alive.
On the morning of the 12th November, Melissa allegedly has left home without her wallet, keys and phone. She then misses the 4pm deadline to surrender her passport to police. By the 13th November she has been reported missing by her husband, and on the 21st February, campers find a decomposing foot on the shoreline south of Tathra, on the NSW South Coast. A few day’s later, DNA analysis confirms the foot to be Melissa Caddick’s.
After the foot washed ashore, many were quick to speculate the possibility that the scammer had faked her own death by amputating her foot and fleeing the country. Others believed she had taken her own life in an attempt to avoid prosecution for her crimes. To this day, nobody for certainty what her exact fate was.
Now, the entire debacle is being revisited, courtesy of the Liar Liar: Melissa Caddick and the Missing Millions podcast. In it, experts attempt to debunk the theory that Caddick severed her own foot, instead suggesting the possibility that it detached from her body before washing ashore.
Moninya Roughan, a professor of oceanography at the University of NSW, appeared on the podcast to argue that it was entirely possible for the shoe to be swept the 400km south by ocean currents.
In a bizarre coincidence, Roughan and her team conducted an experiment just two days before Caddick’s disappearance which tracked how far biodegradable drifters would travel in the ocean.
Satellite tracking devices were attached to the drifters, which were roughly the same size as a shoe, before they were dropped into the sea at Port Stephens, about 150km north of Sydney. The first washed up a month later in Jervis Bay, 250km south of its starting point, while the second was swept down to Wollongong. The last was found on a beach slightly north of the launch position.
“Having looked at the ocean circulation that occurred through November through February, and having looked at the drifters that we deployed at the same time, the possibility of Caddick’s shoe washing up so far south is well within the realm of possibility,” Professor Roughan stated on the podcast.
Widely-respected scientific journalist Erika Engelhaupt also dismissed the idea Caddick had amputated her foot, arguing that the anatomy of the human foot made it borderline ‘impossible.’
“The complicated arrangement of bones at the top of the foot and the ankle… makes it almost impossible to get a clean slice without cutting through bone,” she told the podcast.
Matthew Orde, a forensic pathologist with the University of British Columbia, said that the unique design of modern running shoes has been pivotal in the discovery of detached feet washed ashore. In fact, the Canadian province has reported the discovery at least 21 feet washed up from the water since 2007.
“Over the recent years, they have become more and more advanced in their design and construction, and many of them contain pockets of air filter bubbles in the soles, which make the shoe more buoyant,” Orde told the podcast, speaking to the likelihood of the shoe travelling a large distance.
Several experts have argued for the likelihood of Caddick severing her own foot, which has only added fuel to the contentious fire. Dr Paolo Magni from Murdoch University spoke to The Daily Telegraph in 2021, where he questioned the lack of barnacles found on the shoe, particularly given the warm weather Australia had been experiencing at the time.
As it currently stands, we still do not know what happened to Melissa Caddick that day.
An inquest into Caddick’s disappearance and suspected death will be held in September.
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