A coronial inquest has heard that the husband of the missing Sydney fraudster Melissa Caddick was “too busy working” at home to come to the police station.
www.smh.com.au
Paraphrased:
AK said he was "too busy working" at home to come into the police station after reporting MC was missing
The police officer found Koletti's behaviour "extremely strange & unusual"
Detective Sergeant Trent Riley spoke to AK after being alerted by to concerns by a junior officer who had answered AK's first call to report MC missing.
AK said his wife had been missing for 2 days but couldn''t come in to be interviewed beacuse " he had too much work on that day"
DS Riley later spoke toi AK & he said that his wife “was in good spirits the last time he saw her” and that he couldn’t understand why she would be missing.
AK failed to mention the raid the previous day, instead telling Riley that a “male colleague of Caddick’s was also missing.”
When asked why he didn't report MC missing the previous day , he said he didn't think she was missing, but than said he spend the previous day searching cliffs for her.
Riley told his colleague that AK's story “seems to be chopping and changing.”
Earlier in the day Detective Sergeant Michael Kyneur ( initial officer in charge) was grilled about deficiences in the early days of the investigation
In a recorded interview 12 days later was asked by Kyneur, why he thought his wife hadn’t contacted him. Koletti replied that there was “no need.” “Do you think she wants to deal with this shitstorm I’m dealing with?” Koletti said.
Kyneur didn't bother to obtain a 93 page affidavit that ASIC had given to the court in realtions to MC's crimes, saying that the police weren't investigating a fraud, but were investigating a missing person.
“Didn’t you think it was important to find out all that you could about Caddick?” asked Louise Coleman, junior counsel assisting the inquest.
Kyneur replied that in the early days he was concentrating on the belief she had self-harmed.
Asked whether he considered whether Koletti might have been an accomplice to his wife’s Ponzi scheme, Kyneur said “I didn’t turn my mind to the fraud in the early days.”
Within days police has compiled a risk assessment, which listed 3 scenarios: that she had been injured or killed possibly by her husband, that she had fled, or she had killed herself in the face of the ASIC investigation.
Sergeant Riley has raised suspicions about AK saying he was “sweating profusely” and was evasive, vague and inconsistent in his answers.
Kyneur had discounted the first scenario, & did not notify the homicide squad as there was no evidence a murder had taken place at Caddick's Dover Heights home.
Questioned about why he didn’t press Koletti over the inconsistencies in his various accounts to police, Kyneur said that he took into account Koletti’s stress about his wife’s disappearance. “It was obvious to me that he was flustered. He was all over the place,” he said.
Video in link of AK's interview ( 4min & 48 secs )
