New Underbelly series tries to fill the gaps in Melissa Caddick’s story, but raises more questions

The one thing you might know about the Melissa Caddick story is that we don’t really know much about the Melissa Caddick story.

At least, not about what happened after she walked out of her $6.2 million Dover Heights home early on the morning of November 12, 2020.

How much do we really know about Melissa Caddick? The missing woman is played by Kate Atkinson, pictured, in the new Underbelly.Credit: Tony Mott

And that’s where Underbelly: Vanishing Act, a new two-part series airing on Nine (which publishes this masthead), aims to fill in the gaps: agreed facts blend with pure speculation to create a wild – and at times quite wacky – whodunnit.

The unlicensed financial adviser vanished amid an investigation into a Ponzi scheme she ran for over a decade, during which she defrauded dozens of friends, family members and business associates out of tens of millions of dollars.

Around four months after the scheme was exposed, her heavily decomposed foot washed up on Bournda Beach on the NSW South Coast, some 400 kilometres from where she was last seen.

Speculation and conspiracy theories about Caddick’s fate exploded following the gruesome discovery, with some suggesting she’d taken her own life to avoid the investigation’s fallout. Other theories posited that something far more sinister was at play, and some have even gone so far as to suggest Caddick cut off her foot to throw police and Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) investigators off her scent.

Melissa Caddick.

After DNA from Caddick’s toothbrush and family samples was matched to that of the foot, she was presumed dead – but the fact is, we may never know Melissa Caddick’s fate. For all the eyes trained on her, her story remains largely unknowable.

On the surface, it’s a story perfectly made for the long-running Underbelly franchise, which has traversed shadowy Australian stories from Melbourne’s gangland wars, to the King’s Cross nightclub scene, and notorious criminals like Mark “Chopper” Read.

Starring Wentworth’s Kate Atkinson as Caddick, the franchise’s latest instalment, Vanishing Act, attempts to plug the sometimes gaping holes in her story. From the get-go, Caddick is both subject and narrator and Vanishing Act attempts to draw out the motivations for her years-long fraud via an omnipresent voiceover.

What emerges is a picture of a woman obsessed with value – of clothes, homes, cars and lavish international holidays.

Coin Friels, right, plays invented character George alongside Atkinson’s Caddick. Credit: Tony Mott

The final days of her run as part of the eastern suburbs’ elite is interspersed with flashbacks to her first (seemingly unhappy) marriage and her days as a budding fraudster.

It also casts the narrative net wide, weaving in even the most far-fetched conspiracy theories about how she might have come undone, introducing a chainsaw-wielding crime figure in the form of Colin Friels’ George.

“The biggest challenge is to not feel pressured to give the audience what they want or who they think they know she is — none of us know,” Atkinson has said. “And this is not a truth telling, this is not a documentary.”

Underbelly: Vanishing Act, then, is about entertaining ideas – of who Caddick was and what her fate might have been.

It’s also Australia’s first real foray into the booming scam culture genre – think shows like The Dropout, Inventing Anna, The Tinder Swindler, or Bad Vegan. By its very nature, it’s a highly speculative field, given the reluctance of its subjects to participate in the ever-increasing number of documentaries, podcasts, and think pieces about their crimes.

And while Vanishing Act is up front about its use of creative licence, it – unlike some of the other scam shows – doesn’t really hold a mirror up to forces that enabled Caddick or help us understand what her sprawling deception says about us.

What really sets the latest Underbelly offering apart from blockbusters is resolution – or, rather, a lack of one.

In one way or another, we know how the stories of Elizabeth Holmes, Anna Sorokin (aka Anna Delvey), Shimon Hayut (aka Simon Leviev) and Sarma Melngailis end. That’s not to say they’ve been brought to justice for their crimes but their chapters are, at least for now, closed. With resolution comes space to question how such events unfold.

But when it comes to Melissa Caddick, questions and theories are all we really have. And so when a series like Underbelly: Vanishing Act jumps to imaging what might have happened without advancing the conversation, the gaps it attempts to fill are torn ever wider.

Underbelly: Vanishing Act continues Monday on Nine at 9pm, and is on 9Now.

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