Inquest over, but Paddy Moriarty mystery is still a long way from closure

Writers Caroline Graham, left, and Kylie Stevenson, who have been investigating 70-year-old Paddy Moriarty’s disappearance from Larrimah in the Northern Territory. Picture: Rebecca Booth/The Australian

At this point, we don’t think anything can surprise us.

We’ve spent four years investigating the suspicious disappearance of Paddy Moriarty from the tiny town of Larrimah, 500km south of Darwin.

The case has captured international attention – it has been called an “outback Agatha Christie”, but to us it has always had the feel of an abandoned ship mystery. There’s something eerily Mary Celeste about it.

On December 16, 2017, Paddy and his dog Kellie left their local pub – the Pink Panther – and drove the 800m home by quad bike. They must have arrived because Paddy’s hat, wallet and keys were on the table, next to his dinner – ready to be heated up. The kitchen fan was on. Kellie’s food was half-eaten in the dog bowl. Nothing was out of place. But Paddy and Kellie haven’t been seen since.

While we were writing a book about the case, somehow Paddy’s story became entwined with the story of the outback – a place where even the strangest things often turn out to be true.

Across four years, we met a cockatoo with chlamydia and a man who cooked a cane toad curry. We saw 13 death adders in a jar. And even after publication, wild tales kept coming – like the one about a woman who’d successfully performed CPR on a family of baby pythons and another who saw a horse disappear into a sinkhole.

So when we take seats at the inquest into Paddy’s likely death, we don’t think anything could shock us. For a while, we are right.

One witness says he overheard a conversation between a friend and then Larrimah resident Fran Hodgetts, in which she offered him $10,000 to “get rid of” Paddy, but we’ve heard this is kind of thing before.

When Hodgetts appears via videolink from Melbourne, where she now lives, she denies it, anyway. Hodgetts, who once ran the country’s most remote Devonshire tea house, had a long-running feud with Paddy, who lived over the road. They’d been fighting for around a decade. Through the years, Hodgetts accused him of stealing her property and repeatedly poisoning her plants.

But then Paddy’s other former neighbour takes the stand.

Paddy Moriarty lived in Larrimah.

Owen Laurie is in his 70s and from about August 2017 he was employed as Hodgetts’ live-in gardener. The inquest has already heard that days before Paddy disappeared, he and Laurie had an argument and that on the night Paddy went missing, Laurie made two phone calls from the phone booth out the front of his place around the same time Paddy would have returned from the pub.

Laurie has also admitted to the inquest that he once said if anyone poisoned his plants “it will be the first murder in Larrimah” but claims it was said in jest.

Then comes a bombshell. The court begins playing tape recordings made in Laurie’s bungalow after police received a warrant to plant listening devices there.

“F..k’n idiots, yeah, tell em what I’ve done hit with the fucking hammer,” a voice says in one recording. “Well they didn’t f..k’n find the hammer, well they can’t get me for anything.”

Laurie says that’s not him on the tape. Then he falls silent, exercising his right to not speak. The recordings continue.

“I got a slobbery bunch of coconuts, they’re rolling in the bay, rolling, rolling in the bay. I killerated old Paddy with that f..k’n killerated him. I struck on the fuck’n head and killerated him.”

We watch Laurie’s face. We watch Paddy’s friends Mark and Karen Rayner, seated in front of us, watching his face. And we all listen.

The last known photo of Patrick 'Paddy' Moriarty at the Larrimah Hotel on the day he was last seen. Picture: NT Police

“F..k’n killer bastard. You killed f..k’n Paddy up the bum. You f..k’n killed Paddy, doonged him on the head … Smacked him on the f..ken nostrils … with me claw hammer.”

There are eight tapes. They include singing, guitar playing, yodelling, a ballad. One sounds like a sea shanty.

The words are difficult to decipher and often require clarification from the police transcript.

Once the tapes run out, coroner Greg Cavanagh dismisses Laurie and he slowly exits the courtroom, his white New Balance sneakers bright against the worn blue carpet.

The next day, Cavanagh hands down his findings: Paddy and Kellie are certainly dead, he tells the court.

“In my opinion Paddy was killed in the context of and likely due to the ongoing feud he had with his nearest neighbours,” Cav­anagh says. “He likely died on the evening of 16 December 2017.”

Cavanagh says after Paddy arrived home that night, he went outside with his dog.

“There is no evidence as to where he went, however it is likely that the new plants at Fran’s place were of some attraction. The feud with Fran Hodgetts had been escalating.”

The powers of an inquest are limited. Its purpose is to determine the cause and manner of death. Now the coroner will refer the matter to the Police Commissioner and Director of Public Prosecutions for action or investigation.

Later Rayner tells us she hopes this is a step towards justice for their friend, but the findings are still a long way from providing closure.

Gardener Owen Laurie outside Katherine Court House.

If anything, it raises more questions – and questions that are more awful – than it answers.

At the beginning of this week’s hearings, the police officer in charge, Detective Sergeant Matt Allen, had presented a 3D video to help the court understand the geo­graphy of Larrimah. It included drone shots, situating the town on the precipice of the surrounding great Australian nothingness.

Then the drone zoomed in on the old service station where Paddy lived.

The film was silent and so was the court, except for Allen’s narration.

“That’s Paddy’s bedroom,” he’d said. “His bed … That’s a baseball bat that’s under his bed.

“You can see everything had its place.”

It was like watching a ghost house – the spectre of a life reduced to 7½ minutes on a courtroom screen.

But someone had lived here once. He had a life. He was loved. And he isn’t here any more.

“For us who had the privilege of knowing Paddy, we saw the caring, giving, honest and genuine person he was,” Rayner tells us.

“He didn’t seem to leave too many footprints on this earth but he definitely left a footprint on our hearts. It was a pleasure to have laughed with him and to hear the yarns he spun about his life. We will miss him always.”