Mystery is A Foot: Melissa Caddick

Red Collar

Catherine Townsend

History, Red Collar, Con Artist, Investigation, American Greed, Society & Culture, Blood Money, Love Detective, White Collar Crime, Catherine Townsend, Hell And Gone, True Crime, Fraud, Murder, Documentary, Red Collar Crime, White Collar, Red Collar Diaries

4.6 • 604 Ratings

🗓️ 18 August 2022

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Months after Australian conwoman Melissa Caddick disappeared, a severed foot washes up on a beach hundreds of miles away. Did Melissa take her own life? Was she murdered? Could she have faked her own death? Investigators try to unravel Melissa's life of sex, lies, and a $23 million dollar fraud.

Transcript

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0:00.0	On Sunday, February 21st, 2022, three teen campers were walking along the coast of Borda Beach in New South Wales, which is in Australia, about 800 miles south of Sydney, when one of them saw a single A6 running shoe lying in the sand.
0:19.7	One of the campers picked it up to throw it away, but when
0:22.8	they tipped it over, they saw something horrifying. There were human bones inside that shoe. That's when
0:29.8	they realized that they were holding someone's foot. The photo was splashed all over TV news,
0:36.2	with the image blurred out so that primetime audiences
0:39.2	couldn't see the gore. But it became a massive news story because this was no ordinary shoe.
0:46.8	The shoe retailed for over $200 and police found out that it had been special ordered from Israel.
0:53.5	Immediately, investigators had their
0:55.5	suspicions about who it could be. The remains belonged to 49-year-old Melissa Caddick. She had gone
1:02.2	missing three months earlier under very mysterious circumstances, and the shoe washed up 250 miles
1:09.9	away from where she was last seen. Investigators figured out that the shoe washed up 250 miles away from where she was last seen.
1:12.5	Investigators figured out that the shoe was a match to Melissa after they did DNA testing
1:17.6	on one of her toothbrushes. Everyone in Australia knew about Melissa Caddick.
1:22.9	She was referred to as Australia's biggest conwoman ever. On November 11, 2021, her $15 million
1:30.5	mansion in Dover Heights, which is one of Sydney's wealthiest neighborhoods, was rated by
1:35.6	the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, or ASIC for short. So what happened to Melissa
1:42.5	Katik? As the rumors and the conspiracy theories started to spread,
1:47.3	this became one of the highest profile missing persons cases ever in Australia. It's also one of
1:53.9	the wildest stories of a con artist that I've ever covered. Did Melissa leap off a cliff and die by
2:00.0	suicide? Was she murdered? Did she fake her
2:03.2	own death, have plastic surgery, and then cut off her own foot and run to the other side of the
2:08.2	globe? The mystery continues to this day. I'm Catherine Townsend. This is Blood Money.
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