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LARRIMAH,
Australia — Dusk was falling on the sweltering hot day of Dec. 16, 2017,
when Paddy Moriarty went to the Pink Panther, the only hotel and bar in
this tiny, dusty town, to end the day with his usual round of drinks.
He
downed eight beers, typical for Mr. Moriarty, a laborer who spent most
of his life in Australia’s rugged outback. Then he left for home with
his dog by his side.
He was never seen again. Neither was his dog, a kelpie named Kellie.
Four
days later, when the police arrived in Larrimah, a Northern Territory
town of just 11 people, they entered Mr. Moriarty’s unlocked house to
find a cowboy hat on a cooler box and a barbecue chicken still in the
microwave.
The authorities suspect foul play and have been treating the case as a
homicide, with every single person in Larrimah — all 11 of them — being
probed for clues.
Topping the list of potential suspects now — at least going by the
questioning in a recent inquest involving the town’s residents — are a
former Pink Panther bartender, who was one of the last people to see the
missing man, and a gardener, with whom Mr. Moriarty had fought just
days before his disappearance. Detectives have also questioned the owner
of a roadside tea house, leading to morbid jokes about the filling in
her meat pies.
But with no clear evidence or even a
motive for Mr. Moriarty’s disappearance, every one of Larrimah’s 11
residents is in one way or another part of the investigation — with each
pointing a finger at a neighbor or two, while denying their own
involvement in what has become the latest mystery to capture Australia’s
imagination.
I went to Larrimah
during a critical stage of the investigation to find out where the case
might be heading, and what it’s like to live in a small town with murder
on its mind.
An Outback Mystery
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Larrimah is about the size of a city block and surrounded by head-high, impenetrable thick scrub.
Red
dirt tracks are everywhere, and the main road through town has long
been notorious for murders and mysterious disappearances, including a
British backpacker who vanished 17 years ago. It’s a pit stop for
exhausted tourists driving north to south, but it is also a place where
Aboriginal Australians, even today, refuse to live because they say it
is haunted.
There are only two
gathering places for residents and visitors, the Pink Panther and Fran’s
Devonshire Tea House. I started with the former, a musty pub and hotel
where Mr. Moriarty, 70, was last seen.
“Paddy
used to be here nearly every day, I miss him so much,” said one of Mr.
Moriarty’s closest friends, Barry Sharpe, 76, the publican of the Pink
Panther.
Behind him, out a nearby window, I could see a sugar glider, a small possum, clinging to a cage.
Mr.
Sharpe told me his passion is nurturing the exotic animals he keeps
behind the bright pink hotel, which he has owned for almost 15 years.
The
mix includes rare and exotic birds, snakes and a hulking saltwater
crocodile named Sam, to whom some suspect Mr. Moriarty was fed after
being murdered.
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All Mr. Sharpe said he knew about the disappearance was that his friend
did not show up for “church,” a Sunday morning ritual in which residents
gather in the Pink Panther’s front room to watch “Landline,” the
nation’s premier rural affairs program. It was then that locals sounded
the alarm.
A three-day
search by foot, on four-wheel-drives and from the air ruled out death by
misadventure. To date, the police have found no trace of Mr. Moriarty
or his dog.
One of the last people to
see Mr. Moriarty was Richard Simpson, the one-time bartender at the
Pink Panther, who has a reputation for volatility.
“He
was every day drunk before lunch,” Mr. Sharpe said of Mr. Simpson, his
former employee. “Not only smashed, but not very pleasant.”
Mr.
Simpson scoffed at similar accusations when asked about them during the
coroner’s inquest, a public hearing in which witnesses are questioned
in open court. Upon being told that some people in Larrimah thought he
had something to do with the disappearance, Mr. Simpson declared them
all “goddamn fools.”
Mr. Simpson instead suggested that the police should be looking elsewhere — down the main road at the Tea House.
The next day, that’s where I went.
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“I’ve got no pies left,” a short woman with spiked blonde hair shrieked
from the kitchen. A row of RVs lined up outside as patrons spilled out
to buy tea and pies, despite online reviews warning of “rubbish food”
and questionable prices.
The cook, Fran
Hodgetts, 75, has long prided herself on her scones and meat pies. She
often tells visitors they are famous around the world.
Now, though, they are renowned for all the wrong reasons.
“I
reckon he’s in the pie,” joked Robyn Duignan, a visitor from Victoria
who had been following Mr. Moriarty’s case in the news media and stopped
by to see if there had been any developments.
“He
went through the mincer,” Ms. Duignan added from the Tea House’s
garden, a yard scattered with old toys and signs trumpeting Ms.
Hodgetts’s culinary expertise. (I tried the scones but not the meat
pies: The New York Times cannot confirm their contents.)
Mr.
Moriarty and Ms. Hodgetts were neighbors who often clashed, the police
said. He lived directly across the main road from the Tea House, and
several people in town said it had annoyed him when her customers parked
on his property.
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As
payback, residents said, Mr. Moriarty routinely told them not to eat
her food because nothing was homemade or fresh, adding that even his dog
would not eat her pies.
If
Mr. Moriarty had enemies, he also had allies: Years ago, when Mr.
Sharpe, the publican from the Pink Panther, decided his crocodile Sam
was not enough of an attraction, he started selling his own meat pies.
Mr. Moriarty advertised those pies in front of his house with a massive
sign that read: “Larrimah Hotel Best Pies in Town.”
Ms.
Hodgetts told investigators that Mr. Moriarty regularly taunted her. He
often called her “the bush pig,” a name that caught on with some of her
neighbors. Last year, it got serious enough for her to seek an order of
protection, but a local court rejected her request.
She
said she last saw Mr. Moriarty four days before he went missing, when
she accused him of putting a dead kangaroo near her house.
That history of acrimony led some locals to tell the police she wanted him dead — an allegation she denies.
“Imagine
me carrying a dog and a body, I mean come on,” Ms. Hodgetts said at the
inquest in June. “I’ve had me septic done, me incinerators searched, me
house done four times,” she added, referring to a police search of her
property. “Nobody found anything.”
The Scene in Court
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The testimony from Ms. Hodgetts, sitting on the stand in a tiny
courtroom in the nearby town of Katherine, was part of an investigation
by the Northern Territory coroner, a special magistrate assigned to
determine the cause and manner of Mr. Moriarty’s death.
Local
authorities said they are so reliant on the residents to solve the case
that they held the inquest much earlier than they normally do in part
because most of the residents are in their 70s and might not have years
to wait.
The hearing, which I
attended, included testimony from most of Larrimah’s residents. They all
provided nervous answers to probing questions in a stuffy room filled
with several dozen observers, including a few nosy tourists.
Early
on, the focus fell on Ms. Hodgetts. Bobby Roth, a Larrimah local of 19
years, who used to wash dishes at the Tea House, said the cafe owner
didn’t like Mr. Moriarty.
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“She used to say, ‘I’ll kill Paddy,’” Ms. Roth said at one point, breaking into tears.
But
during her own testimony, Ms. Hodgetts ended up shifting attention to
her gardener, Owen Laurie, 71, a tall, burly man who was known for
keeping to himself, and for taking good care of the Tea House plants.
The
questioning centered on an argument that he and Mr. Moriarty had about
Kellie, Mr. Moriarty’s dog, three days before they disappeared.
That
day, Kellie had been barking at the Tea House from a spot in the middle
of the road. An argument between Mr. Moriarty and Mr. Laurie ensued,
according to testimony, with Mr. Laurie shouting at Mr. Moriarty to shut
the dog up “or I’ll shut it up for you.”
Ms. Hodgetts went a step further, telling the court that Mr. Laurie attempted to “jump the fence.”
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“I told him ‘don’t do anything stupid,’” Ms. Hodgetts said.
Mr.
Laurie admitted to having a bad temper, but he denied any involvement,
turning the court’s attention back to where Mr. Moriarty was last seen:
The Pink Panther.
Mr. Simpson no
longer works at the pub. Mr. Sharpe said he was fired a week before the
coroner’s inquest — a few days before I arrived to find his room there a
mess of dirty clothes and empty beer cans.
He
appeared to have moved on and has since been replaced by someone else,
keeping Larrimah’s population steady at 11. It used to be 12.
Around the bar, patrons still talk about Mr. Moriarty’s disappearance.
“Church”
on Sundays has resumed, but without the charm Mr. Moriarty used to
bring to it. Because he had no family in Australia, the public trustee
now controls his property. To keep an eye on anything that might look
suspicious, his home has been fitted with security cameras, and it’s
flanked by a large missing person sign.
It includes a picture of Mr. Moriarty, smiling, with a question many in town are still asking: “What happened to Paddy?”
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Tags
Supernatural