An Irishman who vanished in the Australian Outback was likely killed because of a neighbourhood feud, an inquest in the Northern Territory has concluded.
Paddy Moriarty grew up in Limerick but had lived in Australia since the 1960s before he and his dog were reported as missing in 2017.
He had settled in the remote town of Larrimah - a tiny place of only 12 people but notable for the ferocity of the grudges neighbours hold against each other.
Local journalist Kylie Stevenson met Paddy before he vanished and was so intrigued by the circumstances of his disappearance that she co-authored a book about it, Larrimah: A missing man, an eyeless croc and an outback town of 11 people who mostly hate each other.
“[Larrimah] is quite a remote place,” Ms Stevenson explained to The Anton Savage Show.
“It’s a very small place at the time he was living there… around 12 people was the entire population of the town.
“On 16th December 2017 he went and did his usual evening routine, he went over to the Larrimah Hotel - the pub - and had a few beers.
“Had a bit of a chat to people, then he jumped on his quad bike with dog, Kelly; they rode 800 metres up the highway back over to their place and he hasn’t been seen since.”
Theories about the cause of his disappearance included that he had fallen into a sinkhole or died from a medical condition. However, the inquest has since concluded what many suspected all along - Paddy was likely murdered by his neighbours.
“Larrimah is quite an unusual town - not only in its size but also the fact that for a very long time all the people living there haven’t gotten along all that well.
“And Paddy was a part of that. He and his closest neighbour, a woman named Fran Hodgetts who ran a small teahouse on the highway there, she and him had been fighting for about a decade I think.
“She accused him of stealing property from her, of poisoning her plants, of doing various things and it had kind of escalated over the years to her calling the police to there being an attempt at getting a court order for him to stay away from her.
“And she was giving it back to him as well.
“So one of the things that would often happen was, there is roadkill on the highway there and Paddy would pick up a dead kangaroo and throw it over Fran’s fence, then she might grab it and throw it back over his fence.
“And that kind of thing was happening quite a lot.”
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Ms Hodgetts told the inquest she had nothing to do with Paddy’s disappearance.
However, Ms Hodgetts was not the only Larrimah resident who was investigated:
“Another man who lived in Larrimah, who was Fran Hodgetts’ gardener, he lived across the road from Paddy also,” Ms Stevenson continued.
“He had been taped by police, they’d received a warrant to put a listening device into his home and they had recorded him and they played eight of those recordings to the court and in those a voice can be heard sort of singing about killing Paddy and hitting him with a hammer.”
The neighbour, Owen Laurie, said the voice in the tapes was not his and denied involvement in Paddy’s disappearance.
@Caro_e_graham and I have spent 3 years writing Larrimah: an investigation into the disappearance of Paddy Moriarty, a tribute to a dying town, and a love letter to the outback. Plus a lot of good goanna anecdotes. Out Sept 28, pre-order: https://t.co/msLUlIeTmZ @AllenAndUnwin pic.twitter.com/1bJDbpOmKf
— Kylie Stevenson (@KylieMStevenson) August 27, 2021
Ms Stevenson is not sure whether there will ever be a successful conviction.
“It’s a bit strange that police have had these recordings,” she said.
“They were made in the six months following Paddy’s disappearance, so they’ve sat on them for quite some time… It’s a bit unusual and we’re not sure why they’ve done that.
“But we’re hoping that there will be some news on that soon.”
Main image: Larrimah Hotel, The Stuart Highway, Northern Territory, Australia.
