Murder in Larrimah

The curious investigation into the disappearance of Paddy Moriarty and his kelpie Kellie in a tiny Northern Territory 12-person community.

- KYLIE STEVENSON and CAROLINE GRAHAM

It was late on Sunday afternoon in 2018 when we first rolled into the dying town in the middle of the Northern Territory. The sun’s arc had settled into a spectacular orange over the bush but the temperature still hovered around 35 degrees. There was no one around as we pulled up next to a giant Pink Panther lazing in a deckchair beside a five-meter tall concrete statue of a beer bottle.

This is Larrimah: a tiny town perched on the edge of the Stuart Highway, about 500km south of Darwin. It’s what they call Never Never country, a harsh, scrubby landscape full of wild donkeys, death adders and the occasional sinkhole.

Our accommodation, the Larrimah Hotel, also known as The Pink Panther, looked like it had been plucked from the collective Australian imagination: a rusting tin roof topped a wide verandah and the building was painted bright pink. Inside, every wall was covered with quirky signs. War relics and more Pink Panthers battled for shelf space around the main bar, which claimed to be the highest in the Northern Territory. Out the back was a maze of aviaries and enclosures filled with emus, crocodiles, wallabies, snakes, squirrel gliders and hundreds of birds.

When the bartender, Richard Simpson, showed us to our room, he stopped by a small pond to introduce us to a croc with no eyes called Ray Ray. His enclosure was about five steps from our pink room.