Paddy Moriarty inquest: Larrimah local told 'don't do anything stupid' after argument
Updated
Fran Hodgetts, owner of the Larrimah tea house, has told an inquest into the disappearance of Paddy Moriarty that she told a companion "not to do anything stupid" after he had an argument with Mr Moriarty days before his disappearance.
Mr Moriarty, 70, was last seen leaving the local pub on December 16, 2017.
Yesterday, an inquest into his suspected death heard Mr Moriarty was a happy-go-lucky man but he had an ongoing dispute with Ms Hodgetts, whose tea house was across from Mr Moriarty's property on the Stuart Highway.
Witnesses told yesterday's hearing the pair detested each other, and would frequently hurl abuse at one another.
Today she told the inquest the pair had been "neighbourly", but things turned sour when Mr Moriarty stole her sun umbrella in 2010, although police did not find evidence that this happened.
'He was angry'
Ms Hodgetts said Mr Moriarty then began to scare her customers away from the tea house.
"He started abusing my customers," she said.
"Threatening tourists and scaring them away from [my] business."
Ms Hodgetts testified that "she'd been to hell and back" over the next 10 years, with a series of accusations of property damage and theft.
"I've never abused him and I've done nothing for what he did to me," she told the inquest.
"Years ago I went crook at him, once," Ms Hodgetts added.
Four days before Mr Moriarty's disappearance, Ms Hodgetts accused him of dragging a dead kangaroo over to her property.
The following day, the inquest heard her companion, Owen Laurie, got into an argument with Mr Moriarty over their dogs.
"I told him 'don't do anything stupid'," Ms Hodgetts told the inquest.
"Yeah he was angry, because of the things that have happened in the past."
She told the court Mr Laurie had said "there's going to be trouble" on the day of the argument about the dogs.
"And I said, 'don't do anything stupid … I don't want to come back and see you in jail'," she said.
Mr Laurie has denied the argument was aggressive on either side
"I wasn't angry or aggressive about it," he told the inquest.
The inquest was told Mr Moriarty was a creature of habit, and when he did not turn up at the pub one day, and his home appeared as though he had never left it, virtually everybody in the community thought something was amiss.
An extensive search has failed to uncover any sign of Mr Moriarty's whereabouts, or that of his dog.
Almost the entire population of Larrimah, which has around 12 residents, were called as witnesses at the inquest.
The inquest continues.
Topics: missing-person, community-and-society, police, law-crime-and-justice, katherine-0850
First posted
