An investigator overseeing the disappearance of Melissa Caddick said her husband’s reporting raised alarm bells and he could have assisted the fraudster in hiding.

The other dominant theory eastern suburbs crime manager Detective Inspector Gretchen Atkins was also told by the officer in charge was that Ms Caddick had self-harmed due to the pending investigation into her million-dollar fraud.

“(Detective Sergeant Michael Kyneur’s) number one theory was she had voluntarily gone missing and was potentially being assisted by (Anthony) Koletti,” she said.

“Does that amount to an offence on Mr Koletti’s part?” Jason Downing SC, counsel assisting the coroner, asked Det Insp Atkins on Thursday.

“(I) had not turned my mind to that,” she said.

But three days after Ms Caddick was reported missing nothing gathered in the police investigation pointed to murder by Mr Koletti.

“There’d been searches at the house, there’d been conversations with Mr Koletti … there was no evidence of homicide,” Det Insp Atkins said.

“If there had been anything we would have absolutely notified the homicide squad.

“The other real possibility is she had taken her own life.”

Det Insp Atkins said alarm bells included the long delay in reporting and no subsequent sighting of Ms Caddick.

Mr Downing revealed that Ms Caddick had a life insurance policy covering suicide.

But this discovery did not change the course of the investigation, Detective Sergeant Steven Morgan said.

Det Sgt Morgan was brought on as a consultant into the suspicious circumstances surrounding the conwoman’s disappearance in March 2021.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission and Australian Federal Police raided Ms Caddick’s Dover Heights mansion on November 11, 2021. This is the last verified sighting of her.

In February 2021 her decomposing foot encased in a shoe washed ashore at Bournda Beach on the NSW south coast.

Subsequent experiments put forward pig carcasses wearing running shoes on their trotters fitted with trackers tossed into the ocean to ascertain sharks’ behaviour.

Det Sgt Morgan is unaware whether this was ever conducted. However, he did speak with a “shark expert” from NSW Department of Primary Industries.

“(He had) some doubt regarding the length of time that a foot had been in the water,” Det Sgt Morgan said on Wednesday.

He was also told of some concerns regarding the initial police search that no CCTV footage had been collected or adequately reviewed promptly, nor had a land search been co-ordinated in the early stages.

The inquest before Deputy State Coroner Elizabeth Ryan continues.

– AAP