Mark Caleo has been arrested and charged with the double murders of his Malaysian wife, Rita Caleo (left) and her brother Dr Michael Chye (right), both the children of Sarawak's former CID chief Peter Chye.
KUALA LUMPUR: In 1990, Malaysian Rita Caleo died after sustaining 23 stab wounds while she was in the bathroom of her luxury home in Sydney, Australia.
Rita was the daughter of former Sarawak CID chief Peter Chye.
The tragedy struck less than a year after her brother, Dr Michael Chye, was murdered in 1989, also in Australia.
The high-profile cases were unsolved until Rita’s brother-in-law Gerard Caleo was arrested at Sydney International Airport in August last year after flying in from Kuala Lumpur.
However, a new twist presented itself as Rita’s husband at the time she was killed, Mark Caleo was arrested by Australian police this week.
Mark was arrested and charged on Feb 4, with the murder and the soliciting of murder of Rita.
He also stands accused of killing his brother-in-law Chye.
As reported by Australia’s The Daily Telegraph, the motive behind the murder of Chye was believed to be a real estate deal worth millions which had gone sour.
The Australian news site quoted prosecutor Clint Nasr as saying that Rita had known too much about the accused’s criminal conduct.
The report further stated that police will allege Mark had paid to have his wife killed by a man introduced to his brother Gerard, via a colleague at work.
Although it took the police 25 years to piece together evidence to arrest Mark, the report mentioned that Rita’s solicitor had produced a letter after she was stabbed, implicating her husband.
The letter was said to have been given to her lawyer three months before she died, which could only be opened if she ‘died unnaturally’.
She implicated her husband in her ‘impending’ murder and that of her brother’s, begging for those investigating the case to not let her husband get away with the crimes.
However, the case was still deemed as weak, with Mark’s lawyer saying that it was based on ‘coincidence, speculation and assumptions’.
The court had refused bail for Mark.
- Source: THE RAKYAT POST | Published - 7 February 2015
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