Rita Caleo handed this letter to her lawyer three months before her death. Photo / Channel 9
Rita Caleo handed this letter to her lawyer three months before her death. Photo / Channel 9
Rita Caleo's husband told police her murder was a robbery gone wrong.
He was out the night she was stabbed to death in the family's Double Bay home, in Sydney's ritzy eastern suburbs, on August 10, 1990. Thieves stole a Rolex watch and some cash and left her bleeding to death on the bathroom floor.
But Mark Caleo, a former Sydney restaurateur, wasn't to know his wife had left behind an incriminating note — one that predicted her death and implicated him directly.
"In the event that my death is unnatural, direct the investigation to my husband Mark Caleo ..." the letter, dated May 15th, 1990, reads.
Sydney businesswoman Rita Caleo (left) and Dr Michael Chye (right). Photo / AAP
"My brother's death is also their doing," she wrote. Her brother, Dr Michael Chye, 36, was fatally shot in the head in his Woollahra home in October the year before.
"(Mark) gets very desperate when he is squeezed financially like what I'm doing to him as a result of his affair ... this is the absolute truth — please do not let Mark get away with this."
Caleo, 39, left the note with her lawyer who produced it after the mother's murder.
Rita Caleo handed this letter to her lawyer three months before her death. Photo / Channel 9
Rick Damelian, who sold the family a number of vehicles, was also named in Caleo's letter but is not suspected of any involvement in her death or her brother's death, nor is he facing any charges in relation to the matter. He has denied any involvement.
On Thursday, almost 30 years on, Caleo, 55, was found guilty of soliciting his wife's murder as well as the murder of her brother.
A NSW Supreme Court jury also found former Kings Cross bouncer Alan Afu, 51, guilty of carrying out the murder of Caleo, who was stabbed 23 times. Dr Chye's killer has never been found.
Mark Caleo has been found guilty of soliciting his wife's murder in 1990 and the murder of her brother in-law in 1989. Photo / AAP
The Crown's main witness — Caleo's former employee, Anthony Stambolis — testified that his boss told him to offer A$10,000 (NZ$10,584) to find someone to kill his wife and to make it look like a robbery gone wrong.
The Daily Telegraph reports that on the night of Caleo's murder, her nanny woke to the sound of "faint whining" noises. She had discovered he was having an affair with Janice Yap, a woman named in her letter.
The couple's two daughters were asleep in the house when Caleo was stabbed in the frenzied attack.
When the couple first met, she was 35 and he was 22. They opened a chain of Italian restaurants and made millions.
Caleo and Afu will face a sentence hearing on a later date.
