It’s been over three years since Tiger King captured the nation with its eccentric characters and wild plot lines that seemed almost too unhinged to be true.
But the new Netflix documentary Last Stop Larrimah has drawn huge comparisons to the 2020 hit thanks to its batch of outlandish locals and neverending twists and turns.
Once considered a place of real community and friendship, vintage video footage included in the two-part series shows locals laughing and cuddling, cracking open tinnies of beer and drinking in the pub until the wee hours together.
Fast forward to present day, and one Larrimah resident called Cookie takes a sip from a bottle of beer, then wistfully describes them to camera as ‘the good old days’.
Located deep in the Northern Territory of the Australian outback, Larrimah was a place that quickly became forgotten by the modern world with no police station or cell reception and just a pub, a pet crocodile and a handful of residents.
11 to be precise. That was, until one appeared to vanish into thin air.
Enter Last Stop Larrimah, where the gripping documentary centres around the disappearance of 70-year old Patrick “Paddy” Moriarty, who was last seen on December 16th 2017.
That night, he left the town’s only pub, The Larrimah hotel, at dusk after a night of drinking.
He was reported missing after friends entered his home 72 hours later to check on him and found the mysterious scene of a half-eaten meal, his keys and beloved hat on the table. His vehicle was also still on the driveway.
A huge search of the area was soon undertaken, with officials initially believing they’d find the pensioner disorientated or dehydrated after succumbing to the blistering outback heat. However the search uncovered nothing.
It would appear that Paddy and his trusted dog Kellie have vanished without a trace.
Although initially coming across as a tightknight community, the documentary soon reveals what the police also uncovered in their investigations into Paddy’s disappearance: the small town of Larrimah is not what it seems.
In reality, it’s a town pulled apart by bitter disputes and furious feuds. As footage from past interviews with Paddy shows, he wasn’t afraid of confrontation and was a man loved and loathed in equal measure – living just feet from people with big scores to settle against him.
The first person in the firing line is Fran, who used to run the Devonshire Tea House where she sold her ‘famous’ meat pies shop. She had a longstanding beef with Paddy (no pun intended).
She believes he poisoned her plants and he once threw a kangaroo underneath her house. Its a dispute that appears to boil down to pies. Fran was well-known for hers and when Larrimah’s local pub owner Barry – who once sold Steve Irwin’s father his first crocodile and features his own croc in the doc – started selling them too, Paddy took his side.
Fran soon became likened in the town to an Aussie Sweeney Todd, the fictional barber of Fleet Street whose victims were cut up and baked into meat pies. In the documentary she reveals that following her neighbour’s disappearance she was eventually driven out by locals, insisting: ‘I had enough of everything. People driving past singing out, “Murderer, murderer. Where’s Paddy?”‘
Meanwhile, pub barman Richard Simpson is also a person of suspicion as he’s accused of holding a grudge against Paddy after believing his wild antics were driving away tourists. Locals Karen and Mark Rayner add that Richard was one of the few individuals that Paddy’s dog Kellie trusted.
‘I don’t know how a stranger would’ve gone up and killed the dog. That’s the part that confused us,’ Karen points out.
Richard is quick to laugh off the claims and insists Karen and Mark have a grudge against him. ‘[The neighbours] all went and did their individual things, made up their own little stories. Hell, we might even get famous out of this,’ he fumes.
Locals Bobbie and Karl also found themselves embroiled in this tangled web of neighbourhood wars. They had a vendetta against pub owner Barry and as a result, Paddy too. Bobbie and Karl’s daughter Diane also had issues with Paddy as she claims he and Barry burnt down her business.
Plus, Bobbie jokes that if Barry and Paddy had suffered a fallout, Barry could have fed Paddy’s body to the pet crocodile that he kept on his property.
“That’s why the crocodile is so fat,” she laughs.
Fran also throws Barry’s innocence into question when she insists it was suspicious that it took him 72 hours to report Paddy missing.
Then there’s Fran’s burly gardener Owen.
She admits she hired him as a form of protection against Paddy’s attacks. Owen was a former boxer and a bushy, known for his sharp temper. He’d even had slanging matches with Paddy over his dog Kellie and just days before his disappearance, neighbours heard him say: ‘Get rid of that f**king dog, or I’ll get rid of it for you.’
Amidst the twists and turns, things take a shocking direction when a secret recording appears to uncover a sickening confession from one resident.
With so many twists and turns within the whodunnit documentary, fans can’t help from speculating about who they think the true culprit is.
‘Last Stop Larrimah has me boggled’ one fan wrote on Twitter. ‘At first I thought Fran did it and she fed those people Paddy’s meat in them pies. But Barry had crocodiles, had his best mate gotten in his way and he decided to silence him?
‘Then there’s Richard… Who did it?’
Unsurprisingly, Paddy’s initial disappearance propelled the small town of Larrimah into a a media circus and the game of pointing fingers only made tensions run higher between the community.
In the six years since the disappearance, most of the aging locals have either moved out or passed away. And there’s no doubt that the Netflix documentary will bring all eyes on the residents again.
However, there has been some good news too. The town has finally had fresh life breathed into it, with new pub owners Ondra Hadras and Lucie Minarikova welcoming their son Matthew, the first baby in in the town for 40 years.
How long this newfound sense of community lasts is anyone’s guess, as mystery surrounding the disappearance Paddy and his dog Kellie, may well be one that Larrimah takes its grave.
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