Anne-Marie Curry, pet detective, has handled a menagerie of cases in her sleuthing career, from hostage situations and revenge theft to an injured rescue goat and a burnt cat.
But the one that upended her life began with a run-of-the-mill call featuring a frantic pet owner, the live possibility of a dead animal and a rapidly cooling trail of evidence.
The woman at the other end of the phone was Shannan Wheeler, an eyelash technician from the cherry-picking town of Young, about four hours west of Sydney, whose puppy had gone missing three days earlier.
Teddy, a black and tan King Charles Cavalier Spaniel, was five months old, microchipped but not desexed, and had last been seen in Wheeler’s front yard when she left for work on June 9, 2020. When Wheeler got home, the gate was unlatched but closed, and her border collie was in the yard, but Teddy was nowhere to be found.
Her five-year-old son, Leo, nominal owner of Teddy, was in pieces.
Wheeler had reported the missing dog to police, put up posters, advertised in the local newspaper and posted about Teddy’s disappearance on social media. In desperation, she turned to Curry.
Curry applies police methodology to her investigations, including thermal drones, covert trail cameras and remotely controlled underground robots, as well as traditional gumshoe methods. Acting on a tip from a couple who saw two women and a dog matching Teddy’s description walking in the direction of a nearby school, she obtained CCTV footage and posted a still on her Facebook page, asking if anyone knew them.
“Just to be clear – we are NOT accusing these women of theft – we just want to speak with them to assist or they can call local police if they feel more comfortable,” she wrote on the evening of June 17.
The CCTV image posted to Facebook showing two women walking with a small black dog.Credit:
“The owners and us just want Teddy found safe and sound, no questions asked, and understand that sometimes people find a wandering dog and assume it needs help.”
Wheeler also posted the image to her own page, and soon received a private message suggesting that one of the women resembled local woman Ainslee Munro, a vet who had worked with Greyhound Racing NSW and was said to breed dogs. Someone else had “tagged” Munro to draw her attention to it, as others had done with their own friends to widen the search effort, and Munro had responded by blocking the friend.
It was now a full week since Teddy had disappeared, and Curry’s concern for his welfare was growing. Prices for purebred puppies had skyrocketed during COVID, and Teddy was particularly valuable as a non-desexed male in a sought-after breed.
She was beginning to suspect the women had stolen him.
That night, she googled Ainslee Munro. One of the first hits was on a complaints board where a pet owner claimed that Munro and her partner had sold him a golden retriever puppy with an incorrect microchip. The puppy had developed hip disease, though the advertisement claimed both parents had been hip-scored. When the vaccination papers arrived – by mail, three weeks after the puppy – they listed a different date of birth to the one on the microchip.
But the pet owner had written a postscript. It turned out that Munro had been going through a difficult time in her personal life, he said, and she had since agreed to refund the purchase price to cover the puppy’s medical bills.
“So please take this retraction statement into account when deciding to purchase a puppy from Ainslee and Scott,” he wrote. “They are registered breeders, and as you can probably tell from your own searches, this is the only complaint out of the many puppies they have sold.”
Teddy, the Cavalier King Charles spaniel at the heart of a defamation dispute.Credit: Facebook via Shannie Wheeler
The next morning, a private message was waiting for Curry in her inbox. It was from Ainslee Munro, confirming that she was one of the women captured by the CCTV. But Teddy had run away from her and her walking friend Lauren Marchant – the other woman in the footage – and they did not know where he was, she said. She asked Curry to remove the posts for her privacy since police had cleared them of wrongdoing. If not, she would take legal action.
Curry deleted the posts.
But after speaking to one of the original witnesses, who described the women’s demeanour as “odd”, Curry called Munro and drew from her a story that, like bubblegum, became thinner and thinner as it expanded.
Munro said she and Marchant often saw Teddy and a border collie alone in the yard when they walked past Wheeler’s house. She had heard the family was rough. “People like that should not be allowed to own pets,” she said.
She claimed they had found Teddy in the street on the day he went missing, walked with him for a while, and picked him up when he became tired until they reached her car. She then drove him to the home of a “meat inspector” on the other side of town, but Teddy had run away when she opened the car door, and she had not seen him since.
Curry was confused. “If there is something you want to tell me, Ainslee, please just tell me,” she said. “I’m really struggling to understand the meat inspector thing.”
Munro agreed it was strange. “I don’t know why I took Teddy there; I realise now it was wrong, I’m sorry,” she said. “But obviously the police have cleared us of all charges.”
A subsequent phone call with Lauren Marchant shed no further light on the story. Marchant confessed in the call to being a mystery Facebook user who had posted Teddy’s photograph in a lost and found group on the day he went missing, and then taken it down.
She had taken down the post when Teddy ran away, she said, and she did not wish to become involved. Curry would need to ask Munro why she took him to the meat inspector’s house, she said.
Neither woman mentioned what Curry soon found out for herself: that the “meat inspector”, Greg Loader, was also a mobile microchipper who bred dogs. He told Curry that Munro had left him a voicemail to say she was leaving a dog in his yard, though he could not think why as he had breeding dogs in the yard and Teddy had the potential to cause quarantine issues.
Curry replied: “Well, she says it ran away.”
Loader laughed. “Does she now?”
When Curry relayed what she had discovered to her client, Wheeler was distressed. It made no sense that the women had not taken Teddy home when Munro admitted that she knew where he lived. She had also detected a change in attitude from police. They had seemed uninterested when she supplied them with the CCTV footage earlier that day, and later visited her in her salon demanding that she take it off her Facebook page. Munro and Marchant had filed a complaint, the officers said, and the publication of their images bordered on harassment.
“I didn’t understand what I’d done wrong,” Wheeler said recently.
“The police were treating me like a criminal.”
Convinced that police were not taking her matter seriously, the next day she and her partner went to Loader’s house to see if Teddy was there. Loader was not home, but his wife was standing on the porch, and they called out to her from the nature strip. The interaction was tense. Why would Loader want a Cavalier from Munro, his wife asked, when they had several of their own?
At 10.37pm that night, Wheeler put up a new post on the Bring Teddy Home Facebook page under the heading “Name and shame”.
Identifying Munro and Marchant by name for the first time publicly, she related the version of events they had given Curry, adding what they had learnt about Loader and that Munro was a veterinarian who should have known she was legally obliged to take Teddy to the pound or nearest vet.
It was a moment of madness. One day later, Munro and Marchant’s legal representative served Wheeler and Curry with concerns notices demanding that they shut down all their Facebook pages and publish an apology on p2 of the most widely circulated newspaper in Young, or expect to be sued for $100,000.
For Curry, events appeared to have escalated from zero to 100 overnight. The images that appeared on her page were so grainy that not even people who knew Munro well were convinced it was her, and they had been online for less than 15 hours – mostly overnight – before she took them down. She had never identified the women by name. In their last phone call, Munro had appeared content with the outcome.
But the legal representative, Darrin Edwards, a former debt collector and witness location agent based in South East Queensland, warned Curry that one of the comments on her page was “now a problem” because Wheeler had named the women, and Curry was “on the hook”.
Darrin Edwards practises law under the phased-out title “solicitor’s managing clerk”, which does not require a law degree.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
Curry and Wheeler quickly removed all the offending posts. There was no further correspondence from Edwards. It appeared that the women’s indignation had flared and burnt out.
Curry has taken on more than 1000 cases since she founded Arthur and Co Pet Detectives in 2017, and claims an 80 per cent success rate. But it is the missing fifth that gnaws at her.
As months passed, Teddy slid into this group. There were no further sightings, no advertisements for dogs matching his description, no dogs with his microchip details handed into council pounds.
Then, 51 weeks after Munro and Marchant sent their concerns notice to Curry and Wheeler – days before the statute of limitations expired – a man marched into Wheeler’s salon and served her with a statement of claim.
She and Curry were being sued for defamation.
In July 2021, most Australian courts were given a new power to weed out trivial defamation claims by applying a “serious harm” test, which puts the onus on plaintiffs to demonstrate their reputations have been significantly damaged by the published material.
But the issue was never decided in Wheeler’s case, as Munro and Marchant started their proceedings a month before the new rules took effect.
Wheeler was still pedalling to catch up from the effect of COVID lockdowns on her fledgling business, and defamation lawyers were an expense she could scarcely afford. She retained a solicitor who was the aunty of a client, and did much of the legwork herself.
Curry retained high-profile defamation barrister Sue Chrysanthou, SC, who brought on Kennedys law firm, and hoped the matter would be dismissed in its early stages.
Instead, it dragged out, for years, with the plaintiffs repeatedly failing to respond to correspondence, missing deadlines, making endless requests for documents and calling dozens of directions hearings.
Curry’s legal expenses rapidly accumulated, and the cost of a silk slipped beyond her means. In mid-2023, her assiduous solicitor Nathan Buck, after working on tick for two years, needed cost security to continue, so she had to let him go as well.
She was now down to her husband, Tom O’Callaghan, a compliance solicitor with no experience in defamation law. Her own business had slowed – she assumed as a result of the publicity – and O’Callaghan had to turn down work to concentrate on her case. They moved house for cheaper rent.
“I had no way to control the court proceedings,” Curry said.
“I had no way to exit the litigation. I had no way to control the pace at which they progressed the litigation. I had no way to go out publicly and defend myself because it was still before the courts.”
Anne-Marie Curry and her solicitor husband, Tom O’Callaghan, arriving at her defamation trial in 2024.Credit: Anna Kucera
When the case finally came to trial, in 2024, the plaintiffs advised Curry’s legal team that they would not be able to produce more than 100 text messages and about a dozen multimedia messages they exchanged around the time of Teddy’s disappearance because Munro’s phone had been “irreparably damaged” in 2023.
Curry’s lawyers asked for the case to be thrown out. The plaintiffs had now been in default of court orders 16 times and their client had paid for solicitors to attend court on 28 occasions. The mounting costs that forced Curry to withdraw instructions from her previous solicitors were in large part due to the “inefficient and inexpert conduct of the plaintiffs”, they said.
District Court Judge Judith Gibson declined.
However, when Munro and Marchant took the stand, a picture emerged of the events leading up to the litigation that was at once fuller and more opaque.
Munro said Teddy was on the road when she and Marchant came across him on their walk, and instinctively picked him up to avoid a passing car. The dog then followed them around their feet, and she did not think to knock on anyone’s door.
“I’m not, I’m quite a timid type, I don’t think I could, well I, I didn’t see the need to, I mean, how was I to know where the dog had even come from?” Munro said.
She decided to take it to Loader’s house because she knew he had a microchip reader, as she had supervised his training in implanting microchips, and it would be less stressful for the dog than attending a vet clinic, she said.
“What’s so frightening about a vet clinic?” O’Callaghan asked.
“Quite often there’s a risk of parvo,” she responded, referring to a virus that affects dogs.
But when she opened the door of the car, it ran away. “I didn’t see what direction it had run,” she said. “By the time I exited the vehicle and had a chance to be like, ‘Where’s it gone?’ … I couldn’t see it.”
Agronomist Lauren Marchant (left) and veterinarian Ainslee Munro (centre) outside the NSW District Court in October.Credit: Janie Barrett
It was not until the CCTV stills were published on Facebook that she became aware of the search, she said, and by then a lynch mob had been unleashed in her small town. “These 2 are guilty AF and need to return poor Teddy”, read one comment among dozens. The night after her name was published, she received a private message: “Did u steal that dog? You absolute waste of life.”
All are equal under the law, but not all are equal in civil litigation. Shortly before the trial began, Curry pulled an ace out of her sleeve in the form of barrister Patrick Larkin, SC, who agreed to help for no upfront payment after she tracked down his cat, Hamish. It was a godsend, and the kind of serendipity that sprinkles more liberally on the well-connected end of town.
There was no such luck for Wheeler. She had run out of money to pay for her father’s funeral and sold her house to pay the legal fees. When her solicitor quoted $200,000 to take the case to trial, she chose to represent herself.
As she watched the barristers spar, with no friends or family in Sydney to support her and no lawyer to interpret their jargon, she understood that she was an outsider. Some of the statements in Curry’s affidavit felt accusatory, and it occurred to her that Curry’s legal team might not have her best interests at heart.
Shannan Wheeler, an eyelash technician and cosmetic tattooist from Young, represented herself in court.Credit: Janie Barrett
Asked under cross-examination whether she believed Munro and Marchant had stolen Teddy, she offered an instinctive denial. And then it was obvious from the ensuing discussion among the lawyers about what had been “particularised” that she had said the wrong thing.
“I feel I’m at a bit of a disadvantage because I’m not sure what my defence means,” she said.
What it meant was that she had undermined a key justification for posting her comments to Facebook, that she was expressing an “honest opinion”, which opened an opportunity for the plaintiffs to claim she was motivated by malice.
She now thinks she misunderstood aspects of Curry’s affidavit.
“It was at the worst time that her statement came out, and I was thinking the worst,” she said.
“I felt so guilty that I was letting my family down, I was letting [Curry] and her family down.”
But the judgment when it arrived last month vindicated them both. Judge Gibson found that Munro and Marchant had failed to clear the first hurdle in a defamation claim, namely that publication had taken place.
This was because the matter they sued over included a mishmash of comments posted on various Facebook pages, some of which were not operated by Wheeler or Curry and some of which were published before Munro or Marchant were identified. The screenshots were out of chronological order and had never existed as a single document. Exculpatory material, such as a comment by Curry that “we are not accusing these women of anything”, was omitted.
But even if publication had occurred, the claim would still have failed, Gibson found, because the allegation that they took Teddy was true.
“I accept that [Munro] intended to put Teddy into Mr Loader’s backyard because she thought, given his cavoodle-breeding activities, that he might like to keep Teddy,” Gibson found. “The intention to deprive the true owner was more or less instantaneous with their recognition of the value of Teddy.”
And tucked into her judgment was another message about defamation litigation, an “astonishingly expensive” exercise akin to taking a tiger by the tail in that it was difficult to let go without injury.
“Parties in litigation should expect complexity and risk, because this is the price of a cause of action which effectively explores the tension between freedom of speech and protection of reputation,” she said.
Curry had paid or owed a combined total of about $750,000 in legal fees when the trial ended, and lawyers involved with the case estimate the legal resources spent by all parties at about $1 million. Gibson determined that even if Munro and Marchant had won the case, she would have awarded them no more than $15,000, and as little as $1000.
But though Curry would have been better off to pay off Munro and Marchant five years ago, she was never going to lie down on principle. She feels lighter than she has in years.
“When the average everyday person hears that Anne-Marie Curry is being sued for defamation, they assume that I have written some hateful, vitriolic, nasty stuff about two innocent women,” she said.
“I’m just so relieved the court found that what I believed from the outset, and what I uncovered in my meticulous investigation, was right. They did steal Teddy.”
It feels less like victory to Wheeler. Teddy is still missing.
“It doesn’t matter in a small country town who wins it,” she said.
“The people who support Ainslee and Lauren still won’t like me, and the people who support me won’t change their opinions either. The best thing would have been to go and grab a coffee together.”
Munro and Marchant declined to comment. They have lodged an intention to appeal.
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