Phuket expat Gerard Phillip Caleo, accused of arranging a hit on his sister-in-law in Sydney 24 years ago, appeared in a Sydney court this afternoon. Mr Caleo, manager of Patong's Hard Rock Cafe, will apply for bail next week on charges of soliciting to commit murder, accessory before the fact and accessory after the fact. His lawyer said he was ''dumbfounded'' at the accusation and would have been 18 at the time.


PHUKET: An Australian man who is reported to have run a restaurant on Phuket was arrested today at Sydney airport over the cold-case murders of a woman and the separate earlier killing of her brother.

The man, whose identity has yet to be revealed, was taken into custody by officers from the Unsolved Homicide Team soon after he arrived in Sydney on a flight from Kuala Lumpur about 6am.

He is being held in the investigation of the killing of mother-of-two Rita Caleo in 1990 and will be questioned about the murder 10 months earlier of Ms Caleo's brother.

Detective Inspector John Lehmann said his cold case team had been working on the investigation since 2008: ''It's a very big arrest, this was a horrific crime where the young mother of two children was murdered in her home while they were sleeping there.

''It was a brutal crime.''

Rita Caleo was stabbed to death in her Sydney home on August 10, 1990.

She was stabbed in the stomach in her en-suite bathroom while her infant daughter and four-year-old son were asleep in an adjoining room.

Her husband, Mark, was working at one of his two Sydney restaurants at the time of the murder.

Mrs Caleo's murder came 10 months after the shooting death of her brother Dr Michael Chye while he sat in his car in the garage of his home in the upmarket Sydney suburb of Woollahra.

Detective Inspector Lehmann said police believed that the murders were linked, and that investigators had strong suspicions regarding the motivation for the crimes.

Mrs Caleo and Dr Chye came from a wealthy Chinese-Malaysian family, with their father Peter serving as a senior-ranking police officer in Malaysia.

Three months before she was stabbed to death in her Sydney apartment, restaurateur Rita Caleo sent a sealed envelope to her solicitor, the Sydney Morning Herald reported today.

The envelope read: ''To be opened only if my death is unnatural.''

Inside the envelope, which Mrs Caleo's solicitor opened in the presence of detectives following her murder in 1990, were the names of two people she accused of organising the gangland-style execution of her brother.
If she died an unnatural death, the same people would be responsible, Mrs Caleo wrote in the letter.

An inquest in 1991 found that Dr Chye, his sister and her husband had been been involved in a dispute over a $3.6 million waterfront property in Blakehurst, in southern Sydney.

Dr Chye had also been questioned in 1989 by members of the Hong Kong Independent Commission Against Corruption in relation to a multimillion-dollar fraud involving a Hong Kong bank.

However, police at the time told the inquest into his death that they did not believe this was related to his murder.

Detective Inspector Lehmann said that police believed the same people were responsible for both murders.

The identity of the arrested man will be revealed when he appears in court later today.