Secrets and lies Jealous guy: Kate Malonyay with then boyfriend Elliott Coulson. Bunkered inside an executive suite of the swish Marriott Hotel at Surfers Paradise, Elliott Coulson knew he was a wanted man. From the balcony of his $600-a-night 26th-floor apartment were sweeping views down the beach. But Coulson, 32, was inside drinking copious amounts of wine and beer with the security chains fastened on both doors to the suite. Days earlier, he had murdered his beautiful, vivacious ex-girlfriend Kate Malonyay in her Mosman apartment in Sydney's north shore. "He was two different personalities": Elliott Coulson. "She was a very attractive, beautiful young lady," says her close friend Hannah Everett. She wanted to see the best in everybody. Coulson, a navy combat officer, had fled north to Queensland, spending the weekend on the Gold Coast at his parents' house before checking into the Surfers Paradise hotel room on April 22. What he did not know, however, was that 22 floors below in the same hotel detectives from NSW and Queensland were planning his arrest. "She wanted to see the best in everybody": Mosman resident Kate Malonyay. Two days earlier, police had broken into Malonyay's McLeod Street apartment and discovered her bruised body. Coulson's text messages from Malonyay's phone to her friends, pretending to be her, had led detectives straight to him. A few years ago, Malonyay had been hoping to move on from the death of her father, and had moved into her own Mosman apartment, away from her family's home base at Avoca Beach on the Central Coast. She took a job at a Sydney financial services firm, Challenger, and worked long hours as the executive assistant to the firm's general manager. Her weekends were spent out socialising with the network of friends she had built up in Sydney. She was an absolutely beautiful person inside and out. She would do anything for anybody. She was very sociable, she loved her job, loved her friends," Everett says. No adverse findings against police: The coroner's report into the death of Kate Malonyay. About a year after her move to Sydney she met Coulson. Coulson was born in Sydney but grew up on the Gold Coast. He spent some time studying in the US but his decision to enlist in the Royal Australian Navy brought him back to Sydney in 2011. He was then a combat systems officer on board the HMAS Darwin, in dry dock at Sydney's Garden Island naval base. Friends say Coulson was a "joker," a fitness fanatic who loved fishing and enjoyed a drink. But an ex-girlfriend, Anne Thoroughgood, who said she dated him for two years on the Gold Coast, described him as "possessive and jealous," a liar and someone who had a fierce temper. Coulson dated Malonyay for 18 months, and photos posted by the pair of their relationship online show a normal, young couple enjoying each other's company. There are holiday snaps in the Blue Mountains and by the sea. In one, below, Malonyay smiles while Coulson has his head turned from the camera and is kissing her. But after 18 months his less desirable qualities began to again shine through. "He was two different personalities," says Everett. When he was drinking he was verbally abusive via text messages and emails. But when he saw her he was the complete opposite. He could be very loving and suck her right back in. Malonyay's friends saw a "sea of lies." Coulson was never clear about where he lived and his stories about overseas deployments did not match up. There were a few things that weren't making sense, which we questioned, but Kate never did. She was in love, so of course she believed him," Everett says. That changed in late 2012, when Malonyay discovered bank statements showing Coulson was out enjoying Sydney's nightlife when he claimed to be overseas. In December 2012, he was introduced to two of Malonyay's friends from work. The friends quickly became alarmed by his "aggressive and controlling behaviour." By January 2013, Malonyay decided the lies and abuse were too much and ended the relationship. Her decision was vindicated after she spoke with Coulson's family and learnt things he had told her about his past were not true, including that he had a twin brother who had died in a car crash. Coulson vowed to change and said he had booked himself into rehabilitation to get help for his compulsive lying. "He gave her doctors' names, phone numbers," says Everett. We were trying to look out for our friend so we called the facility and found out that he wasn't there. We had to break that news to her that it was again a lie. The pair remained in touch but Coulson continued to send abusive text messages. While he was never physical, Malonyay was concerned that he still had keys to her apartment and spoke of moving or changing the locks. But then contact between the two seemed to stop. Three weeks later, on Thursday, April 18, Malonyay did not show up to work at her firm's Sydney CBD office. Friends grew concerned when they could not contact her on Friday and when there was no sign of her again on Monday they called the police. That day officers went to her McLeod Street flat and when there was no response forced their way inside. There they discovered her bruised body. Police did not go public with news of her death until the next day as they had a strong lead: as her friends sat at the police station being interviewed someone was sending them text messages from her phone, pretending to be her and making supposed dinner plans as if she were still alive. Coulson, thanks to information the friends were giving to police, was in the frame for her death. Investigations revealed the seaman had gone absent without leave from the HMAS Darwin and he had taken a mid-afternoon flight on April 19 from Sydney to Coolangatta. By April 24, detectives from NSW and Queensland had tracked him to the Marriott Hotel. They sat in room 408 and devised a plan. They would split into three groups - one on each of the two doors into Coulson's room and the third waiting in the lobby on the off-chance Coulson came down at the same time the two groups were going upstairs in the lift. But for all the planning there was one thing police had not taken into account- the safety latch on a hotel door. As they opened both doors simultaneously, the latches thwarted their attempts to get into the room. One detective kicked down one of the doors and ran in shouting "police." But, by that stage, Coulson had run out to one of the balconies. Coulson glanced back, giving what a detective later described as a "deadpan look" with "no emotion" as their eyes locked. By the time the detective had made it onto the balcony, Coulson had already scaled the railing and was standing on the ledge. The officer lunged and grabbed Coulson's right forearm. As he did, the officer said Coulson told him to "just let go." The officer refused but Coulson, who was very drunk, slipped through the officer's grasp. The detective said as the 32-year-old fell away he looked back at him but said nothing as he plunged to the ground floor where he died on impact. The whole incident, from the police's hampered attempt to enter the room to Coulson's death, unfolded in less than two minutes. A coroner's inquest in Queensland made no adverse findings against the police. Deputy State Coroner Christine Clements found that Coulson died after "deliberately falling from the 26th floor of the Marriott," that he was drunk at the time, and that he "caused his own death avoiding being placed in police custody." With his death went homicide investigators' only suspect in Malonyay's death and any chance of discovering what had transpired in her Mosman apartment only days earlier.