The Special Hearing, the 39 Offences, and the Sentence Dick Caine Never Received

In August 2024, Judge Paul McGuire found that former swimming coach Dick Caine had committed 39 sexual offences, including rape and indecent assault. The findings came after a judge-alone special hearing at Sydney’s Downing Centre District Court, not a conventional jury trial. Six women who had trained or studied under Caine gave evidence about abuse that reached back to their childhoods. The court converted decades of allegations into formal findings. Caine would not reach the stage at which a sentence could be imposed.

The case entered the public legal process in January 2021, when New South Wales police received information about multiple sexual and indecent assaults involving a teenage girl at a swim school in Carss Park. The information concerned a setting where Caine held authority as a coach and where young athletes depended on adults to control access, training, and opportunity. The investigation did not begin with a single recent incident. It opened onto historical conduct alleged to have occurred across the years when Caine coached girls and young women.

Police arrested Caine in 2022 and charged him over historical sexual-abuse allegations. The arrest placed a former figure in Australian swimming before the criminal courts, but the age of the allegations created a different legal problem from an ordinary contemporary prosecution. The complainants were no longer children. Their accounts concerned events said to have occurred when they were between 10 and 16, and the alleged locations included the Carss Park swimming pool, Caine’s home, and his car.

The coaching relationship formed the central structure of the case. The complainants had not encountered Caine as strangers in an isolated public place; they had known him through swimming, where an adult coach could occupy both professional and personal authority. The court heard from six former athletes or students. Their reported ages placed them in the period of greatest dependence on adults for transport, instruction, selection, and access to the sport. The locations attached to the allegations were ordinary parts of that relationship: the pool, the coach’s vehicle, and his home.

By June 2024, the case had moved into a special hearing before Judge McGuire. The procedure replaced a traditional trial because of Caine’s health. It was a judge-alone process, with the evidence presented for judicial determination rather than placed before a jury. The distinction shaped the proceeding without erasing its purpose. The court still had to decide whether the alleged conduct had occurred. The later findings therefore came from a formal hearing of the criminal case, not from a plea bargain or an administrative review.

The hearing continued through August. Six complainants gave evidence about abuse they said occurred while they were girls or young athletes in Caine’s squad. The public summaries do not reproduce every individual incident in full detail, but they identify the broad pattern accepted by the judge and the locations attached to it. The ages reported for the complainants ranged from 10 to 16. The case was therefore not defined only by the number of offences. It was also defined by the age and sporting dependence of the people involved.

Judge McGuire’s August findings supplied the decisive legal consequence. He found that Caine had committed 39 acts, and that the acts included rape and indecent assault. The wording mattered. The court did not leave the matter at the level of police information, an arrest charge, or testimony awaiting determination. After the special hearing, the judge entered findings on the conduct placed before him. Those findings established the central fact of the case: a coach had sexually abused young athletes and students entrusted to his authority.

Caine’s medical condition remained part of the procedural history. He was in palliative care for terminal cancer during the period of final reporting, and the court had used the special-hearing format because his health made a traditional trial inappropriate. The illness did not produce an acquittal, terminate the evidence, or prevent the judge from deciding the allegations. It changed how the court heard the case. The judge’s findings arrived before Caine’s death, but the criminal process still had one formal stage left.

That stage was sentencing. A penalty hearing had been scheduled for 6 December 2024, but Caine died in hospital on 25 September while in palliative care. His death came after the findings and before the court could determine punishment. No sentence was imposed. The legal sequence therefore ended with a judicial finding of 39 sexual offences, including rape and indecent assault, but without a completed penalty hearing against the man the court found responsible.

The case therefore produced a judicial finding but no sentencing outcome. In August, Judge McGuire found that Caine had committed 39 offences, including rape and indecent assault. On 25 September, Caine died before the scheduled 6 December penalty hearing could occur. The court’s findings remained the formal legal consequence of the special hearing; the death meant that no sentence, fine, supervision order, or other punishment was imposed by the court. The public record thus contains a determined criminal case without the separate sentencing decision that would ordinarily have followed.