Kidnapped Read online

  Frank Laszlo returned to Melbourne empty-handed and bitterly disappointed, but still determined to seek custody of his granddaughter when another opportunity arose. He told reporters on his return to Australia:

  I must have new evidence to place before the court before I can resume the struggle for Helen. At the moment I am too tired to think of any new moves. I must consult my legal advisers in Melbourne. But I will resume the battle as soon as I have something to work on.4

  * * *

  After the hearing, Magda and the three children remained in a cheap hotel in Aden waiting patiently for the next P&O ship bound for England. Their every move was shadowed by reporters, who repeatedly asked Magda if she had had advance knowledge of her husband’s kidnapping plans, so it was impossible for them to relax. Helen became even more fearful that she might be wrested away from Magda, despite assurances from her stepmother that she would never let anyone take the girl away. During that time Magda received a letter from Stephen in which he urged her to continue their journey to London. The P&O Company agreed to allow them to transfer their tickets to the SS Strathmore,5 which was due to arrive on 4 November. Magda and the children remained in Aden for more than three weeks before they boarded the Strathmore, bound for Tilbury on the River Thames near London.

  * * *

  The procedures for an extradition of a suspect from an overseas country to Australia are extremely complex and highly technical.6 A small error or omission in the documentation can result in the whole process being thwarted. In cases where there is an extradition treaty between Australia and the foreign country, that agreement establishes the steps that are required for an extradition order to be made. However, in 1960, there was no extradition treaty between Australia and Ceylon. The extradition of Stephen Bradley, therefore, depended to a large extent on some old, colonial-era legislation and the goodwill of government authorities in Ceylon. An application for extradition requires an initial hearing in Australia where all the evidence is presented to a magistrate or coroner, who is required to collate and authenticate the prosecution case and then certify that there is sufficient evidence of a criminal offence to warrant the extradition. The magistrate’s finding is then transmitted to the local State authorities who endorse the request for extradition, and then relayed to the Federal Department of External Affairs, which advises the Governor-General whether or not to make the formal request for extradition. The request is then sent to the appropriate government department in the foreign country, which then commences proceedings in its own magistrates court to assess whether the police brief from the overseas country warrants an extradition order being made. Both court hearings fulfil an important role in screening the strength of the case against the suspect.

  The first part of the process of extraditing Stephen Bradley involved an extradition hearing in Sydney. On 17 October 1960, Magistrate A Hodgson opened the hearing at the Central Court of Petty Sessions in Liverpool Street.7 The proceedings were extensively covered by the media. The Sydney Morning Herald reported:

  When the hearing began spectators, predominantly elderly and middle-aged women, jostled for good positions at the rear of the courtroom and defied police requests to leave some seats vacant. A crowd of about 300 stood in Liverpool Street, outside the court, to watch figures in the case leave during the luncheon break.8

  Sixty prosecution witnesses were called over three days by Sergeant Don Goode, appearing for the police. As is usually the case in the initial stages of an extradition hearing, Stephen Bradley was not represented, so there was no cross-examination of the witnesses. The witnesses included Freda Thorne, who tearfully identified Graeme’s school case, schoolbooks and raincoat, and confirmed that she had peeled an apple for his lunch and wrapped the skin back around the fruit, as she always did. When shown the tie found on Graeme’s body, she said, ‘That was the way I tied Graeme’s tie that morning’. She identified photographs of Stephen Bradley as being the man who had come to her home on the evening of 14 June enquiring about a Mr Bognor. On the third day of the hearing, Magistrate Hodgson ruled that the police had made out a prima facie case against Bradley and that the evidence raised ‘a strong, probable presumption of guilt’ for the murder of Graeme Thorne.

  The next step involved the papers being relayed to the State Government of New South Wales. All the witnesses’ statements and evidence that had been presented to the Magistrates Court in Sydney were collated into an extradition brief, and each page was signed by Magistrate Hodgson and the New South Wales Minister of Justice, the Honourable Norman John (Jack) Mannix.

  The brief was then forwarded to the New South Wales Executive Council, consisting of the Governor, Sir Eric Woodward, the Minister of Justice, and the Attorney-General, the Honourable Robert Reginald (Reg) Downing. After Sir Eric had signed the papers, the next step involved their transmission to the Federal Government in Canberra. The physical task of transporting the papers was delegated to Detective Sergeant Brian Doyle, who had been assigned the task of travelling to Ceylon with the extradition brief. In Canberra, Doyle had to deal with the Department of External Affairs, the Attorney-General’s Department and the Commonwealth Crown Solicitor’s Office. The final signature obtained was that of the Governor-General of Australia, Lord Dunrossil. Finally, Doyle returned to Sydney and obtained authenticated copies of the relevant legislation from the Clerk of the New South Wales Parliament. All of this was accomplished in an unprecedentedly short three days, and on 21 October Sergeant Doyle boarded a plane for Colombo with a suitcase full of certified documents, exhibits and a formal request from the Commonwealth of Australia to the Government of Ceylon for the extradition of Stephen Leslie Bradley.

  Doyle’s departure was covered by every news organisation in the country. The whole nation was on edge lest the man who was suspected of committing this vile crime might evade justice by having slipped away from Australia just a few days before the police could identify him. Bazil and Freda Thorne were desperate that the man who had so cruelly murdered their son might slide away from the grasp of the law.

  When Sergeant Doyle arrived in Colombo, he served on Bradley’s solicitor a copy of the formal request signed by the Australian Governor-General, the extradition brief and the exhibits. The original documents were formally presented to Mr Justice Sansoni in the Supreme Court of Ceylon. The judge made a finding that the provisions of the Ceylonese Fugitive Offenders Act, 1881, had been complied with, setting the scene for an extradition hearing in the Colombo Magistrates Court.

  * * *

  When Stephen Bradley was served with the extradition papers containing the statements and evidence of more than sixty witnesses, he was astounded by the size of the brief against him. He pored over the evidence, reading each statement carefully and marking many with his comments. It came as a genuine shock to him to read in the post-mortem report that Graeme Thorne had sustained a fractured skull. He had previously thought that the boy must have died from a lack of oxygen in the boot – something that he had not anticipated before the kidnapping. He realised immediately the significance of this new information in relation to the murder charge on which the police were seeking to extradite him. As he worked his way through the brief, he became overwhelmed at the extent to which the police had gone to secure a case against him. In a sense he felt that they had persecuted and victimised him by going to so much effort to ‘stitch him up’.

  In the Magazine Remand Prison, Bradley was in custody with five men who had been charged with the 1959 assassination of the Ceylonese Prime Minister, Solomon Bandaranaike. One of the prisoners, Ossie Corea, who had at one time been a Ceylonese Customs and Excise Inspector, was alleged to have supplied the gun used in the shooting.9 Bradley became particularly friendly with Corea and spent more time with him than with anyone else. After going through the brief, Bradley gave the papers to Corea, who had offered to read them and – with the benefit of his training as an inspector – provide an opinion on the case against Bradley. True to his word, over a number of
days Corea read the brief, and then ventured the opinion that Bradley had no chance of beating the murder charge. Bradley quickly discounted this view, rationalising that his gaol friend came from a country where prosecution evidence was meekly accepted in the court system, whereas in Australia the courts had a healthy scepticism of police.

  Bradley recognised that if he was to extricate himself from his current, dire situation, he had to change tack. He prided himself on his readiness to adapt to altered circumstances – a quality that derived from his traumatic experiences during the war. The former inspector’s advice had convinced him that it was useless to deny that he had been involved in the abduction, but he could use an admission of that as an opportunity to provide a convincing defence that the boy’s death had been a terrible, unforeseen accident. Bradley had read the newspaper articles explaining that there was no offence for kidnapping on the statute books of New South Wales, so he was optimistic that if he could avoid responsibility for Graeme’s death he might receive a light sentence for some minor offence for taking the boy away. Perhaps he would be joining Magda and the children in a shorter time than everyone had imagined. This became his overriding plan of action.

  * * *

  Soon after Bradley’s arrest in Colombo, a Queen’s Counsel, Mr Diyasena Sudhira Jayawickrema, and a solicitor, Mr Anthony De Silva, offered to act for him without any payment (pro bono). They advised their client not to speak to the Australian police who had arrived in Colombo, and Bradley readily accepted their advice. The extradition hearing in the Colombo Magistrates Court began on 31 October 1960. Sergeant Doyle was the only witness, and through him the entire extradition brief was tendered. Mr Jayawickrema QC argued that the evidence did not establish a strong presumption of guilt, as required by the Fugitive Offenders Act, but the Magistrate, Mr Amerasinghe, found otherwise, and made an order recommending Bradley’s extradition. Although Bradley had a right of appeal, he elected not to exercise it, as the conditions in the Magazine Prison were oppressive and the food not to his liking. Bradley instructed Mr De Silva to send a cable to his solicitor in Sydney, Mr Richard Holt of Gilbert M Johnstone & Co, warning him of his impending arrival in Sydney. At the conclusion of the fifteen-day appeal period, the Governor-General of Ceylon, Sir Oliver Goonitelleke, signed a formal order directing the prison authorities to release Stephen Bradley into the custody of Detective Sergeants Bateman and Doyle.

  The progress of the extradition proceedings and the conditions under which Stephen Bradley was held in Colombo were the subject of enormous public interest in Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald reported details of his gaol cell, the prison security, his diet and even the books he had borrowed from the gaol library. The reports included:

  Bradley’s thick-walled cellblock is one of the coolest places in Colombo, which is sweltering in pre-monsoon temperatures in the nineties. But warders say he seems to relish sunshine and spends most mornings sunbaking.10

  * * *

  Sergeants Bateman and Doyle had to conduct extensive negotiations with the British airline company BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation), because the airline was reluctant to take on-board a prisoner who was suspected of committing a violent offence and could pose a risk to other passengers or to the safety of the plane. The airline felt that the main risk was that Bradley, in a fit of violence, might break one of the plate perspex windows of the plane, causing a sudden, catastrophic depressurisation. The airline finally agreed to take him on-board but they insisted on several requirements: Bradley had to sit in an aisle seat with one of the two police officers between him and the window, and the other officer on the opposite aisle seat; Bradley’s hands were to be cuffed together at all times while the plane was in the air, with another set of handcuffs attaching him to the buckle of his seatbelt; the detectives were to remain awake at all times while the plane was in the air and could not leave Bradley at any time during the journey; Bradley was not to wear shoes in the plane; while he was allowed to eat, he was not permitted to have a knife while there were other passengers about. Only upon acceptance of these conditions did the airline agree to transport Stephen Bradley back to Australia to face trial for murder.

  12

  CROSSING THE DIVIDE

  At 7.20am on 18 November 1960, Detective Sergeants Doyle and Bateman arrived at the Magazine Remand Prison in Colombo and, after signing a receipt for Stephen Bradley’s person and another for his belongings, they formally took possession of their prisoner. They were escorted by local police on the thirty-mile trip to Colombo airport, where Bradley and his escorts were taken to a special private lounge to await the arrival of the BOAC Comet from India, which was to transport them to Australia. At Colombo airport, Bradley made it clear that he did not wish to discuss with the police anything about the crime with which he had been charged. Once in the aircraft, according to a Herald correspondent:

  Bradley sat quietly reading newspapers and eating chicken and salad sandwiches on the 5 hours and 40 minutes journey from Colombo to Singapore. He hung his woollen Bermuda jacket over the back of his seat and kicked off his shoes. During a 45 minute stop in the Malayan capital, Kuala Lumpur, Bradley was served with fried fish, chips, peas, bread rolls, iced water and fruit. When Bradley visited the washroom, his handcuffs were unlocked unobtrusively and one of the detectives casually followed him to the door, where he stood until Bradley emerged. When a sari-clad hostess gave Bradley a form which, under Australian quarantine regulations must be completed by passengers, Sgt Doyle instructed Bradley to write his address as ‘care of CIB, Sydney’.1

  The police had chosen this particular flight because it was the only one between Colombo and Sydney without any overnight stopovers in foreign countries. This flight did have landings in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, but they were only brief. The police escorting Bradley back to Australia had obtained special permission from the airline and the Australian Civil Aviation Department in Canberra to remain on the plane during these stopovers. The reason for this unusual procedure was that the police and the Australian authorities feared that if Bradley disembarked from the plane in a foreign country, his lawyers could insist upon another extradition hearing in that country. While he remained on the BOAC plane, he was technically under the British flag and not amenable to be served with any local legal documents. Arrangements were made with Qantas employees working at each of the two stopover airports to come onto the plane and cater to any needs of the escorting police or Bradley. It was only while the plane was on the ground and all the other passengers had disembarked that Bradley was permitted to eat hot food with a knife and fork and to move within the plane.

  Despite all of the intricate planning and arrangements that had been made for the long flight back to Sydney, an unforeseen and unforeseeable event occurred during the stopover in Singapore that threatened to bring the whole exercise to a standstill. A traffic-handling superintendent of Malayan Airlines, Mr R Tedd, came aboard the plane to check Bradley’s passport. Not wanting to get off the plane, the police insisted that the officer take the passport away to check it. About an hour and a half later, when the plane was due to depart, the superintendent and the passport were nowhere to be seen. Detective Sergeant Doyle made a calculated decision that the plane should take off, even though they did not have Bradley’s passport. The next landing was at Darwin, and Doyle was confident the absence of the passport would present little, if any, problem when they arrived. It was later ascertained that Mr Tedd had wandered off and forgotten that he had the passport. The Customs Department in Singapore made sure that the passport was forwarded to Australia on the next plane.

  * * *

  Detective Sergeant Jack Bateman had been in the CIB since 1945, and he prided himself on having a 100 per cent success rate in solving murders. He was known among his colleagues as ‘Father Confessor’ because of his ability to befriend criminals and convince them to admit to their crimes. He was a brilliant and utterly professional investigator who would use his intelligence to identify crooks,
give them time to talk, and then use the information against them in court. Detective Sergeant Bateman described his reaction on meeting Bradley for the first time:

  I was prepared for an ogre dripping blood – a man I could loathe on sight. Instead I met an intelligent, personable, well-spoken man who seemed suave, mild and inoffensive. How could he have done it?2

  On the flight from Colombo to Singapore, neither Bradley nor the two police officers said much. However, on the flight between Singapore and Darwin, Bradley’s mood seemed to change for the better. Perhaps something about the proximity of the Australian mainland caused him to relax as he began to chat with Sergeant Bateman about his experiences in the Colombo gaol system, telling him that he had lost a stone in weight during the thirty-eight days he had been in custody. Bradley then moved to more personal topics, explaining how the Germans had nearly killed him in Hungary during the war and describing the agony he had gone through when his second wife had been killed in a car accident in Melbourne. Sergeant Bateman began to feel sympathy for his prisoner and the hardships he had seemingly faced in life. So friendly did they become that Bateman asked Bradley to sign his autograph book – and Bradley complied. After the plane landed in Darwin, and then took off for the long flight across Central Australia to Sydney, Bradley’s mood improved even further. It was as though the closeness of his home city brought him some relief and comfort. What lay in store for him once he landed seemed, in that moment, irrelevant.