Kidnapped Read online

  They were about forty minutes away from Sydney, many thousands of feet in the air above the Great Dividing Range which follows the eastern seaboard about 70 miles inland, with Bradley handcuffed to his seatbelt, flanked on both sides by two burly police officers and approaching the destination where his fate would be decided, when he unexpectedly began to speak about the charge he was facing. He introduced the topic to Sergeant Doyle in a seemingly innocuous fashion:

  ‘Who will interview me in Sydney?’ he asked.

  ‘Perhaps Bateman and I. Perhaps no one,’ replied the detective. There followed many minutes of silence.

  Bradley said: ‘I am pleased to be back in Australia’, followed by another lengthy period of silence. Then, completely out of the blue, Bradley astounded his escort and said: ‘I have done this thing to the Thorne boy. What will happen to me?’

  Always the utter professional, Detective Doyle put on his formal policeman’s voice and said to his prisoner: ‘In view of that, I have to warn you that anything you say, even on the plane, may be taken down and used in evidence against you. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bradley. ‘I know. I have wanted to talk to tell you.’

  Sergeant Doyle then called over Sergeant Bateman and said in a voice loud enough for Bradley to hear: ‘He tells me he has done this thing to the Thorne boy.’

  Bateman said: ‘All right, we will be back in Sydney shortly, and you can tell us about it then, if you want to.’

  Many less experienced police officers would have encouraged Bradley to tell all he knew right then and there. But Sergeants Bateman and Doyle had been involved in too many criminal trials in which oral confessions had been disputed and aggressive defence counsel had alleged impropriety or fabrication during vigorous cross-examination. They were determined that this case would proceed by the book and that no defence counsel would help Bradley squirm out of his confession by making false allegations that it was a ‘police verbal’. Too many juries in the past had been left in doubt when it was the word of one police officer, or even two, against the word of the accused.

  The journey to Sydney continued in silence.

  * * *

  Stephen Bradley had been instructed by his legal counsel in Colombo not to talk to the two police officers, which from his point of view made the long plane journey a bore. Between Singapore and Darwin, it was Sergeant Bateman who began chatting with him. Bradley immediately sensed that the officer was attempting to ingratiate himself, and so he decided to play along with him in a teasing fashion. It amused him that Bateman was unaware that he had seen through the officer’s blatantly obvious tactics. Bateman asked him about his origins, so Bradley fed him the usual stories about his miraculous escapes during the war. Then they moved to his early years in Australia, and Bradley gave him a melodramatic account of his misery after his wife Eva’s death in a car accident in Melbourne. The officer then faked an interest in how he had been holed up in the Magazine Prison, so Bradley gave him an accurate account of the atrocious conditions there. The most laughable part of their interaction was when Bateman asked him for his autograph – as though he were a film star. How could he refuse such fake flattery dressed up as a serious request? He joined in the game and sarcastically wrote, ‘Good luck, Jack, until I see you again. Stephen Bradley’.

  During the flight from Darwin to Sydney, Bradley couldn’t help but have a bit of fun at the officers’ expense. The men were obviously intent on extracting a confession from him, and Bradley couldn’t resist giving them a small taste of what they so clearly wanted – just to see their reaction – and then to pull back, leaving them frustrated. After all, he was giving the police nothing that they weren’t going to get later during a formal recorded interview, when he would advance the defence he had been planning during the weeks he had languished in Colombo. He was quite surprised by the officers’ calm, officious reaction when he dropped the bombshell. Instead of pumping him for more information, Sergeant Doyle gave him the traditional warning and both officers refused to discuss the matter further. Bradley was unimpressed by their pretentious professionalism, and disappointed that it put an end to the entertaining game he had been playing with them. Did they really think they had cajoled him into a confession against his better judgement?

  * * *

  At 8:07am on Saturday, 19 November 1960, the BOAC Comet arrived at Kingsford Smith Airport in Sydney. Stephen Bradley was taken off the plane through the crew’s gangway. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that about 200 people watched in silence as he disembarked and was whisked away in a police vehicle to the central police station in the city. The paper stated:

  Twelve police and four detectives guarded the edge of the tarmac as the giant BOAC Comet pulled in at 8:07am. Eight other police stood on watch in the doorways of the international terminal lounge and on nearby footpaths and roads. Normal customs formalities for Bradley and Detective Sgts Bateman and Doyle were completed in the airline itself. One of the largest batteries of TV, movie and Press cameras ever seen at the airport recorded the scene.3

  * * *

  On board the P&O liner SS Strathmore, Magda and the children had a difficult time dealing with Stephen’s absence. The majority of the passengers were Australians who recognised them as soon as they embarked in Aden. While some people were kind to them, others clearly snubbed them as though they were lepers, so Magda largely remained in their cabin and avoided contact. Whenever the ship berthed – at Suez, Port Said, Naples and Marseilles – numerous reporters came on board wanting to interview and photograph her. In Marseilles, Magda was pursued by reporters as she made her way to a dockside telephone where she tried unsuccessfully for many hours to make a long-distance call to Australia.

  On the very same day that Stephen Bradley was driven through the heavy concrete entrance portal of the Central police station in Sydney, Magda Bradley arrived with the three children on the Strathmore at the port of Tilbury on the Thames River, just 25 miles from London. The synchronicity and dissonance of both members of this couple arriving at their destination at the same time, but on opposite sides of the globe and in vastly different circumstances, was not lost on the media of either continent. In order to give the reporters the slip, the ship’s crew had arranged for Magda and the children to disembark at the Tilbury docks before the other passengers. However, word of the ruse quickly spread, and in no time Magda was surrounded by a bevy of more than thirty newspaper reporters from around the world, who again assailed her with questions suggesting advance knowledge of the kidnapping, which she assiduously ignored. Her seventeen pieces of luggage were quickly loaded into a taxi and she and the children were then driven at high speed to London, where she booked into a small, nondescript hotel near Regents Park, thinking that she had evaded the media pack. As soon as they had completed the formalities at the hotel, she sent a telegram to Stephen in Sydney: ‘The children and I have arrived safely. Keep smiling.’

  Within hours, the newspapers had discovered Magda’s location and were camped in the street outside the hotel, causing the proprietors to complain to her about ‘all these Pressmen hanging about’. Magda is reported to have said:

  I’m sure even Princess Margaret doesn’t have as many as that following me. I am hoping their interest will die down and I do not intend to see any more newspapermen. I realise now I should have got off the ship in the normal way and talked to the Press there. All the weekend I will stay in my flat.4

  However, the children were very restless after the long sea voyage and in deference to their wishes she took them for a walk in Regents Park, where news photographers were constantly snapping at them. When she asked one of the reporters for information about Stephen, she was shown a newspaper report about his departure from Colombo. On reading it, she remarked:

  Poor Steve, how he must be suffering without me. I’m sure I could help him such a lot if I was in Sydney with him. It was his wish that I come on with the children, although there were times today when I wished I was back
in Australia. Steve and I did not have time to say much to each other when he was arrested. Before he left the boat he said to me, ‘Don’t worry, darling. Look after the children.’ Please tell Steve we are all well.5

  When asked by the reporters whether she would be interested in any approaches from Hungarian sympathisers in London, she replied:

  I may have been born in Hungary, but I am now an Australian with a British passport and free to come and go as I please. Anyway, I don’t need any help. We are quite well off.6

  In fact, Magda was not well-off at all – either financially or emotionally – and she did reach out for help. On the second day after their arrival, she rang her Uncle Leslie, an orthopaedic surgeon who lived in London just a few blocks from where they were staying. She explained to him that although she was not in need of money, she would appreciate moral support and advice about the children’s schooling – particularly Ross’s. Her aunt then intervened and took over the phone, emphatically telling Magda that they were very sorry but she should not disturb them with her worries, insisting that Magda should not get too close to them because they could not afford to have their names in the newspapers. Magda begged her aunt to allow her to see her uncle, because she was desperate and lonely in a big, foreign city, but her aunt refused. A few days later, Magda wrote a plaintive letter to her uncle Leslie, requesting contact and advice. He replied with an envelope containing merely a newspaper cutting about Stephen and a list of flats and agents, with a few impersonal words written by hand on the edge of the cutting. Magda was devastated by the rejection from one of the very few members of her family who had survived the Holocaust.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, at the Central police station in Sydney, after being briefly placed in a holding cell, Stephen Bradley was brought into an interview room at the CIB with Sergeants Doyle and Bateman. He felt a mixture of emotions at this point. He was relieved to be back in Australia and no longer in custody in a third-world country. He was concerned about his wife and their children, but he trusted Magda to do the right thing and look after them well. His solicitor, Mr Holt, had not yet arrived, but was on his way. Bradley had had a lot of time while in custody in Colombo to think about what he would, and would not, say to the police once he arrived in Sydney, and so he had not the slightest reluctance to be interviewed. Bradley realised that whatever he told the police in this interview would feature prominently at his trial, so now was the time to weave into his story some vindicating facts that would exonerate him for the murder, diminish his overall culpability and provide support when he came to be sentenced. He did not need to wait for a solicitor to advise him before speaking to the police, because he knew better than any lawyer what his defence would be.

  By this stage, Stephen Bradley was convinced that Graeme Thorne’s death had been a tragic accident – and not his fault – and so he was in no way driven by guilt to unburden himself to the police. Rather, his decision to speak to them was a calculated one that he had made earlier in Colombo. While incarcerated, he had realised that it was in his best interests to admit that he had taken Graeme from Bondi, that he had made the ransom call to the Thornes’ home that morning, and that he had kept the boy prisoner during the day with no intention of harming him. He would explain that he had secreted Graeme in the boot of his car and, having dealt with the removalists, returned to the car to find – to his horror – that the boy was dead. He had then been forced to dispose of the body, which he did in a rather haphazard way because he was so disturbed by this unexpected turn of events.

  After disposing of the body, he had made a further call to the Thornes’ home, and then accepted the inevitable termination of the ransom venture. He would explain to the police that if everything had gone according to plan, Graeme would have been safely home and tucked up in bed on the same night as his abduction. He was convinced that he could convey to the police his lack of responsibility for Graeme’s death and how it had all been a tragic misadventure for which he was not to blame. Surely, they would understand that to successfully carry out his plan to get the ransom money it had been in his best interests to keep the boy alive. He would tell them that he was still mystified as to how or why Graeme had died, but presumably the boy had hit himself on the head within the confines of the boot. In the absence of any direct evidence, how could the police prove otherwise? He would make a point of not showing any remorse for the boy’s death, because that would be interpreted as guilt.

  He had gone over this story in his mind many times as he whiled away the hours of confinement in Colombo between extradition hearings and as he waited to be handed over to the Australian police. Now that he was in police custody in Sydney, if he was to delay communicating these exculpatory facts and chose instead to wait until his trial before disclosing them, it would no doubt be suggested by the prosecutor that he had invented them purely for the benefit of the court hearing. It would therefore be best to advance his carefully crafted version now.

  * * *

  Sergeant Doyle began the interview session by again giving Bradley the traditional caution, and then commenced to question him:7

  Doyle: You said on the plane you did this thing to the Thorne boy?

  Bradley: Yes. I have put him in the boot of the Customline before the furniture men came. I didn’t see him again until it was dark and he was dead. I have thrown his things away near Bantry Bay and put his body on a vacant allotment.

  Doyle: Was it you who rang the Thorne home demanding £25,000 and threatening to feed him to the sharks if they did not pay?

  Bradley: Yes. But I did not know it was a policeman until I was in the Magazine Gaol [in Colombo].

  Doyle: Did you ring again?

  Bradley: Yes, but I read the big write-up in the afternoon papers at Balgowlah and I got very frightened, so I have not said much and I have hung up quick.

  Doyle: The boy had a fractured skull. Did you hit him?

  Bradley (emphatically): No, I did not hit the boy.

  Doyle: What did you use the scarf for?

  Bradley: I put it in his mouth to stop his calling out noise – not on his neck as the newspapers say.

  Doyle then asked him questions about the previous visit to the Thornes’ home. Bradley admitted that he had gone to their home posing as a private investigator, but he could not remember using the name Bognor. Feeling embarrassed to admit that the real reason for the visit was that he had been unable to contact them on the phone number provided by the exchange, he offered a flimsy explanation: ‘I have wanted to see both the mother and father. I don’t remember what name I used. Mrs Thorne sent me upstairs. I went up to that flat in chance Mrs Thorne watched me.’

  Doyle then quizzed Bradley on the interview that he had conducted with him at the Nutt & Muddle factory on 24 August. Bradley explained: ‘It was all lies. What I have told you today is the truth.’

  At this point Sergeant Bateman took over the questioning, asking Bradley to start at the beginning and tell the whole story. This was all Bradley needed to launch into an exhaustive explanation of what had happened and how Graeme Thorne had accidentally died. He related his version in a matter-of-fact way, as though he were speaking about a book he had read or a film he had seen. He began:

  It is a long story. I read in the paper where Mr Thorne won the Opera House. His address was in the paper: 79 Edward Street, Bondi, and I wanted money. I went out to Edward Street to see number 79, and three or four mornings I went out to Edward Street to see what the boy did each morning. Each time he has walked down and went to the school with a lady in the car. One morning I followed them to the school at Bellevue Hill. One night I went out to the house and spoke to Mrs Thorne. I saw Mr Thorne at the same time. I wanted to know them both. Mrs Thorne has sent me to the flat upstairs. I went up to the flat in chance Mrs Thorne watched me.

  Bradley then moved to the day of the kidnapping:

  Then the next was the kidnap. I went out there in the Customline between 8 and 8.30. The boy came down, and I have t
old him that the lady is sick and that I am to take him to school. The boy got in the car. He sat in the front with me.

  At this point Bradley painted an extraordinarily benign picture of the kidnapping that neither of the two police officers believed:

  I drove him around Bondi and Kings Cross for a while and then over the bridge. I keep telling him that I am to pick up some other boys too. I drove over to the Spit and I rang up from a public telephone box. I rang Mrs Thorne for the £25,000. Then I drove him to the house in Moore Street. I drove the car into the garage. I got out and walked to the back near the boot, and I told him to get out, and that I would now then take him to see the other little boy. He got out and I pushed him into the boot and closed the door. The door locks automatically. The furniture men arrived a few minutes later. It was after my wife and children have gone on their holiday. They flew to Hayman Island [sic], you know. The furniture men were there all day.

  Bradley knew that what he was about to say was the decisive part of the interview and would play a critical role in the outcome of his case:

  Several times I went into the garage and carried out some parcels for the furniture men, but I did not let them go in there. I did not speak to the boy again, but I hear the noise of him hitting his shoe like this …

  At this point, Bradley lightly kicked three or four times with the tip of his shoe against the leg of the table in the CIB interview room. He then continued:

  The furniture men were there all day. I read the big news write-up in the papers. I bought the afternoon papers at Balgowlah and I got very frightened. Very late in the afternoon, just on dark, I went to the car. The boy was dead – quite dead. I got him out and tied his legs with string to carry him easy, and I put him under the house. Later I got him out and wrapped him in the rug and put him back in the boot. I drove over to near Bantry Bay and I have thrown his cap and case and things away. Then I have come back and put him on the vacant allotment next to the house the estate agent showed me to buy. Then I ring up again.