Kidnapped Page 4

  On the morning of 7 July, Magda awoke still feeling resentful from the argument the previous night. Stephen was nowhere to be seen, having already left, so Magda got up and prepared to depart in time to catch their flight. Realising that she could not rely on Stephen to take them to the airport, Magda called for a taxi, which arrived between 9.30am and 9.45am. Their neighbours, the Telfords, who had been told that the Bradleys were going for a holiday to Queensland, saw Magda and the children get into the taxi, and were surprised that there was no sign of Stephen. That was because earlier that morning Stephen Bradley had left his home in his Ford Customline to kidnap a child for ransom – a crime so heinous that it had never before been committed in the 172 years of European settlement in Australia.

  2

  FROM ISTVAN TO STEPHEN

  Very little can be verified about Stephen Bradley’s life before his arrival in Australia on 20 March 1950. Many of his assertions are highly unlikely to be true, because of his penchant for telling tall, self-aggrandising stories. He had a constant, desperate need to impress, and the personality, persuasiveness and high IQ to do it convincingly and unflinchingly. He was suave and could quickly sway others with his warmth and enthusiasm. He was particularly attracted to people who had money, status and influence, and he craved acceptance by them as an equal. He had the ability to charm people into doing things for him and, in particular, giving him jobs or money. If anyone challenged his claims, he would remain eminently composed and quietly explain to them why their scepticism was unwarranted. He had an overwhelming need to be seen as a man of status, affluence and class, and he firmly believed that respect came from having an abundance of wealth. He had a penchant for ostentatiously portraying himself as a man of money – particularly through owning an expensive home and car. When he went to restaurants or hotels, he would tip generously and assume the air of a man flush with money. While he was short and, for a man in his mid-thirties, rather pudgy, he was invariably well dressed and his dark hair was always well groomed. Most people considered him quite handsome.

  What is a proven fact is that Stephen Bradley came from Budapest in Hungary, where he was born Istvan Baranyay on 15 March 1926, the son of József Baranyay, an architect, and Klara Baranyay née Kramer. Stephen claimed that his father was Christian and his mother Jewish, with the result that during the Nazi occupation of Hungary he was required to wear a white armband to show that he was a ‘half-breed’. He maintained that in 1944 he was a prisoner of the Gestapo for five months, during which time he was lined up beside a river to be shot with other people of Jewish descent, but that when the shooting started a bullet grazed his right eye, so he dropped into the water and managed to escape.

  After the war, at the age of nineteen, he migrated from Hungary to Italy, with the intention of salvaging a semblance of an education of which he had been deprived in his homeland as a result of the war. He later told people that he had studied in Rome to be a doctor and then an engineer. Istvan’s first marriage took place in Europe. Very little is known about it, except that it resulted in divorce in 1948. At some stage, he realised that Europe had little to offer him – professionally or socially – and so he chose to uproot himself and spend his precious remaining monetary resources to come to a new land full of opportunity – Australia. However, the ‘land of milk and honey’ failed to live up to many of his expectations.

  When he arrived in Melbourne aboard the SS Skaugum on 28 March 1950, Istvan Baranyay claimed to be a qualified male nurse. His foreign education was not recognised, and so he was reduced to working in mundane occupations where his real talents were rarely utilised. He took on a number of trade or sales jobs, at which he quickly became adept. However, he found that his bosses were generally stupid and insular, and they failed to recognise what he regarded as his superior intelligence, education and insights. Any advice he gave them was resented or ignored. As a result, he would soon tire of these jobs and restlessly move to a new one – often in a completely different industry – where he hoped to be given the recognition and opportunities he deserved.

  Istvan readily adapted to the culture of his adopted country, because of his ability to mould his personality to meet whatever circumstances confronted him. His capacity to understand people’s motivations and desires allowed him to manipulate them as he wished. He could be anyone he wanted to be, in order to ingratiate himself to whomever he needed to impress. His ability to charm was a particularly valuable asset to overcome the pervasive prejudice against migrants that Istvan encountered in his new country. His olive complexion, his Hungarian accent, and even his European education frequently provoked initial discrimination, denigration and distrust by ordinary Anglo-Australians, which he was able to overcome with his engaging personality.

  On 1 March 1952, Istvan married his second wife, Eva Laidlaw, also a Hungarian migrant, who had changed her surname from Laszlo. They were married at the Presbyterian Church in Gardiner, a suburb of Melbourne, and lived in that city, where he worked as a motor mechanic. It was from this marriage that Istvan’s only natural child, Helen Jennifer, was born in June 1953. Upon their marriage, Eva’s father, Dr Franz (Frank) Laszlo, a lecturer in engineering at Melbourne University since his arrival in Australia in 1939, transferred a valuable house into his daughter’s name, in which the couple lived. After several years of marriage, the house was sold and a new one was purchased in their joint names.

  Several months later, on 26 February 1955, Eva was tragically killed at Heidelberg when the brakes of the car she was driving mysteriously failed. Their baby daughter, Helen, who was also in the car, sustained an injury to her thigh that left her with a slight but permanent impairment. Istvan inherited Eva’s entire estate. The accident was investigated by the police, but no unequivocal evidence could be found to prove foul play. Dr Frank Laszlo, who had never liked his son-in-law, pressed the police to continue their investigations, but they assured him that everything that could be done had been. Dr Laszlo and his wife, Ilse, realised that if they were to maintain contact with their granddaughter, Helen, it was imperative to have as good a relationship as possible with their son-in-law, so they made the decision to sublimate their true feelings and suspicions about him. Stephen, of course, was well aware of his parents-in-law’s hostility, but he allowed them contact with Helen, because it suited him to have somewhere to leave her.

  Not long after this tragedy, in October 1955, Istvan met another Hungarian migrant – Magda Weinberg1 née Klein. Magda was attractive, vivacious and possessed an inherent sensuality that drew men to her. As opposed to Bradley’s dubious wartime background, Magda’s experiences during the Nazi period were provably genuine. Together with both her Jewish parents, she had been a prisoner in Auschwitz concentration camp, and she still bore the prisoner number A-11-663 tattooed on her left arm. Both her parents had been killed in the gas chambers. Magda had survived, but an injury in the camp had deprived her of sight in one eye.

  Magda married her first husband, Gregor Weinberg, in Hungary, where their first son, Paul, was born in 1947. They migrated to Melbourne in April 1949, where their second son, Ross, was born in 1955. Ross was born with a severe, permanent hearing impediment that caused him to be functionally mute. In October 1955, with her marriage floundering, Magda went to a penny poker card night at a friend’s home where she met the charismatic widower, who, at that time, was still named Istvan Baranyay. She was instantly attracted to him and within a short time they began an affair. On learning of their relationship, Gregor Weinberg initiated divorce proceedings against Magda on the grounds of her adultery.

  In August 1956, Istvan Baranyay changed his name by deed poll to Stephen Leslie Bradley in the hope that the anglicisation of his name would go some way to alleviating the prejudice he confronted daily from most Anglo-Australians. Around the same time, Magda and Stephen set up home together with their three children – Paul, Helen and Ross – initially in Melbourne. Magda readily became Helen Bradley’s principal carer and treated the now three-yea
r-old as if she were her own natural daughter. In 1957 they moved to Sydney, largely because Magda’s ex-husband, Gregor, had taken his elder son, Paul, to live there with him, leaving Ross with his mother and Stephen. On arriving in Sydney, Magda quickly reclaimed Paul, and all five of them moved into a flat at Waverley. The move to Sydney meant that Frank and Ilse Laszlo lost most of their contact with their granddaughter, Helen. They disliked Magda and their feelings about Stephen had only worsened since the death of their daughter.

  It was a constant struggle for Stephen Bradley to provide financially for himself and his family in a manner befitting his education and class. He was a master wheeler-dealer, who was able to supplement his meagre salary from semi-skilled jobs by using his superior financial expertise. He could see opportunities where others saw only folly. Where others were risk-averse, he was adventurous and bold. His financial credo was that riches went to those who were open to new opportunities, and he believed that he had the perspicacity to see them when most others did not. He would regularly buy and sell the houses in which he, Magda and the children lived – largely on borrowed money – generally making small profits each time, which enabled him to buy a bigger and better house the next. He was not averse to fudging the details of a loan application so that a bank or finance company would advance a greater amount than their rules permitted, or making a secret profit on the side, or converting a piece of property that belonged to an employer to his own use. If his infractions were ever detected, he had the capacity to lie his way out of trouble, and in any event he would rarely stay anywhere long-term, so even if his lies were exposed, he would often have already moved on. To Stephen Bradley, the world was full of opportunities waiting to be exploited.

  Armed with his new identity in Sydney, Stephen Bradley arranged for a business card to be printed on which he described himself as ‘Dr Stephen L Bradley. Psychotherapist, DOM (Italy)’. Presumably DOM stood for doctor of medicine. Despite these supposed qualifications, or perhaps because of them, in May 1957 he obtained a job as a psychiatric nurse at Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic, which later became part of the Rozelle Hospital. Five months later, for reasons unknown, he precipitately lost his position at the clinic. He told his wife and friends that he had been forced to leave after he was knocked over by a patient, causing a back injury that aggravated a wound sustained during the war when he had worked with the Hungarian underground against the Nazis. However, so strong was Bradley’s desire to remain within the walls of the clinic that he immediately applied for admission as a patient, claiming to suffer from extreme anxiety – a request that was refused. In the same year, Bradley was charged with false pretences after he sold a motor vehicle that was still financially encumbered to a lender, however the charge was never pursued, due to insufficient evidence.

  At the end of 1957, Magda and Stephen took over the management of the Wunulla Club – part of the prestigious Royal Motor Yacht Club in Rose Bay. Stephen was able to talk his way into this venture despite having no qualifications or previous experience. He relished the opportunity of contact with the wealthy, eastern suburbs boat owners who were members of the club. He and Magda lasted barely three months before the club terminated the contract, but the experience gave them a taste for the hospitality industry, and they believed that in that direction lay their future financial destiny.

  In June 1958, Magda and Stephen purchased the Carinya Guesthouse in the Blue Mountains village of Katoomba, largely from money that Magda had received in her divorce settlement from Gregor Weinberg. They threw themselves into creating a holiday venue at which guests could enjoy the best of European food and hospitality, surrounded by the stunning natural beauty of the Blue Mountains just 70 miles west of Sydney. By this time, Magda’s ex-husband Gregor was running another guesthouse in the adjoining village of Leura, and relations between the former spouses had become quite cordial. Paul Weinberg regularly went between his parents in the Blue Mountains, but because of Ross’s severe hearing handicap, the younger boy had little contact with his father. Magda relished fulfilling the role of mother to Stephen’s daughter, Helen, who, being only three years old when Magda came into her life, had no memory of her deceased natural mother. Helen immediately latched on to Magda as her primary care-giver. It was while they were at Katoomba that Stephen brought home a present for Magda and the children – a female Pekinese dog they named Cherie.

  Magda became Stephen Bradley’s third wife on 8 December 1958 at the Registry Office in Sydney. She brought to their marriage not only her substantial contribution to the guesthouse at Katoomba, but also £3500 in savings. Stephen brought to their union his charisma and panache. After marrying Stephen, Magda gave vent to an aspiration she had harboured for many years – to write and sell music and song scores – but she met with virtually no artistic recognition or financial success.

  Magda and Stephen’s venture running the Carinya Guesthouse lasted only one summer-holiday season. By mid-1959 the business was floundering and the proprietors had realised just how much effort was entailed in running a guesthouse with accommodation for fifty-five people, as well as a restaurant. The newly married couple were only saved from financial oblivion when, in the early hours of the morning of 8 June 1959, the guesthouse mysteriously caught fire and burnt down, enabling the Bradleys to collect the insurance money and sell the land. After payment of all debts, they were left with only £42. The cause of the fire was never determined.

  Once again in Sydney, Stephen Bradley tried his hand working as a life insurance salesman for the T&G Insurance Company. Ross was placed in a school that specialised in the education of children with hearing impairments – St. Gabriel’s School for deaf children at Castle Hill – which was residential during the week but allowed the boy to return home at weekends. In December 1959, Stephen and Magda purchased an elegant house at 28 Moore Street, Clontarf, which had a good, if distant, view of the water at Middle Harbour, but was well beyond their means. The £8000 purchase price was covered by a loan from the T&G Insurance Company for £5000 and a second mortgage for £3300, which also allowed a margin for additional expenses. Shortly afterwards, there was a ‘misunderstanding due to carelessness’ concerning £136 Stephen had collected in client premiums that had not found its way to T&G, and Stephen was obliged to leave his employment. He then secured a job at a lower salary as an electroplater with Nutt & Muddle, a firm of poker machine manufacturers at Darlinghurst. This position was the latest in a long line of jobs in varied industries in which he quickly perfected his role.

  Stephen’s income from Nutt & Muddle was a mere £20 per week, which meant that he and Magda had grossly overextended themselves in purchasing the house at Clontarf, leaving them in a precarious financial position. The mortgage repayments were £11 per week, leaving the family only £9 for living expenses. With outgoings far exceeding their income, clearly the Bradley family was living on capital and, without a massive injection of funds, faced financial ruin. Stephen knew that if he was to maintain his family’s status and their standard of living, he had to pull a mythical rabbit out of a magical hat. Desperate situations called for definitive solutions.

  Magda and Stephen Bradley had a good marriage – she ensured that it was so. She was determined that this marriage would be successful after the failure of her previous one to Gregor Weinberg. Magda constantly told Stephen what a wonderful husband and father he was. She was full of praise for his looks, his intelligence and his enterprising business acumen. She would often compare him favourably to men of vastly greater means and assets, so as to appease his jealousy for their affluent lifestyles. She understood why they had to live up to the appearance of wealth and why it was important for them to associate with people above their true station in society. Magda also knew when to stay quiet, even if something about her husband troubled her. She rarely expressed her concerns for his wild and unpredictable financial ventures, and so his failures generally passed without discussion. Magda put up with Stephen’s fantastic schemes as the family
seemed to veer from one financial disaster to another. She offered no resistance when he wanted to use her divorce settlement monies to jointly purchase the guesthouse in the Blue Mountains, or when he placed her savings in both their names. She got used to the frequent moves when he bought and sold their homes in an attempt to shift up-market, and she accepted the often sudden changes in his work placements and his constant complaints about the stupidity of his bosses. She humoured his grand plans of how they were going to become prosperous and be accepted by Sydney’s high society – the upper-class, wealthy people that Stephen craved to emulate. Stephen still exerted a magnetic effect on her, and their sexual attraction to each other was still as strong as the heady days when they had first consummated their unbridled and dangerous lust for each other.

  Stephen Bradley doted on his wife and their three children. He did not distinguish between his own flesh and blood – Helen – and Magda’s two boys from her marriage to Gregor Weinberg. The family loved nothing better than to spend time together at the beach or a picnic ground. Stephen was loving and attentive to Ross, and never lost his patience when the boy had difficulty understanding him or making his needs known. He was tolerant of Magda’s continuing friendship with her ex-husband, and indeed was not averse to using Gregor to their advantage. He was supportive of Magda’s dream of becoming a successful songwriter, and would always come up with utterly believable excuses whenever she complained of her lack of progress.

  An objective observer would have concluded that theirs was a well-functioning, upwardly mobile family with goodwill on all sides and every chance of leading happy and productive lives. But beneath the surface, Stephen harboured an undercurrent of intense envy and greed, fuelled by a desperate need for social acceptance, a readiness to undertake appalling risks, an unrealistic sense of his own perspicacity, and a perverse thrill in the face of great danger.