Kidnapped Read online

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  Four-and-a-half hours later, at about 3pm, when Bradley still had two hours before he was due to make the second ransom call to Bazil and Freda, the removalists finished loading and left the house. As soon as they departed, a relieved Bradley returned to his car and opened the boot to find, to his alarm, that Graeme had not moved since he had last seen him. Bradley pulled the gag down from the boy’s mouth so that it hung loosely around his neck and realised with horror that he was not breathing. As he began lifting his body, he felt that it was cold to touch and stiffer than it should have been, and he immediately knew that the boy was dead. Recoiling with revulsion, he let the inert body drop back onto the floor of the boot and slammed the lid down, so as not to have to look at the corpse.

  Bradley was devastated – not because he had killed an innocent child, but because his plans had gone completely awry. He understood immediately that it would be much more difficult now to convince the Thornes to pay the ransom without being able to provide evidence that Graeme was still alive. He was utterly deflated at the thought that all of his painstaking plans and preparations, including surveillance of the Thorne family over the preceding weeks, might come to nothing and that he might be deprived of the financial reward he had so eagerly been awaiting.

  Having failed to anticipate these events, Bradley had no plan of how to dispose of Graeme’s body. He needed time to think about how he was going to achieve this without drawing attention to himself or leaving clues that could implicate him. He was determined to get Graeme’s body out of his house under cover of darkness before he retired that night, so that early the next morning he could set off for the long drive to Queensland.

  Pacing agitatedly back and forth in his garage, Bradley decided on a plan. He re-opened the boot, wrapped the family’s picnic rug, which was still in the boot, around the body and secured it with string. Bradley then took the corpse out of the boot and placed it on the floor of the garage, which was littered with dust, dirt and loose vegetation blown in from the garden. From the garage, there was an opening in the foundations of the house that provided access to the other sub-floor spaces. The first space was a dark, bare-earth alcove where nobody would accidentally stumble upon the body and Bradley would not have to view the wrapped bundle if he needed to access the garage or use the car.

  Picking up Graeme’s tightly wrapped body, he carried it into the dim cavern of this sub-floor space and laid it down on the damp, bare ground that was mixed with flecks of mortar from the brickwork of the foundations. He then returned upstairs and thought for a long time about how he might yet convince Graeme’s parents to pay the ransom money. He still had some of Graeme’s possessions – like his school case and its contents – with which he could prove that he had taken the boy, but what was he to do if they insisted on proof their son was still alive before paying the ransom?

  Later that day, Bradley drove the Goggomobil to a newsagency at nearby Balgowlah, where he purchased both afternoon papers. He was horrified to see that they contained articles on the kidnapping. The Daily Mirror particularly had a lot of detail about the abducted child, including his name and his parents’ lottery win. It completely baffled him why the Thornes would have involved the police, and why they would have allowed the incident to be disseminated so publicly when Graeme was still missing. Surely they would know that this would unnerve the kidnapper and thereby threaten the safety of the boy. He was irate with Bazil and Freda for acting in such an unpredictable and counterproductive way. Did they really think that the publicity would make it more likely they would get their son back? For Stephen Bradley, this foolishness in allowing all this publicity – so contrary to common sense – had disentitled Bazil and Freda to expect their son to be returned alive. He felt a sense of vindication in that the Thornes’ actions had retrospectively contributed to what was now the inevitable, tragic ending. In his mind, they were, in part, the authors of their own misfortune – even if they were not yet aware of the extent of it. About one thing he was relieved – there was nothing in the newspapers that pointed in his direction. He felt that if the police had any substantial leads about the man or the car, they would surely have been included in the news reports. He returned home to contemplate his next move.

  At about 9pm, Stephen Bradley placed his driving gloves back on his hands and laid Graeme’s body – still wrapped in the family picnic rug and tied with string, with Stephen’s scarf still loosely looped around his neck – back into the boot of the Customline, together with the boy’s cap, the school case and its contents. At a time when most people were inside their homes and traffic was light, he drove just ten minutes away to a bushy section of the Wakehurst Parkway, a little east of Bantry Bay. During the day, Wakehurst Parkway is a busy, major thoroughfare through a state forest in the midst of Sydney’s Northern Beaches suburbs. Midway through the Parkway is the leafy suburb of Frenchs Forest, while at the southern end is the affluent suburb of Seaforth, overlooking Middle Harbour, an inlet of Sydney Harbour. Late at night, Wakehurst Parkway is a lonely and isolated road with long sections of rugged bush without any houses. Bradley stopped his car in a deserted, thickly wooded section of the Parkway where there was a flat, dirt area on the side of the road surrounding a stone memorial. From here, he had clear visibility for several hundred yards in both directions. Still wearing his driving gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, after making sure that no one was lurking in the vicinity and no cars were approaching, he threw the boy’s school case into the dense bush. He made no attempt to remove any identifying features that linked it to Graeme, because he felt secure that it could never be linked to himself. He then drove about a mile further along the Wakehurst Parkway, where he stopped to throw Graeme’s cap, lunchbox and an exercise book into the bush on the other side of the road.

  Bradley then drove back along the Wakehurst Parkway to Seaforth, about two miles from where he had discarded Graeme’s school case, and just over one-and-a-half miles from his own home at Clontarf. Seaforth contained pockets of bushland suitable for disposing of a body. In fact, Stephen Bradley knew of one such area from a real-estate inspection of a house at 16 Grandview Grove some weeks earlier in anticipation of purchasing a larger home for his family. He drove into Grandview Grove and parked his car at a vacant allotment next to the house at number 16. After making sure that no one was about, he picked up Graeme’s inert body, still wrapped in the picnic rug with the scarf now loosely looped around the neck, and carried it into the bush, where he placed it in a crevice under a large sandstone rock. The fact that the body may be found by local residents, or that this location was close to his home, was of no concern to Bradley, because he was utterly convinced that there was nothing to identify him as the perpetrator.

  Having discarded Graeme’s body and possessions, Bradley decided on his way home to make one – and only one – attempt to convince Bazil Thorne to hand over the ransom money without proof that Graeme was still alive. By this time he was thoroughly unsettled by the effect that this unforeseen death of his victim would have on negotiations with the Thornes.

  He made the call to the Thornes at 9.47pm from a public telephone box at the corner of Seaview Street and Upper Beach Street, Balgowlah, only a mile away from his home. In fact, it was the closest public telephone box to Moore Street. He suspected that if a phone call went for long enough the police could trace its source and, mindful of the fact that he was so close to his home, Bradley was determined not to give them that opportunity. He was also concerned that a canny police officer might have the ability to discern that his accent was Hungarian, which would provide an important clue to his identity. When the phone call was answered, he immediately realised that it was not the same man who had spoken to him that morning. Although the man assured him he was Bazil Thorne, Bradley thought that in all probability he was a police officer. When the man asked him to wait a minute to write down his instructions, Bradley knew that it was a trap. He impulsively uttered an expletive under his breath – in H
ungarian – and then slammed down the phone in anger and frustration.

  His chances of negotiating the payment of a ransom had evaporated. He could not risk any further calls that might provide the police with an opportunity to identify him. As he walked away from the phone box, he was utterly gutted. All his planning had come to nothing. All the dreams of how he and Magda would live in luxury had been dashed. In two days they would have no home, and once again he would face the prospect of finding a new one with meagre financial resources. This time, he had no job to go back to. What galled him the most was that he would have to explain to Magda why they had inspected a number of magnificent, expensive houses over the past few weeks when they now were unable to afford any of them. In fact, they would do well if they managed to find a home as good as the one they had just sold. How was he to explain their change in fortune? What he feared most was not Magda’s disappointment, but her thinking less of him as a provider, a businessman and an investor. Why had life treated them both so harshly?

  Bradley returned home angry and dejected that his grand plan for he and Magda to lead the lives they deserved had come to nothing. He doubted that they would ever get another opportunity like this one. All his plans to buy an impressive house and a new car, and to take a grand trip overseas with the children, had been dashed. He gave not a moment’s thought to the fact that he had cut short the life of a perfectly innocent little boy, nor to the agony that Graeme’s parents were going through, nor to the devastation that would inevitably hit them when they found out that their son was dead. He genuinely felt that it was not his fault that Graeme had died and he was mystified as to how it had occurred. How could he have anticipated that the boy would die from being locked in the boot or from the hit to his head – whichever it was that had caused his death? Bradley was purely focused on his own loss of the reward money and how he was going to explain to Magda that his ambitious plans for their new home had come to nothing. In his mind he railed against fate that had so unfairly plucked such a unique opportunity from him, just when it seemed so close.

  6

  CONTROLLING THE AVALANCHE

  On 8 July 1960, the day following Graeme Thorne’s disappearance, every newspaper carried a front-page article on the sensational kidnapping of the son of the recent winners of the Opera House Lottery. Comparisons were made to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in the United States almost three decades earlier.1 The threat by the kidnapper to ‘feed him to the sharks’ struck a raw nerve in the Australian psyche. There was mention that the ransom demand had been made by a man with a foreign accent, stirring prejudices that were often barely below the surface of what was still a predominantly Anglo society. The reports of the kidnapping prompted an Australia-wide outpouring of sympathy for Graeme’s parents, a desperate hope that the boy would be safely returned, and extreme anger at the monster who had carried out such a callous crime. People felt a sense of personal involvement that they had never before felt for victims of crime. In streets, shops, clubs, hotels, workplaces, on trains and buses, and in homes throughout the land people spoke at length about the kidnapping of this young boy. Many had their own theories about what kind of person would commit such a crime, and speculation was rife about possible outcomes. Australians have a long history of poor cooperation with police investigations – perhaps deriving from our convict past – but in this instance the reaction of the community was overwhelmingly supportive.

  Within days, the New South Wales Government offered a £5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest, and John Fairfax Ltd, publishers of the Sydney Morning Herald, offered £10,000. Within a week, a further £5,000 reward was advanced by the publishers of the Daily Telegraph. This brought the total reward monies to £20,000 – almost as much as the ransom demand. The Daily Mirror reported that in an unprecedented act of cooperation, underworld figures had offered to help the police find the boy, saying that there were a dozen men – each bad by police standards – who would tear the kidnapper to pieces if they found him. By the weekend, there was barely a family in the nation that had not heard of Graeme Thorne. The whole of Australia was anxious to return this eight-year-old boy to the safety of his home and to relieve the agony of his inconsolable parents.

  When the authorities realised that there was in fact no crime on the statute books to meet these circumstances, there was great consternation among the public and in police circles, and a community-wide clamour to amend the law. The State Premier, Mr Robert J. Heffron, publicly asserted his opinion that, ‘In my mind, and I am sure in the public’s mind, the crime of kidnapping should rank with murder.’ The government assured the community that this shortcoming would be remedied at the earliest opportunity. There were even calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty, which had been abolished in New South Wales only five years earlier. However, Premier Heffron and Mr Robin Askin, the leader of the opposition, stated that both personally and on behalf of their party they were against the reintroduction of capital punishment.

  The police were only too aware that publicity would do little to assist Graeme’s safe return from the clutches of his kidnapper or kidnappers, however it was impossible to control the avalanche of information, conjecture and rumour that swilled around the nation’s newsrooms. As a result of the extensive reportage, the police were flooded with information from numerous well-meaning members of the public. The Commissioner of Police encouraged this deluge by publicly stating that ‘the smallest snippet of information could be a vital clue’.

  Never before in the history of Australian policing had there been such intense communal participation as seen in the attempts to locate this missing child and apprehend his abductor. People from all over the country rang the CIB and Bondi police station to report the most extraordinary observations and the most bizarre suspicions. There were countless false leads that had to be investigated by the police, tying up their valuable resources. The response from the public was in fact quite distracting to the substantial police team that had been quickly established. A group of more than forty police officers sifted through every piece of information that came in, and investigated those aspects that warranted further enquiry.

  The information included sightings of a man who, for several days before the kidnapping, had been sitting on a seat in the park opposite the Thornes’ home, but the descriptions of the man were vague and varied enormously. Additionally, on the morning of the kidnapping a number of people had observed a car parked at the corner of Wellington and Francis Streets, just where Graeme would have walked past. The descriptions of the vehicle, however, varied from a blue Ford to a green Holden to a black Dodge. A police artist consulted with Bazil and Freda and drew an artist’s impression of the ‘private investigator’ who had come to their home, and this drawing was published in the newspapers as a person to whom the police wished to speak.

  The snatching of a young boy from a suburban Sydney street while on his way to school not only excited abject horror at the cold-heartedness of the crime and overwhelming sympathy for Graeme’s family, but also caused parents Australia-wide to be seized with panic and alarm at what dangers lurked in public for their own children. If this could happen to Bazil and Freda Thorne, it could happen to almost anyone who had a financial windfall. People who previously had allowed their children to walk to and from school would now accompany them. Children who had been permitted to play in the street for years were now told to restrict their games to backyards within view of nearby adults. Two mothers, who won second prize in the Opera House Lottery a day after the kidnapping, expressed concerns about the safety of their families. In sympathy, the newspapers published their names but not their addresses. Men with foreign accents were subjected to especially critical scrutiny and even more prejudice than usual. Unfortunately, the publicity about Graeme’s kidnapping resulted in many callous, unscrupulous people contacting the Thornes or the police, claiming to be the kidnapper and to have Graeme in their possession in an attempt to cash in on the ransom money.
These ghoulish individuals caused untold anguish to the Thornes.

  During the very early stages of the police investigation, a decision was made by senior officers that certain pieces of information would be withheld from the public. These included the fact that a man with a foreign accent had come to the Thornes’ block of flats about three weeks before the kidnapping asking for a Mr Bognor. However, within a few days, even this detail had been leaked to the newspapers.

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  On the afternoon of Friday 8 July, less than twenty-four hours after dumping Graeme Thorne’s lifeless body, Stephen Bradley again went to a local newsagency and purchased the morning and afternoon newspapers. He was amused to read that although the kidnapper was described as having ‘a slight foreign accent’, experienced detectives had stated their view that ‘it could have been and possibly was assumed [i.e. fake], in view of the “correct” English used in phrasing the demand’. He had worried needlessly about someone with an acute ear picking the origin of his accent when he made the second call. He was chuffed to read in the Sydney Morning Herald that police had conducted a swoop of known criminal underworld haunts in search of the kidnapper. Let them waste their time in useless enquiries! None would lead to him, because he had covered his tracks so thoroughly. The report in the Daily Mirror informed readers that: