Kidnapped Read online

  In reply, an anguished and broken-hearted Freda Thorne wrote back to the post office address supplied by the woman:

  I received your letter today and please God you are telling us the truth. Unfortunately I cannot carry out all your instructions as I had to show the letter to my husband and get the money. I did go to Brisbane as directed in your last letter. But my husband will not give the money until he has proof of your having the boy. Please, I beg of you as the boy’s mother, give me some proof so that the money can be paid and my son given back. Please, if you have the boy, let him write a short note, or if he can’t write, ask him these questions and send me the boy’s answers. Ask him what is Giddy’s Christian name? What is the name of Pam’s dog? What did Father Christmas bring him last Christmas? What is the name of his barber? Please God, as the mother of Graeme, if you have my boy give me some proof so that I can get him back. There will be no hesitation on our part to pay the £25,000 when we are sure, but so many people have written saying that they have my son that I don’t know what to believe.

  Freda signed the letter ‘Mrs Higgins’. The request for information that only Graeme would know produced no response. Despite this, the female police officer, again pretending to be Freda, went to the Exhibition Ground on the appointed day and waited at the nominated ticket box. A thirteen-year-old boy approached her and said that a woman had told him to ask a Mrs Higgins for a parcel. The boy agreed to take the police officer to the woman, but when they got to the spot where the boy had last seen her, she was nowhere to be found. Clearly, the two letters were part of a crude attempt by an impostor to get the money.

  After numerous false hopes from attempts by impostors to enrich themselves, Bazil and Freda Thorne eventually adopted a standard method of testing the genuineness of contact from would-be kidnappers. Whether an approach was by letter or by phone, they would respond with this:

  I received your letter/call relating to my son, Graeme, who is missing. I am not sending money as you asked simply because I am not satisfied that you are a genuine person and that you have Graeme. If you or anyone else has Graeme with them, and if they get in touch with me and let Graeme speak to me or write to me, I will pay the XXX demanded.

  It should be noted, however, that the Thornes also received an enormous amount of cooperation and support from friends and strangers alike. The groundswell of community anguish for their plight was palpable throughout the nation. Church leaders of every denomination prayed with their congregations for the safe return of the boy. The police printed 5,000 posters carrying photographs and a description of Graeme, which were distributed to police stations, food and milk companies, suburban town halls, and places where people regularly gathered. The police were greatly moved when a blind man travelled by public transport from the city to the Thornes’ home to offer his services as an intermediary, pointing out that it would be obvious to the kidnappers that a blind man could never identify them. The Sun newspaper reported that the Director of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, was taking a personal interest in the case, and had asked to be notified immediately should there be a major breakthrough. Mr Hoover expressed his deep sympathy to the Thorne family, while a spokesman for the FBI stated that the organisation would be only too ready to supply ‘the utmost help to Sydney police’.

  * * *

  For weeks, Bazil and Freda vainly hoped that the genuine kidnapper would again make contact, however each time they thought that a call might be the real thing, their hopes were dashed, causing them repeated intense anguish and despair. This rollercoaster drove them to the point of near-complete emotional collapse. Eventually, the calls died down, but so did Bazil and Freda’s hopes for the safe return of their son. After several weeks of telling their daughter that Graeme would still be coming home, Bazil and Freda finally agreed that they should acknowledge to her that her brother might not be coming home after all. For three-year-old Belinda, the news was greeted with silence for a long time and then a series of questions: ‘Has he gone to be with Jesus? Didn’t he want to live with us? Can he come back one day? Is he sad? Are you sad? Am I sad?’

  * * *

  The police engaged in a huge amount of tedious investigative work, basing their enquiries at a central command post at the Bondi police station. For the first time, police utilised a ‘running sheet’ system that recorded in a central documentary archive every piece of information received and every enquiry made – all of which had to be cross-referenced. There were obvious advantages to this methodical approach, considering the size of the investigative team, but there were also pitfalls that had yet to be exposed.3 The main risk was that once a line of enquiry had been recorded in the running sheet, it would disappear in a mass of paper without necessarily being fully considered or disseminated to the whole team.

  The police were inundated by numerous people who claimed to have seen Graeme in a wide variety of unlikely places all over New South Wales. The reports went like this: ‘I saw a man leaving a city theatre with the boy.’ ‘I saw the boy in a car at Kings Cross. He was crying.’ ‘I saw some men with binoculars watching the area of Graeme’s home.’ ‘I saw this boy crying and calling out, “Is my mummy here?” There were two men with him.’ A North Shore resident reported seeing a boy in a Scots College uniform carrying a case on the Pacific Highway thumbing a lift north of Sydney. Twelve hours after Graeme disappeared, a woman who lived near his home reported to the police that she could hear a whimpering noise in a nearby building. Police rushed to the scene, but found a colony of squealing cats. The police took every call seriously. All sightings, however unlikely, were logged and investigated, but they all proved groundless.

  Numerous people contacted the police to report suspicious activity they thought might be connected with the kidnapping, and again each had to be investigated and discounted. A taxi driver reported a policeman as a possible suspect, claiming that the officer had hired his cab to go to the city from the eastern suburbs, but after travelling only a short distance he had abruptly and suspiciously ended the hire, whereupon he had been joined by some friends who arrived in a private car. A North Shore doctor reported that all the children’s comics from his waiting room had been stolen and he believed that this might have some connection with the kidnapping. A woman reported seeing two men and a boy acting suspiciously in bush at Brooklyn on the Hawkesbury River, however they turned out to be on a fishing trip. One of the strangest limelighters to provide information was a man who drove up to a Sydney Harbour Bridge toll collector on the evening of 11 July, four days after Graeme’s disappearance. The man appeared agitated, handed over £1, which was far more than the toll, and said, ‘I have information; they might find the boy at Bundeena; keep the change.’ He then sped off towards York Street. The toll collector was unable to read the registration number on the car because it was covered in mud. Numerous enquiries were conducted at Bundeena, but police failed to find any connection with the kidnapping.

  Police were also besieged by numerous theories advanced by well-meaning people intent on assisting in the search for Graeme. A member of Sydney’s underworld suggested that police should contact all estate agents dealing with holiday-home lettings, because it was likely the kidnappers had rented a house at some lonely spot in which to hold the child. He also suggested that proprietors of caravan-rental companies should be contacted, because Graeme could have been secured in a hired caravan that might have pulled in at one of the many caravan parks along the coast without exciting suspicion. Police Commissioner Delaney informed the public that it was thought unlikely that the child was being held in a heavily populated inner-city area, but rather in a secluded near-city location. He appealed to people with holiday cottages or weekenders in and around Sydney to inspect them as quickly as possible, stating that police believed that Graeme might be ‘in a weekender or a secluded home in areas like Cronulla, Palm Beach, and even as far away as Katoomba’. Various theories advanced by members of the public, and even by the police, fed on racial and ethnic prejudices that
were prevalent at the time. The Commissioner informed the public that his men had ‘questioned roving gypsy bands seen in various parts of the Sydney area in the past few days … and questioned European market gardeners in outer Sydney suburbs’.

  Police kept dozens of rendezvous with people who claimed to have confidential information about the kidnapper. Invariably the information was innocuous or malicious, but the possibility of a lead could never be overlooked. Every clue had to be followed up; every suspects had to be interviewed. Tedious hours were spent tracking the sources of anonymous reports, many of which were based on partially overheard snatches of conversation or even domestic squabbles. Some used the investigation as an opportunity to vent personal animosities by nominating as suspects people who had failed to pay them money or simply offended them in some way. Others reported men with foreign accents they knew or had met who had been acting suspiciously and should therefore be investigated. None of these reports proved fruitful and only tied up valuable police resources.

  * * *

  After a wonderful, but frustratingly short holiday, Stephen Bradley and the children returned by car to Sydney on 12 July and Magda flew down two days later. As soon as he could, Stephen approached a real estate agent and found rental accommodation for the family at 49 Osborne Road, Manly, in an old building divided into three flats. On 19 July, he went to his former employers at Nutt & Muddle and convinced them to give him back his old job.

  It was not until his return to Sydney on Tuesday 12 July that Stephen Bradley saw the Sun Herald that had been published the previous Sunday. With some alarm, he read an article on page 2 headed ‘Mystery man at flat’, which disclosed that three weeks before the kidnapping a man had called at the Thornes’ home describing himself as a private enquiry agent asking for people named Bognor or Bailey. The man was described as aged between thirty-five and forty, thickset, with black or dark brown slightly wavy hair, and thick, dark eyebrows. He was, according to the article, well-spoken and had a foreign appearance, and was wearing a grey coat over an open-necked shirt. The report stated that police would like to interview that man or receive information that could lead them to him.

  Bradley immediately disposed of his grey overcoat, cut his hair short and trimmed his eyebrows. Although he was surprised that the residents at 79 Edward Street, Bondi had remembered his visit weeks earlier – and even more amazed that they recalled the fake name he had used – he was still supremely confident that none of the information they had given to police could be linked to him.

  * * *

  By the week after Graeme Thorne’s abduction, when the nation was still desperately hoping and praying that he would be found alive, there were essentially only two important lines of enquiry that the police felt were significant and worth pursuing. The first was to enquire of all private enquiry agencies to see if the man who had come to the Thornes’ home three weeks before the kidnapping purporting to be a private investigator could be identified. During this aspect of the investigation, the police became excited when they located a real private enquiry agency that trained its agents to use the false name ‘Mr Bognor’, but questioning of the agency’s employees failed to reveal the identity of the man who had used that unusual name at the Thornes’ home.

  The other major line of enquiry, which was kept from the media and the public, concerned reports of a car – described by the preponderance of witnesses as a blue Ford – that had been parked in Wellington Street at around the time of Graeme’s disappearance. The day after his abduction, a young man by the name of Cecil Denmeade and his fiancée, Dorothea Warren, came forward to say that they had seen a man standing next to a car parked at the corner of Francis Street and Wellington Street in Bondi at 8.32am the previous day. By now, the police were convinced that this was the location from which the kidnapper had abducted Graeme. Denmeade described the car as an iridescent blue 1955 Ford Customline, and he felt sure that he could identify the man again if the police found him. Being a car enthusiast, he was adamant that his description of the vehicle was accurate. The police were understandably sceptical about this claim, so Detective Sergeant Brian Doyle from the investigative team showed him a book of photographs depicting every model of Ford car for every year of manufacture and in every colour. Denmeade quickly established that he was capable of correctly identifying each model, year and colour. Doyle then took him outside and conducted a similar exercise with real cars, and again Denmeade passed with flying colours. After this exhaustive series of tests, the police were satisfied that Mr Denmeade was a reliable witness and that the kidnapper had used an iridescent blue 1955 Ford Customline vehicle.

  Confident that they now had an accurate description of the vehicle used in the kidnapping, police set themselves the daunting task of conducting an exhaustive search of the records of the Department of Motor Transport to see how many 1955 Ford Customlines were registered in New South Wales. This exercise alone required a team of twenty-five police searching full-time for some weeks through more than 270,000 index cards of Ford motor vehicles. The initial conclusion from this search was that there were approximately 4,000 1955 Ford Customlines (in any colour) registered in the State. The officers-in-charge of the investigation made a decision that the search for a Ford Customline would remain confidential and not be disclosed to the public. There was no mention of it in the newspapers or on the radio or television, despite the fact that some journalists had got wind of it.

  Armed with the information about the number of 1955 Ford Customlines, the New South Wales police embarked on a line of enquiry so vast and ambitious that nothing like it had been attempted before in the history of Australian policing. They decided to locate and interview every single one of the approximately 4,000 owners of 1955 Ford Customlines throughout New South Wales in an attempt to find the one that had been used in the kidnapping. However, the manner in which the police went about this task was, in retrospect, seriously flawed.4 They came to the conclusion that the kidnapper would not have used his own car to carry out such a brazen child-snatching in broad daylight in a public street, and therefore what they were looking for was a 1955 Ford Customline that had been stolen or borrowed from the owner. Police also felt that there was a possibility that the kidnapper might have modified the car by repainting it. So, rather than focusing on owners of blue 1955 Ford Customlines, they decided to question the owners of all such vehicles, no matter what the colour. This massive exercise involved questioning every owner throughout the State as to where their vehicle had been situated on the morning of 7 July and who had had access to it. Each owner of a Ford Customline was asked three questions:

  1. Has the car been lent to anybody?

  2. Was it in the garage on 7 July?

  3. Does your wife drive the car?

  It was hoped that if owners answered these questions honestly and accurately, this would flush out the vehicle that had been borrowed or stolen from the owner by the kidnapper.

  The exercise to exclude up to 4,000 Ford Customlines was laborious, painstaking and protracted, but the police were determined to accomplish the task. It involved police throughout the State locating owners of these vehicles, questioning them, filling in a standard form and remitting the information back to the nerve centre at Bondi. As several weeks went by without any positive results, police continued to question private enquiry agents and middle-aged men with foreign accents, and to pursue every lead provided by members of the public – no matter how bizarre or unlikely. In the meantime, Bazil and Freda Thorne maintained their vigil by their phone and continued to be harassed by well-meaning do-gooders and perverted, heartless extortionists.

  8

  SKELETON AT THE FORT

  The children of Grandview Grove in Seaforth often played in the local streets and on nearby bush blocks. Seven-year-old Andrew McCue and his four-year-old brother, Peter, had for some weeks enjoyed romping on the bush-covered vacant block next to number 16 – mainly because lying under the large rock they called ‘the fort’ was a
‘skeleton’ wrapped in a blanket, which added to their imaginary games. Like most children their age, they had been mesmerised and horrified by the stories they had been told about the eight-year-old Sydney boy who had been taken from his parents and not heard of again. In fact, Andrew McCue often carried around with him a newspaper clipping with a photograph of the boy, so that he would recognise him if he saw him.1

  On 16 August 1960, five weeks and five days after Graeme Thorne’s disappearance, Andrew McCue told some of his local playmates, including eight-year-olds Philip Wall and Eric Coughlin, about the skeleton, and they all went to examine it at the fort. The extra year of maturity of the eight-year-olds gave them greater insight, so that when they inspected it Philip proudly informed his friends that it wasn’t a skeleton at all, but a body wrapped in a blanket.

  When both eight-year-olds mentioned to their mothers about the blanket in the bush with ‘something like a head in it’, and four-year-old Peter McCue told his mother that ‘Philip says there’s a body there.’ That night, when the fathers arrived home from work, Mr Wall and Mr Coughlin went to investigate. They found a brightly coloured picnic rug wrapped around an object and tied with string. On untying the string, they immediately saw two human arms, causing them to recoil in horror. They wisely did not touch the body and immediately returned home to notify the local police.

  Within minutes, officers arrived at the scene, where they discovered the corpse of a young boy fully dressed in a Scots College uniform, and they immediately realised that it was the body of Graeme Thorne. His ankles were tightly tied together with twine and a silk scarf was loosely knotted around his neck – the size of the loop indicating that it had been used as a gag. Government Medical Officer Dr Clarence Percy examined Graeme’s body where it lay under the rock, after which it was taken to the city morgue in George Street in The Rocks. The picnic rug, the scarf, the twine from the ankles and the string that had been wrapped around the body were all transported to the CIB laboratory in the city.