The Graeme Thorne kidnapping is the name given to the 1960 kidnapping and murder of Graeme Thorne for money that his father, Bazil Thorne, had won in a lottery. A crime which caused massive shock at the time and gathered huge publicity, it was the first known kidnapping for ransom in Australian history. The police investigation that led to the capture and conviction of his murderer, Stephen Leslie Bradley, is regarded as a textbook example of forensic investigation. The kidnapping is arguably Australia's best-known crime and one that became famous around the world.[1]
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In 1960, the construction of the Sydney Opera House was proving expensive and so the New South Wales Government initiated a lottery to help raise money. The £100,000 (equivalent: A$5 or US$4 million in 2006 values) prize in the 10th Opera House Lottery, drawn on Wednesday 1 June 1960, was won by traveling salesman Bazil Thorne. There was no option of privacy for lottery winners at the time, so the details of the Thornes' lottery win were published on the front pages of Sydney newspapers, including their address.
The Thornes (Bazil, 37, his wife Freda and their two children, Graeme, eight, and Belinda, three) lived in Edward Street, in the Sydney suburb of Bondi. Graeme's customary morning routine was to wait at the corner of Wellington and O'Brien streets, some 300 metres from the house, where a family friend, Mrs. Phyllis Smith, would pick him up and take him (along with her two sons) to The Scots College in Bellevue Hill, one of Sydney's more expensive schools. On the morning of Thursday 7 July 1960 Graeme left for school as usual at 8:30am, but when Smith came to collect him, Graeme was nowhere to be seen.
Smith waited a short while then drove to the Thornes' home to find out if Graeme was going to school. His mother confirmed that he was and wondered if he might have arrived at the school by some other means. Smith then drove to Scots College but Graeme Thorne had not been seen there. She left her sons at the college and returned to the Thorne apartment. Now very worried, Mrs. Thorne rang Sergeant Larry O'Shea at the nearby Bondi Police Station to notify that Graeme was missing.
At 9:40am, 70 minutes after Graeme had left for school, a man telephoned the Thorne household. Sergeant O'Shea had already arrived and was taking notes when the phone rang. Mrs. Thorne answered and was told "I have your son" - she was stunned.
Pretending to be Bazil Thorne, O'Shea took the telephone. The kidnapper demanded £25,000 before 5pm, saying "If you don't get the money, I'll feed the boy to the sharks." O'Shea expressed doubt as to his ability to get hold of such a large sum of money (being unaware that the Thornes had recently won the lottery). The caller then said that he would call back by 5pm with more details, and hung up.
Rather than wait for the deadline, or keep the kidnapping under wraps, the acting chief of the Criminal Investigation Bureau called an immediate press conference. That afternoon every newspaper in the country carried the story on the front page.
The kidnapper phoned again at 9:47pm but the telephone was answered by a different police officer. The kidnapper gave instructions that the money was to be put in two paper bags, but then hung up abruptly without giving further instructions.
Police launched a massive search operation on a scale Australia had never seen before. Within hours of the kidnapping, every house and flat in the vicinity of the Thorne's home was searched. Every possible hideout was checked: motels, boarding houses, and even boat moorings around Sydney Harbour came under scrutiny. Known criminals across the country were questioned. Officers on leave were called back to duty to help with the search.
The NSW Police Commissioner made a personal appeal for the return of Graeme Thorne on the evening television. The next day, television stations across the nation screened photos of the missing boy. Bazil Thorne appeared on television briefly and said; "...all I can say is, for God's sake, send him back to me in one piece."
The following day (8 July) at 6 p.m. Graeme Thorne's empty school case was found near the Wakehurst Parkway, a busy highway through several miles of bushland on the outskirts of Sydney. Within hours hundreds of police assisted by army units, helicopters and tracker dogs were combing the area for further clues. On 11 July, Graeme's school cap, raincoat, lunch bag — with an apple still in it — and maths books were also found about a mile from the school case on the opposite side of the highway.
On 16 August, five weeks after he went missing, Graeme Thorne's body was discovered in Grandview Grove, Seaforth in Sydney. Wrapped in a blue tartan rug, Graeme was still wearing his school uniform. The rug containing the body had been there for some time; some local children had known about it for a few weeks but it didn't occur to them that it might have been anything significant. The discovery was only made when two of them mentioned it in passing to their parents.
Examination of the body showed that the boy had died from either asphyxiation or a head injury or a combination of the two. He had been alive when hit on the head. His hands and feet were tied with rope and a silk scarf had been knotted tightly around the neck. Examination also established that he had been murdered within 24 hours of the kidnapping and that his body had been dumped soon afterwards.
There were other pieces of evidence:
Mrs. Thorne recalled that a short time after the lottery win, a man with a heavy European accent and wearing dark glasses had knocked on her door and asked for a Mr. Bognor, a name which Mrs. Thorne didn't recognize. He then asked her to confirm their telephone number, and left after also chatting with the upstairs neighbours.
Also, on the morning of the kidnapping some witnesses had seen an iridescent blue 1955 Ford Customline double-parked at the corner of Francis and Wellington streets, near where Graeme was usually picked up. Dozens of police moved into the Department of Motor Transport and started on the daunting task of checking through 260,000 Ford index cards. Investigations eventually established that there were 4000 cars matching this general description.
Eight days after Graeme Thorne's body was found, two detectives called upon Stephen Bradley at work in Darlinghurst. Bradley (born Istavan Baranyay in Budapest [2] had emigrated in 1950 and now worked as an electroplater) was co-operative and pleasant. He remembered 7 July well; it was the day he moved out of his house to an apartment in the nearby suburb of Manly. Bradley had owned an iridescent blue 1955 Ford Customline, which he had just sold.
Forensic examination of the blue tartan rug found with the body showed two plant types, Chamaecyparis pisifara and Cupressus glabra, that were not present at the vacant lot where the body was found. From the mould on Graeme's shoes, it was determined the body had been where it was found in the bushes for most of the time since the boy was murdered. In addition, soil scrapings from the body showed tiny fragments of pink mortar. Forensic experts deduced that the body had been lying under a brick building at some stage. Also, the brand of rug, an Onkaparinga, was relatively traceable too.
Detectives rummaging in the garden of the apartments on Osborne Road, Manly, the Bradleys' last known address, uncovered a number of discarded 35 mm film negatives among the weeds. The film was cleaned, printed and enlarged. One photo was of Mrs. Bradley and her children sitting on a car rug with the same pattern as the one found around Graeme. Other frames showed Stephen Bradley himself.
Police forensic experts reported that hair found on the car rug, hair found in the trunk of the Ford Customline and hair in the bag of the vacuum cleaner were all from a single source — a Pekingese dog. The Bradleys owned a Pekingese dog called Cherry, whose hair was matched forensically.
Police searched for a house with pink mortar and with the two plant types growing in the yard. Although cypress plants could be found growing in many people's yards, only one of the plant types was common, making the combination of the two plants together very rare.[3] Following a tip-off from a postman, a pink house was identified with a blue Ford outside and the two plant species in the garden. The house was in Moore Street in the suburb of Clontarf.
Police visited the house on 3 October and learned that it had been rented by Bradley with his second wife Magda and their three children. However Bradley had left Australia on 26 September, sailing for London with his family aboard the SS Himalaya. Police also found and impounded Bradley's car and took scrapings from the trunk. They also took possession of a vacuum cleaner, which was among the household items Bradley had sold.
The Himalaya arrived at Colombo, Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon), on 10 October. Two Sydney policemen were waiting for Bradley but Australia had no extradition treaty with Ceylon. After a lengthy hearing, the extradition order was granted and detectives arrived back in Sydney on November 19 with Bradley in handcuffs, allegedly making a confession just before the aircraft landed at Sydney airport (now packed with reporters and hundreds of curious citizens who wanted a look at Bradley).
Taken to Central Police Station for questioning, Bradley admitted the kidnapping, but said that Graeme Thorne had accidentally suffocated while locked in the back of his car. Forensic experts disproved this by connecting a breathing mask to the inside of the boot and breathing the air from the boot for seven hours, without ill effect, indicating that Thorne had been killed by the blow to the head rather than asphyxiation.
On 21 November 1960, Mrs. Thorne was asked to identify the man (from a line-up of sixteen men), and she stopped at Bradley. "Please place your hand on him," the policeman asked. "No," Mrs. Thorne replied. "I will not put my hand near him."
Bradley's trial for murder lasted nine days. At the trial, the prosecution delivered one forensic bombshell after another. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on 29 March 1961 amid jeers from the gallery. Bradley remained emotionless, his hands on the dock rail. The Thornes, who were in court throughout the entire proceedings, remained quiet. Bradley's subsequent appeal to the full bench of Supreme Court judges was unanimously rejected as the evidence against him was simply overwhelming.
It was widely predicted that for his crime against a child, he would be a pariah in prison. Prison authorities subsequently described him as tense, insecure and intelligent, with a sociable and engaging personality, but also deemed him a hopeless liar, a confidence man and an opportunist who was desperate to make money quickly.[4]
Magda Bradley divorced her husband in 1965 and went to live in Europe. While many reporters and investigators believed that Magda Bradley had been party to the kidnapping, Bradley never implicated her in any way. In jail, Bradley was subjected to repeated bashings, but was later kept protected from other prisoners. He died of a heart attack, while playing tennis, in Goulburn gaol on 6 October 1968, aged 42.
The Thornes, with their daughter, moved to another suburb, but never quite recovered. Bazil Thorne died in 1978.
Lottery procedures in Australia were changed after the Thorne case, with all lottery winners being given the option of remaining anonymous when collecting their winnings.
Like all of the other Australian states, the New South Wales Crimes Act didn't carry a provision for the crime of kidnapping. The nearest listed offence was "abduction", which referred to the abduction of a female for the purpose of marriage or carnal knowledge. It carried a maximum penalty of fourteen years' imprisonment. The Thorne case was the catalyst for introducing laws to deal with kidnapping in Australia.[5]
The late crime journalist Alan Dower was of the opinion that Graeme was not Bradley's initial target. Dower's theory was that Graeme's younger sister was Bradley's target and that he had no intention of killing her. She was young enough that, if she had been kidnapped and then released, she would not have been able to give any useful information that could identify her kidnapper. However, she was also so young that she was never away from her parents and so Graeme was abducted instead.
Graeme Thorne's murder was the focus of the Crime Investigation Australia season 1 episode "Kid for Ransom".[6]
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