Kidnapping for Ransom – The Graeme Thorne Tragedy

When eight-year-old Graeme Thorne was kidnapped on his way to school, in July 1960, Australia was gripped with fear and loathing. Just weeks earlier, Graeme’s parents had won a fortune in the Opera House Lottery and this had attracted the attention of the perpetrator, Stephen Bradley. Mark Tedeschi QC is an Australian barrister, law professor, photographer and author, most recently, of a book on the Thorne abduction – Kidnapped – The Crime that Shocked a Nation. Tedeschi is also the Senior Crown Prosecutor for New South Wales and the Head of Chambers of the 84 Crown Prosecutors. To discuss his latest book, Mark Tedeschi addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 23 November 2015.

KIDNAPPING FOR RANSOM – THE GRAEME THORNE TRAGEDY

MARK TEDESCHI AM QC

We are particularly fortunate in Australia that the crime of kidnapping children for ransom is almost unknown. In fact, the kidnapping of Graeme Thorne in 1960 by Stephen Bradley is to my knowledge the only case of its kind in Australia. There are other countries around the world, including some in our part of the world, where that crime is much more prevalent. I hope that it will always be that way in Australia.

I am sure that there are some of you here tonight who would remember the kidnapping of Graeme Thorne. Anyone who was the age of about 6 or 7 and above and in Australia at that time would remember the case vividly because it gripped Australia for about nine months. It was front page news for all that time. And it was a case that, in many important respects, changed Australia. There are two important ways that I’ll mention to you.

Firstly, before the kidnapping of Graeme Thorne, Australian parents would quite readily allow their children to play unsupervised in the streets, in parks, and in nearby bushland. After the kidnapping of Graeme Thorne, parents were much more aware of stranger danger and would insist on their children being supervised to a much greater degree. I’ve had numerous people tell me at talks that I’ve given that their childhood changed with the kidnapping of Graeme Thorne.

Another change, and perhaps from the point of our legal system a more important one, was that the police threw enormous resources at this case to try and solve it. In particular, they engaged in techniques of forensic science that had never been used before – techniques that today are quite commonplace. So this case really marked the beginning of modern-day forensic science in Australia. In my book, I describe in some detail those techniques that were used.

I’ll give you a very brief rundown on what happened, for those of you who weren’t around or don’t remember the case. Graeme’s parents, Bazil and Freda Thorne, had won first prize in one of the early Opera House lotteries. They had won £100,000. It might not sound like a lot today, but if you consider that the average house price in Sydney and Melbourne in 1960 was £8,000, you could buy 12 ordinary houses with the winning prize money.

There was no such thing as a concept of privacy in those days. The official notices of the winners were published in all the newspapers and not only was their name publicised but also their addresses. And if you had somebody’s name and address, you could ring up the telephone exchange and get their phone number.

So it was very easy for the kidnapper, Stephen Bradley, to find out all that he needed about the Thorne family. He had seen a photograph of Bazil Thorne in the Sydney Morning Herald. At the time, he was in dire financial straits. He’d previously been employed by a life insurance company. There had been what he categorised as “a misunderstanding” when some insurance premiums that he’d collected hadn’t found their way to the insurance company, and he lost his job. Whilst he’d been employed at the insurance company, he’d bought a very expensive house in Clontarf with a loan from the company. So, when he lost his job, he and his wife and his three children were in dire financial straits.

It was in that situation that he saw the photograph of Bazil Thorne and, about a week later, he read an article in one of the weekly magazines about some well-known kidnappings that had occurred overseas. It was an Australian magazine and it was written by way of saying, “This is what happens to people overseas; it doesn’t happen in Australia.” Stephen Bradley then thought how easy it would be for him to emulate some of the overseas kidnappings and decided he would kidnap the eight year-old son in the Thorne family.

Bazil and Freda Thorne lived very modest lives. They were typical working class Australians. They had trouble making ends meet. Bazil was working as a travelling salesman, which was an occupation fast disappearing in 1960. They rented a downstairs flat in a modest building in Bondi.

Opposite that building was a big park. So, it was a very easy matter for Stephen Bradley to conduct surveillance of the Thorne family home, and their comings and goings. He worked out very quickly that every school morning Graeme would walk down the street on which his family lived to a nearby corner store, where he’d purchase a packet of chips, sit on his school case and wait for a lady who would pick him up, together with two other boys who were in the same uniform.

Graeme Thorne attended Scots College in Bellevue Hill. His parents struggled to pay the fees to send him to Scots College, but it was a family tradition, as most of the males in the family had been to Scots.

It was primarily the published photograph of Bazil holding his winning ticket that incensed Stephen Bradley. Bradley thought how unfair it was, that he and Magda were struggling and this ordinary man had won a fabulous prize through no merit of his own.

Bradley was possessed with a sense of entitlement. He believed he was of superior ability to most of the people he knew, and a man who could see opportunities that others would miss. He thought it was just grossly unfair that he and Magda hadn’t acquired the wealth that he thought they deserved. The reality was that Bradley was severely deluded. He planned the kidnapping and believed he could foresee every possible eventuality that could happen. He was utterly convinced that, like one of the kidnappings that had been described in the magazine that he read, he could conduct this kidnapping and that within 24 hours it would all be over. The boy would be safely home with his family, and he would be almost unaware of what had happened. The Thorne parents would be upset about it, and upset to lose £25,000, which was going to be his ransom demand, but when their child was returned safely to them, everything would be fine, and he and Magda would be able to live the lives they deserved. In every respect, Bradley was totally deluded.

On the day of the kidnapping, Bradley used his own car and he was undisguised. He parked his car on a corner where Graeme would have to walk right past it to get to the corner store. As it happened, another car came past just as Bradley was getting out of his car. The driver of the passing car thought it was a strange place for someone to park and he noticed both the car and the driver. Unluckily for Stephen Bradley, the man in the car, whose name was Cecil Denmeade, was an absolute aficionado for cars. He was able to describe the make, the model and the colour with utter precision after the kidnapping. It was an iridescent blue, 1955 Ford Customline. Bradley had bought it especially for the kidnapping because it had a large boot which he could use as a makeshift prison for his victim.

In the book, I describe how Stephen Bradley managed to get Graeme into the car and what I think happened afterwards. What we know for a fact is that Stephen Bradley drove his car, with Graeme in it, and made the first ransom call from a public telephone box near the Spit Bridge in Mosman. Before arriving at the Spit, he converted what was a voluntary lift into a forced abduction.

I advance my hypothesis as to how Bradley converted that lift into an abduction. When he made the ransom call, he thought that Graeme’s parents would not have already called the police because they would think that Graeme was truanting or doing something that he shouldn’t be doing, or whatever. Again, Bradley was totally deluded. By the time of the first call, Freda already knew that her son hadn’t arrived at school. She was already absolutely bereft with worry knowing that her son would not have played truant or done anything that he shouldn’t be doing. He was a particularly obedient and compliant boy. She’d already rung the Bondi police station. A police officer had already arrived at their home and was taking down Graeme’s details when the phone rang. Freda raced to the phone and answered it, hoping that it was the school saying that Graeme had arrived. But no, it was a man who said, “Is that you, Mrs Thorne?” “Yes.” “Is your husband at home?” “Why?” “I have your son.”

In horror, she then handed the phone over to the police sergeant who pretended to be Bazil Thorne. Unfortunately, the policeman was probably the only person in the whole of Sydney who didn’t know that the Thorne family had won first prize in the lottery. So when the man on the other end of the phone said, “I want you to get together £25,000 as a ransom for your son and I’ll ring you back at 5 o’clock to tell you what to do with it”, this poor police sergeant said some words that he was later to deeply regret. He said to Bradley, words to this effect – “How on earth do you expect me to get money like that together in that short time?” To which Stephen Bradley replied, “If you don’t have it ready, I’ll feed him to the sharks.”

We are used to headlines today about shark attacks, but let me tell you, in the 1950s and 1960s there were many more shark attacks than there are today – not just in the northern part of the State but actually around Sydney. So it was a very potent threat. That night, Bazil Thorne went on national television to plead for the life of his son. He was prepared to pay any amount of ransom to get his son back.

On the day of the kidnapping, the afternoon papers already had many details of the abduction. Bazil and Freda waited valiantly by the phone for the 5 o’clock call, but it didn’t come. The call came at 9:47 pm. Unbeknown to Bazil and Freda, unbeknown to the police, unbeknown to just about every Australian, Graeme Thorne was already dead.

In the book, I look at the evidence of exactly how Graeme came to die, and why he came to die. Stephen Bradley, in his call at 9:47 pm, was making a last valiant attempt to get the ransom money, even though he knew he couldn’t produce a live victim. It was another police officer who answered the phone that evening, and Bradley realised it was a different voice. He knew that the police could trace phone calls and he had made the call from only a couple of kilometres away from his own home. So, when the policeman tried to stall for time, Bradley swore in Hungarian, his native language, and hung up.

Stephen Bradley made many egregious mistakes. He attempted to call the Thornes before the kidnapping to test the phone connection, but their phone was not connected. So, he actually went up to their front door one night, at 7 pm, and knocked on their front door to find out why their phone wasn’t connected. He thought if he waited about three weeks they’d forget about him, they wouldn’t remember what he looked like, and they wouldn’t remember that he had a fairly strong accent. But of course, he was deluded. By the time he made the call at 9:47 pm he had already discarded Graeme’s school case and cap along the Wakehurst Parkway near French’s Forest, which is a very heavily bushy area. Then, on the way back to his home at Clontarf, he disposed of Graeme’s body on a vacant block of land in Seaforth. In those days, people had no idea about trace evidence like we do today. Today we would know that you can just touch something and you might well leave some trace evidence. In those days people didn’t know that.

When Stephen Bradley left Graeme Thorne’s body on a vacant block of land in Seaforth, he very carelessly left with it a silk scarf of his own that was wrapped around the boy’s neck and a picnic rug that was wrapped around the boy’s body. It was on these items and Graeme’s clothing from which forensic scientists at the instigation of the police managed to get a tremendous amount of trace evidence and information about the person responsible for the kidnapping.

By October 1960 (the kidnapping was in July), three months after the kidnapping, the police already knew the following information about the kidnapper: he had access to a 1955, iridescent blue Ford Customline; he had a foreign accent; he had access to a house where there were two types of cypress tree – one type was very common, but the other kind was very rare; and, in all probability, the building where Graeme had been kept following the kidnapping had foundations made of pink and white mortar. They also knew that the family had a dog, most probably a Pekinese, and that there was a woman in the family who used a particular type of red henna rinse.

That’s quite a bit of information. The police searched for a house of that kind for weeks and weeks without any success. Finally, in desperation, they decided to focus on the area where the body and the school case had been found. They went to the mail exchange at Balgowlah and spoke to all the postman who delivered the mail, and they showed them photographs of the two types of cypress trees and told them about the pink and white mortar. They asked them: please, on your rounds when you’re delivering the mail, keep a look-out for a house that has these three features.

That very afternoon, an observant postman saw a house in Moore Street at Clontarf that he thought had all those three features. So he called the police, the police called the head of the Botanical Gardens to come and inspect the cypress trees. And yes, they were correct. The police then made enquiries as to who was living in that place. Well, there was a new owner. The new owner had taken possession of that house two days after the kidnapping. And the previous occupant had left on the very day of the kidnapping.

So they made enquiries about the man who’d moved out on that day. They found out that: he was an immigrant, he had a strong accent, the family had a Pekinese dog, his wife used a red henna rinse and he owned a 1955 blue Ford Customline.

The police had already interviewed Stephen Bradley. When the police accepted that Mr Cecil Denmeade had given them an accurate account of the car that had been used, the police embarked upon an exercise the likes of which had never occurred in the history of policing throughout Australia. They decided to interview every single owner of a car of that kind. But they decided they couldn’t rely on the colour iridescent blue because no rational kidnapper, they thought, would have used his own car. What they thought they were looking for was a car that had been borrowed or stolen. And the borrower or the thief may well have changed the colour of the car, so they had to interview all of the owners of any colour of that type of car. Amongst the owners they interviewed was Stephen Bradley, and they asked him a stock series of questions that had been formulated by the police.

Was your car in your possession on this particular day? “Yes” said Stephen Bradley. “Was it lent to anybody?” “No.” “Was it stolen at around that time?” “Where was your car on that day?” “In the garage”. Thank you, tick, tick, tick. Just another one of the many owners who had been checked and excluded from the investigation by the police.

In some other respects the police again went along the wrong track. For many weeks, they didn’t focus on the area near to where the body had been found, thinking that no rational kidnapper would leave the body anywhere near where they were located. But Stephen Bradley was a very lazy criminal. If he had the choice of doing something near to his home or far away, he’d invariably choose near to his home, because he was so utterly convinced that there was nothing that could link him to this crime. Of course, he was deluded in that view.

By the time the police had identified Stephen Bradley as the kidnapper, Stephen and his wife Magda and their three children had left Australia on the P&O liner The Himalaya bound for England. When he was identified, they were on the high seas in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The next port of call was Colombo, so the police got an international arrest warrant for Stephen Bradley that they could enforce in Colombo. Bradley was taken off the boat, while his wife and the three children continued on their journey to London.

Stephen Bradley was then subjected to extradition procedures in Colombo. You can imagine that for the three months after the kidnapping, when the police investigation was underway, this case was constantly the subject of media attention. When Stephen Bradley was identified, taken off the ship in Colombo, and charged with the murder of Graeme Thorne, there was even more publicity in the media. His extradition proceedings in Colombo were covered every day, and his return to Australia was met with much attention. He then faced an Inquest into the death of Graeme Thorne and finally a trial in Sydney.

Bradley was in jail for quite a few weeks in Colombo, so he had quite a bit of time to think about what he was going to say and do. He was provided with a copy of the police brief and realised that there was a very strong case against him. Initially, the approach he decided to take was to confess to the kidnapping but suggest to the police that the death of Graeme Thorne had occurred through no fault of his own and that it was a complete accident. He was fortified in this approach by the fact that at that time, to the horror of the police and the politicians, there was no crime of kidnapping for ransom in Australia. That was because there hadn’t been single previous instance of the kidnapping of a child. So, there was no crime of kidnapping for ransom and if the boy hadn’t died, there would have been some minor abduction charges.

On his arrival in custody back in Sydney, Stephen Bradley’s initial approach was to confess to the kidnapping, but deny responsibility for the death. He was then remanded in custody in Long Bay jail and within a very short period of time was disabused by his jail colleagues of the fact that he could avoid responsibility for the death. This was because there was a category of murder known as “reckless indifference to human life” murder. The circumstances in which Graeme had come to die, even if they were not directly caused by Stephen Bradley – which in my view they were – was such that he was liable to be convicted of murder.

Stephen Bradley realised that he stood to be convicted of this category of murder by reckless indifference to human life. So, he very quickly changed his story. By the time he came to trial, he claimed that he had not been involved in the kidnapping at all, and that the recent confession he’d given to police had been extorted from him. He alleged that the police had threatened him that unless he confessed and wrote it out in his own handwriting using the words that they gave him, they would get straight on a plane, go to London and arrest Magda, bring her home to Sydney to charge her also with the kidnapping. This would have the consequence that their three children would be placed in an orphanage in London, or something like that.

Stephen Bradley went to trial claiming that the confession had been extorted from him, that he was totally innocent of the kidnapping and the murder. He gave a dock statement and also gave sworn evidence, so he was cross-examined by the then Senior Crown Prosecutor who was my predecessor. There were only two people in the courtroom who thought that Stephen Bradley would be acquitted. One of them was Stephen Bradley, because of his deluded mind. The other one was his barrister, who was the public defender of the day, a man by the name of Fred Vizzard. He was a very good public defender, but he was also the kind of man who would believe whatever his client told him. He firmly believed that his client, Stephen Bradley, was innocent. When the jury came back with a conviction, there was literally dancing in the street outside the courthouse, but Fred Vizzard was absolutely devastated, feeling that he had let his client down.

The whole of Australia rejoiced at his conviction, because the case against Stephen Bradley was just so overwhelming. The only sentence that was available for murder in those days was life imprisonment, and he was duly sentenced to that. Life in those days didn’t necessarily mean life – it’s not like it is today. If you want to find out what happened to Stephen Bradley after his life sentence you’ll have to read the book.

One of the reasons I wrote this book is because I found the personality of Stephen Bradley and his wife Magda so interesting. What would convince a family man, who had children of his own, (one of them almost the same age as Graeme Thorne), to commit such a horrible crime? What would propel him to bring about the circumstances in which Graeme came to die? At the time of the trial, most of the media and most of the public thought Magda had probably been involved as well. I enter into an analysis of whether or not I think that Magda was involved. I came to the conclusion that she was not involved beforehand, but within a very short period of time after the kidnapping was publicised – which was on the afternoon of the kidnapping when she was in Queensland with the children – she had a terrible thought that her husband might well be responsible and yet desperately hoped that she was wrong. She no doubt found it hard to believe that the man she had been married to and living with could possibly commit such a horrid crime.

Both Stephen and Magda Bradley were fascinating characters and the stuff that people write books of fiction about. However, sometimes true-crime is more fantastic than fiction – which in my view is true in this particular case.

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