Phyllis drove to the Scots College, dropped off her two boys and then went into the administration block where she requested one of the secretaries to enquire whether Graeme had arrived at school. With a throng of students milling around in the playground and masters bustling furiously to get ready for the bell that marked the beginning of classes, it took a good ten minutes before Phyllis was informed that Graeme had not been seen at school. With regret and some alarm, she drove back to Freda in Bondi and gave her the bad news.
By this stage Freda was beset with panic and dread. She already had an overwhelming instinct that something dire had happened to her son and no amount of reassurance from Phyllis could comfort her. Freda insisted on calling the Bondi police station to report her son missing, telling the officer, ‘We only recently won a lot of money and I feel something has happened.’ Her alarm was so patent that the station sergeant agreed to send someone to her home immediately. ‘Immediately’ meant about twenty minutes.
At about 9.30am, Sergeant Lawrence O’Shea of the Bondi police station arrived at the Thornes’ home. On entering the house, he saw immediately that Freda was frightfully upset, so he asked her to sit down and, as calmly as she could, give him a description of her son which he would write down. She explained that her husband was away on one of his frequent business trips to the North Coast. As she began to describe Graeme’s appearance, and before she had had any opportunity to explain why she held grave concerns for her son, the telephone rang. The ringing caused Freda to suddenly leap out of her chair and grab the phone, hoping that it was the school letting her know that Graeme had arrived.
‘Yes, hello?’ she said in a hopeful, enquiring tone.
On the other end was a man with a smooth voice and a distinctly European accent. ‘Is that you, Mrs Thorne?’
‘Yes,’ she replied.
‘Is your husband there?’ asked the man.
‘What do you want him for?’
Then the man said the fateful words: ‘I have your son.’
Freda Thorne reeled from the phone as if she had been struck by a bolt of lightning emanating from the handset. Sergeant O’Shea thought she might faint as she held the phone out to him and said, ‘Take this.’
The sergeant took the phone from her and said: ‘What can I do for you?’
The male with the foreign accent said, ‘Is that you, Mr Thorne?’
Thinking quickly, O’Shea thought that it would be best if he pretended to be the boy’s father. ‘Yes,’ he said.
In a very deliberate manner, with a seemingly calm voice and without the slightest hesitation, the man said, ‘I have got your boy. I want twenty-five thousand pounds before five o’clock this afternoon.’
Unfortunately, Sergeant O’Shea was one of the few people in Sydney who did not recognise the Thornes’ name, and Freda had not had a chance to tell him about the £100,000 lottery win. The police officer’s next response on the phone would be the cause of much regret in the days and weeks to follow.
‘How am I going to get money like that?’
The caller replied, ‘You have plenty of time before five o’clock. I’m not fooling. If I don’t get the money, I’ll feed him to the sharks.’
It should be remembered that during the 1950s shark attacks in and around Sydney were much more prevalent than they are today. The man’s threat caused Sergeant O’Shea to shudder.
‘How am I going to contact you?’ he said.
‘I’ll contact you later,’ the man replied, and the telephone went dead.
Sergeant O’Shea’s face was deathly pale as he put down the handset, turned to Freda and said, ‘I think your boy’s been kidnapped.’
* * *
When Stephen Bradley made the telephone call to the Thorne household at about 9.40am on that fateful day in July 1960, it never occurred to him that the police might already have become involved in the disappearance of Graeme Thorne. In fact, his timing of the call – an hour after he had enticed Graeme into his car – had been carefully calculated to allow an opportunity for the parents to be informed that their boy had not been picked up from the usual spot in Wellington Street, but also to be sufficiently soon after his disappearance so that they would not yet have contacted the police. He anticipated that the parents would be worried about where their son had gone, but would presume that he had gone walkabout or was truanting from school. Bradley himself had done just that on numerous occasions in Budapest when he was the same age. It never crossed his mind that the police would be involved within an hour of the boy being whisked away.
When Freda Thorne answered the phone, Bradley noticed the anticipation in her voice and the deflation when he asked for her husband. Bradley had never heard Bazil’s voice, so when Freda handed over the phone, he assumed he was now speaking to her husband. When the man queried how he was going to get an amount like £25,000, it confirmed just how unsophisticated and unimaginative Bazil was to think that anyone who had the skill and determination to abduct his son would be put off by such a pathetic response. In a fit of pique, he delivered the threat of feeding the boy to the sharks to impress upon this simpleton just how determined he was to get the ransom.
Having made the call, Stephen Bradley was confident that by five o’clock that afternoon the Thornes would be able to withdraw the money from their bank account in which it was languishing. He was so confident that in their panic they would not contact the police that he forgot to tell them that they must not notify the authorities. When he realised this after completing the call, he was not troubled, because he believed that in their fear they would not do anything to prejudice the safe return of their son.
When Bradley returned to his Ford, there was still not the slightest sound from the boot. He drove across the Spit Bridge and up the hill towards Seaforth and Clontarf. He knew that by now Magda and the children would have left in a taxi for the airport, and that he would have a little time before the removalists arrived – enough to check his human cargo, and if necessary administer some more chloroform. As he drove along, he felt a sense of smug satisfaction that everything was going exactly according to plan. He was in no way concerned at the distress he had caused to Graeme’s parents, as they were masters of their own destiny for having unjustifiably enriched themselves through no effort or attributes of their own. Neither did he have any concern for the prisoner in his boot, as he was certain that within a few hours the boy would be released unharmed to resume life in the midst of his family.
* * *
As soon as he hung up the phone, Sergeant O’Shea realised that he had made a feeble attempt at dealing with what was clearly a dire situation. He vainly attempted to comfort Mrs Thorne, who was now in a shocking state. Between sobs, erratic breathing and periods of light-headedness, she told him about the £100,000 lottery win. The sergeant immediately contacted the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) at the Central police station in the city, to inform them that a young boy from Bondi had been kidnapped for ransom. A team of police from the CIB immediately swung into action. Within a short time they had ensured that any further calls to the Thornes’ home were monitored, and alerted points of departure from Australia to keep an eye out for the boy. Because a child had never before been kidnapped for ransom in Australia, the police had no experience in investigating a crime of this kind. The only vaguely similar event in living memory had involved an adult victim who had been abducted in 1932 – coincidentally in Bondi – and forced to write a £10,000 money order, which the kidnappers had been unable to cash. The victim had been released unharmed and the two kidnappers had been apprehended and gaoled. It was with some dismay that the police discovered that because of the rarity of this crime, there was in fact no offence of kidnapping for ransom on the statute books of New South Wales.
It was not until about 1pm that day, four-and-a-half hours after Graeme’s disappearance, that Bazil Thorne learnt of his son’s kidnapping. As he stepped off a plane at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport on his way home from Kempsey, his nam
e was called over the airport public address system. As he approached the enquiry desk, thinking that there would be a message about his work, he was approached by a police officer, Detective Sergeant S. Workman, who explained to him that his son was missing. Realising how distressed Freda would be, Bazil immediately went home to comfort her. By the time he arrived, Freda was so overwrought that she required medical sedation, which gave her the appearance of being drunk, but did nothing to anaesthetise her fears or allay her anguish. Sergeant O’Shea informed Bazil about the phone call. Bazil was terribly distressed that he had not been at home when the kidnapper rang, as he was convinced that he could have negotiated Graeme’s swift release. Three-year-old Belinda, who was still at home, knew that something was amiss. Bazil told her frankly that Graeme was missing, but that he was hopeful that her brother would be found and brought home before nightfall. Belinda wanted to know what ‘missing’ meant, and Bazil told her that her brother was ‘lost’.
Bazil and Freda assured the police that they would pay any amount, even the full £100,000, if it meant getting their son back safely. They were able to tell the police about the suspicious visit to their home three weeks earlier by the man who claimed to be looking for a Mr Bognor, and Freda was confident that his voice and accent were the same. They remembered him as being thickset, in his thirties or forties, with dark brown hair that was longish at the back, having a sallow complexion, bushy black eyebrows and with a distinctly European accent. Both of them, particularly Freda, felt that they could identify the man if the police could locate him. The upstairs neighbour, Mrs Dorothy Lord, was able to confirm that the man with the accent had also come to her door. The discrepancy in the man’s story – telling the Thornes he was looking for Mr Bognor but Mrs Lord that he was looking for Mr Bailey – immediately raised grave suspicions that this had been the kidnapper conducting surveillance on his intended victim’s home. Surely it was more than mere coincidence that a man with a strong European accent had made a clumsy and suspicious enquiry three weeks earlier and that a man with a European accent had made the vicious and determined demand for ransom over the phone.
The police decided not to release to the media or the public any details of the man’s earlier visit to the Thornes’ home, but unfortunately news of Graeme’s kidnapping and the ransom demand spread like wildfire around the Central police station. The information was broadcast on the police radio, which had the unintended and undesirable consequence that police roundsmen from the newspapers heard about these extraordinary events within minutes of the CIB becoming involved.
Reporters for the afternoon papers were placed under extreme pressure from their editors to get the basic details of this alarming offence in sufficient time to publish them that very day. Otherwise, if the news was delayed, the morning papers the following day would get the advantage of first run of the story. Commercial pressures therefore ensured that on the afternoon and evening of the day of Graeme Thorne’s disappearance, the newspapers and the evening television and radio broadcasts carried the story. The Sun had a short note on page three about the disappearance of an unnamed eight-year-old schoolboy from Bondi and the police search for him. The Daily Mirror carried a front-page story headed ‘Kidnapped! Son of £100,000 winner’ in which Graeme Thorne was named and details about the location of his disappearance were given. The news immediately attracted the attention of the nation to the fate of this little boy and the suffering of his unfortunate parents, whose lives had so markedly changed in the course of a single day.
In the meantime, police commenced to extensively canvass the area around Graeme’s home and Wellington Street in an effort to find witnesses who might have seen anything untoward at the time of his disappearance. Even young children living in the surrounding streets were interviewed by investigators. It seemed extraordinary that nobody had witnessed a young boy being abducted in broad daylight on a public street in suburban Sydney. Arrangements were made for a police officer to be on hand at the Thornes’ home twenty-four hours a day. Detective Constable Lloyd Noonan effectively took up residence at their home, to be relieved at weekends by Sergeant Dave Paul. Bazil and Freda gave these two officers strict instructions that Belinda was to be protected from a full appreciation of what was happening. She obviously could not be prevented from knowing that her brother was missing, but the real story was to be kept from the three-year-old.
That afternoon a distraught Bazil Thorne waited by his phone for the pre-arranged 5pm call from the kidnapper, but it never came. He continued his vigil for several hours after the appointed time, desperately praying that the kidnapper would make contact. By this stage of the night, Bazil and Freda were in a frightful state. Freda kept mentioning her regret that she had not properly said goodbye to Graeme that morning. Bazil kept mumbling: ‘If only I had been home this morning’.
At 9.47pm the phone suddenly rang. It was answered by Detective Sergeant David Valentine, who had replaced Sergeant O’Shea at the house. When Valentine answered the phone, a man with a European accent said, ‘Is that you, Mr Thorne?’
When Valentine said that it was, the man asked, ‘Have you got the money?’
Valentine answered in the affirmative.
The man continued. ‘Put it in two paper bags …’
Before he could continue the instructions, Sergeant Valentine interrupted, saying, ‘Wait a minute. I want to take your instructions down. I don’t want to make a mistake.’
The caller was obviously baulked by this response, because he mumbled something in an agitated fashion which the policeman was unable to understand, and then abruptly hung up. Sergeant Valentine was bitterly disappointed that he had failed to keep the caller on the line, and Bazil Thorne, who was nearby, was intensely distraught that contact had been broken off, feeling that the police officer had mismanaged the call and that he himself could have handled it far better. While it was generally agreed in police circles that this call had come from the kidnapper, because Sergeant Valentine had not heard the earlier call he was unable to verify that the voice and accent were the same.
Following the phone call, Bazil and Freda went to the Bondi police station, where Bazil made an emotional television appearance in which he said:
If the person who has my son is a father, and has children of his own, all I can say is, for God’s sake, send him back to me in one piece.
He then broke down and, just before the transmission was terminated, Freda could be faintly heard in the background calling out ‘Keep your chin up, darling’. The transmission then transferred to Police Headquarters in the city, where the New South Wales Commissioner of Police, Mr CJ Delaney, made a personal request to the kidnapper to release Graeme unharmed, and called on the community to assist the police with any information that might progress the investigation. The whole of Australia was hoping that this little boy would be safely returned to his loving family and that their frightful ordeal would come to an end.
5
REMOVALS
Just before 10am, about ten minutes after making the ransom call from the public phone box at the Spit Bridge, Stephen Bradley arrived at his Clontarf home at 28 Moore Street with Graeme Thorne still in the car boot. He parked his car inside the internal garage of the house which was situated in the sub-floor space of the house’s foundations, closed the large doors and contemplated with glee the massive ransom that he was confident of receiving later that day. He realised that time was tight. Magda and the children had left the house, but the removalists were due to arrive between 10 and 11am to pick up the family’s furniture to place it into storage. He needed the boy to remain in his enforced slumber while the removalists did their work.
Bradley gingerly opened the boot of the car and, as the light streamed into this coffin-like prison, the boy began to squirm and groan. It was quite apparent that he was semi-conscious and might fully awaken at any moment. The gag was still in place over Graeme’s mouth and his feet were still securely tied, but Bradley noticed that the twine he had wrappe
d around the boy’s wrists had become slack. Without checking on the boy’s condition, Bradley was concerned that if his young prisoner became fully conscious and managed to get the gag off his mouth, he might call out and be heard by the removalists or neighbours. Without any further thought, Bradley opened the travel bag which was still in the boot and again held the liquid-soaked rag over the boy’s mouth and nose until he ceased squirming. His object was to ensure that he would remain in that state for several more hours, which would allow Bradley to interact with the removalists without being distracted by concerns that the boy might wake up. He then re-closed the boot, believing that his captive was sufficiently secured for several more hours.
* * *
Shortly afterwards, at about 10.15am, Magda phoned Stephen from Kingsford Smith Airport at Mascot as she and the children waited to board their plane to Coolangatta. Although Magda had woken that morning still smarting from the argument the night before, by the time she got to the airport she had calmed down. During the phone call, Stephen told her that he was still waiting for the removalists.
As Magda stepped onto the plane bound for Queensland, did she have some inkling that her husband was in the course of executing something far more serious than any of his previous, crazy financial escapades? Was she getting as far away as she could from what she knew or suspected would be an unfolding tragedy or was she merely a pawn in her husband’s hands who was reluctantly complying with his insistent instructions to go on an interstate holiday so that he would have the house to himself?
* * *
About fifteen minutes after Magda’s call, the removalists arrived. After backing their large van onto the driveway, they immediately began loading. Bradley strictly supervised their work, and indeed helped them by carrying some of the smaller items from the house to their vehicle. He refused them entry to the garage, saying that he would bring them the items they needed to load from there. As they did their work, the removalists constantly walked through the front garden in close proximity to the locked garage doors, which made Bradley distinctly nervous. At one point, as he was walking past the garage doors, he thought he heard a noise coming from within that could only be his young prisoner. Deeply surprised, he looked around to see if any of the removalists had heard anything, but thankfully they happened to be inside the house at that time. In a flash, he unlocked and opened the garage door, entered and closed it behind him. As he tentatively opened the boot lid, he saw his bound and gagged captive stirring. At the same moment, he heard one of the removalists just outside the closed, but now unlocked, garage doors calling out: ‘Mr Bradley. Do you want this to go on the truck?’ In a blind panic, without even checking to see if Graeme was in fact awake, Bradley impulsively reached over and grabbed one of the metal tools from the nearby work bench, and struck the boy’s head with sufficient force to again render him fully unconscious.1
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