Kidnapped

by Mark Tedeschi

  He maintained an alibi for the morning of the kidnapping:

  On the 7th July we were moving. I got up about 7.30 and continue the packing of the night before. Somebody was helping with the packing – probably Paul. That is the eldest boy. After a while I told him that I was going out to Balgowlah to get some wires. Paul often gets the children’s breakfast, as my wife was up late on the 6th July, and when she goes to bed late, she usually sleeps in. I very seldom have breakfast, if ever. I went to Balgowlah. I went in the Customline. The other car – the Goggomobil – was not home … I went to the hardware store in Sydney Road next to two banks there. That is where I got the wire.

  Then I went across to a paper shop and bought a paper and I came back across and went to a delicatessen and bought some cigarettes. I was still annoyed with my wife, and I sat in the car a while and read the paper. About 10 o’clock, I drove home to Moore Street. When I got home my wife and family had already left. They were booked on the 11.45am plane to Coolangatta.

  Shortly after, the removalists arrived. During that morning, while the removalists were there, I received a phone call from my wife from the air terminal. I told her that the removalists were there and I had been to Balgowlah and got some wire. I wanted to make up with my wife, and drove up to Surfers Paradise to spend a few days with the family.

  Clearly, if this version of events was accepted, there had simply not been enough time for Bradley to have driven to Bondi and kidnapped Graeme Thorne. He next sought to give an account of the interview with Detective Sergeants Doyle and Fergusson at Nutt & Muddle on 24 August. He admitted being questioned about his ownership of the Ford Customline but he denied that he had been asked anything about the Thorne kidnapping or a prior visit to the Thornes’ home. He also denied telling Sergeant Fergusson that he had seen Magda and the children off on the morning of 7 July. He asserted that he had told the sergeant that it was in the Customline that he had gone to the hardware store at Balgowlah.

  He attempted to explain the surreptitious planning of the bookings made on the P&O ship to leave Australia:

  In April 1960, we applied for passports. My wife was advised that she has much better chance to sell her songs and musical compositions in England than in Australia … She made a booking for herself and the eldest boy, Paul. She wanted to take him for company, and also give him a trip.

  I was not keen to go to England. It was intended that the little girl Helen and Ross would stay with me. I did not want to be separated from my wife. We decided we would all go. We changed the booking from one to two cabins. On the 26 September 1960, we sailed.

  To explain his confessions at the CIB, he asserted that police officers had threatened to arrest Magda in England and bring her back to Australia to face charges. He told the court that an hour after the flight had left Colombo Sergeant Doyle began the process of intimidating him with threats:

  Sergeant Doyle told me there were two men sent to Aden to question my wife, but they decided against it and decided to wait until she gets to London, where they can arrest her and take into custody in Scotland Yard. They talked about it all the time. I was also told that Mr Walden, the chief, is in London and they are going to fix her. It was suggested they could arrest her and take into custody and bring her back, and she was implicated in this thing. I knew she had nothing to do with it. Neither did I. I didn’t tell them anything.

  On the leg between Darwin and Sydney, according to Bradley, the intimidation had intensified:

  I was very confused and worried. He [Sergeant Doyle] said Mr Walden and Scotland Yard were arresting my wife and taking her into custody, and the only way to help is if I admit to it. He said, ‘The only way to help your family is if you admit it or confess to it.’ I am not quite sure about the words he used, but he also said, ‘If you don’t admit to it you get your whole family in a jam.’

  I was very confused and worried. I did not make any admission to the police they say I did. I was very worried about my wife. It brought back old memories of how she has been in Auschwitz – a terrible concentration camp. Her father and mother were killed, or put in the gas chamber. She was blinded in one eye through beatings. I felt that if she has to go through that ordeal as I have she will never stand it. I love my wife and family and I was prepared to do anything to help them.

  By the time he was placed into the interview room at the CIB, Bradley asserted, he was utterly confused and overwrought, as he had had only about an hour’s sleep during the whole flight. He maintained that he had asked to see his solicitor, Mr Holt, but that Sergeant Bateman had said to him, ‘You know what lawyers are. They don’t come on Saturday.’ The process of intimidation then intensified a number of notches:

  Sergeant Doyle told me, ‘The only way to help the family is if you make a statement – admit to it.’ I said, ‘How can I make a statement? I don’t know anything about it.’ They shouted at me, ‘You bastard, you did it. Who was with you? If you don’t tell us, there is a pack of wolves outside that is going to tear you apart,’ pointing to detectives walking outside the room. I was in a bad state. It is not correct to say that I was clear and collected. I was in such a state of shock, I just did what they said. One of them said, ‘You had better write it down.’ Sergeant Doyle gave me a piece of paper and he said, ‘You had better write it down. That is the only way to help your wife and family.’

  Bradley claimed that the police had dictated the contents of the statement to him, and that he had only participated in the run-around in the police vehicle to the various locations involved in the kidnapping and the disposal of the body after Detective Sergeant Fergusson had threatened him by saying: ‘We can take you out. We have the power to.’

  He gave this account of the run-around:

  We drove to Wellington Street, Bondi, where Sergeant Fergusson pointed to a place. He said, ‘This is where the Thornes live.’ I said, ‘I would not know.’ … Then they drove to Clontarf, where I identified my home at 28 Moore Street, Clontarf, but I did not say – I did not ask not to be taken into the garage, and during that trip I never admitted anything to do with this boy.

  Bradley acknowledged that his family had owned a rug similar to the one found wrapped around Graeme Thorne, but he claimed that it had disappeared around Christmas 1959. He alleged that Sergeant Fergusson, on showing him the blanket, had said: ‘That is yours. Of course it is. I would like to wrap it around your head and smother you.’

  After Bradley finished his dock statement, everybody expected him to sit down. When he remained standing, the judge quizzically asked him: ‘Is that all you wish to say, Bradley?’, whereupon Mr Vizzard stood up, moved to the dock and whispered something to Bradley and the police officer guarding him in the dock. The police officer then unlocked the gate of the dock and escorted Bradley to the witness box at the front of the courtroom, causing a hum of commentary and conjecture in the public gallery at this strange departure from the usual practice. Mr Vizzard then made the announcement: ‘I will now tender the accused as a witness, and he will give evidence on oath.’

  A Sheriff’s Officer administered the oath to Bradley, who calmly sat in the witness box, seemingly keen to confront his accusers.

  There was a marked difference between Bradley in the dock and in the witness box. While he maintained his equilibrium and calmness at all times, his language skills were clearly not as proficient when giving sworn evidence as they had been during the dock statement, and his accent was more pronounced. This was highly relevant to the issues in the trial, because one of the allegations from the defence was that the police had deliberately inserted language errors into the confessions to make them appear more genuine. Vizzard first asked Bradley to confirm the correctness of his dock statement, thereby giving the contents of the unsworn statement the same status as evidence on oath. He then asked Bradley several questions about the scarf and the rug, and then requested that Bradley explain why he and Magda had told various people different lies about where they were going before they left Austra
lia. Bradley explained that the reason for the lies was that they did not want Paul’s father, Gregor Weinberg, to know that they were going overseas, because Gregor had previously objected to them taking Paul to Canada. Vizzard ended by asking his client the crucial question: ‘Do you swear on your oath that you had nothing to do with the taking of that boy away from his home?’ To which Bradley answered, ‘I do.’ Vizzard then abruptly sat down.

  * * *

  It hardly ever happens that an accused person breaks down during cross-examination and admits to their crimes. The best that a cross-examiner can hope to achieve is to elicit the manifest absurdities and inconsistencies in the account that an accused maintains. Sometimes this merely consists of putting to the accused the factual scenarios that they have asserted in a way which highlights the absurdities or inconsistencies in them. At other times, the cross-examiner leads the accused down a path of logic towards an irresistible conclusion pointing to guilt, in the hope that the accused will either deny one or more of the (provable) facts, or refute the logical conclusion which the jury will inevitably accept. Either way, the accused loses credibility before the jurors in a way which will assist them to reject the defence case and ultimately accept the prosecution case. In a sense, when cross-examining an accused person, the Crown Prosecutor is acting as a soundboard (like the soundboard of a piano, which does not create the notes, but gives them clarity and vibrancy), so that the jury can make an assessment of whether the accused is being forthright, credible and reliable, or is vacillating, lying or otherwise resisting the emergence of the truth. Often, the jury’s impressions derive as much from the demeanour of the person being cross-examined as from the content of their answers.

  The preparation of a cross-examination therefore requires a careful dissection of the defence case to identify the manifest absurdities and inconsistencies – big and small. The next task is to order the questions on each topic in a way that anticipates every escape route that the accused may take to avoid the point being made. It is as though the cross-examiner is gradually enclosing the accused by building a fence around him, so it is important not to close the gate before all the pieces of the fence are in place. Having constructed a thorough plan, it is vital for the cross-examiner not to be overly dominated by his or her preparation, as it is crucial to focus on the answers given in court, because unexpected responses will sometimes contain nuggets of gold that need to be mined. The cross-examination of an accused by the Crown Prosecutor is the most dynamic, unpredictable and challenging aspect of advocacy in the whole criminal trial process.

  * * *

  Bill Knight QC unleashed a ferocious, penetrating cross-examination on Bradley, hoping to rattle him into making mistakes and contradicting himself.12 Bradley was clearly prepared for such an onslaught and maintained a calm and confident demeanour; however, his accent and his language errors were more pronounced and more frequent than during his evidence-in-chief. One prominent journalist described his evidence in the witness box as follows:

  He was confident, unshaken by the probings of counsel. He treated the Crown Prosecutor guardedly, but not with fear. There was a suggestion of impatience, an impatience at having to go through the rigmarole of cross-examination, rather than anxiety in the way he stood, slowly bringing his open hands together at the fingertips, then suddenly pulling them apart again. He was cunning, but not cunning enough. When he spoke he lapsed into his normal idiom, ungrammatical at times and quite different from the fluency of the dock statement.13

  The positions that Bradley took on some factual issues raised in the cross-examination were so fanciful that not even he could provide convincing reasons why the jury should accept them. Foremost among them was the allegation that threats from the police had caused him to confess to these terrible crimes. Knight pointed out that in all the voluminous papers with which he had been served in Colombo there was not a single allegation that Magda was implicated in the kidnapping. Knight put Bradley’s handwritten confession in front of him and read out the section about the car trip with Graeme from Bondi to Clontarf. The cross-examination continued:

  Knight: When you wrote that, you realised that that was something that was extremely serious, didn’t you?

  Bradley: Had I realised, I would not have written it.

  Knight: Do you say you just wrote this in a trance, in effect?

  Bradley: I would not know what to call it, but I was in a state of shock, I can tell you that.

  Knight then continued:

  Knight: [Reading from the handwritten statement] ‘I have asked for £25,000 from the boy’s mother and father.’ When you wrote that, even if you were not thinking very clearly, you realised that you were writing down that you had committed a very serious crime, didn’t you?

  Bradley: The whole statement is pointing to a very serious crime.

  Knight: But that was a very serious matter that you were writing when you wrote that sentence, wasn’t it?

  Bradley: Yes, it would be.

  Knight: You realised it at the time?

  Bradley: No.

  Knight: [Reading] ‘I told them that if I don’t get the boy – if I don’t get the moneys – I feed him to the sharks.’ You realised when you were writing that, that it was a very serious thing to write?

  Bradley: I told you that if I had realised it, I would not have written it. I was very strongly induced to write this.

  Knight: I am not worried about whether you were induced. I’m worried about whether you were conscious when you wrote it?

  Bradley: I would not say, in the real sense.

  Knight: You realised when you were writing that, that if you wrote it, there was no hope for you not to be convicted of this crime, didn’t you?

  Bradley: Well, it is very hard to answer the question. At that time, when I was writing that, I was prepared to take the blame.

  By eliciting the manifest absurdities in Bradley’s story, Bill Knight’s cross-examination painted him as evasive and unwilling to come to grips with the powerful case against him. Bradley agreed that he and Mr Holt had spent a period of some hours alone at the CIB over the weekend after making his confessions, but he had no satisfactory explanation to give as to why he had not told Mr Holt that the admissions had been forced from him.

  The cross-examination ranged over a variety of topics, including the rug, the string, the twine, his lies at Nutt & Muddle, the fact that he and Magda had been looking at expensive houses, the argument with Magda overheard by neighbours the previous night, the departure from the Clontarf house on 7 July, the sudden decision to leave Australia after the police interview at Nutt & Muddle, and many other matters. Bill Knight QC asked Bradley what he had been doing between 23 June, when he left Nutt & Muddle, and 7 July. Bradley’s reply – ‘Generally packing and resting’ – was most unconvincing. Towards the end of his cross-examination, Knight put these penetrating questions to Bradley, which contained fundamental allegations:

  Knight: It was on the night of the 6th that you told your wife that you were going to kidnap Graeme Thorne, wasn’t it?

  Bradley: No such thing happened.

  Knight: That was the reason why your wife refused to be associated with you on that day, wasn’t it?

  [No answer].

  …

  Knight: She [Magda] did not travel back to Sydney [from Queensland] in your Ford, did she?

  Bradley: No.

  Knight: I am putting to you the reason she did not want to be associated with your Ford was that she knew your Ford was going to be used [sic]14 in the kidnapping of Graeme Thorne?

  Bradley: No.

  …

  Knight: You knew Centennial Park well?

  Bradley: No.

  Knight: You did take the police, on that day when you were running around with them, you did take the police close to Centennial Park, didn’t you?

  Bradley: I did not.

  Knight: Did the car that you were in get close to Centennial Park at any time when you were going with the polic
e?

  Bradley: It could have been, I do not remember exactly.

  Knight: Would it appear to you to be silly for a man, if he was kidnapping a boy, to drive him sitting up in the car in the front seat to the tollgate on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and pull up to pay the toll with the boy sitting alongside him in the front seat of the car? Does that appear silly to you?

  Bradley: You are asking my opinion?

  Knight: Yes.

  Bradley: Yes, I think it is definitely.

  Knight: And then to pull up at a phone box and leave the boy sitting in the motorcar while someone who had just kidnapped him went and made a phone call, a demand for ransom. That is just silly too, isn’t it?

  Bradley: Yes.

  Knight: It could not happen, could it?

  Bradley: I don’t know that.

  Knight: I am suggesting to you that you took this boy into Centennial Park and that he was in the boot of the car from the time it came out of Centennial Park and when it went over the Harbour Bridge?

  Bradley: Definitely not. I never saw that boy.

  …

  Knight: Was there any coincidence in the fact that you were interviewed by Detective Sergeant Doyle and Detective Sergeant Fergusson on the 24th August, and your wife booked her passage to London on the 25th?

  Bradley: Definitely not.

  At the conclusion of Knight’s cross-examination, Vizzard asked his client several clarifying questions in re-examination, and then Bradley returned with his escorting police officer to the dock, where he sat down and looked around the courtroom with an air of assured confidence that he had done a good job at convincing everyone of his innocence.

  * * *

  As Stephen Bradley walked back to the dock after giving evidence, he was proud that he had admitted nothing under the gruelling barrage of questions from the Senior Crown Prosecutor of New South Wales. He was sure that very few, if any, accused people would be able to say that to themselves after such an ordeal. Knight had tried again and again to trick him into inadvertently admitting something that would demonstrate his guilt, but he had been wise to the prosecutor’s tactics and had never slipped up. He was also pleased that he had kept cool and calm at all times, despite many provocations and considerable disrespect towards him. Surely the jury would think that a man with that degree of composure would be incapable of committing such an impulsive and ill-considered crime. He was gratified that he had been able to convey to the jury his emotional attachment to his wife and their children, so that they could appreciate the pressure he had been under while at the police station during his questioning. As he was giving his evidence he noticed two jurors leaning forward in their seats, seemingly anxious to hear every word he uttered. It was on those two that he focused as he occasionally turned to the jury to address his answers directly to them, as he had seen the police officers do when giving evidence at the Inquest and the trial. He hoped that these two jurors would champion his cause when they came to deliberate their verdict in the jury room. He was convinced that his decision to expose himself in the witness box had been the right one.