Graeme Thorne murder: How our first kidnapping case horrified the nation
STEPHEN Bradley’s evil plan to extort money by kidnapping the son of Sydney lottery winners left a small clue which put police on his trail. Tragically, the body of Graeme Thorne had already been found.
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With his tie neatly knotted and two clean handkerchiefs in his pockets, 55 years ago today Freda Thorne kissed her son Graeme goodbye and packed him off to school.
Tragically, it was the last time she would see the eight-year-old alive. On July 7, 1960, the Scots College student became the victim of Australia’s first kidnap for ransom plot.
The eldest of Bazil and Freda Thorne’s two children, he vanished after leaving the family flat in Edward St, Bondi at 8.30am on a Thursday.
Graeme was to wait nearby on Wellington and O’Brien streets, where family friend Phyllis Smith routinely picked him up to take him to school, along with her two sons, in Bellevue Hill. When Graeme was not there on July 7, Smith drove to the Thorne home to check if he was going to school.
His mother, at home with daughter Belinda, then three, confirmed he was to go to school and wondered if he had already arrived. Smith drove to Scots College, but Graeme was not there. Leaving her own sons at school, she returned to the Thorne home, where Graeme’s worried mother rang Sergeant Larry O’Shea at nearby Bondi Police Station.
At 9.40am, his mother received a call. She was told “I have your son”. O’Shea took the phone and pretended to be Bazil Thorne, when the kidnapper demanded payment of £25,000 before 5pm.
“If you don’t get the money,” he threatened, “I’ll feed the boy to the sharks.” O’Shea expressed doubt that he could get hold of the large sum, apparently unaware of extensive media coverage about Bazil Thorne’s £100,000 win in the Opera House Lottery on June 1.
Media reports on the large win in the 10th lottery draw included the Thornes’ names, address and revealed that the Bondi travelling salesman would receive his prize by July 7. The kidnapper phoned the Thorne home again at 9.47pm, when a different police officer answered.
The kidnapper gave instructions that the money was to be put in two paper bags, but hung up abruptly without leaving further instructions.
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Police searched every house and flat around the Thorne’s ground-floor home unit within hours, expanding to cover motels, boarding houses and boat moorings around Sydney Harbour.
NSW Police Commissioner Colin Delaney appealed for Graeme’s return on evening television, when his father briefly appeared to plead, “For God’s sake, send him back to me in one piece”.
Graeme’s empty school case was found at 6pm on July 8 in bush near the Wakehurst Parkway. His school cap, lunch bag and school books were found 1.5km away on July 11.
Then came the find his family dreaded: “The body of a boy, believed to be that of kidnapped Bondi schoolboy, Graeme Thorne, was found today, tied with cords, on a vacant scrub covered block of land at Seaforth,” newspapers reported on August 16.
Children had seen a blue tartan rug in Grandview Grove, Seaforth, some time earlier. Graeme was found, with his necktie as his mother had tied it for school and his coat still buttoned.
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Forensic analysis found two types of cypress foliage on his coat, pants and a scarf tied around his neck. Soil samples also showed minute fragments of a pink-coloured substance chemically identified as limestock mortar.
A police search for a house with shrubs and pink limestone mortar led to Moore St, Clontarf, about 3km from where Graeme’s body was found.
Hungarian migrant Stephen Leslie Bradley, his wife and their three children had recently moved out. Bradley also owned a blue sedan seen near the Thorne home on July 7.
By the time police were ready to charge Bradley he had sailed for Britain on September 26. Police apprehended Bradley at Colombo on October 10.
At Bradley’s nine-day trial, police claimed Graeme likely died from head injuries on the day he disappeared. Bradley was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in jail at age 42 on October 6, 1968.
When terror came calling at school
On October 6, 1972 teacher Mary Gibbs, 20, and her six female pupils were kidnapped for $1 million ransom by unemployed friends Robert Boland and Edwin Eastwood. Wearing masks and one carrying a sawn-off shotgun, they stormed Faraday school, 32km south of Bendigo, on a wet Thursday afternoon. At dawn the next day Gibbs and two 11-year-old students managed to kick out a panel in the van where they were locked as hostages.
Eastwood escaped from Geelong Prison in February 1977, when he kidnapped teacher Robert Hunter and nine pupils from Wooreen State School in Gippsland before taking another six hostages in 20 minutes.
He demanded a ransom of $US7 million, guns, 100kg of heroin and cocaine, and the release of 17 inmates from Pentridge Prison. Again his hostage escaped and notified police.
Originally published as Graeme Thorne murder: How our first kidnapping case horrified the nation
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