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The Shark Arm Murder

Of all the bizarre crimes committed throughout the world, Australia can lay claim to better than its fair share of them. The Pyjama Girl Murder, the Case of the Walking Corpse and the Snowtown Serial Murders are but a few. But there is one that stands out head and shoulders – or should that be fins and jaws – above all of the others for its raw Aussie uniqueness.

Where else in the world could a tiger shark vomit up the arm of an SP bookie? And how did they identify its owner? How else but by the tattoo on the forearm. And when the severed Warwick Farm led to other devious characters, one of them is murdered alongside one of the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Shades of Sherlock and Dr Watson? Oh yes, there’s even a bloke called Holmes in it.

What started out as a day’s fishing ended up as one of the most bizarre murder mysteries the world has known. Straight out of an Agatha Christie novel, this extraordinary true story had the lot. A giant shark, human body parts, shadowy suspects and another grisly murder.

Operators of Sydney’s Coogee Aquarium, father and son Bert and Ron Hobson, couldn’t believe their good fortune. They had had a very successful morning’s fishing on 18 April 1935, with a captured two-metre shark ready to be taken back to their exhibition, when a monster tiger shark cruised up, ate the smaller shark and became entangled in their net.

What a catch! The bigger shark would be a much more valuable attraction than the smaller shark. But from the outset, when it was released into the aquarium, the huge fish appeared to be ‘off-colour’ and disoriented.

On Anzac Day a crowd had gathered at the aquarium to view the latest exhibit – and it shuddered and regurgitated the remains of a human arm, much to the horror of the onlookers. The police were called immediately.

Close examination by police revealed that the arm carried a tattoo of two boxers ‘shaping up’, and that there was a length of rope tied around the wrist.

Puzzled as to why the shark would vomit up the arm, authorities concluded that under normal circumstances the big shark would have digested it, but it was obviously feeling a bit off, no doubt due to its new surroundings.

The shark proved this beyond doubt by dying five days later.

A post-mortem of the shark’s stomach revealed nothing else of interest and it was concluded that it was the smaller shark the tiger shark had eaten that had swallowed the arm in the first place.

But police didn’t need the shark alive to arrive at one grisly conclusion: the arm had not been bitten off. Oh no! What they saw was the work of a knife or a scalpel in the hands of a very inept surgeon.

An anatomy student perhaps … but that line of investigation was eliminated by two big slashes near the laceration, indicating extreme violence.

It seemed the body had been cut into bits and thrown into the sea to be eaten by the fish – and remain yet another missing person’s inquiry. Who would have guessed that a shark would bring up the evidence in an aquarium?

One can only wonder what the murderer must have thought when the story hit the headlines. What rotten luck!

The theories came thick and fast. One was that perhaps the arm had been preserved in formalin or some other kind of embalming fluid in a hospital for students to study. This theory was soon discounted: it was established that the arm had only been dead and in the water for a matter of days.

Yet another of the more plausible theories put forward was that it was the arm of an escaped mental patient whose body was found floating in Sydney Harbour … minus an arm. The story turned out to be a hoax.

But there was no escaping the fact that Sydney was in the grip of a murder most foul.

And while the scientists were trying to put the pieces together, so to speak, a woman identified the arm through photographs in the paper as that of her husband, 40-year-old James Smith, a Sydney billiards saloon marker, SP bookmaker and ex-employee of Sydney boat builder Reginald Holmes.

In the meantime, a certain John Patrick Brady, a well-known 42-year-old Sydney criminal and close associate of James Smith, was charged with the murder of Smith on the grounds that he had recently visited the Sydney home of Reginald Holmes, who had had recent unsatisfactory business dealings with Smith.

Police instigated a mammoth search around the Cronulla and Port Hacking districts, because Brady had recently moved from a cottage in the area, taking with him a tin storage trunk, an anchor and two heavy window weights.

On 19 May, The Truth newspaper reported:

 

Operating along the theory that the body might have been carved up, and perhaps only the arm with the identifying tattoo had been consigned to the waves, the police dug up certain premises, dragged the bottom of the bay, searched the tide-washed rocks, scoured the sandhills, but to no avail. The mystery is still as deep, and as apparently unsolvable, as ever.

 

Brady denied any involvement in the murder of Smith and in his statement to police said that he had last seen the dead man with Holmes and another man.

Shortly after the police began a search for the elusive boat builder, a bizarre twist in the story took place. On the evening of 21 May, Sydney Water Police pursued a launch that was reported to be behaving in an erratic and dangerous fashion on Sydney Harbour.

During the ensuing four-hour chase, the wayward vessel attempted to ram the police launch four times before being apprehended. The driver turned out to be Reginald Holmes; he was dazed, and had blood pouring from a gunshot wound to his head.

While he claimed to have been fired upon and that he believed the police to be his attackers, police took possession of a .32 pistol, believing that the unstable Holmes had attempted to kill himself but the shot had only grazed his head.

Holmes told detectives that Brady had murdered Smith and dumped his body, in a trunk, off Port Hacking and had threatened Holmes’s life if he ‘dobbed’ him in. No charges were laid against Holmes and he was allowed to leave, after he had agreed to reveal his valuable information at an inquest into the death of James Smith.

Reginald Holmes never made it to the inquest. On 11 June, he was found slumped over the steering wheel of his car, which was parked near the Sydney Harbour Bridge, with three bullets to the head. He had been shot at close range with a .32 calibre pistol.

John Patrick Brady was in police custody charged with the murder of Smith at the time of Holmes’s murder.

At the inquest, the surprise witness turned out to be the wife of the recently deceased Holmes, Mrs Inie Parker-Holmes. She revealed her late husband’s business dealings with Brady. Her husband had told her how Brady had confessed to killing Smith, placing the cut-up body in a trunk and dumping it at sea.

A real estate agent, P.H. Forbes, identified Brady as the person who had rented a cottage from him – under the name of ‘Mr Williams’ – then vacated it, taking with him various items, including a tin trunk (it had been replaced by a larger new one).

John Patrick Brady was committed for trial for the murder of James Smith.

But the case was still shrouded in mystery. Persistent rumours of underworld conspiracies, narcotics trafficking and gangsters dogged the trial, which was held before Mr Justice Jordan at the Central Criminal Court.

Brady admitted that on the night of 8 April, he had accompanied Smith back to the cottage, but steadfastly maintained that Smith had then left, in the company of well-known Sydney waterfront identities Albert Stannard and John Patrick Strong.

Brady was eventually acquitted because of insufficient evidence. He changed his name and dropped out of sight completely.

Stannard and Strong were charged with the murder of Holmes, tried twice, and eventually acquitted.

And like all cases where fact makes fiction look ridiculous, there was one last twist to the tale.

In November 1952, a fire at the Holmes residence took the life of Mrs Inie Parker-Holmes, thus eliminating the last living link to the infamous Shark Arm Murder.