CHAPTER 14

THE THORNE KIDNAPPING

Most countries have a famous kidnapping. On 10 July 1973, in Rome, John Paul Getty III, grandson of oil billionaire and renowned miser, J. Paul Getty, was kidnapped and a ransom of US$17 million was demanded over the telephone for his safe return. Not one willing to part with his hard-earned money in a hurry, his grandfather refused to pay any ransom ‘on principle’.

In November 1973, an envelope containing a lock of hair and a human ear was delivered to a daily newspaper. The note attached said: ‘This is Paul’s ear. If we don’t get some money within 10 days, then the other ear will arrive. In other words, he will arrive in little bits.’ Still reluctant to part with the ransom, Getty senior negotiated a deal and got his grandson back for about US$2 million. He was found alive in southern Italy shortly after the ransom was paid. His kidnappers were never caught.

America’s most famous case of kidnapping and ‘crime of the century’ occurred in 1932. The baby son of the world’s greatest living hero, Charles A. Lindbergh, was abducted from Lindbergh’s New Jersey home by an intruder using a crude, homemade ladder to gain entry to a second-storey bedroom. A ransom note was left on the windowsill. The demand was paid, but the child was found dead in the woods near the house 73 days later. Two years later, 35-year-old Bronx carpenter Bruno Richard Hauptmann was tried, found guilty and executed, despite protesting his innocence to the bitter end.

In 1960, four-year-old Eric Peugeot, son of the Paris automobile millionaire, Raymond Peugeot, was kidnapped from the playground of a fashionable golf course outside Paris. His kidnappers demanded US$35,000 – about the equivalent of a round of drinks to mega-rich Peugeot – for the boy’s safe return. The ransom was promptly paid and the boy was returned, unharmed, a short time later. His kidnappers were arrested in 1962 and each sentenced to 20 years in jail.

Unlike the more notorious cases from around the world, Australia’s most famous kidnapping wasn’t of a member of a fabulously rich or famous family. It was also Australia’s first-ever kidnapping. In fact, kidnapping was so unheard of in Australia that, until it happened, no Crimes Act in Australia contained a provision for it! Child kidnappings only ever happened on the other side of the world, two or three weeks away by propellered aeroplane in America or Europe, not in Australia where children were king and could swim, fish and bushwalk in absolute safety and the only predators were the sharks and magpies protecting their young. Yet, due to the circumstances surrounding the case and the extraordinary scientific detection utilised for those archaic times, the Graeme Thorne kidnapping is arguably Australia’s best-known crime and a crime that became famous around the world.

• • •

On Wednesday, 1 June 1960, amid much fanfare, ticket number 3932 was drawn out of a huge barrel at the State Lottery Office in Barrack Street in the heart of Sydney. It was the winning number of the 10th Opera House Lottery, so-named because the proceeds were used to help pay for the construction of what was to become one of the world’s most recognised landmarks – the Sydney Opera House – to be situated on the foreshores of Sydney Harbour at Bennelong Point. The first prize was worth £100,000, a considerable windfall when it is considered that, in today’s money, it would convert to approximately $5 million. At £3 a ticket, or about 20 per cent of the average weekly wage of the time, it took a while for the lottery to fill and its draw was eagerly awaited by the ticket-holders.

The lucky owner of ticket number 3932 was travelling salesman Bazil Thorne, who was in the north-west of New South Wales when news of his good fortune reached him. He was so elated he cut his business trip short and drove home immediately to enjoy the moment with his wife and young family. Bazil and Freda Thorne, with their two children, Graeme, eight, and Belinda, three, lived in a two-bedroom, ground-floor apartment in Edward Street, Bondi, only a couple of minutes' walk to another famous Australian landmark – Bondi Beach. But the money changed little in their lifestyle. Although the Thornes were what Australians refer to as ‘battlers’ – a young couple with a young family living on a single income – they persisted in their daily routine as if nothing had happened, although they could now pay cash for the flashest of houses and cars, and could take an extended trip around the world and have plenty left over.

In a business partnership with his father, 37-year-old Bazil Thorne had worked hard enough to send his son, Graeme, to nearby Scots College, one of Sydney’s more-expensive schools with an outstanding reputation for exemplary education and sports. Graeme loved the beach, football and riding his bike, and the fortune his parents had won made little difference to him. At 8.30 a.m. each weekday morning, he walked up the street in his grey school uniform, turned right into Wellington Street and sat on his school case on the corner of O’Brien Street where Phyllis Smith, a friend of the Thornes, would pull up at the kerb and Graeme would hop in the back seat with her two sons, who were also students at Scots.

But, on Thursday, 7 July 1960, Graeme Thorne walked out of home as usual and disappeared. It was just 36 days after the lottery win. When Mrs Smith arrived at the O’Brien Street corner at 8.35 a.m. and couldn’t see Graeme, one of her sons looked in at the nearby grocery store where Graeme sometimes brought potato chips and waited, but he wasn’t there. Concerned, but not overly worried at this stage, Mrs Smith waited a short while, then drove around to the boy’s home and spoke to Mrs Thorne who was convinced that Graeme would turn up somewhere shortly. However, it wasn’t like him to go astray. Mrs Smith drove to Scots College, but Graeme had not been seen there either. She left her sons at the college and returned to the Thornes' apartment.

Now very worried, Mrs Thorne rang Sergeant Larry O’Shea at the nearby Bondi Police Station. Within minutes he was knocking at the front door. Sergeant O’Shea was taking notes when the phone rang. Mrs Thorne answered.

‘Is that you, Mrs Thorne?’ a man’s voice with a thick European accent asked. ‘Is your husband there?’

‘What do you want my husband for?’ Freda Thorne asked, sensing that something was wrong.

‘I have your son, Mrs Thorne,’ the voice replied.

Mrs Thorne was speechless. Sergeant O’Shea took the phone from her and pretended to be Bazil Thorne. ‘What can I do for you?’ the sergeant asked.

‘I have got your boy,’ the man said. ‘I want £25,000 before five o’clock this afternoon.’

Unaware that the Thornes were winners of the Opera House lottery, Sergeant O’Shea asked in disbelief: ‘How do you think I’m going to get that kind of money?’

‘You have plenty of time before five o’clock,’ the man replied. ‘If you don’t get the money I’ll feed the boy to the sharks.’

‘How will I contact you?’ Sergeant O’Shea asked.

‘I will get in touch with you later on,’ the caller said and hung up.

It was then that Mrs Thorne told the police officer of their recent lottery win, and he understood immediately why someone would want to take their boy. Thus, the events of Australia’s first-ever kidnapping were set in motion. It was the little boy of an ordinary Australian family who had been plucked from obscurity and become naively vulnerable by their good fortune.

Instead of keeping the kidnapping under wraps for the time being until negotiations could be made with the kidnapper, a ransom paid and the boy hopefully returned unharmed, Detective Inspector Bert Windsor, the acting chief of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, chose to call an immediate press conference. That afternoon every newspaper in the country carried the story on the front page in huge print. And even though they weren’t made aware that the caller’s voice was that of a European, the newspapers couldn’t help but compare the Graeme Thorne kidnapping with that of four-year-old Eric Peugeot, grandson of car millionaire Jean-Pierre Peugeot, who had been kidnapped two months earlier in Paris and was returned unharmed after the ransom had been paid. Eric Peugeot’s kidnappers were still at large at the time that Graeme went missing.

To a man, the nation was dumbfounded. This could happen in America or Europe, yes, but not here. It just didn’t happen. Australia was so unprepared for a kidnapping that, like all of the other states, the New South Wales Crimes Act didn’t even carry a provision for the crime. The nearest listed offence was ‘abduction’, which commonly referred to the abduction of a female for the purpose of marriage or carnal knowledge. It carried a maximum penalty of 14 years imprisonment. But it was only a matter of time before there would be a catalyst that would introduce laws for kidnapping. Tragically, for the Thorne family, their missing boy would be it.

• • •

Police launched a search operation on a scale the likes of which Australia had never seen before. Within hours of the kidnapping, every house and flat in the vicinity of the Thornes’ home was searched. Every possible hideout was checked; motels, boarding houses, weekenders and even boats on moorings around Sydney Harbour came under scrutiny. Known criminals across the country were questioned. Officers on leave were called back to duty to help with the search. Bazil Thorne told detectives to offer the entire £100,000 in return for his son, but they declined as they expected that all it would attract were tricksters and conmen and would inhibit the real search.

Although under heavy sedation, Mrs Thorne recalled that, a short time after the lottery win, a man with a heavy European accent and wearing dark glasses had knocked on her door and asked for a Mr Bognor, a name she didn’t recognise. The man then asked her if her phone number was 307113, which was correct although it was not listed in the telephone directory. Mrs Thorne suggested that the man ask the lady living in the flat above. It was later revealed that the phone number was given to the mysterious caller with the European accent by an employee at the State Lottery Office. In 1960 in Sydney, there was no secrecy attached to the name, address or telephone number of a lottery winner.

When the kidnapper had not rung back by 5 p.m. on 7 July as he said he would, the New South Wales Police Commissioner, C.J. Delaney, made a personal appeal for the return of Graeme Thorne on the evening television news. The following day television stations across the nation screened news flashes with photos of the missing boy. Bazil Thorne appeared on television briefly and said: ‘If the person who has my son is a father of his own, all I can say is, for God’s sake, send him back to me in one piece.’

The following day at 6 p.m., Graeme Thorne’s empty school case was found a few yards in from Wakehurst Parkway, a busy highway that runs through several kilometres of bushland on the outskirts of Sydney. Although it wasn’t relevant at the time, but would be of significance in the future, this location is on the way to the oceanside suburb of Seaforth, about 10 kilometres from the heart of Sydney as the crow flies. The school case with the name ‘Graeme Thorne’ on it was found by an elderly man collecting bottles who, fortunately, had seen the television coverage of the kidnapping and immediately recognised the importance of his discovery and contacted police. Within hours hundreds of police, assisted by army units, helicopters and tracker dogs, were combing the rugged bushland area for further clues. That night, Commissioner Delaney again appeared on television with an appeal to the kidnapper: ‘Please let us know if the boy is safe.’

On Saturday night, police arranged with the Bank of New South Wales for a special withdrawal of £25,000 from Bazil Thorne’s account, just in case the kidnapper should get in touch with them again. When they had heard nothing by Sunday, 10 July, Mr Thorne went on television and offered all or part of the £25,000 in cash for any information leading to the return of his son. Sitting alongside Mr Thorne was the Reverend Clive Goodwin of St Mark’s Church of England in Sydney’s Darling Point, who said he was acting as intermediary and promised anyone who came forward that there would be no interference from the police.

All the announcement did was attract the heartless conmen all in search of a quick buck about whom the police had warned Mr Thorne. One such call that sounded genuine was from a woman saying she was acting as a go-between. Police were reluctant to allow Mr Thorne and Reverend Goodwin to go ahead and connect with the woman without their assistance. They only allowed the connection to go ahead if they could shadow Reverend Goodwin as he made the money drop and collected the information.

The police followed the Reverend to Sydney’s outer-western suburbs at the foot of the Blue Mountains, where he was instructed to hand over an envelope addressed to a Mr Day and containing £100 to the owner of a fish-and-chip shop. The Reverend delivered the envelope as instructed, but there was no money inside it. A woman collected it and disappeared before police could catch her.

On Monday, after an exhausting weekend, the hundreds of searchers were rewarded for their efforts. Graeme Thorne’s school cap, raincoat, lunch bag – with an apple still inside it – and maths books were found about a kilometre from where the school case had been found on the opposite side of the highway. But was Graeme Thorne still alive? That was the question that was on Australia’s lips. It would be quite some time before Australia knew the answer.

• • •

On 16 August 1960, five weeks after Graeme Thorne had gone missing, his body was discovered under an overhanging ledge of rock in the scrub on a vacant block of land only 15 metres from an occupied house in Grandview Grove, Seaforth. His hands and feet were tied with rope. A silk scarf had been knotted tightly around his neck. He was wrapped in a checkered car rug and still wore his Scots College blazer. The boy had died of either a fractured skull or strangulation – or both.

The body was discovered by two young boys. They had been aware of the bundle under the rock ledge for a couple of weeks and had fantasised that it was a dead body but, unaware of the Graeme Thorne kidnapping, had never told anyone. While taking an older friend to their nearby bushland adventure ‘fort’, the boys mentioned the bundle. The friend told his parents, who made the terrible discovery that night by torchlight.

The main line of inquiry pursued by police was related to a car seen near the corner on the morning Graeme disappeared. A young man came forward when the story first broke and reported seeing an iridescent blue 1955 Ford Customline at the scene of the abduction. It might have been anyone’s car, but police were searching for any possible lead as they had so little to go on.

Dozens of police moved into the Department of Motor Transport for the weekend and started on the daunting task of checking through 260,000 Ford index cards. Today it would take minutes to come up with the 5000 owners of 1955 iridescent blue Ford Customlines registered in New South Wales. For the investigators of 1960, it was going to take weeks. Then each vehicle would have to be traced, and each owner located and physically questioned. To speed up the process, police appealed numerous times through the media to members of the public to come forward if they knew of anyone with an iridescent blue Ford Customline who had been acting suspiciously.

William and Kathleen Telford of 26 Moore Street, Clontarf, the suburb next to Seaforth where Graeme Thorne’s body was found, had a neighbour, Stephen Bradley, who drove that model car. But he and his wife seemed such nice people that the Telfords had never bothered to contact police. They hadn’t thought any more of it even when the Bradleys moved out of their house the day that Graeme Thorne disappeared and over the following weeks representatives from finance companies came around knocking on their door, asking if they had any idea to where their neighbours (the Bradleys) had moved. But, when Graeme Thorne’s body had been found in the next suburb, they had a good think about the circumstances and rang the police. The Telfords told detectives that one week prior to the Thorne kidnapping, Mr Bradley had been leaving home at the unusual time of around six o’clock each morning. They also said that he was Hungarian and had a strong European accent.

Eight days after Graeme Thorne’s body was found, two detectives called upon Stephen Leslie Bradley where he worked as an electroplater at a small factory in the inner-city suburb of Darlinghurst. A thick-set, olive-skinned man of average height and in his mid-30s, Bradley was cooperative and pleasant. Born in Budapest he had arrived in Australia 10 years earlier. He had changed his name by deed poll from Istvan Baranyay.

Bradley remembered 7 July well: it was the day he had moved house. His wife and children left by taxi for the airport about 10 a.m. They were going on a holiday to sunny Queensland in northern Australia. The removalists arrived about an hour later. Bradley left the same time as the removalists, soon after lunch. When he drove off with the removal van was the first time the Ford Customline was out of the garage all day. Bradley was now living in an apartment in Osborne Road in the nearby seaside suburb of Manly.

The day following the interview with Bradley at the factory, his wife Magda booked a one-way passage for herself and her 13-year-old son, Peter – by a previous marriage – to London on the oceanliner Himalaya. Four days later, Bradley booked a passage for himself and their two other children, Helen, seven, and Robert, eight, on the same ship. The next day the Himalaya, with the Bradleys on board, passed through the heads of Sydney Harbour.

The following Sunday’s newspapers published a description of Bradley’s missing 1955 iridescent blue Ford Customline, and police received a call from a local used car dealer who had purchased it on 20 September from an auction. Police impounded the car and took scrapings from the boot. They also took possession of a vacuum cleaner that was among the household items Bradley had sold to a city furniture auctioneer. The results of the tests of the boot scrapings and the contents of the vacuum cleaner made Bradley a hot suspect. But with Bradley and his family on the Himalaya to London via Aden, in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), from where there was a direct flight back to Hungary and no extradition treaty, it wasn’t going to be easy for police to get their hands on him. They would have to act quickly.

The master of the Himalaya was asked by cable to keep the suspected fugitive under surveillance. When the oceanliner berthed at Colombo on 10 October, Bradley was called into the purser’s office and confronted by officers of the Ceylon Police Harbour Patrol. Protesting his innocence Bradley was taken to the shore lock-up. Mrs Bradley was most upset. It was just not possible for Stephen to do such a thing, she said. Nevertheless, she continued the voyage to London with her children.

The antiquated Australian Fugitive Offenders Act of 1881 enabled easy extradition within the British Empire, but now that Ceylon was an independent nation and the treaty was invalid, police had to establish a prima facie case to a Ceylonese court to justify an extradition order on Bradley. Ceylon was also in political turmoil at the time and anything but friendly to the British Empire or any nation that was a part of it. With the results of the tests on the boot scrapings and what they had found in the vacuum cleaner, along with the circumstantial evidence they had gathered, police hoped they had a strong enough case. With a briefcase packed with the evidence, Detective Sergeants Brian Doyle and Jack Bateman arrived in Colombo to have their case heard before a sometimes-hostile court. Doyle said:

Colombo police had refused point-blank to pull Bradley off the Himalaya although we said we wanted him for murder. That is why we had to get him taken off the boat by customs officials. The authorities were very unfriendly.

After a lengthy hearing, the extradition order was granted. Considering themselves lucky to get out of Colombo with their lives, let alone with their prisoner, Doyle and Bateman arrived back in Sydney on 19 November with Bradley in handcuffs. Sydney Airport was packed with reporters and hundreds of curious citizens who wanted a look at Bradley. But they were to be disappointed as the prisoner was whisked out the back way in an unmarked car and taken to Central Police Station for questioning.

• • •

Australia’s trial of the century opened at the Sydney Central Criminal Court on 20 March 1961. The public gallery was packed, and hundreds of disgruntled men and women who had camped out the front of the court overnight were turned away. The case was far from cut and dried. While the police were confident they had their man and had built up a strong case, much of the evidence was circumstantial and they were by no means guaranteed of a conviction. Bradley, neatly dressed in a blue suit, pleaded not guilty.

In his opening address, the Crown Prosecutor, W. J. Knight, urged the jury to be impartial. From the outset, he made it clear that, if he got a conviction, it would be for murder and not for the lesser charge of manslaughter. He said:

The prosecution will prove to you that Stephen Bradley kidnapped and deliberately murdered Graeme Thorne and that the boy did not die by accident when he became asphyxiated while in the boot of the accused’s car. There are lots of questions that are unanswered that would indicate that Mr Bradley deliberately and wilfully murdered the lad. Would Graeme have sat impassively in the car while Bradley paid the bridge toll or when he got out of the car to make the phone call to Mrs Thorne? Did not Bradley’s movements on the day of the kidnapping and in the days that followed suggest flight? I suggest to you that Bradley deliberately murdered Graeme Thorne by delivering a blow to the head shortly before or after he put him in his car after kidnapping him.

From then on, step by step, the prosecution built up a strong case against the accused. The prosecution called on a specialist from the New South Wales Department of Health. He said that he had been asked whether there was a flow of air in the Ford Customline or whether Graeme had died of asphyxiation. He said about half the air in the boot changed every hour. He and another officer had fixed an apparatus that carried a tube away from the boot of the car to face masks. They breathed through these face masks for seven hours with the doors and windows of the car and garage locked. ‘Neither my colleague nor I suffered any ill effect,’ he said, indicating that Graeme Thorne had been killed by the blow to the head rather than asphyxiation.

Then the prosecution delivered one forensic bombshell after another. A team of eight scientific experts had examined Graeme Thorne’s clothing and the car rug that was wrapped around his body. From the mould on Graeme’s shoes, it was decided that the body had been where it was found in the bushes for most of the time since the boy was murdered. The Australian Mining Museum had established that the pinkish substance found on Graeme’s clothing was a lime stock mortar. Detectives had concluded that at some stage Graeme’s body had been lying beneath a house or in a garage.

Dr Joyce Vickery of the National Herbarium at Sydney’s Botanic Gardens reported that vegetarian fragments on Graeme’s clothing came from two types of cypress bush. Two detectives carrying samples of the cypress sprigs, soil and mortar trudged around the streets of Seaforth and finally called at 28 Moore Street, Clontarf, the Bradleys’ second-last address. Jackpot! They matched the soil from the rug, the shrubs and the pink mortar. They were all there.

Police forensic experts reported that hair found on the car rug, hair found in the boot of the Ford Customline and hair in the bag of the vacuum cleaner were all from a single source – a Pekinese dog. The Bradleys owned a Pekinese dog named Cherry. The dog was now a vital piece of evidence. But where was Cherry? A Clontarf resident remembered that a vet had called at the Bradleys in a Volkswagen. Police turned up the vets in the pink pages of the local telephone directory. They found a vet at Rushcutters Bay on the other side of Sydney Harbour who picked up animals in a Volkswagen. And they were holding the Bradleys’ dog, a Pekinese named Cherry, for shipment to London. Hairs from Cherry matched the hairs found on the rug in which Graeme Thorne’s body was wrapped.

A real estate agent told police that he had shown the Bradleys several houses that were for sale on 24 June. One had been in Grandview Grove, Seaforth, next to the vacant lot where Graeme’s body was found. Detectives rummaging in the garden of the flats in Osborne Road, Manly, the Bradleys’ last-known address, uncovered a number of discarded 35-millimetre film negatives among the weeds. The film, which was crumpled and torn and had been lying out in the weather, was carefully cleaned, printed and enlarged to be shown in court. One photo was of Mrs Bradley and her children sitting on a car rug with the same pattern as the one found around Graeme. Other frames showed Stephen Bradley himself.

The court was told that on the morning of Monday, 21 November 1960, 16 men, all looking somewhat alike, stood in a line-up. Mrs Thorne was asked to identify the inquiry agent who called at her apartment looking for Mr Bognor. She stopped at Stephen Leslie Bradley. ‘Please place your hand on him,’ the policeman asked.

‘No,’ Mrs Thorne replied. ‘I will not put my hand near him.’

Amid heckles and hissing from the public gallery which Mr Justice Clancy ordered to be stopped immediately or he would have the court cleared, Stephen Bradley finally took the stand. He was extremely confident and articulate. He said he was never at 79 Edward Street, Bondi. He had nothing to do with taking Graeme Thorne away. He said that on 7 July he got up at 7.30 a.m. and finished packing. He had sat and read the papers in the car, annoyed with his wife for going off early to Surfers Paradise, leaving him to do the packing. A taxi had collected Mrs Bradley and the children to take them to the city airport terminal in time for the 11.45 a.m. flight to Coolangatta. The removalists arrived shortly after. Bradley said his wife had been in a concentration camp during the war. He had been a prisoner of the Gestapo for five months in 1944. He was part-Jewish.

Knight, the Crown Prosecutor, suggested that the Bradleys had argued over the kidnapping of the boy. He also suggested that Magda had taken a taxi to the city to avoid being associated with the Ford Customline and that Bradley could have gone over to Bondi and arrived back comfortably in time for the removalists at 10 a.m.

The defence called Magda Bradley, 41, to the stand. She had flown in from London a few days before. She wore a black outfit and a turban-type hat. She was asked to show the Auschwitz concentration camp number, A-11-663, tattooed on her arm. She said the car rug displayed in the court was very similar to the rug she had possessed but was more worn. She said that they had lost the rug some time ago. She denied having seen the scarf that was found around Graeme Thorne’s neck. Knight lost no time in endeavouring to implicate Magda Bradley. ‘I put it to you that you knew your husband could not drive you to the airport terminal because you knew your husband was somewhere in the Bondi area at the time,’ he said to her.

Mrs Bradley replied: ‘No sir, I am sorry, sir, you are very wrong.’ She said she had not been aware that detectives had called on her husband at his work on 24 August.

‘You say it is just a coincidence that the very next day you went and booked yourself a passage to London,’ asked Mr Knight.

‘I am very sorry. It must be a coincidence,’ replied Mrs Bradley.

In his summing up for Bradley, Mr Vizzard, Bradley’s counsel, emphasised that most of the evidence was circumstantial. Even the police line-up in which Bradley was pointed out had little validity in view of photographs of Bradley that had already appeared in the press.

The jury filed out, and then returned to the courtroom to have the medical report on Graeme’s death read out again. They appeared to want confirmation of whether the crime committed amounted to manslaughter or murder. The expression that a ‘good force’ would have been needed to fracture Graeme’s skull helped them to decide. It ruled out an earlier claim that, while still in the boot, Graeme struck his head on the rim of the spare tyre. Again the jury withdrew.

It was evening. Home-going office workers swelled the crowds already gathered outside the court. In the corridors, television cameras and reporters waited for any news. The tension mounted as the hours ticked away.

The jury returned at ten minutes to eight. ‘Guilty,’ said the foreman. The gallery in the courthouse and the thousands waiting outside the court erupted.

‘Hang the bastard,’ they yelled. ‘Feed him to the sharks.’

Bradley remained emotionless, his hands on the dock rail. The Thornes, who were in court throughout the entire proceedings, remained stoically calm, their faces pale and drawn.

Bradley was asked if he had anything to say. He said: ‘Yes, I have a few things to say. I have never had the opportunity before this trial to say anything.’ He said he had never been given a chance because of prejudice. He admitted that the jury had done its best under the circumstances, but that they had been influenced by powerful emotions.

Mr Justice Clancy delivered his sentence almost immediately: ‘Stephen Leslie Bradley, the sentence of this court is that you are sentenced to penal servitude for life.’ The crowd roared its approval.

• • •

Bradley’s subsequent appeal to the Full Court of the Supreme Court of New South Wales was unanimously rejected. Magda Bradley divorced her husband in 1965 and went to live in Europe.

Bazil, Freda and Belinda Thorne moved out of Bondi into a house in nearby Rose Bay. Unable to get over the death of his boy, Bazil Thorne died suddenly in 1978.

Life in prison for Bradley, one of Australia’s most hated men, was far from pleasant. Despised by the other prisoners and subjected to repeated brutal bashings, he was put into protective custody for his own good. Despite the fact that many reporters and investigators considered that Magda Bradley had been party to the kidnapping of Graeme Thorne and when it all went wrong she didn’t want to know about it, she was never implicated by Bradley in any way. On 6 October 1968, while playing tennis with other protected prisoners, he dropped dead of a heart attack. He was 43 years of age.

No case of a similar nature has ever been perpetrated in Australia since. As a direct result of the Thorne kidnapping, lottery ticket purchasers are now given the option to remain anonymous.