Graeme Thorne: The Bondi Boy and the Opera House Lottery, 1960

There was a time in Sydney when kids walked to the corner by themselves, parents didn't think twice, and if you won the lottery your name and address went on the front page of the paper. The winter of 1960 changed all that. An eight-year-old Bondi boy named Graeme Thorne went to wait for his lift to school one Thursday morning and never came home. The Sydney Morning Herald and the National Film and Sound Archive both call it Australia's first kidnapping for ransom, and people who were around at the time still talk about it as the moment things changed.

The Sydney Opera House, the building the 1960 lotteries were raising money for. Photo: Bernard Spragg, 2011, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

A ticket in the Opera House Lottery

The Opera House on Bennelong Point was being paid for partly through lotteries run by the New South Wales Government, and the first prize was £100,000. A detective sergeant writing in the Australian Police Journal in 1963 noted that a modest Sydney home cost around £8,000 at the time, so this was serious money. The 10th draw was held on 1 June 1960. Former Crown Prosecutor Mark Tedeschi, who wrote a book on the case, describes the next day's front-page photo: a 37-year-old Bazil Thorne holding winning ticket number 3932.

The Thornes were not wealthy people. Tedeschi describes them living in a modest downstairs flat at 79 Edward Street, Bondi, opposite a big park running up the hill. There was Bazil, his wife Freda, and their first-born, Cheryl, whose severe disability meant she had to live in an institution. Then came Graeme, born in 1951, and Belinda, born in 1957. The Police Journal gives Graeme's full name as Graeme Frederick Hilton Thorne. Even the father's name isn't settled. The Australian Dictionary of Biography calls him Bazil Henry Parker Thorne, but Freda's entry in the Australian Cemeteries Index lists her husband as Bazil Harold Parker Thorne.

Back then nobody gave much thought to privacy for lottery winners. Tedeschi has explained that everything was published so nobody could say the lottery was rigged. The 1963 Police Journal article says anyone who read the Sydney papers knew that Bazil had won and that he'd be paid before 7 July.

The man who came asking for "Mr Bognor"

One person reading those stories was a 34-year-old Hungarian migrant called Stephen Leslie Bradley. According to the ADB, he was born István Baranyay in Budapest on 15 March 1926, the son of an architect. He arrived in Melbourne on the Skaugum on 28 March 1950 and worked as a life insurance salesman, a male nurse and an electroplater in a poker machine factory. His second wife was killed in a car accident in 1955. He changed his name by deed poll to Stephen Leslie Bradley in August 1956, and in December 1958 he married Magda Wittman, a Hungarian divorcee with two children who owned a boarding house at Katoomba. The guest house burnt down in 1959 and he made nothing out of the insurance.

The ADB doesn't paint a pretty picture. Bradley lived beyond his means, dressed well and liked big cars. Prison authorities later called him intelligent and engaging, but also "a hopeless liar, a confidence man and an opportunist who was desperate to make money quickly". He brought his family to Sydney determined "to do something big", and once the Thorne win was reported in June 1960, he started planning to take their son.

On or about 14 June, according to the Police Journal, a man knocked on the Thornes' door one evening asking for a "Mr Bognor". He checked a little notebook and asked if their number was 30 7113. That was the number they'd been allotted, but the phone hadn't even been connected yet. When a startled Freda asked how he knew it, he said, "We have ways and means," and claimed to be a private inquiry agent working on "a husband-and-wife affair". In his later confession Bradley wrote that he'd watched Graeme leave the house for about three mornings and once followed him all the way to school at Bellevue Hill.

Thursday 7 July 1960

Every morning Graeme walked down to the corner of O'Brien and Wellington streets, where his mother's friend Phyllis Smith picked him up and drove him to Scots College at Bellevue Hill with her own two boys. The 2019 Herald retrospective adds that he'd usually buy a packet of chips at the corner shop while he waited.

That Thursday, the very day the prize money was due, he left home at about 8.30. He wasn't at the corner when Phyllis arrived, so she drove round to the house to see whether he was going to school, and then to the school itself. He wasn't there, and the police were called.

At 8.20 that morning a man and a woman driving to work had noticed an iridescent blue 1955 Ford Customline parked at the corner of Francis and Wellington streets. It was parked so that anyone walking along the Wellington Street footpath, Graeme's usual route, had to walk around it. In his confession Bradley said he parked "off Wellington Street", waited on the corner, and told Graeme the lady who usually took him was sick, so he'd been sent to take him to school instead.

"I'll feed him to the sharks"

Sergeant Lawrence O'Shea of Bondi police got to the house at about 9.30. Bazil was away on business. When the phone rang, Freda answered, then handed it to O'Shea, who pretended to be the boy's father. A man with a foreign accent demanded £25,000 by five o'clock. Tedeschi has the words as "I'm not fooling. If I don't get the money, I'll feed him to the sharks." The Canberra Times of 9 July 1960, quoting O'Shea, reported it as "I've got your boy. I want £25,000 by 5 o'clock or I'll feed him to the sharks." The Police Journal, the 2019 Herald piece and the Sydney Crime Museum put the call at about 9.40am, though that 1960 Canberra Times report said about 10.30am. Bradley's confession says he made it from a public phone box near the Spit Bridge.

He rang once more that night. The Police Journal and the 2019 Herald piece put that call at 9.47pm, while the Sydney Crime Museum says 9.40pm. A different officer answered, again claiming to be the father. The caller said the money was to go into two paper bags, then hung up before giving any more instructions, and never rang again. The Police Journal's writer thought he was probably spooked by hearing two different men both claiming to be Mr Thorne.

The biggest search the state had seen

The Canberra Times reported police headquarters calling it "the biggest in N.S.W. police history", and the 2019 Herald says all police leave across the state was cancelled. The rewards are reported a little differently. On 9 July the Canberra Times reported £15,000 in rewards, including a £10,000 cheque from the Sydney Morning Herald group handed to Police Commissioner Delaney. The 2019 Herald describes a £5,000 official reward plus £15,000 from two newspapers. Either way, the cranks came out of the woodwork. Tedeschi told the Huffington Post that people rang pretending to be the kidnappers, and the Thornes ended up asking callers to put questions to Graeme that only he could answer.

There were false trails too. Late on 8 July a Pennant Hills garage owner reported seeing a boy who looked like Graeme in an old Dodge, numbered BMC-379 or BMG-379, with two European-looking men. Police squads searched the area through the early morning, the Canberra Times reported.

The first real lead came the day after the kidnapping. Graeme's school case, embossed "G. Thorne", turned up about 30 yards from the Wakehurst Parkway in the Frenchs Forest bush. An old man, Joseph Bell of Collaroy, had found it but couldn't read the name, so nobody realised what it was until his son-in-law got home from work at 6pm and rang the police. The Police Journal says the case was behind a stone monument beside the road, and that Graeme's cap and the rest of his things were found several days later about a kilometre away.

The Spit Bridge, Seaforth, 1932. Bradley made his first ransom call from a phone box near the Spit Bridge. Credit: NSW State Archives, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Meanwhile detectives were chasing the blue Customline. The Police Journal explains that every 1955 Customline had an engine number starting with SQ or ASQ. About 4,000 of the 270,000 Fords on the Department of Motor Transport's books matched, and police set out to trace and interview every one of those owners, whatever the colour of their car.

Grandview Grove, Seaforth

On Tuesday 16 August 1960, nearly six weeks after he was taken, Graeme was found on a vacant block in Grandview Grove, Seaforth. The Police Journal puts the spot about a kilometre and a half from where his school case had been found. The Canberra Times the next day reported that three schoolboys from Grandview Grove found him at about 4.30pm: Eric Coughlan, 8, and his mates Phillip Wall, 8, and Andrew McCue, 7. The ADB says two boys. His parents formally identified him the following day.

He was still in his school clothes, wrapped in a woollen rug under an overhanging shelf of rock beside a house fence. The autopsy, as the Police Journal reports it, found a fracture at the back of the skull and signs of asphyxia, and death "was caused by the head injury or asphyxia, or a combination of both". The ADB puts it as "bashed and strangled". His tie was still knotted the way his mother had tied it, and his two handkerchiefs were still folded from the wash. Everything pointed to him dying within a day of being taken, long before most of Sydney had stopped hoping.

Rugs, cypress and pink mortar

What happened next is why the case is still taught as a landmark in forensic science. The Police Journal set it out in detail in 1963. The rug was pattern number 0639, one of 3,000 made at the Onkaparinga Mills in South Australia between May 1955 and January 1956. It was covered in reddish dog hairs, which an expert identified as Pekingese or similar, along with human hairs, some of them blonde or rinsed grey.

Onkaparinga Woollen Mills at Lobethal, South Australia, in 1929. The rug Graeme was wrapped in was traced back to this mill. Credit: State Government Photographer (SA), via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).

Caught in the rug and on Graeme's clothes were bits of two garden shrubs that didn't grow on the block where he was found: Chamaecyparis pisifera var. squarrosa and Cupressus glabra. The ADB and an ABC Science Show feature both credit the botanist Dr Joyce Vickery of the Royal Botanic Gardens with identifying the plant fragments. Soil scraped from his coat, trousers, shoes and scarf held tiny pink fragments of lime mortar. That suggested he'd been lying under a brick house. Experts at the University of Sydney's School of Agriculture studied the fungi growing on his shoes. Together with the blowfly larvae, identified as Calliphora stygia, his empty stomach and the state of his clothes, they put the time of death within about 24 hours of the kidnapping.

Cupressus glabra, one of the two cypresses whose traces were found on the rug. Photo: Alan Levine, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

So police were looking for a brick house with pink mortar and both of those shrubs, a woman with blonde or rinsed hair, a Pekingese, a blue 1955 Customline and a man with a foreign accent. Lots of gardens had one of the shrubs, but hardly any had both. How the house was found depends on who you read. The 1963 Police Journal describes a painstaking house-to-house canvass. The 2019 Herald piece credits a tip from a postman.

Either way, the trail led to a pink-mortared brick house in Moore Street, Clontarf, with one of each shrub growing beside the garage door. Detectives called there on 3 October 1960. The Police Journal puts it about three kilometres from where Graeme was found. Underneath, the soil was full of pink mortar, and police later found a pale blue tassel that matched the rug. The house had been rented by Stephen Bradley, his wife Magda and three children. Bradley had owned a blue 1955 Customline, registration AYO-382, which police traced to a Granville car yard. The dog hairs found in it matched, and so did the Pekingese he'd left at a vet. A Melbourne man proved he'd given a rug just like it to Mrs Bradley in 1955.

Clontarf Beach. Bradley rented a house in Moore Street, Clontarf. Photo: md111 (Flickr), 2008, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

The family had moved out on 7 July itself. Removalists arrived at 11am on the day of the kidnapping and found the garage locked tight. From Clontarf the Bradleys went to a flat in Manly, and on 26 September they sailed for England on the P&O liner Himalaya.

Waiting at Colombo

The liner Himalaya, the ship Bradley and his family boarded for London in September 1960. Credit: State Library of Queensland, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

A warrant was issued in Sydney on 8 October, and when the Himalaya reached Colombo in Ceylon two days later, Bradley was taken off the ship. After weeks of legal argument he was extradited on 18 November. The Sydney Crime Museum names Detective Brian Doyle as one of the two officers who brought him home. The Police Journal says that during the flight Bradley "lost his composure completely" and told his escorts he'd done it. His handwritten confession was signed at 10am on 19 November 1960 and witnessed by Detective Sergeant J. H. Bateman. Bradley later claimed it had been dictated to him and that he only wrote it out because he feared for his family.

The trial

Bradley was tried for murder at the Central Criminal Court in Sydney from 20 to 29 March 1961, and he pleaded not guilty. The Thornes and their upstairs neighbour, Mrs Lord, had already picked him out of a 16-man identity parade as the fake inquiry agent, and the couple who'd seen the Customline identified him as its driver. In his confession he claimed Graeme's death was an accident. He said he locked the boy in the boot in his garage while the removalists worked, and that "when it was nearly dark" he found him dead. Tedeschi's account has Bradley first driving Graeme into Centennial Park. To test the suffocation story, an expert sat in the boot breathing its air through a tube and face mask for seven hours. The readings showed there would have been enough oxygen, and the story didn't fit Graeme's injuries anyway.

The ADB says Bradley was convicted on 29 March and sentenced to life imprisonment. The Police Journal calls it penal servitude for life, the maximum penalty for murder in New South Wales. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed his appeal unanimously on 22 May 1961. Mr Justice Herron said he doubted he'd ever seen a confession "more convincing of its truth".

Goulburn

Goulburn Gaol, where Bradley served his sentence and died in 1968. Photo: AYArktos, 2006, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5).

In June 1961 Bradley was moved to Goulburn Gaol, where he worked as a hospital orderly. He kept saying he was innocent, and the ADB says "he seemed oblivious of the pain suffered by the Thornes". On 6 October 1968, aged 42, he died of a heart attack while playing in the gaol tennis competition. He was buried in Goulburn cemetery.

Graeme was buried at Macquarie Park, and the family moved to Rose Bay. The 2019 Herald piece says that, by all reports, they never got over it. According to the Australian Cemeteries Index, Bazil lived from 1922 to 1978, and Freda died on 30 July 2012, aged 86, and was laid to rest at Macquarie Park too.

What it changed

Tedeschi has called it "the end of innocence in Australia". He remembered being eight himself and keeping Graeme's photo on his bedroom wall in case he spotted him in the street. After the case, Sydney parents kept their kids in the backyard, and "stranger danger" entered the language.

It had practical effects too. The 2019 Herald reports that every Opera House lottery ticket afterwards carried a "not for publication" box to tick, and Tedeschi told the Huffington Post that the laws were changed so winners' names could be withheld. He also says kidnapping wasn't even listed as a crime before the Thorne case, and that the Labor Premier of the day, Heffron, changed that. The investigation, with its rug, hairs, cypress fragments and pink mortar, is still held up as a landmark in Australian forensic science.

Behind all that is a little boy in a Scots College uniform who walked down to the corner on a winter's morning in Bondi to wait for his lift. Graeme Thorne was eight years old.