Sixty years ago this week, Stephen Leslie Bradley (pictured) was found guilty of the murder of eight-year-old Sydney schoolboy, Graeme Thorne and sentenced to life imprisonment.
It was the climax to an horrific crime that left a lasting mark on Sydney and shocked the nation.
The Crown alleged that Bradley kidnapped Graeme while the eight-year-old boy was on his way to Scots College and later demanded by phone £25,000 ransom under threat of “feeding him to the sharks.”
The kidnapper, speaking with a foreign accent, telephoned the boy’s home and demanded £25,000 for his safe return.
The whole of NSW was alerted in the search for the kidnapper of Graeme – the son of a recent £100,000 (equivalent to $3million today) lottery-winner.
Tragically, he was never seen alive again.
The 1960 case first introduced the concept of “stranger danger” to Australian children.
It was also the first time that forensic science had been used in a criminal investigation in Australia.
Graeme’s father, Bazil, had won the Sydney Opera House Lottery on June 1, 1960. For the traveling salesman and his family, it was a huge windfall and made headlines across Australia.
Bradley abducted the young schoolboy near his home – under the guise of giving him a ride to school – and took him to Centennial Park where he hogtied and gagged the child, before wrapping him in a blanket and placing him into the boot of his car.
He placed the ransom call to the boy’s family and then later returned to the boot of the vehicle, only to find the boy had died.
On August 16, nearly six weeks after the kidnapping, three school boys discovered little Graeme’s body – still dressed in his school uniform – dumped on a vacant plot in Seaforth.
