THE SHARK ARM CASE
Broadcast 6.30pm on 29/4/2002
Itís 1935, Anzac Day. A shark on display at Coogee Aquarium disgorges a human arm which sets off a series of events too improbable for crime fiction. A medical examination of the arm reveals it was cut from the missing body with knife, and the focus of the investigation turns to murder. This incredible story takes place among the backdrop of Sydneyís criminal underworld and proves that truth really is stranger than fiction.
NEWSREEL: Sharks. In three weeks of February and March 1935, three young men were taken by sharks from NSW beaches. One in Austinmer --
MANDY PEARSON: Sydney in 1935 was under attack from the sea. The shark was public enemy number one and bounty hunters were employed to help rid beaches of the menace. But there is one shark story from that year that still reverberates through popular memory and has become notorious in the criminal history of Australia.
PROFESSOR ALEX CASTLES, AUTHOR, 'THE SHARK ARM MURDERS' Back in early 1955, I came up to Sydney and I was given permission to go to the Redfern police barracks where many of the old police records were being kept. And the NSW Police Force gave me full access to all of the records there dealing with the Shark Arm murders.
MANDY PEARSON: In April 1935, a 3.5 metre tiger shark was caught off the coast of Coogee. It was brought back alive and put on public display at the Coogee Aquarium Baths. Crowds flocked to see the monster with the man-eating capabilities. On Anzac Day, it didn't disappoint.
PROFESSOR ALEX CASTLES: Suddenly after the shark had seemed to be ailing for most of the afternoon there was a great commotio in the pool The shark moved rapidly around the pool, up and down, and then suddenly it disgorged a human arm.
MANDY PEARSON: The discovery of the arm caused a media sensation.
A vital clue to its identity was a tattoo of two boxers shaping up to fight. After reading one report in a Sydney newspaper, Edwin Smith contacted police claiming the arm belonged to his brother who had been missing for several weeks. Because of the well-preserved state of the arm police managed to obtain some fingerprints. These provided a match confirming the arm had in fact belonged to Jim Smith, former boxer and small-time criminal. But there was another gruesome aspect to the discovery of the arm. Medical examinations revealed it had not been bitten off by the shark but had been removed from the body by a knife, and not in a surgical procedure. Now it was a murder investigation.
PROFESSOR ALEX CASTLES: Jim Smith was a battler, and like many of the period, he tried to be upwardly mobile. And one of the few ways you could do it at the time was to become a boxer. And Jim tried to become a leading boxer in Sydney. He battled hard, he trained hard. And he had some quite good fights from time to time. But in the end he just didn't quite have it to make the big time.
MANDY PEARSON: Smith drifted onto the edges of the underworld and became involved in illegal gambling and SP bookmaking that was rife throughout Sydney at that time.
MAN ON NEWSREEL: The starting price lives like a cancer. Over the wires, millions of pounds pass in illegal turnover. Bookmakers make a great thing out of it.
MANDY PEARSON: The underworld was populated by tough, hard men and women who didn't hesitate to use violence to get what they wanted. There was one unwritten rule -- never squeal to the cops.
PROFESSOR ALEX CASTLES: The last time James Smith was ever seen was here at Cronulla in the company of his long-time friend Patrick Brady. They'd spent most of the afternoon in the Hotel Cecil in the middle of the town and then they came back to a cottage which had been rented by Brady and which was on the shore of Gunnamatta Bay.
MANDY PEARSON: The cottage owner was not happy when Brady moved out. A trunk and a mattress had been replaced, and other items were missing. Suspiciously, the walls had seemed to have been scrubbed clean. In Patrick Brady, police had their first suspect.
PROFESSOR ALEX CASTLES: A key link for the police in their investigations was information they got from a cab driver who was located at Cronulla. On the morning after Jim Smith was seen for the last time, Brady turned up at the cab driver's home, and wanted a ride into Sydney. He was dishevelled, he had a hand in a pocket and wouldn't take it out. He got in the cab, and they drove through towards Sydney, and as the cab driver was able to give evidence on later, it was clear that Brady was frightened. He kept looking out the back window, fearful that somebody was following him. And then, finally, he came to North Sydney, and he got the cab driver to pull up outside of the home of Reginald Lloyd Holmes.
MANDY PEARSON: Brady's taxi journey linked Jim Smith's murder directly to the respectable middle-class businessman Reginald Holmes. He ran a highly successful boat-building business on the harbour foreshore at Lavender Bay. But Holmes had a much darker side. He controlled a lucrative smuggling ring using speedboats built at his boatshed to pick up cocaine, cigarettes and other contraband thrown overboard from passing ships. Jim Smith was a sometime employee of Reginald Holmes, and often drove one of the speedboats during smuggling operations. They had fallen out over a failed insurance scam, and Smith had begun to blackmail Holmes using the boatbuilder's position in society as leverage. All the evidence the police had collected so far against Brady and Holmes was purely circumstantial. They needed a confession.
PROFESSOR ALEX CASTLES: The police arrested Patrick Brady, and brought him here to the Central Police Station. They then conveyed him to a room just over there. And then, over a period of many hours, they subjected him to a fearsome interrogation. Reginald Holmes was also brought here, and at first, he denied ever knowing Patrick Brady.
MANDY PEARSON: The police were frustrated. They had no body, and their two main suspects were refusing to cooperate. They decided to charge Brady with the murder of Jim Smith, to maintain the pressure on him.
PROFESSOR ALEX CASTLES: This is exactly where one of the most startling events took place. Here, on May 20 in 1935, Reginald Holmes came out from his boatshed, went out to one of the fastest speedboats in the country, pulled out a pistol, fired the pistol at his head, and a nickel-jacketed bullet splayed all around his forehead. It stunned him -- he fell into the water, and a rope bound around one of his wrists as he fell. Falling into the water revived him. He crawled back into the vessel. He then started it up. He drove the speedboat right past Circular Quay, through the mid-morning ferry traffic, and then, for four hours, he was chased by the police right down Sydney Harbour until, finally, he gave up just outside Sydney Heads.
MANDY PEARSON: After Reginald Holmes's failed attempt at suicide, he made a statement to police, directly implicating Patrick Brady in Jim Smith's murder.
PROFESSOR ALEX CASTLES: He told how Brady had arrived at his house not far from here and he'd bought with him a little kitbag and he went into Holmes's study -- ..he went into his study, opened the kitbag dramatically and pulled out Jim Smith's arm with the tattoos on it. He threatened Holmes. He told Holmes that if he didn't collaborate with him, then he would be in just the same sort of trouble as his old mate Jim Smith.
MANDY PEARSON: Holmes agreed to be the star witness against Patrick Brady. But at 1:20am on June 12, just hours before the start of the inquest into the death of Jim Smith, Reginald Holmes's body was found slumped over the wheel of his car in the deserted docks area of Dawes Point, the victim of a gangland-style killing.
PROFESSOR ALEX CASTLES: With the death of Reginald Holmes, the Crown case against Patrick Brady virtually collapsed. And the result was that his trial was over in just about a day and a half and he was acquitted and walked from the court as a free man. One reason Jim Smith came to lead a dangerous life was that he became a police informer -- a 'fizzer', or a 'fizgig' as they called them at the time. One of the people that Jim Smith informed on was a young man called Eddie Weyman. As a result of the information that Jim gave to the police, Eddie and one of his mates were actually caught red-handed raiding a bank. And Eddie Weyman was one of the most dangerous criminals in Sydney in the 1930s.
MANDY PEARSON: The Shark Arm case has left many questions with few answers. Jim Smith and Reginald Holmes both squealed to the cops and wound up dead. But who was responsible for the murders? Who did kill Reginald Holmes?
PROFESSOR ALEX CASTLES: On the afternoon before his death, Holmes went to his bank, took out £500 and arranged for the £500 to be paid to a hitman who was then told that he had to kill Holmes that night to make sure that Holmes wouldn't have to make an appearance at the Coroner's Court in the morning.
MANDY PEARSON: Incredible as it may seem, Holmes actually organised and paid for his own murder. But what about Jim Smith?
PROFESSOR ALEX CASTLES: My own feeling is that the most likely killer of Jim Smith was Eddie Weyman, the young man who had actually been dobbed in on a couple of occasions by the former boxer and who was such an angry young man that it seems likely that he, perhaps assisted by someone else, committed this crime.
MANDY PEARSON: Weyman himself was shot dead 10 years later by the notorious gunman Chow Hayes, during a gangland quarrel. Patrick Brady died of natural causes, as an old man. He steadfastly maintained his innocence for the rest of his life but was dogged by his involvement in the case. This amazing story would never have been told if, all those years ago, that shark had not been caught off Coogee Beach, proof, perhaps, that truth really is stranger than fiction.
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