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| Stephen Leslie Bradley |
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 thickset, olive-skinned man of average height and in his mid-thirties, Stephen Bradley was co-operative and pleasant. Born in Budapest he had arrived in Australia ten years earlier. He had changed his name from Istvan Baranyay.
Bradley remembered July 7th well; it was the day he moved out of his house. His wife and children left by taxi for the airport about 10 a.m. They were going on a holiday in sunny Queensland in northern Australia. The moving van arrived about an hour later. Bradley left the same time as they did, soon after lunch. When he drove off with the moving van, it was the first time the Customline was out of the garage all day. Bradley was now living in an apartment on 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 thirteen-year-old son, Peter — by a previous marriage — to London on the ocean liner 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 Customline and police received a call from a local used car dealer who had purchased it on September 20th from an auction. Police impounded the car and took scrapings from the trunk. They also took possession of a vacuum cleaner, which was among the household items Bradley had sold to a city furniture auctioneer.
The results of the tests of the scrapings in the car trunk 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, where there was a direct flight back to Hungary and no extradition treaty, getting their hands on him wasn't going to be as easy as they hoped. They would have to be quick.
By cable the master of the Himalaya was asked to keep the suspected fugitive under surveillance and when it berthed at Colombo on October 10, 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, it was a case of establishing a prima facie case to their courts 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. "Colombo police had refused point-blank to pull Bradley off the Himalaya although we said we wanted him for murder," Detective-Sergeant Doyle said. "That is why we had to get him taken off the boat by customs officials. The authorities were very unfriendly."
With the results of the tests on the scrapings in the car trunk and what they found in the vacuum cleaner, along with the circumstantial evidence they had gathered, police hoped they had a strong enough case. With a brief case packed with the evidence, Detective-Sergeants Brian Doyle and Jack Bateman arrived in Colombo to have their case heard by a hostile court.
After a lengthy hearing, the extradition order was granted and Doyle and Bateman arrived back in Sydney on November 19 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.
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| Stephen Bradley arrested in Ceylon |
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