Australia's trial of the century opened at the Sydney Central Criminal Court on March 20, 1961. The public gallery was packed and hundreds of disgruntled men and women who had camped out in front of the court overnight were turned away.

The case was far from simple for prosecutors. While the police were confident they had their man and had built up a strong case, a lot of it was circumstantial evidence. Bradley, neatly dressed in a blue suit, pleaded not guilty.

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In his opening address, the Crown prosecutor, Mr 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.

"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 trunk of the accused's car," he said.

"There are lots of questions that are unanswered that would indicate that Mr. Bradley deliberately and willfully murdered the lad," Mr. Knight continued. "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 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, the prosecution built up a strong case against the accused. The prosecution called on a specialist from the NSW Department of Health. He said he had been asked whether there was a flow of air in the Customline or whether Graeme died of asphyxiation. He said about half the air in the trunk changed every hour.

He and another officer fixed an apparatus that carried a tube away from the trunk of the car to face masks. They breathed through these face masks for seven hours with doors and windows of the car and garage locked. "Neither my colleague or I suffered any ill effect," he said, indicating that Graeme Thorne had been killed by the blow to the head rather than asphyxiation.

The rug around Graeme Thorne's body

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 determined the body had been where it was found in the bushes for the most part 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.

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