Odd this day
25 April 1935
On this day 90 years ago, the murder of Jim Smith was discovered. Smith was a criminal, blackmailer, and police informant, so his untimely demise was not entirely surprising — and would have remained unremarkable (especially from the point of view of this account) had it not been for the way it was discovered: a shark in a Sydney aquarium vomited up his left arm in front of a crowd of spectators 18 days after he disappeared.
The shark had been caught off Coogee Beach and installed in its new home a few days earlier, after Smith’s disappearance, so he must have gone into the sea at some point. The shark, though, had not been the cause of death. The arm had a rope tied to it, and had been severed not by the teeth of an ocean-going predator, but by a knife.
Smith, an unsuccessful former boxer turned criminal, had worked for Reginald Holmes, an apparently respectable man with a boat-building business — who smuggled cocaine and cigarettes on the side. Smith sold a billiard saloon to set up a business supplying building materials to Holmes for some flats they built, but had come away from the deal $8,000 in debt.
The various sources for this are not what you might call rigorously academic, so: according to Alan Whiticker’s Twelve Crimes that Shocked the Nation (2005), Holmes bought his silence by giving him the money to buy another billiards place. Perhaps having little choice if he wanted to make any money again, Smith continued working for Holmes, taking part in insurance scams — including one in which a yacht, insured for more than it was worth, sank. Most unexpected.
At some point, though, the balance of power in the relationship shifted. Smith gave a copy of Holmes’ signature to forger Patrick Brady, who faked it on a cheque. Smith told Holmes to verify the signature when his bank asked, and to supply the signatures of clients and associates to help this new ‘business’ idea of his along.
Being blackmailed might not have been conducive to Holmes’ respectable status, but it is surely nothing more than a coincidence that he skipped town for Melbourne the day after the arm’s unexpected ejection from the unwell shark.
Police discovered that Brady had been drinking with Smith and another man on the evening of 7 April, and began to work on the theory that Brady, or both men, had done him in and chucked him in the sea near a cottage Brady had rented. (The landlord who’d rented it to him complained that he’d left early, replaced a trunk and blanket, borrowed a boat without permission, and left the walls and floors suspiciously clean…)
Then, on 3 May, a twist: someone sent a letter to Smith’s son, which read:
Son, keep your mother quiet. I am in a jam. I plead its OK call the cops off tell your mum I will have plenty soon and will be alright. They want me something in town never mind be a man for me.
Your loving father Jim Smith
…which seemed entirely convincing, especially when it was marked at the bottom:
Destroy this
The police were not taken in by this transparent and ungrammatical attempt to make it look like Smith was still alive, and arrested Brady on 16 May. On the matter of who the other man might have been, a cab driver said he’d taken Brady (who was acting suspiciously) to Holmes’ house on the morning of 8 April. But this was all rather circumstantial. Holmes denied any involvement.
Then, on 20 May, Holmes began to act in a way which — to put it mildly – did rather suggest involvement. He went to a boatshed, put a gun to his forehead and tried to kill himself. The bullet somehow flattened itself against his skull instead of penetrating it, and he fell, unconscious, into the harbour. The water revived him, so he climbed into a speedboat and led the police on a four-hour chase. Obviously.
Eventually, he gave himself up, and told police enough to implicate Brady — but said he’d only tell the full story at the coroner’s inquiry the following day, and went home. In perhaps the least surprising turn in this story yet, his body was found in his car in the small hours of the 12th with three bullets in its chest.
In the absence of solid evidence or confession, Brady got off and lived into his 70s. According to Alex Castles’ 1995 book, The Shark Arm Murders, a historian and law professor writing 60 years later reckoned another man altogether was behind it all: bank robber Eddie Wayman, who wanted rid of (police informant) Smith. Twelve Crimes that Shocked the Nation thinks Weyman paid Brady to do it.
Either way, Weyman was himself done in by “Australia’s first gangster” John ‘Chow’ Hayes in 1945, and I don’t know what happened to the shark.
