Short Stuff: Shark Arm Murders

Get yer info on one of Australia’s great true crime cases he-re! See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:21Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. So that's a short stuff. That's a bingo.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  That's right. And we're talking about the shark arm murder and we need to thank the Dictionary of Sydney, the Sydney Crime Museum, Snopes and Atlas Obscura.

• 1:42Josh Clark?

  Wow, you really did that up, man.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  I love that Atlas Obscura site. That's a great, great website.

• 1:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah, same here. Same with Snopes too. They're good too.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. And hey, hats off to the Sydney Crime Museum while we're at it.

• 1:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And who could leave out the Dictionary of Sydney?

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Yes, we're talking about Sydney because that's where the shark arm murders took place. Infamous crime in Sydney, Australia's history in 1935. And this is how it starts.

• 2:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  A fisherman was fishing off of Coogee Beach and caught a little small shark. And then right after that, a larger tiger shark swallowed that smaller shark. And so all of a sudden he has two sharks. Because this tiger shark was so big, he was like, hey, this thing, maybe I should take this in to the aquarium baths there in Coogee because it'll be a nice like attraction for people to come see it. Like it was still alive and people can come see this dreadful shark swimming around because sharks have been killing people around the area lately. So he thought it was a pretty good idea.

• 2:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah, just over the course of a couple of weeks, three different men were killed by sharks on New South Wales beaches. So that was a big deal to catch the shark that may have been the one or at least one of the ones. And he was right, like there were a lot of people that showed up to see this giant shark. I mean, 12 feet is pretty, pretty long, right?

• 3:08Speaker 02

  It's a big shark.

• 3:09Josh Clark?

  And those tiger sharks, they're, they're BAs too. At any rate, the shark was giving the people what they wanted to see, you know, like he would swim around along the window and just flip the people off. He had a real bad attitude, exactly what they wanted to see. And he was acting pretty normally. And then on April 25th, which was Anzac Day in Australia, which is I'm taking it as similar to our Memorial Day here in the United States.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:37Josh Clark?

  The shark started acting really weird. Like he started getting lethargic and sluggish, like a wet sponge. He seemed disoriented. And then all of a sudden, everything came to a head, essentially.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, the shark goes

• 3:56Speaker 02

  that's usually your part and pukes up a human arm. So everyone freaked out. They assumed initially, of course, like this is probably an arm of another bather that had bad timing and bad luck.

• 4:10Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  But when they did the medical examination, they were like, this was no tiger shark? No, sorry. I just watched Jaws with Ruby, so I had to work a Jaws quote in there.

• 4:20Josh Clark?

  Sure. What did Ruby think of?

• 4:23Speaker 02

  She liked it.

• 4:24Josh Clark?

  How could you not?

• 4:25Speaker 02

  I was delighted. She didn't love it, but she liked it. Like she hung in there through the whole thing.

• 4:29Josh Clark?

  Was that a happy birthday treat for her to watch Jaws?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  That's right. Happy birthday to both of you in real time.

• 4:35Josh Clark?

  Thank you. Happy birthday to Ruby.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  We did all our, our private birthday stuff and Ruby sent you a video and you sent her one, which was very sweet. I imagine we'll do that for the rest of our lives.

• 4:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  So at any rate, back to the autopsy. Not some, not some half ass shark autopsy, but a shark, an autopsy on this arm. They were like, this was not a shark biting this arm off. Like this thing was cut off with something sharp. It wasn't shark teeth and it was not surgery either. So I think we have a murder on our hands. And again, with Jaws, they were like, whatever that shark ate is bound to still be in there. And this arm was in there. Fairly well preserved. Like you could see a tattoo of a couple of boxers about to go at it. They put it out in the newspaper and a guy named Edwin Smith was like, I think that might be my brother's arm.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  He had this tattoo and he's been gone, missing for a few weeks. And the cops were like, all right, they were able to get fingerprints and they were like, yep, bing, bing, we have a winner. That is Jim Smith's arm.

• 5:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I say that we take a break here and come back and talk about Jim Smith a little bit.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  All righty.

• 6:05Josh Clark?

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• 8:25Josh Clark?

  So Chuck, we're back and Jim Smith has just been confirmed to be the owner of the arm, but the rest of Jim Smith has not been found. So the cops are approaching this now as a murder. They start looking into Jim Smith's background and they find out that he was a builder, but he was bankrupt. He also made some money on the side, working basically in the underworld. He was a boxer, he was a bookmaker. He also turned out to be a smuggler, as we'll see. And at the, and this was also at a time, the 1930s in Sydney. It was like gangland, apparently. Like there was open gang war in the street for control of Sydney's underworld. It was just that lucrative, right?

• 9:07Josh Clark?

  So I get the impression that if you were bankrupt, you could always turn to Sydney's world of crime and start making some money too. And Jim Smith had done that.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, sounds like it. So investigators found out that his last known whereabouts were, he was drinking with his friend, Patrick Brady at a hotel in, I want to say Cronulla, but it might be Cronula? Like, I don't know. Maybe an Aussie will tell us.

• 9:33Josh Clark?

  When you said Coogee Beach, it just dawned on me that like we hadn't looked at the pronunciations and like that cartoon sweat like jumped off of my forehead.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  I think he said Coogee because it's two Os, but that might not be right either. But

• 9:44Josh Clark?

  It could be Coogee.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Aussies love us. So yeah, it could be Coogee actually. I will hear. I can't wait. We'll, we'll talk about it later in a listener mail.

• 9:51Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  We're looking forward to all the Aussie pronunciations coming back to us.

• 9:55Josh Clark?

  I think it's Coogee because there's the Coogee Beach Sunday Outback Steakhouse.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  I don't want to believe you.

• 10:03Josh Clark?

  No, don't, don't. I could see it, so I mean, that's definitely possible.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  For sure. So Brady, his buddy that he was drinking with, he was also sort of a bad guy. He was an expert forger and the cops knew about him. And there was a cab driver there that had some pretty key information, which was on the morning after Jim Smith had last been seen drinking with his friend, his friend Brady had hailed this cab, said, take me to North Sydney and pull up outside this house and, and wait for me. And that house turned out to be the house of a guy named Reginald Lloyd Holmes, who was, as far as everyone knew generally, a respectable boat builder. He had a boat building business. But on the other side of the coin, he was also a, like you said, a smuggler.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  He apparently had a thing where he would build these speedboats and he would drive around Sydney Harbor and pick up discarded contraband. I guess when the noose was tightening on real smugglers, they would dump like cocaine and cigarettes and other contraband. And he would drive around and, or he, his guys would drive around and pick this stuff up. And I think Brady and Smith were some of these guys at times, or at least Smith was.

• 11:14Josh Clark?

  Yeah, Smith definitely was. And I think these were actually like, this was, like, these were planned rendezvous. That's just how they transferred the cargo.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Oh, I thought it was like they were in trouble, so they would dump their load.

• 11:26Josh Clark?

  I don't know. I don't know. It hadn't occurred to me that they dumped their load.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, just keep going.

• 11:35Josh Clark?

  So either way, that's how he made his money. And again, like he was picking up cocaine in the 30s. That was a huge, huge business in Sydney. Everybody and their brother and their mother and their little sister was on cocaine constantly in Sydney.

• 11:49Josh Clark?

  At any rate, it, it was shown that Jim Smith worked for Reginald Holmes. And now with this cab driver coming forward, they had the last man to be seen with Jim Smith while Jim Smith was alive, taking a cab and acting very cagey, as the cab driver would, would later testify, to Reginald Holmes's house. And Reginald Holmes was connected to Jim Smith. So now Jim Smith's arm seems really, really connected to Reginald Holmes and Patrick Brady.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  That's right. So it turns out that Smith and Holmes had a falling out over an insurance scam. And there was the idea that Smith was blackmailing Holmes, was like, hey, you're a respectable boat builder, so you don't want this to get out kind of thing. And that cab ride was linked to, you know, the murder in Holmes at that point. So cops got on this theory that Brady had murdered Smith, cut his arm off, like he was directed to murder Smith because of the blackmail thing by Holmes, brought it to Holmes, it's like, hey, this guy's dead. You thought I'd bring a finger? This is Sydney. Here's his arm. So that was the idea at least. Holmes had an explanation was that Brady brought it to him as like he was going to

• 13:08Speaker 02

  extort Holmes and was like, hey, I just like killed this guy and here's an arm. Like I really mean business, so you gotta pay up. The arm obviously was later just thrown back in the ocean and the shark ate it. The rest of the body, everyone presumes was just like weighted and sunk probably.

• 13:24Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it, it didn't ever come back up. The arm came back up, right?

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:28Josh Clark?

  Thanks to our shark friend.

• 13:31Josh Clark?

  Problem is, you could put all this stuff together and painted a pretty convincing picture, I guess, of Brady and Holmes's involvement in the disappearance and probable murder of Jim Smith, but it was all circumstantial. So as any cop from the 30s in Sydney could tell you, you need a confession. This isn't like Chinatown. This is Sydney, 1930s. We need confessions. We can't convict people on circumstantial evidence. So they started to turn up the heat on those two.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  That's right. They arrest Brady, take him to the police station, they bring Holmes in. He's like, I don't even know this Brady guy. And everything kind of stalled out basically, because they, you know, nobody was confessing anything until May 20th. And this is when Holmes leaves in a speedboat out into the harbor and pulls out a gun to try and kill himself. And he fails at that, but when he falls into the water, his, where he, he might've drowned at that point, but a rope catches his arm and stops him from drowning. Being plunged in that cold water, I guess, like, you know, revived him. And he gets back on board.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Police are on the scene at this point and there is a four hour boat chase through Sydney Harbor until finally Holmes is like, all right, like you, you got me, I'm done.

• 14:52Josh Clark?

  I'm, I'm bored with riding around in my boat.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:55Josh Clark?

  So that's fairly suspicious behavior and the cops took it that way, too. When they arrested Holmes, he said, you know what? I'm just going to give in entirely here. I'm going to testify against Patrick Brady. He was the one who killed Jim Smith. I'm your guy. I'm going to be a great witness. How about you just let me go take a little drive in my car for a little while? I gotta clear my head. And Holmes head was cleared for him, actually, his, his chest was, because he was found shortly after that, dead in his car with three gunshot wounds to the chest.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  That's right. So now that Holmes is dead, basically the whole case against Brady falls apart because that was, you know, the key link. This, this cab driver, like they had that testimony, but that wasn't enough to, you know, to convict anybody. So it did, I think, go to trial, but it was a pretty quick trial and the judge was basically like, you know, we can't do anything but acquit at this point because all we have is circumstantial evidence.

• 15:58Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  So you'd think it might be over at this point, but it's not. Because it turns out that Smith had been a police informant, or what they called a fizzer or a fizz gig, I guess, in Sydney at that time. And he had informed on a guy named Eddie Wayman. And it looks like Wayman turned out to be the trigger man because he had gotten ratted out basically by Smith.

• 16:22Josh Clark?

  That was a theory for sure. An author named Alex Castles advanced that theory because Eddie Wayman was definitely the kind of person to do that. He was a very dangerous person in the Sydney underworld at a time when the Sydney underworld was basically nothing but dangerous people. That's possible because remember here, like, we have no idea still to this day who killed Holmes.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:44Josh Clark?

  It was possibly Brady because he was certainly the one to gain the most from it, but we just don't know.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  He was in the cocaine business too. So there could, there were probably all kinds of people that wanted him dead.

• 16:54Josh Clark?

  Right. And he had shown that he was willing to talk to cops, right? And since Jim, Jim Smith had shown that he was willing to talk to cops by ratting out Eddie Wayman, it, another theory is that both of them were just rubbed out as, you know, part of the normal business of gangland Sydney's in Sydney in the 1930s, right? That they were just stool pigeons who were both murdered. And it just so happened that those murders were wrapped up into this shark arm murder caper.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  That's right. But there's still one more theory, and this came from Atlas Obscura. I don't know if they made it up or whatever, but this, it was on their website at least.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  But they, in their article, they said, they, they think they pulled a Fletch or Holmes did. They think Holmes hired a hitman to kill him in a weird like suicide to, to get rid of him and fair, and spare his family the scandal of him, you know, being this big criminal. And to get, you know, some clean insurance money that they could collect upon his death.

• 17:59Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Is that what Fletch does in Confess Fletch?

• 18:04Speaker 02

  No, in the original Fletch, that's what Tim Matheson does. He hires Fletch to kill him.

• 18:10Josh Clark?

  I see, I see.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  I know that you hated Fletch, so you probably don't remember.

• 18:16Josh Clark?

  I need to go back, if I can stomach it and watch some of the works of Chevy Chase and see if I, I still dislike him as much. I wonder if I will even more.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm curious.

• 18:27Josh Clark?

  All right, I'll let you know how it goes.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  There, there were some good ones. There were a handful of really good Chevy Chase movies, in my opinion.

• 18:33Josh Clark?

  The one I remember liking the most was Seems Like Old Times.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, well, those, that's Neil Simon, so.

• 18:39Josh Clark?

  Oh, okay.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  That's Chevy Chase. Even if you hate Chevy Chase, you got a Neil Simon script at the root of that one.

• 18:45Josh Clark?

  Speaking of Neil Simon, I watched for, you asked me the other week or so ago, which movie I've seen the most? And I watched, re-watched Murder by Death again. I was like, this one is definitely up there. I've seen Murder by Death a lot and it's still, it holds up every single time I watch it.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  All right, well, I still haven't seen it. I need to check it out.

• 19:07Josh Clark?

  Oh, really?

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:09Josh Clark?

  Okay. Well, I, let me know what you think.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  I will.

• 19:12Josh Clark?

  All right, well, in the meantime, short stuff's out.

• 19:18Speaker 03

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