By Paul B. Kidd:

What started out as a day's fishing ended up as one of the most bizarre murder mysteries the world has known. Straight out of an Agatha Christie novel, this extraordinary true story has the lot. A giant shark, human body parts, shadowy suspects and another grisly murder.

But before our story begins here are a few insights into the tiger shark and some of his sinister pals. A habitat of the warmer waters of the world and growing to about 6m and about 1000kg, tigers are notorious scavengers and will eat anything they come across... and that most certainly includes humans. Number plates, paddles, paint tins, beer bottles, a four gallon drum and even a suit of armour (with no one in it) have been found in their stomachs.

Tiger sharks are notorious for hanging around the backs of ships moored at harbour mouths waiting for a berth and they eat all of the scraps including the cardboard boxes and plastic garbage bags that are thrown overboard. Throughout the Pacific Islands the tiger shark is by far the most feared and notorious of all of the aquatic predators. Once prevalent off Coogee where the Shark Arm Murder tiger was caught, fortunately for swimmers and largely due to beach netting, they are now a rarity.

Contrary to popular belief, not all sharks are man-eaters. Of the 350 or so species, only four are proven man-eaters being the white pointer (aka the great white or white death), the tropical tiger shark, the oceanic blue shark and all of the whaler family consisting of the bull, bronze, oceanic, white tip and black tip whalers. The much-maligned grey nurse shark, foolishly feared only because of its name, is in fact a harmless reef-dweller and has never been accredited with an unprovoked attack on a human anywhere in the world.

Our story begins...
Operators of Sydney's Coogee Aquarium, father and son Bert and Ron Hobson, couldn't believe their good fortune. They had had a very successful morning's fishing on April 18, 1935, with a captured 2m (6ft) shark ready to be taken back to their exhibition, when a monster tiger shark cruised up, ate the smaller shark and became entangled in their net.

What a catch! The bigger shark would prove to be a valuable attraction, much more so than the smaller fish. But from the outset, when released into the aquarium, the huge fish appeared to be 'off-colour' and disoriented.

On Anzac Day a crowd had gathered at the aquarium to view the latest exhibition when it shuddered and regurgitated the remains of a human arm, much to the horror of the onlookers. The police were called immediately.

Close examination by police revealed that the arm carried a faded tattoo of two boxers 'shaping up' to each other and also had a length of rope tied around the wrist. Puzzled as to why the shark would vomit up the arm, authorities concluded that under normal circumstances the big shark would have digested it but it was obviously feeling a bit off colour, no doubt due to its new surroundings.

The shark proved this beyond doubt by dying five days later.

A post mortem of the shark's stomach revealed nothing else and it was concluded that it was the smaller shark which the tiger had eaten, that had swallowed the arm in the first place.

But they didn't need the shark alive to arrive at their grisly conclusion; the arm had not been bitten off. Oh no! It was the work of a knife or a scalpel in the hands of a very inept surgeon. An anatomy student perhaps... but that line of investigation was eliminated by two big slashes near the laceration, indicating extreme violence.

By all accounts the body had been cut into bits and thrown into the sea to be eaten by the fish to become yet another 'missing persons' inquiry. Who would have ever guessed that a shark would have brought up the evidence in an aquarium? One can only wonder what the murderer must have thought when the story hit the headlines. What rotten luck for the killer.

The theories came thick and fast. One was that perhaps the arm had been preserved in formalin or some other kind of embalming fluid in a hospital for students to study. This theory was soon discounted when it was established that the arm had only been in the water a matter of days.

Yet another of the more plausible theories put forward was that it was the arm of an escaped mental patient who's body was found floating in Sydney Harbour... minus an arm. The story turned out to be a hoax.

But there was no escaping the fact that Sydney was in the grip of a murder most foul.

And while the scientists were trying to put the pieces together, so to speak, a woman identified the arm through photographs in the paper to be that of her husband, 40-year-old James Smith, a Sydney billiards saloon marker, SP bookmaker and ex-employee of a Sydney boat-builder, Reginald Holmes.

In the meantime, a well-known 42-year-old Sydney criminal and close associate of James Smith, a certain John Patrick Brady, was charged with the murder of Smith on the grounds that he had recently visited the Sydney home of Reginald Holmes who had had recent unsatisfactory business dealings with Smith.

Police instigated a mammoth search around the Cronulla and Port Hacking districts as Brady had recently moved from a cottage in the district taking with him a tin storage trunk, an anchor and two heavy window weights.

On May 19, The Truth newspaper reported; "Operating along the theory that the body might have been carved up, and perhaps only the arm with the identifying tattoo had been consigned to the waves, the police dug up certain premises, dragged the bottom of the bay, searched the tide-washed rocks, scoured the sandhills, but to no avail. The mystery is still as deep, and as apparently unsolvable as ever."

Brady denied any involvement in the murder of Smith and in his statement to police said that he had last seen the dead man with Holmes and another man. Shortly after the police began a search for the elusive boat builder, a bizarre twist in the story took place. On the evening of May 21, Sydney Water Police pursued a launch that was reported to be behaving in an erratic and dangerous fashion on Sydney Harbour.

During the ensuing four-hour chase, the wayward vessel attempted to ram the police launch four times before being apprehended. The driver turned out to be the elusive Reginald Holmes, dazed and with blood pouring from a gunshot wound to his head. While he claimed to have been fired upon and that he believed the police to be his clandestine attackers, police took possession of a .32 pistol, believing that the unstable Holmes had attempted to kill himself but the shot had only grazed his head.

Holmes told detectives that Brady had murdered Smith and dumped his body, in a trunk, off Port Hacking and had threatened Holmes' life if he 'dobbed' him in. No charges were laid against Holmes and he was allowed to leave providing that he reveal his valuable information at an inquest into the death of James Smith.

Reginald Holmes never made it to the inquest. On June 11, Holmes was found slumped over the steering wheel of his car parked near the Sydney Harbour bridge with three bullets to the head. He had been shot at close range with a .32 calibre pistol. John Patrick Brady was in police custody charged with the murder of Smith at the time of Holmes' murder.

At the inquest the surprise witness turned out to be the wife of the recently deceased Holmes, Mrs Inie Parker-Holmes. She revealed her late husband's business dealings with Brady. Her husband had told her how Brady had confessed to him of killing Smith and placing the cut-up body in a trunk and dumping it at sea.

A real estate agent, P.H. Forbes, pointed out Brady as the person who had rented a cottage from him under the name of 'Mr Williams' and had vacated the cottage taking with him various items which included a tin trunk which had been replaced by a larger new one. John Patrick Brady was committed for trial for the murder of James Smith.

But the case was still shrouded in mystery. Persistent rumours of underworld conspiracies, narcotics trafficking and organised gangsters dogged the trial which was held in front of Mr Justice Jordan at the Central Criminal Court. Brady admitted that on the night of April 8, he had accompanied Smith back to his cottage but steadfastly maintained that Smith had left in the company of well-known Sydney waterfront identities, Albert Stannard and John Patrick Strong.

Brady was eventually acquitted on insufficient evidence, changed his name and dropped out of sight completely. Stannard and Strong were charged with the murder of Holmes, tried twice and eventually acquitted.

And like all cases where fact makes fiction look ridiculous, there was one last twist to the tale. In November 1952, a fire at the Holmes residence took the life of Mrs Inie Parker-Holmes, thus eliminating the last link with the infamous Shark Arm Murder.

(22 October 2001)


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