Season 09 Episode 19: Something in the Water

stories you hear on the show. But it's also a home for something more personal, my fiction, my strange amusings, and the odd fragments that don't belong anywhere else. Search for Richard McClain smith on substack, or go to Richard mcclainsmith dot substack dot com to find out more and subscribe. If you'd like a little bit more of me and Unexplained in your week, join me on substack and let's

keep exploring the unknown together. New writing most Tuesdays. It was a glorious autumn day in Sydney, Australia, as Nazis Young lent on the rail overlooking the indoor saltwater swimming pool near Coudji Beach. Young worked at the Sydney Morning Herald, but on Anzac Day, April twenty fifth, nineteen thirty five, he was taking some time out to enjoy the busy public holiday. Earlier, the pool had been bustling with visitors,

although no one was there to swim themselves. Now, as late afternoon sunshines slanted across the water, Young was one of only a few visitors left staring at the reason why of fourteen and a half foot long tiger shark. That had been eight shark attacks around Sydney in the past twelve months, six of them fatal. In one case, seventeen year old Frank Riley had his leg torn off at the hip by a shark that, as onlookers described, had shaken him back and forth like a dog shaking

a rabbit. A beach inspector eventually managed to pull the horrifically injured Riley to shore, while fellow bathers beat the water to keep the shark at bay, but it was too late. The young man bled to death at the Surf clubhouse while a horrified public watched the shark cruising up and down the shallows in the bloodied water. Sydney's slaughter houses and sewage system had been dumping their waist directly into the ocean, which seemed to be attracting tiger

sharks as well as bull sharks and great whites. Close to the city's most popular swimming beaches of Manly, Bondai and Cudjie, the public were equally terrified and fascinated, with many becoming increasingly eager to catch a glimpse of the so called man eating monsters. And so, with business being slow at Cudgee's indoor swimming pool, its owner, Charlie Hobson, atched a cunning plan to try to catch one, and

did his brother Bert, an expert angler, to help. A week before Anzac Day, Bert and his son Ron put out baiting lines at Maroubra Point, a well known shark hotspot just south of Kujie. The following morning they found the head of a six foot shark clenched onto one of the hooks. Tangled up alongside it was a much bigger tiger shark, which had evidently eaten most of the smaller shark, but had itself been caught in the process. It was exactly what they were looking for. With the

help of Ropes and several other men. The shark offered no resistance as the Hobsons hauled it out of the water along the beach and finally lifted it into the swimming pool. After its forty five minute ordeal, the shark was barely alive. It remained that way for most of the day until a pump was brought in to aerate the water, at which point it seemed to perk up a little. On top of the shark of being pulled out at the sea and placed in the swimming pool,

something clearly wasn't right with it. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLain Smith. A week after its capture, there'd been little improvement in the tiger shark's health. It was still despondent and barely eating, but it had certainly brought in the tourists. For Herald journalist Narsis Young, however, there was little to enjoy watching the thing edge listlessly

from one side of the pool to the other. After watching it for fifteen minutes, it was just about to leave when the shark suddenly began to swim, frantically, bumping into the sides and flashing its tail after beating the water into a foam. The shark then suddenly swam around in a tight circle before sinking to the bottom of the pool. Young stared on and wrapped as a cloudy plume of brown sludge rose up from the depths. Then

a terrible stench hit its nostrils. Emerging from out of the sludge, Young could see all manner of strange, putrid things, half a rat, chunks of fish, feathers even, But the strangest thing of all was the long, pale piece of meat that rose up in the center of it all, a human arm. Sometimes called the trash cans of the sea. Tiger sharks have one of the most vary diets of all shark species, as well as eating a wide variety of marine creatures thanks to the endless waste we produce,

they've even been known to consume our rubbish. Thankfully, Tiger sharks have a nifty way of dealing with anything their stomach doesn't quite agree with, by pushing it out of its mouth to eject its contents in a feet known as gastric aversion. The stomachs of tiger sharks have on occasion been found to contain some very strange items. You might remember the scene in Jaws where a tiger shark is all top seed by a marine biologist played by

Richard Dreyfuss. He finds a Louisiana state vehicle license plate in its stomach. The scene is much closer to fact than fiction. Along with license plates, objects found in the stomach of tiger sharks have also included entire dogs with collars and leads still attached, fur coats, and even an entire suit of armour, including the helmet, according to one

sixteenth century report. And of course, human body parts too have been found, much like the arm that appeared at the Cujee swimming pool on that strange day in April nineteen thirty five. It had been a quiet Anzac day for detectives at the police station on the hill above Coojie Beach when the phone rang late in the afternoon. On being told what had just happened at the swimming pool,

two officers were promptly dispatched to investigate. Arriving at the pool, they found Bert and Charlie Hobson attempting to clean up some of the stinking debris. With their help, the officers fished the arm out of the water. There were several striking things about it. It was deemed to have belonged to a male and was in a remarkably good state of preservation considering where it had come from, so good

that the fingerprints were still clearly visible. It also bore a striking tattoo just below the forearm, two boxers facing each other, outlined in blue and wearing red boxing shorts. There was one other curious feature. A length of rope had been tied around the wrist. Once the detectives established unequivocally that the arm had come out at the shark and hadn't just been thrown into the tank at some other time, an officer was sent for from the fingerprint branch.

He delicately cut the skin from the fingertips and took it away for identification. The following day at the Margue down at Sydney's Circular Key, the arm was examined in greater detail. A pungent blend of maldehyde fumes and brotting flesh hung heavily in the air. Oblivious or perhaps accustomed to the unpleasant odors. Doctor Arthur Palmer, an experienced government medical officer, along with the shark White specialist bent over the severed arm and peered closely at its broken and

mangled skin. It had been assumed that the unfortunate owner of the arm had fallen victim to yet another shark attack. There were numerous puncture wounds which had likely been made by the tiger shark when it ate the arm, But as Palmer and the bite expert pored over the wound where the arm had been torn from the body, both agreed that were none of the ragged tears or bite

marks you'd expect to find from a shark attack. What they found instead was the arm had been sliced off cleanly with a single bladed implement, meaning it had been removed before it ended up as chum. It was later speculated that the arm had likely been eaten first by the smaller shark that the Hobson brothers caught before that, and its stomach contents were in turn eaten by the

larger tiger shark. To help identify the man to whom the arm had once belonged, police put out a description of the distinctive tattoo in the press and ran the prints through their database. It didn't take long to get a result in a modest cottage in a suburb in northern Sydney, and missus Molloy recognized the description of the tattoo as one that her son in law also had. She rushed to tell her daughter Gladys, whose husband had

been missing for three weeks. He'd supposedly gone to Cronulla, fifteen miles south of Sydney on a fishing trip with a friend, but had so far failed to return. At first, Gladys was in denial. Then her brother in law came to call. He'd already spoken to the investigators who'd shown him a photograph of the tattoo. He was adamant it was his brother. His and Gladys's worst fears were confirmed when the fingerprint check came back with a positive match too,

because the arm's owner had a police record. His name was Jane Smith, a forty five year old from the suburb of Gladesville, known to his family and acquaintances as Jim or Jimmy. The man had been a builder and a keen amateur boxer. More recently, he tried to invest in property but had fallen on hard times. He'd been fingerprinted three years earlier after being charged with a minor offence.

Those records also contained a description of the tattoo on his left arm two boxers outlined in blue wearing red boxing shorts. But this was no simple case of a man falling overboard while fishing, then being attacked and partly eaten by a shark. The events that had led to the arm being in the shark's stomach had begun many months earlier. In the early pre dawn light one April morning the previous year, a mile offshore from Terragle, a small fishing town on the central coast of New South Wales,

glanced around the beautiful yacht he was aboard. He took in the Pathfinder's fine lines, polished walnut interiors and bespoke furniture for one last time. Then, as the yacht bobbed gently in the water, he went below decks with a hammer and smashed the toilet's water pipes. A little while later, the Pathfinder was low in the water and listing heavily to one side. Wishing that the yacht would sink a little faster, the man climbed into the dinghy he'd prepared,

when out of the dawn gloom a ship loomed. It was a coal transporter bound for Sydney when its skipper spotted the stricken yacht. He drew his ship closer and called out to the man in the small dinghy, who seemed to be rowing away from it towards shore. He asked if he needed any help, but the man just kept rowing and didn't reply. Perplexed, the coal ship's captain could continued on to Sydney well Later that day, he

reported the incident to the police. As he tried to get away, the man in the dinghy cursed his bad luck. Being seen leaving the yacht was not part of his plan, as he rowed. His muscles flexed, rippling the skin which on his left arm bore a singular tattoo, two boxes facing each other, outlined in blue and wearing red boxing shorts. The man was, of course, James Smith. Jim had fallen in with a shady Sydney based boat builder and speedboat

racer called Reginald Holmes. He'd become involved in criminal activities, including using boats to coordinate drug drops off the coast of Sydney. The plan for this latest venture that he'd undertaken for homes was to sink the path Finder and claim it was an accident in order to collect the insurance money for it. But things were not going to plan. As Smith continued to row, a strong wind from the southeast picked up and with it came a heavy swell.

It took all of Jim's strength and four exhausting hours to make it to shore, staggering into Terrible police station to report his concocted story of how the Pathfinder had sunk. Smith made a serious error, perhaps because he was so tired. Instead of concealing the name of the yacht's owner, he asked a policeman to dial the owner's number for him, then immediately called him mister Holmes when he picked up.

A short time later, the police were alerted to the report made by the coal ship captain, along with an inquiry from a shipping insurance company about the suspicious sinking of a yacht they just received a claim. On joining the Dots, the police called Reginald Holmes and his his business partner, Albert Stanart, who also had a boat building business on Sydney Harbor, in for questioning. Jim Smith was

questioned too. Charges of attempting to defraud the insurance company were eventually dropped, but Smith's relationship with Holmes at Sowart. Determined to push on with his criminal activities, Smith turned to the man who seemed to be his one remaining friend, Patrick Paddy Brady, who he described to his wife as

Australia's cleverest forger. Brady invited Smith to join him on his next criminal venture, a convoluted scheme that involved using the Pathfinder sinking scam to blackmail money from Reginald Holmes. Brady would forge checks that appeared to have been issued by Holmes, and Holmes felt that he had no choice but allow them to be cashed. Terrified that the investigation into his insurance scam would be reopened if he didn't comply, but Brady got greedy, as well as confronting Homes directly

to extort more money from him. Paddy Brady brought a third small time crook into the mix, a man named Stanley Watson. Watson was soon caught and identified in a police lineup as the person cashing the forged checks. Watson soon came to suspect with good reason that he'd been shopped, as it turned out, in exchange for immunity from prosecution. In the scuttling of the Pathfinder, James Smith had become

a police informant. The next few months were a dangerous time for Smith, when Watson was convicted of forgery and sentenced to three years hard labor. News of the botched Pathfinder job, along with rumors that Smith might now be a police informant, spread through Sydney's criminal underworld. One night, Smith came home drunk, bleeding from a head wound that

was bad enough to need stitches. His wife, Gladys, asked what had happened, only for Smith to claim that he'd fallen and cut himself on a broken bottle, but Gladys wasn't convinced. A few days later, on April seventh, nineteen thirty five, James Smith walked his wife down the street to where she caught the tram to work. He told her he was going to Crunneller in South Sydney for a week to stay at a cottage that Paddy Brady had rented for them both. They planned to go fishing,

he said. Then he and Gladys said their goodbyes and waved to each other as Gladys's tram trundled away. It was the last time that Gladys would ever see her husband. Later that afternoon, Paddy and Jim were seen drinking in the bar at Cronneller's Cecil Hotel. The next day, a taxi driver was hailed by a disheveled looking man who seemed to be strangely on edge. The man asked the driver to wait for him outside a second hand furniture store, before emerging a few minutes later with a large metal

trunk and a mattress. The driver was then instructed to deliver the man to the cottage where he was staying. A day or so later, the landlord of the cottage that Paddy Brady had rented for himself and James came to inspect the property and get it ready for his next set of guests. Weirdly, he found that the mattress had been replaced and the walls scrubbed scrupulously clean. When James Smith's arm was found, Paddy Brady was immediately brought

in for questioning. Under police interrogation, Paddy Brady wove in a labor story which implicated Reginald Holmes in Smith's disappearance.

Brady claimed that after dealings between the two men had turned sour, Holmes decided to do away with Smith, but having by then identified Brady as the man whom Smith had stayed with in Cronulla and who had also taken a taxi to buy the replacement mattress, the police surmised that he had murdered Smith in the rental property and had been forced to replace the bed to cover his tracks.

On May nineteenth, despite no sign of Smith's body save for his arm, Paddy Brady was charged with his murder, but the police still wanted to speak to Reginald Holmes. Early the following day, a dense fog hung over Sydney Harbor. Around seven a m Reginald Holmes, dressed in an overcoat, went down to Stannard's Wharf and borrowed a small speedboat from a man named Harz. Hars could tell that Holmes was drunk, but was happy to let him take the boat.

With that, Holmes gunned the engines and sped off into the harbor, before coming to a standstill just offshore from a place called Piper Point. As the fog slowly lifted, with curls of it drifting across the water, Homes cut the engine then pulled a half empty bottle of brandy from his overcoat pocket and gulped down its remaining contents. Then he took a revolver out of another pocket, pointed

it at his forehead, and pulled the trigger. The sharp crack of the gun shot resounded through the mist, followed by a loud splash as Homes tumbled over the side. For a moment, there was nothing but an eerie silence. Then frantic splashing sounds came from beside the speedboat as Holmes is thrashing arms. Then his head breached the water's surface. He had survived his suicide attempt. The gun had been loaded with cheap nickel based bullets, and the shot hadn't

been strong enough to penetrate bone. Instead, the bullet had become embedded in Holmes's forehead. Immersion in the freezing water had brought the stunned man back to consciousness. After hauling himself back into the boat, Reginald Holmes sat dazed, sopping

wet and cold, with a terrible headache. Its acquaintance, Hearts, who happened to be out in one of his workboats, noticed the speedboat bobbing on the water in the distance, Drawing closer It was shocked to see Holmes hunched over the wheel, bleeding profusely from a head wound and only semi conscious. Taking the speedboat in tow, Hars returned to the wharf, where he jumped out and hurried to the

local water police to get help. Holmes had remained throughout slumped at the wheel of the speedboat, but when he saw the police approaching, he sprung into action and took off across the harbor at speed. The water police followed in hot pursuit. For four hours, the police chased homes around Sydney Harbor. Onlookers watched amazed as the fugitive, crouched over the wheel with blood streaming from his head, twisted and turned his speedboat in and out of bays and coves,

dodging boys and jetties. Several times. He made sharp u turns and sped toward the police at full throttle as if about to ram them, seemingly convinced that he could evade them with his superior skills, and perhaps he might have had he not run out of fuel. When he was finally apprehended, Holmes was interrogated for three hours, with the bullet still lodged in his head. His account of events over the previous weeks were very different to Paddy Brady's.

According to Holmes, during that time that Brady had relentlessly blackmailed and threatened him. On the morning of April ninth, Holmes alleged that Brady turned up at his office with a canvas back and told him to look inside it. When he did, he saw that it contained James Smith's severed arm, Claiming that he'd killed Smith, Brady made it fairly obvious that if Holmes was not careful, he might

end up the same way. This seemed to explain to the police why Holmes had tried to kill himself to avoid the misery of being tortured to death by Brady. Weighing the evidence, the police decided that Brady was the murderer, and Holmes was released on the condition that he would testify at the inquest into Smith's death and Brady's subsequent murder trial, but Reginald Holmes would never see the inside

of the court room. On the afternoon of June eleventh, Reginald Holmes visited his bank, where he withdrew five hundred pounds in cash roughly fifty thousand Australian dollars in today's money that evening. He went out in his car the next morning, the same day he was due to testify at the inquest, he was found dead in his car from a gunshot to the head fired at close range. Was it suicide or had someone done the job for him? His withdrawal of the cash, along with forensic evidence, led

the police to conclude that it was murder. But with Paddy Brady in custody, who else had wanted Holmes dead? Brady was now firmly in the frame for murder. But before he could go to trial, there was the inquest on the Cause of James Smith's death. It was over in less than two days. The evidence against Brady was all circumstantial, and his defense lawyer, quoting historical precedents, successfully made the case that for someone to be charged with murder there had to be a body, not just an arm,

and so the inquest was quashed. Brady was tried for the murder in September that year, but with no body and only circumstantial evidence to go on, he was acquitted. Then in November, based on fresh evidence, two new suspects were put on trial for Smith's murder. One of them was Albert Stanart, the long time business associate of Reginald Holmes. Like Holmes, he too was a wealthy boat builder rumored

to be involved in insurance fraud and drug smuggling. He was charged with the murder alongside John Patrick Strong, a docker who worked for him, but again with little but circumstantial evidence and still no body, they were also acquitted. To this day, no conclusive evidence about who killed James

Smith or Reginald Holmes has ever been found. They remain two of Australia's most intriguing and longest unsold cases, and both they and exactly how James Smith's tattooed severed arm ended up in the stomach of a shark seem destined to remain forever unexplained. This episode was written by Diane Hope and produced by Richard McLain Smith. Thank you as ever for listening Unexplained as an Avy Club production podcast created by Richard McLain Smith. All other elements of the podcast,

including the music, are also produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or idea is regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation or a story of your own you'd like to share.

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