July 29, 2026 • 16 mins
Get yer info on one of Australia’s great true crime cases he-re!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
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, that's right.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Wow you really did that up man.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
I love that at Let's Obscure site. That's a great,
great website.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Yeah. Same here, same with Snopes too, they're good too.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Yeah, and hey, hats off to the Sydney Crime Museum
while we're at it.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Yeah, and who could leave out the Dictionary of Sydney.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yes, we're talking about Sydney because that's where the Shark
Arm murders took place, infamous crime in Sydney, Australia's history
in nineteen thirty five.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
And this is how it starts.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, a fisherman was fishing off of Coooge Beach and
caught a little small shark and then right after that
at a larger tiger shark swallowed that smaller shark and
so all of a sudden he has two sharks.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Because this tiger shark was so big.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
He was like, hey, this thing, maybe I should take
this in to the aquarium bass there in Koujie 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 had
been killing people around the area lately, so he thought
it was a pretty good idea.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Yeah, just over the course of a couple of weeks,
three different men were killed by sharks New South Wales beaches,
so that was a big deal to catch this 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, twelve feet is pretty long, right,
(01:51):
big shark, and those tiger sharks they're ba's too. At
any rate, the shark was given the people what they
wanted to see, you know, like you 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
twenty fifth, which was Anzac Day in Australia, which is
(02:14):
I taking it as similar to our Memorial Day here
in the United States. 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.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Essentially, Yeah, the shark goes.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
That's usually your part and pukes up a human arm.
So everyone freaks out. They assumed initially, of course, like
this is probably an arm of another bather that had
bad timing and bad luck. But when they did the
medical examination, they were like, this was no tiger shark. No, sorry,
(03:00):
I just watched Jaws with Ruby, so I had to
work at Jaws.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Quote in there. Sure she liked it.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
I was delighted. She didn't love it, but she liked it,
Like she hung in there through the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Was that a happy birthday treat for her to watch Jalls?
Speaker 3 (03:15):
That's right, Happy birthday to both of you in real
time youthday made Ruby.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
We did all our private birthday stuff and Ruby sent
you a video and you sent her.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
One, which is very sweet.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Imagine we'll do that for the rest of our lives. Yeah,
so at any rate. Back to the autopsy.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Uh, not not some half assed 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,
(03:51):
they were like, whatever that shark ate has bound to
still be in there. And this arm was in there, uh,
fairly well preserved, like you could see a tattoo of
a couple of boxers about.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
To go at it.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
They put it out in the newspaper and a guy
named Edwin Smith was like, I think that might be
my brother's arm. He had this tattoo and he's been
gone missing for a few weeks. And the cops are like,
all right, they were able to get fingerprints, and they're like, yep,
bing baning, we have a winner.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
That is Jim Smith's arm.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah, I say that we take a break here and
come back and talk about Jim Smith a little bit. Alrighty,
(04:56):
So Chuck, we're back, and Jim Smith has just been
confirm 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.
(05:18):
He was a boxer, he was a bookmaker. He also
turned out to be a smuggler, as we'll see at
the And this was also at a time in the
nineteen thirties in Sydney it was like gang land apparently,
like there was open gang war in the street for
control of Sydney's underworld. It was just that lucrative, right,
(05:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
Yeah, sounds like it.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
So investigators found out that his last known whereabouts were
he was drinking with his friend Patrick Brady at a hotel.
And I want to say crenula, but it may be cronula,
Like I don't know, yeah, would be an Aussie will tell.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Us when you say Kogi beach. It just dawned on
me that, like we hadn't looked up the pronunciations in
like that cartoon sweat like jumped off of my forehead.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
I think it's a kogie because it's two o's, but
that might not be right either. But it could bezz Loves,
So yeah, it could be coogie.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Actually, I will here. I can't wait.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
We'll talk about it later in a listener mail. Okay,
we're looking forward to all the Ozzy pronunciations coming back
to us.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
I think it's koogie because there's the Coogie Beach Sunday
at Outback Steakhouse.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
I don't want to believe you don't.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
I could see it, so, I mean, that's definitely possible
for sure.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
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 seeing drinking with his friend. His friend Brady had
hailed this cab said take me to North Sydney and
(07:03):
pull up outside this house 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. He
(07:24):
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 his
guys would drive around and pick this stuff up. And
I think Brady and Smith were some of these guys
(07:44):
at times, or at least Smith was.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Yes, 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.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Oh, I thought it was like they were in trouble
so they would dump their load.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
I don't know, I don't know. It hadn't occurred to
me that they dumped their load.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
Yeah, just keep going.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
So either way, that's how he made his money. And again,
like he was picking up cocaine in the thirties, 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. At any rate, it was shown
that Jim Smith worked for Reginald Holmes, and now with
(08:27):
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
(08:49):
Jim Smith's arm seemed really really connected to Reginald Holmes
and Patrick Brady.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
So it turns out that Smith and Holmes had a
falling out over an entrance 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 and Holmes at that point,
So cops got on this theory that Brady had murdered
(09:19):
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
(09:40):
was going to extort Holmes and was like, hey, I
just like killed this guy and here's an arm, Like
I really mean business, So you got to pay up.
The arm obviously was later just thrown back in the ocean,
and the shark hated. The rest of the body everyone
presumes was just like weighted and sunk.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Probably yeah, it didn't ever come back up. The arm
came back up right right, thanks to our shark friend.
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.
(10:16):
But it was all circumstantial. So as any cop from
the thirties in Sydney could tell you, you need a confession.
This isn't like Chinatown. This is Sydney, nineteen thirties. We
need confessions. We can't convict people on circumstantial evidence. So
they started to turn up the heat on those two
that's right.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
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 know nobody was confessing anything until May twentieth. And
this is when Holmes leaves in a speedboat out into
the harbor and pulls out a gun to try and
(10:56):
kill himself. And he fails at that, but when he
falls into the water where he might have 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.
Police are on the scene at this point, and there
(11:16):
is a four hour boat chase through Sydney Harbor until
finally Holmes is like, all right, like you got me,
I'm done.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
I'm bored with riding around on my boat.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
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
(11:48):
me go take a little drive in my car for
a little while. I got to clear my head. And
Holmes head was cleared for him. Actually his chest was
because he was found shortly after that dead in his
car with three gunshot wounds to the chest.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
So it did, I think.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Go to trial, but it was a pretty quick trial,
and the judge was basically like, you know, we can't
do anything but a quit at this point because all
we have is circumstantial evidence. Right, 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 call a fizzer or a fiz gig
I guess in Sydney at that time, and he had
(12:44):
informed on a guy named Eddie Wayman, and it looks
like Wayman turned out to be the trigger man because
he had gotten rated out basically by Smith.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
That was a theory for sure. An author named Alex
Castle's advanced that theory because Eddie Weyman 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
(13:14):
to this day, who killed Holmes. Yeah, it was possibly
Brady because he was certainly the one to gain the
most from it. But we just don't know another.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Kid's in the cocaine business too, So there could There
were probably all kinds of people that wanted him dead.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Right, and he had shown that he was willing to
talk to cops, right, And since Jim Smith had shown
that he was willing to talk to cops by renting
out Eddie Weyman, another theory is that both of them
were just rubbed out, as you know, part of the
normal business of Gangland Sydney's at Sydney in the nineteen thirties, right,
(13:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
There still one more theory, and this came from Atlas Obscura.
I don't know if they made it up or whatever,
but it was on their website at least. But they
in their article they said they think they pulled a
Fletch or Holmes. Did they think Holmes hired a hipman
to kill him in a weird like suicide, to get
(14:21):
rid of him 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.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Is that what Fletch does, and confess Fletch.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
No, in the original Fletch, that's what Tim Mathoson does.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
He hires Fletch to kill him.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
I see, I see.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
I know that you hated Fletch, so you probably don't remember.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
I need to go back if I can stomach it
and watch some of the works of Chevy Chase and c.
If I still dislike him as much, I wonder if
I will even more. Yeah, I'm curious, all right, I'll
let you know how it goes.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
There were some good ones. There were a handful of
really good Chevy Chase movies.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
In my opinion, the one I remember liking the most
seems like old times.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Oh yeah, well that's Neil Simon. So oh okay, that's
Chevy Chase. Even if you hate Chevy Chase, you got
a Neil Simon script at the root of that one.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
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 rewatched Murdered by Death again.
I was like, this one is definitely up there. I've
seen Murdered by Death a lot, and it's still it
holds up every single time you watch it.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
All right, well, I still haven't seen that. I need
to check it out.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Oh really yeah, okay, well let me know what you
think I will. All right, well, in the meantime, short stuffs.
Speaker 4 (15:46):
That one stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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, that's right.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Wow you really did that up man.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
I love that at Let's Obscure site. That's a great,
great website.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Yeah. Same here, same with Snopes too, they're good too.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Yeah, and hey, hats off to the Sydney Crime Museum
while we're at it.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Yeah, and who could leave out the Dictionary of Sydney.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yes, we're talking about Sydney because that's where the Shark
Arm murders took place, infamous crime in Sydney, Australia's history
in nineteen thirty five.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
And this is how it starts.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, a fisherman was fishing off of Coooge Beach and
caught a little small shark and then right after that
at a larger tiger shark swallowed that smaller shark and
so all of a sudden he has two sharks.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Because this tiger shark was so big.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
He was like, hey, this thing, maybe I should take
this in to the aquarium bass there in Koujie 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 had
been killing people around the area lately, so he thought
it was a pretty good idea.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Yeah, just over the course of a couple of weeks,
three different men were killed by sharks New South Wales beaches,
so that was a big deal to catch this 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, twelve feet is pretty long, right,
(01:51):
big shark, and those tiger sharks they're ba's too. At
any rate, the shark was given the people what they
wanted to see, you know, like you 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
twenty fifth, which was Anzac Day in Australia, which is
(02:14):
I taking it as similar to our Memorial Day here
in the United States. 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.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Essentially, Yeah, the shark goes.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
That's usually your part and pukes up a human arm.
So everyone freaks out. They assumed initially, of course, like
this is probably an arm of another bather that had
bad timing and bad luck. But when they did the
medical examination, they were like, this was no tiger shark. No, sorry,
(03:00):
I just watched Jaws with Ruby, so I had to
work at Jaws.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Quote in there. Sure she liked it.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
I was delighted. She didn't love it, but she liked it,
Like she hung in there through the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Was that a happy birthday treat for her to watch Jalls?
Speaker 3 (03:15):
That's right, Happy birthday to both of you in real
time youthday made Ruby.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
We did all our private birthday stuff and Ruby sent
you a video and you sent her.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
One, which is very sweet.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Imagine we'll do that for the rest of our lives. Yeah,
so at any rate. Back to the autopsy.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Uh, not not some half assed 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,
(03:51):
they were like, whatever that shark ate has bound to
still be in there. And this arm was in there, uh,
fairly well preserved, like you could see a tattoo of
a couple of boxers about.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
To go at it.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
They put it out in the newspaper and a guy
named Edwin Smith was like, I think that might be
my brother's arm. He had this tattoo and he's been
gone missing for a few weeks. And the cops are like,
all right, they were able to get fingerprints, and they're like, yep,
bing baning, we have a winner.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
That is Jim Smith's arm.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah, I say that we take a break here and
come back and talk about Jim Smith a little bit. Alrighty,
(04:56):
So Chuck, we're back, and Jim Smith has just been
confirm 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.
(05:18):
He was a boxer, he was a bookmaker. He also
turned out to be a smuggler, as we'll see at
the And this was also at a time in the
nineteen thirties in Sydney it was like gang land apparently,
like there was open gang war in the street for
control of Sydney's underworld. It was just that lucrative, right,
(05:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
Yeah, sounds like it.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
So investigators found out that his last known whereabouts were
he was drinking with his friend Patrick Brady at a hotel.
And I want to say crenula, but it may be cronula,
Like I don't know, yeah, would be an Aussie will tell.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Us when you say Kogi beach. It just dawned on
me that, like we hadn't looked up the pronunciations in
like that cartoon sweat like jumped off of my forehead.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
I think it's a kogie because it's two o's, but
that might not be right either. But it could bezz Loves,
So yeah, it could be coogie.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Actually, I will here. I can't wait.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
We'll talk about it later in a listener mail. Okay,
we're looking forward to all the Ozzy pronunciations coming back
to us.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
I think it's koogie because there's the Coogie Beach Sunday
at Outback Steakhouse.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
I don't want to believe you don't.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
I could see it, so, I mean, that's definitely possible
for sure.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
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 seeing drinking with his friend. His friend Brady had
hailed this cab said take me to North Sydney and
(07:03):
pull up outside this house 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. He
(07:24):
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 his
guys would drive around and pick this stuff up. And
I think Brady and Smith were some of these guys
(07:44):
at times, or at least Smith was.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Yes, 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.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Oh, I thought it was like they were in trouble
so they would dump their load.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
I don't know, I don't know. It hadn't occurred to
me that they dumped their load.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
Yeah, just keep going.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
So either way, that's how he made his money. And again,
like he was picking up cocaine in the thirties, 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. At any rate, it was shown
that Jim Smith worked for Reginald Holmes, and now with
(08:27):
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
(08:49):
Jim Smith's arm seemed really really connected to Reginald Holmes
and Patrick Brady.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
So it turns out that Smith and Holmes had a
falling out over an entrance 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 and Holmes at that point,
So cops got on this theory that Brady had murdered
(09:19):
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
(09:40):
was going to extort Holmes and was like, hey, I
just like killed this guy and here's an arm, Like
I really mean business, So you got to pay up.
The arm obviously was later just thrown back in the ocean,
and the shark hated. The rest of the body everyone
presumes was just like weighted and sunk.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Probably yeah, it didn't ever come back up. The arm
came back up right right, thanks to our shark friend.
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.
(10:16):
But it was all circumstantial. So as any cop from
the thirties in Sydney could tell you, you need a confession.
This isn't like Chinatown. This is Sydney, nineteen thirties. We
need confessions. We can't convict people on circumstantial evidence. So
they started to turn up the heat on those two
that's right.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
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 know nobody was confessing anything until May twentieth. And
this is when Holmes leaves in a speedboat out into
the harbor and pulls out a gun to try and
(10:56):
kill himself. And he fails at that, but when he
falls into the water where he might have 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.
Police are on the scene at this point, and there
(11:16):
is a four hour boat chase through Sydney Harbor until
finally Holmes is like, all right, like you got me,
I'm done.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
I'm bored with riding around on my boat.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
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
(11:48):
me go take a little drive in my car for
a little while. I got to clear my head. And
Holmes head was cleared for him. Actually his chest was
because he was found shortly after that dead in his
car with three gunshot wounds to the chest.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
So it did, I think.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Go to trial, but it was a pretty quick trial,
and the judge was basically like, you know, we can't
do anything but a quit at this point because all
we have is circumstantial evidence. Right, 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 call a fizzer or a fiz gig
I guess in Sydney at that time, and he had
(12:44):
informed on a guy named Eddie Wayman, and it looks
like Wayman turned out to be the trigger man because
he had gotten rated out basically by Smith.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
That was a theory for sure. An author named Alex
Castle's advanced that theory because Eddie Weyman 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
(13:14):
to this day, who killed Holmes. Yeah, it was possibly
Brady because he was certainly the one to gain the
most from it. But we just don't know another.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Kid's in the cocaine business too, So there could There
were probably all kinds of people that wanted him dead.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Right, and he had shown that he was willing to
talk to cops, right, And since Jim Smith had shown
that he was willing to talk to cops by renting
out Eddie Weyman, another theory is that both of them
were just rubbed out, as you know, part of the
normal business of Gangland Sydney's at Sydney in the nineteen thirties, right,
(13:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
There still one more theory, and this came from Atlas Obscura.
I don't know if they made it up or whatever,
but it was on their website at least. But they
in their article they said they think they pulled a
Fletch or Holmes. Did they think Holmes hired a hipman
to kill him in a weird like suicide, to get
(14:21):
rid of him 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.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Is that what Fletch does, and confess Fletch.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
No, in the original Fletch, that's what Tim Mathoson does.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
He hires Fletch to kill him.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
I see, I see.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
I know that you hated Fletch, so you probably don't remember.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
I need to go back if I can stomach it
and watch some of the works of Chevy Chase and c.
If I still dislike him as much, I wonder if
I will even more. Yeah, I'm curious, all right, I'll
let you know how it goes.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
There were some good ones. There were a handful of
really good Chevy Chase movies.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
In my opinion, the one I remember liking the most
seems like old times.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Oh yeah, well that's Neil Simon. So oh okay, that's
Chevy Chase. Even if you hate Chevy Chase, you got
a Neil Simon script at the root of that one.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
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 rewatched Murdered by Death again.
I was like, this one is definitely up there. I've
seen Murdered by Death a lot, and it's still it
holds up every single time you watch it.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
All right, well, I still haven't seen that. I need
to check it out.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Oh really yeah, okay, well let me know what you
think I will. All right, well, in the meantime, short stuffs.
Speaker 4 (15:46):
That one stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Betrayal Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.