Short Stuff: Shark Arm Murders

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and there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for days. So that's a short stuff. That's a bingo. 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. Wow, you really did that up, man. I love that Atlas Obscura site. That's a great, great website.

Yeah, same here. Same with Snopes, too, they're good, too. Yeah, okay, that's off to the Sydney Crime Museum, while we're at it.

Yeah, and who could leave out the dictionary of Sydney?

(laughs) 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. Yeah, a fisherman was fishing off of Kooji 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 Kooji,

because it'll be a nice 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.

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 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 long, right? To be sure. And those tiger sharks, there are BAs too.

At any rate, the shark was given the people what they wanted to see, you know, like, to swim around along the window and just flip the people off, you 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 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, essentially. Yeah, the shark goes, but 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. Yeah.

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 at Jaws quote in there. Sure.

What did Ruby think of? She liked it. How cute. That was not. I was delighted.

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

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

That's right, happy birthday to both of you in real time. Thank you, happy birthday to Ruby. We did all our private birthday stuff and Ruby sent you a video and you sent her one. It was very sweet.

I imagine we'll do that for the rest of our lives. Yeah. So it didn't even rate back to the autopsy. Net some, not some half ass shark autopsy. But an autopsy on this arm, they were like,

this was not a shark biting his 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 has bound to still be in

there and this arm was in there.

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

I say that we take a break here and come back and talk about Jim Smith a little bit. Alrighty. What's up fam, I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl Sam J.

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AO rewatch on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, 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 this was also at a time the 1930s 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?

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 in Jim Smith had done that. Yeah, sounds like it. So, investigators found out that his last known whereabouts were, he was drinking with his friend Patrick Brady at Hotel, and I want to say Kranula, but it may be Kranula, like, I don't know.

Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. When you say Koji Beach, it just dawned on me that we hadn't looked at the pronunciations in, like, that cartoon sweat jumped off of my forehead.

“I think it's a Koji because it's too old, but that might not be right either, but it”

could be Koji's love. So, yeah, it could be Kougi, actually. I will hear. I can't wait. We'll talk about it later in a listener mail.

We're looking forward to all the Aussie pronunciations coming back to us. I think it's Kougi because there's the Kougi Beach Sunday outback steak house. I don't want to believe you. It's your own. I don't.

I can see it. So I mean, that's definitely possible for sure. So Brady, his buddy that he was drinking with, he was also sort of a bad guy. He was an expert forger in the cops knew about him.

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 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 like you said, a smuggler.

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 news 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.

Yes, Smith definitely was.

And I think these were actually like, this was, like, these were planned rendezvouss.

That's just how they transferred the cargo. Oh, I thought it was like, they were in trouble, so they would dump their load. I don't know. I don't know. It's hard to me that they dumped their load.

Yeah, just keep going.

“So either way, that's how we made his money.”

And again, like, he was picking up cocaine in the 30s. That was a huge, huge business in Sydney. Everybody in 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 Homes 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 is the cab driver would, would later testify to Reginald Homes' house and Reginald Homes was connected to Jim Smith. Now Jim Smith's arms seems really, really connected to Reginald Homes and Patrick Brady. That's right.

So it turns out that Smith and Homes had a falling out over an insurance scam and the idea that Smith was blackmailing Homes 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 the murder and Homes 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 Homes, brought it to Homes as 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. Homes had an explanation was that Brady brought it to him as like he was going to extort Homes 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 ate it. The rest of the body, everyone presumed, was just like weighted and sunk probably. Yeah, it didn't ever come back up. The arm came back up, right? Right.

Thanks to our shark, Frem. Problem is, you could put all this stuff together and painted a pretty convincing picture, I guess, of Brady and Homes's involvement in the disappearance of a 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. That's right.

They arrest Brady, take him to the police station, they bring Homes in, he's like, "I don't even know this Brady guy."

Everything kind of stalled out, basically, because nobody was confessing anything until

May 20th, and this is when Homes leaves in a speedboat out into the harbor and pulls out a gun to try and kill himself. 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 is a four-hour boat chase through Sydney Harbor until finally Homes is like, "Alright, you got me, I'm done." I'm bored with writing around on my boat. Yeah. So that's fairly suspicious behavior, and the cops took it that way too.

When they arrested Homes, 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 got to clear my head."

after that, dead in his car with three gunshot wounds to the chest. That's right.

So now that Homes is dead, basically, the whole case against Brady falls apart, because

that was the key link. This cab driver, like they had that testimony, but that wasn't

“enough to, you know, took and victim to 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. 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 called a Fizzor 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. That was a theory, for sure. Author named Alex Cassels 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 the stay who killed homes. Yeah. It was possibly Brady, because he was certainly the one to gain the most from it, but we just don't know, another.

It's in the cocaine business, too. So there could, there were probably all kinds of people that wanted him dead. 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 running out Eddie Wayman,

it's another theory, is that both of them were just rubbed out as, you know, part of the normal business of gangland Sydney, it's 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. 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 it was on their website at least. But they, in their article, they said, they, they think they pulled a flesh or homes to it. They think homes hired to hit man to kill him in a weird, like suicide to, to get rid of him and spare, 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.

Yeah. Is that what flesh does and confessed, flesh?

“Uh, no, in the original flesh, that's what Tim Mathitz and does. He hires flesh to kill”

him. I see. I see. I know that you hated flesh, so you probably don't remember. 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.

Yeah, curious. All right, let you know how it goes. There were, there were some good ones. They were a handful of really good Chevy Chase movies in my opinion. The one I remember liking the most is seems like old times. Oh, yeah. Well, those, that's Neil Simon. So, okay. That's Chevy Chase. Even if you

hate Chevy Chase, you got a Neil Simon script at the root of that one. 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, murder by death again. I was like, this one is definitely up there. I've seen murder by death a lot. And it still, it holds up every single time you watch it. All right. I'll still haven't seen any to check it out. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. Well,

let me know what you think. I will. All right. Well, in the meantime, short stuff that stuff.

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