Short Stuff: Shark Arm Murders

A fisherman off Coogee Beach in 1935 caught a small shark, then watched a twelve-foot tiger shark swallow it, and hauled both in to the aquarium baths as an attraction — sharks had killed three men on New South Wales beaches over the preceding weeks, so crowds turned out. The shark behaved normally until Anzac Day, when it went lethargic and disoriented and then regurgitated a human arm. The initial assumption was another shark victim. The autopsy said otherwise: the arm had been cut off with something sharp, not bitten, and not surgically removed either.

The arm carried a tattoo of two boxers squaring up. Once it ran in the newspapers, a man named Edwin Smith recognized it as his missing brother's, and fingerprints confirmed Jim Smith. Smith turned out to be a bankrupt builder who had moved into Sydney's underworld — boxer, bookmaker and smuggler — in a decade the hosts describe as open gang warfare over a very lucrative trade. He had last been seen drinking with Patrick Brady, a known forger. A cab driver placed Brady the next morning taking a ride to the North Sydney house of Reginald Lloyd Holmes, a respectable boat builder who ran speedboats around Sydney Harbour collecting dumped contraband, cocaine included, and who employed Smith. Smith and Holmes had fallen out over an insurance scam, with Smith reportedly blackmailing him.

The case never closed because the evidence stayed circumstantial and the key witness didn't survive. Holmes took a speedboat into the harbour and shot at himself, failed, fell in, was saved from drowning by a rope catching his arm, and led police on a four-hour boat chase. He then agreed to testify against Brady — and was found shortly afterward dead in his car with three gunshot wounds to the chest. Without him the case collapsed and Brady was acquitted.

The hosts run through the surviving theories. Smith had been a police informant and had informed on Eddie Wayman; the author Alex Castles argued Wayman was the trigger man. A broader reading is that both Smith and Holmes were simply killed as informants, and the shark happened to fold those murders into one story. Atlas Obscura floated a third: that Holmes hired his own killer to spare his family the scandal and secure clean insurance money. Nobody knows who killed Holmes to this day. Along the way the episode also has an unresolved argument about whether it's Coogee or Coogee.