been tied in the red-and-blue blanket
and saw a head and two small arms. He
ran back home and phoned the police.
Three detectives from nearby Manly
arrived and finished unwrapping
the bundle. It contained the badly
decomposed body of a boy about eight
years old, dressed in grey shorts and a
grey blazer with a blue lion emblem on
it.
The boy’s hands and feet had been
tightly bound with twine, while there
was a dark blue scarf tied around
his neck. The officers knew they
were looking at the dead body of
Graeme Thorne. They put through an
immediate call to Sydney police HQ.
Bazil and Freda Thorne were
informed that a boy’s body had been
found. Then the police drove Mr.been dead for at least five weeks. Very
possibly, he had met death on the same
day that he was kidnapped.
While the doctors examined the body,
Detective Sergeant Alan Clark, head of
the CIB scientific squad, went to work
on the boy’s clothing and the blanket.
With painstaking thoroughness, he went
over the blanket with a vacuum-cleaner
and deposited the dust and other matter
into a glass jar. He repeated the process
with the boy’s clothing. On the various
articles, he found hair, soil, mortar and
fragments of dead leaves of shrubs.
Clark submitted the samples to
three leading Australian experts –
Dr. Cameron Cramp of the Sydney
Medico-Legal Laboratory, Dr. Joyce
Vickery of the Agriculture Department,
and Dr. Whitworth of the Geological
and Mining Museum.
Other detectives succeeded in
tracing the blanket to a woollen mill in
South Australia. Officials there stated
that only a few hundred blankets
of that particular pattern had been
manufactured. Most of them had been
sold to dealers in New South Wales.
But, unfortunately, they had no way
of checking on the sale of a particular
blanket.Bazil Thorne addressed the media and appealed for the return of his son –
but the appalling situation took a toll on the concerned father (below left)Thorne to the morgue. He broke down
in tears as he identified the body as that
of his son.
Early next morning 100 detectives
and police officers gathered at the
vacant site. While some of them cut
through the bush and conducted a
minute search, others fanned out
through the suburb and made a
door-to-door canvass of residents.
The police effort in the areadeveloped no clues. But the experts
at the morgue had greater success.
The autopsy, conducted by Dr. C. E.
Percy and Dr. John Laing, showed that
Graeme had sustained a skull fracture at
the back of the head, apparently from a
heavy blow. The condition of the lungs
also indicated suffocation.
The doctors stated that the boy might
have died from either of these causes,
or from a combination of them. He hadAVAILABLE
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