Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Shark Arm Murders

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

Get yer info on one of Australia’s great true crime cases he-re!  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And many, many more. Open your free High Heart Radio app. Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Totoro. And listen now. Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, 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 murderer, 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. And, hey, hats off to the Sydney Crime Museum while we're at it. Yeah, and who could leave out the dictionary of Sydney? Yes, we're talking about Sydney because that's where the shark armed 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 Koogee 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, 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. Yeah, just over the course of a couple of weeks, three different men were killed by sharks on 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, 12 feet is pretty, pretty long, right? It's a big shark. And those tiger sharks, they're BAs, too. At any rate, the shark was given the people what they wanted to see, you know, like he 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 25th, which was Anzac Day in Australia, which is I'm taking it as similar to our Memorial Day here in the United States.

Okay. 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, bl-bl-blet. 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 a Jaws quote in there. Sure. What did Ruby think of? She liked it. How could you 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 dogs? That's right. Happy birthday to both of you in real time. Thank you. Happy birthday.

I mean, we did all our private birthday stuff, and Ruby sent you a video and you sent her one, which is very sweet. I imagine we'll do that for the rest of our lives. Yeah. So, at any rate, back to the autopsy. Not some half-ass shark autopsy, but an autopsy on this arm. They were like, this was not a,

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. Fairly well preserved. 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 missing for a few weeks. And the cops were like, all right, they were able to get fingerprints. And 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.

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to an entire administration. Guess you didn't move in on a bunch of dumb hillbillies now, did you? Listen to Our Town on the IHeart 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 gangland, 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, too, and 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 a hotel. And I want to say crinula, but it might be cronula.

Like, I don't know. Maybe an Ozzy will tell us. When you said Koji Beach, it just dawned on me that, like, we hadn't looked up the pronunciations and, like, that cartoon sweat, like, jumped off of my forehead. I think he said Kooji because it's two O's, but that might not be right either. But the Aussies love us. So, yeah, it could be Kooky, actually. I will hear. I can't wait. We'll talk about it later in a listener mail. Okay.

We're looking forward to all the Aussie pronunciations coming back to us. I think it's Kugi because there's the Kooky Beach Sunday at Outback Steakhouse. I don't want to believe you. No, don't. Don't. I could see it, though. 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, 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 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 a, 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 noose was tightening on real smugglers, they would dump like cocaine and cigarettes and other contraband. And he would drive around or 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 some of me. was. 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. 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 hadn't occurred to me that they dumped their load. Yeah, just to keep going. So either way, that's how he made his money. And again, like he was picking up cocaine in the 30s. 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 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 later testify, to Reginald Holmes's house.

And Reginald Holmes was connected to Jim Smith. So now Jim Smith's arm seems really, really connected to Reginald Holmes and Patrick Brady. That's right. So it turns out that Smith and Holmes had a falling out over an insurance 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 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 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 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 ate it. The rest of the body, everyone presumes, 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 friend. Problem is you could put all this stuff together and painted a pretty convincing picture, I guess, of Brady and Holmes' involvement in the disappearance. 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, too. That's right. 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 you know, nobody was confessing anything until May 20th. And this is when Holmes leaves in a speedboat out into the harbor and pulls out a gun to try and kill himself. And he fails at that, but when he falls into the water, his, 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 Holmes is like, all right, like, you got me, I'm done. I'm bored with riding around on my boat. Yeah. 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 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. That's right.

So now that Holmes is dead, basically the whole case against Brady falls apart because that was, you know, you know, the key link. This cab driver, like they had that testimony, but that wasn't enough to, you know, to convict 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 fissor 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. An author named Alex Castle's 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 this day who killed homes yeah uh 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 another theory is that Both of them were just rubbed out as, you know, part of the normal business of gangland Sydney's 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 in their article, they said, they think they pulled a Fletch, or Holmes did. They think Holmes hired a hitman to kill him in a weird, like, suicide to get 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. Yeah. Is that what Fletch does and confess Fletch?

No, in the original Fletch, that's what T. Tim Matheson does. He hires Fletch to kill him. I see. I see. I know that you hated Fletch, 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 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. There were some good ones. There were a handful of really good Chevy Chase movies, in my opinion. The one I remember liking the most was seems like old times. Oh, yeah, well, that's Neil Simon, so 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 holds up every single time I watch it. All right. Well, I 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's that one. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.