I
was a teenager when Graeme
Thorne was kidnapped for
ransom (his parents had won the Opera House lottery),
but I still remember the horrifying
effect it had on the whole
country, and when
I saw that a
book had been published on
the topic I
was naturally drawn
to it. The kidnapping by Stephen Bradley, and
subsequent events, was in
many ways the crime that propelled Australia into the brutal world
of greed and violence, which unfortunately has become so much the
norm for societies everywhere. Up
until the kidnapping, Australians, on the whole, trusted and respected
each other; houses were often left unlocked, and, when not at school,
children spent their days beyond
the limitations of parental control, often
exploring. No one worried about them, because there was no reason to
worry. After Graeme Thorne things slowly
began to change. The
kidnapping became a line
between innocence and the loss of innocence.
Mark
Tedeschi QC was also a child at the time of the kidnapping and
was obviously affected by the
crime. His book, written with the added perception of his many years
in the field of law, is balanced,
well presented, well researched, well
written and, at all times,
interesting. He
goes to great lengths
(both in the
Preface and in the chapter entitled Hypotheses and Syntheses) to
explain that there are certain aspects of Stephen Bradley's story
that no one can possibly know for certain and that
he therefore
based Bradley's motivation
and thought processes on what he managed to learn about the
perpetrator, together with his own years of experience in dealing with
the criminal mind.
There
will be many readers of Kidnapped
who, like myself, know
the main points of the story before opening the first page, and
yet I would imagine that
Tedeschi manages to sustain both their
interest and their
feelings of suspense.
A
book I would recommend, especially to anyone who lived
through those weeks when the kidnapping was front-page news but
also for anyone interested in what it is that can motivate an
ordinary person to commit a heinous crime.
As Tedeschi writes at the end
of the book: 'Murder for greed is essentially a crime born of an
abject fear of nothingness'.