The Perfect Crime Was Undone by a Vomiting Shark. Then It Got Weird.

In 1935, a captive tiger shark vomited a human arm in front of a crowd of spectators. What followed was one of the strangest criminal investigations in history.

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• A captive tiger shark vomited a human arm in front of spectators at a Sydney aquarium in 1935.
• Police identified the arm’s owner through a tattoo and fingerprints, linking him to Sydney's criminal underworld.
• A stunning chain of evidence emerged—but a defense attorney’s argument undid the entire case.

It’s April 25th, 1935, which if you’re in Sydney, Australia means it’s Anzac Day. Named for the abbreviation for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, the holiday was created to commemorate the landing at Gallipoli during the First World War, and this particular Anzac day marks the 20th anniversary. The men who landed at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, would witness unfathomable carnage; little do you know, twenty years on, that you’ll witness something unfathomable as well.

To commemorate Anzac day, you decide to take a trip to the Coogee Aquarium and Swimming Baths at Coogee Beach. You’ve heard tell that they have a real live tiger shark on display in one of their aquarium displays (which looks to be just a swimming pool), and when you finally get there, you see it’s true; and what a shark it is. It’s 13 feet long and reportedly weighs a ton. You get there towards the end of the day, around 4:30 pm, but hear that the aquatic predator has been acting erratically all day. After a moment, you start to see why: it begins to vomit. It coughs up a rat, then a bird, and finally, a human arm.

It floats along the water’s surface: a left hand, attached to a forearm marked with a distinct tattoo, the forearm attached to no one. You’d be forgiven for feeling like this is the beginning of a detective story by Arthur Conan Doyle (or, since this is 1930s Australia, maybe Mary Fortune or Ellen Davitt). If the police suspect foul play, you think, they can use the severed arm to identify the victim, and then catch themselves a killer, all thanks to a once-hungry shark.

And you would have been half right.

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The pool where the shark had been displayed

Now, if you (present-day reader you, not hypothetical 1930s Australian you) assumed that this shark had swallowed the arm after biting it off of a body, you’d be wrong on two counts. First, as it turns out, this shark had actually swallowed a smaller shark, which itself had consumed the arm. Second, and more pertinent to the police investigation, it was evident that the arm had been separated from the body with a blade, rather than by a shark bite (the multiple rows of teeth would have left a different mark), meaning the arm was severed before the first shark got to it.

Police put out a description of the forearm’s unique tattoo, depicting two men boxing, into the local papers, and eventually Edwin Smith came forward with the claim that the arm belonged to his brother James, who had been missing for some time. Remarkably, the arm had remained so well preserved inside the shark that police were still able to collect fingerprints from the hand. Analysis of the prints confirmed that the arm had belonged to James Smith.

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James Smith

Now police knew that the missing James Smith was missing his left arm, but that wasn’t all they knew about man. Smith, an Englishman living in Sydney, was on the radar of the police because he frequently passed through various criminal circles. That proximity to, and sometimes participation in, criminal activities is also what put Smith unofficially on the police payroll, working as an informant. James Smith knew that information had value, that knowing things could lead to a payday. In his case, that’s also the likely reason that part of him wound up inside a shark.

We say “likely” because the murder of James Smith has never officially been solved. In fact, it’s never even officially been confirmed as a murder, due to a quick-thinking defense attorney.

Suspects soon emerged in the investigation. Smith had last been seen on April 7, out drinking with friend and convicted forger Patrick Brady at a hotel in Cronulla, a suburb south of Botany Bay. Reportedly, the two then departed for a cottage Brady had rented. That was the last anyone would see of Smith, but not the last anyone would see of Brady. The very next morning, Brady hailed a cab, which took him from Cronulla all the way to North Sydney, where it dropped him off at the home of one Reginald Lloyd Holmes.

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The Cronulla cottage rented by Brady

Reginald Holmes was a prominent businessman in Sydney who operated a boatbuilding business. But as the State Library of New South Wales notes, not everything about Mr. Holmes was on the up-and-up: “Holmes was also known to be involved in other activities. He controlled a lucrative smuggling ring using speedboats built at his boatshed to pick up cocaine, cigarettes and other contraband thrown overboard from ships passing off Sydney Heads.”

James Smith drove some of those boats for Holmes, so he knew at least some of what Holmes was doing under cover of darkness. And James Smith, as noted, knew that information was a currency with a very good exchange rate.

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Reginald Lloyd Holmes

Investigators suspected that Smith had begun blackmailing Mr. Holmes. If Brady had dispatched James Smith at his Cronulla cottage and went to see Holmes the following morning, that meant that either Brady killed Smith at Holmes’ behest, or that Smith’s blackmail scheme had merely been replaced by an even more lethal blackmail scheme by Brady.

Police first approached Holmes, hoping they could use the same leverage Smith had used to extort money—this time to extract a confession. Holmes denied any knowledge of any plot, then after the police had gone, he took one of his speedboats out into the water and attempted to shoot himself in the head.

In a moment as remarkable as a shark spitting up an arm, the bullet was stopped by Holmes’ skull and he survived. The force of the blast caused Holmes to topple into the water, but miraculously again, a rope caught around his wrist saved him from sinking. Police were alerted to the activity, but Holmes—revived by the shock of hitting the water and running on the adrenaline of a man the universe refused to let die—led them on a four-hour boat chase through Sydney Harbour.

Once caught, Holmes relented and confessed to police that Brady had murdered Smith, dismembered the body, and tossed most of it into Gunnamatta Bay. But Brady held on to one limb, the left arm, which he brought to Holmes the morning after the murder, extorting the boatbuilder for £500. After Brady left, Holmes admitted to tossing the severed arm into the waters at Maroubra Beach, unintentionally feeding it to a shark which would itself be consumed by a tiger shark.

As open and shut as this all sounds, the police were unable to convict Brady of any crime. The prosecution’s key witness, Reginald Holmes, was not placed under protective custody, and on June 12, 1935, he turned up dead inside his car, shot three times at close range. The day prior, he had withdrawn £500 from his bank account and told his wife he had to meet someone. Who that someone was has never been confirmed.

But what of the arm? Surely the evidentiary appendage that appeared under such miraculous circumstances must have provided the key to convicting James Smith’s killer—or so one might think. A pioneering forensic scientist, Sir Sydney Smith, was even brought in to undertake a thorough inquest into the arm for the purposes of trying Brady. But Brady’s attorney argued that no inquest should be conducted.

A single arm, he argued, “did not constitute a body,” and that as such, a severed arm was not proof enough that James Smith was even dead to begin with. While police did charge Brady with the murder, he was ultimately acquitted and lived a full thirty years after the incident, maintaining his innocence the entire time.

In a detective novel, a severed arm being swallowed and subsequently spit out by a shark that was itself inside a shark being gawked at during a commemoration of the landing at Gallipoli would be seen as the hand of fate intervening in a shocking twist to convict a man who thought he’d committed the perfect crime. But the real story of the “Shark Arm Murder” shows that even when a Deus ex machina pops up in the plot, human error can still foil the final act.

Michael Natale
News Editor

Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.