Shark Mystery

Regardless of man-eating sharks which infest their waters, robust Australians cockily make sea-swimming their favorite sport. Since a shark digests an Australian in a few days, it was major Commonwealth news when a huge tiger shark, thrashing around under the eyes of fascinated bathers in an aquarium near Coogee Beach, suddenly spewed up the contents of its stomach including an undigested human arm tattooed with two boxers wearing red shorts.

Promptly recognized as the arm of a locally popular barfly named James Smith who had disappeared two weeks before, the undigested arm put Australian sleuths on their mettle. By last week they had reconstructed the "Shark Murder" about as follows: A drug-smuggling gang hired Smith to scuttle a yacht they had insured for $42,500 with Lloyd's. When Scuttler Smith later tried to blackmail the gang with threats of exposing them to Lloyd's, the gang had him dismembered and fed piece by piece to sharks in Sydney Harbor. Smith's tattooed arm was swallowed by a baby shark which failed to digest it before the baby shark was in turn gulped down by an oversize tiger shark. By final coincidence the tiger shark happened to be caught and so roughly handled on its way to the aquarium that its stomach turned before it had quite digested the baby shark, thus spewing up Smith's tattooed arm in prime condition.

Such smart detective work so impressed Coroner E. T. Oram that he encouraged police to hold an Irishman named Brady on a charge of murder because Smith was last seen when he left his home to go fishing with Brady. "Keep your mouth shut!" lawyers advised, and Pat Brady set his Irish jaw. Last week before the Commonwealth's High Court Brady's counsel cited a basic maxim of Anglo-Saxon law, argued: "There can be no inquest, much less a trial for murder, without a corpus delicti and one tattooed human arm disgorged by a shark is not a body!"

Accepting this plea, the Court freed Pat, left Australia's great "Shark Murder" stymied. "For all they can prove," declared Pat's friends, "James Smith may still be alive. What if his arm was cut off and thrown to a shark? That doesn't show he's dead!"

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