The police had been busy during the first day of the kidnapping, conducting a concentrated search near the Thorne house in Bondi. News of the kidnapping soon leaked to
Bill Jenkings of the Sydney
Daily Mirror, The next evening, on Friday 8 July, the focus of the investigation moved to Sydney's north-eastern suburbs, when Thorne's school case was found near
Seaforth. The owners of a
petrol station there had reported that they saw the group with the boy pulling into the petrol station in a dark-coloured vehicle at about 10 pm on 7 July. leading to a number of hoax calls. a foreign man, acting as an investigator, had called at the Thornes' residence seeking a "Mr Bognor" while also asking Thorne's mother to confirm their as-yet unlisted telephone number. On Tuesday 16 August, nearly six weeks after the kidnapping and 1.5 km from where the school case was found, Thorne's body was finally discovered hidden on vacant land in Grandview Grove, Seaforth, Wrapped in a blue tartan picnic blanket, and tucked into a ledge, the boy had been tied with string, gagged with a scarf and was still wearing his school uniform. The blanket containing the body had been there for some time; two local children had known about it, but the discovery was only made when mentioned to their parents around 7:00 p.m. that day. Also, two tree types (
Chamaecyparis pisifera and
Cupressus glabra) that were not present at the vacant lot where the body was found were
identified by an expert in the blanket, along with Pekingese and blonde human hair. Examination of the body showed cuts and abrasions and internal trauma, and it was clear that the boy had died from either asphyxiation, a skull fracture or a combination of the two. Following a tip-off from a postman, a house was identified at 28 Moore Street in the suburb of
Clontarf, 1.5 km from where the body was found. Police visited the house on Monday 3 October and learnt that it had been occupied by a Hungarian immigrant named Stephen Bradley. Bradley had also owned an iridescent blue 1955 Ford Customline (registration number AYO-382), had a Pekingese as a family pet and his wife had dyed blonde hair. However, Bradley and his family had vacated the house on 7 July for a rented flat at 49 Osborne Street in
Manly, and had left Australia for London with his family a week earlier, on 26 September, aboard . ==Extradition and trial==