It was three days after Christmas, 1956. Two teenage sisters, Barbara and Patricia Grimes, who were fifteen and thirteen years old, respectively, left their home in the McKinley Park neighborhood of Chicago at around seven-thirty p.m. to head down to the Brighton Theater about a mile and a half away. Both girls were huge Elvis fans, and they had pooled their two dollars and fifty cents to go see their idol starring in Love Me Tender, which they had already seen fourteen times.
The sisters settled into the theater to watch the movie, with their friend Dorothy Weinert and her younger sister sitting right behind them. After Love Me Tender was over, Dorothy and her sister decided to skip the second film of the double feature and start heading home. On their way out, they saw Barbara and Patricia standing in line to get some popcorn so they could stay for the second film.
The girls’ mother, Loretta Grimes, figured that the sisters would have stayed for both movies, and so expected them home at around eleven forty-five p.m. But when midnight arrived with no sign of them, Loretta sent some of her other children out to the bus stop to see if the sisters were perhaps just running late.
Three buses passed, and none of them contained the girls. At two in the morning, a panicked Loretta phoned the police to report her daughters missing.
The alarm was sounded all over Chicago, and unconfirmed leads soon began pouring in from witnesses who said they had seen Barbara and Patricia on the night of their disappearance. Numerous people, for example, claimed to have seen the girls boarding an eastbound bus near the theater, and a few witnesses also reported seeing them getting off the bus at Western Avenue at five minutes past eleven. This stop was only halfway to their home.
Two teenage boys who had been driving around the McKinley Park area at about eleven-thirty that night told police they spotted the girls about two blocks away from the Grimes home, and that the girls appeared to be laughing and horsing around with each other.
While these sightings seemed plausible and indicated that the sisters had perhaps made it most of the way home before something awful befell them, there were other sightings that might have suggested a far stranger scenario.
On the morning of December 29th, for instance, a security guard reported that the Grimes girls had asked him for directions, and later that evening, one of Patricia’s classmates stated that she saw Patricia walking past the restaurant where she was eating, but that Patricia was with two unidentified girls, neither of whom was her sister.
And early on the morning of December 30th, Minnie Duros, the owner of the D&L Restaurant more than five miles away from the Brighton Theater, said she saw the girls in the company of a man named Bennie Bedwell, who worked as a dishwasher at the restaurant. She claimed that Patricia was staggering, as though she was drunk or drugged.
On the same day, a clerk at the nearby Claremont Hotel told police that the girls had checked in there, and they were also reportedly spotted on a train near Glenview by the conductor, though the date of this sighting is unclear.
Though police left open the possibility that the girls had run away from home of their own accord, perhaps to travel to Nashville to visit Elvis at Graceland, Loretta Grimes was adamant that her daughters would do no such thing, particularly as they only had a few dollars to their name and had taken none of their belongings with them. Elvis Presley himself took to the media to specifically beg the girls to go back home and “ease their mother’s worries.”
The year would end with the girls’ mysterious disappearance still very much up in the air, and it would be another three weeks before the tragic fate of the Grimes sisters would be discovered.
All through the early days of 1957, more sightings of and clues about the missing girls would have police working overtime to try and find the vanished teenage sisters. Just in the first half of January, Barbara and Patricia were reportedly seen riding a bus along Damen Avenue, trying to check into a hotel on West 61st Street, at a Chicago department store listening to Elvis records, and even as far away as a Nashville bus station and employment agency.
By far the most unsettling occurrence during this uncertain period supposedly took place at around midnight on January 14th, when the phone rang at the home of the Tollstan family. Sandra Tollstan was a friend and classmate of Patricia Grimes, but it was her mother Ann who answered the phone. Ann told police that she heard a voice on the other end of the line that sounded to her very much like the frightened voice of Patricia Grimes herself. The voice only said, “Is that you, Sandra? Is Sandra there?” Ann called her daughter to the phone, but by the time Sandra got there, the caller had hung up.
Whether or not any of these sightings or identifications were accurate, it would soon be definitively known what had ultimately happened to the Grimes girls. On the early afternoon of January 22nd, a man named Leonard Prescott was on his way to the grocery store when he spotted what he thought was a pair of mannequins lying just on the other side of the guardrail along German Church Road. He thought the scene looked a little odd, so he turned around and drove back home to pick up his wife. When the couple returned to the scene and got a closer look, they realized that they were looking at the naked dead bodies of two teenage girls.
Police arrived at around one-thirty p.m. and immediately identified the remains of Barbara and Patricia Grimes. Though the girls were nude and their faces had been partially gnawed by animals, there were no other obvious wounds found on their bodies, other than a few minor bruises and three small puncture wounds in Barbara‘s chest. The way the sisters’ corpses were haphazardly piled on the ground indicated that they had possibly been tossed from a moving vehicle.
Because there had been a great deal of snowfall and a thaw in between the time that the girls had disappeared and when their bodies were found, there was some controversy about the exact time of death. Harry Glos, chief investigator for the Cook County coroner’s office, suspected that the girls could have been alive until at least January 7th, arguing that the thin ice layer found around their bodies could only have developed if the bodies were still warm when a major snowfall occurred after that particular date.
However, the pathologists who performed the autopsy disputed this assertion, reporting that the contents of the girls’ stomachs matched the meal they had eaten before leaving for the movies on December 28th. This suggested that the sisters had been killed only four or five hours after last being seen at the Brighton Theater; it also rendered every sighting of the girls that had allegedly taken place on December 29th or later to be false.
Further examination revealed that Barbara had been sexually assaulted. As none of the wounds on either of the bodies were fatal, the pathologists were obliged to rule that the cause of death was simply exposure to freezing temperatures.
Once the girl’s tragic deaths had been definitively established, investigators began focusing on likely suspects. Among those who were questioned and released included a seventeen-year-old boy named Max Fleig who confessed to the crime and failed a polygraph test, but was later dismissed after no solid evidence could be found tying him to the crime.
Police also brought in a fifty-three-year-old man named Walter Krantz, who had called them on January 15th and told them he’d had a prophetic dream that the Grimes sisters’ bodies would be found in Santa Fe Park, which was less than two miles away from where the bodies were actually found a week later. Despite several interrogations of the supposed psychic, investigators eventually released him as well, determining that his alleged vision had probably been a coincidence.
By far the most scrutinized suspect at the time was Edward “Bennie” Bedwell, who worked at the D&L Restaurant, the owner of which had claimed to see him with the girls on December 30th. Upon being questioned, Bedwell signed a confession stating that he and a buddy had had the girls with them for a full week, taking them around to various taverns and apparently having consensual sex with them before finally feeding them hot dogs on January 7th and then beating them to death after they refused to submit to further sexual activity. The confession further stated that he had dumped the girls’ bodies on January 13th.
Almost from the moment the confession was signed, however, there were obvious contradictions. The autopsy had not found any traces of hot dogs or alcohol in either of the girls’ systems, and further had found no sign that the sisters had been beaten to death. Bedwell himself, who was illiterate and mildly mentally handicapped, soon recanted his confession, claiming it had been coerced out of him, and after further investigation, he was released.
In May of 1957, Loretta Grimes, mother of Barbara and Patricia, received a terrifying phone call from a man who bragged about helping to kill her daughters, chuckling as he described undressing them. Loretta reported the call to the police, who felt that the caller was possibly the killer, as he seemed to know a few details about the crime that had not been made public. The man would call once more after another horrific murder had taken place, and there is some evidence to suggest that the perpetrator was responsible for carrying out both these gruesome crimes.
On September 22nd, 1958, fifteen-year-old Bonnie Leigh Scott left her home at approximately seven p.m. and never returned. Her dead body was not discovered until November 15th, when a group of Boy Scouts who had volunteered for a search party came across it in a forest preserve southwest of Chicago.
The nude body was so badly decomposed that determining time and manner of death was essentially impossible. Bonnie had been sliced across the abdomen and then decapitated, though pathologists established that these wounds were probably inflicted post-mortem.
Interestingly, the day after Bonnie Scott’s remains were found, Loretta Grimes received another anonymous phone call, just like the one she had received back in May of 1957. She told authorities that she was sure the voice was the same as on the previous call. This time, the man on the other end of the line informed her that he had “committed another perfect crime,” and made reference to the fact that this murder wouldn’t be blamed on Bennie Bedwell, as the murder of the Grimes sisters initially had been.
The following day, twenty-one-year-old Charles Melquist confessed to killing Bonnie Scott, saying that he and Bonnie had been seeing each other for more than a year, and that he had smothered her with a pillow while they were in his car out at the forest preserve, though he admitted he didn’t know why he had done it. He also told police that he had returned and stabbed the girl’s dead body a few days after dumping it, though he gave no particular reason for doing this.
After an extensive investigation, Charles Melquist was tried and convicted of the murder of Bonnie Leigh Scott, and some investigators believe that it was he who made the phone calls to Loretta Grimes, indicating that he was perhaps involved in the murder of the Grimes girls as well. Some sources also point to a similarity in some of the non-lethal wounds found on the bodies of both Bonnie Scott and the Grimes sisters that might suggest they were killed by the same assailant.
Despite being sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison for killing Bonnie Scott, Charles Melquist was released after serving only eleven years. He later went on to marry and have two children. He was never formally investigated in connection with the murder of Barbara and Patricia Grimes, and he died a free man in June of 2010.
Crime Immemorial 