Grimes Sisters

[GravesEnd]

I did a search on this topic but didn't find any thread. I wonder if any of you heard of this case? Barbara (13) and Patricia (15) Grimes turned up missing on December 28, 1956 after they left to see an Elvis Presley movie, Love Me Tender. Elvis Presley, in a statement asked the girls to come home. Their nude bodies were found off of German Church Road in the Chicago area in January 1957. This crime was never solved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimes_sisters



Warning: Contains picture of their nude bodies, but not too graphic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:GrimesCrimeScene.jpg

[suzuchan]

I heard of this case. I always wonder if it really was Patricia that called her friend.
For some reason, just the fact that there was a mysterious phone call makes the case that much creepier.

[GravesEnd]

I heard of this case. I always wonder if it really was Patricia that called her friend.
For some reason, just the fact that there was a mysterious phone call makes the case that much creepier.

I wonder that too. Perhaps, she managed to sneak in a phone call but couldn't speak too loudly and had to cut it short.

[suzuchan]

I wonder that too. Perhaps, she managed to sneak in a phone call but couldn't speak too loudly and had to cut it short.

That's what it sounded like from what I saw on Wiki...

[Lisamarie]

I remeber this story...so fucking sick and sad when some pervert gets ahold of these young girls and abuses them and dumps them like thay are nothing..happens all the time......

[Lisamarie]

how could they have made a call after they were found dead??

[Ghoulie Girl]

I had never heard of this story, once again, I learn something new on this site!
I love this place.

[John Trim]

how could they have made a call after they were found dead??

They were found on January 22. the phone call was on January 14th.

[Maruz83]

how could they have made a call after they were found dead??

They were found dead on the 22 and the phone call was the 14th.


I had never heard of this..... why did so many people confess ?????

[darlingdawn]

Here's what I don't understand. This case had national coverage, so much that Elvis himself made a plea for their return.. Why then did the lady who ran the hotel refuse them a room? It would have saved their lives for her to give them a room and then call local police! I wonder about the validity of the "witness" testimonies!

[SinKittyVixen]

Wow. I never heard of this. So sad! And unsolved to boot. Awful.

[GravesEnd]

I remeber this story...so fucking sick and sad when some pervert gets ahold of these young girls and abuses them and dumps them like thay are nothing..happens all the time......

I agree completely. It really sickens me. It is bad enough when it happens to adults but an innocent, defenseless child is unfathomable . A person can't get any lower who does that to a child.

[cachluv]

The caption of the crime scene photo:

"Police and press are trampling the crime scene after the Grimes sisters were found."

That hit me pretty hard. I guess sensationalism is a pretty powerful thing.

[hell0kitty]

this is what makes this site interesting for me--good ole who dunnits, death haggeries delight!

[*racheal*]

when I first read this story from what I remember some had said the girls were always getting into trouble. And doing stuff with the boys and stuff like that. I don't know but I do know you can find this in the crime Library. Well I just looked for it and I can't find it. they changed everything on me so I am lost. Try there I know I read about the case and I know it was there.

[GravesEnd]

when I first read this story from what I remember some had said the girls were always getting into trouble. And doing stuff with the boys and stuff like that. I don't know but I do know you can find this in the crime Library. Well I just looked for it and I can't find it. they changed everything on me so I am lost. Try there I know I read about the case and I know it was there.

I did find this article that mentions something to that effect, although not definitive:

"Other theories maintain that the girls may have indeed encountered Bedwell or another "older man" and rumors circulated that the image of the two girls had been polished to cover up some very questionable behavior on their parts. It was said that they sometimes hung around a bar on Archer Avenue where men would buy them drinks. One of the men may have been Benny Bedwell. Harry Glos, who died in 1994, had released information that one of the girls had been sexually active but later reports from those who have seen the autopsy slides say there is evidence that both of them may have been. It is believed that Coroner McCarron may not have released this because of religious reasons or to spare additional grief for the family. "

http://www.prairieghosts.com/grimes.html

[GravesEnd]

I also discovered that there was another crime just a few years earlier in Chicago involving three boys. I guess that story would deserve its own thread.

"the murders of the Grimes sisters and the killings of three young boys who had been found under similar circumstances in October 1955. One of the most shocking and terrifying events in the history of Chicago took place in that month, when the bodies of the three boys were discovered in a virtually crime-free community on the northwest side of the city. This was several years before the disappearance of the Grimes sisters and at the time of what was called the Schuessler-Peterson murders, the city would be stunned by the horror of violence against children.
The terrifying events began on a cool Sunday afternoon in the fall of 1955 when three boys from the northwest side of the city headed downtown to catch a matinee performance of a movie at a Loop Theater. The boys made the trip with their parent’s consent because in those days, parents thought little of their responsible children going off on excursions by themselves. The boys had always proven dependable in the past and this time would have been no exception, if tragedy had not occurred.
With $4 between them, John and Anton Schuessler and Bobby Peterson ventured into the Chicago Loop to see a movie that Bobby’s mother had chosen for them. Around 6:00 pm that night, long after the matinee had ended, the boys were reported in the lobby of the Garland Building at 111 North Wabash. There was no explanation for what they might have been doing there, other than that Peterson’s eye doctor was located in the building. It seems unlikely that he would have been visiting the optometrist on a Sunday afternoon.
Around 7:45 pm, the three entered the Monte Cristo Bowling Alley on West Montrose. The parlor was a neighborhood eating place and the proprietor later recalled to the police that he recalled the boys and that a "fifty-ish" looking man was showing an "abnormal interest" in several younger boys who were bowling. He was unable to say if the man made contact with the trio. They left the bowling alley and walked down Montrose to another bowling alley, then thumbed a ride at the intersection of Lawrence and Milwaukee Avenue. They were out of money by this time, but not quite ready to go home. It was now 9:05 in the evening and their parents were beginning to get worried. They had reason to be, for the boys were never seen alive again.
Two days later, the boy’s naked and bound bodies were discovered in a shallow ditch about 100 feet east of the Des Plaines River. A salesman, who had stopped to eat his lunch at the Robinson Wood’s Indian Burial Grounds nearby, spotted them and called the police. Coroner Walter McCarron stated that the cause of death was "asphyxiation by suffocation". The three boys had been dead about 36 hours when they were discovered.
Bobby Peterson had been struck repeatedly and had been strangled with a rope or a necktie. The killer had used adhesive tape to cover the eyes of all three victims. They had then been thrown from a vehicle. Their clothing was never discovered."

[Lisamarie]

How sick and scary.....I had thought about that as well with all the sightings of the girls.and you know wat that time that kind of stuff was really frowned upon....thats crime scene pic is hearbreaking .

[Bleedstreet]

Silas Jayne (suspect on the wikki)

with a name like that he HAD to have killed someone...somewhere...

actually....it would make a kool band name as well.....hmmmmmmmmm

[imadeathhag]

Sorry if this was posted before, but this caught my eye. While searching for crime scene pics, I found another link, it's called "Grimes Sisters Murder Location and Other Haunted Locations." It's a video. I don't know if its any good, I'm going to watch it right now because I love that stuff!

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/503650..._locations_to/


Barbara Grimes and Patricia Grimes are two girls who disappeared on December 28, 1956, in Chicago, Illinois. They were found dead on January 22, 1957. Their murder case is known as the Grimes sisters' murder case and to this day remains unsolved.

Disappearance

On December 28, 1956, sisters Barbara (13) and Patricia (15) Grimes left their house and went to the Brighton Theater to see the Elvis Presley movie Love me Tender. Brighton Theater was a short distance from their house. In their pockets they had $US 2.15, but it is unknown how they arrived at the theater (whether they took the bus or walked). They were seen in the popcorn line of the theater at around 9:30 pm. The movie was over at around 11 pm, and they were expected at home around 11:45 pm. At 2:15 am, the two sisters were reported missing by their mother.
Their disappearance launched one of the biggest missing-persons hunts in Chicago history. However, police were not able to determine what happened to the Grimes sisters. In a statement, Elvis Presley asked the girls to go home.


Found dead

On January 22, 1957, a construction worker named Leonard Prescott found the Grimes sisters. Their naked bodies were discarded next to the German Church Road near Willow Springs. Barbara Grimes lay on her left side with her legs slightly drawn up toward her body. Patricia Grimes covered the head of her sister. She lay on her back and her head was turned sharply to the right.
The autopsy, performed by experienced pathologists, earned much criticism. They concluded that the Grimes sisters died on December 28, the day they vanished, and the cause of death was due to shock and exposure to low temperatures. The cause of death was only determined by excluding all other possibilities. However, Harry Glos, one of the chief investigators in the case, believed that the Grimes sisters were still alive when their bodies were discarded next to the German Church Road. He stated that the thin ice layer on the bodies of the girls indicated that their bodies must still have been warm when they were dumped there. Only after January 7, 1957 would there have been enough snowfall to create the ice layer. Therefore, according to this theory, the Grimes sisters must have been still alive until at least January 7.
Also, the corpses contained various bruises and marks (for example puncture wounds in the chest that may have come from an ice pick) that were never fully explained. Glos has also theorized that Barbara Grimes was sexually molested before she was killed. Although the pathologists denied this claim, the Chicago police crime lab confirmed Glos' theory.

Witnesses

• Friends saw the Grimes sisters on December 28, 1956, at 9:30 pm in the popcorn line of the Brighton Theater. They laughed and their friends didn’t notice anything unusual. This sighting is considered reliable.
• Numerous people said that they saw them boarding an Archer CTA bus heading east into the city after the screening. According to those people, the Grimes sisters got off the bus at Western Avenue, about half the way to their home. Why they would get off the bus at this station is unknown.
• A security guard on the northwest side believed he was asked for directions by the Grimes girls on the morning of December 29.
• Classmates said they saw the Grimes sisters on December 29 at Angelo's Restaurant at 3551 South Archer Avenue. The accuracy of this sighting is not known.
• A railroad conductor reported them on a train near the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in north suburban Glenview.
• On December 30, 1956, at 5:40 am the owner of the D&L Restaurant on West Madison, claimed to have seen the Grimes sisters, with Patricia apparently drunk or sick, accompanied by a later suspect, Edward L. "Benny" Bedwell.
• On January 1, 1957, they have been reported aboard a CTA bus on Damen Avenue.
• The following week a night clerk at the Unity Hotel on West 61st street refused two girls a room (because of their age) who he believed were the Grimes sisters.
• On January 3, 1957, three employees at Kresge thought they had seen the girls listening to Elvis Presley music at the record counter.
• On January 14, 1957, the parents of a classmate of Patricia Grimes (Sandra Tollstan) received two telephone calls around midnight. When picking up the first phone call, nobody at the other end spoke. On the second phone call, 15 minutes later, a seemingly frightened voice asked "Is that you, Sandra? Is Sandra there?" but before the parents could bring their daughter to the phone, the caller had hung up. Ann Tollstan, the mother of Sandra Tollstan and the one who answered the second phone call, was convinced that the caller's voice belonged to Patricia Grimes.

Only the sighting of the Grimes sisters in the popcorn line at 9:30 pm by their friends is undisputed. The accuracy of the other sightings is unknown or questionable.



Suspects


Edward L. "Benny" Bedwell

A 20-year-old drifter from Tennessee who bore some resemblance to Elvis Presley. According to the owner of the D&L Restaurant where Bedwell occasionally washed dishes, he was at the restaurant with the Grimes sisters on the morning of December 30. Bedwell first confessed to the murders, but later withdrew his confession on the grounds he had been coerced by the sheriff's men. Considering the time and place, this may well have been true . Also, only the sheriff but no other investigator believed that Bedwell may have been the murderer of the Grimes sisters. (Harry Glos, another chief investigator, believed he may have had something to do with their disappearance and murder, but wasn’t sure about Bedwell's role in this case.)

Max Fleig

Max Fleig was a 17 year old suspect in this case. He voluntarily took a polygraph test and failed it. After failing the polygraph, he allegedly confessed to kidnapping the girls. However, because at that time it was illegal to perform the polygraph test on a minor, police had to let Fleig go. He was never charged with the murders because there was no evidence that he killed or kidnapped the girls other than his alleged confession and the polygraph failure. Max Fleig was sent to prison a few years later for the unrelated murder of a young woman.

Walter Kranz

Walter Kranz, a 53 years old steamfitter, had called the police on January 15. He told police he dreamed that the bodies of the girls could be found in a park at 81st and Wolf. This park was less than a mile from the location where the bodies of the girls were actually found. Because of that, Walter Kranz was one of the suspects. But after he had been taken into custody and was questioned by the police, he was released.

Silas Jayne

Silas Jayne was a stable owner and confessed to the murder of the Grimes sisters. He may have been involved in other murders within the Chicago area at that time. However, his confession fell apart and he admitted that he had lied to the police.

[octobersky]

Great post! Interesting case for sure.

[MorbidMolly]

Hell of a post....gonna see what I can dig up ( no pun intended )

[lisalouver]

WOW!

Interesting on the cause (or lack therof) of death and the theory that they were alive when dumped?!

[imadeathhag]

Thanks guys. Did anyone check out the video? It was pretty interesting.

[lisalouver]

Thanks guys. Did anyone check out the video? It was pretty interesting.

Gonna check it out now.

[lisalouver]

The guy really is out of breath!

This should be on cold case files, I can't beleive that the Chicago Police have not taken a fresh look at it.

[MorbidMolly]

The guy really is out of breath!

This should be on cold case files, I can't beleive that the Chicago Police have not taken a fresh look at it.

Too many missing pieces and theroies.....I mean this seems like a mess from the very begininng

[King Tut]

The fifteen year old looks downright voluptuous (as corpses go).

[MorbidMolly]

The fifteen year old looks downright voluptuous (as corpses go).

You are BAD........go to your room please

[Shano]

Very interesting. Thanks for posting! Makes you wonder where they were kept alive for those 25 days. I can't imagine for 25 days they were unnoticed next to the road. And them dying of exposure... come on! The pathologists were idiots.

I agree with King... the 15 year old looks like she had the body of a 21 year old. I am surprised that just the 13 year old was sexuality assaulted. All of this investigation was totally messed up!

Here is another link to the story....
http://www.prairieghosts.com/grimes.html

A public appeal by the Kind himself after the sisters disappeared.....
"If you are good Presley fans, you'll go home and ease your Mother's worries."

The attached picture is of their Mother Loretta in their bedroom. Soooo sad

[baroque1]

I believe there is a thread on this somewhere but at any rate its very interesting. I found this :

The Grimes sisters, Barbara, 15, and Patricia, 12, disappeared off the streets of Chicago one night over Christmas break 1956, and investigator Harry Glos went to his grave believing that the girls spent the following several weeks in the depraved custody of an illiterate West Madison Street drifter who ultimately killed them.
It was a belief that many officials and journalists shared at first, but one that fell out of favor and ultimately cost Glos his job as the top sleuth for the Cook County medical examiner's office.
In recent years, Glos' daughter, Renee Glos, 48, a nurse, and her friend Oak Park writer Christine Vernon, 50, have been working on a book and a screenplay they say will vindicate Harry Glos, who died in 1994, and at last expose the extraordinary facts behind the still unsolved killing of the Grimes sisters.
Like so many girls of their day, the Grimes girls were Elvis Presley nuts. On the night of Dec. 28, 1956, they left their Back of the Yards home to see "Love Me Tender" for the 11th time at an Archer Avenue movie house. When they hadn't returned by 2 a.m., their mother reported them missing. Within days virtually the whole city was looking for them.
Their naked, frozen corpses were found along an isolated road west of Willow Springs on Jan. 22.
Witnesses quickly led police to Edward "Benny" Bedwell, 21, a Skid Row dishwasher from Paris, Tenn., who liked to tell people he knew Elvis. After lengthy interrogation, Bedwell offered up a signed confession and reportedly led sheriff's deputies to the exact spot where the bodies were found.
Cook County Sheriff Joseph Lohman and State's Atty. Ben Adamowski were among the early believers in Bedwell's tale--he claimed that the girls were sexually active runaways and that he and another man got them drunk one night in mid-January and ditched them in a panic after knocking them unconscious in a scuffle.
But a curious and highly public quarrel quickly broke out on the front pages of the newspapers between those who felt the evidence showed the girls had been killed and dumped the night of their disappearance--including Coroner Walter McCarron and several top pathologists--and those who believed it supported the tale Bedwell was by then attempting to recant.
Vernon said her research into the investigatory files kept by Harry Glos has convinced her that top officials entered into "a gentle, kindly conspiracy" to protect the Grimes family and preserve the girls' reputations in death--even though it meant the killer would go free.
"It got all tangled up in the mores of the 1950s," she said. "They wanted these girls to have died as virgins."
Harry Glos, who was also a lead investigator in the strikingly similar 1955 murders of Robert Peterson, 14, and brothers John and Anton Schuessler, ages 13 and 11, saw a coverup brewing. He held a news conference in his home 23 days after the bodies were found and revealed several then-unpublished facts, including evidence that Barbara had been raped.
McCarron fired Glos the next day. Bedwell was soon released. He is 62 today if he is still alive. My recent efforts to locate him in Florida, where his trail ran cold, were unsuccessful, as were the efforts of Vernon and Renee Glos to interview immediate survivors of the Grimes sisters.
I contacted five veteran newspaper crime reporters from that era, each of whom said they came to believe that Bedwell was simply a low-life patsy whose confession was coerced for political reasons.
Vernon and Glos strongly disagree, of course, and say they hope their efforts to tell this story will lead to the sort of progress made recently in the 1965 killing of horsewoman Cheryl Rude (an arrest last week) and in the Schuessler-Peterson murders (a conviction in 1995). Indeed, Vernon hopes officials will explore her pet theory that it's more than coincidence that the riding stables of Ken Hansen, convicted in Schuessler-Peterson, were in the same corner of the same Forest Preserve Division where Bedwell said he took the Grimes sisters on their last night alive. The working title of Vernon's 210-page screenplay and Glos' unfinished book is "The Loud Whispers," a title Harry Glos once put on a magazine article about the case.
The women said they believe the whispers are the voices of the sisters from beyond the grave. Listen, said Vernon, and they will finally tell us the truth

[imadeathhag]

The pic of the mom is sad. Poor lady. Was she a single parent?

[Mulvaness]

Looking at the picture, I am hard pressed to believe that after 25 days even in the winter their bodies would look that good. I am leaning more to the side that they were alive somewhere for that period of time. Whether it was Bedwell or the Teenage boy that did it, I don't really think they were killed the night they were abducted.

[bulletnose]

Thanks for the info. I did not know of this crime. The only credible witness seems to be the girls in the theatre getting popcorn. The others don't make any sense. Why would the girls be roaming around Chicago when they could just go home. Quite often in cases like this well meaning,and some not so well meaning, people try to help by seeing the victims everywhere. With what little evidence we have it seems the girls were a bit wild and perhaps got caught up with the wrong person or persons. It seems highly unlikely that they died on the 28th and any forensic examiner could have seen that. It's a shame politics got in the way of solving this crime.

[Linnie]

Just like the boy who allegedly caused the OLA fire in Chicago a couple of years later, more suspects in heinous murders were being protected for all the wrong reasons !!!
And if the tales of Silas Jayne's stables (under the management of the late, unlamented Mr. Hansen) also figuring the Grimes murders are true as well as the Schuessler-Peterson killings (not to mention possible visits by then-teenaged, also late, unlamented John Wayne Gacy) perhaps the title of a book about all these cases should be entitled "Stables of Evil."

[Upset]

It's cases like this one that make me hope the afterlife has a special version of Wikipedia that fills in all the blanks of the great unsolved mysteries.

[TaupinJohn]

I don't have any new theories to offer, although I've enjoyed reading all of yours... you guys don't miss much, and that's so awesome to me.

Just... someone mentioned "creepy" -- yes. The whole... flavor of it. The times. The attitudes. Going to see an Elvis Presley movie for the 11th time. I don't care what anyone says, those were simpler, kinder times. Which is why this wasn't solved... nobody wanted to mention the probable rape and murder of this mother's daughters, gods no! Or arrest someone who'd speak such rot! And so the facts were forgotten to spare a mother all she had left, very possibly, a degree of dignity and memories of daughters forever pure. Corny as hell, but so was television in the 1950's, and nobody seemed to mind.

So two corpses, dumped very modern-ish and all.... in a time when decency mattered and modesty was fashionable... well it's creepy.
That phone call? Not even convinced it happened, but still... ultra fucking creepy.

The "witnesses" were, I'm thinking, not attention whores or liars but people who were stunned by this story and perhaps what they said they remembered wasn't consistent with... a damned thing but their own hysteria. ("Oh my god, missing for how long? Yep, saw 'em on a train." Saw some girls on a train and that was enough. Understandable but still... I'm guessing mostly bullshit.)

I'd love to see this solved. I think that knowing I never will makes it more haunting to me somehow... the way the Boy in the Box haunts me... I think of these kids when I'm driving and I say, "What the hell happened to you?"
So far, I've never gotten an answer. But one can hope, right? (That was pretty creepy also... sorry!)

[AlexPKeaton]

I've always wondered why the police let the press photograph Barbara and Patricia's naked bodies and especially why they didn't put a blanket over Barbara and hide her tits/chest from public view. Even in death, the sisters should have been given dignity.

[Linnie]

I've always wondered why the police let the press photograph Barbara and Patricia's naked bodies and especially why they didn't put a blanket over Barbara and hide her tits/chest from public view. Even in death, the sisters should have been given dignity.

They should have kept the press outta there until the last minute. Otherwise, then as now, it's not a good idea to cover a body or bodies in that situation until all possible forensic evidence (even such as it was in 1956) has been collected.
The extra people simply trampled whatever leftover evidence might have been there, and sex sells, even if it's a teen murder victim and her tween sister.
A few years ago, someone was selling prints of the crime scene photos from the Schuessler/Peterson murders on EBay. Worse than I imagined.

[TheDude]

The media will destroy everything in it's path just to get a story. Dignity for two innocent girls who were murdered? The Media has none.