True Crime in the Great Outdoors
The most shocking crimes from national parks, camping trips, backpacker murders, and hiking incidents
The disturbing disappearance of the Beaumont children on Glenelg Beach
Jane Nartare Beaumont, Grant Ellis Beaumont, Arnna Kathleen Beaumont disappeared January 26, 1966, Glenelg Beach, Adelaide, South Australia
Updated November 2024
The Beaumont children case involved the mysterious disappearance of three children from Glenelg Beach near Adelaide, South Australia, on January 26, 1966 (Australia Day). Speculation is that it was an abduction, but clues have been sparse.
Despite a huge search effort, no sign of the children has been found in over 50 years. An Aus$1 million reward is still being offered for information related to the cold case by the South Australian Government.
The disappearance of the Beaumont children has been one of Australia's most notorious cold cases and subject to wild speculation at times, including possible sightings of the children living as adults overseas.
Another mysterious case occurred just down the coast of South Australia, south of Adelaide: the Somerton Man.
The Strange Mystery of the Somerton Man (Tamám Shud case)
Who were the Beaumont Family?
Jane Nartare Beaumont (9), Arnna Kathleen Beaumont (7) and Grant Ellis Beaumont (4) lived with their parents, Grant "Jim" Beaumont, a former serviceman and driver for Suburban Taxis, and Nancy Beaumont (née Ellis). Jim and Nancy had married in December 1955. The family lived at 109 Harding Street, Somerton Park, a suburb of Adelaide in South Australia.
Circumstances of the disappearance
On 25 January 1966, during a summer heatwave, Jim Beaumont dropped his three children off at Glenelg Beach before heading off on a three-day sales trip to Snowtown. Jane, the eldest child, was responsible enough to care for the two younger siblings. This was a normal situation back in 1960s Australia.
On the morning of January 26, 1966, the public holiday known as Australia Day, the children asked their mother to revisit the beach. Australia Day is the official national day of Australia, marking the anniversary of the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet of British ships at Port Jackson, New South Wales, and Governor Arthur Phillip's raising of the Flag of Great Britain at Sydney Cove.
As it was too hot to walk, the children took a five-minute 2-mile bus journey from home to the beach at 8:45 am and were expected to return home on the noon bus. The children arrived at Glenelg / the Moseley Street bus stop across the road from Wenzel’s bakery and then had a short walk to the beach and Colley Reserve.
Jane was dressed in a pink one-piece bather with pale green shorts and canvas sandshoes with white soles. She took a paperback copy of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. She carried three drying towels inside a generic airways-type bag. Arnna wore a one-piece red and white striped bather with tan shorts and sandals. She also sported a bright orange hairpin. With no shirt, Grant wore only green and white vertically striped bathers under green cotton shorts and red sandals.
Nancy became worried when the children did not return on either the 12:00 or 2:00 p.m. buses. When Jim returned home early from his trip around 3:00 p.m., he immediately drove to the beach to locate them. However, he could not find them and returned home to pick up Nancy. Together, they searched the streets and visited friends' houses. At around 5:30 p.m., they went to the Glenelg Police Station to report the children missing.
The Search for the Beaumont children
Jane Nartare Beaumont, Grant Ellis Beaumont, Arnna Kathleen Beaumont
Police quickly organised a search of the area on and around the beach, assuming that the children were nearby and had lost track of time. They then expanded to nearby buildings, monitoring the airport, rail lines, and interstate roads.
Police quickly established that between them, the children were carrying 17 individual items, including clothing, towels, and bags, but none of these items were located.
The Patawalonga Boat Haven was drained on 29 January after a woman told police that she had spoken with three children, similar in description to the Beaumont children, near the haven at 7:00 p.m. on January 26. Nothing was found.
On the day of their disappearance, several witnesses had seen the children on and near Glenelg Beach with a tall blond and thin-faced man, with a sun-tanned complexion of thin to athletic build, aged in his mid-30s to mid-40s. He was approximately 6 feet to 6 feet 1in height, clean-shaven, and wearing Speedo-type swimming trunks. He had a long face and a high forehead, swept-back, light brown to fair, short hair parted to one side. He was wearing navy blue bathers with single white stripes down either side. He had a towel, shirt, and trousers with him, which he had placed on a nearby park bench.
An identikit was drawn up of the man. However, there are some problems with this drawing. The artist was drunk then and had to rush the sketch due to a deadline.
Beaumont children abductor sketch
Sightings of the Beaumont children with the “thin faced man”
Confirmed sightings of the three children occurred at the Colley Reserve and Wenzel’s cake shop on 2 Moseley Street in Glenelg.
The children played with the thin-faced man and appeared relaxed and enjoying themselves. There was no sign they were being held against their will.
A woman saw the children between 11 am and 12 noon. She was sitting on a wooden bench near the Holdfast Bay Sailing Club / Yacht Club and watched the children run up from their dip in the ocean. They had laid out their towels before running under the freshwater sprinklers to clean themselves off. This witness noticed a middle-aged man already lying on his towel before the children arrived and was closely watching them.
After playing under the water, the children walked over and started playing games with this individual. Grant, the youngest boy, jumped over him, followed by Arnna, then Jane. The two girls then began playfully flicking him with their towels.
A female eyewitness who got up from the park bench to walk home around 11.30 am stated the man and the children were still playing near the water sprinklers.
Later, the man approached a couple close by and asked: “Did any of you people see anyone with our clothes? When asked why, he said: “We’ve had some money taken from our clothes.” Another witness believed the man stated, “Has anyone been messing with our clothes? We have had our money pinched”.
After asking the people, the man then returned to the children. However, this couple was curious when they witnessed the man dress all the children. They thought this was strange, especially as the elder girl, Jane, appeared old enough to dress. The man then picked up his towel and clothes just after midday and walked in a northerly direction toward the changing sheds at Colley Reserve, 130 metres ( 142 yards ) from where they were playing.
Jane, Arnna and Grant happily followed him and waited outside the changing rooms before walking away with him in the opposite direction at around 12. 15pm to the children’s bus stop for their return trip.
The Beaumonts described their children, particularly Jane, as shy. For them to be playing so confidently with a stranger seemed out of character. Investigators theorised that the children had perhaps met the man during a previous visit or visits and had grown to trust him. A chance remark at home, which seemed insignificant at the time, supported this theory. Arnna had told her mother that Jane had "got a boyfriend down the beach". Nancy thought she meant a playmate and took no further notice until after the disappearance. If indeed the abductor was the ‘boyfriend’ it suggests that this person was frequently at Glenelg, having seen the children on occasions before, and this would more likely be a local than someone living further away.
Jane was well aware of the risks strangers posed, and her parents seemed surprised that she would play with a supposed random man and let him dress her. Jane also brought her book ‘Little Women’ to the beach with her that day, despite it being a 5-minute bus drive and only a planned two-hour outing. Is it possible she wanted to impress someone that day, hence bringing the book?
The last sighting of the Beaumont children was also around 12.20 pm to 12.30 pm at Wenzel’s bakery, at the corner of Mosely Street and Jetty Road.
A shop assistant at the bakery reported Jane had bought a pie placing this in a separate bag. She also bought five pasties, six finger buns and two large bottles of fizzy drink with a one-pound note.
Police viewed this as further evidence that they had been with another person for two reasons: the shopkeeper knew the children well from previous visits and reported that they had never purchased a meat pie before, and the children's mother had given them only 6 shillings and 6 pence, enough for their bus fare and lunch, and not £1. Police believed it had been given to them by somebody else. The food and drink the children bought was quite large for a short trip to the beach.
Psychic detective and bestselling author Scott Russell Hill, 60, who was a childhood playmate of the Beaumont children, said in 2018, “My father, who knew all the Beaumont family very well, was taking a shortcut to beat Australia Day traffic when he saw the children standing on the corner of Augusta and Durham Streets in Glenelg at 1.30 pm. They were with three other people – a thin-faced blond stranger, a male he recognised from one of the local racing stables with shoulder-length hair, and a middle-aged woman wearing a pale blue patterned dress. Dad was surprised they were with another woman, not their mother, Nancy. He did report it to detectives at the time, but there were so many sightings not all of them were followed up. To his dying day in May 1982, my father swore black and blue it was the Beaumonts he had seen.” Hill was approached by several other people who confirmed his father’s eyewitness account, right down to the distinctive design on the unknown woman’s pale blue dress.
Other sightings
The children were seen walking alone at about 3.00 pm, away from the beach along Jetty Road, in the general direction of their home. The witness, a postman, knew the children well, and his statement was regarded as reliable. He said the children were "holding hands and laughing" in the main street. Police could not determine why the reliable children, already one hour late, were strolling alone and seemingly unconcerned. This was the last confirmed sighting of the children. The postman contacted police two days after his initial statement and said he thought he saw them in the morning, not the afternoon, as he had previously said.
Several months later, a woman reported that on the night of the disappearance, a man, accompanied by two girls and a boy, entered a neighbouring house that she had believed was empty. Later, she had seen the boy walking alone along a lane where he was pursued and roughly caught by the man. The following day, the house appeared deserted again, and she saw neither the man nor the children again. Police could not establish why she had failed to provide this information earlier. Other reported sightings of the children continued for about a year after their disappearance.
Gerard Croiset
On 8 November 1966, Gerard Croiset, a parapsychologist and psychic from the Netherlands, was brought to Australia to search for the children. This proved unsuccessful, with his story changing daily and offering no clues. He identified a site in a warehouse near the children's home (and also near the Paringa Park Primary School attended by Jane and Arnna) in which he believed the children's bodies had been buried. At the time of their disappearance, it had been a building site, and he said that he believed their bodies were buried under new concrete inside the remains of an old brick kiln. The property owners, reluctant to excavate based on a psychic's claim, soon bowed to public pressure after publicity raised $40,000 to demolish the building. No remains or evidence linking to the Beaumont family were found. In 1996, the structure identified by Croiset was undergoing partial demolition, and the owners allowed for a full search of the site. Once again, no trace of the children was found.
Hoax letters
About two years after the disappearance, the Beaumonts received two letters. One was written by Jane, and the other by a man who said he was keeping the children. The envelopes showed a postmark of Dandenong, Victoria. The brief notes describe a relatively pleasant existence and refer to "The Man" who kept them. Police believed at the time that the letters could quite likely have been authentic after comparing them with others written by Jane. The letter from "The Man" said that he had appointed himself "guardian" of the children and was willing to return them to their parents. In the letter, a meeting place was nominated.
The Beaumont parents, followed by a detective, drove to the designated place, but nobody appeared. Sometime later, a third letter, also purported to be from Jane, arrived. It said that the man had been willing to return them, but when he realised a disguised detective was also there, he decided that the Beaumonts had betrayed his trust and that he would keep the children. There were no further letters. In 1992, new forensic examinations of the letters showed they were hoaxes. Fingerprint technology had improved, and the author was identified as a 41-year-old man who had been a teenager at the time and had written the letters as a joke. Because of the time elapsed, he was not charged with any offence.
Later developments in the Beaumont case
In November 2013, excavation was started on a North Plympton factory site that had previously belonged to one possible suspect in the case, Harry Phipps.
In January 2018, an excavation occurred at a different factory part, where a slight disturbance was detected. Between the 4th and the 7th of January 2018, specialised and modern testing was used to probe the soil. Subsequent excavation of this area by police on the 2nd of February 2018 yielded no trace of the Beaumont children, only some bones thought to be from a large animal.
The excavations were based on two men reporting that, as boys, they had been paid to dig a hole in that area around the time the excavations were made.
Nancy and Jim Beaumont
Jim and Nancy Beaumont
Nancy Beaumont
Jim Beaumont
Nancy died in an Adelaide nursing home in September 2019, survived by her former husband Jim, now aged in his 90s. Such was the strain of the children’s disappearance; the couple separated in the 1980s and later divorced. Neither had any more children.
Map of major events
A. ‘A’ is the bus stop where the Beaumont children arrived around 10:15 am.
B. Between 10.15 and 11 a.m., the children swim in the shallow water just north of the jetty, beneath the B in the picture above.
C. The water sprinkler at Colley Reserve
D. There are two location Ds in the picture. One of these may be where the children played under the sprinkler. The witness was sitting in front of the now non-existent Holdfast Sailing Club building. Historically, Colley Reserve was the entire grassed area north of the jetty, including the grassed sea frontage. The children were seen with a mysterious man, and initially, the man was described as lying face down and watching the children. Around 15 minutes later, the man was viewed playing with the children as they whipped each other with their towels.
E. This is Wenzel’s cake shop where the Beaumont children bought pasties, a pie and drinks. They seemed to be alone inside the shop.
F. This is the bus stop where the Beaumont children were scheduled to take the midday bus.
G. The location of the Colley Reserve change rooms
Possible suspects
Bevan Spencer von Einem
Bevan Spencer von Einem
Bevan Spencer von Einem was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1984 for murdering the son of Adelaide newsreader Rob Kelvin, 15-year-old Richard Kelvin.
Investigators believed von Einem had accomplices and was possibly involved in additional murders and disappearances, including the Beaumont children. However, no accomplices were ever charged, and von Einem has refused to cooperate about his possible connection with other murders.
Police heard from an informant identified only as "Mr B”, who spoke of an alleged conversation in which von Einem boasted of having taken three children from a beach several years earlier and said he had taken them home to conduct "experiments". Von Einem had been told that he performed "brilliant surgery" on each of them and had "connected them up". One of the children had supposedly died during the procedure, and so he had killed the other two and dumped all the bodies in bushland south of Adelaide. Police had not previously considered von Einem concerning the Beaumont children, but he somewhat resembled the descriptions and police sketches from 1966.
According to Adelaide police detective Bob O'Brien, Mr B gave important information during the investigation into the Kelvin murder and was regarded as a generally reliable source. However, there were enough concrete details to warrant further police investigations.
Von Einem had been known to have visited Glenelg Beach to watch children in the changing rooms. But he was younger, at 20-21 years old, than the suspect seen with the children in 1966. Von Einem was convicted of murdering a 15-year-old boy and suspected of killing males in their teens and twenties, victims older than the Beaumont children.
Von Einem also told the witness that he had taken two girls from the Adelaide Oval during a football match, another infamous disappearance.
In August 2007, it was reported that police were examining archival footage from the original search, shot by Channel Seven, that shows a young man resembling von Einem among onlookers. The report said police called for information to establish the man's identity.
Arthur Stanley Brown
Arthur Stanley Brown
Arthur Brown has been linked to both the Beaumont case and the infamous Adelaide Oval abduction, which occurred on 25 August 1973.
In 1998, Arthur Stanley Brown (1912-2002) was charged with the murders of sisters Judith (7 years old) and Susan (5 years old) Mackay in Townsville, Queensland. They disappeared while on their way to school on August 26, 1970, and were less than 200 metres from their house when they were abducted. They had only left home 10 minutes earlier, walking to the bus stop.
Their naked bodies were discovered two days later in a dry creek bed. Both girls had been raped, and each had been stabbed three times in the chest. Both of them were choked to death before the sexual assaults took place: Susan with the killer’s bare hands and Judith after sand was forced into her mouth and nose, blocking her airways.
Judith and Susan Mackay
The girls’ school uniforms were neatly folded and placed beside them, along with their straw hats and school bags. Even their socks were folded and positioned carefully, one inside each shoe.
One man saw a slender male leaning out of a car, talking to the girls at the bus stop at 8.10 am. Three hours later, 85 kilometres away, the same man arrived at a service station and refuelled. The attendant, Jean Thwaite, recalled later that one of the two girls with the man asked, “When are you taking us to mummy? You promised to take us to mummy.” The two children seemed upset. Later, another driver had a heated argument with the man, who was with two young girls in school uniforms that matched those of the Mackay girls.
Although these latter two sightings were the most concrete, police disregarded them. Both the petrol station attendant and motorist claimed the car was a Vauxhall with a mismatched driver’s side door. They also described a man with a narrow, long head and high cheekbones.
Numerous other witnesses told police, however, that the car was an FJ Holden with a mismatched door. Given that this description happened to match a car parked near where the bodies were found, police focused on finding this vehicle above all else. A police sketch was never circulated to the media, as the car was thought to be a critical piece of information. The FJ Holden was never located, vital witness statements were not treated seriously, and the case quickly went cold.
Brown was a very strange man and was meticulously neat to a fault, with immaculately pressed shirts and an odd habit of folding garbage up into near squares before disposing of it. This latter quality interested police, given the neatly folded clothing near the Mackay sisters’ bodies. He also drove a Vauxhall with an oddly coloured door, which he replaced and buried shortly after the murders as he didn’t want “anyone interviewing or annoying him”.
He married Hester Porter in 1944 and became stepfather to her three children while also conducting an affair with Hester’s sister, Charlotte. When Hester died in 1978 following a fall, he quickly married Charlotte. Charlotte’s son, Peter Neilsen, believes Brown killed his first wife, fearing she was planning to go to the police as she had caught Brown molesting a child and confessed to her older sister Milly that she made sure he was never alone with her children. It wasn’t enough to protect them.
Several came forward in the early 1980s and claimed that Brown had molested them as children. Unfortunately, they were advised to keep this a family secret for fear that a trial may be traumatic for Brown’s many victims. Many of the children were taken by Brown to the same dry creek bed the Mackay sisters were found in.
Brown's July 2000 trial was delayed after his lawyer applied for a section 613 verdict (unfit to be tried) from the jury. He was never retried as he was found to have dementia and Alzheimer's disease. He died on July 6, 2002, at the age of 90, with no criminal conviction, in a nursing home in Malanda, Queensland. He left no blood relatives and gave instructions to his carer that there were to be no death notices published. It took months for the media to report on his death.
Brown died an innocent man, having never been convicted of any of the crimes he was charged with, including the rape of six children, the Mackay murder and 45 sexual assault charges. He had a facial similarity to the identikit picture of the suspect for both the Beaumont and Adelaide Oval cases, where two children had disappeared. Searching for a connection to the Beaumonts was unsuccessful, as no employment records could shed light on his movements. Some of the documents were believed lost in the 1974 Brisbane flood. It is also possible that Brown, who had unrestricted access to government buildings, may have deleted his files.
Although there is no proof that he had ever visited Adelaide, a witness recalled having a conversation with Brown about seeing the Adelaide Festival Centre nearing completion, which placed him in the city in June 1973.
Another witness, who reported seeing a man near the Oval carrying a young girl while another older girl in distress followed, later identified Brown as the man she had seen after seeing his picture on television in December 1998 concerning the MacKay murders. The woman who placed the abductor as Brown first saw him for a single minute when aged 14 and then identified him as Brown 25 years later when she saw him as an 86-year-old on television. Additionally, she reported that the man was wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, a pair that Brown is known to have worn, something considered by police to be another noteworthy point in the identification.
However, Brown was 53 at the time of the Beaumont disappearance, which does not match the description of the suspect seen with the children, who was reported as being in his late thirties.
James Ryan O'Neill
James Ryan O'Neill
In the early 1970s, James O'Neill (born Leigh Anthony Bridgart in 1947), who was jailed for life in 1975 for the murder of a 9-year-old boy in Tasmania, had told a station owner in the Kimberley and several other acquaintances that he was responsible for the disappearance of the Beaumont children. In 2006, O'Neill lost an injunction in the High Court of Australia to stop the broadcast of a documentary, “The Fishermen”, which attempted to link him to the Beaumont case. The documentary aired on 26 October 2006 on ABC.
Between 1965 and 1968, O'Neill ( Bridgart) worked in the opal industry, which required frequent travel between Melbourne and Coober Pedy in South Australia. He then obtained work at a cattle station in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. In 1969, a business partner accidentally shot him in the head while playing with a pistol. The bullet, which entered his right forehead and came out of his neck, destroyed his sense of smell and taste. Bridgart went on to give many reasons for the bullet wound to various people, including it being the result of serving in Vietnam, that his mother's boyfriend had shot him and being an ASIO spy.
In 1971, Bridgart was charged with 12 offences involving the abductions and sexual assaults of four boys in Victoria. He skipped bail and fled to Western Australia. In November 1974, he moved to Tasmania and changed his name to James Ryan O'Neill.
O’Neill pointing to location of body of Ricky Smith
In February 1975, nine-year-old Ricky John Smith (also known as Ricky Kube) was abducted, and O'Neill was one of many who helped in the search for the missing boy. Over the next two weeks, five children were kidnapped in separate incidents, but all managed to escape. Nine-year-old Bruce Colin Wilson was then abducted, and his body was found in May 1975 near Risdon Vale. O'Neill was a suspect and, after interrogation, led police to the body of Ricky Smith.
Although arrested for both murders, he was only tried for Ricky Smith's murder following legal practice at the time. O'Neill pleaded insanity due to his head injuries from being shot in 1969 and claimed that police had held a gun to his head to get his confession. The jury found O'Neill guilty, and he was jailed for life. He applied for parole in 1991 and again in 2005 but was turned down and has not reapplied. He remains Tasmania's longest-serving prisoner.
In the 1990s, freelance journalist Janine Widgery approached a retired Victorian detective, Gordon Davie, with a proposal to make a documentary on James O'Neill. Davie saw no story suitable for a documentary and declined. In 1998, Davie read in a news report that O'Neill had been transferred in 1991 to the low-security Hayes Prison Farm and was allowed to go fishing in the Derwent River unsupervised. Davie wrote to O'Neill asking for permission to interview him. O'Neill claimed he had never even received so much as a parking ticket before the murders. Davie contacted Widgery and told her he didn't believe a word O'Neill had said and thought there would be a story. Over the next four years, Davie recorded hundreds of hours of their conversations.
O'Neill was highly intelligent and charismatic. Davie said afterwards: "He is one of the most likeable men you would ever meet. On the first day of filming, there were six or seven out there and at the end of the day, I said, "What do you think of him?" They all said, "You've made a mistake; this bloke couldn't have done anything wrong." however, a pattern emerged from the interviews of the places O'Neill visited: children had gone missing in seven or eight of them. It was also alleged he was in Adelaide about the time the Beaumont children disappeared and that he had told people he was responsible for their disappearance.
The resulting documentary The Fishermen, named for O'Neill’s passion for fishing and Davies's belief he also used the term as a euphemism for his murders, was scheduled for broadcast on ABC television on 21 April 2005. Still, O'Neill applied for an injunction on the grounds it was defamatory and would hurt his chances of parole. The case, O'Neill v Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Roar Film Pty Ltd and Davie, was heard by the Supreme Court on 22 April. The judge ruled in favour of O'Neill and granted an interlocutory injunction against the broadcast in Tasmania. As 500 houses in northern Tasmania could still view the documentary due to transmission overlap from the mainland, the documentary was pulled nationwide. On 29 August 2005, the ABC's appeal against the decision was dismissed 2-1 by a full sitting of the Tasmanian Supreme Court. The ABC appealed this decision to the High Court of Australia in Sydney, which, in a 4-2 decision, quashed the Tasmanian Supreme Court ruling allowing the program to be aired in October 2006.
Chief Justice Murray Gleeson and Justice Susan Crennan wrote in their joint judgement: "It is one thing for the law to impose consequences … in the case of an abuse of the right of free speech, It is another … for a court to interfere with the right of free speech by prior restraint."
Davie said that although there was no evidence to link O'Neill to the disappearance, he was persuaded that O'Neill was to blame. "I asked him about the Beaumonts, and he said: 'I couldn't have done it. I was in Melbourne at that time.' That is not a denial." Later, asked again if he had murdered the children, he replied, "Look, on legal advice, I am not going to say where I was or when I was there." Although O'Neill claims never to have visited Adelaide, his work in the opal industry at the time required that he frequently visit Coober Pedy, which would have required him to pass through Adelaide. Davie also suspected O'Neill was involved in the disappearance of Ratcliffe and Gordon in 1973. South Australian police have interviewed O'Neill and discounted him as a suspect in the Beaumont case.
In the early 1970s, O'Neill told a station owner in the Kimberley and several other acquaintances that he was responsible for the disappearance of the Beaumont children. Although O'Neill claims never to have visited Adelaide, the roads to travel from Victoria to Coober Pedy pass through Adelaide. The Tasmanian Police Commissioner, Richard McCreadie, was also interviewed for the documentary and claimed that O'Neill was frequently going backwards and forwards through Adelaide at about that time. When asked if he had murdered the children, O'Neill replied: "Look, on legal advice, I am not going to say where I was or when I was there". O'Neill has never spoken on the subject again. He now denies being in South Australia between 1965 and 1968. Although Davie and McCreadie don't believe he is a prime suspect, both admit the possibility that O'Neill was responsible. The South Australian police, however, interviewed O'Neill and discounted him as a suspect.
Richard McCreadie, the retired Tasmanian police commissioner, has described O’Neill as “probably the most cold-blooded and calculated murderer I’ve ever dealt with”.
Derek Ernest Percy
Derek Ernest Percy
There have been suggestions that Derek Ernest Percy (1948-2013), Victoria's then longest-serving prisoner, had been involved in the Beaumont case. Percy was in prison until he died in 2013 after being found not guilty because of insanity for the 1969 murder of Yvonne Tuohy.
His insanity plea in the Tuohy murder was at least partly based on his suffering from a psychological condition that could prevent him from remembering details of his actions. He was supposed to have indicated that he believed he might have killed the Beaumont children, as he was in the area at the time, but he had no recollection of actually doing so. On 30 August 2007, Victoria Police successfully applied for permission to question Percy concerning the Beaumont disappearance.
In 1966, Percy was 17 and, therefore, seems too young to have been the man seen with the Beaumont children by several witnesses. It is also unknown whether Percy would have had a car at that time, while the Beaumont children suspect is presumed by commentators to have had access to one for facilitating a quick getaway and also for disposing of the children's bodies.
Alan Anthony Munro
Alan Anthony Munro
In 2015, a man, Allan Maxwell McIntyre (died June 2017), who had himself been investigated by police and cleared of involvement in the Beaumont case, gave a secondhand account that a man he had known in 1966, called Alan Anthony Munro, had come to his home with the children's bodies in the boot of his car.
McIntyre's children said that they and their father initially mistook the body of Arnna Beaumont for a boy because of her short hair.
Munro was a former Scoutmaster who had pleaded guilty to 10 child sex offences, including buggery and indecent assault against several victims in South Australia’s Kangaroo Island, Rapid Bay and the Glenelg between 1962 and 1983. He had been sentenced to 10 years in prison, with a non-parole period of five years and five months. In 1992, Munro was convicted over a 1990 indecent assault of an 11-year-old boy and sentenced to seven months in prison.
He moved to Cambodia in 2009 and became involved in charities for orphaned Cambodians.
In June 2017, Adelaide detectives were given a copy of a child's diary, written in 1966, which allegedly placed Munro in the vicinity of Glenelg Beach at the time of the children's disappearance. Munro returned to Adelaide for questioning from Cambodia, where he operated a lady-boy bar.
Police believe Munro was in Adelaide around the time when the Beaumont children vanished, but there is no evidence linking him to their disappearance.
Harry Phipps
Harry Phipps
Harry Phipps (died 2004), a local factory owner and a member of Adelaide's social elite, was identified as a possible suspect after publishing “The Satin Man: Uncovering the Mystery of the Missing Beaumont Children” in 2013. The book did not name the identity of the Satin Man, but his estranged son identified him soon after as the Satin Man and possible murderer.
Phipps bore a substantial likeness to the police artist's impression of the man seen talking to the children on the beach. He was a relatively tall man, around 6 foot one, and had light brown hair in 1966 and a thin face. He was wealthy and known to be in the habit of giving out £1 notes, was later alleged to have pedophile tendencies, and lived only 300 metres away from Glenelg Beach on the corner of Augusta Street and Sussex Street.
His birthdate of July 1, 1917, made him 48 years old at the time of the Beaumont disappearance. Those who knew Harry Phipps at this time said he looked a lot younger than his 48 years. This age discrepancy leaves a question mark next to Harry Phipps being the possible abductor—a 48-year-old having to look around 35.
In 2007, Phipps's son Haydn, who was 15 at the time of the disappearance, came forward to researchers with the claim that he had seen the children in his father's yard that day. Two other persons, youths at the time, said that Phipps had paid them to dig a 2 × 1 × 2-metre hole in his factory yard that weekend for unstated reasons.
In November 2013, a one-metre-squared section of a factory in North Plympton, which Phipps had owned, was excavated following new information about his possible involvement in the children's disappearance. A ground-penetrating radar found "one small anomaly, which can indicate movement or objects within the soil," but the dig found no additional evidence, and investigations into the site were closed.
On 22 January 2018, Adelaide detectives announced that they would return to the factory site and conduct further excavations after a private investigation sponsored by Channel Seven Adelaide. The hole, which was dug on February 2, 2018, took nine hours to complete. Animal bones and general rubbish were found, but nothing related to the Beaumont case.
In 2017, more evidence may have come to hand as, according to S.A. Major Crimes Superintendent Des Bray, “There has been information that has come in, and that caused us in 2017 to commence a discreet investigation which we didn’t announce publicly (into Harry Phipps).” In addition to this, former SA detective Bill Hayes has said: “In this particular case, we’ve got over 30 coincidences lining up to Mr Phipps.”
Despite the failed Castalloy dig, there is still the possibility that Harry Phipps was the Beaumont children's abductor. There was a cottage at Castalloy that was deemed out-of-bounds to all staff except Harry Phipps, and it is alleged he dressed in satin here, which aroused him. He may have taken the Beaumont children to this cottage before disposing of their bodies through another method at the site. There was a factory waste area that resembled a sandpit. Phipps may have dumped the surfboard bags containing the Beaumont children and would have bypassed the risky manoeuvre of getting people to dig the hole. Another possibility involves the furnace that Harry Phipps had access to on the factory site. Depending on certain factors, this may have been considered an easy way to hide all evidence.
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Read other strange and disturbing stories from Australia
The real "Wolf Creek" - the disturbing case of the backpacker murders in the Australian Outback
The Peter Falconio disappearance in the Australian Outback
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_the_Beaumont_children
https://www.newidea.com.au/beaumont-children-witness-comes-forward
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/who-took-the-beaumont-children-new-lead-in-iconic-australia-day-abduction/news-story/9421e7f6bf6c96a81ec6e262d65c4137
https://thebeaumontchildren.com.au/what-happened-to-the-beaumont-children/
https://somerandomstuff1.wordpress.com/2018/02/02/after-second-failed-castalloy-dig-is-phipps-responsible-for-beaumont-children-disappearance/
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/revealed-millionaire-ladyboy-bar-owner-and-child-sex-offender-tony-munro-questioned-in-1966-beaumont-children-mystery/news-story/3cfbbd9479d0c47fbf33fdc23b01be45
Read other true crime stories
The Terrifying Case of Gary Michael Hilton, the National Forest Serial Killer: Part 1 Meredith Hope Emerson (Member only)
The Terrifying Case of Gary Michael Hilton, the National Forest Serial Killer: Part 2 Cheryl Dunlap
The Terrifying Case of Gary Michael Hilton, the National Forest Serial Killer: Part 4 Other murders
Further Reading and viewing
Michael Madigan - The Missing Beaumont Children: 50 Years of Mystery and Misery.
Alan Whiticker and Stuart Mullins - The Satin Man: Uncovering the Mystery of the Missing Beaumont Children