Grimes Sisters Murder Case (Chicago 1956/57)
Lord Sir
from the Chicago area in the mid-1950's.
In attempting to track down any information I could find online I came across
the following two pieces.
I must say that I don't believe this is the crime I recall, but then again,
maybe my memory is too hazy to be counted upon and I have conflated parts of two
separate crimes into what serves as my memory.
Meanwhile I thought I'd post these articles to at-c as I haven't seen any
reference to the unsolved murder of the Grimes sisters here before. Besides,
this crime has even given birth to a ghost story as seen in the second article
below.
Anyway, maybe it will help uncover more information regarding the crime I am
interested in from the same time period if there ever was such a crime.
Also, any further information on these murders would be appreciated.
Regards,
Lord Sir
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from : http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/6865/gr.html :
Grimes Sisters Murder Case (Chicago 1956/57)
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.
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From : http://www.prairieghosts.com/grimes.html :
HAUNTED CHICAGO
THE GRIMES SISTERS MURDER SITE
The End of Innocence in Chicagoland
Willow Springs, Illinois
Remember how when you were a kid and your mom would let you make that trip the
corner store by yourself... or perhaps give you some pocket change to walk down
to the drug store and buy a soda and a comic book? Would you allow you child to
do that today?
I have friends, much older than myself, who grew up in the 1930's and 1940's,
when people didn't have to worry so much about what was going when their kids
were out of sight. Sure, the "good old days" were not always good, but it just
seemed to be a more innocent time in the hearts of all Americans.
I was a child in the late 1960's and early 1970's and even then, people were not
as cautious as they are today about letting kids do things on their own... but
even now, I can remember the words that I'll probably never forget...Never Talk
to Strangers!
Well, in Chicago of 1956, two young girls did talk to strangers and became the
focus of one of the region's most puzzling unsolved crimes. Not only did this
event shatter the innocence of the people of Chicagoland... but it gave rise to
mysterious events and a chilling haunting.
It was December 28, 1956 and Patricia Grimes, 15, and Barbara Grimes, 13, left
their home at 3624 South Damon Avenue and headed for the Brighton Theater, only
a mile away. That was the last time they were ever seen alive. The two sisters
were missing for the next 27 horrific days before their naked and frozen bodies
were found along the banks of Devil's Creek in the southwest part of Cook
County.
Autopsies were performed and the coroner reported that the girls had died from
exposure and shock.... but were otherwise unharmed. It is believed that the
girls had gotten into a car with their killer voluntarily. It had been a
bitterly cold night and they probably would have accepted a ride with someone
they recognized.
Needless to say, the citizens of Chicagoland were stunned. The authorities
questioned an unbelievable 300, 000 persons, searching for information about the
girls, and 2000 of these people were seriously interrogated, which in those days
could be brutal. The police named a 17-year-old named Max Fleig as the chief
suspect but the current law did not allow juveniles to be tested with a
polygraph, or lie detector.
Police Captain Ralph Petaque persuaded the boy to take the test anyway and in
the midst of it, he confessed to taking the girls. Because the test was illegal
and inadmissible, the police were forced to let Fleig go free. Was he the
killer? No one will ever know.
Some time later, the police investigated another confession, that of Silas Jane,
a transient who was believed to have been involved in some other murders around
the same time period. His confession later unraveled and he admitted that he had
lied.
Now, more than 40 years later, the mystery of who killed the Grimes sisters
remains unsolved. There are many who remember the case and as discussed earlier,
remember a time when children did not have to be afraid to walk the streets in
their own neighborhood. The impact of this tragedy is still being felt today....
as is the impression of what may have been the girl's final moments.
Along German Church Road in the southern suburb of Willow Springs, is a low
point in the roadway which played a part in the 1956 murders. It was here where
the bodies of the Grimes sisters were discovered and the location where the
police claim to have had numerous strange reports over the years.
Since the discovery of the bodies, the police have received reports from those
who say they have heard a car pulling up to the location with its motor running.
They also say they have heard the door open, followed by the sound of something
being dumped alongside the road. The door slams shut and the car drives away.
They have heard these things...... and yet there is no car in sight!
Another woman claimed that in addition to the sounds, she saw what appeared to
be the naked bodies of two young girls lying on the edge of the roadway. When
police investigated, there was no sign of the bodies.
Many researchers believe in "residual hauntings", which means that an event may
cause an impression to be left behind on the atmosphere of a place. It is highly
likely that the traumatic final moments of the Grimes sisters may have left such
an impression on this small stretch of German Church Road. It may have also been
an impression caused by the anxiety and madness of the killer as he left the
bodies of the young women behind.
Regardless, it seems to be very real and I defy anyone to travel and stop along
this stretch of road and to say that they are not moved by the tragedy which
took place here... The destruction of innocence in Chicagoland.
Willow Springs is a southern suburb of Chicago and the strange area of road way
is at the bottom of a wooded hill on German Church Road. For the exact location,
contact Ghost Research Society President Dale Kaczmarek
Copyright 1998 by Troy Taylor
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Chester1851
these stories I do recall reading abou them. Classic tales.
Lord Sir wrote in message <7acbph$c...@edrn.newsguy.com>...
Michael Newton
Anderson disappeared on the way home from a friend's house, in
Chicago. She was found about two weeks later, shot four times in the
head, dismembered, her body parts packed into two oil drums, floating
in Montrose Harbor. If I'm not mistaken, this crime also remains
unsolved.
mn
Lord Sir
Yes, I vaguely remember this crime (Judith Mae Anderson) too and I believe it
does remain unsolved.
The Grimes sisters crime comes closer to the crime I seem to have stuck in my
head, it seems like the right time of year (winter) and in the crime I am
thinking of their were dead sisters. However, my memory claims that there is
also an unsolved Chicago area crime in which a mother and all her daughters were
found dead in their car during the same time period, though it could have been
1957-1958.
Thanks for your input and if you happen to know of or find any additional
information on any of these crimes online please post it here.
Regards,
Lord Sir