Murder of the Grimes sisters

Disappearance

On December 28, 1956, sisters Barbara (aged 15) and Patricia (aged 13), students at Thomas Kelly High School and St. Maurice respectively, went to the Brighton Theater to see the Elvis Presley movie Love Me Tender.

The theater was about one-and-a-half miles from the girls' McKinley Park home. They had $2.15 between them. It is not known how they travelled to the theater.

Patricia's friend, Dorothy Weinert, sat behind the girls with her own younger sister during the movie. Weinert and her sister left the theatre at the intermission of the double feature showing that night, about 9:30, and saw the Grimes girls in the popcorn line. They seemed in good spirits and neither the Weinerts nor anyone else noticed anything unusual.

The sisters stayed for the second film, and were expected home around 11:45 p.m. When there was no sign of them by midnight, their mother Loretta sent their older brother and sister to wait by the nearest bus stop for their arrival. After three buses had gone by with no sign of them, the siblings returned. At 2:15 a.m., their mother reported Barbara and Patricia as missing.

The two girls' disappearance launched one of the biggest missing-person cases in Chicago history, producing many reports of sightings but nothing in the way of hard evidence. It was initially thought that they might have simply run away, possibly to Nashville, Tennessee to see Elvis Presley in concert or just to "emulate his lifestyle." On January 19, 1957, a statement was issued from Presley's Graceland estate: "If you are good Presley fans, you'll go home and ease your mother's worries."

Sightings

Between the last confirmed sighting of them at the movie theatre on December 28, 1956, and the subsequent discovery of their bodies on January 22, 1957, there were several unconfirmed sightings of the girls both in and outside the city. The most widely reported sightings include the following:

Discovery of the bodies

Following a thaw and rain, on January 22, 1957, while driving along German Church Road, about 200 feet east of County Line Road in unincorporated Willow Springs (later, in 1960, incorporated as part of Burr Ridge) a construction worker named Leonard Prescott spotted the nude bodies of the Grimes sisters behind a guard rail. Initially unsure of what he had seen, Prescott later returned to the site with his wife Marie, who fainted on taking a closer look.

Barbara Grimes lay on her left side with her legs slightly drawn up toward her body. Patricia Grimes lay on her back, covering her sister's head. It was thought that they had most likely been dumped there from a passing car.

The autopsy, performed by experienced pathologists, concluded that due to their stomachs containing the approximate proportions of their last known meal, both sisters had in fact died within about five hours of the time they were last seen at the theatre, i.e. on either the evening of December 28 or the early morning of the 29th. However, Harry Glos, at the time chief investigator for the Cook County coroner's office, disagreed with the time of death. He pointed to a thin layer of ice found on the bodies of the girls as indicating that they had been alive until at least January 7, since only after that date would there have been snowfall enough to react with their warm bodies and create the ice layer, let alone hide the bodies until their discovery.

There were no obviously fatal wounds on either girl's body and nothing to indicate that they had been drunk, drugged or poisoned. Despite being "very clean", both corpses had various bruises and rodent bites, including three puncture wounds in Barbara's chest that may have come from an ice pick. It was also later revealed by authorities that Barbara at least had likely had sexual intercourse around the time of her death, but no evidence of forcible molestation was found. The immediate cause of death was given as "secondary shock" resulting from exposure to low temperatures.

Bennie Bedwell

Edward Lee "Bennie" Bedwell was a 21-year-old illiterate drifter from Tennessee who allegedly bore some resemblance to Elvis Presley. According to Minnie Duros, owner of the D&L Restaurant where Bedwell had worked as a dishwasher, he was there with the Grimes sisters on the morning of December 30, 1956. Bedwell was booked on murder charges January 27, 1957 after signing a confession stating that he and another man were with the Grimes sisters January 7 and after seven days of drinking at West Madison Street ("skid row") saloons, they fed the sisters hot dogs and then beat them to death for refusing their further sexual advances before discarding the bodies on January 13. Loretta Grimes, mother of the victims, was quoted upon Bedwell's alleged confession: "It's a lie. My girls wouldn't be on West Madison Street, they didn't even know where it was." He later withdrew the confession on the grounds that it had been coerced by the sheriff's men. The autopsy reports later supported this contention as no alcohol or hot dogs were found in the victims' systems nor had they been beaten to death. Bedwell was also clocked in at Ajax Consolidated Company, his place of employment, from 4:19 pm on December 28, 1956, to 12:30 am on December 29, covering the time period of the girls' likely abduction and murder.

However, Harry Glos, chief investigator for the Cook County coroner's office, who strongly believed Bedwell had in fact committed the murders, later charged that the marks found on the bodies had not been adequately investigated. He further theorised that they were evidence that the sisters had been beaten, and, in tandem with the evidence of sexual activity, were thus in line with Bedwell's claims. Glos claimed that official investigators were covering up these and potentially other more lurid details of the case, possibly out of a desire to protect the girls' reputations and/or spare their mother's feelings. Similar allegations would be repeated in later years by others, some of whom claimed to have seen the original casefiles. The Chicago crime lab, meanwhile, continued to insist that there was no evidence in either girl's case of extreme violence or sexual molestation. After refusing to retract his statements, Glos was fired by Coroner Walter E. McCarron on February 15.

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-year-old steamfitter, called police on January 15 to say that he had dreamt that the bodies of the girls were in Santa Fe Park at 81st Street and Wolf Road. The park was around one-and-a-half miles from the true location where they were to be found one week later. Krantz told police that psychic powers ran in his family. After multiple interrogations by the police, he was released.

Outcome

The case remains unsolved. The sisters' mother died in 1989.

In 2013, Ray Johnson, a retired West Chicago police officer, began an investigation of the case, on his own accord. Johnson became interested in the Grimes sisters' case in 2010, while he was researching a book he was writing about the city's history. The Grimes sisters' brother, James Grimes, aged 68 in 2013, who was 11 when Patricia and Barbara disappeared, welcomed what he saw as the "reopening of the case." He stated "I just assumed it was never going to be solved. [But] maybe there's hope."