Disappearance of the Beaumont children

Police investigating the case found several witnesses who had seen the children in Colley Reserve near the beach in the company of a tall, blonde (police later emphasized that the man had fair to light brown hair and not blonde) and thin-faced man in his mid-30s, of a sun-tanned complexion and of thin-to-athletic build, wearing swimming trunks.[17] The children were playing with him and appeared relaxed and to be enjoying themselves.[15]^:36[18][19][20] The man also approached one of the witnesses, however, asking if anyone had been near their belongings as their money was "missing".[12] The man then went off to change while the children waited for him, and the group were seen walking together away from the beach some time later, which the police estimated to be around 12:15 pm.[21]

The Beaumonts described their children, particularly Jane, as shy.[22] 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.[23] A chance remark at home, which seemed insignificant at the time, supports this theory. Arnna had told her mother that Jane had "got a boyfriend down the beach".[21] Nancy Beaumont thought she meant a playmate and took no further notice until after the disappearance.[21]

A shopkeeper at nearby Wenzel's Bakery also reported Jane had bought pasties and a meat pie with a £1 note.[21] 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.[24][25] Police believed it had been given to them by somebody else.[26]

According to an initial statement, the children were seen walking alone at about 3:00 pm, away from the beach along Jetty Road,[15]^:34–35[27] in the general direction of their home. The witness, a postman, knew the children well, and his statement was regarded as reliable.[28] He said the children were "holding hands and laughing" in the main street.[14] 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 that he thought he saw them in the morning, not the afternoon as he had previously said.[15]^:37

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 empty. Later she had seen the boy walking alone along a lane where he was pursued and roughly caught by the man. The next morning the house appeared to be 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.[29]

The case also attracted international attention.[30] On 8 November 1966,[31] Gerard Croiset, a parapsychologist and psychic from the Netherlands, was brought to Australia, causing a media frenzy.[18][25] His search for the children proved unsuccessful, with his story changing from day to day and offering no clues.[26] 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, who were reluctant to excavate on the basis of a psychic's claim, soon bowed to public pressure after publicity raised $40,000 to have the building demolished.[32] No remains, or any evidence linking to any of the Beaumont family, were found.[32][33] In 1996, the building identified by Croiset was undergoing partial demolition and the owners allowed for a full search of the site.[34] Once again no trace was found of the children.[25]

About two years after the disappearance,[35] the Beaumont parents received two letters supposedly written by Jane, and another 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 was keeping 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 hand them back 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. It was some time later that 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 a hoax.[36] 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 that had elapsed, he was not charged with any offence.[25][37][26]

In November 2013, excavation was initiated in the back of a North Plympton factory that had previously belonged to one possible suspect in the case, Harry Phipps (see below); further excavation at a slightly different location on the site was undertaken in February 2018.[38] Nothing relevant was found. The excavations were based on two men reporting that as boys they had been paid to dig a hole in that area at around the time, and geophysical testing which had identified anomalous disturbed soil.[38] Animal bones were found, but nothing relating to the Beaumont children.[39]

Bevan Spencer von Einem was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1984 for murdering 15-year-old Richard Kelvin, son of Adelaide newsreader Rob Kelvin.[40][41] Police and prosecutors publicly stated that they believed von Einem had accomplices and was possibly involved in additional murders.[41] About this same time, police came to suspect von Einem of possible involvement in the Beaumont children disappearance.[28] No accomplices were ever charged. Von Einem has refused to co-operate with investigators about his possible connection with other murders.

During the investigation into von Einem, police heard from an informant identified only as "Mr B".[42] He related 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".[28] Von Einem had said that he performed "brilliant surgery" on each of them, and had "connected them up".[43] 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.[42] Police had not previously considered von Einem in connection with the Beaumont children, but he somewhat resembled the descriptions and police sketches from 1966.[44]

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.[41] However, police reception of the alleged confession was mixed. There were enough plausible details to warrant further research, yet other details relayed by Mr B did not fit with known facts and were regarded with skepticism by police. As of 2014, von Einem had not been ruled out as a suspect.[45]

While von Einem was known to have frequented Glenelg Beach to "perv" on the changing rooms, and was described as preoccupied with children,[46] what argues against his involvement in the Beaumont case is that he was younger than the suspect seen with the children in 1966 (the suspect was reported to be in his mid- to late-30s, whereas von Einem was 20 or 21 at the time). Another important distinction is that 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 and the children who were abducted from the Adelaide Oval. Such disparities amongst victims of a serial killer are not unheard of, but unusual.[41]

The reference to surgical experimentation von Einem had purportedly made to Mr B also corresponded to the coroner's reports on several of the murdered youths. Von Einem also told the witness that he had taken two girls from the Adelaide Oval during a football match. He said he had killed them but did not elaborate.

The cases of the Beaumont children and of Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Gordon remain officially open. However, von Einem matched the police sketches of the suspect in both the Beaumont and Oval cases[44] and, in 1989, he was identified as a suspect in a confidential police report.[44] 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 that police were calling for information to establish the man's identity.[47]

Arthur Stanley Brown (1912–2002) was charged in 1998 with the murders of sisters Judith and Susan Mackay in Townsville, Queensland.[48] They disappeared while on their way to school on 26 August 1970 and their bodies were found several days later in a dry creek bed. Both girls had been strangled. 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.[49] Brown died in 2002.[50]

Along with von Einem, Brown is considered to be the most likely suspect for the Beaumont abduction as he bore a striking similarity to an identikit picture of the suspect for both the Beaumont and Adelaide Oval cases.[51] A search for a connection to the Beaumonts was unsuccessful as no employment records existed that could shed light on his movements at the time. Some of the records 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 own files.

Although there is no proof that he had ever visited Adelaide, a witness recalled having a conversation with Brown in which he mentioned having seen the Adelaide Festival Centre nearing completion, which places him in the city in June 1973. The Oval abduction occurred on 25 August 1973. However, no evidence has ever been found to connect Brown with Adelaide in 1966, when the Beaumont children were abducted.[46] Another witness, who reported seeing a man[52] 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 in relation to the MacKay murders. The woman who identified 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.[53] Brown's appearance, in fact, had barely changed, and he was still very much recognisable as the same person when compared to photographs of him taken 30 years earlier, which was a factor in identifying him as matching the sketch of the suspect in the Beaumont and Oval abductions. Additionally, she had reported that the man was wearing a pair of horn rimmed glasses, a pair of which Brown is known to have worn, something considered by police to be another noteworthy point in the identification. 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.

In the early 1970s, James O'Neill, 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 the ABC.[54][55]

Former Victorian detective Gordon Davie spent three years speaking to O'Neill to win his confidence before filming him for the documentary. 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.[56] South Australian police have interviewed O'Neill and discounted him as a suspect in the Beaumont case.[57]

On 22 April 2007, a report in The Age suggested that the Beaumont children may have been killed by Derek Ernest Percy (1948–2013), Victoria's then longest-serving prisoner.[58] Percy was in prison until his death in 2013, after being found not guilty by reason of insanity for the 1969 murder of Yvonne Tuohy. The Age alleged that evidence gathered by cold-case investigators indicated that he was a likely suspect for a number of unsolved child murders, including the Beaumont children. His insanity plea in the Tuohy murder was at least partly based on his suffering a psychological condition that could prevent him 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.[59] On 30 August 2007, Victoria Police successfully applied for permission to question Percy in relation to the Beaumont disappearance.[60]

In 1966, Percy was 17 and therefore seems too young to have been the man seen with the Beaumont children by several witnesses.[24] 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 later.[61] Percy was in prison from 1969 until his death in 2013, which means that he could not have been the abductor in the Oval case, whom many of the police who investigated both cases believe to be connected to the Beaumont disappearance.

In 2015 a man, Allan Maxwell McIntyre (died June 2017[62]) – who had himself been investigated by police and cleared of involvement in the Beaumont case – gave a secondhand account to The Advertiser that a man he had known in 1966, who by 2015 was being sought in Southeast Asia in connection with child abuse incidents there, 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 Kathleen Beaumont for a boy because of her short hair. Arnna Beaumont had gone to Glenelg that day in a female bathing suit.[63] The man in question was later identified as businessman Alan Anthony Munro (aged 75 in 2017), a former Scoutmaster who had pleaded guilty to 10 child sex offences dating back to 1962.[12][64] For these crimes, he was sentenced to 10 years, with a non-parole period of five years and five months, making him eligible for release in 2022.[12]

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 was convicted of abusing several children, including a son of McIntyre,[4] who was a contributor to the diary. Munro had been previously investigated by police but no evidence had been found that he was involved in the Beaumont case.[65]

Harry Phipps (died 2004), a local factory owner and then-member of Adelaide's social elite, came to attention as a possible suspect after the publication of the book The Satin Man: Uncovering the Mystery of the Missing Beaumont Children in 2013.[66] It was republished and updated with new information in 2015.[67] 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.[68]

Phipps bore a substantial likeness to the police artist's impression of the man seen talking to the children on the beach, was wealthy and known to be in the habit of giving out £1 notes, was later alleged to have paedophile tendencies, and lived only 300 metres away from Glenelg Beach on the corner of Augusta Street and Sussex Street.[12] 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 they had been paid by Phipps to dig a 2 × 1 × 2-metre hole in his factory yard that weekend, for unstated reasons.[69][70][71]

In November 2013, a one-metre-squared section of a factory in North Plympton, which had been owned by Phipps, was excavated following the new information about his possible involvement in the disappearance of the children. 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.[72] On 22 January 2018, Adelaide detectives announced that they would return to the factory site and conduct further excavations,[70] after a private investigation sponsored by Channel Seven Adelaide.[5] The excavation, on 2 February 2018, took nine hours. Animal bones and general rubbish were found, but nothing related to the Beaumont case.[39]

In 1973, two children, Joanne Ratcliffe (11) and Kirste Gordon (4), disappeared from the Adelaide Oval during a football match, and they are presumed to have been abducted and murdered. Ratcliffe's parents and Gordon's grandmother had allowed the girls to leave their group to go to the toilet. They were seen several times in the 90 minutes after leaving the Oval, apparently distressed and in the company of an unknown man, but they vanished after the last reported sighting.[73] The police sketch of the suspect resembles that of the man last seen with the Beaumont children,[74] but it is not a satisfactory identikit image.[75] Detectives believe the cases may be linked.[76]

In 1979, the body of a young man was found in Adelaide. He was identified as Neil Muir (25). His body was badly mutilated. In 1982, the mutilated body of Mark Langley (18) was found. Before his death, he had been subjected to "surgery" — his abdomen had been sliced open, and had been shaved prior to this. Part of his bowel had been removed and Langley had died from loss of blood. Over the next few months more bodies were found. The dismembered skeletal remains of Peter Stogneff (14) were found almost a year after his disappearance and Alan Barnes (18) was found mutilated in a similar manner to Langley. A fifth victim, Richard Kelvin (15), was found in 1983, once again with the same mutilations. Bevan Spencer von Einem was convicted of Kelvin's murder in 1984 and was charged with the murders of Barnes and Langley in 1989. However, the prosecution was forced to enter a nolle prosequi (unwilling to pursue) when crucial evidence was deemed inadmissible. These crimes have been known collectively as the Family Murders; police believe that a core group of four people and up to eight associates were involved in the murders. Testimony given during von Einem's trial alleged he was involved in both the Beaumont children disappearance and the abduction of Ratcliffe and Gordon.[42]

At the time of the investigation, the Beaumonts received widespread sympathy from the Australian public. They remained at their Somerton Park home, and Nancy Beaumont in particular held hope that the children would return and stated in interviews that it would be "dreadful" if the children returned home and did not find their parents waiting for them.[3] Over the years, as new leads and new theories emerged, the Beaumonts co-operated fully in exploring every possibility, whether it was claims that the children had been abducted by a religious cult and were living variously in New Zealand, Melbourne, or Tasmania, or some clue that suggested a possible burial site for the children. They were devastated in 1990 when newspapers published computer-generated photographs of how the children would have looked as adults. The pictures, published against their wishes, caused a huge wave of public sympathy from a community which is still sensitive to their pain.

The couple later divorced and lived separately,[13] having resolved to live their final years away from the public attention that followed them for decades. They sold their home and, while the case remains open, the South Australian Police Force remains informed of the couple's addresses. They were reported to have accepted that the truth may never be discovered.[6][8] Nancy Beaumont died in Adelaide on 16 September 2019, in a nursing home, aged 92, whereas Jim Beaumont, also aged in his 90s, continues to reside in Adelaide.[79]