BEAUMONT CASE BREAKTHROUGH!
The Beaumont children vanished without a trace – but now police think they’ve found their grave
Jim and Nancy Beaumont may finally be able to lay their three precious children to rest more than five decades after they vanished.
A possible burial site was last week declared a crime scene, and a “very strong” suspect identified after state-of-the-art equipment allowed new tests to be carried out on what police now believe could be their final resting place.
It was a very different Australia when Jane, nine, Arnna, seven and Grant, four, disappeared from Adelaide’s Glenelg Beach on Australia Day in 1966. Their abduction shocked the nation and became the most famous unsolved missing children’s case
in Australia. Australia But now new evidence has come to light.
Police will spend the next month excavating a new area of the New Castalloy factory in the Adelaide suburb of North Plympton, to search for the children’s bodies. It follows a year-long investigation using ground-breaking radar, which uncovered a “significant anomaly... an area of disturbed earth” measuring one metre wide, two metres long and two metres deep – the size of a grave.
BEST LEAD EVER
Former SA Police detective Bill Hayes, who assisted with the recent testing, says the identification of the new site at the back of the factory is “without a shadow of a doubt” the most significant evidence to ever emerge in Australia’s most infamous cold case.
“It’s the best lead there ever has been in the case of these children – the best information we’ve ever had,” he says. “You do get information from time to time but unfortunately, like most of these things, some of the information you can discount immediately. Just now and then, though, one piece starts to make things gel a bit.”
It was one of those classic classicc hot summer days when the e three Beaumont children kissed their mother goodbye ye at their home in Somerton Park to take the five-minute e bus trip to Glenelg beach.
Jane, who was considered d to be a responsible child, promised they would be home at 2.30pm but they never arrived, and were never seen again.
Witnesses say they saw the children playing with a tall, tanned, thin-faced man in his 30s with short blond hair. A shopkeeper also remembers Jane buying pasties that day with a one pound note – though Nancy had given them only six shillings.
Wealthy Adelaide businessman Harry Phipps, who died in 2004 and owned the factory site at the time of the children’s s disappearance, is back at the forefront of the investigation as a possible suspect.
His involvement had been raised in the past by his estranged son Haydn, as well as two men who claimed he ordered them to dig a trench on the industrial site when they were w young workers. Pol Police excavated part of the site in 2013, but the men weren’t present and claim the wrong spot was searched.
Haydn previously told p police he saw children fi fitting the description of the Beaumonts in the ba backyard of his family hom home, which was just 250 metres from the place they were last sighted, on th the day they vanished.
De Det Hayes describes Harry Phipp Phipps as a “predatory paedophile” and a “dangerous man”. He says Haydn had accused his father of the murders in the past, believing he buried the children under what is now a carpark at the site.
SON SPEAKS OUT
“Haydn told me his father was a paedophile,” the detective says. “The description of his father fitted very closely with the description of the man seen playing with the children.
“His father had a habit of handing out pound notes to children.
“[Haydn’s] exact words were, ‘They are in the sandpit, Bill.’ ”
Det Hayes said Jim, 92, who is in a nursing home, and his wife Nancy, 90, who suffers dementia, deserve answers.
“It’s never been over for the Beaumont [family] – it’s never been over for the state or for the country,” he says. “The taking of these children was and is an abhorrent act.”
One of the investigators working on Seven’s now axed Murder Uncovered TV series, which spent 12 months trying to find out what happened to the Beaumont children, also says the new information about Harry Phipps may finally give some peace to Jim and Nancy.
“For them both to have some closure should their little ones be found and finally laid to rest before they go – that’s all we can hope for,” he says.
Police are expected to start work on the excavation in the coming weeks.
‘His father had a habit of handing out one pound notes to children’