Jane, Arnna and Grant Beaumont, aged 9.7 and 4 respectively, disappeared on January 26, 1966 on the beach in Glenelg, Australia. A look back at a case that marked an entire country.
Australia, January 26, 1966. In the Somerton Park district, southwest of the city of Adelaide, three children take advantage of the hottest day of summer to hit the beach. At 8:45 a.m., Nancy Beaumont put Jane, 9, Arnna, 7, and their little brother, Grant, 4, on the bus to Glenelg Beach. She kisses them, reminding them to return around noon, without suspecting that she will never see them again. Three hours later, Nancy is surprised not to see her little trio return. She warns her husband, Jim, back from a business trip, who rushes to the beach in search of his children. Without success. Around 5:30 p.m., the Beaumont spouses report the worrying disappearance.
First, the police scoured Glenelg beach and its surroundings. There, several witnesses confirm having seen the Beaumont children, but one detail challenges the investigators. Several times, Jane, Arnna, and Grant have been spotted in the company of a tall, blond, athletic man in just a bathing suit. According to some witnesses, the Beaumont children played happily with him and even left the beach with him around 12:15 p.m. Afterwards, little Jane would have passed by Wenzel’s Bakery, a pastry shop located not far from Glenelg Beach, where she would have, according to the owner, bought sweets and a meat pie with a denomination of 1$. An intriguing detail, Nancy Beaumont having given only six shillings and six pence to her children to pay for the bus journey.
A series of mysterious letters
Armed with this information, the investigators launched a large-scale operation in Australia, but none of the devices deployed would allow the investigation to move forward. Until 1968. Two years after the disappearance of their children, Nancy and Jim Beaumont find two mysterious letters in their mailbox. The first is allegedly written by Jane’s hand, the second by a man who claims to have made himself the “guardian” of the Beaumont children. In his letter, the latter says he is ready to return Jane, Arnna and Grant and gives a meeting place to their parents. Upset, Nancy and Jim Beaumont go to the meeting place, followed closely by a police inspector. However, neither the man nor the children will ever show up at the place indicated. Later, the Beaumont parents will receive a new letter in which Jane will explain that their “guardian” had noticed the presence of the inspector when he came and, feeling betrayed, had finally decided to keep them with him.
In more than 55 years, none of the leads explored by the police have led to any trace of the Beaumont children. Several criminals, including the child killer Bevan Spencer von Einem, Arthur Stanley Brown, accused of the murder of his sisters, and Derek Ernest Percy, suspected of the murders of several Australian children, were notably suspected, without result. The latest twist in the investigation dates back to 2013, when the son of a certain Harry Phipps, who died in 2004, accused his father of playing a role in the Beaumonts’ disappearance. This one affirms that on January 26, 1966, he would have seen Jane, Arnna and Grant digging a hole in the garden of his father at his request. Two other men, young children at the time, confirmed that they had been paid by Phipps for the same task, that same weekend in 1966. Unfortunately, the investigations carried out by the police turned up nothing.
“There is not a person in this country who does not want them to be found”
In 2019, Australian media announced the death of Nancy Beaumont, the mother of three missing children, at the age of 92. On the sidelines of the news, Chief Inspector Des Bray, in charge of major crimes, indicated that he “would do everything humanly possible to locate the Beaumont children and return them to their families.” “I don’t think there’s a person in this country who doesn’t want them found.“, he added. Jane, Arnna and Grant’s 90-year-old father still lives in the Adelaide area. The inquest into the disappearance of the Beaumont children is now the longest on record in Australia.
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