The Beaumont Children
It was 10 a.m. on a blazing hot day in Australia on Jan 26, 1966.
Nancy kissed her three children, 9 year old Jane, 7 year old Arnna and 4 year old Grant, as they boarded the bus for their trip to a very crowded Glenelg Beach.
The children had made this trip many times before.
When they didn't return home by 2 p.m. like they were supposed to, the parents started to worry.
When Jim, Nancy's husband, came home from work at 3 p.m. he immediately drove to the beach in search of the three children.
He was unable to find them and returned home to continue the search at friend's houses and scouring the streets.
Around 5 p.m. the parents went to the police station to notify them of their children's disappearances.
Witnesses confirmed seeing the children appearing happy and relaxed at the beach with a tall, blonde, thin-faced man, in his mid-thirties, with a sun-tanned complexion, a thin athletic build and wearing swim trunks.
Jane's family described the this fact as odd, because she was very shy.
This fact led the police to believe that the children had met this man on their previous visits to the beach and that they trusted him.
Nancy thought back at a comment that Arnna had made one day.
She claimed that Jane had "got a boyfriend down at the beach."
The mom thought at the time that she met a playmate around her age.
It was reported that shortly after midday, the children left the beach with the man and walked to nearby Wenzels Cake shop.
There the storekeeper knew the children and said they bought pastries and a meat pie.
This too was considered unusual, because the children had never purchased a meat pie before.
He also said that the children usually had just a few dollars, and this time they had about $25.
The children were last seen at 3 p.m. by a mailman who new them well, walking up the main road in the direction of their home.
He said they were alone, holding hands and smiling.
Investigation
The police were originally under the assumption that the children probably had lost track of time.
The search started with the beach and the adjacent areas and then expanded to the sand-hills, ocean, nearby buildings, and the monitoring of the airports, rail lines and interstate roads once it was feared the that children were hurt or kidnapped.
All of the 17 individual items that the children were carrying were never found.
On January 29th, the Patawalonga Boat Haven was drained and searched after a woman had reported seeing children matching those of the Beaumont kid's descriptions, near the haven at 7 p.m. on January 26th.
The searched turned up nothing.
Several months later, a woman reported that she saw man with two girls and a boy going into a nearby house she thought was abandoned, on the night of the children's disappearance.
She then said that later she saw the boy being chased by and roughly caught by the man.
The lady also said that the next morning the house appeared to be empty again.
The police have no idea why she didn't come forward earlier.
Fast forward to January 2018.
Animal bones were found when police excavated the back of the North Plympton factory that had previously to a possible suspect.
Two men had reported that as boys they were paid to dig a hole around the time of the children's disappearance.
The only thing that was found were animal bones.
Suspects
Bevan Spencer von Einem
He was sentenced to life in prision in 1984 for the murder of 15 year old Richard Kevin.
Police believed that he had accomplices and was possibly involved in other murders such as those of the Beaumont children.
His accomplices were never caught and Bevan refuses to cooperate with investigators.
During the investigation into Bevan, an informant came forward saying that Bevan was bragging that he had taken three kids from the beach several years earlier to his home to conduct experiments on them.
Bevan had told the informant that he preformed surgery on them and "connected them up".
He also stated that one of them died during the surgery, so he killed the other two and dumped their bodies in the bushland.
Bevan was a known perv.
He liked to spy on people in changing rooms and was preoccupied with children, however he was 21 at the time and not in his mid thirties that the description of the perp.
Bevan did meet the rest of the physical description of the suspect though.
He also was previously suspected of killing people in the teens and twenties, not little children.
Bevan's victims were from a different Adelaide Oval.
So all this means that he had to have changed his serial killer pattern, which is very unusual.
Arthur Stanley Brown
In 1998, he was 86 years old and charged with the murders of sisters.
They had disappeared on their way to school on August 26th, 1970.
Their bodies were discovered several days later in a dry creek bed.
Both of the girls had been strangled.
He was never tried, because he suffered from dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
He died in 2002.
Arthur resembled the composite of the suspect.
His employment records could not be found, perhaps due to the Brisbane flood in 1974 or due to the fact that he was a former government employee who could have changed his own records.
James Ryan O'Neill
Before he was in jail for life in 1975, for the murder of a 9 year old boy in Tasmania, James told a station owner that he was responsible for the Beaumont children's disappearances.
Derek Ernest Percy
He was Victoria's longest serving prisioner.
He died in 2013.
Derek was found not guilty by reason of insanity for the 1969 murder of Yvonne Tuohy.
His insanity plea was partially due to him suffering a psychological condition that could prevent him from remembering the details of his actions.
He supposedly indicated that he believed he might have killed the Beaumont children.
He was in the area at the time.
In 1966 he was 17 at the time, which didn't fit with the suspect's description.
Alan Anthony Munro
In 2015, Allan Macintyre claimed that a man he had known in 1966, according to his children, had come home with the bodies of the Beaumont children.
That man was Alan Munro, who had pled guilty to child sex offences back in 1962.
Harry Phipps
He lived only streets away from the beach where the Beaumont Children disappeared.
Are these cases related to that of the Beaumont children's disappearance?
Joanne Ratcliffe and Kriste Gordon
In 1973, 11 year old Joanne Ratcliffe and 4 year old Kriste Gordon disappeared from a football game from the Adelaide Oval when they were allowed to go to the bathroom by themselves.
They were presumed to have been abducted and murdered.
They were seen in distress and in the company of an unknown man fitting the description of the suspect in the Beaumont case.
Detectives believe that their disappearances are linked to the Beaumont children.
The Family Murders
In 1979, the body of 25 year old Neil Muir was found in Adelaide, badly mutilated.
In 1982, the mutilated body of 18 year old Mark Langley was found.
Before his death, his abdomen had been sliced open and had been shaved prior.
Part of his bowel had been removed and Mark had died from losing too much blood.
Over the next few months, more bodies were found all with similar mutilations to that of Mark's.
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