The Beaumont children mystery: Will it soon be solved as police prepare new excavation?
ON Australia Day 52 years ago, a horrific and still unexplained crime at Glenelg shattered our nation’s innocence. But today, as police prepare a new excavation, there is fresh hope the mystery of the Beaumont children could finally be solved.
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- Special report: Where did the Beaumont kids go on that fateful day?
- Police to launch new dig for Beaumont children at North Plympton
- Harry Phipps named a person of interest in child abduction case
- Joanne Ratcliffe’s sister believes the same predator is responsible
ONE sunny afternoon in 1966, three small children walked hand-in-hand down a beachside Adelaide street.
They turned a corner and were gone, out of their parents’ lives and into Australian folklore.
The image of three young children, a picture of innocence, missing without a trace, permanently imprinted on the state’s psyche.
Jane Beaumont, 9, her sister, Arnna, 7, and brother Grant, 4, became the very public faces of a shift away from Adelaide’s naive country town mentality when they disappeared from Glenelg on Australia Day in 1966.
Only seven years later, the town’s innocence was further battered when Joanne Ratcliffe, 11, and Kirste Gordon, 4, disappeared from Adelaide Oval on August 25, 1973.
Now the ghosts of the past are once again being exhumed. More than five decades after the disappearance of the Beaumont children, police will be returning to the site of a former excavation to again break earth in an attempt to find any trace of the missing children.
The site of the dig: New Castalloy Manufacturing on Mooringe Ave in North Plympton, a sprawling industrial estate co-founded and built by Harry Phipps, the principal person of interest in the disappearance of the Beaumont children.
Phipps, a successful businessman, died a wealthy man with no criminal charges against his name in 2004.
Only after he died did accusations about his life behind closed doors as a sex offender and family tyrant come to light.
Amid the dozens of ageing buildings, which cover large swathes of the huge Castalloy property, are the traces of a large hole dug by two young men in late January or early February of 1966.
Police have never disputed the story of the two boys, now old men, who dug the hole at Phipps’ behest.
In 2013 detectives had a false start, digging in an area of the Castalloy facility which proved to be the wrong spot.
Now, almost five years after the first attempt, police will return to the site after Flinders University researchers located an anomaly the size and depth of the hole the men said they had dug.
Only days away is what might be the last chance for police to close the file on the Beaumont children, providing closure to two devastated parents and mending a 50-year-old tear in the fabric of South Australian society.
WITHOUT A TRACE
January 1966 was shaping up to be a scorcher. Australia Day was looking to be as hot as the day before, a roasting 38C, and the Beaumont children were keen to get out of the house and to the nearby beach.
Nancy Beaumont saw the children off at the gate of their humble house which still stands at the corner of Petersen St and Harding St in Somerton Park.
Her husband Jim, a former taxi driver then linen salesman, had left Adelaide the day before, taking off in his van stuffed with fabric to be sold in country towns, after dropping his three children at the beach in Glenelg.
Before making the 150km trip to Snowtown, Jim spent half an hour watching his children while they played and frolicked in the shallows. It was the last he would see of the children.
On January 26, 1966, just after 10am, Nancy watched Jane, Arnna and Grant walk the 100m to Diagonal Rd where witnesses said they got on the bus heading to Glenelg beach.
What happened from the moment they left the bus is not clear but by the time the 3pm bus had come and gone from the end of her street Nancy was panicking.
Jim got home early from the unsuccessful business trip and found his wife overwhelmed with concern for the children.
The couple drove to the beach to search for them children but returned home empty-handed.
By 4pm they were on the way to the police station.
From there it became a blur for Nancy as she waited at home while Jim spent the night in a patrol car, crisscrossing the streets of the beachside suburb, calling out over a loudspeaker “have you seen three small children?”
On January 27, 1966, Australia woke to the news that three children from Adelaide were missing, gone without a trace.
A BEACHSIDE BOYFRIEND
A week before the disappearance Arnna made a throwaway comment which would later come back to haunt her mother.
“Jane has a boyfriend down at the beach.”
That fateful day the three children were seen by several witnesses in the presence of a blond man in dark blue swimming trunks.
The children were said to be comfortable around the man, jumping over him as he lay on the grass while Jane playfully hit him with a towel.
An elderly couple told police they were approached by the man who asked whether they had seen anyone touching their discarded clothes because they were missing some money.
Another witness said they saw the man helping all three children pull their shorts over their bathers which struck her as odd, bearing in mind that Jane was nine years old.
Jane was reserved, bordering on shy. She stuttered when excited, her mother said of her eldest child, and she would never let a stranger help her dress.
One of the final sightings of the children was at Wenzel’s cake shop, where the children purchased pasties, a meat pie and drinks using a £1 note.
The children had left the house with eight shillings and sixpence in coins as bus fare and to buy pasties for themselves and their mother on the way home.
The final confirmed sighting came at 12.15pm as the children waited on a seat at the nearby Colley Reserve changerooms.
A local postman who knew the children well said he had seen the children on their own, holding hands and laughing, but could not be sure of the time of the sighting.
NO STONE LEFT UNTURNED
The disappearance kicked off a search effort unheard of in South Australian history.
Police identified that the children would have been carrying 17 individual items including towels and bags, none of which have been recovered.
On the night they scoured the Beaumont home for any sign of them.
The next day police searched the beach and coastline as officers retraced the steps of the children before they disappeared.
Sightings were reported across Australia and as far away as New Zealand, but none were proven real.
Dutch clairvoyant Gerard Croiset arrived in Adelaide on November 8, 1966, in a bid to find the children’s remains.
He traced the children to an old brick factory in Somerton Park, which was soon excavated with the help of funds donated by the public.
No bodies were found and the psychic left in disgrace.
Two letters purportedly written by Jane arrived in the post in 1968, giving Nancy and Jim hope.
The parents went to a prearranged meeting spot in the hopes of being reunited with their children.
No one came to meet them and the letters were later proved to be a hoax.
Hundreds of calls, letters and emails have come to police over the years with officers interviewing known sex offenders as recently as last year.
For many years the parents remained at their home in Somerton Park, Nancy stubbornly refusing to move in case the children returned and found their knocks unanswered.
Nancy, 90, and Jim, 92, still live a quiet life in Adelaide.
THE PHIPPS CONNECTION
Almost to the day fifty two years later, Detective Superintendent Des Bray, head of the Major Crime Division of the South Australian police, stood behind a podium before representatives of the nation’s media.
Despite the news breaking the night before that a new search for the Beaumont children was to be launched, Det Supt Bray was there to provide a reality check.
He confirmed that Castalloy would be the site of a new dig prompted by research and testing conducted by Flinders University and funded by Channel 7.
The research had located an abnormality in the soil matching the size and location of where the two men dug a large hole in the weeks after the disappearance, coinciding with a “discreet” police investigation into the site.
However, hopes for a long awaited break in the case needed to be reined in, he said.
“There is a need to temper expectations,” Det Supt Bray said.
“There has never been anything to prove that the Beaumont children are in the hole. However common sense says that if there is a slightest chance that this hole could be relevant, we should search and that’s what we’re doing.”
Phipps, a former person of interest who was thought to have been cleared after the 2013 excavation, was once again squarely in the sites of investigators.
“We have had hundreds of people nominated as persons of interest,” Det Supt Bray said.
“We have had some of the most notorious and vile criminals from across the country nominated as suspects. Similarity in those cases we have not been able to prove that they were responsible or exclude them.
“There would be at about 10 to a dozen people who fit in that category but have not been elevated to suspect. Harry (Phipps) is still a person of interest.”
PREDATOR IN PLAIN SIGHT
Author Alan Whiticker is convinced Phipps is the most likely candidate for the disappearance of the Beaumont children.
He studied the former businessman, tracking down the scant details of his life and using the accusations of Phipps’ son who said his father was a completely different man behind closed doors, putting it all together for the book The Satin Man.
“I don’t think Harry Phipps was a serial killer but I do think he was an opportunistic sexual predator,” Mr Whiticker told The Advertiser.
“He was one of those people with two faces, he was an incredibly smart man, very wealthy and started his own business. But at home he was a tyrant, he terrified his first wife who died before him, he lavished gifts on his son and then abused him.
“Harry Phipps had a dark side, we have enough evidence to show that he was a paedophile, a predator hiding in plain sight.”
Phipps lived only streets away from where the children disappeared, he had a predilection for abusing children, he matched the description of the mystery man at the beach and he owned properties attached to the Castalloy factory which he could have easily used to hide the Beaumonts.
But why dig a very obvious hole and allow two young men to link him with the unusual move?
“The thing that gets me is asking why he dug the hole when he had a furnace at his disposal,” Mr Whiticker said.
“The thing with people who kill others is that they like to keep a trophy, they like to keep a secret, and what better secret than to be sitting on the grave of the children that he kidnapped.
“The idea that he would come to work and sit on top of the evidence which he buried would be quite tantalising to him.”
If the latest excavation doesn’t find any evidence of the Beaumonts, Mr Whiticker still believes Phipps was responsible.
“The best-case scenario is also the worst-case scenario, the children are in the grave, that way the police will be able to work it all backward and tie it all up,” Mr Whiticker said.
“As long as there is something incriminating that ties Phipps to the children it will give police enough motivation to carry on.
“But if I’m being bloody minded I will say that just because there is nothing in the hole does not mean Phipps was not involved with the disappearance of the Beaumont children.”
PROFILING A MONSTER
Despite evidence pointing towards Phipps, author Micheal Madigan says the prominent businessman does not fit a well-established profile of a multiple child killer.
“The FBI have put in a lot of research going back to the 1970s into child abduction,” Mr Madigan said.
“Paedophiles very rarely murder children. Those who do are very disturbed people, they are isolated from society, they are very awkward, they don’t have normal relationships.
“Phipps doesn’t fit the profile. In saying that, murderers come in all sorts of different disguises and profiles aren’t perfect.”
Phipps, however, ticks one box — his proximity to the beach on the day they went missing.
“It is almost certain that the abductor would have been a resident of Glenelg,” Mr Madigan said.
“There is a startling statistic for child abduction, that people who do it are usually supposed to be in the area, either living or working nearby.”
The Beaumont disappearance has captivated Australians for more than 50 years, in part because it is such a unique case.
“I’ve tried to find anything that compares to this in the western world,” Mr Madigan said.
“You do hear about children being abducted, but rarely multiple children and most of the time they find bodies.
“It is just bizarre that Adelaide had three children go missing in 1966 and another two in 1973. If this lead does go somewhere it will be one of the most incredible solved crimes in history.”
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