Missing Beaumont children: Fruitless search means decades of heartache continues

FRIDAY’s search for the Beaumont children — Jane, Arnna and Grant — began full of hope and ended, yet again, in disappointment. For their parents, it simply means the decades of heartache continues. Andrew Dowdell reports.

Jane, Arnna and Grant Beaumont disappeared on Australia Day 1966.

• Another despondent end in quest for the awful truth
• Beaumont search: Harry Phipps ‘is still the only credible suspect’
• Police end Friday’s dig, having found no human remains
• The final hours of the Beaumont children
• Who was Harry Phipps? Assault victim’s shocking claims

THE theory was alluring and seemingly credible. But like the preceding half-century parade of clairvoyants, water diviners, religious zealots and cruel impostors, Friday’s dig for the missing Beaumont children merely delivered more questions.

In hindsight, history foretold the excavation at a North Plympton foundry would not end in a dignified burial for Jane, Arnna and Grant, or with any resolution for their elderly parents.

Nor would it confirm or disprove claims that late millionaire businessman Frederick Henry “Harry” Phipps abducted, killed and buried the children on Australia Day, 1966.

This week’s excavation illustrated just how much passion the case continues to evoke.

A media army contemplated the slim possibility of the children finally being found, police sweated it out in the burgeoning pit and several apparent crime groupies thought it an appropriate time for selfies.

As the afternoon wore on, Jim and Nancy Beaumont — who divorced long ago — sat in separate homes with police victim support officers, waiting for the phone to ring.

ANGUISH: Jim Beaumont comforts his distressed wife, Nancy, during a press conference just days after their children disappeared on Australia Day, 1966.

Again, there was abject disappointment as the dig ended without a skerrick of evidence. No crime has had more effect on the community or attracted more suspects than the missing Beaumont children.

Accusations have indelibly smeared the reputations of innocent men and wrongly pointed the finger of blame at killers and rapists.

Suspected “Family” serial killer Bevan Spencer Von Einem’s name is still bandied around as the possible culprit for the disappearance of the Beaumont children and young friends Kirste Gordon and Joanne Ratcliffe from Adelaide Oval in 1973.

Jim Beaumont with his children Grant, Jane and Arnna.

Destined to die in prison, Von Einem was only convicted of one murder — that of 15-year-old Richard Kelvin, a son of Channel 9 newsreader Rob Kelvin. Many swear Von Einem’s depravity was first unleashed upon the Beaumont children, despite his infamy for luring, drugging, raping and, on occasions butchering, teenage boys and young men — vastly different prey to the Beaumonts, Kirste and Joanne.

Child killers Derek Percy, Arthur Stanley Brown, James O’Neill and recently jailed paedophile Anthony Munro are just some of those accused over five decades.

As shock turned to anger and fear in the days and weeks following the abduction, Jim and Nancy — then aged 40 and 38 — used any means possible to help forge a breakthrough.

They initially refused to believe their “kiddies” were dead and, for several years, publicly pleaded for any scrap of information.

Instead, the already anguished couple were smashed by a tsunami of reports and claims, ranging from the logical to the ludicrous.

Jim publicly stated he would sell the family’s Harding St home at Somerton Park and pay $4000 for the safe return of the children, while Nancy tried to play on their captor’s conscience — in the unlikely event they, indeed, possessed one.

Police concede the sheer weight of time, calls and reports transformed a formidable investigation into a morass of fantasy and useless information.

Inside the lives of the Beaumont children

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The couple was inundated with letters, phone calls and knocks at the door from strangers, including a man claiming the children were being held by Christian Brothers in a secret room under nearby Sacred Heart College.

A woman arrived without warning to explain that her “spirit guide” had told her the trio had fallen asleep on the beach before “the water rose and the soft sand covered their bodies”.

Some of the wild speculation proffered would be almost comical if not for the heartbreaking backdrop.

It is today hard to fathom the level of faith which many invested in the supernatural. They gave credence to a cocksure proclamation by famous Dutch clairvoyant and “armchair detective” Gerard Croiset that the siblings were buried under a North Brighton warehouse. Thousands of dollars were raised to fly Croiset to Adelaide, where a throng of locals breathlessly followed his every move like fawning acolytes.

The November 1966 warehouse search yielded nothing, as did another excavation in the 1990s funded by late property tycoon Con Polites.

The excavation at the Castalloy factory for the Beaumont Children on Friday. Pictured is a forensic crime scene investigator looking at items found in the soil. Picture: Dylan Coker

Others to offer their dubious expertise included a water diviner, ghost whisperers and Sydney man Tom Fear, who gouged a hole in the asphalt road at Torrens Gorge after a “prophetic” dream. An assortment of crank calls, honest mistakes and cruel pranks led police to search swampland at Port Phillip Bay near Melbourne, the grounds of Minda Homes at Brighton, Myponga Reservoir and another patch of dirt at the New Castalloy site.

While most false leads were born of misguided good intentions, sheer malice or gross stupidity was the sick motivation for three letters, which arrived in the Beaumonts’ mailbox two years into their indefinite misery. Sent from Dandenong in Victoria, the letters purported to be from their eldest child, Jane, with handwriting so similar to hers that police and the parents had genuine hope for the first time.

The vile fantasy stated the children, who would have been 11, nine and six by then, were being held by “The Man”, who was treating them well.

Only Jim and Nancy know the depth of despair which flowed from their agreed “meeting” with the fictitious kidnapper.

A third and final letter accused Jim and Nancy of reneging on the deal by bringing a detective, inflicting a further deep wound of guilt upon the couple.

It would be another 20 years before forensic advances would finally prove the letters were just a callous trick penned by a teenage boy.

Jim and Nancy’s unflagging resilience and decision to remain for years in the family home came from the hope that one day their beautiful children may walk back into their lives.

But everyone has their limit.

Inevitably, the couple were beaten down by the rollercoaster of hope followed by cavernous despair.

In another ruthless twist, the couple’s marriage finally collapsed under the incomprehensible strain.

A former senior detective also came up with a baseless theory that Jane had been raised by a cult and remained alive. In the 1990s, speculation that a New Zealand man was Grant again came to nothing.

Detectives have promised Jim and Nancy that they will never give up, revealing at least 12 men remain “persons of interest” — including Phipps.

But only a supreme optimist could keep faith that a half-century of vexing blockades, faded or conflated memories and misinformation will culminate in the answers Jim, 91, and Nancy, 89, seek in their twilight years.

What is certain is that rampant speculation and wild but fervently-held theories abound.

Without a miracle, there seems every chance the tale of the Beaumont children will be passed down like a dark warning fable to future generations, long after the key players of Australia Day 1966 are gone.