Parents of Beaumont children’s tortured wait goes on

THEIR lives torn apart by the kidnap and murder of their three children, Nancy and Jim have endured the longest and cruellest wait: will their hopes be dashed again?

TIME is running out for the parents of the Beaumont children, both now aged in their 90s, nearing the end of lives which were torn apart by Australia’s greatest murder mystery.

Jim and Nancy Beaumont, believed to now be aged 92 and 90 but long since separated, may be on the brink of having the biggest question of their tragic lives solved.

Police are digging up the site of the old Castalloy factory in Adelaide, in the hope they will find a trace of the three children, and keeping Mr Beaumont updated from the scene.

The latest dig for clues comes after claims the factory’s wealthy proprietor was a violent paedophile who murdered Jane, 9, Arnna, 7, and Grant, 4, and disposed of their bodies on the site.

But for Mr and Mrs Beaumont, whose marriage crumbled under the weight of their three children’s abduction and certain murder, what will it mean?

The estranged couple have over the years had their hopes raised with false leads that their children were still alive or, as the years rolled by, that their remains were about to be found.

Sightings of the three Beaumont children at Glenelg Beach on the day they disappeared put them in the company of a tall, blond, thin-faced man with a suntan.

After playing at the beach on January 26, 1966, Jane, Arnna and Grant were seen with the man soon before they vanished.

Lives torn apart: Jim and Nancy Beaumont on a South Australian beach after the abduction of their three children, Jane, 9, Arnna, 7, and Grant, 4.

The parents of missing Arnna, Grant and Jane Beaumont have had their hopes of finding their children falsely raised before.

The Beaumont family with an unidentified woman by a caravan some time before the children’s 1966 disappearance from Glenelg beach.

A massive hunt for the missing children and their abductor ensued, with members of the public joining in the search, but no trace of them was found.

There has been much speculation about who the thin, blond man at Glenelg was, including that he might have been paedophile murderer Derek Percy, a suspect in many child murders around Australia.

Dutch clairvoyant Gerard Croiset claimed the children would be found under a concrete floor in an Adelaide factory. The floor was dug up after a publicly funded campaign in 1967, because police had dismissed his claims. No remains were found

In 1967, the Beaumonts hopes were cruelly raised again when Adelaide detective Stanley Swaine was put in charge of the case.

Forensic investigators dig at Adelaide’s Castalloy factory for traces of the Beaumont children, who vanished in 1966. Picture: Dylan Coker.

Mr Swaine kept up Jim and Nancy’s belief that their children could still be alive.

The detective made an abortive trip with Jim Beaumont to Melbourne to investigate letters written by a person who claimed to know where the children were and that they were well-looked after.

Mr Swaine was discredited as a detective thereafter and left the job, but his life was curiously haunted by the Beaumont children until his death.

In 1996, after the 30th anniversary of the children’s disappearance, Mr Swaine made the outrageous claim that he had found a 40-year-old Canberra woman who was Jane Beaumont.

The ex-detective, who was to go to his grave trying to solve the case, said all three Beaumont children had been taken and raised by a satanic cult.

Jim and Nancy’s marriage fell apart.

Two of the Beaumont children’s school hats in the family home.

Twilight search for a clue to the missing Beaumont children in August 1966.

The woman in Canberra proved to have mental health problems of her own and South Australia Police quickly discredited Mr Swaine’s story.

Weeks before he died in 2002, the former detective made another claim about the Beaumont children to a journalist. He said he knew where they were buried and that a priest had told him it was in a church cemetery in Adelaide.

In late 2016, SA Police identified a 71-year-old former Adelaide scout leader as a person of interest in the Beaumont mystery. Millionaire bar owner and convicted paedophile Anthony Munro pleaded guilty to child sex offences in South Australia going back to 1962 — four years before the Beaumonts vanished.

Police believed Munro was in Adelaide around the time when the Beaumont children vanished, although there was no evidence linking him to their disappearance.

The other theory about the fate of the Beaumont children surfaced in 2013 with the release of the book The Satin Man, in which a man claimed his deviant father had killed them.

The book alleged the unnamed cross-dressing father, a wealthy Adelaide businessman, had the Beaumont children in the back yard of the family home and then buried them in the sand pit at his factory.

The Adelaide businessman was later revealed as the late Harry Phipps, founder of city manufacturing business Castalloy.

Police dug up the Castalloy factory and found nothing, but it is to this site they have again returned with the current dig, on which Nancy and Jim Beaumont’s hopes are pinned.