Unsolved mystery of Beaumont kids hounds mother Nancy to her grave

The mother of the Beaumont children has died after 53 years of not knowing the fate of her two young daughters and little son.

The mother of the Beaumont children — the three Adelaide kids who disappeared from Glenelg Beach on Australia Day, 1966 — has died after 53 years of not knowing the fate of her two young daughters and little son.

In another chapter in a mystery that has plagued the collective psyche of South Australia for more than 50 years, Nancy Beaumont died on Monday at her Glengowrie nursing home, just one suburb from where her children vanished.

Mrs Beaumont was 92 and is survived by ex-husband Jim, who is 90 and still lives in Adelaide.

Her death is a sad postscript to a case that tore this family apart, not just through the disappearance and presumed deaths of Jane, 9, Arnna, 7, and Grant, 4, but also the unbearable weight it placed on Nancy and Jim, whose marriage collapsed in the early 1970s amid the horror of it all.

The Beaumonts were forced to endure constant and often crackpot theories as to the fate or whereabouts of their children, ­becoming recluses as a result.

The coverage often resembled a circus and it continued to the modern day, with sceptical South Australia Police conducting another excavation in February last year amid a new theory as to the fate of the three.

Big-name reporters flew in from Sydney and filed live from the scene in breathless tones, and TV stations hired cherrypickers to secure the best line of sight when the digging began. Neighbours came out to see what the fuss was about and factory workers watched on from the local park.

Nancy Beaumont with Grant, Arnna and Jane.

In the end, nothing happened. And it was a cruelly appropriate result, as the Beaumont case inspired more false leads, dashed hopes, insane theories and despicable hoaxes than any other crime in our nation’s history.

The cliche holds that the disappearance of the Beaumonts was the day that Australia lost its innocence. It certainly heralded an end to the era where parents would let their children head off on public transport for a day at the beach, safe in the knowledge they would be home in time for tea.

It also became the first mass media crime mystery in Australia.

Five days after the children disappeared, Jim Beaumont delivered a televised address to the nation pleading for the safe return of his kids. It is still unwatchably sad, with Mr Beaumont breaking down as he says he hopes he will see them again one day. In the days after that press conference, Nancy Beaumont had a full nervous breakdown and was placed under sedation, with the pair subsequently declaring they would no longer take part in any media appearances.

Out of desperation, they reappeared a year later when an ­eccentric Dutch clairvoyant named Gerard Croiset claimed to have had a premonition that the children had been buried alive at an Adelaide factory site. Public donations funded an excavation that uncovered nothing.

For many years even after their divorce, the Beaumonts held on to their family house in Harding Street, Somerton Park, in the forlorn hope that Jane, Arnna and Grant would simply come home one day.

While the Beaumonts withdrew completely from public life, they continued to be hounded by strange and often sick theories, ­receiving letters from people claiming to be their children, a visit from a man saying the children were being held as slaves in an underground chamber at nearby Sacred Heart College, and a woman arriving at their house one day saying her “spirit guide” had told her the children had simply been washed out to sea.

There was also an excavation of another factory site in the 1990s paid for by the flashy Rolls-Royce-driving Greek property mogul Con Polites, which again came to nought.

Police insist it is not a cold case, but an open case, even though ­detectives admit that with each passing year the chances of solving the mystery diminish markedly.

“Sadly, this means for the Beaumont family that we still have no answers,” the head of the state’s Major Crime Division, ­Detective Superintendent Des Bray, said after last year’s dig.

During the excavations last year, Nancy Beaumont was sitting by the phone in her nursing home with a police victim-support officer by her side to have any developments relayed to her as they came to hand.

It was the answer she had grown used to. Nothing. An ­answer that has now hounded this poor mother to her grave.