Murder of the Grimes sisters

On the 18th anniversary of the disappearance of the Grimes sisters, Ernest Spiotto, the sole detective who had been involved in the investigation of the girls' murders from the very beginning and who remained assigned to the investigation, again announced to the media the police had no credible suspects in the case. Officially, the murders of the Grimes sisters remain unsolved, although this is an open case.

The Grimes sisters' younger brother, James Grimes, who was just 11 at the time of his sisters' murder, stated in 2013 that he welcomed what he saw as a public "reopening of the case," stating: "I just assumed it was never going to be solved. [But] maybe there's hope."

In 2013, a retired West Chicago police officer named Raymond Johnson began a personal investigation into the case. Johnson—considered by many to be an expert on this case—had become interested in the Grimes sisters' case in 2010, when he had been researching a book he had been writing about the city's history. Having extensively researched the case, Johnson has stated his conviction that the case is still a solvable one, but only with public assistance, and that he believes that the perpetrator of this crime had been a 23-year-old self-confessed child killer named Charles LeRoy Melquist, who had been considered a suspect in the sisters' abduction and murder in 1957.

Charles Melquist was never charged with his alleged involvement in the deaths of the Grimes sisters. He died in 2010.

Joseph Lohman, the Cook County Sheriff who strongly believed the Grimes sisters had been beaten, tortured and murdered by a sexual predator who had lured them into a vehicle on the evening of their disappearance, died of natural causes in 1969. At the time of his death, Lohman was the Dean of the School of Criminology in Berkeley.

Melquist had been convicted of the September 1958 murder of a 15-year-old girl named Bonnie Leigh Scott, whom he had known prior to her murder, and whose decapitated body had been found two months after her disappearance less than 10 miles from where the Grimes sisters' bodies had been discovered. Following the discovery of Scott's body, investigators had noted similarities in this murder and body disposal, and that of the Grimes sisters. Nonetheless, Melquist was never questioned as to his potential culpability in the Grimes sisters' murders, as his attorney had forbidden him to be subject to questioning.

On January 19, 1957, an official statement was issued from Presley's Graceland estate. This televised statement read: "If you are good Presley fans, you'll go home and ease your mother's worries." Presley is also known to have made a direct radio plea to the Grimes sisters, imploring the girls to return home to their mother.

On January 22, 1957, following a rapid thaw of recent snowfall, a construction worker named Leonard Prescott spotted what he later described as being "these flesh-colored things" behind a guard rail as he drove along a rural country road named German Church Road, approximately 200 feet east of County Line Road in unincorporated Willow Springs. Initially unsure of the origin of what he had seen, and believing the forms may be mannequins, Prescott later returned to the site with his wife Marie, who fainted upon taking a closer look at what her husband had earlier seen. The forms were actually the nude, frozen bodies of the Grimes sisters, and the Prescotts immediately reported their findings to the Willow Springs Police Department.

The chief investigator of the Cook County coroner's office, Harry Glos, strongly believed an official suspect in the case named Edward Bedwell had been the individual who had committed the sisters' murders. Glos asserted that the wound marks noted upon the girls' bodies in their autopsies had neither been adequately investigated or considered. He would also further assert his opinion that the wounding and assault marks had been evidence that the girls had been beaten prior to their murder and, in tandem with the evidence of sexual activity, were thus in line with the claims Bedwell provided to investigators in his January 1957 interrogations. Glos would also claim that investigators had refused to disclose these and potentially other lurid details of the case due to a possible desire to protect the girls' reputations and/or spare their mother's feelings. Similar allegations would be repeated in later years by others, some of whom claimed to have both seen the original case files, and to have interviewed numerous McKinley Park residents who alleged both girls had been in the habit of spending free time outside bars on 36th Street and Archer Avenue, where they regularly persuaded older men to purchase alcoholic drinks to be delivered to them outside the premises.

Initially, Bedwell was insistent that John and Minnie Duros and a patron named Rene Echols (who had corroborated the Duros's eyewitness statements) were mistaken in their identification of the girls he had been in the company of on December 30. However, he was formally charged with the sisters' murders on January 27, 1957, having signed a 14-page confession in which he said that he and a 28-year-old acquaintance named William Cole Willingham had indeed been in the company of the Grimes sisters on December 30. He stated that they were together until January 7—typically drinking in various West Madison Street skid row saloons. According to Bedwell, after several days in the girls' willing company, shortly after he and his companion had fed the sisters hot dogs, they had extensively beaten both girls before throwing their nude bodies into a snow-filled ditch when both sisters had refused their sexual advances. Upon reading Bedwell's confession, Lorretta Grimes was quoted as stating: "It's a lie. My girls wouldn't be on West Madison Street. They didn't even know where it was."

In May 1957, Lorretta Grimes received an anonymous telephone call from an individual who claimed to have undressed and killed her daughters. Although the Grimes family had received numerous hoax phone calls following the girls' disappearance, this particular caller, having ridiculed police efforts to affix blame upon suspects such as Edward Bedwell, ended his phone call with information indicating he may indeed have been the perpetrator: "I know something about your little girl that no one else knows, not even the police. The smallest girl's toes were crossed at the feet!" This caller then laughed before terminating the call.

The day after the body of Bonnie Leigh Scott was discovered, Lorretta Grimes received a phone call from an individual who, on this occasion, claimed responsibility for Scott's murder. On this occasion, the caller had stated: "I've committed another perfect crime ... This is another one those cops won't solve and they're not going [to affix blame onto] Bedwell or Barry Cook." Lorretta Grimes would remain adamant until her death this caller had been the same individual who had contacted her in May 1957 and had revealed the deformity upon one of her daughters' feet which had never been released to the press or the public, stating: "I will never forget that voice."

The murder of the Grimes sisters is an unsolved double murder that occurred in Chicago, Illinois, on December 28, 1956, in which two sisters named Barbara and Patricia Grimes—aged 15 and 12 respectively—disappeared while traveling from a Brighton Park movie theater to their home in McKinley Park. Their disappearance initiated one of the largest missing persons investigations in the history of Chicago. The girls' nude bodies were discovered alongside a deserted road in Willow Springs on January 22, 1957.

On December 28, 1956, two of the seven children born to Joseph and Lorretta Grimes—sisters Barbara, 15, and Patricia, 12—opted to view a screening of the Elvis Presley film Love Me Tender at a Brighton Park theater. Barbara and Patricia have been described as being inseparable sisters, and attentive students at the Thomas Kelly High School and St. Maurice Catholic Elementary School they respectively attended. They are also known to have been devoted fans of Presley, and both had recently joined his official fan club. This particular occasion was the eleventh time the girls had viewed this particular film of Presley's, and the sisters are known to have left their residence at approximately 7:30 p.m., having promised their mother they would be home before midnight.

Between the last confirmed sighting of the sisters at the Brighton Theater on December 28, 1956, and the subsequent discovery of their bodies 25 days later, several unconfirmed sightings of the sisters both in and outside Chicago were reported to the Chicago Police Department. The most widely reported sightings include the following:

Edward Lee "Bennie" Bedwell was a 21-year-old semi-literate drifter, originally from Tennessee, who had been evicted from his family's East Garfield Park home in November 1956 and in the weeks preceding the Grimes sisters' murder had occasionally earned money by working as a part-time dishwasher in a Chicago skid row restaurant. Bedwell was a tall individual who allegedly bore a strong resemblance to Elvis Presley. According to John and Minnie Duros (the owners of the restaurant where Bedwell had been employed), he and another young male had been at her premises in the company of two girls who physically resembled the Grimes sisters in the early morning of December 30. Duros conveyed this information to police on January 24. Bedwell was arrested thereafter and subjected to interrogation for three days.

The autopsy reports upon both girls also supported Bedwell's recantation, as no alcohol or hot dogs were found in either victim's blood or digestive systems, nor had the girls been beaten to death. Furthermore, Bedwell is also known to have been clocked in at Ajax Consolidated Company, his place of employment, from 4:19 p.m. on December 28, 1956, to 12:30 a.m. on December 29, covering the most likely time of the sisters' abduction, with further records confirming Bedwell had been working in Cicero on the date he said he had murdered them. On February 6, Bedwell was freed on a $20,000 bond paid for by an individual from Champaign.

The same year of his acquittal, Bedwell would be tried and acquitted of the 1956 rape of a 13-year-old girl in Oak Hill, Florida. He died in November 1972.