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Cold Cases

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songhrati

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Police follow lead on children missing for nearly forty year

Growing up in Adelaide, I was inundated with media stories about the disappearance of the three Beaumont children from suburban Glenelg beach in 1966, which one remians one of Australia's greatest unsolved crimes. The latest lead comes from Dunedin, New Zealand.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,9535288%5E2702,00.html

NZ Police to probe lead on Beaumont children
By Jeremy Roberts
May 12, 2004
A MYSTERY customer with an intriguing story about three small children growing up in the New Zealand city of Dunedin has raised long-held hopes of a breakthrough in one of Australia's most famous mysteries - the disappearance of Adelaide's Beaumont children nearly 40 years ago.

The customer recently walked into the Peoples Meats butcher shop in the North Island town of New Plymouth, where he picked up on the Australian accent of an employee serving behind the counter and told her he grew up in the South Island city of Dunedin, where he knew of three children believed to be Jane, Arnna and Grant Beaumont.

New Plymouth police senior sergeant Fiona Prestidge said the shop attendant did not know about the Beaumont case but later read about the case in New Zealand's Woman's Day magazine.

"She took some notes and tucked them away and probably wondered about the credibility of the story - but then when she read (the Beaumont) article she came and told the police," Sergeant Prestidge said.

The three Beaumont children disappeared while visiting the Adelaide beachside suburb of Glenelg on Australia Day, 1966.

The unsolved disappearance has led to numerous excavations of sites in and around Adelaide, some sparked by psychic visions, others by tip-offs, but none leading to the discovery of the children's remains. Police have drained dams, excavated land and torn up floorboards in houses to no avail.

In Adelaide, Detective Sergeant Brian Swan said the Beaumont file remained open and he had received about one tip-off a week - mostly locations of where the remains might be found.

Sergeant Swan said he pursued each lead that could not be ruled out from information in the file, and also warned the elderly Beaumont parents of any large media exposure of the case.

Sergeant Prestige said it was still unclear how the man could identify the Dunedin home he had described.

"If this man doesn't surface then we have information - names and workplaces - that is specific enough in Dunedin that we could verify whether the information is true," she said.

"We take it seriously because it relates to a serious case. New Zealanders are not aware of the Beaumont case, so there is no community hype, so we must go on the information that has been provided to us."


see also

http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/adelaide/children_2.html

for background information on the Beaumont children's case and the possible link to "The Family" murders of Adelaide.

Zane
 
Bloody hell. I thought everyone had forgotten about the Beuamont children.

The next question is what do they do? They'd all be in their 40s. I find it hard to believe that the eldest wouldn't remember something about life in Adelaide, and have tried to contact her parents. Then again, I don't know the full details, or even if they actually are still alive. (The article isn't clear.)

The Beaumonts must be desperate for closure. I hope, for their sake, the lead does pan out, but I wouldn't want to put money on it.
 
Village photograph triggers police murder hunt for missing teenager - 80 years late
Sandra Laville, crime correspondent The Guardian, Wednesday 4 February 2009

The disappearance of a servant girl in rural Sussex in the 1920s is being treated as murder by detectives, 83 years after she went missing on her way to work.

In one of the oldest cold case reviews the country has seen, officers announced this week that they would reopen their investigation into what happened to 16-year-old Emma Alice Smith in 1926. The move follows the screening of a short film based on her disappearance.

At the time the teenager vanished, Britain was in the grip of industrial crisis, Stanley Baldwin was prime minister and Eamon de Valera was making sure the Irish question was at the forefront of his mind.

But the villagers of Waldron and Emma's parents and younger sister, Lillian, were distraught after she failed to return home from Tunbridge Wells, where she was working. She had cycled to the station at Horam in East Sussex as usual earlier in the day to catch a train, but never came back.

Her family reported her missing to the local police, and it is believed the local newspaper may have carried an article, but the weeks and months passed and soon Emma's fate was something that occupied the minds only of her closest family and friends in the village.

That was until a village playwright called Valerie Chidson decided to research Emma's disappearance for a short fictionalised film after seeing a picture of the teenager in an old village photograph.

"I was looking at the picture, the row of girls' faces, when a man just came up to me, pointed to this very pretty girl aged about 16, and said 'That girl disappeared you know'," said Chidson yesterday. "That pricked my interest in the story and I just kept wondering how she had disappeared. The general belief was that she ran away. Only, her father said she would never have done this."

A few years later Chidson overheard someone talking about the photograph in the pub. She discovered the man in the pub was a relative of Emma's, and he claimed her killer had made a deathbed confession but her relatives had chosen not to go to the police because the crime had taken place so long ago.

Last year - persuaded by Chidson - Emma's great nephew spoke to Sussex police and passed on the information given to him by his mother, her niece.

On Monday night Chidson presented a 40-minute film to a select audience including Detective Chief Inspector Trevor Bowles, of the major crime branch of Sussex police.

Afterwards, Bowles announced that his team had decided to carry out a cold case review, codenamed Operation Stratton, on the suspected murder of Emma Smith. He said yesterday: "The sister of Emma Alice was tending to a dying man in 1953 and he admitted to her that he had killed her sister. He told her that he had destroyed the evidence and dumped her body in a pond."

Emma's sister was now dead, he said, so inquiries into the identity of the man who had allegedly confessed to her would prove very difficult. Given the passage of time, the police inquiry would not be one in which officers would point the finger of suspicion at any individual.

"This investigation is to locate the body of Emma Alice and return that body to her family for a proper burial that they wish to give her," said Bowles.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/0 ... hunt-1920s
 
Fascinating post, Rynner!
I love this type of mystery. This one has an interesting twist in the fact that the family chose not to go to the police.
 
If this was Cold Case (tv) they would track down a centerian and take them away in cuffs. That happened in an episode over a murder which occurred in 1938. They actually arrested an alzheimer case who had to be over 100! Any judge would send them down for contempt of court!

Mummified babies found in LA
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/bre ... ing28.html

Authorities were examining the mummified remains of two babies found inside newspapers dating to the 1930s and placed inside an old steamer trunk in a Los Angeles apartment building basement, police said last night.

The remains were found on Tuesday night by the property owner cleaning out the basement of the building in downtown Los Angeles, police said.

"We're trying to figure out if they're related, where they came from and how they died," said Ed Winter, assistant chief coroner for Los Angeles County, who added that the remains were "mummified."

Both sets of remains, which might be fetuses, were wrapped in Los Angeles Times newspapers dated 1933 and 1935. One of the bodies appeared to be full-term while the other's development was not determined, Mr Winters said.

The remains had been placed in two separate doctors bags before being put inside the trunk.

Investigators discovered some photos and paper documents that will hopefully assist in identification. Also in the trunk was a ticket stub to the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Mr Winters said.

Officials are classifying the cold case as a "death investigation" due to the lack of clarity over how the babies got to the location, and an extensive forensic examination will continue today, Mr Winter said.
Click to expand...
 
Two infant skeletons found in 1920s LA building
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11019215

A picture of Los Angeles in 1930 The remains were wrapped in newspapers printed in Los Angeles in the 1930s

Two infant skeletons have been found wrapped in newspaper from the 1930s in the basement of a building in Los Angeles, California, police say.

The remains, which are believed to be decades old, were found placed in doctor's bags inside a trunk in a 1920s building near MacArthur Park.

Two women found the skeletons while cleaning out the Glen-Donald building.

Police have promised an investigation and are awaiting test results from the coroner's office.

"We'll try to reconstruct the circumstances based on what the coroner tells us, based on the history of the residence and based on science," Los Angeles police chief Charlie Beck told the Los Angeles Times newspaper.

One of the skeletons was wrapped in a 1933 copy of the Los Angeles Times and the other was in a 1935 issue.
'Not very pleasant'

Gloria Gomez, the building's manager, said she and Yiming Xing, one of the building's tenants, had found the remains after prying open a 4ft (1.2m) tall unclaimed steamer trunk.

"I saw something not very pleasant and very unusual. It didn't have any shape to it. But it seemed like a dried-out body," Ms Xing told the Los Angeles Times.

She added: "The first thing I thought was the spirits - maybe we disturbed the spirits."

Ms Gomez said one set of remains looked like an embryo, while the other appeared to be those of a newborn baby.

The trunk was reportedly labeled "Jean M Barrie" and also contained personal letters and ticket stubs from the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games.
Click to expand...
 
And to think that claims of ritual(ised) abortion and infanticide get rubbished on the grounds that they never find any bodies... except sometimes they do :(
 
While I'm at home I'm watching a lot of YouTube videos to occupy my time. Yesterday I watched this one and was very intrigued as I'd never heard of the Beaumont Children case before now. I wanted to see if it had been discussed on here but this was the only thread I found.


So as not to spoil the video for those who haven't seen it I've put my thoughts in spoler tags.

As the video unfolded I was convinced that the chap Harry Phipps was the perpetrator and that they were bound to find the bodies when they did the latest dig in the factory grounds, right at the end of the video.

The video stopped there without telling us but I searched online and found that in fact nothing relating to the children had been found, but this seems to be as far as the information goes - so I'm interested to know what everyone else thinks, it seems such a tragic case and the fact that the parents, still alive and now in their nineties, have lived all this time not knowing what happened to their children.

Another curious thing mentioned in the video was the white purse found in the basement of the house, which was said to have been purchased recently but it seemed a bit coincidental considering the eldest child owned such a purse.
 
A mystery from my neck of the woods. I'm sure I first became aware of this story in one of Fort's books

Jean Milne: Forensic experts review 1912 murder of heiress​

    • Published
      6 hours ago
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Image caption,
Jean Milne was murdered in her home in Broughty Ferry in 1912
The unsolved murder of a wealthy heiress in Broughty Ferry in 1912 has been re-examined by forensic experts.
Jean Milne was beaten with a poker and stabbed with a carving fork but no-one was ever convicted of the crime.
Her body was found at the bottom of the stairs of her own home, covered in a blanket and in a room covered in blood.
A new review of case files found fingerprints and the pattern of blood spatter was recorded - but it was not enough to identify a suspect.
The case was examined by experts at the University of Dundee's Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science and their results shared on BBC Scotland's David Wilson's Crime Files: Cold Cases.
It is the second oldest cold case on Police Scotland's books.
Click to expand...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-63158198
 
rynner2 said:
Village photograph triggers police murder hunt for missing teenager - 80 years late
Sandra Laville, crime correspondent The Guardian, Wednesday 4 February 2009

The disappearance of a servant girl in rural Sussex in the 1920s is being treated as murder by detectives, 83 years after she went missing on her way to work.

In one of the oldest cold case reviews the country has seen, officers announced this week that they would reopen their investigation into what happened to 16-year-old Emma Alice Smith in 1926. The move follows the screening of a short film based on her disappearance.

At the time the teenager vanished, Britain was in the grip of industrial crisis, Stanley Baldwin was prime minister and Eamon de Valera was making sure the Irish question was at the forefront of his mind.

But the villagers of Waldron and Emma's parents and younger sister, Lillian, were distraught after she failed to return home from Tunbridge Wells, where she was working. She had cycled to the station at Horam in East Sussex as usual earlier in the day to catch a train, but never came back.

Her family reported her missing to the local police, and it is believed the local newspaper may have carried an article, but the weeks and months passed and soon Emma's fate was something that occupied the minds only of her closest family and friends in the village.

That was until a village playwright called Valerie Chidson decided to research Emma's disappearance for a short fictionalised film after seeing a picture of the teenager in an old village photograph.

"I was looking at the picture, the row of girls' faces, when a man just came up to me, pointed to this very pretty girl aged about 16, and said 'That girl disappeared you know'," said Chidson yesterday. "That pricked my interest in the story and I just kept wondering how she had disappeared. The general belief was that she ran away. Only, her father said she would never have done this."

A few years later Chidson overheard someone talking about the photograph in the pub. She discovered the man in the pub was a relative of Emma's, and he claimed her killer had made a deathbed confession but her relatives had chosen not to go to the police because the crime had taken place so long ago.

Last year - persuaded by Chidson - Emma's great nephew spoke to Sussex police and passed on the information given to him by his mother, her niece.

On Monday night Chidson presented a 40-minute film to a select audience including Detective Chief Inspector Trevor Bowles, of the major crime branch of Sussex police.

Afterwards, Bowles announced that his team had decided to carry out a cold case review, codenamed Operation Stratton, on the suspected murder of Emma Smith. He said yesterday: "The sister of Emma Alice was tending to a dying man in 1953 and he admitted to her that he had killed her sister. He told her that he had destroyed the evidence and dumped her body in a pond."

Emma's sister was now dead, he said, so inquiries into the identity of the man who had allegedly confessed to her would prove very difficult. Given the passage of time, the police inquiry would not be one in which officers would point the finger of suspicion at any individual.

"This investigation is to locate the body of Emma Alice and return that body to her family for a proper burial that they wish to give her," said Bowles.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/0 ... hunt-1920s
Click to expand...

“Det Ch Insp Trevor Bowles said: "Lillian Smith, a sister of Emma Alice, and now deceased, had told her niece that in the 1950s she had taken a death bed confession from a man claiming that he had murdered Emma Alice on her way to the train station in Horam.

"He had disclosed that he had put her body in a pond. Lillian was the only person who appeared to have concerns that Emma had been murdered."
In fact she had eloped with Thomas Wills, a road worker in his mid 30s, who had left his wife and four young children. Police believe the pair went to the Irish Republic.

Det Ch Insp Bowles said: "Between 1933 and 1936 there is evidence that there was an argument at a Sunday school outing between Emma Alice's mother and the wife of Thomas concerning the relationship between Emma Alice and Thomas.

"I am now satisfied that she was not murdered and this case is now closed."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-14079082

maximus otter
 
I have mentioned somewhere on here before that my great-grandmother was deemed to have committed suicide in the 1930s by cutting her own throat. My sister has her suspicions that actually somebody done her in...

I tried to find details from the Northampton newspapers of the time but apparently their archives were destroyed in WW2.
 
bugmum said:
I have mentioned somewhere on here before that my great-grandmother was deemed to have committed suicide in the 1930s by cutting her own throat. My sister has her suspicions that actually somebody done her in...

I tried to find details from the Northampton newspapers of the time but apparently their archives were destroyed in WW2.
Click to expand...
I couldn’t find any figures but suicide by throat cutting is extremely low on the list of methods..
 
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/31/us/st-petersburg-florida-trunk-lady-identified/index.html
Police found an unknown body in a trunk on Halloween 53 years ago. Thanks to DNA testing, the ‘trunk lady’ now has a name
By Lauren Mascarenhas, CNN
After police found a body in a black steamer trunk in a wooded area in Florida 53 years ago, the mystery of the “trunk lady” became a cold case that captured the attention of the public for decades. Using DNA evidence, police have now identified the victim as Sylvia June Atherton, a mother of five, from Tucson, Arizona.

On Halloween 1969, St. Petersburg police were called to a wooded area behind what was then a restaurant named the Oyster Bar, Assistant Chief Michael Kovacsev said at a news conference Tuesday. He said two children reported seeing two White men in a pickup truck unload the trunk in the field and leave.

When the officers opened the trunk, they found a woman’s body, wrapped in a large plastic bag, police said in a statement. She had visible injuries to her head and was partially clothed in a pajama top. She had been strangled with a bolo tie, police said.

Investigators were unable to identify the woman, and she was buried as “Jane Doe” in St. Petersburg’s Memorial Park Cemetery.
The mystery of the “trunk lady,” as she came to be known, captured the attention of crime shows, journalists and amateur sleuths over the years, but even after her body was exhumed in 2010, detectives were unable to crack the case. The teeth and bone samples they collected were too degraded, police said.

When a sample of the victim’s hair and skin taken during an original autopsy turned up this year, St. Petersburg Cold Case Detective Wally Pavelski sent it to a lab for DNA testing and police were soon able to identify Atherton. They say she was 41 when she died.

“She has a name now after 53 years. Her family has closure,” Kovacsev said.
A family still searching for answers

Pavelski tracked down Atherton’s daughter, Syllen Gates.

“It was shocking, because it had been so many years,” Gates said at the news conference via a video call from California, according to a video of the event posted by 10 Tampa Bay. “We had no idea what happened to her.”

Gates was about 5 years old when her mother left Tucson for Chicago in 1965, she said. Police said Atherton left with her husband, Stuart Brown, and three of her children: Kimberly Anne Brown, adult son Gary Sullivan and adult daughter Donna Lindhurst – along with Lindhurt’s husband David Lindhurst.

Gates and her 11-year-old brother stayed in Tucson with their father, Atherton’s ex-husband.

“We thought we would hear from them at some time, but life goes on. I was young,” Gates said. “It’s a sad relief to have finally found her. Of course, it’s a terrible way to die – just a few years after she left the state.”
Gary Sullivan eventually returned to Tucson. Gates used ancestry.com to try to find her mother and sisters, with no luck. She said she had not heard of the “trunk lady” case until Pavelski reached out to her.

Stuart Brown died in 1999 in Las Vegas. He never listed Atherton as missing and did not include her name on bankruptcy filings, Kovacsev said.

While police now know her name, they still don’t know who killed Atherton.

“This is where, like, amateur sleuths will come in.” Kovacsev said. “This is where we’re asking for assistance to kind of put the pieces together.”

Police say the two daughters who left Tucson with Atherton have yet to be located. Kimberly Anne Brown, who was around 5 years old at the time of the disappearance and Donna Lindhurst, who was around 20 years old, may have information that could help, police said.

“We’d like the case to be solved. We’d like to find out who did this – also to find my sisters,” Gates said. “That’s my hope. Maybe this gets out, maybe they’ll hear and maybe we can locate them.”
Click to expand...
 
rynner2 said:
Village photograph triggers police murder hunt for missing teenager - 80 years late
Sandra Laville, crime correspondent The Guardian, Wednesday 4 February 2009

The disappearance of a servant girl in rural Sussex in the 1920s is being treated as murder by detectives, 83 years after she went missing on her way to work.

In one of the oldest cold case reviews the country has seen, officers announced this week that they would reopen their investigation into what happened to 16-year-old Emma Alice Smith in 1926. The move follows the screening of a short film based on her disappearance.

At the time the teenager vanished, Britain was in the grip of industrial crisis, Stanley Baldwin was prime minister and Eamon de Valera was making sure the Irish question was at the forefront of his mind.

But the villagers of Waldron and Emma's parents and younger sister, Lillian, were distraught after she failed to return home from Tunbridge Wells, where she was working. She had cycled to the station at Horam in East Sussex as usual earlier in the day to catch a train, but never came back.

Her family reported her missing to the local police, and it is believed the local newspaper may have carried an article, but the weeks and months passed and soon Emma's fate was something that occupied the minds only of her closest family and friends in the village.

That was until a village playwright called Valerie Chidson decided to research Emma's disappearance for a short fictionalised film after seeing a picture of the teenager in an old village photograph.

"I was looking at the picture, the row of girls' faces, when a man just came up to me, pointed to this very pretty girl aged about 16, and said 'That girl disappeared you know'," said Chidson yesterday. "That pricked my interest in the story and I just kept wondering how she had disappeared. The general belief was that she ran away. Only, her father said she would never have done this."

A few years later Chidson overheard someone talking about the photograph in the pub. She discovered the man in the pub was a relative of Emma's, and he claimed her killer had made a deathbed confession but her relatives had chosen not to go to the police because the crime had taken place so long ago.

Last year - persuaded by Chidson - Emma's great nephew spoke to Sussex police and passed on the information given to him by his mother, her niece.

On Monday night Chidson presented a 40-minute film to a select audience including Detective Chief Inspector Trevor Bowles, of the major crime branch of Sussex police.

Afterwards, Bowles announced that his team had decided to carry out a cold case review, codenamed Operation Stratton, on the suspected murder of Emma Smith. He said yesterday: "The sister of Emma Alice was tending to a dying man in 1953 and he admitted to her that he had killed her sister. He told her that he had destroyed the evidence and dumped her body in a pond."

Emma's sister was now dead, he said, so inquiries into the identity of the man who had allegedly confessed to her would prove very difficult. Given the passage of time, the police inquiry would not be one in which officers would point the finger of suspicion at any individual.

"This investigation is to locate the body of Emma Alice and return that body to her family for a proper burial that they wish to give her," said Bowles.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/0 ... hunt-1920s
Click to expand...
It turned out that Emma most likely ran off with a married man and set up home with him in Ireland!

Safe Argus link -
80-year-old Sussex mystery solved

Emma Alice Smith disappeared aged 16 while living in Waldron, East Sussex.

Her family later came to believe a man had made a deathbed confession to killing her and dumping her body in a pond.

Sussex Police launched an investigation after a local historian highlighted the case in 2009.

After searching a pond and interviewing people in the area, they now believe she had eloped to Ireland in 1928.
Click to expand...
There may be living Irish descendants.
 
Forgive me if this has been posted, but a 40 year old murder cold case was solved in NJ, and the murderer identified:

Blairstown 40-year cold case solved: 'Princess Doe,' accused killer ID'd by authorities​

Advances in DNA technology helped investigators solve the 40-year-old cold case of an unidentified teen girl affectionately known as "Princess Doe" who was found bludgeoned to death in a Warren County cemetery.

The girl, whose badly beaten body was found on July 15, 1982 by workers of the Cedar Ridge Cemetery in Blairstown, was Dawn Olanick, 17, of the West Babylon and Bohemia areas of Long Island, Warren County Prosecutor James Pfeiffer said during a news conference in the township on Friday morning.

In addition to announcing the identity of Blairstown's beloved princess — the community raised funds to bury her in the cemetery and honored her life over the years — authorities also announced charges against her alleged killer. Arthur Kinlaw, 68, who is already serving a 20-year-to-life sentence in Sullivan County, New York, for the murder of another woman, was charged with first-degree murder. The young woman was identified as a "Jane Doe."

Kinlaw had in 2005 confessed in writing to the Warren County Prosecutor's Office he killed Princess Doe, Pfeiffer revealed Friday. But officials needed to positively identify her before having a solid case, he said.

1685878444832.png

https://www.njherald.com/story/news...ss-doe-accused-killer-identified/65374641007/
 
My mate, old John, has repeatedly tried to look into a story of his family, that has it that his grandfather killed a man in Ireland, then fled on the next ferry to England, where he changed his name to Stacey or de Tracey and became a postman in York. I've been unable to establish the veracity of any of this story, even down to being unable to find out whether there ever was an Irish postman in York in the 1930s. But it's all very mysterious and intriguing.
 
catseye said:
Thak you, Max! I'll pass all this info on to John (although I suspect very strongly that he's telling me all about his relative in the hopes that I will join Ancestry and do all the legwork for him. I won't. I don't have time, because I know that if I join I'll start looking into my family and bang will go the next twenty years or so...)
Click to expand...
Both parents' sides of my family have done the ancestry palaver and very interesting it all is too.
We have no royalty or war heroes, but I am proud of a great-great-great uncle or summat who was hanged for sheep-stealing in 19th century Shropshire.

There's a branch in Australia who I hope are descended from transportees. One of my uncles contacted them and was handed copies of all their research. How generous!

Someone on'ere described how the coincidences would pile up once they got stuck into the genealogy. It's worth doing just for that aspect.
 
escargot said:
It turned out that Emma most likely ran off with a married man and set up home with him in Ireland!

Safe Argus link -
80-year-old Sussex mystery solved


There may be living Irish descendants.
Click to expand...
It would be interesting to find out what kind of life she lead, just running off with someone is fairly common but nowadays there are better ways to trace people, in the UK you have your National Insurance ID number it's pretty had to to do much without it
 
Robbrent said:
It would be interesting to find out what kind of life she lead, just running off with someone is fairly common but nowadays there are better ways to trace people, in the UK you have your National Insurance ID number it's pretty had to to do much without it
Click to expand...
The couple are supposed to have moved to Ireland which is not part of the UK.
 
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