Thinking Sideways: The Beaumont Children

is Thinking Sideways the podcast. I'm Devin. That's and that is Steve. Yes, that's clean. Actually we did at that time. Yeah, it's good. I won't have to edit that at all, except for all of the five booths that we did before then. Yeah yeah, yeah no. So as you probably we know, but maybe not. This month of October, we've

been doing Thinking Sideways is Most Wanted. So we came up with a list of fifteen, the fifteen most requested mysteries, and we did an episode on the five the top five voted, so they weren't necessarily the top five most requested that we've ever had. They were a list of the most requested and then there was a vote. So sorry, if we missed the most requot, we didn't. We got, but there are some that are like that are pretty frequently requested that I guess we'll attempt to tackle on

the next next year. Yeah, if we're not, if we're not covering the mystery that you really really are dying to see us cover, we'll send us money. It's good. Yeah, we do accept bribes. Yeah. So this is our uh no, not, there's no more like weird first runner up, the second runners. No, this is our winner, our winner, and uh the we're going to talk about the disappearance of the Beaumont children. Yeah. Yeah, it's a big one. So you may or may not

have listened to our group shows before. You might be able to tell this is going to be a long episode. So I didn't do it by myself. We all three broke it up. So we're going to do our standard show that we broke up style, and we're just going to each tackle different parts of it. I got the lambst part he did because he said he didn't care. Yeah, I know. So I'm gonna start by giving a quick overview of the story. You might want to give him

the warning because this is a story about childbuction. You that's you know, an uncomfortable subject for Yeah, not only is it child abduction, but a lot of the um suspects I guess are pretty bad. People are pretty and we are going to talk not in graphic detail, but in some big detail about what they did and why it pertains to this. So if you're squeamish, it's not you, it's not your bag. Just get this one. Although presumably you're not going to be so upset about this morning.

If you're super excited about us covering with mystery, hopefully there won't be any cross over there. Yeah, I don't, I don't. I think this is pretty Pg. Thirteen. I wouldn't be too concerned. It's not the worst. But just for all some of our listeners who need to know things like that, I think our listeners are already. They're not that kind of people anyway. They love the gore, not all of them. Okay, you guys ready. On January nineteen sixty six, which was Australia Day of that year,

three children disappeared. Guess what their name was? Their last names for beaumont Um. They were Jane who was nine, Arna who was seven, and Grant who was four. They were on a beach that was called glenn Elg, which is the palindrome. You guys, I know that's really cool. You know. You pointed that out and I had not enough step before. It's palindrome. My Australian friend who helped me with some of these pronunciations. Uh, the first thing he said, I said, how would you say this word?

He said, it's a palindrome and I was like, yeah, but how do you say it? So apparently that's the thing. Um. Anyways, it was near It was near Adelaide, South Australia. South Australia is the state, I believe, right, I think so, yeah, which is also near Somerton, which you may or may

not remember. This is why you are so excited about this particular case, just because it ties into your favorite one, my favorite one, yeah, which is um, that family actually lived in Somerton, um, which is where the whole Tam and Shrewd thing, Tom and Shrewd thing. It's kind of a little for me to triangle. Yeah, it happened in nine and it's actually, as it turns out, this area

is pretty notorious for disappearance and murders. So um, maybe someday we'll cover some other ones, but now we've covered two. Well certainly, I mean some of the suspects in this case had been suspects and many many disappearances of children. It's like, it's kind of shocking how many people were out there doing this kind of stuff in South Australia. It's weird. It's you'd think it was like a place that people sent the worst people that they hadn't even

going to make that all right. So their parents were Jim and Nancy Beaumont, and they often allowed the three children, Jane, Arena and Grant to ride the bus to the beach. It was like a five minute bus ride from their home to the beach um, and so they were often allowed to do that. And on this day they were excited. It was Australia Day, which I think is kind of like fourth of July here. I believe that. Yeah, it's

I think it's Independence Day or something. Ignorance sorry everyone, anyways, it was a day of celebration, and so the three children said they wanted to go to the beach and their parents said sure, yeah, no problem, said by lunch. Yeah. They left home just after ten am. I believe it was ten. Ten was when the bus left, and they arrived at the beach predictably at about ten fifteen, which is confirmed by the bus driver and also um a few passengers of the bus. They said, yeah, the kids

got off around eleven. The children paused to play in a sprinkler that was on the lawn of Collie Reserve, which is like a public park that's just adjacent to the beach. It's like big One. I looked at pictures. It looks really pretty. Around this time, a witness also noticed that there was a man playing with the children.

He was wearing blue swim trunks, and a school friend of Jane's said that she saw the kids there too at about eleven, but that she didn't notice the man playing with them, and so maybe the man was just playing in the sprinklers but not with them. Yeah. Maybe. The witnesses description of the whole encounter with the man was that he was laying on the grass initially like tanning, and then got up and started playing with the kids. But forty five minutes later the children bought some pastries

and a pie from one Cel's cake shop. Uh. They paid with a one pound note and pause for all of our Australian listeners. You might be saying, but in nineteen sixty six we had the dollar. Not so, not until May. I did my research on this one. It was still the pound until May of nineteen sixty six. So they paid with a one pound note and um.

Later Nancy told authorities that she had given Jane eight shillings and sixpence in coins, which was to cover the bus fare, and then like small little snacks, get yourself something a munch, Yeah, just little little snacky things. So they so it's unclear where they got the one pound note from. Uh. The owner of the shop also mentioned that she did know the children and they they had purchased a meat pie, which they had never purchased before. Um,

though they'd come into the shop many times. Yeah you're a kid, You got some cash and you go into a pastry shop. Yeah yeah, or cane croissants or you know whatever. Not it's not going to be a hearty meat pie. So she thought that was a little odd, but she you know, didn't question them or anything like that. But she did recall that as being odd when she

was interviewed later around noon. A number of witnesses were all sitting on a bench when they were approached by a man who matches the description of the man in the blue Simms swim trunks, and he said he was missing some money and wondered if they had seen anybody touching his clothing. No, no, I know where. Yeah they might have stole it, right, Yeah, they don't. They didn't

seem like that kind of a group of kids. Um. The group, who was comprised of a woman, an older couple, and the older couple's ten year old granddaughter, said sorry, we didn't see um anybody touching her clothes, and so the man walked back to his clothes, where three children were waiting for him. The witnesses said they were quote fairly certain that at least two of the children were Jane and Grant, and were absolutely positive that the third

child was Arena. And the man then helped the three children dress, which they the witnesses said they thought was odd because at least two of them looked like they were definitely old enough to dress themselves at nine and seven at nine, that's a little weird, But he apparently helped. He took the time to help them all dress. It took them like fifteen minutes to get all dressed, but he apparently helped them all dress and then around um, twelve fifteen. As I said, it took it took that

long too. I haven't seen anything that said, I guess so it was about noon when he approached them, So the conversation took maybe a minute or two, and then he walked back to the children and immediately helped them start dressing. And then the witnesses said they departed around twelve fifteen, so it did take them a while. Maybe it was he was not helping them get dressed, maybe he was trying to undress them and they were kept they kept dressing themselves, he kept undressing. No, I think

it was pretty clear he Actually I was. I was wondering about it, as I had never thought about this. But if the children buy something and they eat something and somebody laces it on them, that would be why you would have to help a kid get dressed, if you they were a little drunk. That's good. I hadn't actually, no, I just yeah about that now. Yeah, it's just this whole scenario. It's just it's just a little hard to picture from today's modern stand put. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, I

think guys. I mean, obviously you don't want to be having anything to do with the kids that you don't know he'll go anywhere near them. Absolutely, that's worth kind of a more paranoid society today than we used to be. Well in this case, actually was the imptis for a lot of that. It turns out there was the catalyst for a lot of families in Australia, particularly to stop allowing their children the kind of freedom that the Beaumont

children were afforded. Yeah, between because this happened between the Purvs and the Dingoes, you know, I mean Australia wanting to get your kids. Yeah, yeah, it absolutely is. Well, and that's the thing about this these kids is that you bring up a great point, Joe is everybody's probably freaking out going, oh my god, their parents let them go on their own. But it was he was a

very different world. And I mean I grew up in in the States, you know, and and still when I was a kid, my parents still said where are you going when you're gonna be back? You know you're gonna be back by this time, and don't ride your bike in the street. Yeah, And then I just took off and did what I wanted. Yeah, and it's exact same thing these kids were doing. Yeah, I know, he would just take off and go all over the place. Yeah.

And I think it's interesting actually to think about the way that we're reacting to this story versus like the Madeline McCann case for instance, right where I know we were all like, what were those parents thinking? That's absurd, But it was genuinely the society that was exactly how everybody was treating their children. Yeah. I think it's that And there's an age difference thing here between this and the Meccans. Yeah, I'm not trying to like, you know,

it was genuinely at a different time. And regarding the maccan parents, you know, they should have locked their room. But other than at you know, that wasn't it wasn't too egregious on their part because we actually got a little blowback and when that episode there and some people were like upset with us because I thought we were too hard on the parents. Yeah. So Nancy, as we've

just discussed, it was, you know, a different time. Nancy Beaumont, the mom, she wasn't too worried when the kids didn't come home at on the noon bus. She kind of just figured that maybe they had decided to walk home from the beach with they which they had done before, and would have taken them, you know, extra time. Yeah, or maybe they missed the bus. It wasn't exactly what we would call a frequent run bus. The next bus was due back at two, so she said, you know,

she was she wasn't concerned. Really. She thought either they would be waiting for her at home they would walk home, or they'd be on the two o'clock bus. So she did. She went home, and she was a little myth that they weren't home waiting for her. I think she genuinely thought, oh, they just walked home. And then she walked from home to the bus stop for the two o'clock bus, expecting them to get off that bus. They didn't. They didn't

get off any bus. She kind of thought, Okay, that's weird, but I guess they could be on the next bus. And the next bus came at three. Rationalizing is what it is. Yeah, when denial, if your kids are your kids are kidnapped. Yeah, So when they were not on the three clock bus, she did start to freak out. And there's this possible sighting of the kids at one or two fifty five pm. I have a hard time too. So these two, these two sightings are like the police

don't think they're credible, but we'll mention them anyway. So it's possible that at one PM the children were seen with the same man, but he had light brown hair, not blonde hair. Men in the blue trunks. Yeah, and the report was that they were leaving the beach um pretty much at that moment. It's also possible that the postman, who was familiar with them, saw them work walking along

Jetty Road towards the beach. He said it would have either been at the getting or end of his round, which would have been at one or to fifty five pm. And in some statements he actually said that he saw them in the morning, but he recanted that. So you'll see out on the internet all three versions of that in all the different places. You'll see that the policeman, deaf or the postman definitely saw them on their way to the beach. Oh, he definitely saw them walking alone

at one. Oh, he definitely saw them walking alone at Toft but he couldn't even remember. But he couldn't remember. Yeah, he couldn't remember any of that, so the police kind of discounted that as well, understandably so I agree. So I gu said Nancy by this point was pretty concerned, um, but she she did go home and continue to wait

for them and tell Jim. Her husband got home, at which point both of them I think it was about five pm when he got home, and they decided to go to the beach to look for the kids, I think, just hoping that they had lost track of time or

something like that. Obviously, they didn't find anything, so they officially reported the children missing at seven thirty pm that night, and then Jim continued to look throughout the night for the kids or any sign of the kids, and when there was no sign of them, they were officially declared missing the next morning. So the morning of January nineteen sixty six. The search that ensued was extensive and did eventually become the biggest man hunt or search search in

the history of Australia. There are a few things to note, not very many, but a few. The first thing of note is that the children, but particularly Jane, were described as shy. Apparently, Arena had at one point told her mother that Jane had quote got a boyfriend down the beach unquote, and Nancy, of course, you know, thinking that seven year old arna Um referring to nine year old Jane had just meant a playmate and ignored the comment. But it did seem a little weird after the kids disappeared.

In hindsight, yeah, a lot of things that are very simple. We've talked about this before though, Yeah. Um, so investigators did theorize that the man in the blue swim trunks that had been seen playing with the kids, um had actually met them before, since they did go to the beach fairly frequently, that he had worked to gain their trust. Um, because it would it seemed out of character, I guess for the kids to play with a stranger within you know, such kind of ease. It lends me to think that

there was a lot of planning put into places. This wasn't a crime of opportunity. Was snatch and grab, Yes, that's exactly the right term used it. Somebody had to spend three four separate occasions with these kids to build up that relationship. If indeed the man in the blue swim trunks was responsible, we don't know that. But also if he if this guy had been regularly hanging with the kids. Do you think they would have been a lot more witnesses have noticed on previous occasions, I guess.

But also it's not exactly as though the police were saying, like, anybody who ever saw these kids interacting with anybody, tell us anything? You know, they were saying specifically on this day these kids disappeared, did you see them? You're in this area? It seems like, um, this speech is kind of a touristy area, so it's not as though a regulars and I don't know. It's also entirely possible that the man in the blue shorts was playing with his

own three children. They were misidentified absolutely the children. UM, they had things like towels, small playthings. Jane had a copy of Little Women, which is not a small book with her, and none of these items were ever found, which lends itself to think that the kids weren't just washed out to see those things would have probably washed back up on the shore or um, so it wasn't

just a riptide. Jim appeared on national television on January thirty one asking for any leads, and um hundreds of tips flooded the hotlines and Apparently every single one of them was followed up, and none of them really produced

any kind of substantial leads. A few months after the kids disappeared, a woman reported that on the night of the disappearance, she had seen a man and three children, two girls and a boy, enter a house next to hers that she thought was empty, and I think it was like a vacation rental sort of situation, not like an abandoned house sort of situation. She reported that she saw the boy walking alone when he was chased and quote roughly caught by the man. Why did you wait

too much? Yeah, I mean that's actually it just like the Springfield three and lady who said that she saw the girls in the vein months later. Months later, Yeah, yeah, and that's exactly. The police weren't able to to substantiate this story because of the distance of time between when it happened and when the tip was given, so they weren't able to go get any forensic evidence or anything

like that that would have potentially existed in this house. Fingerprints. Yeah, if if this happened right, if this woman was telling the truth, there would have been for forensic evidence there and they would have been able to collect it and I would have probably yielded many more results in the long run. But if it was I they must have

followed up with the owners of the house. I mean, if it was a vacation rental then and they rented it to somebody for a day or two, I presume I The only thing that you can never find about this is that it just there were no leads from it, So I presume that it wasn't actually rented on that day.

This is always at most paph Yeah, but I did want to include it because it is kind of interesting, you know, Like we said before, while this case did drastically alter the way that parents behave with their children, the allowances they gave them, the kind of freedom they gave them, no one blames the family in this case,

which I think is fair. And if you know something, there is still a one million dollar reward um for any information leading to this case being solved, which is still there's still a huge commitment to the solving of this case. And that's that's why thinking sideways is not going to solve it right at the moment, because actually that's how we're going to fund the showy year old mystery,

and this whole thing. Yeah. Now, the thing about it is is if you go and you look at all the information on the internet, it's quite obvious who did the killing, and it's quite obvious where the bodies are. But unfortunately the Australian dollar is really weak right now, and I'm going to wait until it's a couple of years ago it was actually it is actually pretty strong, and now it's like worth you know, it's just not worth that much. So we're going to hold off on

solving sorry folks. Yeah, so do Actually we do have really really big news we're really excited about, but we're not sure if we're going to release it or not on Australia. Get your acting then we can solve this case. It's on you. This is like that picture of a million likes, right, Like, if this picture just gets a million likes, Bill Gates will he will anyway at the end of the overview of this story, Steve, Yeah, there's more of course. Oh, we're we're in. I think this

is going to happen for a while. Is there's more story to tell before we ever even get into the theory section, because as with all high profile cases, stuff just keeps happening. Yeah, and um, as a disclaimer, I don't I don't know about you guys, but like I did my research on my parts and then like the other part kind of skimmed the cliff notes of the other parts. So just so our listeners are prepared, they're

gonna be a lot of weight. What But apparently there were some letters, some letters there were It's unclear the exact date that the first letters arrived. It was either thee or four February of nine. The Beaumonts received a letter that was supposedly from their daughter Jane, and of course Mr Paumont calls the cops. Smart, yeah, he calls. The lead detective on the case was Stan Swayin Right, Yeah, it was so Swain And I'm gonna he'll be referred

to a couple of times through here. They check it out and the letter is evidently sent from a town that is called Dandenong. That yep, it's gonna go with that, Victoria. And it was evidently sent two or three days prior so they said it was sent on the twenty one to February based on its postmark. Those are pretty reliable. Those are pretty reliable. It's it's the arrival date. That's why I'm a little iffy on this because we don't

know exactly what day had arrived. What the letters are weird because the handwriting isn't really Janes, like it's kind of Jins but not you know what I mean. It's like it's kid, right. Yeah, Well it's also hard at that age, Like I can look back at my journals. Yes, I kept journals from when I was nine until when I was eleven, right, that on a daily basis. Yeah, they went ahead and hoped, I'm going to say, I'm gonna put it that way. They hoped that it was

actually her handwriting. And the letters said that the children were good, We're okay, but that and that they would be returned to their parents, and all their parents had to do was follow a set of instructions, and that those instructions were that they that one of the parents. I believe it's it might have been expressly Mr Beaum though I think it is positive, but we're going to

say it is um. And he had he had to wear a completely right no, not a pink jumps suit, not my uniform, no, No, Jim had to be in front of the post office in that town at eight fifty in the morning on the February, which was a Monday, and he was gonna be wearing a he had to wear a dark coat and white trousers. Of course, with all these letters, it says if tell costs, the whole thing's off, so you can't do anything. There is some very right off the stop top peculiarities with letters, and

that is that Arna's name is continually spelled wrong. It's supposed to be two ends and it only has one end every time that it's used in the letter. But what the heck, We're going to go ahead and follow up. The parents leave for town on Sunday morning. They head out. Yeah, they detectives. They took cops with them, of course, and this whole thing was supposed to be done on the on the download. It was going to be super hush.

Somehow that didn't happen. One of the cops was Detective Swain. Yes, yes, Swain did go but yeah, they were going to do it on the download, and that that somebody was a jerk and leaked it in Vain. Well, there's a couple

of things that were wrong here. There's there's people who were honestly suspicious, but it did get leaked to the Adelaide Press somehow that this was going on, and so why I don't I'm not going to accuse anybody of taking bribes from the press, but I guess also, like my other part of that though, is that like if this, if the public commitment is to getting this thing solved and like ensuring the well being of the children, I think the commitment was that strong. Because we're not even

a month later, we're barely a month after. It just still seems like any what editor worth its salt wouldn't be like, oh, I mean, it's not like it's the UK Mail, Like, it's not you know, it's not that kind of publication. So yeah, that's upsetting to me. It's setting to me that they would have published something like that. Yeah, but by the way, it wasn't just a month or so, it was it was like two years. Thank you, I'm an idiot. It's okay, it was a million years ago.

It was it was two years after the fact. So I will agree then, Okay, you're right, But I also think that if it's been two years and this is a case that I feel like it's kind of like Lord Luken, he gets trotted out and lipped up, gets trotted out to sea. They send all these guys down there. Yeah, I just it just feels like I am going to blame the newspaper a little bit. I know a lot of other stuff happened that went wrong, and that's fine, but I am definitely going to place some pretty heavy

blame whether the letters were real or not. You, as a newspaper shouldn't ever say, like, these people are going to like potentially recover their children after two years of searching, let's publish it before it happens. Now, they didn't publish it. They just they just of the Balmas to dandon the town. Yeah, the town. Yeah. Actually, it's like they're like the Australians like the Brits, and so it's probably pronounced dong any who.

So obviously the Adelaide newspaper guys are there. At the same time, there's a pub owner who sees Swayin wandering around and is suspicious something, and the reason is that somebody had been in that town breaking into safes and he's like, I don't know who this guy is. I'm calling the call. Wasn't Swain or was it, Mr Beaumont, I can't remember. One of them was wearing like the black trench coat and the hat and like kind of wandering. I thought both of them were just like kind of

wandering around suspicious. We were being suspicially the Yeah, I think Balt was loitering in front of the post office

like you're supposed to. And then if the detective was just walking around the neighborhood like you know, being acting like a pedestrian just walking through, well, but I I really to get the impression that you're you're early on in the timeline because I think that if and I might be wrong, but I got the impression that the cops were called on Sunday when they were patrolling around trying to figure things out. Because what happens is this

guy calls the cop. The cop somehow figures out that Swayne is a police officer in Adelaide, and what does he and I don't know how he does it. I'm not sure who he calls. But then what does he do? He goes ahead and calls the local press and tells them what's going on. So at A fifty the next morning, because Mr Beaumont is in front of the post office. He's doing what he's supposed to. But there's all of these I'm using air quotes here, random wandering people. I'm

just minding my own business. Wasn't like I'm sure. Actually, let's just keep going because this is my favorite. It's about to come of phone calls. Yes, so so of course he's standing outside. Somebody calls he's out and he's outside the post office. Somebody calls the post office. It's a male voice with a Australian accent. He talks to this postal woman worker. It's a woman. She goes and says,

I need you to take a message outside. She takes a message outside to Mr Beaumont saying that they're delayed and they they're on their way. Okay, everything seems fine so far. Not too long after that and I there's a telegraph comes through somehow. The message is conveyed again to Mr Beaumont that they're on their way, and then after that another message is brought to him saying that Grant is sick and so they can't be there till after lunch. And of course you know Mr he's hanging out,

he's gonna wait and they're his kids. He's of course they're his kids. And he finally he gets there at eight fifty in the morning, he gives up three o'clock. I think he kind of figured out, yeah, he's had enough, and so obviously he didn't get his kids. What I don't really get about this is didn't the police. It's it's easy to find out what telegraph office the telegrams

originated in. Don't ask me, brother, I I don't know why that didn't happen and did that well, and and there's there's some follow up, but it doesn't seem like at that time, I don't know why, you know, I kind of feel it feels a bit like there there was going on, you know, that suddenly it was just like nobody knew what to do anymore, nobody knew how

to do their job anymore. Yeah, it was like, well, we don't want to blow our cover, so we're not going to go, you know, as soon as the telegram got we're not going to follow the telegram guy both back in because obviously he's being watched so or potentially you know, and by that point, I don't think you keep a necessarily great record of like this person at exactly this time said this telegraph saying this, but you can talk to the people who work in the office.

I mean, you know, I know you right down text they send the text, so somebody's going to interact with you. And yeah, of course, I just think that, like if you follow up a couple of days later, especially if you happened to send it from a really populoust area,

like well, you know, here's here's the thing too. And of course, well I don't want to I don't want to give away the ending, but more than one telegram was sent, So after the first telegram, if the cops had just you know, got in the telegraph telegraph office that received the telegraph the telegram and then found out from them where it originated. Right, But that's what I'm saying.

I thought, like, I think they still thought their cover was like they were still I think they thought they were still being really sneaky, and they were like, but if I follow this guy into his office, I'm not being sneaky anymore, you know what I mean, Like they were they still thought they had it versus like, you know, a couple of days later, they realized like a cover was super blown. Immediately we were like dummies. Okay, it's

okay to go question this person. Yeah, if if that had the telegrams, if the letters and everything had been for real, then that that would that really, in my mind, represents a huge lost opportunity. Absolutely, No, I agree with you. I think that one of the biggest problems in this entire case, as with so many cases we cover, is the fact that it was just totally bungled by the police a little bit. But Steve has more things to say.

I'm just staring at you too, watching your blabern Okay, so we've talked about the fact that several telegrams come through. One of them says they're going to be late. The other one tells Mr Beaumont to go wait across. This is my favorite part. I just like that is seriously my favorite part of this entire story, because I just

imagine it was like, Okay, you've got the image. You have a bunch of people in like n C. I s right there doing a steak out or the wire they're doing a stake out, and it's like, no, I'm just a homeless person. I'm asking for money. Oh I'm a person giving you you know, it's like all staged. Yeah right, but the moves right, So like Mr Baman gets the thing and he's like, okay, I'll grow go

across the street. And he goes across the street and like two seconds later, everybody else is around him again too, with the same exact tableau just on the other side. That's that mental image is one of my favorite mental But yeah, so Mr Bamant stays in that town for a total he he waits outside the post office for a total of three days, hoping that something's going to happen, and it doesn't, but more letters are sent to the

family's home. There are three letters that are sent in two envelopes, and one of them was postmarked from the twenty ninth of February from that same city town, same same town, and would have been on the same The other one was from the same day, but it arrived the same day. It was posted on the same day. Is the way that it's written. I'm assuming that it was. That means that the post office handled it and stamped it that day, but it's not. It's never been said

where it came from. I would presume that it was the same town, but maybe whoever was sending him went to the next town and it went through their post system. I'm I can't clarify that. But the letters they show up and again there's a letter from Jane and in that letter, um, well there's two letters. Yeah, there's the letter from Jane and it's it's signed. It's still in that weird handwriting that's not quite Jane's handwriting, but it's

still there. And then there is there's what's called the disguised handwriting, which I think means I'm writing with my left hand so you can't tell who I am. Kind of disguised handwriting. It's really terrible. I'm guessing from but it's it's signed the man and it says that because the Beaumont didn't play ball, the kids aren't going to be returned. Um. And it's it's really it's it's just

it's kind of a brutal thing. And the whole thing is brutal to me because it turns out, as I think everybody's figured out at this point, the whole thing was a hoax because in that waste they looked at the letters again, but they didn't get much out of him. And then ten years ten eleven years later they had better ways to to fingerprint things, and they were able to pull prints off of them, and they found the guy who wrote the letter, and he was he was

a kid when he did it. He was seventeen year old kid who thought it was funny and he did this. But the whole time after he felt, you know, as he matured, he was really regretful of the whole thing and realized what a jackass movement was. But so the letters are weird and they're alluded to, but the whole thing turns out to be for not Yeah, yeah, too bad, all right, So the time goes by. This is actually this what I'm gonna talk about now, happened before the

letters arrived. This is later in the year of nineteen six. This was obviously a huge deal and it got worldwide publicity, publicity, and so a Dutch paras psychologist or psychic psychic who was named offered his services. He was actually sometimes consulted by Dutch police in murder and missing person cases. And he was the girl with the dragon tattoo. Yeah, he had crazy hair. There's a picture requisite crazy hair. Do you see this picture? It wasn't as crazy as I

thought it was going to be. But it was still pretty crazy. It was pretty crazy. Yeah, it was. It wasn't as crazy as I thought it was going to because it was missing the top part. Yeah. But man, anyway, Yeah, he's good. There is a bull joke. Yeah, there is a Wikipedia page this guy. You can look at the picture yourself. Is his name is? Is? Actually um, it's spelled like Gerard Cross Croisset. But yeah, so Gerard Croissets and so no, no, they should have to figure out

how to spell it. They should have to figure out how to pronounce it. What's wrong with you? If they insist we pronounced things correctly, they should figure out how to spell things from our pronunciation. That's right. Screwed, Yeah, ruined? Okay, so what so? Did he was involved in this case and he didn't involved his career by the way, it was kind of a mixed bag. He actually did occasionally succeed in giving police clues that helped to solve the

occasional murder, missing person or missing bodies. Do you think it's like we could give helpful clues to people? I have two feelings, one is living, the other is dead. Who is Tom? Oh? You mean Tim? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, we're stealing street from Facebook seemed to fail more off and then he succeeded. Yeah, but they what the hell,

they were desperate. They sent him photos and other information about the disappearance um, and he contacted them and gave them some clues about his feeling about where the kids might might be, more their bodies might be. And of course all those were checked out. None of them panned out, so eventually decided to would be better if he went

to Australia. Yeah that makes sense, like feelings better, closer to boots on the ground and honest uf yeah, yeah, and his travel expenses were paid by a rich Australian businessman who had taken an interest in the case. Who is hilarious looking by the way. Yeah, oh he he uh. He wears great suits and funny hats. Yeah I've seen Oh you had to ask me. I knew it until then. But he's the funniest looking guy ever. Okay, Well, well, anyway, it's very generous of them to treat close to a

free trip to Australia. The Bamas, for their part, didn't actually want to meet with Class because they thought he was a quack. They didn't believe in psychics, and they also really were not happy about the media feeding frenzy that was taking place. Yeah, the word got out that he was coming and everybody got all excited. Uh. He did succeed in actually meeting with the Beaumas before he left Australia, but yeah, I don't think they took him

too seriously. Yeah, he kept changing his mind about where they were then, This is before he even arrived in Australia. He was he kept changing his mind about that. At first he said they were only half a mile from where they disappeared, maybe in a collapsed stormwater pipe, and then he changed his mind, said that they were in

some sand dunes. UM. When he arrived in Australia, which was like November, he walked on the beach and just sort of commune with nature and stuff, and then said that he felt that they were buried under the floor of a warehouse that had recently been constructed. Um and so he he requested that they rip up the concrete floor of the warehouse because the bodies were underneath the underneath there. The police were skeptical because they had searched

the area thoroughly at the time the kids disappeared. This was actually a building site and then so they hadn't poured the concrete slab yet, so actually in all likely place to dispose of some bodies. What the police had had apparently searched the work site before the concrete slab had been poured, and so they were extremely skeptical. And of course the building's owner wasn't enthusiastic at all about the idea. Of course, the person who has a stake

in this building. Oh yeah, uh. They kicked off a big fundraising campaign to raise funds to compensate the owner for the damage that was going to be done. Raised about forty bucks. They ripped up the floor and found nothing, and then again they it was the building was partially demoed in and then the current owner then let the police society again and once again nothing was found. And this is weird. Well, they brought in the cadaver dogs.

Remember that, because I actually watched some of the footage from that, because of course you media feeding frenzy. The cameras are all there, and I must have watched four different newscasts in a row that were you know, they had the cadaver dogs and the pits trying to figure things out. The dogs weren't really getting much of anything weird. Yeah, like they were may not have been bodies there. Yeah,

maybe their bodies weren't there. Yeah yeah. Actually, uh later told somebody that he actually believed that the children were buried in the foundation of a block of apartments, but then he didn't he didn't say anything about that because he didn't want to upset the people living in the apartment, so he decided on the warehouse instead. That reached him manure. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like that, will I forget it. But he left Australia Australia. Many people thought that he was

just a fraud and he never came back. Yeah. And also there's another psychic who has kind of stuck him inserted himself into this case. Uh, Australian guy named Scott Russell Hill who claims to be a psychic detective, and he's written a book called Psychic Detective. That's a good name. I don't know why I didn't think that. He says that he knew the Beaumont kids when he was young, and I didn't bother to check that out, and I'll take him at his words. Yeah. He also said that

he encountered with Grant's ghost. Remember Grant was a little four year old. I'll also take that at face value. Yeah. Yeah, so he had account ghost and he says he's working on the case, but so far nothing. Yeah, that's the only part of this that I believe. Yeah. Yeah, so so the psychics didn't really pan out a last. When you want to talk about next suspects, maybe, yeah, you guys were there, I want to talk about suspect No, not at all. I guess we'll start because suspects are

theories at this point. Yeah. Yeah, the theories are or who done it? Yeah, there are really interesting ones. Yeah. So the first one is a gentleman, if you can go on that, by the name of Bevin Spencer von Einem. And I'm just going to preface this by saying, sometimes when you research this kind of mystery, you end up having to research a person who was so horrible that you literally do not know where to start. And I think Steve felt this way too when researching his suspect um.

So I'm gonna go ahead and say, of all of the real life confirmed killers we've ever talked about in the show, this guy in my book takes the cake every single time. I watched a number of news pieces about this guy, and every single time they referred to him as the sadistic von Eimen. That was that his title, Like that's his name. Now he is currently alive and

currently in jail. Well, and if he's part of what he's alleged to be part of, then it's super He's definitely part of what he's alleged to be part of. I'm going to go on the record and say he's absolutely part of that, and we'll talk about that. He's not He's not a nice guy. I wasn't trying to defend this a great citizen. I mean, he's in jail for a long time for a reason. Yeah, but guess what the possibility of problem? She doesn't get that anyways,

W go Australia. Einem was born in nineteen forty five or maybe nineteen fifty nine, I'm not sure, to be honestly. When you google him, right, there's usually that like preview of the Wikipedia page, and on the preview it says born in nineteen fifty nine, and you click through and it's like born in nineteen So I literally don't know ye what year he was born in I'm I so too. That's what I'm going with for all of the like ages that we're gonna refer to in a little bit.

But just so you guys know, there is that discrepancy on the Internet Internet somewhere, I'm going to say that that was a Wikipedia update that then got cash by. Yeah it's possible. Yeah, Um, so he was born in Australia because it was a suspect and he was born in it would have been seven yea. Probably not that his Wikipedia and Murtipedia page list his number of victims as one to five plus. Probably doesn't. He is currently

serving life with possibility of parole somehow. Like we said, I kind of suspect he's never going to get He's definitely not. But the fact that it's a possibility is interesting to me. To understand why he's so horrible, you have to learn about something that happened in the late seventies to mid eighties in Adelaide called the Family murders.

Who in hell named this the media? Actually yeah, folcally this is it's a group of suspects that was called the Family and police are adamantly against calling them that because they feel like it gives legitimacy to a group of people who did some really bad stuff but aren't affiliated with each other anymore. I don't know how the police choose to refer to these guys, so unfortunately, we're going to refer to them as the family. How well

documented is the existence of this group? Um, it's from what I have read, it's internally confirmed within the police. The problem you run into, um shockingly, put on your tin hats, is that everybody but I am is allegedly either a really successful business person or connected to the politics society, politicians, judges, yeah, um, or just you know,

rich business people, so they've got the connections. So it's actually when you when you research about these they're referred to as um item and then you've got suspect one, two, and three. They're not named, even though the police are pretty sure they knew who these people are. How do psychotic perverse like this find each other? I mean, and seriously interesting, isn't it. You just like walk up to your guy in the bar and say, hey, what are you into? And they meet each other on per book.

Yeah in the seventies. Yeah, yeah, But I've always wondered about, like like previously, like we talked about Leonard Lake and Charles Ing you know each other. That was a prison Yeah, but those two met in prison. But it's like, you know, how did they One of them said, Hey, you know, I really like this torturing and raping and murder. How

about you do me? No, I don't know, and I especially don't know how these guys all met, but they did, and together they are suspected to be responsible for at least five, but probably twelve or thirteen murders all um, almost all young people. The oldest one is twenty five, but that's an outlier. The bulk of them are under seventeen. And as it turns out, all but one of the

like five like definitely attributed to these people. Murderers are unsolved, so that means that we know what we're doing next October. He just kidding. Um. The one that has been solved is the one that von Einen is serving life for the murder of Richard Kelvin in Um nineteen eighty three. I don't want to go too deep into this. It's

really really vicious. But Richard was a fifteen year old boy who was kidnapped, raped, sodomized, and tortured for five weeks until his death caused by massive blood loss due to an anal dream. Um. His body was dumped on July three, unceremoniously and really poorly hidden right next to an airfield, and they found a lot of drugs. They found a quote massive amount of um what they call hypnotic drugs, drugs which are sedatives, um. And it was four different kinds and this is this is what this

is what did Yeah, they did a search of his house. Um. Actually they did a search of people who had been prescribed these drugs, and a Mr. B Von I'm in I M can be the names to the I'm sorry came up and the police knew this name because he had been questioned in conjunction with four other almost identical cases.

Apparently his prescription was for a massive amount of these drugs too, Wasn't it like a couple of thousand pills over the course of like two years that he had been prescribed like eight Michael, all four of these um. But he he was found to be in possession of two of the drugs that were found in Richard's system. So the police went to his house. They said, hey, uh, can we search your house? And he said yeah, totally, um. And they found one of the well, they found one

of the drugs in his medicine cabinet. He said, oh, it's prescribed to me. And they said, okay, are there any other drugs in the house and he said no, no, And they pulled a wardrobe away from the door and there was another bottle of one of the other kinds of medicines that was found in richard system. And they said, as this years and he said, oh, yeah, but I

don't take it a whole lot anyway. It's actually kind of god, I hate to say this, it's kind of an interesting case if you want to read about it. There's a lot of really good reading out there on this. But that was a lot of other physical evidence. And so luckily and yeah, frankly, I think for considering the severity of the crime, they should have strung him up. Yes, So the case was really really strong against him. He

had been acting kind of suspicious the entire time. Um. So he was eventually sentenced to life in prison with a twenty four year no parole term that was immediately appealed and amended to a thirty six year no parole term. The term was up in two thousand seven, but the at time Premier of South Australia vowed that he would not leave jail alive if it's a thirty six year no parole term. And he went to jail in eighty three that oh, three thirteen. Did he go to jail

that year? Yeah, that means but it was nine? Sorry, sorry, I guess I didn't mention there. They push up parole for things like good behavior. Okay, got it. I was the math wasn't working, And I think that it's possible that I got that number from the twenty four year no parole term, not the thirty six but he was up for parole. Did it didn't go through? I will never go through. It won't anyhow. The family is likely responsible for the other four murders um starting in nineteen

seventy nine of mostly teenage boys. All five of them died due to massive blood loss caused by an adal injury UM. Oh, except for one of them was undetermined because farmer had set the body on fire on accident um bad tractor. So the thing about em didn't the jury deliberate deliberate for like all of three hours before it was actually seven and a half a half. Yeah. Yeah, so, um, well, but why is Vonayan considered a suspect in the Bouman

children disappearance? Good question. Neither of you asked it. Shame on you. I was letting your listeners ask it. Well, I mean, I mean his m O doesn't necessarily match the Beaumont children. Yeah. So this the allegation actually stems in part from, uh, some footage that was taken by a local news station at the time when the initial

search was mounted for the Beaumont children. UM. And in one clip, the police are searching a storm drain and there are a lot of onlookers and one of the men looking on looks almost exactly like I am, at like twenty or twenty one, which is how old he would have been at the time. UM. And they actually found an image of him from like four or five years later, when he was twenty five. UM. And then they for reference, they darkened his hair a little bit

and gave him similar sunglasses. So, UM, I know our listeners don't have this image, but if you will turn the page, do look rather similar. It's it's a startling similarity, and it's a good comparison. And I would say that it's not. He doesn't necessarily look like an everyday Joe. You know when I look at this image, I mean, you know, when you look at that image, you're not immediately like black could be anybody. It's they look he's got a very distinct feature. He's got a distinct dry

line and chin. He's got a real jetting chin. Yeah, although the fact that he was just sort of hanging around while the police were doing their thing doesn't necessarily prove much of anything, certainly not, but but it would place him at the area at that time. Apparently the report I read some reports that one of the men standing next to him also looks very similar to to another one of the alleged families that the old man, because the people who were standing there, they're kind of

in pairs. There's one pair and then there's one him and this other guy. And I assumed that they were

talking about the guy. So the other part of this is the statements by um a witness which which was just referred to as Mr B. And he's deemed a highly credible witness for almost everything, and he gave a lot of information that led to the arrest and conviction of on Iron allegedly He once told Mr B that he had several years ago, taken three children from a beach, taken them home, and um quote conducted experiments on them. He said that he had performed performed a surgery on

each of them. Uh, then quote connected them together. And I really hope it just means he tied them together, not surgically attached them. I don't know that. I kind of think, uh. And one of the children had died during the operations, so he killed the other two and then dumped their bodies in the Bushland's home operation. Yeah, I can see how that would kill somebody. Yeah, And apparently actually he did live in the area and did go to Glenelg Beach to perv on the changing room

a lot, And I guess it's possible. I don't know a whole lot about psychopathic ms and if they age or change at all. But if he were a young man targeting a younger demographic and that demographic aged with him, that's not something I've ever heard of. I don't know.

I don't know either young boys you're into young men, or you just kill people at random, Like I've never I've never heard of anything where it's he was a young man, so he was into children, and then when he was a middle aged man, he was into young man and progressing that way. I guess it was pure speculation, but if there, if it were because of some sort of trauma, that it would it could potentially age with you.

But I don't know. Cason desires change with time, and that goes for psychos as well as regularly, but also potentially that he you know, if he was a psycho and was really his draw was too much younger children, and when he was working alone, he had been targeting younger children, and then he found this group of people that was like, dude, seriously like four year olds. I don't know, fourteen year olds is like more where it's at.

That's fine, So I don't but I don't know. I guess there's also a possibility of that or there's influence well, you know, and this he if if what we're talking about is correct, he is then exactly who you were speculating a about one of you. Recently, when we talked about the serial killer, we were just kind of theorizing the serial killer who continually changed their m oh, they didn't actually have I'm sure you're the one who brought that up. Actually, I don't think that was me. I

think that was one of you. But the point is this, that's that's a good that that's a that's a good idea. It's a good I mean, it's a it's an interesting point. I I think that personally, if you're targeting, you know, people in the four to nine year old range, there's a couple of good reasons for it, and it's probably it probably is not going to change. One handy thing about little kids is that they're fairly naive and small

and weak and so. But I guess if like, if you're thinking, like I want to overpower and do horrible things to a person, right, if you're one single person, you're going to target something that's easier than if you're a group of five grown men, four grown men, three children. Though isn't easy that's gained their trust. I don't know. Again, I'm not arguing pro or con on this one. It's hard. It's hard to tell. And then I guess a few other things we need to mention because I'm just going

to move this forward a little bit. Um. One is that apparently Vaughan I'm in was um he was reported to be preoccupied with children, whether that like we've been arguing back and forth, Mr B did say that he was preoccupied with children and that he actually claimed to have also taken two girls from a football match and killed them, because he actually claimed that, or was he

just accused of that? You know? He actually he told Mr B. So this was like in an encounter, he told Mr B. Oh, yeah, I took three kids several years ago. I took three kids from a beach and did this to them. And then a few years later I took two girls from a football match. He didn't never like say specifically like it was these kids and

I took them. Um. So I think, to be honest with you, that lends additional credibility to me that he was telling the truth versus like him just kind of bragging, because if he were trying to brag to brag, he would have said, like I'm responsible for the Beaumont kids, I'm responsible for this specific case. It wouldn't have been like a vague yeah, I did this thing in my mind, people could commit these heinous crimes and then actually bragged

to people. I guess Mr B was one of his fellow purvs, right, I think the sense that I have is that Mr b was kind of like a an associate, not one that was responsible for like actually killing and kidnapping and things like that, but that he was granted some sort of immunities for his testimony. But the case that Steve was alluding to was that, um, Joanne Radcliffe and Christie Gordon are two girls did go missing from a football game uh in Adelaide in nineteen seventy three.

The other issues that there is is, I know we didn't mention this when we were kind of going through but the description, Yeah, the the witnesses description of the blonde man in the blue swim trunks. Um, they guessed that he was in his thirties, UM, which was older than von I m would have been. UM. But photos of him from around that time do actually really closely match the sketches. He was kind of a sandy blonde

at that point. UM. And then I would be remiss if I didn't mention the first reason that anybody knew about Von Einman, and that is the night of May tenth,

nineteen seventy two, which is just weird. If you read his Wikipedia page, you will find a heading called the Good Samaritan and on night of May nine, two gay men were thrown into the river Torrens and this attack was widely believed to have been carried out by a group of police officers squad h Yeah, and one of the men did drown and the other one survived with

a broken leg or maybe broken ankle. Accounts Ferry broken something, but he I guess played dead until the cops left, crawled out of the river, crawled to a road, flagged down a passing car. The driver took the man to the hospital. The driver was Bevin Spencer Van I am, I am, which is weird, Like I know you would think would like it. I'll push the guy back down the river back and then got down and murder him.

It's just it's just a little weird, I guess in my mind, which is like it just kind of brings up that like stigma that we have about psychopaths that were like, yeah, they just want to kill everyone, but they don't kill a certain act. Yeah, he has he has very specific tastes. So anyway, that's um, that's him, and I kind of like him. I wasn't able to find explicitly where in South Australia he was living at the time of the disappearance of the Beaumont children, but

it sounds like he was in the area. He you know, kind of casually claimed that he was responsible for a lot of these disappearances. I think he was probably certainly capable of it. He kind of matches the description. I don't know. I think he's a plausible He certainly is. We'll never will probably never know unless well, he's still alive,

so he might fess up one of these things. He's still alive, but you but he has the possibility of parole, even though people think he's not gonna ever make it out. But if he were, like, yeah, I did those crimes, like he'd be dead pretty quick and he's never going to get out of parole anyway, though, somebody needs to convince that. Yeah, but there might be a deathbed confession confession you know, hopefully one can help. Yeah. So yeah, that's h that's my guys. Yeah, my guy's just a

total champ too. So thanks for whoever saddled me with this one. You volunteered, I actually didn't. I said I don't care. Joe was the one who was typing that we don't care. Well, let's talk about this guy in true killer fashion. He's got three names. He's always identified as Arthur Stanley Brown. We're just gonna kind of take him, as we do with a lot of these guys. We're just gonna take you kind of through who they are and what they've done, and then why it's relevant to

the case. So Arthur was born nine lived in a town, uh most of his life, a place called Townsville. It fully sounds like it's out of a cartoon. It's kind of like towntown town Berg. Yeah. Townsville is northwest of Brisbane. It's god, it's like kilometers, so it's it's a good distance away from there. But that was kind of a landmark. I could find what is that in miles? I don't know, Joe, what is that in miles? Kilometers? That's all right, I can get my phone and get the calculmar. I want

you to do that. He So Brown did Mary. He married a woman whose name was Hester Anderson. I'm sorry, Okay, Yeah, Devin likes the name Hester. Hester had three children of her own from her first marriage, and uh, I'm gonna say thankfully she never had any children with Arthur. According to the you will see it referred to as either the family secret or the family legend. Everybody knew in the family that Arthur had a thing for kids, and then he was a pedophile. And there are allegations that

he molested a number of children in the family. And I don't just mean his wife's children. It sounds like he was any children in the family that he could get his grubby little hands. This is the one that the book's being written about. Or is it a different person? What book are you talking about? The satin Oh No, that's that's Harry. Different guy, that's Harry. Yeah, that's a

different guy, totally different person, very similar backgrounds. But it's from the accounting that the parents told the kids to keep away from him, and they told him, they told him why they were Evidently didn't hide the fact that they considered him a pedo. They don't understand why they didn't. Just like to the police, I say the same freaking thing. I don't know. But I did learn a really an

interesting slang, which is rock spider. Evidently that's slang for a pedophile in Australia and I've never heard of that one. But the kids used to all of the kids in the family would refer to him as a rock spider, so they all knew stay away from that guy. He He is pretty well known because of a case that happened. It's a disappearance in killing that of two young girls

in nineteen seventy's the s of August nineteen seventy. We have Susan and Judith Mackay and these girls are five and seven and they disappeared from a suburb which is eight Conville. Believe it's how your pronounced. Their bodies were. They disappeared on the twenty six. Their bodies were found two days later in a creek bed and they had been molested and both of them had been stabbed in the chest three times of peace. One of them was

strangled that the stabs weren't what killed them. One of them was strangled and one of them it's officially it was a fixiate it with sand asfixiated Yeah, that word, um, I don't or I don't know if that is that or shove face in sand till run off. I don't know. But but the hunt for the girls was huge and there eventually was a big reward put out for information. It was ten thousand dollars at the time, which is equivalent to about a hundred grand today. People came forward,

they had all these stories of what they had seen. Um. But some people to people who came forward that would become important to this are a man who was said he saw the girls at a bus stop at eight ten that morning, and then another person who said he saw the girls in a car at a gas station at eleven o'clock in the morning, and the guy at the gas station said he overheard the girls, one of them saying, you said you were going to take us to see mummy. I want to see mummy now, So

that you know that kind of to me. I don't know why. Well I do know why it was discredited at the time, and but we won't get too much into that. So here's what goes on though, is that people say they see these girls in a car, and the car description is really really bad. It turns out to be described as a blue car. But there's three different kinds. There is a Holden e H which is kind of a it's it's like a late sixties that

flat square style of car. Yeah, yep. There's there's a couple of witnesses who say well, no, it wasn't that. Instead it was a Vauxhall Victor, and the Vauxell is more of a nineteen fifties round ish car. You know, they don't look they don't look much alike at all. And what's even worse is that the people who say that it was a Vauxhall Victor, they eventually changed their description to a different kind of hole that. I think it's a hold In f J, which is also kind

of a nineteen fifties roundies style looking car. But the one thing that those two people do agree upon is the fact that this blue car had a driver's side door that wasn't the same color as the rest of the car. Interesting, if you're gonna be a handy tip for you would be serial killers out there, you want to like not have cars like that. Yeah, yeah, well that's the focus. Yeah, or an Escort or something. But Honda, Honda Accord, maybe a Kia maybe Kia. Well, well, the

point is the cops went with a Holden. They decided it's got to be the Holden. I don't remember. I think it was the the e H is the description they went with. So people are looking for holdens that have a weird colored door and obviously never find the car. We then jumped forward to and at the point Arthur's one of his relatives sees a TV show where the

case of these two girls is. You know, it's one of those kind of cold case rehash TV shows, and she says, well, you know, the description kind of sounds like that's that skiezy uncle of mine. And she reports him, and okay, she sees the sketch of the man. They had a sketch of the man who's driving the car, and you think, well, okay, it's like thirty years later. He can't look like the same dude except the brown. Really, he didn't he aged, but his face looked remarkably similar

from nineteen seventy to two thousand. It got wrinkly, but it didn't sag or really change at all. He's one of those disturbing people who I you've I've talked about. Yeah, he just he doesn't he Yeah, he's that painting somewhere. He doesn't look like he aged. That. That explains something here, because I was going to mention later, but being born in nineteen twelve, the Guy and the Beast was described as mid thirties and he would have been fifty four,

so maybe he did at just age really really well. Well, I mean we've had this conversation. I have an uncle who is in his seventies, and if you didn't know what you would think he was in his early to mid fifties. And you both have met him and probably didn't realize how old he was. Yeah, my mom, I have memories of her getting carded. You don't have memories until you're you know, really like five six. She had me when she was thirty five. I get carded still,

which is weird. I get carted all the time, you do know. I get carded very rarely get There are people who yeah, definitely just age. Well yes, well this guy, you know. Okay, so we're thirty years later the cops when they go ahead and they follow up on this tip, and then suddenly they start realizing some things like he had a Vauxhall Victor at the time that the girls were murdered, and the lo and behold it had it was blue and it had an off colored door. Huh.

And he did some weird stuff like he took the door off and he buried it and he replaced it with another door. And then later on went and dug that door back up. His family's like, you're so weird, what are you doing. He gave some weird excuse about how he didn't want to be involved in the case, and like, really, to me, things that call suspicion to yourself. Yet nobody did anything at the time. That's kind of a kind of just a lot of work when he could have just taken it somewhere and got to body

shop and gotten it repainted. Yeah. Although the other on the other hand, if there's this search happening for a car and you're responsible auto shop, somebody brings a car that matches that description with a weird description, that's the problem. Is the cops were golden going with the hold in and he had the Vauxhall, so he totally could have done something simple enough for all he knew. They were just yeah, he was being smart. I don't know he was.

He wasn't being very smart at all. I would have pushed it into the river and reported for insurance. So here's some of the other things that kind of became damning evidence against him is that he um for thirty years. God, I think it was like thirty years or something like that. He was a carpenter and he worked for the Queensland Department of Public Works. Takes care of public buildings, is

kind of the simple way to think of that. And one of the things he had to do was he had been working at the time the girls disappeared at their school, so he would have seen them painting the school. Right, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm making a TV reference. Yeah, I was totally gonna say, wait a minute, you're making a TV show, Joe. I am um ten points to Raven. We have to do the clothing. That's Raven clothe, Okay, Harry Potter jokes point being he uh. He gets he

gets hauled into court, they press charges. The first trial ends in a hung jury. They try to try him again. His lawyer then files emotion and it eventually goes through saying he's not fit to stand trial because he was starting to suffer from dementia and he had Alzheimer's and

he died in two thousand and two. And it's fairly that they're fairly certain that he is responsible for the murder of these two young girls, but they can't say for sure because there's things like there's no records of where he worked at certain times, so some of the

stuff is spotty. Like they know he was at the school where the these two girls were at s were murdered, but like for the Beaumont children, they don't have records because there is um There was a giant flood and it wiped out a bunch of records because you know, back in the day when everything's done in paper, waterlogged

records are useless. But they think that he might be involved in this because if he was working for the Department of Public Works, he could be connected to the Beaumont case because that means that he would have gone where they told him to go. It's a long way away from where he lived. It's d kilometers, it's fifteen hundred miles. I think if I actually did the math on, people do have to travel that far from work, especially

in Australia where it's everything's kind of far. Everything is very far away from a lot of the things that are major on the coast, and the coastline is long, so it's going to be a big area. But I get that. Yeah, so I'm not sure. I think this guy is kind of weak. Well, no, I mean, it's it's there's some other things. Well, I don't know that he's I don't know that he's necessarily we I mean, there's the whole he looked young earth than he actually was.

Bit there's working for the Public Works Department. Um, the records being destroyed in the it's the Brisbane flood seventy four is the one that did it. But there's that, Or there's the fact that he worked for the Public Works Department, so theoretically he probably had access to the records room to go file his reports and stuff. Yeah, he could have destroyed the records of what he did

if it was just a regular working stiff. I'm not sure how much time he would have had to spend loafing on the beach, you know, you know, getting into young children, that is That is kind of the odd One of the things that's that's hard for me with this is that, Yeah, he would have had to have been on the beach and been there for an extended amount of time, as I said before, because the kids didn't go to the beach every day, so he would

just be prowling around. But if if he were working at their school, Jane or Arness, Yeah, if he were working at Jane's school, for instance, and had developed a relationship with her and then bumped into her at the beach. Yeah, because they think the sense that I had of those children was that Jane was the responsible. Well, she was responsible, but she was also the most shy of them. So I think that, you know, had she accepted someone in general,

the other two would have followed her lead. You know, if she said no, it's okay, you guys, this is my friend, they would have been like, oh, yeah, of course that's okay. Jane says it's you know, okay, So it's okay. I don't I don't like Brown for this one. I think that it's it's a stretch for him to be that far from home, but I can see why people would would lump him in, especially when everybody kind

of knew he really had a thing for kids. Yeah, yeah, all right, we were we were promised some more suspects. There are actually three more. I know they're a little weak. Um yeah, they do kind of progressively get weak, lower and lower on the possibility, and it's like I organized

it that way or something something. The uh, well, the next two are really kind of weak because they were really way too young to have been this guy on the beach in his mid thirties, although again, you know that doesn't necessarily well yeah, also the guy in the beach might not have been involved at all. And here's

the deal. You know, supposing you were that guy and you're living in Adelaide at the time, or you hang out on that beach and you knew the kids and you read about this in the paper, are you going to come forward and say, Hey, I I hung out with the kids a few times. But are you going to do that? I guess I would. I guess yeah. And maybe this is like the difference between like being

a lady and being a dude. But like I guess I would because I would have nothing to fear front, right, really well, but I think he would say, like, yeah, like here's my story. Do everything you can to like search my house, you know, see if I've ever been prescribed any you know, like any like just do everything that you can. Here's the difference. There's there's two two

problems here. One you're a woman, and but two it's also nineteen six and it's easy to just fall off the radar and stay away because any you know, cases easily. And I will say at the time. I feel like, whether it was Australia or England or the United States or wherever, things like this become a witch hunt and as soon as you do something, everybody is putting you

under the microscope. I guess for so for me, like he would have had to have left town, right because if this guy lived in that area and stayed in that area, the fact that, like so many different witnesses placed him with the Beaumont children. You go out one day to dinner and people are like, oh my god, it's you. You're the one I saw. Police everybody, this is the one I saw. Like, that's that's what's going to happen in that case, right, either you come forward

or you leave, that could happen. Well, no, I mean you could just Uh here's why why I probably would not come forward if it if it had been me, I would probably stop going to the beach, but I wouldn't necessarily leave town. Uh. And if if I eventually I did get busted, I just say, hey, you know, you know, I never had any reason to think that it was me. I never had anything to do with this. And then except I mean, except for if somebody like a bunch of people say, no, we saw you with

the kids. Yeah, then you said, then you have to explain why you didn't come forward, and that makes you look even guiltier. And the circle that we can get but you can pretty easily. It is it is. There's

there's good arguments on both sides. But the thing about it is is if you come forward and then you become a person of interest, then somebody at the police department leads it to the press, and then once it's out in the press and your name and your photograph are out there, your life is just your one over you I hear you. Yeah, yeah, it's again, it's like both arguments. Yeah, that's why I probably if it had been me, I probably wouldn't come forward. I just go

on a really long vacation. But so or find a job in another town. But let's get back to our our next two suspects. Well, these guys actually could have been involved. I mean they they were not good people, and but they were really way too young to have been this thirty five to forty year old guy. But

that doesn't mean they weren't involved. They maybe could have been involved, because this this is not necessarily just one guy that did this and as we've talked about, like both of you know, both Steve and I had suspects that we're not mid thirties, but definitely matched the police sketches, you know, on either end. And I want to throw one more suspect. By the way, Jane, I think she objected the two years. Okay, so what's your first one? All right, let's go right to the real suspects here,

James Ryan O'Neill. Uh Si. Again, this guy is not a wrong suspect, but we'll talk about it for a minute. Anyway. Uh he was born Lee Anthony bridge Art, and I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. I mean, it looks like he can pronounce it brid Gart, but I'm gonna go with bridge Art. But he was born in nineteen seven, so make him a bit young. But inten seventy one, he was charged with twelve crimes related to abductions and sexual assaults of four boys. So he skipped town and

skipped bail. Yeah, really weird, and went to West. I mean, he's if somebody has abducted an assaulted four boys, why would you put them on on bail? Why would you look up? Yeah? I mean really well, because you can't. You don't know that they have, right, I mean, I guess I would set Bill awfully high. But well, anyway, he skipped bail, went to Western Australia. He changed his

name to James Ryan O'Neill. Uh, and was during his time in Western Australia that he actually told several people that he was the one who carried out the Billmont kidnapping. I guess people didn't take them all that seriously. This is you know, this is again not that long after. This is like, you know, five, six, seven years after, and uh, it was still a pretty huge deal. So it's kind of surprising that nobody ever talked to the

police about this until far far later. But anyway, in uh February nine, he abducted and murdered a nine year old boy named Rickey Smith, and not too long after that he did the same thing to another nine year old named Bruce Wilson. And Bruce Wilson's body was found in May and James O'Neill fell out a suspicious for the killing, and Vestal was dragged downtown and interrogate he he fessed up. He took the police to Ricky Smith's body. Yeah, and so he was kind of busted. He was convicted

of the crime. He's a sociopath, he has uh he has sort of hinted that he might have been involved. He was interviewed for three years by a detective named Gordon Davy, who eventually came to believe that he was the guy who hadn't have the Beaumont children. But again, he was on eighteen years old when the kids disappeared, so I don't know. Again, but but again, the guy

in the beach might not have been the kidnapper. I've been able to find any pictures of him, but I've also read that he doesn't look like the kidnappers description. But again, again, we don't know that the guy at the beach was actually a kidnapper, as the South Australian Police have questioned them and they don't think he's a good suspect and uh he uh. He apparently was involved

in a lot of abductions of kids. There were there were a serious of other other ones between Ricky Smith and Bruce Wilson's Wilson were like another four or five who were abductive but they managed to escape. So his his m O was again to kidnap the kids one at a time. But he the one is he the one who, when asked, has confessed to every abduction that they've asked him about. Yeah, that was that was our

next suspek. Yeah, he was the next one. Was the one where they were like, oh, you did this one right, and he's like, well, I was in that area right this It was in that area, but I don't remember if I did it or not. Yeah, a true psychopathy. Yeah, yeah. Derek Percy, Derek Ernest Percy. Yeah, family is very famous Australian criminal um. He murdered a twelve year old girl named Evon Toy and he was found not guilty by reason of insanity, which that doesn't mean that he got

to walk free. He's still locked up. He's said he's psychotic, maybe skechophrenic, that he had this legitimate psychiatric issue whereby he really honestly couldn't remember a lot of stuff that he'd done, because that's what he would always say. It's like you said, it's say, oh you know I was in Adelaide. I was, I was, I was right there in the immediate area, but I don't really remember killing

anybody or conducting anybody. I could say that about every day. Yeah, I remember being there, I remember killing I remember being in Portland when Kirrain went missing. But I don't know. Yeah, I know I was. I was here. I'm sorry. Yeah no, but yeah, I I don't think he was. I'm not sure that he's crazy at all. I think he was just a sociopath. Luckily for us, he died in prison. But he was also much too young. He was also again too young, but again he could have been involved

in some way or another. He placed himself at the sign at the crime scene on that day, but then said he couldn't recall if he did it or not. But here's the deal. It's like, like say, everybody they asked him about it, he would say, oh, yeah, I was right there. I actually don't remember actually kidnapping that particular kid and killing him. You know, he he said this stuff. I think he was just playing the corps. He was j Yeah, yeah, he was Percy, Derek Percy.

Apparently they found maps in his possession of the scene of the Beaumont crime with the area circled in with a pen. But that doesn't necessarily mean much. I mean, he might have just it might have been. This is terrible to say, but it might have been a fan thing. Yeah, it could have been. It could have been, or it could have been he just wanted to It could have been he wanted to have something that to just sort

of implicate himself. But I mean nothing serious. Leting a map with the circle drawing out it is not going to get you the electric chair. But yeah, it'll drive the cops crazy, it'll drive the public crazy and the parents crazy. But yeah, it doesn't get them much of anywhere. But again, he was much too young according to what he was. He was way too young. Uh, it's not

even a parent that you know. It's thought everybody believes at least that whoever did this would have had to have a car to get the kids out of there quickly. I would agree with that. Yeah, and it's not clear that he had a car. It's not even clear that he even had a driver's license at that age, and so so that kind of lets him out. Well he was, but it was a weird, weird person. I've heard this story. This is a little bit apocry full, but when he was a teenager, he was spotted by some other boys

at a watering hole. He was dressed in girl's clothes and he was stabbing at a pair of girls panties and yelling Uh yeah, okay, yeah. Anyway, then he went down to the river's edge and defecated in the water, and then the boy all the boys, of course, ran back to school and told everybody about it, and uh and actually it didn't Nobody believed them. Everybody thought it was so strange that they were Everybody was sure that they were just making it up. You're making it up. Yeah,

I cut it out. He was. Actually, he had a reputation as for stealing women's underwear. Apparently the women's underwear tended to disappear everywhere he went and such a weird thing to do. I know, I just go buy some guy. Yeah yeah. It was also known to be kind of colder and emotionless. So obviously this is this guy is not a model citizen. Uh. He spent some time in the Navy and was still in the Navy when he

was arrested for the murder of Yvon. Yeah. And one reason a lot of people rule him out also is that the Adelaide Oval case, that was the one where the two girls went missing at the football game. Yeah, it's very big because, and this is one reason I don't totally buy this, but when that happened, he was in prison, and since everybody thinks that they were committed by the same person, that would rule him out. It's a suspect. Do you think that it was the same Someday?

Probably we will, I don't. I don't think this totally rules him out because they could have been done by two different people. I don't. A lot of people are absolutely certain they were done by the same Yeah, I mean, one of the things we glossed over is the fact that that area has had a almost prolific number of young people disappear in that kind of same area, not like recently, not, but there was a there was a lot of kids and young adults disappeared or were murdered.

And uh we I don't think any of us wanted to touch on that in this show because it's like it's a huge, huge thing that aren't prepared to take on, but it is. It is probably I guess worth a mention that, like, there were some other things that happened around that time that the same person could or could not have been responsible for him. But yeah, lots of stuff going on anyway, So he just ruled out Derek Percy. I think, yeah, he was he was weak from the start. Yeah.

Last of all, this guy is a more recent nominee for a suspect who is Harry Phipps. He he was the former chairman and co founder of a company called Casteloy, and somebody is apparently writing a book about him, or maybe it's out by now. I think it's called The Satin Man, and there's really not It's it's a pretty tenuous case, so I'm not going to spend more than

thirty seconds on this. Uh yeah, but apparently one of his sons came forward after Phipps died, well after he died, and said that Phips, Harry Phipps, was a child abuser and a cross dresser, which of course doesn't make him a This is the one that the book is being written about, right, It's the whole long book. It's called The Satin Man. Yeah, finding the Murderer of the Beaumont Children. And like, this guy was a horrible man, and here's all the dorm things he did to me, and that

obviously makes him responsible for my dad was a jerk. Yeah, Like I'm pretty sure that's my understanding of the whole entire book. I haven't read it or anything, but my understanding of the book is like, here all the reasons that my dad was a jerk, and he must have of course been responsible. I know. Yeah, well, the the the evidence that I know. I have not read the book, I do, like I said, as far as I know,

it's not even out yet. But this guy says this is Harry Phipps's son, says that on the day of the Bee kids disappeared, he saw three children in their backyard, which I'm not quite well wasn't And Harry Phipps also Dick kind of resembled the description of the guy at the beach. Yeah, well, but wasn't he connected to the property that they dug up? Yeah? I don't know, not that I know. I thought, I guess I had somewhere that he was connected to that property that the psychic

was like, yeah, the kids are buried there. I thought that he was the owner or worked there or something. There was some connection between him and that property, and that's what made the case quote unquote stronger. I you know, I've never actually heard who the owner of that warehouse was. I've never heard. I don't know, so that was I guess that was the only thing that I would add to that. It was but a kid. But then again, if if, if Phipps was connected to that, but I'll

guess what kids bodies weren't found there. Yeah, no, exactly, Yeah, but that that was one of the reasons I think that the family was like, well, he was kind of a jerk, and also he was connected vaguely to this area, so that strengthened their case a little bit. But you know, I think that again I don't remember, so please everybody

forgive me if I've just said something that's percent wrong. Yeah. Well, I think that the one reason I don't buy him the Phipps theory at all is that you just committed a major crime, which is kidnapping. You take the kids to your own house and let them out in the back of Hello, I don't I'll buy this at all. I totally don't buy Harry Phipps. So I think, you know, maybe he was a cross dresser, maybe he was kind of mean to his kids, but you know, that's about it,

and you know, who knows, maybe even that's not true. Yeah, So and that's it for the suspects. Well yeah, and then there's the whole like amorphous like that. It could be in random whoever. Yeah, I don't, it's not on our list. Yeah, I don't think anyway, even our strongest suspect to his one item is Frankly, I got to say, the evidence is pretty thin. Yeah, it's not good. It's not great, but he is. I I think he's the strongest of the suspect. Oh, yes, he is, but it's

still now not great. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, people lock your kids up, put tracking devices on them, chip them, chip your kids. What's that? What's that song? Lock your kids to hide your wives? No, it's hide your kids, hied your wife's That's that's I used to live by evidently. Yeah. I you know, I don't have any kids. If if I have any, whenever I send them out of the house, I'm going to be trapped them. Yeah, because you're definitely and like prime kid having time. Yeah yeah, alright, kids

wear your glass and nailing crusted jackets. Yeah, you know you duct tape clean war minds to the front of the back of face. Yeah. Well, so, as we said, there is a one million dollar reward for anybody who has information about this. So, if you have information about this, the fact that I just said it's a million dollars, and tell us your theory, we'll cut you in. Yeah, we'll cut you in. We'll give you a one percent

sounds fair in Australia, Australia. If you want us to solve the mystery for you, your economy being Yeah, no, you're not gonna do that. Just bump it up to one point four million, which is the equivalent of one billion in American and then we'll tell you. We'll tell you who did it, where the bodies are? Yeah, but do you have anything else? Do you have anything else? Yeah? No, I doubt this case will ever be solved. I agree, it's unfortunately, well until they raised the money, of course.

Yeah yeah, and then we'll solve it. UM. So if you want to see some of the links that we used to research this show, UM, or you want to leave a comment, UM, you can also listen and download episodes on our website. That website is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. Um. You are probably listening to us on iTunes. If you are, leave as a comment and rating just it helps people find us UM continually moving up the ranking, moving up the rankings. Yeah. In fact, um, I think

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gonna get out of here. Happy October everyone. Yeah, so yeah, we'll see you in November. Yeah. So you guys are gonna meet your candy right? What candy Halloween? I'm sugar free? Yeah, actually I will because I'm sure mine's full of razor bloods. You guys suck for life