Episode 515: The Murder of the Grimes Sisters

I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at a high school in upstate New York. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast. What's the answer, and what do you do if they tell you it's all in your head?

Hysterical, a new podcast from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free on Wondery. Plus. Hey weirdos, I'm Alina.

And I'm ash, and this is morbid.

And it's morbid in the morning.

It is, and my brain is also not functioning on any kind of high frequency right now, so I apologize. At a time. She's a little wily today, folks. I said my child's name wrong while I was just talking about her.

I like, I put like, all the names into one. Yeah, that was interesting, I liked that. Yeah, I'm just not. I'm not with it, I'm not with it.

Get with it, I'm trying to get with it. Maybe we should get you a pomp-tini. Imagine, imagine.

8am Pomp-tini. Just drinking a pomp-tini at 8am, honestly. Goals Lisa Vanderpump. Is that you? Oh, my Lord?

Yeah, I don't do. I don't think I have anything exciting to talk about, maybe because my brain isn't working, so yeah, I don't know. The actor strike is over, that's exciting.

So now we'll get TV. Yay, I'm just excited about Stranger Things season five. Hell yeah, brothers, so it's countdown to my wedding is on again.

Again, everybody was very concerned that me and Drew didn't get married in October, like we said we were going to. But you know, family things happen, you move things, and now we're getting married at another time, there you go.

But I'm not telling, I'll never tell. Yeah, we're almost there, folks, so close I'm about to be a whole ass wife, you will.

It's true, yep, but before that, we're going to talk about some terrible things. Yeah, that's our job, that's what we do, and we're here to do it.

This particular one that I'm going to talk about is from the fifties. Shut up, I will not shut up, shut up. It's like, in Princess or not Princess diaries.

It's like in mean girls, and she's like, I didn't say anything, I was just going to say that. My case this week is also from the fifties, or my next one, I guess it'll be next week, who knows?

I don't know when any of these come out, it'll be at a time. By the time this comes out, Ash can be married. I have no idea about any concept. Yeah, Mikey just nodded.

So congratulations on getting married. Thank you so much. it was such a great time with you there. Yeah, so we're in the fifties today and this is unsolved technically. Oh, technically.

That tells me it should have been solved. There's someone who's an interesting suspect, who unfortunately we can't really get anymore, but there was someone that they followed. We'll get there, but it's technically unsolved. I really think it has the potential to be closed at some point. OK, can we do, like a little exclamation, maybe?

Yeah, there you go, there you go. I think I would like to see this closed because this is a really, really sad story. And their parents, especially their mother, I feel like carried guilts that she didn't need to carry. Oh, that's terrible.

And I hate that she had it on her and that she felt that way and like, I can't fathom it. So let's get into this horrible, horrible tale, OK, so, the murder of the Grimes Sisters and the investigation that followed is still one of Chicago's most notorious cold cases. And it is one of the most costly and labor intensive searches in the state's history. Wow.

Despite all of the hard work put into search for this killer, the investigation was ultimately hitting dead end after dead end. Partially because of bad leads at times that were chased a little too far. And also some well-intended but very misguided attempts to withhold evidence that allowed this killer to still go unpunished to this day. And it left generations of people wondering what the hell happened to Barbara and Patricia Grimes? Oh, I think I know this one, it's really sad, yeah.

And we'll get to it. But there is some withholding of information from the press and the public. That obviously that is very important sometimes, and obviously that can push a case forward sometimes. I fully support that.

Yeah, in this case, the reasoning behind it was like, and then it actually ended up kind of hurting in the end. Which was obviously not the intent of the people who did it. But it didn't work out well in the end. So, Barbara Grimes was born May 5th, 1941, and Patricia Grimes was born December 31st, 1943, a couple of years later. And a New Year's baby, yeah.

So they were both born and grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and were the third and fourth of what would be seven children born to Joseph and Loretta. Grimes Wow, that's a lot of kids. Joseph and Loretta had married very young. They actually married when they were both 17 years old.

Oh, were they just like in love? They were just in love. And then when they were 19, they had their first child, a daughter, Shirley, with, like, such cute names, I know.

It's really cute, like Loretta, Shirley, Patricia, you know, Barbara. Since they married so young, they didn't really get a chance to pursue a formal education. Yeah, that makes sense.

And they kind of started a family quick, so they definitely struggled in the beginning, yeah, and I mean, with that many children, yeah.

And they relied on welfare, they kind of went without basic needs, a lot like heat and electricity, electricity in the beginning. Eventually, though, that the struggle is only for a little while and they got through it. But during the struggling time, as we know, that can be tough. Yeah, definitely.

They have all these kids that they keep having and the struggle is getting worse, the burden, the financial burden, is becoming harder. But eventually, Joseph did manage to find work as a truck driver. And by the late 1940s, he was making around $80 per week, which now would be about $950 per week. So that was a stable salary. And it did help relieve that financial pressure that was happening, especially having six children and one on the way at that moment.

So at that moment, he had six children and one on the way. That's a lot of pressure. Unfortunately, the couple had not weathered the struggling time as well as they had hoped, and in December 1951, they filed for divorce. Now, luckily for the entire family, including the kids, Joseph and Loretta's divorce was pretty uncomplicated.

They very much agreed on it mutually. There wasn't a lot of fighting, it wasn't a lot of upheaval and nastiness. It was like they still had respect for each other. They just agreed that this wasn't working, too much happened.

And once the papers had been signed and the divorce was official, they went their separate ways. Barbara, Patricia and three of their five siblings remained in the custody of their mother, and Joseph moved to an apartment not far away. They still saw their father. Everything was chunky.

DORY Yeah, now. The only problem was without the income of Joseph's job, although he did pay $35 per week in child support from his $80 a week salary. It's a good chunk. Loretta was forced to find work, and luckily, she quickly did.

She got work as a file clerk for Park Davis Pharmaceuticals. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to really take care of every. I mean, again, they have seven kids, that's a lot, so they did have to rely on welfare, still, some social supports from time to time. She worked a lot of hours, but despite that, she prided herself and everyone said it, including, like everybody. The whole family said it that she was an amazing mother to her kids. And she did the best she could while she was at home, to be there whenever she could.

That's incredible to have that much pressure on you. Of, like, staying afloat financially, working all these hours. And then to still be a great mom when you're home, and to be present and do whatever you could to be there for them. Like, Loretta was killing it, yeah, so, by all accounts, Barbara and Patricia, in particular, were smart, polite, very well-liked girls in their neighborhood, in their whole community.

Really, at school, Barbara ended up having a part-time job at 15 years old, when she was only a sophomore, at Kelly High School. And she actually ended up working at Wolf Furniture House. And she ended up doing that to help her mom make ends meet, so she immediately was like, I want to help.

Because she respected her mom a lot, yeah, now. Her younger sister, Patricia was described as super friendly, a little more outgoing than Barbara and more energetic than Barbara. Barbara and Patricia were also described as seemingly inseparable, and they were said to often walk places hand in hand.

Oh my god, that's so sweet. Now. Barbara is 15, Patricia is 13, so they're pretty close in age.

Pretty close in age, the two girls had a lot of interests in common. But, like many of their peers at the time, what they were really passionate about was Elvis Presley, Elvis baby, Elvis Presley.

Now, in 1956, Presley was only a handful of years into what would be what we all know, an iconic career. You would say, Yeah, he had a pretty iconic career, Elvis.

Huh, yeah, you know now? As devoted Elvis fans, Barbara and Patricia would often spend their afternoons at the local record store listening to his singles, I Love It. They would find anywhere that had a jukebox around town just to hear his music over and over again.

And at home, their whole bedroom was covered in pictures of him that they'd cut out of magazines. You could also get them at the Five and Dime store, so they had purchased them whenever they could. So cool and in the fall. By the fall of 1956, they joined his fan club and were eagerly awaiting their membership cards.

Oh, I love it, that's so much fun, isn't that adorable? It's just like I remember a time when it was like magazines like Teen Beat magazines and like Tiger Beat and all that shit. And you could, like, send away for stuff.

They had, like, fan club mail, that's so fun, it was wild.

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She struck him with her motor vehicle, she had been under the influence, and then she left him there. In January 2022, local woman Karen Reed was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O'Keefe. It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lover's quarrel en route to the next location. What happens next depends on who you ask.

Was it a crime of passion? If you believe the prosecution, it's because the evidence was so compelling. This was clearly an intentional act. And his cause of death was blunt force trauma with hypothermia. Or a corrupt police coverup, if you believe the defense theory, however, this was all a coverup to prevent one of their own from going down. Everyone had an opinion.

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So on November 15th, 1956, Elvis Presley's first feature film, Love Me Tender, was released in theaters across the country. It was something. If you were a devoted Elvis fan, you were going to see that movie a million times. It was just happening. And as dedicated Presley fans, Barbara and Patricia got their opening night. And by Christmas, they'd seen the film a ton of like, dozens of times. I love that so much.

They'd seen it a ton, but Barbara and Patricia just couldn't get enough of it. And on December 28th, my birthday, and a couple of days before one of their birthdays, on December 28th. Barbara and Patricia convinced their mother to allow them to go to the movies to see the film again, like, for the hundred thousandth time now.

Early that week, Barbara had come down with a bad cough and was taking cold medicine for a few days. So Loretta was like, a little reluctant, cause she was like, I don't know you've had a cough. It's the winter. But eventually they begged and begged, and she gave in and let them go.

Probably just wanted to make them happy, and they promised they would be home before midnight. And she was like, Okay, as long as you promise, then you can go now. When she agreed to let the girls go, Loretta gave them explicit instructions to be home by 1145. This gave them enough time to watch two movies that evening.

So when 1145 p.m. came and went and no one came home. Loretta immediately began to get anxious and sent the two, her two other children, Teresa and Joey, to the nearest bus stop to wait for them, hoping that they maybe just got the late bus. But three buses stopped and 15 year old Barbara and 13 year old Patricia did not get off those buses. And you just think of one, the mother, Loretta, having to send the kids out and hoping for the best. But probably thinking, you know, like this isn't right. And then those two siblings watching three buses go by.

Just the increasing worry that was building up, oh my God, I can't even imagine. And then these two come home and say they didn't get off, and Loretta's just panicking. So when she learned that the girls still hadn't returned, she immediately called the local police precinct around 1230 a.m. and sent Teresa and Joey back to the corner to meet the officer. So the kids explained that their sisters were supposed to be home an hour earlier and hadn't arrived.

They hadn't heard anything. The officer immediately put out an alert for the sisters, but they still hadn't heard anything a few hours later. And so Loretta called the precinct again to officially report them missing now. Although the investigation into Barbara and Patricia's disappearance officially began on the morning of December 29th. It didn't really get into high gear until it hit the Chicago newspapers on Monday morning, December 31st, which also happened to be Patricia's birthday, right?

Now, it was by then that the investigators had talked to the staff of the theater. They'd gone door to door speaking to people, they'd searched neighborhoods, garages, alleys, abandoned buildings, everywhere in between.

They found no trace of Barbara and Patricia. And obviously, any child going missing, or multiple children going missing is alarming for the residents of Chicago. But this disappearance started really setting everyone's minds going. Because it definitely reminded them of the disappearance of three local boys whose bodies were discovered on a rural road outside the city. A little over one year earlier. Oh wow, it was very similar. We actually talked about these boys, John and Anton Schuessler and Robert Peterson, in one of our Spooky Forests episodes. Because there's all these stories about the place where they were found.

This certain forest has a lot of activity. Yeah, that rings a bell. It's a really like, horrifying story, yeah.

Like, really horrifying. I mean, they were 11, 13 and 14. They were found stripped and stacked on top of each other. They were bound, gagged, raped and strangled. That's absolutely horrific.

The details are really horrifying for that one. And that had already kind of shook everybody, of course. But this, on top of it, is now, oh fuck, like, what's happening is there's someone out there stealing kids.

Now, the first tip finally came in on the afternoon of December 31st. When Jack Franklin, who was a security guard with the Admiral Corporation, reported to police that he thought he'd seen the girls a little after 9 30 a.m. on the morning, they were reported missing. What we will see in this case is so many people say they saw these girls when they had already been dead. I remember that being reported like.

I've heard this case told a few times and it's not like one or two people, it's a lot, lots of people, that's interesting.

It's very, it's weird, and do you believe some of them? I don't know. I mean, eyewitnesses to me are very, it's. it's shaky, yeah.

But so many people, yeah, I think it's some kind of phenomenon, but I'm also like, what is going on here? Well, and I think I like styles. Like girls were all dressing in very similar styles and had like certain hairstyles back then, so maybe that had something to do with it, but it's very strange.

Yeah, uh, now. According to Franklin, he said quote It was their rudeness that made him remember them. Oh, I doubt which they're not described that way, I doubt that.

And Franklin told investigators he had been standing on a sidewalk on Lawrence Avenue Saturday morning and he saw the two girls pass him. And he said, one said to the other, I wonder where the bus stops? Yeah, and Franklin heard them, so he said, You just missed the bus.

And one of them looked over and said, Oh, shut up, and then the two continued walking towards the bus stop. That doesn't sound like them from how they've been described exactly. And again, this was very troubling because he was sure it was the girls.

Yeah, and then this is troubling because the three boys that we mentioned, who were murdered in October 1955, were last seen in the same area before their bodies were found a few days later. And this was concerning to everybody, like, Oh shit, now. The same day, 15 year old Dorothy Fisher told police she'd seen Barbara and Patricia in the theater that night, the evening that they had gone. So they're thinking they made it to the movie.

Yeah, and they, she said, they had spoken with briefly together, and then they left the theater. Okay, uh, she said. The girls. Uh. Apparently. The girls were also seen that evening, around 11 p.m. by a bus driver who picked them up at the stop near the movie theater. Okay.

Um, but they were put. But this bus driver reported that they got off at Western Avenue, which was nowhere near the Grimes home. So and why would they get off there when they promised they'd be home? That's the thing now. Despite all the witnesses reporting that the girls were alone when they were seen, detectives had initially theorized that the girls had just run off. For, quote, a date with sailors that's random.

Sounds random, Oh, but it's not. Cause when I first read that, I was like, Uh, they're 15 and 13. What the fuck are you talking about? That came out of nowhere.

Well, apparently. A few days earlier, Patricia had told friends about a letter she'd received from a sailor acquaintance, saying he would be home for the holidays. Okay, just one month earlier, in fact, both girls had come home from a movie with two sailors they had met at the theater. Okay?

So this wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility. And sorry, and yes, these sailors are men, right? And I'm sorry. Did you say a year earlier or a month earlier?

A month earlier and they came home with these, I think these sailors brought them home, okay, from the theater.

All right, same reaction indeed. I said, Huh, you would hope?

Well, yeah, no. I was going to say, you'd hope that they're just like 18, but you know, even that's wrong. Still 15 13. So it's like, Oh, no, I meant the sailors, but then I was like, Yeah, they're 15, No, but that's what I mean. Like, still, still doesn't work, unfortunately.

But yeah, that's, uh, that's, that's a whole part of this. That's just like, Oh, and did Loretta ever comment that like, she like, did you ever confirm that she had, like, met these sailors? Or I think we we find out who those sailors are? And I think they, um, they were able to, like, clear them.

Yeah, but not much is known about them. But tips kept coming in, and the next day, one of their school friends said they had seen Barbara and Patricia in her neighborhood on Saturday afternoon. And a passenger on the train said they'd seen them board his Milwaukee bound train on Sunday afternoon. So two days after they've gone, so now we're seeing somebody has seen them at the theater.

Somebody has seen them on a bus, driver has said they dropped them off somewhere far away from their home that night. Then someone else is saying they saw them the next morning, and then a school friend is saying they saw them the next afternoon, and then somebody else is saying they saw them Sunday.

Okay, so now we're seeing them all three days and we have multiple people saying it right, very strange, very.

Now, according to this passenger on the train that said, they got off, um, that Milwaukee bound train, um. He said that the girls got on at the Edison Court station, which is just two stops away from the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. Which further supported their belief that they met up with Patricia's sailor friend. Now, based on this information, detectives began looking into the sailors that had brought them home the previous month. Known only as Terry and Larry, Terry and Larry. Now, since, it was all looking a little crazy here now, with the possibility of, you know, fucking adult men being involved here. The case did get assigned to a task force led by Chief of Detectives Patrick Dealy. This task force had actually been put together a few months earlier to investigate the murders of those three local boys. In October, 40, officers were assigned to the case.

Um, and they were from the OR. 40. Officers from the Brighton Park precinct were assigned to the case, and several of these were from the Juvenile Bureau, which was put together to investigate sex crimes and homicides. Now, meanwhile, the students at St. Maurice, where Patricia attended school, were helping out. However they could, they stuffed over 15,000 missing flyers into mailboxes. Um, and the clergy and parishioners at the family's church had collected enough money to offer a thousand dollar reward for any information for their safe return.

So the whole community is on this. It's a huge search now. Unfortunately, weeks passed and it seemed like they had just vanished, Loretta Grimes told reporters. I'm waiting here for news, hoping and praying. If someone is holding them, please let the girls call me.

I'll forgive them from the bottom of my heart if they just let my girls go. I like, literally almost tear up hearing that. It's just like I can't fathom the depths of her despair here. Um, she insisted to media and police that the girls didn't have boyfriends and neither one of them were the type to run away.

And they never had run away, especially since it was days before Patricia's birthday and there was a party planned. She was like, they wouldn't have run away and this was just it's like, obviously this was just something they did.

Went to the movies, saw the Elvis movie, came home. They had done this a million times. Yeah, this wasn't out of the ordinary, it wasn't a sudden thing.

They wanted to see this movie, they'd seen it a million times, right? Reporters even suggested to her like, in which I was like, Cool, oh God.

Reporters like, You're saying this to a devastated mother, what did they say? They were like, Oh, do you think they ran off to Tennessee to see Elvis at Graceland?

And it's okay, like, I get where the thought is coming from, but it's also like, she really cute joke, right?

Fun, like, not the time, yeah, like, what the fuck? And by January 19th, Elvis Presley himself made a statement.

Wow. He released it from his home in Graceland and said quote If you're good Presley fans, you'll go home and ease your mother's worries. Thanks, Elvis. That's helpful, yeah.

Everyone's really helpful here, I can see. Thank you Mr. Presley. I don't think you needed to make that statement. Because right now it's not really looking like they're holding up somewhere and just worrying their mom.

Right, sounds like something happened. Yeah, so like, maybe let's not put it on them, yeah.

You know, let's put it out there and say, like, let's get you girls home. If you're holding these girls, let them home. Spin that a different way. yeah, spin that a little bit different.

Now, horrifically, all of those hopes and prayers fell away. Just a few days later, on January 22nd, 1957, when the bodies of Barbara and Patricia Grimes were discovered off County Line Road in nearby Will Springs, Illinois. And that's almost a month after they disappeared. Now that day, Leonard Prescott was on his way to the grocery store outside Willow Springs and was traveling on German Short Church Road. When he saw what he thought were mannequins, he said, he thought they were just store mannequins.

Never, he later told reporters. I didn't have a care in the world. My wife told me to go out and get groceries. I was going mighty slow and I noticed these flesh colored things underneath the railing along the side of the road.

So he didn't stop initially, but he said he went grocery shopping and then on his way home. He was like, it really bothered me the whole way home, I couldn't. He was like, you know? He said he had read about the missing Grimes sisters in the papers. Because everyone in Chicago and beyond had at this point. And even though he had convinced himself those were just store mannequins, he was like, I just need to confirm this because I can't just go about my day.

So he and his wife, Marie, actually went back to the spot that afternoon, and when they reached the embankment, Marie Prescott screamed. Because it was clearly the sight of the nude bodies of two girls lying in that ditch, barely covered by a layer of snow, Marie began weeping uncontrollably. Leonard had to literally carry her back to the car. The absolutely horrified couple just sat there for a while, trying to calm themselves.

Once they were able to speak, they drove down the road, only about a mile, to the Springs Police Department, only about a mile away now. Sergeant John McKay was just getting out of his car, like showing up at the station, and the Prescott's got out of their car and came right up to him. And McKay said he was all excited he'd seen two what he thought were dummies lying alongside the road on German Church Road.

I told him that I would immediately go over there, he should show me the spot now. When they reached the scene, McKay confirmed what the Prescott's had suspected that these were the bodies of the of two girls. Um, someone had obviously dumped the bodies of two girls along the side of the road. And he was strongly suspecting that these were Patricia and Barbara Grimes.

McKay radioed the sheriff's station and stayed on scene until all the officers arrived. Now, the discovery of the Grimes Sisters brought a heartbreaking end to a week's long search that had been underway right from December 28th. But no questions were answered here, like the more questions were asked. The bodies were covered in snow, which indicated they had been there since the last snowfall, which was on January 9th. Oh, wow.

This was January 22nd, wow, so they'd been there since January 9th, at the very least, yeah. And they had only become visible when the snow began to melt.

So a few days earlier now, at the time, German Church Road was a was not traveled a lot. It was in, um, it was in an unincorporated town. Oh, okay, which makes sense.

That explains why they hadn't been discovered earlier. No one went down that road, it was like a very seldom traveled road. How fucked up is it, though, that they were a mile away from the police station and nobody knew? Just under snow, and like the right on the side of the road, too, they were not far off the road.

There's unfortunately crime scene photos and they're right off the side of the road. And do they? I might be getting ahead of myself here, but do they think that they had been there the whole time? We'll get to that, okay, um, but like, Yeah, they will, we'll definitely get to that.

But um, but unfortunately, there was no, no clues on the scene to what the hell happened here, um, before the girls were removed from the scene. Unfortunately, Joseph Grimes, their father, was taken to the site, Oh God, where he positively identified them as Barbara and Patricia. And as he did so, he just dropped to the ground and burst into inconsolable tears.

Yeah, and I can't even fathom that scene when you don't hear a lot of like parents being brought brought to the crime scene. I think it was the fifties, shit was just like wiling back then.

Yeah, it was very. They don't do that now. That's the thing that that's horrific anyway, to have to identify your child. But at the crime scene or wherever they were, the dump scene.

Yeah, like that God, I can't imagine, yeah, now. According to Harry Gloss, a representative from the coroner's office, the bodies had been hastily covered with leaves and grass. Barbara's body laid across Patricia.

Both girls had three puncture wounds in the chest. And quote that appeared to have been made by an ice pick. Oh my god, uh. Barbara's face had bruises that indicated that she had been beaten. Uh, there were cans, bottles and other debris just strewn all around the area, but none of it appeared to be related to the crime scene. It was just a place where people threw trash.

Now. The autopsies were performed a few days later. Because they had to give the bodies adequate time to thaw out because they'd been essentially frozen there, right? Um, but they didn't get a lot of extra information even then. According to all three of the very qualified pathologists who performed the examinations, both Patricia and Barbara's causes of death were shock and exposure. Wow.

Which indicates that they were dumped alive, yeah, and died from the cold, from the elements.

But they can't get a lot more than that, which is like horrifying. Because they were stabbed three times in the chest, right, one of them at least was beaten, and then they were stripped and thrown in the snow, right?

Like, what the fuck? And did they know had they been assaulted at all? We will get to that, okay.

Um, they couldn't agree on an exact time of death for either victim. Uh, all of them agreed that they had likely died the night they went missing. Okay, um, and had been in the ditch covered by fresh snow for quite some time.

Now, in their final report, the pathologists also noted that the girls quote had not been sexually molested. Okay, and there were, quote, no signs of external violence on the bodies that could have caused the death. Okay, now, that's so strange.

Yes, now. Ultimately, the autopsy results produced obviously more questions than answers. Yet again, for one thing, if the girls had been killed the night they disappeared, how is it possible for so many people to say they'd seen them around the city, right?

Like, after their disappearance, the answer to that, to me, feels like eyewitnesses are just notoriously unreliable. Um, these people were probably just mistaken, I'm assuming, or they wanted to see these girls and be part of the help. Like they wanted to feel like they saw them right. And so they were mistakenly thinking. But who knows?

It's still strange, even though, you know, eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. We all know that we've seen a million times. It is strange how many people were sure they saw them or interacted with them, right?

You know, like classmates from school, that's the thing. It's not just strangers, it's people who actually knew them, so that's, it's very weird.

Um, but the remarkably well-preserved state of the bodies did support the theory that they'd been left packed under snow for quite some time. Wow.

I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like, at my locker and she came up to me and she was like, stuttering, super bad. I'm like, stop around, She's like, I can't.

A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast, like doubling and tripling. And it's all these girls with a diagnosis. The state tried to keep on the down low.

Everybody thought I was holding something back. well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.

No, it's hysteria, it's all in your head, it's not physical. You're, oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since the Witches of Salem, or is it something else entirely?

Something's wrong here, something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline, and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical?

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Okay, now. The bigger problem, though, was that, and no one was going to become aware of this until much later. The bigger problem was that. The pathologist who conducted the examinations had been under strict orders from Harry Gloss, who was the representative for the coroner's office, that the coroner's office had to withhold certain sensitive information. For example, the pathologist report and subsequent news reports clearly stated that neither girl had been sexually molested, which was vague enough to be defensible. If challenged, they could at least defend the wording of that, I guess, but it wasn't exactly true.

In fact, when the autopsy was conducted, evidence strongly indicated that Barbara had either been raped or had consensually. But she's 15, so engaged in sexual activity near the time of her death. And how are they, how are they able to get away with that? Because of the wording, because I think it's like, sexually molested is different than.

And they're saying here that they couldn't determine whether it was forcible or consensual. Later it will come out. They were both raped, both of them.

And you should know that right off the bat, but like it does come off later, that come out later. That they were both raped well, and that's interesting because they're also like. One was laid across the other, just like in that previous case, where the three boys were raped and laid across each other. Like, it seems to correlate now, so this is why the coroner's office had done that because of that previous case, No.

Oh, sorry. They were trying to protect Barbara's chastity, and the investigation was the image that both the girls were pure.

Okay.

Which is upsetting.

Because so they're trying to hold back this point so that they are still looked at as like children deserving of our well. In sympathy. They are, no matter what, because either way, they're not of legal age to consent to anything. How horrifying is it that they had to think that way, that the coroner's office literally was like? We should protect their reputations by not telling the public or the press that any sexual assault happened because it could be looked at as their fault. Wow.

Everyone we love patriarchy, take that in, take that in, like, and that's the thing.

I believe the coroner's office believed they were doing something right. They had good intentions, they had good intentions there, but they by no means had bad intentions withholding that. But it didn't help later.

It actually ended up hurting, right? And obviously now we know, like now it's like this was the fifties, obviously. So it's like they were looking at it. As if we release that people are going to look at them differently, and that's like, mind blowing.

And then the other thing is is like, people need to know this information. If this is something they need to worry about, is their children going out into the streets, getting abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered? Well, this hindered the investigation. Like big time, because so we'll get to that, for sure. But the discovery was obviously fucking devastating for the Grimes family. Particularly poor Loretta, who learned of her daughter's fates that afternoon as she was on her way to St. Maurice's church.

Oh my God, she told her reporters. I knew they hadn't run away. I knew that something had happened to them. I kept telling the police that they wouldn't run away. She told this to reporters, and then she just ran into one of her neighbor's home.

That's so sad now. Those who knew the family knew that the deaths would be particularly awful. I mean, losing a child, nevermind two, is unthinkable. But this was the second time that Joseph and Loretta had lost a child in 1954. There, the couple's 26 year old daughter, Leona, had died after a kidney operation.

Oh God, so this was, I mean, they've gone through the ringer, yeah. They lost three of their seven children. And later, Loretta Grimes would be very outspoken about how she felt largely responsible for the deaths of her daughters because she gave them permission to go out that night.

She could have never, ever, ever had known that this would happen. That poor mother, I can't even imagine feeling that way, and she doesn't deserve to feel that way, she did not deserve to feel that way.

She didn't do anything wrong or out of the ordinary, especially given the time period. And the Fifties kids were going at those that 11, 13 and 14 year old. The case before this one. Yeah, they were out at nine 30 at night by themselves. It was the way it was.

It was just kids got on buses and just came home, and this wasn't even like. We've said it already. But and they'd done that a million times in the fifties. Especially going to the movies, going to a diner and playing something on the jukebox was the thing to do. Kids did it all the time, parents let them do it.

This was not strange. That mother did nothing fucking wrong, and I hate that she had to live with that guilt. That's the thing, and it's like she's sending them to a public place that's safe.

And together, yeah, and like, she should have been able to send her kids out to go watch a movie. I just feel so awful for her, cause it's like she did not deserve to have that guilt.

But you can understand, I'm sure as a mom, why she did, and that's what kills me. I'm like, I just wish I could like, I feel like, I'm like, Sorry, Loretta, I know.

But since the discovery of Barbara and Patricia, Grimes was the second set of children like we talked about found brutally murdered in the Chicago area. Many in the press and public were worried that there was a serial killer afoot, abducting and killing children. Sounds like it. In both cases, the victim's bodies have been found nude, in or near a forested area and on top of each other.

Investigators believe the inclement weather had helped the killer lure the victims. And all had been like it was, you know, it was rainy or snowy out. So they could be like, Oh, you need a ride, right? Like, that's easy and all had last been seen headed to a movie theater.

Oh, the three boys were also, they were on their way to a movie theater, too. They were going to see. Like it was like, Disney's like Live Lion Movie or something like that that was out that year. That's strange that they were all headed to movies.

Now, because of all this, and I get it. Detectives vehemently pursued the case, with the possibility that all five murders could somehow be linked. And I get that, oh, a hundred percent, I mean, the the all the factors line up now. Once the bodies were removed from the scene, a team of more than 70 men began searching the area for any clues that could lead to the killer.

They combed that area all along Devil's Creek, where the girls were discovered. And the investigators hope to find anything. Any physical evidence, like clothing, anything in that debris and garbage that they could link to anybody, but nothing now. At the same time, another team was starting to dig into the leads. Porting and pouring into the police, they started putting together a possible suspect list, and they started with 53 year old self-described psychic Walter Krantz. He was top of the list because a week earlier, he had called the police with an anonymous tip saying the girls would be found in Santa Fe Park.

Okay, he refused to give his name when he called, but he said he quote unquote dreamed of seeing the bodies there. Okay. Police were able to trace the number back to Krantz, obviously, and he immediately became their number one suspect, but he passed two polygraph tests and tests.

And after being interviewed for hours and hours, it was determined he was had no involvement in the case. Now, just two days after detectives abandoned that investigation, another suspect, Edward Benny Bedwell, came into view now, according to a cab driver who had seen the girl's pictures in the newspaper. He'd seen Barbara and Patricia on the morning of December 30th in the company of two men at the DNL restaurant in Chicago's Skid Row neighborhood. Okay now? Although he didn't know their names, the cab driver recognized one of the men, who he described as having Elvis Presley sideburns and a ducktail haircut.

Now, investigators spoke to the owners of the DNL restaurant, John and Minnie Duros, who confirmed the cab driver's story and identified the one, who looked like Elvis as Benny Bedwell. And that would have meant that they spent two days with him, okay, now, they confirmed that this was Benny Bedwell because the two. The couple who owned the restaurant said that they had actually occasionally hired him to wash dishes so they knew him well.

Yeah, so, according to Minnie Duros, the group, so it was Benny, who they are saying was Patricia and Barbara Grimes, and one other man together. She said the group had come into the restaurant early that morning and sat in a booth. And she told investigators the older of the two girls was in bad shape. She looked sick or sick, or drugged.

And she had been sick, yeah, she had been sick. Eventually, they all went outside, where she saw the two men try to get the girls into a car. But the taller girl came back into the booth and put her head on the table. So when the others came back and tried to get the girl back outside, Minnie told them to leave her alone, but the three persisted and Minnie became distracted by another customer. And when she looked back at the table, she saw the man, she identified as Benny Bedwell, escorting the girl out of the restaurant.

Okay? According to Duros, the group came back later that afternoon. And the taller girl, whom she believed to be Barbara, was, quote, carrying on with Benny. So she asked them all to leave, Okay now. By the time investigators became aware of Benny Bedwell, there was already three law enforcement agencies pursuing this case together, but not together, independent of one another.

Okay, Chicago Police had taken the initial missing persons report, Cook County Sheriff's Department discovered the bodies. And the FBI was following up on the handful of ransom demands that the family family had received since the girls went missing. People are so disgusting because people are and always will be absolute fucking garbage.

Truly, we're garbage, everybody are garbage, species garbage. Now, as is often the case, the famous ego game becomes a problem. And each agency was reluctant to share information with the others and actively withheld shit from each other.

It's like, guys, we all have a common cause here. Let's figure out what happened to these two children. Seriously, like, shake your dicks around later, like there's two children who were fucking raped and murdered. And you can't get your shit together. To give some information to another agency, cause they might get credit for it.

Yeah, like, I don't know any of your names, that's the thing. I don't know any of your names, except the ones that actually did the work. So do the work and we'll know your names for it.

But if you're holding shit, we're not going to know shit exactly. In fact, on January 24th, when Sheriff's department officers arrested Benny Bedwell, Chicago police investigators complained to the press. That quote. They were not informed of the arrest and said it violated a pledge of cooperation among the various law enforcement agencies. So they didn't even tell the other agencies that they arrested the guy. Well, it's like, that's exciting news.

You know like, hey, we might have this guy here. And these big other agencies are so are wasting time like pursuing other leads when you've got this guy, right?

Tale as old as motherfucking time. Imagine not being able to put your egos aside for the sake of solving the abductions, possible rape and murders of two young girls. Like, imagine that, no, so.

The sheriff's officers eventually tracked Bedwell to the Star Garter Theater, a former Burlesque theater turned movie house in downtown Chicago. Interesting, it ran double features all day and night. The Chicago police had turned out were right to have complained because rather than fill the other law enforcement agencies in on the arrest. A spokesperson for the sheriff's office just went to the Press Press to talk about having a custody, a suspect in custody. Going to the press and being like, Look, we did it instead of telling the other agencies first right now. According to their report, 21 year old Bedwell had grown up in central Illinois and taken a draw a job with a traveling circus when he was 18..

Oh, wow. But he had recently returned to Chicago around the area after a very short stint with the military. And at the time of his arrest, he was living at the McCoy Hotel. Now. Reporters immediately jumped on the story and started digging in to find more about Benny Bedwell. Less than 24 hours after he was arrested, they'd found his mother, Ethel Bedwell Bradbury, who was more than happy to talk about her son.

She was 16 when she became the sixth wife to John Bedwell, a man who is 30 years older than she was. Holy shit. She gave birth to John Jr. not long after they were married, and six years later she had Benny Bedwell.

Damn. As far as his mother was concerned, Benny was, quote, a lazy, shiftless bum, just a big, lazy boy who didn't like to work. Gross. She didn't know anything about her son's involvement in the case of the missing Grimes sisters, but she did tell reporters. QuoTE. On several occasions, Benny had mentioned having a new girlfriend.

Now in custody, Benny insisted he had never even met the Grimes sisters and certainly didn't kill them. He did, however, admit to being at the DNL restaurant on the evening. He was spotted there, and he said he was with a friend and two girls now, according to Bedwell, they were not the Grimes sisters.

He said he had met the two girls and their male companion at the movies that day, and the two had gone to a bar near the theater. Left when the bartender refused to serve the two underage girls because he loves underage girls. Gross. After that, they went to another bar nearby, where they each had three drinks. And he said We were only in there a little while when the girls went to the washroom.

And he said, When they came out of the washroom, they ducked us. We saw them leave and the other guy said, let's follow them. But he said that he refused and he claimed that the girls like, they got away.

And he said they ran into the girls a few days later and they ignored him. I bet so now that's a weird story. BENNY Well, and the problem with this was this wasn't the first statement Benny gave to police, the second one, the initial statement he gave. He claimed he had been out that day with friends that he referred to as Louie and Frank.

He said they met up with the girls he identified as being the Grimes sisters. Okay, so first he knows them and then he doesn't. According to Benny, he was driving the car and the girls were in the back with his friends. And he heard, quote, the sound of scuffling.

And he looked back to find the two girls were dead. That's his first statement. So he's dry, I want you to picture this, he's driving a car there.

In the back seat, he hears a little bit of scuffling. He looks back. They're dead, doubt it. Benny then said the men stripped the girls clothing off and forced him to drive out to German Church Road, where they dumped the bodies.

When asked why he told that first story if it wasn't true, Benny said I thought you would let me go if I told you that. I thought you would let me go if I told you I was an accessory to murder, yeah.

Let's think about that seems legit. Let's let's do some critical thinking there. Benny Boy, I don't think he knows how to do that, no?

Well, the multiple statements from Benny didn't make him look any less suspicious. The second story, he told police, about meeting the girls at a theater, who weren't the grand sisters. That was eventually corroborated by the two young women who were part of the story, apparently, whose names Benny said he had forgotten at the time. Their names were Irene Dean and Carol King, and the other man in the group was Richard Wittenmeyer. So boom alibi.

Okay, like, the guy came forward and was like, Yep, the girls were like, Yep, it was us. Do we believe them? So? He had already told multiple stories, which was a red flag, obviously.

Yeah, and they tried to corroborate, they were like, that's, that's nice, but let's corroborate the story even further. So they went to the owners of the D and L restaurant and were like, Were these the girls? like, Do you recognize these girls? The owners of the D and L restaurant swore that Dean and King were not the girls that they had seen Benny with.

I wonder if somebody intimidated those girls. This was further suspect because there were many other witnesses who told investigators they had also seen Barbara and Patricia Grimes. With Benny on or around the time they went missing, yeah, so there you go now, in fact, between the night they went missing and the week that followed. No less than eight witnesses claimed to have seen the girls in the company of two men each. Including in their statement a fact or detail that would not have been known to the public.

Okay, oh, fucking, like, there you go, like, for example, a waitress at Mount Pindos restaurant told Detective she'd seen the girls in the restaurant with two men. And as they were leaving, she heard one of the girls refer to the other as Petey, which was Patricia's family nickname. Oh, wow.

Also, most of the witnesses indicated, or at least implied, that the girls looked uncomfortable and looked like they were not exactly with these men. Slash pigs willingly, like voluntarily, right? Things got more complicated on December 28th, the day after statements were taken from Wittenmeyer, Dean and King. Because now Benny Bedwell made another statement. Early that morning, Chicago Police arrested a guy named William Willingham Jr. who was a known associate of Bedwell's.

They'd picked up on a disorderly contact charge, okay? When they showed Willingham a photo of Benny Bedwell, he admitted knowing Benny, but strenuously denied having anything to do with the Grimes murders and told police. I don't know anything about this. And I never went out with those girls. And it's like, Oh, that sounds a little SUS protests, too much.

Correct? But when Benny was informed about Willingham's arrest, he recanted his previous story about being ditched by the girls at the movies. Oh, okay, that one, and returned to another version of his initial statement that included the Grimes sisters.

Right now, according to Benny now, he'd met both girls, Patricia and Barbara Grimes, on the evening of January 7th. Nope at Harold's club, and they were in the presence of a man he referred to as Frank.

Benny claimed they had a few drinks at the club and then got a room at the Crest Hotel there. He said. He, quote, went to bed with Patricia and Frank with Barbara. Benny claimed all four of them spent several days drinking and driving and stopping at random bars and friends apartments where they kept drinking heavily. Finally, on the 11th or 12th. They stopped for gas and to get some lunch with the girls, and the girls went to use the bathroom at a gas station. When they got back, both men indicated they wanted to find a place to have sex, but both the girls refused. And he said that they both, both the men got violent.

Okay. In a recorded confession, Benny told Sheriff Joseph Lohman I hit Patricia harder than I was aiming to on the chin. Okay, both men, he said, knocked both girls unconscious, like, beat them unconscious, and he's one of these men, him and Frank.

Frank Yes. They immediately thought they had killed the girls, so they drove them up to the little used German Church Road, stripped them of their clothing and dumped them behind the guardrail. The sheriff asked whether they knew the girls were dead or not, and Benny said They didn't move anyway. I didn't know the girls were dead.

I figured they would come to and go for help. I didn't do it intentionally well. And then that makes sense. Because they believed that they had died of exposure, so he beat them unconscious and then left them there. And that because I was saying in my head, I was like, they died of exposure. But, like, did they try to get home somehow?

Or don't worry, we'll get through, we'll talk about that, so, Benny said. It wasn't until several days after this that he read about the Grimes sisters in the paper and realized that it was them. He claimed to. Neither of one of them had mentioned running away from home and never mentioned they were being looked for, they also said. He also said he only met Frank a couple of times, didn't know his last name.

Benny said When they got back to the city after this whole thing, they departed from each other. And had he hadn't seen Frank since, okay, now. His statement was read back to him for clarification, and Benny identified Barbara and Patricia Grimes from photographs presented to him by the sheriffs. Uh, confirming they were the girls he'd been with then. With his statement having been taken, Benny guided investigators on a 50 mile tour of where he and Frank had taken the girls, ending at the site on German Church Road, where the bodies were found. Okay.

Now, along the way, hundreds, if not thousands, watched and followed this whole ordeal. The press referred to this whole thing as quote, a tragic circus parade at high speed, which is chilling, yeah, so. Sheriff Lohman was immediately convinced of Benny's guilt, particularly because it seemed to be in line with what they've learned from witnesses in the days prior. And just the fact that he's told about 40 different stories.

In fact, one of the witnesses who claimed to have seen the girls after they disappeared was Leonard Woss, an employee at a service station not far from where the girls bodies was discovered. According to Woss. All four had stopped at the gas station in early January. He couldn't be certain of the date, and the girls asked to use the restroom boom.

As they were leaving, Woss claimed the girl, he identified as Barbara Quote, gave him a strange look, which he interpreted as her desire not to get back in the car. Oh, no, I love that. Not, not a one person has stepped in to be like, Girl, are you okay? Well, that's the thing.

Are you all right? Because everything's okay. All these adults are like, Yeah, it looked like they were being abducted, it was wild, It's like, I don't know.

Fuck faces, why don't you go ask that child if they're okay, what the fuck is wrong with you? And it's like, clearly they looked young enough that you wouldn't go ask them because at one place they weren't served, cause they looked so young.

It's never a bad thing to just be like, Hey, you all right? yeah, do you need help? Yeah, like, what the fuck, dude?

Especially when they're with these, like two older men, like, Come on guys, wow, now. There were some people, though, who didn't really buy Benny's confession he had lied a lot.

Well, and like, what number confession is this? And he had told a lot of stories by this point, and although some of his stories seem like it was being confirmed by witnesses and shit, there was a lot that didn't make a lot of sense. Well, and there is, like, you know, confirmation bias, like there's one big thing.

So Benny had claimed both. There's a couple of big things actually, Benny had claimed. Both girls ate hot dogs for lunch at the service station. Okay, the autopsy said. Nope, there were no hot dogs in their stomachs. In fact, there was nothing recent in their stomachs.

Interesting, both girls had light bruising on their faces, but not enough to corroborate a beating that would knock them unconscious. Okay, like Benny had described, Yeah.

He described it as very violent. Yeah, and he said, when they dumped, when they dumped those girls, he thought he had killed them, right? Also, did you remember the puncture wounds in the chest?

I was just about to ask, where did he never mentioned those? No where did those come from? Benny never mentioned this.

Huh? The press immediately pointed out all of this, and his confession was now being questioned by everyone. But there are so many things that he did know that do make sense. Well, there's also another problem here, because the biggest issue that everyone had with his confession was that. Benny claimed to have engaged in repeated sexual intercourse with Patricia. But according to the autopsy report that everyone knew about, neither girl was quote sexually experienced, meaning neither had engaged with in sexual intercourse. Because, remember, they were withholding that information.

Right, so now the public is hearing this confession involving that, and they're saying, well, it can't be true, but it is. In fact, when reporters asked one of the pathologists whether the girls were chased, he refused to answer the question. Because, again, remember, the coroners are being told you're not allowed to say it.

Right, he said the question, and his answer was that that's a question of morals, not science. So he was like, I'm not answering that, like, I'm not telling you whether these girls are chased.

That's not that's like opinion, that's not science. I'm here to talk about science, like, let's not put that in your story.

Asshole. In truth, his refusal, again, was the direct results of being under strict orders from the coroner's office to protect their reputation and not answer those questions. Loretta Grimes, on the other hand, wasted no time reinforcing what the autopsy had included. She said Our girls came from a good home and were brought up in religious surroundings. He's not right.

She said of Benny Bedwell and she insisted that he was lying. She said I want to see my girl's clothing before I believe anything. Even then I won't believe what Bedwell says about their being in bars. Yeah, which I don't blame her.

No, of course, not more than any of the other inconsistencies in Benny's confession, which I think the puncture wounds are a huge inconsistency. He never mentioned them. And I think if you stabbed the girls three times with an ice pick each, you would mention that in your confession? Did he head back to the car, though? And Frank did that.

I don't know to ensure that they were dead, I don't know. But his insistence that he engaged in sex with one or both of these girls was held up by the press, the family and many others. As evidence that he was lying. After all, the autopsy report indicated that had not happened.

So there was no way he could be telling the truth. Unfortunately, it would be many years before anyone learned that the coroner's office had, out of some misguided sense of decency. Can basically conspired to suppress certain results to protect them, their innocence. This is so interesting. And, in truth, several members of the sheriff's department had seen the autopsy slides. And years later would confirm, like I said, that both girls had been sexually assaulted before their deaths, right?

Now, despite the many flaws in the case, Lohman remained convinced of Benny Bedwell's guilt. I'm kind of convinced I'm not, you're not okay.

And he accepted the confession, and he booked the man on murder charges and intended to see the case through to trial. So the announcement of Benny Bedwell's confession and the impending indictment brought some comfort to the people of Chicago. Yeah, particularly those who had been increasingly anxious over the rising, you know, instances of children being abducted and raped and murdered in the city and the surrounding areas. But for others, Benny seemed like a scapegoat in a case that multiple law enforcement agencies had failed to solve.

Benny's pro bono lawyer, David Bradshaw, told reporters The boy in this case is wholly illiterate, doesn't understand what's going on, and has found himself the main object. In a case of nationwide interest, Loretta Grimes agreed, really, telling reporters he's changed his story so many times. Who wouldn't?

He's had no sleep and nothing to eat. She's a consummate mama. Yeah, she really is. She's literally like, the boy hasn't had anything to eat and he hasn't slept. He's going to say, whatever.

Like, she's just looking at it like, this is a 21 year old, right? Like Loretta Grimes is a mama bear, like, that's my girl.

She really is, but she didn't agree, she did not agree, she did not think that this was the guy, all right.

Well, I respect how she, whatever she thinks, cause you also have to think like, there's some mama instinct there now. Benny's lawyer, David Bradshaw, believed investigators were under intense pressure to solve this case. Yeah, obviously.

And since Benny was their only real suspect, they pursued him despite all the contradictions in his confession. And it's like, Okay, I understand pursuing him, like, based on some of the things he was saying. But don't do it exclusively at the expense of finding other people. I think it reminds me of something, uh, the West Memphis three. It reminds me of, um, like, when they just went forward with Jesse Muskelly. Even though there was several contradictions in his confession, they just corrected them. That confession is one of the saddest things you will ever hear about in your life.

No. Also, Bradshaw believed his client was being scapegoated because the public and many in law enforcement continued to cling to the grimes. Sisters Purity, right? And they refused to believe that the two teenagers had gone anywhere near skid Row bars and theaters. And that, like, something could have happened.

Yeah, so they. He was like, I think he's just being put up here as like the easy way to understand all of this. And at that point, his lawyer also didn't know about the truth. Yeah, so the more investigators dug into Benny's story, the less likely it seemed he was telling the truth.

William Willingham, the friend that had been arrested when he was, UM, had told investigators that he had gone out drinking with Benny. Around the time the girls went missing and that he swore the girls were with her, um, that the girls that they were with were Irene Dean and Carole King, and the results of his polygraph test indicated he was telling the truth. Interesting also when Dean and King were shown photos of Benny Bedwell and William Wellington. Yeah.

They again identified them as the men they had been out with at the D and L restaurant, among other places. So they were like, That was us. That's interesting. A coroner's inquest began on January 30th, 1957, and much of what was learned did little to support Benny's confession.

It was determined that the girls had most likely been abducted shortly after they left the movie theater, a little after 1130 p.m. At that time, Benny Bedwell was known to have been at work. The inquest also demonstrated the extent to which so many involved in the case were committed to protecting the quote unquote innocence of Barbara and Patricia. At one point, while the girl's school friend, Dorothy Weiner, was testifying that she saw both of them buying popcorn and a candy bar at the movie, Loretta jumped up out of her chair and started calling the girl a liar. Because she said she had only given them money for movies, and she said she insisted that she gave her money for the bus ride, the ticket for the movies and one popcorn.

So because of how sensitive everything was. Just because this school friend had said that these girls had an additional 30 cents. Many interpreted it as that they must've been dishonest or they'd done something immoral to get that 30 cents. Wow, so that's why Loretta jumped up and was like, No, no, no, no, no, no, like this is no. I gave them this amount, but that's how ridiculous that had gotten.

That's insane now. After three days of testimony, Betty Bedwell once again recanted his 14 page confession, saying he had only confessed because he was threatened and beaten by police. Oh wow. In fact, he again said he had never met or seen the Grimes sisters and only knew the case through the newspapers. Benny had so many and told so many conflicting stories by this point that it would have been reasonable for anyone to be skeptical of this latest one.

At that point, I mean, come on. But now the in the uh, coroner's inquest that was starting to show that he was probably innocent, he was probably like, innocent of this, I should say, well, the inquest was in its third day.

The lab and toxicology ecology reports came back and found that both girls most likely died December 28th, the night they disappeared. Wow. Also, there was no alcohol in either of the girls systems, and the contents of their stomachs turned up particles of fish and potatoes on those later reports. Not hot dogs, okay, um, Bedwell had only claimed that they'd eaten hot dogs, and that was in January.

And do you have any idea if? Loretta said, like, they had fish and potatoes, I'm assuming that's what they had for dinner. I didn't see it in any of the things, but because they weren't concerned by it, it makes sense that that's what they had for dinner. They were going to a later movie.

Yeah, and they that movie was later, and they weren't concerned about these, they weren't using it as part of the investigation. So I'm assuming that was from home. It also just sounds like a family.

It does now. A few days later, on February 6th, a bail bondsman named Morris Brown put up the $20,000 bail for Bedwell's release. He believed him innocent, so Benny was released from custody. Wow.

Now, when Benny Bedwell got out of jail and was seemingly exonerated by the findings of the autopsy and the coroner's inquest, investigators were just back to square one. square one, yeah. Detectives and deputies from the Chicago Police Department and Cook County Sheriff's Department returned to German Church Road and the theater where the girls had gone the night they disappeared. But they couldn't find anything else to help them. Investigators revisited their previous suspects.

They found a couple that seemed promising at some point, but then they would go nowhere. The most promising of these suspects was 17 year old Matt. Max Fleeg Um, there's little known about Max Fleeg. But he was picked up by police shortly after the bodies were discovered and was convinced by Captain Ralph Pataki. To take a polygraph test, according to author Troy Taylor, Max failed the polygraph exam and confessed to the murders. But quote Because the test was illegal and inadmissible, the police were forced to let him go cause he was coerced into taking.

Yeah, gotcha. Now, as the month and years went by, there would be other suspects, people would confess to it again. None of them were strong enough to get a conviction.

In late 1962, Alfred Lawless, an Illinois prisoner about to be released from jail on a drunken, disorderly charge, claimed that he had killed the Grimes sisters. Quote Six years ago Today, I killed Barbara and Patricia Grimes, and I've been running ever since, he told so. According to him, he had met the girls at the theater the night they disappeared, and he murdered them. A few hours later, he said, I had to tell somebody about the murders.

I'm scared that if I didn't, I might do the same thing again to other innocent girls, okay? But, like Benny's confession years before, his story was surprisingly detailed. But all the information he provided, no matter how small the detail, had been reported by the press. So investigators were like, I don't know about that. Those delts only grew when Lawless began confessing to other crimes, including the murder of a man in Jamestown, Kentucky, 15 years earlier, in which Lawless got many of the details wrong.

So I think he was just going off the deep end. In fact, when they started to take a closer look at his story, there were more than a few important discrepancies. And investigators were like, No, he's not a viable suspect now. In time, unfortunately, the leads began to dry up. And slowly but surely, it seems like the story kind of disappeared, first from the press, then from the public's memory. And after years of inaction, the case had gone cold and was shelved by all law enforcement agencies. Now. The Grimes Sisters Cold case had sat on a shelf for more than 50 years when it was rediscovered by a retired West police officer, Ray Johnson.

In 2010, Johnson began going over old newspaper articles and review viewing the evidence in the case. Uh, for a book he hoped to write. He told reporters I thought nobody should give up on this case. And two years into his research, he contacted. He was contacted by a woman who claimed she had been with Barbara and Patricia the night they disappeared. But she was too scared to go to the police in 1957 to tell them what she knew, according to this anonymous woman. She left the theater with the sisters when they were offered and accepted a ride from a man in his early twenties. But this woman became uncomfortable and had jumped out of the car when it slowed down and left the sisters in the car.

Oh, now. Eventually, Johnson came across a report from Loretta Grimes about one of the anonymous calls she received about the time the girls went missing. Cause, remember, people have always been and will always be fucking garbage. So she was getting a ton of anonymous phone calls while she was grieving her children missing again. Garbage, we're garbage.

Now, unlike the previous ransom calls and harassment, this caller seemed to know things about the case that people other people didn't, he claimed. Quote He was the one who undressed the girls, and then he hung up the phone. That poor fucking woman, that's so sick.

A little over a year later, Loretta received another call from an anonymous man who told her he quote got away with another one. And he said, This time, the police would not be able to pin this one on Benny Bedwell. The next day after this call, police found the decapitated body of 15 year old Bonnie Lee Scott in nearby Addison. Oh, my whole entire body, only about three miles from where Barbara and Patricia's bodies were discovered.

Oh, that, nope. Eventually, police arrested 23 year old Charles Melquist for that murder, and he quickly confessed. He said, I'm sorry about it all.

I don't care what happens to me. He was convicted of the murder of Scott, but only served eight years in prison due to what he says were his connections to the Chicago Machine. The murder of Bonnie Lee Scott bears many similarities to the Grimes Sisters case, but there's no real connection that they could pull on. Melquist had connections to Sheldon Teller, who had been one of the lead investigators on the Grimes case. But John, that retired detective that was looking into this case and found all this. He believed that Charles Melquist could be the murderer in the Grimes case. But Teller, who he was connected to? Who was the lead investigator on the Grimes case, had connections to the Chicago machine and helped Melquist skirt the charges.

That's also why he got such a light sentence for the other murder and got away with shit. Is that is the machine like the mob? the mob? Yeah, now. Unfortunately, Charles Melquist had died in 2010..

Oh, how strange. That was the same year that the author decided, Yeah, wow. But at the time of his arrest, he was considered a strong suspect in the Grimes case, and Johnson believes he could very well be the man who killed Barbara and Patricia Grimes.

As of now, the case remains open, and Johnson hopes new information can be found. To link Melquist definitively to the case. And finally, solve the heartbreaking murders of Patricia and Barbara Grimes. I think Charles Melquist is the guy, really, I think he's the guy. Wow.

And unfortunately, we're not going to be able to fully get the justice. And maybe someday, you never know. And unfortunately, Loretta Grimes has passed away at this point. So, but it's like, But they, I'm sure, maybe they have live living siblings, yeah.

I'm hoping they're sick, like I'm hoping something can. I just want this family to have, like the closure, you know? And I really do believe, I think, the fact that this kind of shit happens. These are a 13 year old and a 15 year old girl, both abducted from movie theater, found naked, raped, stabbed, beaten and murdered on the side of the road. And people are calling this family and pranking them.

It's look in the fucking mirror, those, what the fuck is wrong with you? A laundry list of things. All I can hope is that karma, like, just bites them in the ass. I hope karma chews on their ass.

Like, Jesus, people are so fucked. Anytime I hear about that shit, I'm like, you gotta be, especially when it's a child involved. I'm like, the. You have to be truly deranged, like you have to be a deranged, just feral fucking animal to do that shit.

Like, it makes me so angry, it's just you can't even fathom it. And that these people going through what they went through. And her having that guilt that she was living with, that she did not deserve to have, but she's a mother, that guilt she had. And to be having to deal with fucking pigs calling her and pranking her and saying disgusting shit, like, man, you deserve what you get.

Society, man, but rough. I think Charles Malquest is a great, great suspect for this. I really do believe he is the fact that he got eight years for decapitating a young girl.

That poor girl's family can you imagine being in the in the trial or in the courtroom for sentencing? And you find out the man that decapitated your child gets eight years and he's 23. I mean, that's nothing, yeah.

Nothing, yeah, he's going to be a young guy just walking out of there and I'd be interested to see or to hear. I would love to follow what the rest of his life was.

There's no way that man stopped what he was doing. Yeah, so it's like, somebody needs to, and I'm hoping, who knows, maybe Johnson there is working on. It is piecing together what that guy was doing. Cause I would love to find out and start digging into what his life was after that, I mean, he lived until 2010..

Yeah, so I would like to know what happened there. And I hope that somebody is looking into it. And I'm like, Can I help? Cause you would imagine that he would have gotten out of jail sometime in, like the late Sixties, early Seventies, I think.

So, to be honest, I'm probably going to start trying to dig into this guy's life because it's bothering me. And I'm like, and I know this, like, retired police detective is probably on that ship. But I'm like, I'm just going to do this for my own personal wellbeing, because I need to fucking know what this guy was doing. Yeah, I mean, maybe we can do like some kind of follow up.

Yeah, I would love to, and who knows if you'll find enough? Yeah, hey, keep us updated, man.

I know I'm like, I'm like, you know what? Please Ray Johnson, please let me know what the fuck is going on. If you're listening, let's get together, let's squad up.

But yeah, this is a horrific, horrific tale. Yeah, that's really devastating. It doesn't have the ending that you're really looking for. But it's got something at the end that you feel like there's. There's something to work with, yeah.

What an interesting case all around, though. Just all the eyewitnesses afterwards, and then the many stories and the people that were so convinced that they saw Benny with him, so convinced, perhaps.

Yeah, it's really, it's fucked up, it is, it's really fucked up, and I hope the Grimes family was able to to move past it.

Not move past it, but, you know, move forward. Yeah, yeah, well, with that, we hope you keep listening, and we hope you keep it weird.

I got nothing. Yeah, don't, don't be this, don't call people who are going through things and prank them. You pieces of shit, there you go.

Don't keep it that weird, don't do that.

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