Unsolved: The Case Of The Grimes Sisters

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hello everybody and welcome back to my channel today we're talking about an unsolved case that rocked the city of Chicago in the 1950s two sisters went to the movies to see their idol Elvis Presley in Love Me Tender they were never seen alive again the bodies of these two sisters turned up a month later and what followed was an investigation that's world with inconsistencies and mistakes theories that hinted at a cover-up a strange connection to two other murders in the area in a troubling set of circumstances that made no parent in Chicago feel safe for many years to come before we get started I want to have a word from our sponsor of this video and our sponsor for this video is hunt a killer a subscription box service that allows you to be a detective hunting for a killer this is a box one of the newest season of huntin killer and I am so excited to dive in Hunter Killer sends you a box of clues over the course of an entire season these clues will add up and fill in the puzzle of who committed a crime I love Hunter Killer so much I have a ton of fun figuring out these clues putting everything together and trying to solve a murder the best part is it's not easy it's not something you could do without putting a lot of thought into it they make it very very challenging which I love it's a distraction from my work it's a distraction from cases where real people are being killed and I can just dedicate my crime solving abilities to something that's really not a life or death situation in real life when you get your hunter killer box it'll usually have an envelope in it the envelopes going to have police reports and other little clues that lead you in the right direction go for instance in this box I got this moon summit and National Park wildlife guide and notebook and it says establish 1917 so it's pretty much empty but since this is the first time I'm actually opening the box on the camera with you I'm sure there is something in here that will give us a guide to the case and this has an introduction safety guidelines so I'm gonna look through that it has a moon phases in here so I almost feel like there's something with moon phases involved I also have an evidence bag from the Park Service's investigative branch and this says that it's from moon Summit National Park fatality bear attack taupey mendon it looks like a bear tooth right it's a bear tooth this looks like it's from the same a case and it says found inside Tobey Mendez backpack it'll also get things like an autopsy report there's an incident report here there's a lot of like police paperwork in here so every time you get a new box it just adds to your clues create a murder board that's what I have I put all my clues together on that and then over time I start to get a better picture of who's to blame and what the whole circumstances are but I mean like obviously it wasn't to the bear right because it's not hard to bear it's hard to kill her Hunter Keller starts at $25 a box which means you could have more fun at home with yourself or your friends than you could actually going out and buying dinner or drinks or a movie you know expensive movies alright now it gets insane additionally proceeds from every box go towards the Cold Case Foundation which is a foundation that helps solve real-life cold cases and Jan Douglas who was the inspiration for Netflix's mind hunter he's actually chairman of the board right now for viewers of this channel if you go in the description box there's a link and if you use that link you can get 20% off of your first box so I guess the only question left is do you have what it takes to hunt a killer all right guys let's get started on the video this is the story of 15 year old Barbara Grimes and her 12 year old sister Patricia Grimes like most other teenage girls at that time they loved Elvis Presley at home they played his records non-stop they giggled in their room together about how handsome he was and on the evening of December 28th 1956 they were planning on going to Chicago's Brighton theater to see Love Me Tender which had been released that past November 15th and they'd already seen it several times some sources say it was their 11th time seeing it some sources say it was their 15th time seeing it either way they'd seen it quite a bit and they wanted to again and it reminds me of when Titanic came out I saw it probably 11 or 12 times in the one time I brought my dad with me and he was miserable the whole time anyways it was supposed to be very cold that evening and the night before the girls had been late getting home from a friend's house so their mother Loretta had told them that they wouldn't be able to go to the movies that next night however she ended up giving in she knew how much her daughters had been anticipating the movie they'd saved up their own money to buy their own tickets on that Friday evening Loretta made a tuna fish salad for dinner and the family sat down together before the girls left for the movie now Patricia had snuck in a banana split before dinner so she wasn't really that hungry and she didn't eat but Barbara ate all of her dinner happily Barbara dressed in a yellow blouse a great wheat skirt white bobby socks and black ballet shoes over that she put on a grey a three-quarter length sleeve coat and a grey scarf barbara was the older sister but she was quiet and reserved shy even her younger sister Patricia was the one who kind of seemed to call all the shots in their relationship she was the leader she was energetic happy outgoing and that evening she'd put on a yellow sweater over blue jeans with black shoes she also had worn a black jacket with white striped sleeves and she had tied a white scarf around her head now this was a very exciting time for the girls Patricia especially they've each received their own personal little radio for Christmas and Patricia was turning 13 in just a few days on the 31st of December the next day which would be a Saturday she'd planned a birthday party and she did vited all her girlfriends over from school it was really a great time to be alive for the grime sisters Elvis was on the radio every time you turned it on and they had each other sisters and best friends they left their house that evening with two dollars and fifty cents between them enough to buy a few movie tickets maybe take the bus there or back we'll probably not both ways Loretta sent them off telling them to come straight home after the movie and to be safe now the Brighton Theatre was located on south Archer Avenue which was just about a mile and a half away from the Grimes home and they arrived safely there at about 7:30 p.m. according to Dorothy wine arts a school friend of Patricia's who sat behind the girls during the movie now when Dorothy left the theater she saw the girls again and she claimed that they were standing in line at concessions this was about 10 at 15 p.m. and the girls had promised their mother that they'd be home by midnight but that evening there was a double feature playing and although no one knows or can say for sure it's speculated that they may have decided to stay for the second movie which is why they'd been at the concession counter after the first movie was over as we'll soon see this is just the first of many questions and inconsistencies surrounding what happened that night and what happened to the Grimes sisters because so much doesn't make sense it just doesn't add up when the girls weren't home by midnight their mother obviously began to worry but her other children told her not to worry that Barbara and Patricia would probably be walking in at any moment but they didn't now the girls older siblings Teresa who was 17 and Joey who was 14 they went to wait at the bus stop to meet the girls but one bus arrived and then another and then another and none of them were holding the Grimes sisters after the third bus came and went Teresa and Joey went home and told their mother at the bad-news Barbara and Patricia hadn't been on the bus and no one knew where they were the Ryder Grimes called the police and reported her daughter's missing at 2:15 a.m. now to understand the police and community response in the wake of this tragedy we have to also understand two things first the time period this was the 1950s and some things were very different first of all children were given a bit more freedom in being out and about by themselves for to young girls to be walking to a movie theater after dark it wasn't really strange people felt safe but this was also the time of girls being seen and not heard a time where your husband could give you a black eye and if you reported it you'd be asked well what did you do to him to make him so angry additionally this was Chicago and although the crime and corruption of the 1920s Prohibition era had somewhat tempered there was still a lot of organized crime and police officers who were on the payroll of these gangsters initially when Barbara and Patricia didn't come home the police considered them their mother Loretta knew better the Grimes family had seen and experienced quite a bit of hardship in their lives Loretta and her husband Joseph Grimes had divorced in 1951 and he had remarried three years later another loss came when the eldest daughter Leona passed away unexpectedly at the age of 26 that still left Loretta with six children to care for two boys James and Joey who are 11 and 14 in four girls Shirley who was the oldest Teresa Barbara and Patricia you see even though the family had experienced great loss and sadness they were almost closer for it Barbara and Patricia or described as good girls who would be given chores and tasks to do from their mother and they would do them without complaint all the kids knew how hard their mother worked to provide for them usually seven days a week and they did what they could to help out at home Barbara was a sophomore in high school who was interested in art and she worked part-time at a furniture store with her older sister always giving her paycheck to her mother she even gave her mother the $5 bonus that her boss had given her for Christmas so you can really tell that Barbara had a lot of respect for her mother for her family and she worked so that she could contribute the night that they went missing their older sister Teresa had told Patricia to meet her downtown the next day and she would buy her a blouse for her birthday because remember Patricia was turning 13 on December 31st now Patricia agreed and jokingly added you can buy me lunch too and right there it kind of shows you the difference in Barbara and Patricia's personalities you know they were both good girls but Patricia was kind of a jokester she would have been the one who as soon as the 60s hit was growing her hair long and wearing bell-bottoms well the other kids were really good to neighbors told stories of how Joey would shovel their driveways for them when it's stormed and it storms in Chicago and he did it without being asked or paid they were good kids who were raised to respect adults and not shy away from responsibility sure Patricia who was nicknamed PD she could get a little headstrong and sometimes even flighty when it came to the king himself but mrs. Grimes knew her daughters would never have run without telling her they've left behind all their things including their new radios which they've been so proud of they hadn't taken any clothes they hadn't packed anything Patricia had invited friends over for her birthday the next day and made plans with her sister to me for shopping in lunch there was not a doubt in Loretta's mind that something bad had happened to her girls but the police were not listening now the amount of sightings coming in from all over the country didn't help there were people who had claimed to have seen the girls in Nashville Tennessee and the cops began to theorize that they had gone on an adventure to try and meet their Idol Elvis Presley once again Loretta Grimes vehemently disagreed her daughters loved Elvis yes but they were good girls they never leave the state without talking to her first and this isn't the first case we've looked at and talked about we're missing children are not taken seriously by the police in fact Johnny Gosch case that I'm looking into now is a glaring representation of that these kids were immediately determined to be Runaways or troublemakers which left the first hours and days of the investigation being wasted by law enforcement who were half-heartedly tracking down runaway kids instead of urgently trying to find a child who may have been in mortal danger and they're like a days ago attitude about the girl's disappearance began to spread to the community and the press they've probably just run away neighbors said behind the back of Loretta Grimes who kept insisting that her daughter's had not run away that her daughters were in danger and I don't want to make it seem as if the police and the community did nothing because those reports started coming through of people who had seen the girls that night and in the days following a darker picture began to form the search for the Grimes sisters ended up actually being one of the biggest collective searches in the history of Chicago with police and civilians alike taking to the streets and searching isolated areas going door to door looking for the two missing girls these reports in these sightings they came in at all different times over the next few months but I've done my best to piece them together for you so it makes sense in the timeline but it does get confusing and some of it truly just does not make sense so after the girls friend Dorothy sees them at concessions the next person who claimed to see them was a bank clerk named Roger Minard he said he'd been sitting behind them during the movie and that they were walking behind him on the street outside the theater when everyone left at around 11 he also claimed that he saw a car pull up to them and 1952 Buick he said the girls giggled and talked with the occupants of the car before it pulled away but it was followed by another car that stopped next to the girls a dark colored mercury he doesn't know what happened next because he had turned down a side street and then they were out of his view another man a truck driver claimed he saw the girls get picked up by someone driving a 1949 black mercury next to the theater at about 10:40 3:00 now clearly this contradicts the previous statement from a man who said they had left the theater at about 11:00 but around the same time 11:00 p.m. stanley sidarsky was watching television inside his house on Archer F the theater was on Archer Ave and he heard a car radio in the sound of an engine outside so he went to the window and he looked out and he claimed he saw a girl who looked like Barbara Grimes's standing outside talking to a man who looked to be in his early 20s about six-foot tall 180 pounds with blond bushy hair wearing a light-colored army jacket a few feet away another girl who resembled Patricia Grimes was talking to another young man and at the curb a black mercury with the double exhaust pipes set and two more men were waiting inside now once he saw what was happening outside his window stanley claims that he went back to his television program and then he heard the car pull away about ten minutes later Stanley's at our skis house would have been on the Grimes assisters way home they would have passed his house on their way home from the movies so if we can assume that they possibly took the bus to the theater in order to make sure they got there on time planning to walk home afterwards they would have passed sidarskys house next a bus driver named Joe smock claims that he picked up the two girls at the archer Ave stop at around 11:15 but he couldn't remember where he dropped them off additionally two local teenage boys at Lordan and Earls Astro were driving around killing time before they had to be home for their curfew when they saw the two walking down 35th street just a few blocks from the Grimes home now the boy said that they recognized the girls because they knew them and they knew their family and they also said that Patricia and Barbara seemed completely normal and happy they were giggling and laughing and jumping out at each other from doorways this was a little bit before 11:30 p.m. Gertrude Kovacs who lived six blocks away from the theatre claimed she heard a girl screaming from the inside of a car that was driving down Archer Ave at around 11:30 and sell a box who lived in the neighborhood near the bus stop the girls would normally take she claimed tear screaming from outside at about 12:15 a.m. so we've got a lot of sightings right the night of but the strange thing is they can't all be true or accurate they can't all have happened you've got somebody who says they were walking by his house at a certain time but then you've got a bus driver who places them on his bus around that same time you've got two teenage boys who see Patricia and Barbara close by to their mother's house but then you have these other women who live near the bus stop that they would have taken and live near the theatre hearing screaming coming from outside between 11:00 and 12:00 a.m. well the next day December 29th there was also multiple sightings of the girls around the city Jack Franklin who was a security guard had encountered them on the corner of Lawrence and Central Park Ave where they'd asked him for directions he claimed he couldn't remember where they were headed where they'd wanted directions to just that he'd walked by them with an armful of groceries and he'd heard one of them ask the other I wonder where the bus stop is to which he stopped and pointed telling them that they'd passed it already according to him one of them told him to shut up before they both walked away in the direction he pointed and this was about 9:30 in the morning allegedly a young girl named Catherine Borak who went to school with Patricia claimed she was sitting in a cafe and eating when she spotted Patricia walking by with two people she didn't recognise at about 6:30 p.m. and these ridiculous sightings kept rolling in everyone had seen these girls just wandering around the city of Chicago in frigid weather with apparently on January 1st a CTA bus driver claimed they'd wrote his bus on January 2nd George Pope the night clerk at the unity hotel said he'd refused them a room at 9:00 p.m. on January 3rd three department store employees claimed that they'd seen the sisters sitting at the record counter listening to Elvis there's obviously a lot of reasons for this like I said the media was very involved the media back in those days like if we think they're bad today the media back in the 20s and the 30s and the 40s in the 50s they were literally ambulance chasers so any scent of controversy or scandal or a huge crime huge dramatic crime they'd be all over it they try to question people the girls knew they'd camp outside of the Grimes house and they didn't report with integrity so they talk to people in the community who'd be like yeah those those girls were trouble you know they were always hanging out with boys and then they would report it that way but it wasn't true so you're gonna get a lot of people who are gonna come forward after reading the paper knowing that they were on their way to see an Elvis movie knowing that they were Elvis fans and they're gonna create these sightings based on what they know about the girls now they may not just be completely making it up they may have actually seen two girls but because they'd already read the newspapers and maybe these two girls kind of look like Barbara and Patricia they're just gonna start attributing Barbara and Patricia to every two little girls they see and they're gonna report it as if they saw those two girls not oh we saw somebody who looked like them they're gonna go to the paper and the police and say absolutely it was these two girls and that is kind of the problem when you have the paper and the police working close together which they did back in the day you have the police telling the paper these tips that they're getting and then the papers reporting it as if it's a fact it was just an incredibly problematic and as you can see as we're trying to rebuild this timeline it's almost impossible because of all these bananas sightings so On January 14th the parents of Sandra Tolson claimed to have received two odd phone calls at around midnight the first one Walter toll stood picked up wondering who the heck would be calling his home that late when he said hello no one answered but he said he could tell someone on the line when even get a response he hung up well 15 minutes later the phone rang again this time aunt Olson picked up and this time the person on the other end did speak she claims it was the framed voice of a little girl a little girl that mrs. Tolson thought sounded a lot like Patricia Grimes now this voice asked for Sandra but when the Tolson said they would wake her up and get her to the phone whoever was on the phone hung up as the days passed and Barbara and Patricia were not found Loretta Grimes became more and more insistent that something had happened to them she'd been receiving strange letters in the mail 8 in total from someone claiming to have her daughter's the first letter told her to go to a Catholic Church in Milwaukee and bring $1000 with her she was directed to place the money next to her on the Pew and within a short time Barbara her oldest daughter would come in and take the money and leave and then returned with Patricia once the money had been delivered to the kidnappers now the FBI accompanied her and they instructed her to follow the directions to a tea which she did and she sat in that church waiting for her daughter to walk in waiting for the nightmare that had become her life to be over but no one did come in no Patricia no Barbara and Loretta Grimes continued receiving these letters these letters with instructions of going to Milwaukee always Milwaukee with money sometimes a thousand sometimes five thousand and she always went you know and the police the FBI they always went with her every time but she never did get her daughter's back nothing ever happened eventually the police tracked the writer of the letters to a mental hospital where a patient had been writing them for fun and it was another dead end for a month the police handled the case as if the girls had run away despite a lot of evidence to the contrary then the unthinkable happened it was January 22nd a cold night the kind of Chicago night where between the chill in the air and the wind there's no escaping the creeping chill that penetrates you to your very bones a man named Leonard Prescott was driving down a German Church Road on his way home when he spotted something off the street behind the guard now initially he thought that the two white figures could be storm mannequins but something about the scene didn't feel quite right so he continued home and he picked up his wife Marie he told her what he'd seen and he was like come back with me and check this out and let me know if I'm really seeing mannequins or what the couple drove back together to have a closer look and when Marie spotted the figures she gasped she pulled back and she told her husband they needed to go to the police station immediately and it is strange when you're talking about these vintage crimes that happened in the 20s the 30s the 40s the 50s oftentimes when people spot the bodies of victims they would have they would have thought that they were store mannequins it's the same thing that happened in the black dahlia case when the woman and her little child were walking by and they saw Elizabeth shorts body initially the woman had thought it was a store mannequin so it kind of just tells you the time as well I mean we still have store mannequins now but I guess back in the day if a store was getting rid of the mannequins they would just kind of like toss them out they wouldn't recycle them or do anything with them or put them in a back storeroom they kind of just throw them out so it seemed to be a common thing to just see discarded store mannequins now the next morning Loretta Grimes was on her way to church when she got called to the station and informed that her daughters had been found dead tossed on the side of the road like trash both girls were naked with Patricia lying on top of her sister their bodies were brought to the morgue to be autopsied by three forensic pathologists this is where things get even more tricky and even more mysterious one of the pathologists dr. Walter J camp determined that the crime sisters had been killed within hours of being taken he came to this conclusion from the contents of their stomachs Patricia had nothing in her stomach but Barbara had undigested food that was the exact same meal she Dean the night they'd gone missing the thing that puzzled all three of the men the most was the lack of markings on their bodies there was no obvious cause of death no ligature marks no gunshot or stab wounds nothing really there were these three superficial puncture marks on Patricia's chest and they thought that they'd been made by something sharp like an ice pick but none of them were more than three core of an inch deep and they were not responsible for her death Barbara had some bruising on her cheek and her face once again it was superficial and had not caused her death not either of the girls had alcohol or drugs in their system and their cause of death was listed as exposure to low temperatures now this was reported to the press in public along with the fact that there had been no sexual assault it was also reported that the police believed the girls hadn't been found until that day because there'd been a big snowstorm on january 9th and 10th a foot of snow had fallen and the wind had picked up causing drifts most likely covering their bodies until the thaw came and the snow melted now it was theorized that they'd been taken and they'd been held in some cold isolated area before being thrown from the car and dying of exposure although the police searched a four mile area around where the bodies were found their clothes were never recovered not everyone agreed on these conclusions from the autopsy and we're gonna get to that in a moment but when Loretta Grimes was told that her daughters were dead she sobbed and she said I knew they hadn't run away I knew something had happened to them I kept telling the police that they wouldn't run away my poor babies why couldn't they have taken me and let my babies live if the police had listened to me they would have had the true story half an hour after the girls went missing Loretta was essentially calling out the Chicago Police Department and it was true she had insisted from the very first moment that her daughters were good girls they wouldn't have left without a word to her she knew Barbara and Patricia knew their hearts and how dedicated they were to their mother and their family Loretta was so distraught she was unable to face the bodies of her daughters and their father Joseph was given that gruesome task Loretta had also been Manning the phones right along with the police taking calls from people who might have information about the whereabouts of her daughters on January first she'd received an anonymous call saying she'd find the girls bodies behind the theater on Archer Ave police investigated but there was no evidence that they had ever been there now she got a ton of calls many of these calls turned out to be hoaxes false sightings but one call that was received after the girls were found rattled Loretto to her core he was a man a man who had a very distinctive voice who seemed very gleeful as he told her that he was responsible for the deaths of her girls this man gave her specific details about what he had done but what worried her the most was a detail he knew that had not been shared with the press he mentioned that one of the girls had crossed toes something he'd noticed while he helped undress her in fact little Patricia did have crossed toes he also threatened Loretta's other children saying this isn't over the next one will be found floating in the river loretta believed that this man had actually been responsible Patricia would often cross her toes when she was nervous or upset but her toes weren't just perpetually crossed so when her body was found she didn't have crossed toes it was just a habit she had in life it was a small personal detail they have very few people knew outside of the family what this man did know it Loretta also believed that the culprit was someone who lived in the neighborhood someone her daughter's knew as they had often been taught and told never to get in a car with strangers the Grimes sisters hadn't been the first case in the Chicago area that had shocked the city many saw similarities in this case to another one also involving children that had happened a year prior in October of 1955 brothers John and Anton Schussler and their friend Robert Peterson decided to go downtown and see a matinee on a Sunday afternoon John was 13 Anton was 11 and Bobby was 14 when they didn't return they were reported missing two days later their bodies were found in a ditch in the Robinson woods Forest Preserve like the Grimes assisters all three of them had been planning to see a movie the day they'd been snatched up and all three were found naked but the boys were beaten badly and they'd been bound and gagged with tape and they'd all been strangled to death additionally Bobby Peterson had been violently slashed on his head 14 times and if the coroner was right both the boys in the Grimes sisters had been killed soon after being taken additionally both abductions had taken place during a period of inclement weather for the boys it had been raining heavily for the sisters it had been snowing and very cold police believed the weather conditions may have made it easier to lure the children into the vehicle of a stranger and just as with the Grimes sisters the boys clothing was never found now I do want to insert here something that I find very very odd and kind of creepy this case with the three boys it happened you know in Chicago in the 1950s and it was eventually solved allegedly somebody did go to jail for it even though he claimed he was innocent the entire time and he never stopped claiming that he was innocent so a man named Kenneth Hanson ended up going to jail for this and it took nearly 40 years to apprehend him so he was 22 when he allegedly committed this crime and he was 66 when he was finally arrested for it and I'll try to come back to it at the end of the video but there are ties between Kenneth Hanson and the grime sisters if I forget to do that and come back to it just let me know in the comments and I'll tell you what I mean but I can do a whole video on this case if you want it's very in-depth there's a lot to it but it also was weird to me that they were found in the Robinson Forest Preserve because it reminds me of the West Memphis Three case where the three boys were found in Robin Hood Hills they were bound they they had you know horrible things done to them and we don't really know what happened to the boys we don't know if they were abused or assaulted in that way because in the 50s they kind of didn't talk about stuff like that they didn't make it public knowledge at least so if they were most likely we wouldn't know about it only the boys families would and they probably wouldn't want that information spread around rightly so this isn't the first time I found these strange connections in these cases that I look at and is a coincidence most likely but it just seems like things repeat themselves Robin Hood Hills Robinson Forest Preserve three boys all kind of handled and left in the same way it's just very strange and I know I'm being so vague right now and I want to to explain to you more what I mean but I have to do some more research before before I do that just know that I think it's very strange how these crimes that happened you know 10 20 30 40 50 years apart seem to be so similar let's get back to the actual case that we came here to talk about now that I've gone off on my tangent so as the city tried to wrap its head around the loss of so many young lives the police got to work trying to figure out who'd killed Patricia and Barbara Grimes one of the first suspects they focused on was a 53 year old man named Walter Krong January 15th before the girls bodies had been found the police received an anonymous call from a man telling them to search Santa Fe Park and that they would find the missing sisters there now they checked out the park but they found no sign of the Grimes girls when the bodies were found only a mile and a half away from this park police tracked the anonymous caller down to a Tavern on Halsted Street and it was Walter Krantz at first he denied making the call but later his story changed and he said he had made the call but only because he'd received the information through his psychic powers and ability that ran and his family for generations he claimed he'd had a dream about where they might be but he was not involved in what happened to them he was given three polygraph tests and in all three he only showed signs of deceit when he was asked if he'd seen the bodies after death this question was asked differently each time and each time a disturbance was detected after he answered that question not willing to let him go yet Kranz was fingerprinted and his prints and his photograph were sent to the FBI in Washington for further review I suspect that this man might have come upon the bodies at some point after they'd been left there and called the police and said it was his psychic dream but I think that's why when he answered the questions he was showing the seat in that one area that's my theory allegedly I think that that's very possible then the police got a tip from a taxicab driver named Reno Valdez Eccles Echols told police he'd seen two girls matching the description of the Grimes sisters three weeks before their bodies were found and he said that they were sitting in the back booth of a diner on Madison Street with two men he claimed it was early on a Sunday morning between a 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. and after some time the girls left with one of the men now police brought pictures of Barbara and Patricia to the diner and showed them to the owner Minnie doulas who confirmed Eccles story she said she had seen them they had been there however she had a bit more information for law enforcement she said she knew the man that they left with that night a previous employee of hers who'd been a dishwasher and she gave the police the name of Benny bedwell now Benny Bedwell has been described in some online resources articles that cover this case as looking like Elvis I don't think so he had a similar haircut you know that highly kind of puffy Elvis haircut I don't know what it's called quaff he had that same kind of haircut but then so many young men did in those days Elvis was the thing Elvis was the [ __ ] if you wanted girls to like you you want it to be Elvis he was 21 years old and what you have to understand is this man was known as a drifter he was supposedly someone who spent a lot of his time in Chicago's Skid Row area he could barely read or sign his own name he definitely couldn't write but there was a lot of evidence against him that led police to place him under arrest and questioned him extensively that's what the police said right they said there was a lot of evidence that then led them to putting him under arrest and that's not necessarily true they had many Doulos the the cafe owners word or her testimony saying that she'd seen the two girls with Benny that was all they had as far as as far as evidence goes but okay at first Benny told the police that he and a friend were with the grime girls the night they'd gone to the movies in fact he said that they'd been with them at the movies and they'd wanted to continue the fun afterwards but Barbara and Patricia had ducked out on him and his friend later that evening and in the days that followed Benny claimed he and his buddy who he called frank had seen the girls several more times at various Skid Row bars after that he elaborated on his story saying that he and Frank had scuffled with the girls in the back seat somehow they'd fallen unconscious the girls not Frank and bunny at which point the men dumped them on this of the road after this his story changed again this time he was claiming that everything he told them previously was a lie and he'd only said those things because he thought that the police would let him go if he confessed finally after spending some more time with the police three days to be exact in a motel not at the police station Benny allegedly wrote out and signed a full confession a man that could barely read or write mind you wrote out and signed an entire confession in this confession he suddenly had some more clarity as far as time and place went he said that he and Frank had picked up the girls on January 6th and the two couples had spent the next week drinking and carousing in bars and living in hotels then on January 16th after spending the past 10 days with these girls Benny claimed Frank pulled up in a car and suggested that they all take a ride and Benny said he didn't know where Frank had gotten the car whether he borrowed it or stolen it but that wasn't important to him at the time they all got in and drove to get some food they ate hot dogs and then they stopped at a gas station so that Barbara and Patricia cos used the bathroom after which he says that they drove to the Forest Preserve and found an isolated place to park at this point the men made advances on the girls but they were turned down benny then claims that they began to scuffle and he hit Patricia a bit harder than he intended to and Frank was having the same issues with Barbara in the backseat so basically these two men were just scuffling with the girls in the cars and they accidentally used too much force and killed them after this Benny couldn't remember exactly what happened because they'd been drinking heavily that day but he said that there was some discussion between him and Frank about getting rid of the bodies at which point they removed them from the vehicle left them on the other side of the guardrail and drove away now there's so much wrong with Benny bad Wells confession and his recounting of these events for one no traces of alcohol or hotdogs were found in the girl's systems or either girl's stomach for another he talks of beating the girls pretty severely but neither one had any significant marks on them and if his story is to be believed we would have to assume that the autopsy was completely wrong and that time of death had been severely miscalculated by more than a week since dr. camp had found traces of the Grimes dinner from that night in Barbara's stomach later at the inquest dr. camp would admit that there was a small possibility she'd eaten the exact same thing and a different time but that's still one to explain the absence of alcohol and hot dogs so police tracked down the other man who Benny called Frank but whose real name was William Cole Willingham a 25 year old hillbilly singer this man told the police that Benny was crazy and he hadn't seen him since November when they'd spent some time with two girls but they weren't the crimes girls they were Indian girls the police thought that William Willingham aka Frank was lying until to 19 year old Indian women came forward they were named Irene Deane and Carole King and they confirmed that they had spent time with bunny and Frank however there were some things that didn't help bunny Bagwell's case firstly that I win a statement from the night that the girls had gone missing as Stanley as a tarski he'd said he saw the two girls with men outside of his house next to a dark-colored Mercury and he described one of the men as being 6-foot tall 180 pounds with blond bushy hair wearing a light-colored army jacket Benny was 6 feet tall he was about a hundred maybe 190 pounds and he had sandy colored hair caught in the style of Elvis Presley puffed up on the top additionally when he was arrested he was wearing a tan army jacket it's not looking good for Benny I mean this family is a tarski guy must have had some serious night vision great like vision to be inside his house and be able to accurately pinpoint like how tall this guy was what color his hair was how much he weighed in what he was wearing but I digress another eyewitness came forward on February 8th his name was Robert J Mitchell and he owned and operated a service station four miles away from where the girls bodies had been found it was his claim that on a night in late December or early January a young man had come into his station staying a tow truck this young man was tall and blond and he had red bloodshot eyes while Mitchel drove him four miles to a car that was stalled on German Church Road where another man was waiting inside the car Mitchel tried to talk to the two man but he claimed that they were evasive and antagonist sick even and while he was hooking the car up to his tow truck he noticed a piece of cloth sticking out from inside the trunk a piece of cloth that might belong to a girls dress or a girl's skirt for instance Mitchell claimed he also wondered why these two men hadn't requested help from any of the nearby residents of the neighborhood there was people around there was actually closer places they could have gone but instead they walked for miles to his station additionally the police had driven Benny to the place where the Grimes sisters had been found and he saw a neon sign that was on the way Benny remarked how two of the signs letters had been blacked out when he'd driven by on the 13th of January and when the police contacted the owner of the sign to verify they found that this was true so like I said there was an inquest to determine whether or not there was enough evidence to charge Benny with the double murder now Lauretta crimes had from the start now believed the story of Benny bed well and had dismissed it as ridiculous she reiterated her daughters were good girls they wouldn't be cavorting with older men on Skid Row she was so sure that the story was a lie that during the inquest she actually comforted Benny bed Wells mother telling her I don't think your boy did this Benny testified that he was completely innocent and that his confession had been beaten and bribed out of him he said he'd been punched he'd been given money he'd been promised things and he finally told him what they wanted to hear he said they brought him into a hotel and questioned him for four days not letting him leave he'd been beaten and when that didn't work an officer called Fred Brennan had given him $5.00 when that didn't work Brennan had given him $15 and promised to buy him a new suit the police also allegedly told Benny that if he just confessed he wouldn't be charged with murder only drunk and disorderly because technically the girls had frozen to death just tell us what we want to hear we'll let you go and then Ralph sailor fact worker came forward and gave Benny an alibi for the time he would have been getting rid of the bodies Saylor said that he'd been on a public bus with Benny between 12:30 and 1:05 a.m. on the morning of January 13th so Cook County had no choice the charges against Benny bedwell were draft after the district attorney said they didn't have a case against him and this upset a lot of people in and out of the police department who were sure that Benny Bagwell was the guy Sheriff Loman claimed that no one had touched a hair on Betty's head that the dismissal of the charges was a political move made against him personally Harry gloss one of the men who had been present during the autopsy on the girls also vehemently disagreed with this decision he gave a press conference an impromptu press conference like at his house where he spilled all the tea on the coroner's office and what he referred to as a cover-up on behalf of his boss had coroner Walter McCarran Glaus was a former police sergeant turned a chief investigator to the coroner and he told reporters this may cost me my job but I cannot sleep knowing things are being covered up Harry gloss was of the same mindset the same camp ul as sheriff Loman they both believed that Benny bedwell was responsible he was the one and that the autopsy had either been done incorrectly or the truth was being hidden for one reason or the other now McCarran countered this saying that exhaustive forensic and tax ecology tests had been done and he basically claimed that Harry glass wasn't educated or trained enough to understand what any of that meant Harry gloss responded saying he'd been in the room for five hours while the pathologists were doing their thing and he knew what he'd seen and he knew what he heard and it was time that it came out so Harry Glaus alleged that the girls had been beaten and that they'd both been sexually abused but the coroner had wanted to keep these details a secret in order to spare their grieving mother he also claimed that sperm had been recovered in fluid taken from Patricia his theory was that they hadn't been killed the night they were taken but had been alive for a week or more before being stripped naked and thrown outside to the mercy of the elements he said that there'd been only three occurrences of heavy fall in January the seventh the eighth and the thirteenth and these would have been the only days the snow would have fallen enough to cover the bodies so essentially he's saying that the the Chief Coroner who had been his boss completely lied and you know kept certain things from the public and from the parents in order to spare them the devastation as I mentioned earlier but he's also saying that there's a theory that they've been kept alive for some time and then just thrown outside most likely is still alive to just freeze to death and that the only reason their bodies hadn't been discovered before it was because they hadn't been on the side of the road because snow hadn't fallen because it had been a good you know week week and a half between when they disappeared and when the snow had fallen enough to cover their bodies so they would have been just kind of laying there on the side of the road and somebody would have noticed them beforehand Harry gloss was fired but luckily Sheriff Loman was standing by to offer him a job since both men were gunning for Benny Bagwell Chicago Chief of Detectives Pat Healy made a statement that yes there appeared to have been sexual activity before death but it was only evident on Barbara they had no way of knowing whether it was consensual or not deally also denied that either girl had been beaten so now we have a you know a new story here before they said no one was beaten nobody was sexually abused then Glaus was like they were both being they were both abused then the chief of detectives comes out and he's like yeah there was some sign of sexual activity we don't know if was consensual which like this girl's a child you know most likely it wasn't consensual but welcome to the 50s doctor camp did not waver from his initial estimation of the time of death stating that the girls were dead within hours not days he even found traces of banana and Patricia stomach from the banana split she'd eaten before dinner causing her not to be hungry for the actual meal so Benny Bagwell was released on $20,000 bond provided by a professional bondsman there was plenty of them in Chicago but he was promptly arrested again when the governor of Florida asked for his extradition based on charges of assault against a 13 year old girl Benny Matt in a Florida trailer park so while Benny was being held for the Grimes sister's case he'd wrote a letter to a young woman in Florida which was intercepted on its way out of the prison and read like they are in this letter Benny told this girl that he'd marry her if she was pregnant and the girl that he'd written this letter to and the girl that the governor of Florida wanted him extradited forward they were one in the same so Benny was the main suspect for many years and the question of his guilt or innocence caused a lot of conflict in the city's law enforcement circles more recently a Chicago author thinks he's gotten to the bottom of the mystery and discovered who the real killer was Ray Johnston is a formal criminal investigator in DuPage Illinois born and raised in Chicago after being interested in crime in history for so long he began to write books about the stranger Side of Chicago and he's known as the history cop his theory on the murder of the Grimes sisters comes from the culprit of another case the murder of Bonnie Lee Scott in 1958 Bonnie was a 15 year old girl with a troubled past who lived with her aunt uncle and grandmother on Normandy Drive in Addison her grandmother actually had custody of Bonnie because her mother was a patient at a psychiatric hospital and Bonnie was having troubles in school so when she didn't come home on September 22nd 1958 her grandmother who was her guardian assumed she'd run away as she done before and called police police questioned those in the young girl's life including her boyfriend a man named Charles Mel Quist the problem with this relationship was the big age difference Charles claimed to have met Bonnie at a carnival the summer before when she was 14 and he was 20 but he said he didn't know how young she was until she brought him to visit her mother at the Elgin state mental hospital according to Malthus once he figured out her real age he became more of a a big brother to her rather than a boyfriend someone who would remain in her life and give her advice and help and guidance if she needed it when asked if he'd talked to her the day she went missing he admitted that she had called him that night at around 8:15 p.m. from the 4d restaurant in Chicago to complain about her new boyfriend who was making unwanted advance towards her later Charles mal quest received another call from this alleged boyfriend who told him that he was throwing money out of his car on route 66 and Lagrange Road Charles mal quest told the police that he'd driven out there tried to pick her up try to find her but there was no sign of Bonnie given the fact that he had been romantically involved with the young girl and there was a significant age difference the police were a little suspicious of história first and their fears were confirmed when they questioned a waitress at the forty restaurant who told them she'd seen Bonnie the night of the 22nd with four teenage boys they all seemed to be having a good time laughing and dancing they even took the party out to the parking lot to dance besides the boys car at 8:30 p.m. the boys had asked Bonnie if she wanted to ride home and she'd said no at which point they drove away and left her in the parking lot the waitress also claimed that no one had made a call from the forty that night so mal quest story of getting a call from Bonnie that night from the restaurant began to look more and more unlikely but he was being extremely cooperative with the police and in the days and weeks following Bonnie's disappearance he volunteered to drive her grandmother around the city looking for the girl unfortunately Bonnie Lee Scott was not found until November 15th a group of Boy Scouts were on a nature walk in a forest preserve located on the southwest corner of LaGrange and 95th Street as they walked they came upon the body of a young girl lying 15 feet off the side of the road she was badly decomposed and her head had been removed this young girl would turn out to be a Bonnie and her head was discovered 20 yards away from her body once her identity was confirmed the police picked up Charles and mal quest again remembering that he'd been eerily accurate about the last place Bonnie had allegedly been they picked him up at home just before midnight on November the 16th and they interviewed him for the better part of three hours afterwards the police chief himself drove Mel quest home at which time Charles mal quest made the comment that he was planning to apply to the DuPage County Sheriff's Department the following week and he hoped that this little mess with Bonnie you know being found dead wouldn't get in the way of his application the chief was like kind of a weird thing to worry about right now but okay and he asked him to return to the station the next morning for further questioning and Mel Quest did arrive he arrived at 10 a.m. the next morning and he was accompanied by his father and it was kind of a weird situation because even though his story didn't completely add up and he was an odd kind of guy he seemed very willing to cooperate with law enforcement and he actually requested a polygraph test which probably wasn't the best idea considering what that polygraph test showed the results came back showing that he had lied he was then asked to take another better polygraph which he agreed to but during that test he confessed to murdering Bonnie in specific and gory detail Charles mal quest said that on the 22nd he'd picked Bonnie up from her house at around 8 p.m. and they parked somewhere to mess around but their antics seemed to go a bit too far when he held a satin pillow over her face for too long and she stopped breathing once he realized he'd accidentally killed her he took her clothes off and then drove her to the drop location where she was found rolled her body over the guardrail before going over the guardrail himself and dragging her body into a thicket mal quest claimed he shoved Bonnie's clothes under the passenger seat of his car and went home the next morning he woke up and he was like well what a crazy dream I must have you know dreamed all that can't possibly be real so he thought he dreamed it all up he drove back to where he'd left the body on September 26th to verify that it had really happened and he brought with him a large hunting knife which he then used to cut off Bonnie's head having the urge to do so he said he said he had the urge to do so and that's why he did it but mal quest actually tried to visit her body a third time but he was scared off when he saw someone in the area mal cuesta then said he thought it would be a good idea to get rid of Bonnie's clothes which he'd still had in his car the very same car he'd been driving her grandmother around in for weeks looking for her according to him he burned the clothes and he never looked back so how do Bonnie we Scott and Charles at mal quest tie in with the Grimes sisters first of all there was a very short distance between where Bonnie Lee Scott was found where Barbara and Patricia were found additionally as a grown man seeking out companionship from young girls it would fit his MO additionally Charles mal quest had a method of rendering a girl's unconscious using a military chokehold he learned while in the army ex-girlfriends of his claimed he be used this tactic on them and they had left them with bruises on their faces a form of petechiae Patricia and Barbara did not have any obvious science of what might have ended their lives but they did have minor bruising on their faces and if you remember from earlier Loretta Grimes had received a chilling call after she discovered her daughters were dead from a man who claimed to have been there when it happened the day that the news came out about a female body being discovered before it had even been identified as Bonnie loretta grimes claims that this same man called her and told her that he'd gotten away with another one before laughing and hanging up Loretta Grimes said she could never forget the voice of the man who'd called her telling her such horrible things about her own daughters and this caller's voice was the same strange thing is after confessing to the murder of a 15 year old girl mal quest was sentenced to 99 years in prison however he only served eight of those years before being released getting married and having kids how would a man who admitted to committing such a heinous crime be able to serve such a light sentence to answer that we once again might have to consider the time and place Chicago in the 1950s and for several years before was run by gangsters and criminals who had the police and politicians basically in their pocket working as their lackeys the mob had been using the city as its own personal playground since before the days of prohibition and the police force had learned to look the other way and even profit from their nefarious deeds if they didn't as they would end up as another statistic showing the rise of violent crimes in that city that brings us to a man named Sheldon Teller who'd been one of the lead detectives on the Grimes case it also turned out teller was working for a Sicilian crime boss Sam Giancana selling drugs and making sure that he stayed out of trouble a few years later Sheldon teller would be indicted along with two other police officers in narcotics trafficking detective teller was also one of the first people on the scene at the arrest of Charles mal quest and he was the one who'd recovered or retrieved an address book from mal quests home showing names and addresses of several young girls at least two of these girls were neighbors of the grimes that in itself might not seem too strange but when you look at the fact that mal quest was not a wealthy man yet he was represented by a very good lawyer a man named Robert McDonald MacDonald was also a lawyer to mafia boss Sam Giancana and he was married to Sam's daughter but although police wanted to question mal quest in relation to the Grimes case McDonald for bida Ray Johnston believes that Sheldon teller used informants to infiltrate smaller gangs in order to identify and eliminate possible threats to Giancana x' drug business and he had listed one of these informants as a 19 year old army veteran named chuck now Mel Quest had been in the Army and Chuck is a common nickname for Charles it would have been possible for mal quest to have used his army technique to render Patricia and Barbara unconscious and after doing whatever he wanted them he toss them out of his car into the unforgiving Chicago cold naked and possibly still alive there they would have stayed until the elements got them ray Johnson also thinks that there was others involved unwilling or unknowing participants who would have been very young teenagers themselves at that time he believes they're still alive today but too afraid to come forward knowing would implicate them in the girls deaths the fact that there were so many eyewitnesses who saw the girls with two or more boys might support that theory however it's my own theory that some of these witnesses may have been plants in order to cast suspicion on Benny Bedwell since the arrest of mal quest might bring light to his affiliation with Sheldon teller and then to Giancana for instance the witness who claimed he's seen the girls outside of his house talking to boys the description he gave of one of the boys a spot-on description about well like I said down to the coat he was wearing this witness also didn't come forward with that information till after the girls were found dead and he was actually questioned by the police because they thought his story was a little too hi a little too neat to be true Robert Mitchell the owner of the service station also seems a bit suspicious to me once again and eyewitness citing that came in after the girls bodies were discovered the mob was known for creating relationships with business owners charging them money for protection so a business owner who may have been in league with the mob who maybe had been threatened by them before maybe this person this business owner may have felt compelled to do a favor for a very dangerous man who could turn his violent gaze on him at any moment and remember that girl the young girl friend of Patricia's who claimed she'd seen Patricia walking outside this this restaurant with two people she didn't recognize she completely made that up she also made up other stories of strange men calling her and claiming like oh we killed your friend what are you gonna do about it are you gonna call the police and she was like yes I am so she made all of this up most likely for attention and I'm not saying that this little girlfriend of Patricia's was a plan to buy the mob but I'm saying that people will make things up you can tell the amount of people that confess to crimes they didn't commit or the amount of people that call it a tip lines with information it's really not information there's also the small and often overlooked detail of that Thursday night before Patricia and Barbara went missing the night that they'd gotten home late from a friend's house which almost caused their mother to forbid them from going to the movies the next night some believe that they may have first encountered their kidnappers that night because there was a missing hour between when they left their friend's house and when they arrived home giving their mother an excuse for their lateness that she clearly didn't believe during that mystery our eyewitnesses spotted Patricia Grimes running across a street corner between her friend's house and the Grimes home so about halfway between her friend's house in the Grimes home she's seen running across a street corner but the weird thing was she was running in the opposite direction not running the way that she should have been going to go home running away from her home it's theorized that Patricia and Barbara may have encountered a person or persons who had attempted to take them that night maybe they were walking home from their friend's house a vehicle had pulled up to them and started talking to them Patricia ran away remembering what her mother had about not talking to strangers only to discover when she ran a little way and looked back her sister had not followed and it terrified her so she ran back to make sure Patricia was okay and that's when the eyewitness saw her running across the street corner away from her home since so many years have passed between then and now will most likely never know what happened to Barbara and Patricia Loretta Grimes never forgot her girls and the family stopped putting up Christmas trees after that since it reminded them of two little girls who were no longer there to enjoy Christmas trees or Christmas Loretta Grimes passed away in 1989 never knowing exactly what had happened to her daughters but hoping to see them again and hold them in her arms in heaven before she died she did extracted a promise from the city's law enforcement who never give up trying to figure out who had hurt her girls unfortunately because there seems to be so much to this case that went wrong from the autopsy to the investigation to the alleged corruption and cover-ups in the Chicago PD I doubt that this promise was upheld by many Charles mal quest seems to me to be the best theory in this case but there's no way now to confirm this due to his incredibly short sentence in the brutal murder of a teenage girl it's clear to me he had some kind of powerful connections on his side connections with an interest in keeping him out of prison where he might chat with Sal mates or law enforcement and reveal something that they didn't want known Benny bedwell is also a good candidate for the crime both he and mal quest showed a preference for young girls and there's no way to prove that his confession was actually extracted from him by violence or by force although it's possible he was chosen by corrupt cops to be the fall guy and they would have done pretty much anything to pin it on him so that the real killer could walk free and who was this mysterious caller that plagued loretta grimes with calls for years was it the result of another twisted sick mind a hoax for fun like the ransom letters or was it actually the person who was responsible for what happened to her daughters the fact that he knew the detail about Patricia's cross toes it does seem as if he had access to inside and unpublicized information at the very least and since he took responsibility for Bonnie's death as well this points once again to Charles melt Qwest it's also possible that it was someone or multiple someone's that we don't even know about who managed to evade the attention of authorities Chicago has been known for its incredibly high rate of violent crimes for many years this was a city where HH Holmes felt comfortable running his dark schemes where gangsters like Al Capone openly flouted law enforcement and allegedly ordered the hit of seven men who were part of his rivals gang where in 1966 Richard Speck took the lives of eight women in one night Chicago was home to John Wayne Gacy the killer Klown to teenage Psychopaths named Leopold and Loeb and John Dillinger I mean we can do a series on only Chicago crimes and never run out of cases to cover it's not out of the question the Barbara and Patricia died at the hands of some other murderous lunatic roaming the streets who melted back into the dark as quickly as he had emerged from it it is strange covering these older cases because things were so different you know we talk a lot of crap about the LAPD and my PD even the Chicago PD I mean honestly let's let's let's be upfront here Chicago is still a very corrupt violent City and has been in the news even recently for corruption within law enforcement but we have come so far since the days of the 20s and the 30s and the 40s and the 50s so far as far as DNA goes as far as taking families of victims seriously as far as not waiting 72 hours to report somebody missing we've come a long way and we've made strides but we have so much more to do and unfortunately the case of Barbara and Patricia Grimes will just always remain a cautionary tale thank you guys so much for being here with me check out hunt a killer in the description box if you want to give it a try and embark on this next season of adventure and crime solving with me also a big shout out to all my patreon who I love who keep this channel going who allow me to give you these cases every week hopefully for as long as I can thank you guys so much for being here stay kind and stay beautiful and stay safe and I'll see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: Stephanie Harlowe

Views: 409,118

Keywords: stephanie harlowe, true crime, the grimes sisters, bennie bedwell, charles melquist, chicago crime, vintage crime, mystery monday

Id: 6ARgWOmuSG4

Length: 65min 42sec (3942 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 05 2020