Vanished but not forgotten

Even after 55 years, the disappearance of the three Beaumont siblings from a crowded, Adelaide beach on Australia Day 1966, still haunts me.

Jane (9), Arnna (7) and Grant (4) Beaumont seemingly vanished into thin air that hot summer's day and have never been found.

I was only born the year before the crime which shattered a nation's trust but I used to hear about the "poor little Beaumont children" whenever I visited my Aunt and Uncle in Adelaide in the early 1970s.

From the day they disappeared, "the Beaumont Children" became a byword for why us youngsters were not allowed out of our parents' sight.

Unwittingly, they stopped a still naive country in its tracks, neighbors started looking twice at each other and everyone wracked their brains and their consciences about how this could have happened in sleepy Australia.

Before the Beaumont children were snatched and presumably murdered, kids roamed the streets from a young age, only coming home at night fall.

Parents and guardians didn't give their safety or welfare a second thought. After all, Australia was like one, big country town where everybody knew everybody else.

But after the Beaumont children's demise, everything changed. Now, if you let your three children all under the age of 10, catch a bus to the beach alone, you were neglectful and asking for trouble.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Here's what happened. Nancy, a homemaker, and her husband, Grant, ex-Army taxi driver, give into their children's pleas to let them go to nearby Glenelg Beach for a second day's outing.

Grant had dropped them off at the beach the day before, January 25, and they had duly caught the bus home so Nancy caved in and let the older daughter, Jane, take her siblings on the short, five-minute bus trip to beach.

Jane was given 6 shillings and 6 pence (66 cents) to pay for the bus tickets home at midday.

The children caught the bus to Glenelg Beach at about 8.30am but were not on the noon bus back or the later, 2pm one. Naturally, Nancy and Grant began to panic. The father jumped in his car and raced to the beach in a frantic bid to find the three. After a fruitless search, the couple finally reported the children missing to the police at 5.30pm.

Jane, Arnna and Grant had last been seen in the company of a tall, fair-haired, athletic and suntanned man aged in his mid-30s who was playing with them at a park, Colley Reserve, just up from the beach.

It is thought he was the same man who had then changed and taken the kids to a nearby bakery where they had bought pasties and a meat pie with a crisp, 1 pound note, a lot of money in those days and far more than the just over 6 shillings their mother had given Jane for their excursion.

Heartbreakingly, it is believed Jane had used the money from her mother to buy sweets for the three earlier that day, leaving them no funds to get home on the bus and rendering them easier prey for the persuasive man promising them a hot lunch and a ride home.

In the years following the Beaumont children's disappearances, their desperate parents, Nancy and Grant, were plagued and plundered by hoaxers and psychics all claiming they knew where the children were.

The parents, who later divorced, held on to the little Somerton Park house for as long as they could because, as Nancy said, the children might come home and it would be "dreadful" if they weren't there to greet them.

Conspiracy theories and suspects have all been put forward as to what happened to the children, factory floors have been excavated looking for their tiny bones but nothing.

It's a terrifying, nightmarish example of how three, happy, little children can be playing at the beach one minute then suddenly gone the next. Their final hours were no doubt filled with unspeakable, violent and depraved acts with poor Jane, herself only 9, unwittingly leading the younger members to their deaths.

Of all the theories put forward, the most likely suspect, of course now long dead, appears to be a local and wealthy businessman, Harry Phipps (aka Hank Harrison), who also happened to live just 300m from Glenelg Beach.

His own son Warwick claimed to have seen the children playing in the family home's back yard on the afternoon of their disappearance but for many years was too terrified to say anything as he claimed to be the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of his father.

Phipps was also in the habit of giving out crisp, 1 pound notes to children for odd jobs or just to be "friendly". He was also his own boss so would often go to the beach on weekdays. Australia Day 1966 was a Wednesday and not a public holiday.

Well-connected and outwardly respectable, he was later revealed to be a voracious pedophile known as "The Satin Man" because of his predilection for wearing satin clothing under his business suits to arouse himself.

He bore an uncanny resemblance to the police artist sketch of the man seen cavorting with the Beaumont children and asking passerbys whether they had seen the children's money which had "disappeared". More likely, Phipps had taken the money to set up the ruse of the children having to rely on him to get them home.

Phipps also asked two local boys to dig a hole, 2m x 1m x 2m deep in the floor of one of his factories for reasons he did not specify. The boys did this on the weekend after the children's disappearance.

There is still a AUD$1 million reward for information which could help solve one of Australia's most troubling cold cases. It's too late for Nancy who died in September 2019, aged 92, in an Adelaide nursing home, and Grant Beaumont, who is now in his late 90s and infirm.

Personally, I don't think we'll ever know for sure what happened to Jane, Arnna and Grant forever immortalised in the grainy, black-and-white photos, with their crooked smiles, bad haircuts and little lives about to be cut so awfully short.