The Mysterious Disappearance Of The Beaumont Children_ 2018 Update

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hello, everyone, Welcome back to my channel and welcome to
another true crime video. So today I'm going to be
telling you about a really old case that takes place
in Australia. And I've had so many of my Australian
subscribers request this. I actually had the pleasure of going
to Australia two years ago and one of the tour
guides that I was with actually requested this in person,
so I was very interested to talk about this. It's

(00:25):
been a really long time. I'm surprised I've waited this long,
but this one is super, super weird and is going
to leave you guys with a big old question mark.
So this is Jim and Nancy and they met and
married in nineteen fifty five. They had their first child
in nineteen fifty six named Jane, a second name Arna
in nineteen fifty eight, and a third named Grant in

(00:46):
nineteen sixty one, and they were a happy family living
in Southern Australia. On January twenty sixth of nineteen sixty six,
the three kids were going to Glen Oak Beach. And
Glen Oak Beach is a beach in the suburb city
of Adelaide in the state of South Australia. It is
known to be a popular tourist attraction and the children
were familiar with this area. And at this time, you know,

(01:07):
it's Australia, it's the sixties. Many people are sending their
children to the beach by themselves. It was just a
different time. Kids walked around way more than they used to.
I mean even when I was a kid, it was
different than it is even now. And this was not
the first time that the kids had gone out on
their own. In fact, they had literally done it the
day before and it was like hottest shit outside. I mean,
remember it's opposite season, so January is a very hot

(01:30):
month for them. Between eight forty five and ten am
that day, the children set out to the beach. Now
I'm not sure exactly what time because different sources report
different things. It's an old case and you know, things
get messed up. Their mom gave them just enough money
to get to the beach from the bus and to
get some food, and the beach was only two miles
from their house, so it'd only be like a five
minute bus ride. It's not a big deal at all. Jane,

(01:52):
who was the oldest, was known for being very responsible,
very trustworthy, and they just felt really comfortable with her
looking after the other two, and she told me to
catch the afternoon bus so that they were back by
two at the latest. Their mom was planning to visit
a friend while they were gone, and their dad was
at work, so when two pm rolled around the kids
were still not back, Nancy got worried, but you know,

(02:15):
she thought maybe they had missed the bus and they
were just waiting for a later one. It's not like
they had a cell phone they could just text her
or anything. So they stayed tried to stay calm and
waited for them. However, when they weren't home by the
time Jim got back from work around three, Jim decided
to go down to the beach and look for them himself.
So after he searched the beach, there was no sign
of them, So Jim and Nancy ended up just looking

(02:36):
around surrounding areas near their house, at neighbors' houses, just
checking anywhere that they could think of, but they found
absolutely nothing. So at five pm they decided that they
should probably just contact the police and file a missing
person's report. But remember it's the sixties, it's different. It
was all weird back then with the violent police report
laws like a lot of them made people wait seventy

(02:57):
two to twenty four hours to filing miss persons reports,
so people didn't call as quickly as they do now.
But the police actually jumped on this really fast. They
organized a search team, went over the whole beach and
within twenty four hours the entire nation was aware of
this case.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
As joined the nine year old as she oh, very intelligent,
very intelligent. They've only got to tell her a thing
once and she always does which she's told never to
talk to any strangers on the base when she swims
to it, always in groups. Be quite able to look
after the other two oh cloud capable clout cable.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
So the first thing, however, here towards this reach right
you can write line now come out and.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
It actually became the largest search in South Australian history.
On the night that they went missing, a woman told
police that she had seen the kids earlier that morning.
She actually said that she had spoken with them near
the Pada Wolanga behaved. On January twenty ninth, they decided
to go ahead and drain the marina. They figured that
the kids likely the marina so this would help them

(04:02):
in the search. But when they were searching, they weren't
able to find anything. And this is weird because the
kids had a total of seventeen items on different things
such as bags, towels, money like things like that, so
they thought it was kind of strange for them to
drown because chances are one of the objects would at
least show up like on the shore somewhere near the beach,
or come in from the water, and when they drained

(04:22):
the marina, they did not find them, so at this
point they're starting to think abduction. Another witness, a woman,
actually saw the kids around eleven or claims to have
seen them around eleven playing near this grassy area near
the beach. They were apparently playing in the sprinklers and
just having a good time and she just noticed them.
Now it's weird. She also said that she saw a

(04:43):
man that looked to be in his thirties just crappily
watching them. Then she said that eventually this man started
interacting with the kids and it wasn't long before they
were all playing with him. Another witness said that they
saw the man helping the kids put their shorts back
on over their swimsuits. She also saw them waiting for
him outside of the dressing room when he was getting changed.

(05:04):
She said she didn't think anything of it and didn't
call the police or anything because the kids seemed completely
comfortable and having a good time, so she thought they
knew him. Nancy and Jim thought this was really strange
because their daughter, Jane was actually really shy. They said
that they would never think of her as being someone
that would even talk to a stranger, let alone go
somewhere with him willingly. So then around twelve pm, another

(05:24):
witness said that they saw the kids at a bakery
and they were buying some pastries and a meat pie.
And I'm sure a lot of you in America are like,
what is a meat pie? It actually this really popular
food in Australia. I saw it everywhere there's like chains.
It's literally a pie filled with meat. So the baker
that worked there said that he remembered the kids coming
in and they ordered the meat pie, and he thought

(05:47):
it was unusual because normally they never ordered one, and
they said that the meat pie was actually for the man.
So at this point, the police are thinking that the
last time the kids were seen was around three pm,
and they thought that because a postman claim to have
seen all three of them walking in the general direction
of their house at around three. He said the children
were holding hands and laughing. However, the postman who contacted

(06:08):
the place actually figured out that he saw them in
the morning, that he was confused and it wasn't the afternoon.
So now the last known time was eleven am at
the bakery. So months went by without any answers, and
then one random day, a woman came forward and claimed
that she saw a man walking with two girls and
one boy into a house near hers, and she said

(06:30):
she believed it was abandoned and that no one was
currently living in it. This is so frustrating because if
this woman is telling the truth, why did you wait
months to say this? Like, wouldn't you call the police
right away if you saw a person taking kids into
an abandoned house, Like that's that's weird. So no one
knows why it took her so long. But yeah, they
weren't really able to do much with that. So this

(06:52):
case really struck home with Australia. Australia is a very
safe place. It's a it's just completely different and there
community is different, So they were so so hurt by this,
and this just didn't happen in the sixties, especially not Australia.
A few months later, on November eighth, a man from
the Netherlands named Jared Chrisette was brought to Australia to
help with the search, and he was actually a parapsychologist

(07:15):
and a psychic. A parapsychologist is actually someone who studies
paranormal and psychic phenomena in the science field. This type
of study isn't taken very seriously and isn't known to
be credible, but it's very interesting. And Gerald said that
he had a vision of where the children were. And
Gerald was actually known for working on missing persons cases
in the past. A lot of psychics actually do this.

(07:37):
Some of them were complete failures and he was totally wrong,
and some of them he was completely right. So it's
kind of like a fifty to fifty thing, which seems
to be that way with most psychics. So it's kind
of like why not take the chance, And that's how
their family felt.

Speaker 2 (07:50):
I really appreciate him coming out over I mean to
find I.

Speaker 4 (07:56):
Think it'd be very thin to me dead think you
feeling man, and I think that kid's main objected is
finding the two more size than killing.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
Correct. Jared identified a warehouse near their home that he
thinks the kids are buried under. It was under construction
at the time, and he thinks that they were buried
like into the construction, under the concrete.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
In my opinion, I have found the spot, whether children
are orly, Where is that spot? Where is that? Who
it is?

Speaker 1 (08:26):
And where I was this morning?

Speaker 2 (08:28):
And near the wall of that storeroom where that children
was last where executive at well, that's Wilton Street summit
in the park, Yes, Wilton Streets protected down.

Speaker 1 (08:45):
He specifically said that the remains would be in an
old brick kiln. Obviously, the people who owned the warehouse
were really hesitant to let them dig it all up,
especially just because some psychic said that the kids are
buried under there, but eventually they caved. The public raised
forty thousand dollars for the warehouse to be demolished and
they agreed, so they went ahead and demolished it, but

(09:06):
sadly they found absolutely nothing. So then two years after this,
Jim and Nancy received letters in the mail. They were
supposedly written by Jane and then the other one was
written by the man, and this man claimed that he
was keeping the kids. The envelope was postmarked to dan Denong, Victoria,
which is roughly four hundred and fifty miles away from Glenogue, Australia.

(09:28):
They were really short, but one of the letters, the
one that Jane had written, basically described her life being
pretty good with the man. Police actually believed that these
letters were authentic because they compared it to Jane's handwriting
in the past and it matched up. And the letter
from the man said that he basically appointed himself as
guardian of these kids and was raising them as his own.
But he did say that he would be willing to

(09:50):
give them back if the parents would meet him at
a certain meeting spot at a specific time. So they did.
They actually hired a detective. The detective followed them out there.
They drove to this spot and when they got there
there was nothing. They waited, there was nothing, And after
this they received another letter from the man, and this
time he said that he decided not to give the

(10:11):
kids back to them because they betrayed his trust by
bringing a private investigator with them, and so he decided
that he was going to keep the children. Obviously, the
Beaumonts were like, really upset, they don't even know if
this is real. And in nineteen ninety two, new forensic
examinations of the letters show that they were a hoax.
Fingerprint technology had improved and the author was identified as
a forty one year old man who had been a

(10:33):
teenager at the time and had written the letters as
a cruel joke, and because of all the time that
had elapsed, he was not charged with anything. So there's
a few people that are suspects in the case. The
first is Bevin Vaughan Einen. Bevin was sentenced to life
in prison in nineteen eighty four for murdering a fifteen
year old named Richard Kellvin around the same time police

(10:53):
started to suspect Bevin and possibly be involved in the
Beaumont children's disappearance. During the investigation into Bevin, police hurt
from a source that apparently they had a conversation with him,
and he allegedly bragged about having taken the children from
the beach a few years prior, and said that he
had taken them home to conduct experiments on them. He
bragged that he had performed a brilliant surgery on them,

(11:16):
where he somehow connected their bodies all up, which I
don't even know what that means. He said that one
of the children had supposedly died during it, so he
killed the other two and then claims he dumped the
bodies in Adelaide, like out in the middle of nowhere.
And police had not previously considered him to be a suspect,
but once they heard all of this, they started thinking.
He looked pretty similar to the police sketches that were

(11:37):
released in nineteen sixty six. Apparently, investigators think that he
is a reliable, incredible source, so they took him seriously.
But there was enough to argue against his involvement. The
main thing is that he was a lot younger than
the suspect was thought to be. The suspect was thought
to be in his late thirties. This guy would have
been in his early twenties at this point. And another

(11:58):
important thing that made people question if he actually did
anything was the fact that he only killed men in
teens older than fifteen. That was kind of like what
he was known for. But to me, like both of
those reasons seem like pretty weak. In August of two
thousand and seven, it was reported that police were examining
news footage old news footage of the case and they

(12:18):
came across a video clip which showed a man that
looked like Bevin watching them search for the bodies. But
they were never able to figure out the identity of
this man or connect him to Bevin, so that whole
lead just went cold. There's also Alan Monroe. In June
of twenty seventeen, detectives were given a copy of a
child's diary that was written in nineteen sixty six. They

(12:40):
were able to figure out that a man named Alan
Monroe was at the beach during the time of the
children's disappearance, and he was actually convicted of doing this
to several children in the past. He was interrogated by police,
but nothing came out of it. Then there's James O'Neill.
In the early nineteen seventies, James was put in jail
for life for the murder of nine year old boy

(13:00):
in Tasmania. James had apparently told several people that he
was responsible for the disappearance of the Beaumont children as well. However,
during his interview, James claimed that he had never been
to Adelaide, so it couldn't have been him who did it,
and they have interviewed him many times and have concluded
that he just cannot be considered a suspect. There's a
lot of people in this. The next is Derek Percy.

(13:21):
On April twenty second, two thousand and seventy, report in
Australia The Newspaper suggested that the Beaumont children may have
been killed by a man named Derek Percy. Derek was
in prison until his death in twenty thirteen after being
found not guilty by reason for insanity in the nineteen
sixty nine murder of Yvonne Tuhey. They thought that maybe
he could have been involved in the Beaumont children case
as well, but after they did some more investigation on it,

(13:44):
they determined that it just was impossible because he would
only been seventeen years old at the time. Then there's
Harry Phipps. Harry was a businessman who had two kids
of his own and lived close to the beach in
a bakery that the Beaumont children were at. One of
Harry's sons, Hayden, was fifteen when the kids did and
his father was in his forties. Hayden agreed to do
a full interview about his father, but the contents of

(14:06):
that interview have never been released. But Hayden did say
in the interview that he remembered his dad talking to
three kids. He said that he actually saw his dad
bring three kids in their house, and as he was
getting closer to his house because he was like walking up,
he heard gunshots, but he didn't think anything of it
because apparently this was normal in his house. Hayden talked
about how his father was very violent and scary. He

(14:27):
said that he carried a gun with him wherever he went,
and he also remembers his dad loading what looked to
be surfboard covers into the bed of his truck and
then driving off. He had assumed that the three kids
had just left on their own and thought his dad
was actually carrying surfboard covers in the back of his car.
Another thing that made Harry look really guilty is that
a man named David came forward and told authorities that

(14:48):
a man that looked like Harry had asked him and
paid him to dig a big hole. He and his
friend often did things on the weekend, like little odd
jobs to make money, and when they were offered a
decent amount of money just to dig a hole. They
were like sure, and he wanted them to dig it
near this factory, and they did it. They didn't think
anything of it. He said that they got there early
in the morning. The man told them to get to digging,

(15:10):
and they did. He paid them and they never saw
him again. Now this hole is pretty big. You could
easily fit three small children in there. However, Harry did
not ever become a suspect, which is interesting because a
lot of people think it was him, but police say
that he just didn't fit the description that people were
giving them. Harry was a high businessman in the area.
He was well known. Wouldn't more people have noticed him,

(15:32):
would he had taken the risk and taken someone right
from his town. You'd have to have a really good
case to prove him guilty. Harry ended up dying actually
in two thousand and four. Then ten years later his
son Hayden, passed away as well. But there also was
a woman who came forward saying that she thinks she
may have been sexually assaulted by a man that looked
like Harry. So years later, after he died, Harry's ex

(15:54):
wife decided to let the police search his house. When
they were going through the basement, they found a white
clutch purse. This looked extremely familiar because this looked almost
exact to the one that Jane was actually caring with
her that day. When the police asked her about the
purse and how her ex husband may have gotten it,
she said that it was hers and she had just

(16:14):
bought it. But authorities asked her, like, if you just
bought this, why was it just like thrown in your
basement in the dark. And that's when she got angry
and told the police to leave. So in twenty thirteen,
the authorities decided that they would go ahead and dig
a hole in the area that the boys said that
they had dug a hole for some man. In the hole,
they found absolutely nothing, But in twenty seventeen it was

(16:36):
discovered that they were actually digging in the wrong place.
So just this past year, January of twenty eighteen, detectives
announced that they would be excavating the site after all.

Speaker 4 (16:46):
All right, the purpose of this press conference is to
updout you all in respect to some recent developments in
relation to the disappearance of Jane, Anna and Grandpam on
nineteen sixty six over the years, there's been many books,
magazines and media interest about this case, and it's fair
to say it's one of the most famous cases within Australia.

(17:08):
It's probably had more people nominated as a potential offender
than any other case that I'm aware of, certainly in
this state. One of those people, as you know, is
Harry Phipps, who operated the Castle Loy factory at Maringiy
Avenue at North Plimpton. Major Crime first investigated claims about
Harry Phipps in two thousand and seven and at that
time we were unable to prove that he was involved

(17:30):
or that he was involved. Obviously, in these cases, whenever
we have a person of interest, it's our job to
one either proves that the person is responsible or equally
to prove that they're not responsible. But unfortunately sometimes the
matter remains unresolved, and that's the situation with mister Phipps.
Subsequent to that, we had two men come forward who

(17:52):
said as boys they dug a hole for mister Phipps
at the Casta Lay's site at the year of the
disappearance of the Beaumonts. Some time ago. We attended that
site with the brothers. They pointed out one site which
was excluded almost immediately and one site which required further exploration.
Ground penetrating radar was used at that site and there

(18:15):
was an excavation, and again nothing to prove mister Phipps
was involved or to prove that he wasn't. Since twenty thirteen,
there's been ongoing speculation. There's been information that's come in
and that caused us in twenty seventeen to commence a
discrete investigation, which we didn't announce publicly, and it had

(18:35):
been our intention to complete that investigation. In twenty seventeen,
we became aware a media outlet was also making simultaneous inquiants.
Then from that point worked collaboratively with Channel seven and
Flinders University. Flinder's University conducted what's known as ert testing
on the site, which involves placing a number of probes
into a defined area and it uses electricity to analyze

(19:00):
what's underneath. That was done from the fourth to the
seventh January, and after that the people from the university
went away and analyzed the data, which was quite complex
and time consuming. That analysis identified small anomaly in the
middle of the block, consistent with where the brothers said
that dug.

Speaker 1 (19:19):
The excavation took place on February second of twenty.

Speaker 3 (19:22):
Eighteen, fifty two years ago. Two young brothers like a
holt like a hole on this site, with the assistance
from this university UP and other identify an anomaly underground.

Speaker 1 (19:35):
And it took a total of nine hours. Animal bones
in general rubbish were found, but nothing related to the
Beaumont children. Though this case remains unsolved as of the
latest on it. Jim and Nancy really believed that their
kids were alive, so they stayed put at in their
home for many many years, but eventually years passed and
they got divorced. They are both currently in their nineties
and they have no idea what happened to their three children.

(19:58):
So this is just one of those mysteries that people
have so many theories on. I really want to know
what you guys think. I don't know, Like it seems
like a lot of those suspects could be legitimate, could
have done it, Like I don't know, it's just so weird,
but then each one gets somehow ruled out. It's just
like the perfect storm. I want to know what you
guys think. Did you think any of those men did it.
Which one do you think was most convincing? What do

(20:19):
you think happened to the Beaumont children? I really want
to know your guys's opinions on this one. I think
it's such a creepy case, especially that it's been so
long that they'd be adults by now, and who knows
if they're alive. It's just one of those ones that
keeps you up at night. But yeah, that's it for
me today. Guys, be sure to let me know your
thoughts in the comments, and I will see you in
my next video, What'd Your God? Seems like it's been

Speaker 2 (20:49):
Forever hover the Chu Big