Only many years later, the police would follow the trail. Devoted husband of Loraine Beaumont (nee Pingitore). The parents wanted to be there if the Beaumont children would come home one day. Public Domain1966 police sketches of the sun-baked swimmer (left) and 1973 soccer stadium abductor (right). For them to be playing so confidently with a stranger seemed out of character. It is also the most extensive and longest search for perpetrators in the country's history. In 2013, investigators scoured a factory west of Adelaide, after two brothers told police they had spent the 1966 Australia Day weekend digging a large hole on the site at the request of the owner Harry Phipps. The mother of the missing Beaumont children has died without knowing whatever happened to her children. Jim Beaumont, the children's father, is still alive, but the couple separated years ago. They uncovered bones of animals - but no remains of the Beaumont children. Laurie discovered years later that the two werent related at all and that the young girl was never seen again. Nancy was born on December 2, 1949 near San Francisco, Californ The lack of remains made it impossible to prove the possibility of murder. One of Australia's coldest cases broke the heart of the nation, and still, it remains unsolved. McIntyre's children said that they and their father initially mistook the body of Arnna Beaumont for a boy because of her short hair. At 2 p.m., her husband came home, but not the children. 1966 police sketches of the sun-baked swimmer (left) and 1973 soccer stadium abductor (right). In the early 1970s, O'Neill told a station owner in the Kimberley and several other acquaintances that he was responsible for the disappearance of the Beaumont children. Their mother . It is also possible that Brown, who had unrestricted access to government buildings, may have deleted his own files. Nancy Beaumont, 92, passed away in 2019 while at a care facility in Adelaide. Munro was a former Scoutmaster who had pleaded guilty to 10 child sex offences including buggery and indecent assault against several victims in South Australias Kangaroo Island, Rapid Bay and the Glenelg between 1962 and 1983. Davie said afterwards: "He is one of the most likeable men you would ever meet. The man, Gerard Croiset, said that the kids were buried inside a warehouse kiln. In 2007, Phipps's son Haydn, who was 15 at the time of the disappearance, came forward to researchers with the claim that he had seen the children in his father's yard that day. This was not the childrens first unsupervised outing, as Jane had precociously learned the local bus routes. He was convinced that the three children's bodies would lie under the ground of this factory. Please try again later. Nothing was found. It is one of Australia's most enduring mysteries and a cold case South Australian Police have never given up on. At the time of their disappearance, it had been a building site, and he said that he believed their bodies were buried under new concrete, inside the remains of an old brick kiln. 19.2% had a female householder with no husband present, and 36.8% were non-families; 30.7% of all households were made up of individuals, and 10.0% had someone living alone who was 65 . In 1971 Bridgart was charged with 12 offences involving abductions and sexual assaults of four boys in Victoria. He then obtained work on a cattle station in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Alleged Time Traveler Predicts Imminent Alien Invasion Of Earth, Tollund Man So Well Preserved Guts Reveal Alarming Last Meal From 2,400 Years Ago, 22-Year-Old Woman Explains How She Lives Life While Stuck Inside "8-Year-Old's Body". His birthdate of the 1st of July 1917 made him 48 years of age at the time of the Beaumont disappearance. Police believed it had been given to them by somebody else. By. In November 1974 he moved to Tasmania and changed his name to James Ryan O'Neill. Because of the time that had elapsed, he was not charged with any offence. Brown's job was at the Department of Public Works, where he was unsupervised and had vast access to public buildings, which would give him ample opportunity to plan and execute kidnappings. In the letter, a meeting place was nominated. It was soon discovered that these were merely the scraps of an elderly, amateur sleuth who had been passionately following the case, and her relatives threw these documents out when she died. At the time, police said they remained in close contact with Mr and Mrs Beaumont to offer support. Spanning 36 hours, the police force, Navy, Airforce, Marines, and concerned citizens all searched frantically for the kids. In early 2018, police conducted a dig at an Adelaide factory site hoping to find remains of the missing children. After learning about the disappearance of the Beaumont children, read about the disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz, one of the original milk carton kids. Nancy Beaumont, the mother of the three missing Beaumont children, has died in Adelaide aged 92. Beloved father of Lori (T.J.) Horten and Jack (Nancy ) Beaumont. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Then in March 1986, the case appeared on the brink of being solved when authorities found three suitcases in a residential garbage can. Jim and his wife Nancy then knocked on some doors in their neighborhood. However, Jane's mother, Nancy, knew that her daughter Jane had not brought any money with her. The children's father Jim Beaumont is still alive. Bluebonnet News. The children's father, Jim Beaumont, is also aged in his 90s, and is living in Adelaide. A major search, and an ongoing investigation over the past five decades, failed to find any trace of the children. "My heart goes out to Nancy, who was a great woman," Mr Madigan said. Nancy died in September 2019 at the age of 92 . Another child killer, Derek Percy, was interviewed in connection as well, but both were thoroughly ruled out. Between 1965 and 1968, O'Neill ( Bridgart) worked in the opal industry, which required frequent travel between Melbourne and Coober Pedy in South Australia. That struck her as odd. He had been sentenced to 10 years in prison, with a non-parole period of five years and five months. The True Story Of The Disappearance Of The Beaumont Children. Wikimedia CommonsBeaumont children Jane, Grant, and Arnna in 1965. The parents did not believe that their children had been killed despite everything. Her ex-husband, Jim Beaumont, also resides in Adelaide and is currently 90 years old. Catalog; For You; New Idea 'REUNITED IN HEAVEN' DEVASTATED FATHER DIES WITHOUT SOLVING HAUNTING MYSTERY 2023-04-24 - By Phillip Koch . The town raised $40,000 together in order to excavate the site which took an entire year to dig through. The disappearance of the Beaumont children has been one of Australia's most notorious cold cases and subject to wild speculation at times, including possible sightings of the children living as adults overseas. Two other persons, youths at the time, said that they had been paid by Phipps to dig a 2 1 2-metre hole in his factory yard that weekend, for unstated reasons. After analyzing the handwriting and fingerprints, detectives identified the letter's writer. He didn't know the other two adults: a blond male, and a woman wearing a blue and white dress with a "distinctive design." Mrs Beaumont passed away on Monday in a nursing home and her death was confirmed in a notice published on Thursday. Nancy became worried when the children did not return on either the 12:00 or 2:00 pm buses, and when Jim returned home early from his trip around 3:00 pm, he immediately drove to the beach to locate them. A Aus$1 million reward is still been offered for information related to the cold case by the South Australian Government. She was sitting on a wooden bench near the Holdfast Bay Sailing Club / Yacht Club and watched the children run up from their dip in the ocean. South Australian police have interviewed O'Neill and discounted him as a suspect in the Beaumont case. Brown was a very strange man and was meticulously neat to a fault, with immaculately pressed shirts, and an odd habit of folding garbage up into near squares before disposing of it. All That's Interesting reports that in 2013, two men claimed that they had been paid to dig a ditch on that fateful day in 1966, but the grave didn't contain human remains. They were never found. On 29 August 2005, the ABC's appeal against the decision was dismissed 2-1 by a full sitting of the Tasmanian Supreme Court. Phipps bore a substantial likeness to the police artist's impression of the man seen talking to the children on the beach. It was unofficially considered inevitable from this point on: the three children had fallen victim to a pervert. When that proved fruitless, the couple reported their children missing at the Glenelg Police Station at 7:30 p.m. By the next day, a reward of $250 was offered to the public for any information leading to the kids discovery. The factory site was excavated in early 2018 but no trace of the children was found. It was Australia Day in 1966 when the Beaumont children disappeared in a case that would hound investigators for decades. 0. Nine-year-old Jane was considered old enough (by 1960s standards) to care for her younger siblings, Grant, seven, and Arnna, four, for the day and the three children had made the short journey to Glenelg beach many times before. Once again no trace was found of the children. They seemed to be alone inside the shop. Nancy Beaumont, the mother of the Beaumont children who went missing from an Adelaide beach in the 1960s, has died aged 92. He had with him a towel, shirt and trousers that he had placed on a nearby park bench. In February 1975 nine-year-old Ricky John Smith (also known as Ricky Kube) was abducted and O'Neill was one of many who helped in the search for the missing boy. Tips about the children continued to roll in throughout the following decades as the case grew colder and colder. With the sun-baked suspects sketch plastered across the news, hundreds called into the police claiming to have seen him that day, yet nothing ever came of this. The grieving mother waited in vain for decades for her missing children. The childrens father, Jim, returned from work around 3:00 p.m. and drove to Glenelg Beach to find his kids. He skipped bail and fled to Western Australia. He identified a site in a warehouse near the children's home (and also near the Paringa Park Primary School attended by Jane and Arnna) in which he believed the children's bodies had been buried. The FJ Holden was never located, vital witness statements were not treated seriously, and the case quickly went cold. There were no further letters. He applied for parole in 1991 and again in 2005 but was turned down and has not reapplied. This witness noticed a middle-aged man already lying on his towel before the children arrived and was closely watching them. There was a factory waste area that resembled a sandpit. The authorities finally searched the ground under the factory, which the parapsychologist had found so suspicious at the time. She carried three drying towels inside a generic airways type bag. He holds dual bachelor's degrees from Pace University and a master's degree from New York University. Police quickly established that between them the children were carrying 17 individual items, including clothing, towels, and bags, but none of these items was located. The story of a nearly six-decade-old triple missing person case is one of Australia's most harrowing tales. They also both gave similar descriptions of a man with a narrow, long head and high cheekbones. Witnesses at Glenelg Beach that day also spoke of a tall, slender man in his 30s. Beaumont children Jane, Grant, and Arnna in 1965. Around the 40th anniversary of the childrens disappearance, Tasmanian Police Commissioner Richard McCreadie suggested that a convicted child murderer named James ONeill could have been the abductor. The couple at first co-operated with the intense national and international media interest, the theories . The investigations continue to this day. The children were playing with the thin-faced man and appeared relaxed and to be enjoying themselves. Soon, they became the highest-profile missing person cases in this part of the world to date. The brief notes describe a relatively pleasant existence and refer to "The Man" who was keeping them. Another hour passed. The day began with a trip to the beach and ended in a nightmare. Jesse Mike Brown. They would come, thought Nancy Beaumont, as she later told the police. He married Hester Porter in 1944 and became stepfather to her three children while also conducting an affair with Hesters sister Charlotte. Investigators theorised that the children had perhaps met the man during a previous visit or visits and had grown to trust him. Funeral services will be held at 2:00 p.m., Thursday, April 15, 2021, at Praise Church in Beaumont. Another witness, who reported seeing a man near the Oval carrying a young girl while another older girl in distress followed, later identified Brown as the man she had seen after seeing his picture on television in December 1998 in relation to the MacKay murders. NANCY BEAUMONT OBITUARY Nancy Lynn Beaumont passed from her earthly life into her heavenly home on October 15, 2008, at the age of 55, after a valiant battle with cancer. Although O'Neill claims never to have visited Adelaide, the roads to travel from Victoria to Coober Pedy pass through Adelaide. Over the years, Nancy Beaumont had never given up hope that her children would return one day. Police could not establish why she had failed to provide this information earlier. More promising were the claims of a Perth woman who revealed that for nine months in 1966, she had lived next door to the children in a desolate railway town between West and South Australia. Von Einem had been known to have visited Glenelg Beach to watch children in the changing rooms. "No one could imagine the torment those parents went through," Madigan told New Idea of Nancy and Jim Beaumont, who separated in the early 1970s. Her children . Mother of missing Beaumont children dies aged 92. O'Neill has never spoken on the subject again. On Jan. 26, 1966, however, they didnt. About 40 years after the children's disappearance, convicted child murderer James O'Neill was suggested as a possible suspect but police ruled him out. They still believed their children might be alive. Some of the records were believed lost in the 1974 Brisbane flood. They had laid out their towels before running under the freshwater sprinklers to clean themselves off. However, no one showed up at the agreed meeting point. In November 2013, a one-metre-squared section of a factory in North Plympton, which had been owned by Phipps, was excavated following the new information about his possible involvement in the disappearance of the children. Investigators excavated the site that year and then again in 2018, but found only non-human bones. Nonetheless, Phipps own son revealed that his father had sexually molested him as a child and that he believed his father was involved in the Beaumont childrens disappearance. When the food was on the table, the children weren't there. "I asked him about the Beaumonts and he said: 'I couldn't have done it. An obituary published in the Herald and Review for Nancy Mochel Beaumont, 67, of Shelbyville, states she had died February 12, 1999 in her residence. TwitterNancy Beaumont died without ever seeing her children again. As it was too hot to walk, the children took a five-minute, 2 mile, bus journey from their home to the beach at 8:45 am and were expected to return home on the 12:00 noon bus. Such was the strain of the children's disappearance, the couple separated in the 1980s and later divorced. She lived in a remote town, but police couldn't gain any additional information from her account. The Beaumont children - Jane, nine, Arnna, seven, and Grant, four - left their family home on the morning of Australia Day, 1966, to go to Glenelg Beach, which was a five minute bus journey away.Their mother, Nancy, expected them home around noon, and wasn't . Another lead alleged that the Beaumont children were living in the Mud Islands of Victoria. Nancy passed away in 2019, at the age of 92. The report said that police were calling for information to establish the man's identity. That was not unusual - the strange thing was that she was paying with a banknote. A police sketch was never circulated to media, as the car was thought to be the key piece of information. Around 15 minutes later, the man was viewed playing with the children as they whipped each other with their towels. She gave them some coins to buy ice cream on the beach and waved goodbye. It wasnt enough to protect them. A search at the time and another 30 years later found nothing. Unfortunately they were advised to keep this a family secret for fear that a trial may be traumatic for Browns many victims. The witness was sitting in front of the now non-existent, Holdfast Sailing Club building. At 10am on January 26, 1966, Nancy Beaumont kissed her three children goodbye as they boarded the bus for a trip to the beach. A staff writer for All Thats Interesting, Marco Margaritoff has also published work at outlets including People, VICE, and Complex, covering everything from film to finance to technology. The journey took only a few minutes.