The Gruesome Unsolved Murders of the Grimes Sisters

A young man, a look-alike of Elvis Presley, was the last person seen with the Grimes sisters before they were found dead. Their gruesome murders are still unsolved.

A pair of sisters, Barbara Jeanne and Patricia Kathleen Grimes, were only a few years apart in age and were attached at the hip from the beginning of their lives. Barbara, the older of them, born on May 5th, 1941, loved her younger sister, born on December 31st, 1943. Patricia adored her older sister. Together, they fell in love with the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley and around the time of their murders, had just joined the official Presley fan club.

The sisters had watched the movie Love Me Tender starring Presley ten times, and on December 28th, 1956, they were heading out to watch for the eleventh time. They left their home in McKinley Park at around 7:30 p.m., promising they would be home before midnight. It’s unclear how they travelled the one-and-a-half miles to the Brighton Theater, but they usually walked or take the bus. Together, they had around $2.50, and Barbara was instructed to keep 50¢ inside her wallet just in case the girls wanted to watch the second screening.

One of Patricia’s school friends, Dorothy Weinert, told investigators that she had been seated behind the girls with her own younger sister for the movie, confirming that the pair made it to Brighton Theater. The Weinert sisters left during intermission of the double feature, around 9:30 p.m., and as they left, they saw the Grimes sisters in line to buy a bucket of popcorn. They seemed happy and unworried.

As the sisters had stayed for the second screening, they weren’t expected home until around 11:45 p.m., but when they weren’t there by midnight, their mother became worried. Lorretta Grimes sent two of her seven children, Theresa (17) and Joey (14), out to wait at the bus stop near their home for their arrival. Three buses came and went without Barbara or Patricia, so the two went home to tell Lorretta.

While they were waiting, Lorretta called around to their friends, hoping that the sisters had decided to spend the night at one of their homes.

When they all realised no one had seen or heard from the girls, Lorretta filed a report to the police at 2:15 a.m. on December 29th.

The preceding search was one of the largest missing person cases in the history of Cook County; hundreds of officers were assigned full-time to perform a city-wide search for Barbara and Patrica. Officers from surrounding suburbs chipped in to help search, and eventually, a task force devoted solely to finding the sisters was formed.

Hundreds of local volunteers assisted the police in the ground searches that began on December 29th. The police, in tandem with the searches, conducted door-to-door canvassing throughout Brighton Park. The canals and rivers were dredged, and more than 15,000 flyers were distributed.

Churchgoers from the sisters’ church collected a thousand-dollar reward for information leading to their whereabouts.

Around 300,000 people were questioned, with around 2,000 getting subjected to serious interrogation about their potential involvement with the disappearance of Barbara and Patricia. Two arrests came, and charges were brought against the individuals who confessed to the crimes, but it was all dropped.

One of the two was Edward Bedwell, who claimed he had been coerced into confessing after a prolonged interrogation. More on him soon.

Despite the police’s best efforts and extensive media appeals, no hard evidence was found or presented regarding the two young girls’ disappearance. This is despite several of the girls’ friends seeing the sisters conversing and entering a car, described as a Mercury model, with a young man who strongly resembled Elvis Presley.

Prior to the task force’s creation, several investigators assigned to the case theorised the sisters had run away or were voluntarily staying with a boyfriend. Their parents adamantly protested the theories.

Other theories claimed the sisters were in Nashville, Tennessee, to attend a Presley concert or had left to attempt to emulate the Presley lifestyle.

Lorretta didn’t believe these theories and was certain her daughters had been kidnapped, so she made a public plea. “If someone is holding them, please let the girls call me” — “I’ll forgive them from the bottom of my heart.”

On January 19th, 1957, an official statement from Presley’s Graceland estate was televised, and a direct plea was aired over the radio imploring the girls to return home. “If you are good Presley fans, you’ll go home and ease your mother’s worries.”

The pleas weren’t heard, however, as just three days later, on January 22nd, a construction worker named Leonard Prescott spotted what he described as “these flesh-coloured things” behind a guard rail on a rural country road, German Chruch Road. He initially believed them to be mannequins and left, but when he returned with his wife, Marie, she passed out after realising they were the nude, frozen bodies of the Grimes sisters. The Prescotts reported their findings to the Willow Springs Police Department.

The sisters were lying on a flat, horizontal section behind the guard rail that extended for around ten feet before reaching the incline of an embankment leading to Devil’s Creek.

Barbara lay on her left side with her legs curled slightly to her chest. She had three wounds on her chest that resembled puncture wounds created by an ice pick. There were wounds resembling blunt force trauma on her face and head.

Patricia lay on her back with her body on top of Barbara’s head with her own turned to the right. Marks that resemble bruises were found on her face and body.

All the injuries are referred to as resembling what they are suspected to be since the autopsy deemed the wounds to be from wildlife and all created postmortem, but more on that in just a second.

Joseph Grimes, their father, was driven to the crime scene to formally identify the bodies.

Over 160 officers from several suburban Chicago departments, some of whom were volunteering their time, and untrained civilians searched the crime scene, a fact that would later be criticized. Despite the numbers, little to no real evidence was found that was proven to be linked to the murders.

The day following the discovery of the bodies, Barbara and Patricia’s autopsies were performed by three experienced forensic pathologists who took five hours for each girl. Through examination of the contents found in their stomachs, it was determined that the girls were murdered within five hours after they were last seen alive at the Brighton Theater, placing their time of death around the early hours of December 29th.

Their cause of deaths were ruled as shock and exposure but was still classified as murder. It’s reported that the cause of death was found through a process of eliminating other potential.

The autopsies claimed no obviously fatal wounds on either of the girls’ bodies, and toxicology reports revealed that neither were drunk, drugged, or poisoned prior to death. No clothing was found around the girls, but their bodies were completely clean, as though they had been cleaned, but that wasn’t officially reported.

The only thing in the official autopsy report that is linked towards another person being involved with either Barbara or Patricia before their death is it was reported that Barbara had sexual intercourse, but it is unclear if it was consensual or not.

Official death certificates for both Barbara and Patricia listed their cause of death as “secondary shock” resulting from exposure to low temperatures that reduced their body temperature to “below the critical level compatible with life.”

One coroner performing autopsies (Walter McCarron) said the girls had been by the guard rail for many days before discovery. Stated that the condition they were still in was because of the frigid climate leading up to January 22nd. He also claimed that they had laid there for more than three weeks because of the snow in the area that had been there since January 9th and the speed at which it had melted in the days leading to the discovery.

Despite most official conclusions, the chief investigator for the Cook County Coroner’s Office, Harry Glos, disagreed with the official time of death. Later, he stated to the media that there had been numerous “marks of violence on those girls’ faces” that were strongly indicative of antemortem violence as opposed to postmortem rodents.

He also argued that the thin ice layer indicated the sisters had likely been alive until at least January 7th due to the weather and reaction to body heat; he believed that the sisters were still warm when they were dumped in the area but agreed that they were deceased when they were put over the guard rail.

I’m not entirely sure how he worked this out, so I won’t attempt to explain it further than that.

Glos also stated that both girls had been sexually assaulted throughout a period of captivity, and the autopsy conducted found semen within the vaginal fluid swabbed performed on Patricia. This meant both Barbara and Patricia had evidence of sexual activity, but Glos believed it to be non-censual, and the three forensic pathologists who performed the autopsy claimed they were unable to determine if it was or not.

The autopsy also found curdling milk in Barbara’s stomach, which she isn’t known to have had on the 28th.

Glos believed that official suspect Edward Bedwell committed the murders, asserting the wounds hadn’t been adequately investigated. His opinion is the markings on the girls’ bodies were signs of being beaten before their murders and that the signs of sexual assault lined up with Bedwell’s 1957 interrogations.

He claimed that the investigators failed to disclose these details of the case to protect the girls’ reputations and/or protect their mother’s feelings. Similar allegations would be repeated years later by others who claimed they had read the original case files and had interviewed residents who claimed the girls had a habit of spending their free time outside bars on 36th Street and Archer Avenue convincing men to get them drinks.

Investigators connected to the case insisted throughout all the claims that there was no evidence to suggest either girl was disreputable or the victims of extreme violence or sexual molestation before their deaths.

Glos was fired on February 15th for refusing to retract his statements, and he claimed his termination was politically motivated. Sheriff Joseph D. Lohman would deputize Glos to continue working on the Grimes sisters’ case without pay. This was done because the Sheriff agreed with Glos’ argument that Barbara and Patricia were beaten and tortured by a sexual predator.

The police’s lead suspect, Edward Lee Bedwell, was a twenty-one-year-old semi-literate drifter who earned money as a part-time dishwasher in a Chicago Skid Row restaurant. He was tall and described as having a strong resemblance to Elvis Presley.

According to the restaurant owners, John and Minnie Duros, Bedwell, and another male were in the company of two girls who physically resembled the sisters on the early morning of December 30th. The information was given to the police on January 24th, leading to Bedwell’s arrest and three-day interrogation.

Bedwell was insistent the Duros were mistaken when identifying the girls he was with on December 30th. He was formally charged with the murders of Barbara and Patricia Grimes on January 27th, 1957, after signing a fourteen-page confession in which he said that he and a twenty-eight-year-old acquaintance, William Cole Willingham, had been in the company of the girls until January 7th; they were drinking at West Madison Street saloons for most of their time together. After several days, the pair forced Barbara and Patricia to eat hot dogs before beating them for refusing their sexual advances. They dumped Barbara and Patrica’s nude bodies into the snow-filled ditch after the attack.

Willingham and Lorretta Grimes argued the confession.

Willingham stated that while he and Bedwell were in the company of two girls on December 30th, they weren’t the Grimes sisters. He denied any involvement in the murder.

Lorretta stated, “It’s a lie. My girls wouldn’t be on West Madison Street. They didn’t even know where it was.”

Bedwell recanted his statement, claiming he only confessed after being held in custody for three days and being under the false belief that if he confessed, the police would free him.

Rather than believing his words, Bedwell’s confession was examined, and nothing he claimed lined up with the autopsy reported. He claimed they drank for days straight, but toxicology found no alcohol in either girls’ system. He claimed to have force-fed the girls a hot dog, but it wasn’t found in their stomach contents. He claimed to have beaten them to death, but the wounds didn’t line up with that violent of a death.

It was also found that Bedwell was also clocked in at Ajax Consolidated Company from 4:19 p.m. on the 28th until 12:30 a.m. on the 29th. Further records confirmed that Bedwell had been working in Cicero on the date that he claimed to have murdered Barbara and Patricia.

On February 6th, Bedwell was freed on a $20,000 bond paid by an individual from Champaign. That same year, Bedwell would be tried for the 1956 rape of a 13-year-old girl in Oak Hill, Florida; he would be acquitted of the crime. Bedwell died in November 1972.

In 2013, a retired West Chicago police officer, Raymond Johnson, began a personal investigation. He believes that the case is still solvable but only with public assistance. His main suspect is confessed child killer Charles LeRoy Melquist, who had been considered a suspect in the 1957 investigation.

Melquist had been convicted of the September 1958 murder of 15-year-old Bonnie Leigh Scott, whose decapitated body had been found two months after her disappearance less than ten miles from where the Grimes sisters were found. He was never questioned due to his attorney forbidding him from being subjected to questioning.

The day after Bonnie was discovered, Lorretta received a phone call from an individual who claimed responsibility for the murder of her Bonnie’s murder. The caller stated, “I’ve committed another perfect crime.” Lorretta would remain adamant until her death that the caller had been the same individual who had contacted her in May 1957 and revealed a deformity on one of her daughter’s feet that was never made public.

Charles Melquist was never charged with his alleged involvement in the deaths of the Grimes sisters. He died in 2010.

The case of the Grimes Sisters is still unsolved as of writing this on October 29th, 2023; I will be sure to add any updates to the comments of the post. Thank you for reading about the horrible murders of two innocent Elvis Presley fans, Barbara and Patrica Grimes.