Fifteen-year-old Barbara Jeanne Grimes and her twelve-year-old sister Patricia Kathleen Grimes lived with their mother Loretta and several siblings in the working-class neighborhood of Brighton Park, Chicago. They were the kind of postwar Catholic family that defined the city’s South and West Sides in the 1950s—large, tightly knit, and rooted in routine.
Barbara was the more independent of the two, a pretty brunette who loved popular music and fashion trends. Patricia, younger and more reserved, tended to follow her big sister’s lead. Both were devoted Elvis fans, part of the first wave of teenagers to reorganize their lives around the new logic of celebrity, radio, and movie schedules.
On December 28, 1956, the sisters left home with about a dollar each in spending money to see the 7:30 p.m. showing of Love Me Tender at the Brighton Theater, less than a mile and a half from their house. It was cold, but the route was familiar; they had done it many times. They told their mother they planned to be home by midnight—the time the double feature would end.
They never walked through the front door again.
Witnesses would later report seeing the girls alive inside the theater. A school friend saw them in line at the concession stand during intermission between the first and second showings. A ticket clerk recalled them returning to watch a second screening of the film—a detail that fits their well-known obsession with Elvis.
By midnight, Loretta realized something was wrong. The Brighton Theater was close enough that even a slow walk home should not have taken more than twenty to thirty minutes. When the girls did not arrive by 2:00 a.m., Loretta sent some of the older siblings out to search the route. By 2:15 a.m. on December 29, she contacted police.
What began as what authorities initially treated as a possible runaway situation quickly swelled into something larger. By the end of that day, local newspapers had picked up the story. Within days, the disappearance of the Grimes sisters would trigger one of the largest missing-persons investigations in Chicago history.
The search for Barbara and Patricia rapidly expanded from a neighborhood check into a citywide operation. Hundreds of police officers combed the streets, interviewed witnesses, and checked theaters, bus routes, diners, and alleged sightings. Civilian volunteers joined the effort, scouring vacant lots, alleys, and parks, and searching culverts, abandoned buildings, and stretches of roadway on the city’s outskirts.
Police circulated the girls’ photographs—Barbara smiling confidently, Patricia’s expression softer and younger—and the images quickly became fixtures in Chicago’s newspapers and on local television. The girls’ status as devoted Elvis fans became part of the story. In an era when the new music was already polarizing adults, some early speculation suggested that the girls might have run away to follow their idol or join traveling rock-and-roll shows.
But their mother insisted this was impossible. The girls had left with only a small amount of money, no extra clothes, and no history of disappearing. They were obedient, she told reporters, and they loved home too much to vanish on purpose.
As days passed, the story drew national attention. Elvis Presley himself reportedly addressed the case, encouraging the girls—if they were listening—to go home and assuring them they would not disappoint their idol by returning to their family. It was a gesture that underscored both the cultural reach of the case and the terror that the girls could still be alive but held somewhere in fear and confusion.
As coverage intensified, the police were inundated with tips. Hundreds of alleged sightings poured in from across Chicagoland and beyond: people claimed to have seen the girls at other movie theaters, boarding buses, in restaurants, even supposedly hitchhiking or walking with men in other states.
Some witnesses insisted they had seen both girls in the days after December 28, fueling a theory in the press that the sisters might have chosen to run away or been kept alive for a period of time. Others described seeing girls matching their description getting into cars with older men. The Chicago Police Department, under pressure to find the girls, tried to chase down as many leads as possible—and in doing so, may have muddied their own timeline.
The flood of information created a paradox: the more “evidence” came in, the less clarity investigators had. Early missing-person investigations often suffer from too few witnesses, but in the Grimes case, the opposite may have been true. The sheer volume of tips buried any reliable signal inside an overwhelming amount of noise.
For the Grimes family, each reported sighting meant another day of suspended reality. If the girls had been seen alive in other neighborhoods, Loretta could cling to some belief that they were still out there, waiting to be found. That fragile hope would be shattered on a frigid morning nearly a month later.
On January 22, 1957, a driver traveling along a rural stretch of German Church Road near Willow Springs, a southwest suburb of Chicago, noticed what he initially thought were mannequins lying in a roadside ditch. As he got closer, he realized they were bodies. He contacted the police.
When officers arrived, they discovered the nude bodies of two young girls lying on their backs in the shallow, snow-dusted embankment beside the road. The bodies were positioned close together, with one slightly behind the other. They were partially covered in snow and debris, but not fully hidden. The location was near a busy trucking route and within a few yards of the roadside, leading some investigators to believe the bodies had been dumped there, not killed on the spot.
The terrain and the way the bodies lay suggested they had been placed deliberately. The presence of frost and the condition of the skin complicated later attempts to pinpoint the time of death. However, some medical examiners would eventually conclude that the girls had died soon after their disappearance and their bodies had likely been at or near that location for some time.
The girls were quickly identified as Barbara and Patricia Grimes. The confirmation ended any lingering hope that the case would resolve as a simple teenage runaway story. It had become a double homicide.
The Cook County coroner’s office performed autopsies on both girls. What they found would become the foundation for decades of controversy, unanswered questions, and conflicting interpretations.
The official cause of death was listed as “secondary shock due to exposure”—in other words, the girls were believed to have died as a result of being exposed to the cold, possibly after being left outdoors while still alive. The phrase “murder” appeared in the documentation, but the specific mechanism—a beating, suffocation, or poisoning—was not clearly pinned down.
The autopsies identified several key findings:
Time of death: Estimates concluded the girls likely died on December 28 or 29, within about 24 hours of their disappearance. This contradicted reports from witnesses who claimed to have seen them alive days later.
External injuries: Both girls had various bruises and marks on their bodies. Some investigators interpreted these as signs of a violent attack or being struck by a blunt instrument. Others argued that some of the damage could have been caused postmortem, either by environmental exposure, animals, or the process of body recovery and transport.
Signs of sexual assault: The question of sexual assault became one of the most contested aspects of the case. Some early reports suggested the girls may have been sexually abused; other accounts, including some official statements, claimed that findings were inconclusive or showed no definitive trauma consistent with rape. Over time, this ambiguity fed further speculation about whether the girls had been held, assaulted, and then killed—or whether they died in another sequence of events.
Toxicology tests did not reveal obvious poisoning. There were no bullet wounds or stab wounds. The narrative suggested by the official cause of death—shock and exposure—created an odd dissonance with the public’s expectation of a “murder case.” How exactly had these two girls ended up nude in a ditch in the dead of winter without any clear, singular cause of fatal internal injury?
The coroner convened an inquest, and a jury returned a verdict that the sisters had been the victims of a “murder by person or persons unknown.” But the underlying medical findings remained muddy, and critics later accused the investigation of failing to press for more clarity in the forensic record at a time when the science was, admittedly, more limited than it is today.
The discovery of the bodies shocked Chicago. The idea that two teenagers could vanish from a movie theater and end up dumped in the snow weeks later was horrifying enough. The unanswered questions—where they had been, what they had endured, and who had done this—pushed the city into a collective anxiety.
For many families, the Grimes case became a turning point. Parents allowed their children less freedom. The notion of “stranger danger,” which would become more dominant in later decades, found an early, vivid expression here. The girls’ love of Elvis and the movies also made the case a kind of cultural flashpoint: some moralists used it to argue against teenage independence, rock and roll, and the dangers of modern youth culture.
Police, under immense pressure to deliver answers, turned their attention to suspects.
In high-profile unsolved cases, authorities often latch onto a suspect who seems to “fit” the public narrative. In the Grimes investigation, that figure became Edward “Bennie” Bedwell.
Bedwell was a 21-year-old drifter and part-time dishwasher who had a passing resemblance to Elvis Presley—a detail that did not go unnoticed in a case so saturated with the singer’s aura. He was known to frequent bars and rooming houses in the area and had a reputation as something of a wanderer.
In early January 1957, Bedwell was picked up and questioned. After prolonged interrogation, he signed a confession claiming that he and another man had been out drinking with two girls, whom prosecutors contended were Barbara and Patricia. In his statement, he allegedly claimed the girls had died after a night of heavy drinking and that their bodies had been dumped. The confession described events that involved the girls being in bars and hotels and heavily intoxicated.
But almost immediately, serious problems with Bedwell’s confession emerged:
Timeline conflicts: His description of when and how the girls had died clashed with medical estimates of time of death and other forensic indicators.
Character of the victims: The idea that the two young Catholic girls had spent days drinking in bars with adult men did not align with what their family and friends knew of them.
Coercion concerns: Bedwell later recanted, insisting that police had pressured him into signing the confession and that he had not fully read or understood it. There were allegations that he had been held and questioned for an extended period without proper counsel.
Defense lawyers and some members of the public came to view Bedwell’s confession as a classic example of a coerced statement extracted under duress. Eventually, the charges against him were dropped due to a lack of corroborating evidence and the inconsistencies in his account.
Other suspects
Bedwell was not the only person of interest. Over the years, police investigated several local men with histories of harassing or approaching young girls, as well as individuals whose vehicles were reportedly seen near the site where the bodies were found. Some leads centered on men who spent time near the Brighton Theater or who had been accused of stalking teenage girls in the area.
None of these avenues produced clear, prosecutable evidence. The combination of shaky witness identifications, weak physical evidence, and conflicting timelines undermined attempts to pin the crime on any particular suspect.
The case generated a range of theories, some grounded in evidence, others in rumor.
Held alive vs. killed quickly
One major fault line runs between the official time-of-death estimate—that the girls died within about 24 hours of their disappearance—and the numerous alleged sightings of the sisters in the days and weeks that followed. If the medical estimate is accurate, virtually all such sightings were either mistaken or attention-seeking fabrications.
However, if any of those sightings were legitimate, it would suggest the girls were held alive somewhere, possibly subjected to abuse, before being killed and dumped along German Church Road. This scenario has haunted both investigators and armchair sleuths for decades, especially in light of the rumors of sexual assault and the vivid fear that the girls may have been suffering in captivity while the city frantically searched.
Single offender vs. multiple offenders
Some investigators and writers have argued that the logistics of abducting two girls from a public area, transporting them, holding them, killing them, and disposing of their bodies suggest the involvement of more than one offender. Controlling two victims simultaneously reduces the probability that a single perpetrator working alone could avoid detection, particularly in an urban environment.
Others counter that a single offender with a vehicle and a credible ruse—someone they vaguely knew, or a man posing as an authority figure—could have persuaded both girls to get into a car without immediate struggle. The case offers no definitive evidence for either scenario, but the possibility of multiple perpetrators remains a persistent thread in public speculation.
Organized crime angle
A weaker, more speculative theory suggests that the girls might have crossed paths with men connected to Chicago’s underworld. The Willow Springs area and parts of nearby Cook County had ties to organized crime figures, illicit gambling, and related activities in the mid-twentieth century. However, no credible evidence has ever directly linked the Grimes case to organized crime operations. The theory persists mostly because of the setting and the era, not because of solid proof.
From a modern perspective, it is difficult not to see the Grimes case as a study in investigative chaos and missed opportunities.
Evidence handling: The crime scene and autopsies occurred in an era before DNA testing, and recordkeeping standards were less rigorous than they are today. Some physical evidence that might have been preserved for future analysis either never existed, was discarded, or was inadequately documented. Whatever remains has not been publicly identified as suitable for modern forensic testing.
Conflicting narratives: The rush to solve the case led to public statements from various officials that sometimes contradicted each other, especially on crucial details like time of death and signs of sexual assault. Those contradictions eroded public confidence and made it difficult to reconstruct a coherent narrative later.
Media pressure: Intense media coverage contributed to an environment where authorities were both deluged with leads and pressed to announce progress, sometimes prematurely. The Bedwell episode is a stark example: the willingness to treat his confession as credible, despite glaring inconsistencies, likely reflected a system desperate to show that it was acting decisively.
All of this left the case in a liminal state: officially unsolved, unofficially tangled in a web of contradictory details and speculation.
The murders of Barbara and Patricia Grimes are still officially classified as an unsolved double homicide in Cook County, Illinois. Decades after their bodies were found, law enforcement occasionally revisits the file, but no suspect has been definitively tied to the crime, and no charges have ever been successfully prosecuted.
The case left deep marks on Chicago’s collective psyche:
Cultural impact: It became one of the emblematic “lost girls” stories of mid-century America, predating later cases like the Boston Strangler and the long series of unsolved child murders that would mark other cities. For many Chicago families, the Grimes murders marked the end of an era when children could walk to the movies alone without parents fearing the worst.
Law enforcement lessons: The investigation is often cited in discussions about how media pressure, coerced confessions, and uncontrolled tip lines can derail a case rather than solve it. It highlights the importance of careful forensic work and the need for skepticism toward convenient narratives that do not fully align with evidence.
Enduring fascination: Books, articles, podcasts, and documentaries continue to revisit the story, trying to piece together a coherent account from the fragments left behind. The combination of ordinary teenage life—two girls obsessed with a movie star—and the extraordinary violence of their fate has ensured the case remains in the public imagination.
For the Grimes family, the story never had the closure the public seemed to demand. They were left with a grave in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois, a series of official documents filled with uncertainties, and a city that moved on without ever naming the person or people responsible.
On paper, the case of Barbara and Patricia Grimes is straightforward: two sisters disappeared on December 28, 1956, and were found dead on January 22, 1957, and were officially determined to have been murdered by unknown persons. The real story, however, lies in the gaps—between conflicting autopsies, between a coerced confession and a lack of charges, between dozens of supposed sightings and a medical estimate that suggests the girls were dead almost immediately.
Those gaps are where Chicago’s fear, myth, and longing for answers have lived for nearly seventy years. Somewhere inside that space is the truth about what happened between the closing credits of Love Me Tender and the cold roadside where the sisters were left in the snow.
That truth has never been formally established. The file remains open, and the question remains the same as it was in 1957:
Who killed the Grimes sisters—and why?
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