Barbara & Patricia Grimes

Case background and investigation

Barbara Grimes, 15, and her sister Patricia, 12, left their family's home on Chicago's Southwest Side on the evening of December 28, 1956, to see the Elvis Presley film Love Me Tender at the Brighton Theater. According to NBC News, an older sister and younger brother were to meet them at a bus stop afterwards, but the girls never arrived. Patricia was three days short of her thirteenth birthday, and many reports give her age as 13.

The search that followed has been described as one of the most labor-intensive missing-person efforts in Cook County history, involving hundreds of officers. NBC News reports that Presley himself issued a public appeal asking the girls to come home. Some early investigators believed the sisters had run away, a view their parents rejected.

On January 22, 1957, a construction worker driving past noticed two unclothed, frozen bodies behind a guard rail on German Church Road in an unincorporated area near Willow Springs, in what CBS Chicago describes as present-day Burr Ridge. They were identified as Barbara and Patricia. According to published summaries of the autopsy, examiners found no clearly fatal injuries and attributed the deaths to secondary shock from exposure to cold, estimating that the sisters had died within hours of their disappearance. Their death certificates list the deaths as murders.

Days after the discovery, police arrested Edward "Bennie" Bedwell, a 21-year-old drifter, after restaurant owners said they had seen him with two girls resembling the sisters. After prolonged questioning he signed a confession and was charged on January 27, 1957. He then recanted, saying the statement had been coerced, and its details conflicted with the autopsy findings on the time of death. The charges were dropped in March 1957. Other men were questioned over the following months and years, and none was prosecuted.

Retired West Chicago police officer Raymond Johnson, who began researching the case around 2009, has argued publicly that Charles Melquist, who was convicted of the 1958 murder of 15-year-old Bonnie Leigh Scott, may have been responsible. Melquist was never charged in the Grimes case and died in 2010; the theory has not been confirmed by authorities. CBS Chicago reported in 2018 that the Cook County Sheriff's Office was still working the case, with a cold case detective assigned. No one has been convicted in the deaths of Barbara and Patricia Grimes.