The 1956 murder of Chicago sisters Barbara and Patricia Grimes remains unsolved after one of the largest investigations in the city's history
Where the evidence lands: UnresolvedThat Barbara and Patricia Grimes were abducted and murdered by an unknown person or persons after leaving a Chicago movie theater in December 1956, that the massive investigation which followed failed to identify the killer, and that the true perpetrator, whom various researchers have variously identified, was never charged or convicted.
Believed by: That the murders happened and were never solved is the settled, mainstream account, shared by police, the press, and cold-case researchers. The competing theories about who did it are exactly that: theories, none established in law or by the physical record.
The full story
What is documented
Start with what is not in dispute. On the evening of 28 December 1956, Barbara Grimes, fifteen, and her sister Patricia, twelve, left their home in Chicago's McKinley Park neighborhood to see the Elvis Presley film Love Me Tender at the Brighton Theater. The girls were devoted Presley fans and had reportedly seen the movie more than once. They were last confirmed at the theater that night, and they never came home.
Their disappearance set off an immediate and growing search. Within days it had become one of the largest missing-persons efforts in Cook County history: hundreds of Chicago and suburban officers, a dedicated task force, hundreds of volunteers, thousands of flyers. For weeks, the city lived on tips. Dozens of people reported seeing the sisters alive in Chicago and far outside it, ransom notes arrived, and the family and the FBI quietly ran down demands that led nowhere. Their mother, Loretta Grimes, held to the belief that her daughters had been kidnapped and pleaded publicly for their return. Even Elvis Presley issued an appeal urging the girls to go home.
On 22 January 1957, a passing motorist named Leonard Prescott saw pale shapes behind a guardrail along German Church Road in unincorporated Willow Springs, southwest of the city. They were the nude, frozen bodies of Barbara and Patricia. On these facts, the trip to the theater, the vast search, and the roadside discovery, there is no serious argument. What has never been settled is everything that matters most: who took them, and who killed them.
The autopsy, and a timeline that would not hold
The medical findings were disturbing and, in their own way, inconclusive. Autopsies attributed the deaths to secondary shockbrought on by exposure to the cold. Barbara's body bore wounds described as consistent with an ice pick, along with blunt-force injuries to her head and face; Patricia showed bruising. But the pathologists could not agree on when the girls had died. Some analysis suggested death within hours of their last sighting on 28 December; other readings pushed it later.
That disagreement mattered enormously, because it collided with the flood of reported sightings. If dozens of witnesses had genuinely seen the sisters alive in the weeks after they vanished, the girls could not have died on the first night; if the earliest medical estimate was right, nearly all of those sightings were mistaken. Investigators could not have it both ways, and the conflict was never cleanly resolved. The result was a case whose most basic question, how long the victims survived, stayed genuinely open.
A murder is only as solvable as its timeline, and this one had a timeline that pathologists and witnesses could not be made to agree on.
The confession that collapsed
The closest the case ever came to a resolution was also one of its clearest failures. In late January 1957, a transient dishwasher named Edward Lee Bedwell was arrested and, after days of interrogation, signed a 14-page confession. He said he and an accomplice named Frank had picked the girls up and killed them. He was charged. For a moment it looked as though the mystery was over.
It was not. At a habeas corpus hearing that began on 31 January, Bedwell recanted, saying he had confessed only after being held for days and subjected to threats, inducements, and rough handling, in the belief that cooperating would get him released. The physical evidence was against his account in specifics that mattered: the food and drink he described sharing with the girls were not found in their stomachs, and they had not died in the manner he related. The confession fell apart, and Bedwell was released on bond in early February.
The Bedwell episode is why so many later readers came to distrust the investigation. Whether or not police believed they had their man, the spectacle of a signed confession that could not survive contact with the autopsy report suggested a case reaching for a convenient answer under enormous public pressure. It also burned time and attention in the weeks when a case is most solvable. What it did not do was identify the killer.
The other suspects, and why the file names no one
Bedwell was not the only man questioned. A teenager named Max Fleig was persuaded to take an unofficial polygraph, during which he is said to have made incriminating remarks; but Illinois law at the time forbade polygraphing juveniles, so anything from that test was legally worthless, and he was not charged in the Grimes case. He would later be convicted in a separate, unrelated killing, a fact that keeps his name in circulation but proves nothing about these murders. The horseman Silas Jayne was questioned and cleared, his whereabouts vouched for by numerous people. Decades on, former investigators and authors have argued for still other culprits, the confessed child-killer Charles Melquist prominent among them, a man convicted in a different case and now dead.
These theories deserve to be reported, and some are seriously argued. But every one of them shares the same fatal limit: no charge, no conviction, and no physical evidence publicly tying the named person to the deaths of Barbara and Patricia Grimes. Suspicion, motive, and proximity are not proof. A man convicted of another crime is not thereby guilty of this one.
So this file does what the record supports and no more. It reports that suspects were questioned, that a confession was taken and discarded, and that various theories have since been advanced. It does not endorse any of them, and it does not name a killer, because to do so would be to assert as fact something no court and no evidence has established.
Where the evidence lands
Keep the layers apart. The crime is documented: Barbara and Patricia Grimes disappeared on 28 December 1956 and were found murdered along a Willow Springs road on 22 January 1957, after one of the largest investigations the region had ever mounted. The identity of the killer is unproven: no one was ever convicted, the one confession collapsed under the evidence, and the suspects named over the years remain suspects and nothing more. That is why this file is rated Unproven.
Unproven is not the same as unknowable-in-principle, and it is not a shrug. It is a precise statement about the state of the evidence: a real double murder whose perpetrator the record does not identify. The failure has explanations, the coerced confession, the storm of false sightings, the disputed time of death, the investigative standards of the 1950s, but explaining why a case went cold is not the same as solving it.
The right posture is to hold the horror and the humility together. Two children were killed, and their family never got an answer. The case is still officially open, and researchers still argue over it. But the honest thing to say, seventy years on, is the thing the evidence supports: the Grimes sisters were murdered, the investigation was vast, and no one has been shown to have done it.
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What's still unexplained
- Who killed the sisters has never been established. Despite a vast investigation, no one was convicted, and the physical evidence has never been publicly tied to a specific person.
- When the girls died is itself disputed. Pathologists disagreed over the time of death, and the many conflicting sightings of the sisters alive make it genuinely unclear how long they survived after leaving the theater, which in turn undercuts efforts to reconstruct their final hours.
- How much the early handling of the case cost it is unresolved. Bedwell's coerced-then-recanted confession, the crush of false sightings, and disagreements among investigators all consumed the crucial first weeks. Whether better-preserved evidence or a tighter early focus could have solved the case is impossible to know now.
- Whether modern forensic methods could ever crack it is an open, and probably fading, hope. With the crime nearly seventy years old, most principals dead, and evidence of that era's standards, the practical odds of a definitive answer are slim, even as the file stays officially open.
Point by point
The claim: The Grimes sisters were murdered, not victims of an accident or a runaway that ended badly.
What the record shows: This is the documented core of the case. The girls vanished on 28 December 1956 and their nude bodies were found on 22 January 1957 along a rural road miles from home. Autopsies attributed death to secondary shock from exposure, but noted wounds on Barbara consistent with an ice pick and blunt-force injuries, and the bodies had plainly been placed where they were found. Police and coroner's officials treated it as a double homicide, and no serious account disputes that the sisters were killed.
The claim: The investigation was one of the largest in Chicago and Cook County history.
What the record shows: Supported. Contemporary reporting describes hundreds of officers assigned full-time, a dedicated task force, hundreds of volunteers, and thousands of flyers distributed. Accounts put the number of people questioned in the hundreds of thousands, with roughly two thousand subjected to serious interrogation. The scale is part of why the failure to solve the case became so notorious.
The claim: Edward Lee Bedwell confessed, so the killer was found even if the case fell apart in court.
What the record shows: This overstates a confession that did not hold. Bedwell signed a lengthy statement after days in custody, then recanted, alleging coercion. Critically, the physical evidence contradicted him: the autopsies found none of the food or alcohol his account described in the girls' systems, and the injuries did not match a beating death as he related it. He was released on bond within weeks, and the confession is generally treated as unreliable, not as a solution to the case.
The claim: A polygraph confession from another suspect, Max Fleig, points to the real killer.
What the record shows: It does not resolve the case. Reporting describes a Chicago police official persuading the teenage Fleig to take an unofficial polygraph, during which he is said to have made incriminating statements. But Illinois law at the time barred polygraph testing of juveniles, so any such result was legally worthless and could not be used; Fleig was not charged in the Grimes case. He was later convicted in a separate, unrelated killing. His name recurs in accounts of the case, but nothing tying him to the Grimes murders was ever proven.
The claim: The many reported sightings of the girls alive show the timeline is known.
What the record shows: The opposite is closer to the truth. Dozens of sightings placed the sisters alive, in different places, during the weeks between their disappearance and the discovery of their bodies, and they conflicted with one another and with the physical evidence. Pathologists themselves disagreed over the time of death. Rather than pinning down a timeline, the flood of unconfirmed reports muddied it, and remains one reason the case was so hard to work.
The claim: Later researchers have identified who did it, so the mystery is effectively solved.
What the record shows: Several writers and former investigators have named favored suspects over the decades, including the confessed child-killer Charles Melquist, who was convicted in a different murder and is now deceased. These are argued theories, not findings. None of the named men was ever charged in the Grimes case, and no physical evidence or judicial record establishes any of them as the killer. The honest status is unsolved.
The claim: The case is closed and forgotten by authorities.
What the record shows: Not so. The murders remain an open investigation, and the Cook County Sheriff's Office has continued to treat it as an active cold case, with periodic renewed interest, media features, and appeals for information. What is absent is a suspect the evidence can support, not official attention.
Other readings
Angles that don't fit neatly into the claim or its rebuttal, laid out and weighed, not endorsed.
The named-suspect theories
Over the decades, several former investigators and authors have argued for a particular culprit, the confessed child-killer Charles Melquist being among the most cited, and others have pointed back to figures questioned at the time. These accounts can be thoughtful and are worth reading, but they are interpretations built on circumstantial reasoning, not proof. This file reports that such theories exist and that none has ever been substantiated; it does not adopt any of them, and it names no killer.
The mishandled-investigation read
A second angle focuses less on a specific suspect than on the process: the coerced Bedwell confession, the failure to control a flood of false leads, and the pathologists' disagreements are read as evidence that the case was solvable but bungled in its opening weeks. This is a reasonable critique of 1950s investigative practice, and parts of it are well documented. It explains why the case went cold without, on its own, revealing who committed the murders.
Timeline
- 1956-12-28Barbara Grimes, 15, and Patricia Grimes, 12, leave their home in the McKinley Park area of Chicago's South Side to see the Elvis Presley film Love Me Tender at the Brighton Theater in Brighton Park. Fans of Presley, the girls had reportedly seen the film several times already. They are last confirmed seen at or near the theater that evening and do not return home.
- 1956-12-29When the sisters fail to come home, their mother, Loretta Grimes, reports them missing. A ground search begins the next day. Within days it expands into a full-scale effort involving hundreds of police officers, colleagues from surrounding suburbs, and hundreds of volunteers.
- 1957-01Dozens of unconfirmed sightings pour in, placing the girls alive in Chicago and well beyond it in the weeks after they vanished. Ransom notes and demands arrive; some are quietly checked by the family and the FBI and none pan out. Loretta Grimes insists her daughters were kidnapped and makes public pleas for their safe return.
- 1957-01The case becomes a national story. Elvis Presley, whose film the girls had gone to see, issues a public appeal urging them to go home to their mother. Flyers by the thousands are distributed, and a community reward is offered for information.
- 1957-01-22A passing motorist, Leonard Prescott, spots what he later described as flesh-colored shapes behind a guardrail along German Church Road, roughly 200 feet east of County Line Road in unincorporated Willow Springs. They are the nude, frozen bodies of the two sisters. The Willow Springs police are notified.
- 1957-01Autopsies find the sisters died of secondary shock brought on by exposure. Wounds resembling those made by an ice pick are noted on Barbara's chest, with blunt-force injuries to her head and face, and bruising is found on Patricia. Investigators and pathologists disagree over the time of death, which complicates the timeline and the investigation from the outset.
- 1957-01-27Edward Lee Bedwell, a transient dishwasher, is charged after signing a 14-page confession following days of interrogation. He claims he and an accomplice named Frank killed the girls. Almost immediately, doubts surface: parts of his account do not fit the physical evidence.
- 1957-01-31At a habeas corpus hearing, Bedwell recants, saying he confessed only because he was held for days and subjected to threats, inducements, and rough treatment, and believed police would release him if he cooperated. Autopsy findings undercut his story: the food and drink he described were not in the girls' stomachs, and they had not been beaten to death.
- 1957-02Bedwell is released on bond in early February as his confession collapses. Other men are questioned over the following months and years, including the teenager Max Fleig and horseman Silas Jayne, but each is cleared or never charged. No indictment for the murders is ever returned, and the case goes cold.
Unresolved. The core facts are documented and grim: Barbara Grimes, 15, and her sister Patricia, 12, vanished on the night of 28 December 1956 after leaving a Chicago movie theater, and their bodies were found on 22 January 1957 along a rural road in Willow Springs. What is unproven, and remains so nearly seventy years later, is who killed them. The case triggered one of the largest missing-persons and murder investigations in Cook County history, yet no one was ever convicted. A drifter named Edward Lee Bedwell signed a confession in early 1957, then recanted it, and physical evidence contradicted his account; he was released. Other men were questioned and cleared. Investigators and writers have since named their own favored suspects, but none of these attributions has ever been proven, and this file reports the case as an open, unsolved mystery. It names no killer, because the evidence does not.
Reviewed by The Conspiratory Editors · Last reviewed July 19, 2026 · How we rate
Sources
- 1.Murder of the Grimes sisters, Wikipedia
- 2.2 Investigators: The Unsolved 1956 Murder Of The Grimes Sisters, CBS Chicago (2016)
- 3.The Unsolved Murders of Sisters Barbara and Patricia Grimes, A&E
- 4.Chicago Grimes Sisters' Murders Hit 59 Years Without Answers, NBC News (2015)
- 5.Grimes sisters killings: Infamous Chicago cold case revived, NewsNation
- 6.The Grimes Sisters Murders: Did investigators overlook a crucial lead in girls' murders?, WGN-TV
- 7.Unsolved Murder of the Grimes Sisters, Historic Mysteries
- 8.German Church Road and the Grimes Sisters Tragedy, M.A. Kleen (2021)
- 9.Two naked bodies frozen in the snow: the mystery of the brutal crime of the sisters who loved Elvis, Infobae (2022)
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