# The 1956 murder of Chicago sisters Barbara and Patricia Grimes remains unsolved after one of the largest investigations in the city's history

**No verdict.** 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.

Category: Unsolved Crimes & Disappearances · Era: 1950s · First circulated: Public interest was immediate and enormous from the first days of the search in late December 1956; the case has been retold as an unsolved mystery ever since, and remains an open investigation with the Cook County Sheriff's Office · 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.
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/grimes-sisters-murder

## Summary
On the evening of 28 December 1956, sisters Barbara Grimes, 15, and Patricia Grimes, 12, left their home in Chicago's McKinley Park neighborhood to see the Elvis Presley film Love Me Tender at the Brighton Theater. They never came home. Their disappearance set off a citywide search that grew into one of the largest missing-persons investigations Cook County had ever seen, drawing in hundreds of officers, thousands of volunteers, ransom notes, false sightings, and even a public appeal from Elvis Presley himself. On 22 January 1957, a passing motorist spotted their nude bodies along German Church Road in unincorporated Willow Springs. The murders have never been solved. A confession was extracted from a local drifter and then fell apart under the evidence; other suspects were questioned and released. This file reports what is documented about the crime and the investigation, weighs the theories fairly, and stops where the proof stops: no one has been shown to have killed the Grimes sisters.

## The claim
That 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.

## Origin and timeline
- 1956-12-28: Barbara 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.
- 1956-12-29: When 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.
- 1957-01: Dozens 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.
- 1957-01: The 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.
- 1957-01-22: A 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.
- 1957-01: Autopsies 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.
- 1957-01-27: Edward 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.
- 1957-01-31: At 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.
- 1957-02: Bedwell 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.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The Grimes sisters were murdered, not victims of an accident or a runaway that ended badly.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: The investigation was one of the largest in Chicago and Cook County history.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: Edward Lee Bedwell confessed, so the killer was found even if the case fell apart in court.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: A polygraph confession from another suspect, Max Fleig, points to the real killer.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: The many reported sightings of the girls alive show the timeline is known.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: Later researchers have identified who did it, so the mystery is effectively solved.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: The case is closed and forgotten by authorities.
  Evidence: 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.

## Why people believe it
- The crime is real and terrible, and its victims were children. Two young sisters killed on an ordinary night out is the kind of case that lodges in a city's memory, and the enduring public fascination is grief and horror as much as mystery.
- The investigation was enormous and still failed. When hundreds of officers, thousands of tips, and one of the largest manhunts in the region's history produce no conviction, the gap between effort and result invites the sense that something was missed, mishandled, or hidden.
- There was a confession, and then there wasn't. Bedwell's signed statement and quick collapse feed a lasting suspicion that police reached for a convenient suspect, and that the botched handling of early leads let the real killer slip away.
- The 1950s setting and the Elvis connection give the case a vivid, almost cinematic texture: the movie theater, the frozen roadside, the pop-star appeal. That atmosphere has kept the story alive in true-crime retellings for generations, each of which floats its own candidate for the killer.

## Open questions
- 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.

## Sources
- Murder of the Grimes sisters, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_the_Grimes_sisters
- 2 Investigators: The Unsolved 1956 Murder Of The Grimes Sisters, CBS Chicago (2016): https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/grimes-sisters-murder/
- The Unsolved Murders of Sisters Barbara and Patricia Grimes, A&E: https://www.aetv.com/articles/murders-of-barbara-and-patricia-grimes
- Chicago Grimes Sisters' Murders Hit 59 Years Without Answers, NBC News (2015): https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/cold-case-spotlight/chicago-grimes-sisters-murders-hit-59-years-without-answers-n486401
- Grimes sisters killings: Infamous Chicago cold case revived, NewsNation: https://www.newsnationnow.com/crime/grimes-sisters-killings/
- The Grimes Sisters Murders: Did investigators overlook a crucial lead in girls' murders?, WGN-TV: https://wgntv.com/news/wgn-films/the-grimes-sisters-murders/did-investigators-overlook-a-crucial-lead-in-girls-murders/
- Unsolved Murder of the Grimes Sisters, Historic Mysteries: https://www.historicmysteries.com/major-crimes/grimes-sisters/1244/
- German Church Road and the Grimes Sisters Tragedy, M.A. Kleen (2021): https://michaelkleen.com/2021/01/26/german-church-road-and-the-grimes-sisters-tragedy/
- Two naked bodies frozen in the snow: the mystery of the brutal crime of the sisters who loved Elvis, Infobae (2022): https://www.infobae.com/en/2022/03/23/two-naked-bodies-frozen-in-the-snow-the-mystery-of-the-brutal-crime-of-the-sisters-who-loved-elvis/

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