Grimes Sisters Murders
Chicago, Illinois – Winter 1956–57
It was the week after Christmas, and Chicago had begun to freeze. The streets of Brighton Park glistened with crusted snow, lit by the orange flicker of gas lamps and the flickering neon of the Brighton Theater marquee. That night, December 28, 1956, two girls—sisters—stepped into the cold and disappeared.
Barbara Grimes was fifteen, her younger sister Patricia just twelve. Pretty, polite, and Presley-obsessed, the girls left their home around 7:15 p.m. to watch Love Me Tender—again. Their mother, Loretta, didn’t think twice. The Brighton Theater was only a few blocks away. The girls were good kids. This was 1950s Chicago, and nice girls didn’t just vanish.
They never came home.
The City Mobilizes
When midnight passed with no sign of the girls, Loretta reported them missing. The Chicago Police Department took the case seriously almost immediately. The city responded with what would become one of the largest missing persons hunts in its history. Block by block, officers questioned witnesses, swept alleyways, searched movie houses, and combed through vacant lots, rail yards, and rooftops.
Over 300 sightings flooded in. One woman claimed she saw the sisters boarding a CTA bus. Another thought she spotted them at a South Side restaurant. Truck drivers across state lines said they gave the girls a lift. A security guard in Nashville was sure he saw them buying Cokes at a diner. None of it held up.
The papers printed theories like ticker tape—rumors of a teenage runaway pact, a secret boyfriend, even hints of abuse at home. But Loretta pushed back. Her daughters had barely missed a curfew in their lives. Barbara still made her bed every morning and folded her socks in pairs. Patricia idolized Elvis but still played with dolls. "They didn't run away," Loretta insisted. "Someone took them."
Even Elvis Presley himself weighed in, sending a personal plea to the girls through the press: “Please go home and ease your mother’s worries,” he said. “Don’t stay away to hurt her.”
Weeks passed. Winter deepened. And then, almost a month later, the bodies surfaced.
A Frozen Discovery
January 22, 1957. Noon. German Church Road, Willow Springs—a quiet stretch on the outskirts of Chicago, flanked by tall grasses and brush, bordered by desolate roads. Construction worker Leonard Prescott pulled off the shoulder in his pickup and saw something that made his blood turn to ice.
Two naked forms lay in a roadside ditch, pale against the snow, side by side, positioned almost tenderly. They were frozen stiff, lightly dusted with snow, limbs relaxed. Their faces were turned upward toward the sky. It was as if they had been posed.
Prescott called the police. When detectives arrived, they confirmed what Loretta already knew in her gut.
It was Barbara and Patricia Grimes.
The Postmortem Puzzle
The city reeled. The media went wild. Crowds gathered at the scene, trudging across snowbanks to gawk at the last sad tableau of the Grimes girls.
Autopsy reports soon followed—but brought more confusion than clarity. Coroner Walter McCarron ruled Barbara’s death as likely due to shock and exposure, though she had suffered blunt trauma to the face and head. Patricia’s cause was listed as simply exposure, with no clear signs of external violence.
But not everyone agreed.
Enter Harry Glos, a private pathologist hired by Loretta Grimes, who dropped a bombshell of his own. He claimed Barbara had been sexually assaulted and that Patricia bore marks of restraint, possibly bruises on her wrists. He also insisted that the bodies showed signs of having been stored somewhere warm—perhaps a basement or garage—before being dumped in the snow days after death.
This contradicted McCarron’s timeline, which had the girls dying within 5–6 hours of their last confirmed sighting. Glos suggested they might have been held for weeks, their corpses later staged to look like a swift tragedy.
Detectives began to split into camps. One side backed the coroner. The other believed Glos. As the media frenzy surged, police leaned on one outcome: a suspect in cuffs.
False Confession, Real Chaos
In February 1957, detectives picked up Edward “Bennie” Bedwell, a 21-year-old semi-literate dishwasher from Tennessee with an IQ that hovered near the line of intellectual disability. He bore a striking resemblance to Elvis Presley and had reportedly been seen talking to two teenage girls in a diner around the time of the disappearance.
After hours of questioning, Bedwell confessed. He said he and a friend had picked up Barbara and Patricia, partied with them over the course of several days, then beat them to death and dumped their bodies in the woods after an argument. The girls, he claimed, “wouldn’t do what we wanted.”
It was a horrific confession—one the public accepted without hesitation.
But there was a problem. Actually, several.
Bedwell’s timeline didn’t match the autopsy. He said the girls were killed on January 7. But if the official coroner was right, they’d been dead long before that. He also got key details wrong—like the condition of the bodies and the location they were found. No physical evidence tied him to the crime. And then, he recanted.
Police quietly released Bedwell without charges.
In the minds of many, the damage was done. The public had already decided he was guilty. Others thought he’d been coerced into confessing, possibly beaten or manipulated into making a false statement. Whispers of a cover-up began to swirl.
A Lingering Shadow
The case remained active through 1957 and into the years beyond. Then, in 1958, a new name surfaced—Charles Melquist, a 23-year-old from suburban Lyons. He’d just been convicted of killing Bonnie Leigh Scott, a 15-year-old girl who was also found naked, dumped in a remote area, and showing signs of restraint.
Detectives questioned Melquist multiple times about the Grimes case. He denied everything. Though circumstantial evidence seemed eerily parallel, police could never link him to Barbara and Patricia. He served time for Bonnie’s murder and was later released—only to die in a car crash in 2010.
Despite decades of rumor, suspicion, and renewed efforts—including a 2013 cold case review—the murder of the Grimes sisters remains officially unsolved.
Loretta Grimes spent the rest of her life campaigning for answers. She died in 1989, never knowing who took her daughters. She was buried with their photos in her wallet.
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Did You Know?
• Elvis Presley was reportedly deeply shaken by the case. When told that the girls had vanished after seeing Love Me Tender, he allegedly said: "If I’d known, I never would have made that movie."
• The Chicago Police Department’s handling of the Grimes case was later cited in training manuals as a cautionary tale of how media pressure can derail investigations.
• Some local residents believe the girls were kept in a South Side house for several days and that multiple people in the neighborhood knew—but were too afraid to talk.
1950s Innocence Shattered
In an America that had sold itself on nuclear families, white picket fences, and teenage soda-fountain dreams, the Grimes murders cracked the illusion. These were ordinary girls from an ordinary home who vanished into a night of movie magic and never returned. Their deaths weren’t just a family’s tragedy—they were the moment 1950s Chicago lost its innocence.
For parents across the nation, the message was chilling: If it could happen here, it could happen anywhere.
🕰️ Timeline Highlights
Dec 28, 1956 Girls attend Love Me Tender - never return home
Dec 29, 1956 Mother Loretta Grimes reports them missing
Jan 22, 1957 Bodies discovered in a ditch near German Church Rd, Willow Springs
Jan 23–24 Autopsies conducted; controversial findings released
Feb 1957 Suspect Edward Bedwell confesses, then recants
1958 Charles Melquist convicted of unrelated teen girl murder
Where the Case Stands Today
• Case Status: Open, unsolved.
• Last Cold Case Review: Cook County Sheriff’s Office, 2013.
• Suspects: Edward Bedwell (recanted confession), Charles Melquist (never charged).
• Current Leads: None publicly disclosed.
• Public Archive Access: Chicago Tribune microfilm, Cook County Coroner reports, PrairieGhosts.com.
They went out to see a movie. They never came home. More than sixty years later, their names still echo across Chicago’s south side
