Almost six decades after the three Beaumont children disappeared, it remains unknown what happened to the siblings who vanished from their local Adelaide beach on January 26, 1966.
As he looks into the case for true crime docuseries The Hunters, esteemed Australian investigative journalist Adam Shand calls for an inquest into the case if there is to be any chance of the truth ever coming out.
“It’s been over 59 years now, and unlike many other cases of this nature, there has never been an inquest and that’s just not good enough,” Shand tells WHO.
“With each passing day, the pool of elderly witnesses gets smaller and the clock is ticking.”
What happened to the missing Beaumont children?
On that fateful morning, Nancy Beaumont walked her kids, Jane, 9, Arnna, 7, and Grant, 4, across the road from their Somerton Park home to the bus stop, from where the three children made the five-minute journey to Glenelg Beach on the bus by themselves.
Unimaginable today, at the time it was considered normal and safe for children in Australia to be unattended at public venues.
By 3pm, their father, Jim, hopped in the car to go looking for his kids. Unable to find them, their parents raised the alarm at 5pm, sparking what would become one of the largest police investigations in Australian history.
With no trace of the trio or their belongings ever found, law enforcement relied upon bystanders coming forward for their investigation.
“There were so many people on the beach that very hot day, but eyewitness accounts are strangely thin on the ground,” Shand explains.
“There were less than half a dozen significant leads, but when you look into it more closely, the police were simply overwhelmed. There were so many people going into Glenelg Police Station – there was a queue up the street there and the phone lines were overwhelmed – and a lot of them didn’t get to give their information.”
Police were able to piece together that the children stayed at the beach for a couple of hours until they headed to Wenzel’s Bakery at 11.45am to buy lunch with a crisp £1 note, which was much more cash than Nancy had sent them off with.
The shop assistant recalled one of them mentioning “the man” and several sightings placed them with a 30-something fair-haired male.
Shand believes there could potentially be more people out there with vital information who didn’t come forward at the time but would be willing to now.
“If someone was at the beach that day, maybe with someone who wasn’t their wife or with someone who had a different husband, so they stayed quiet, now maybe they don’t need to,” he explains.
Who are the suspects in the Beaumont children’s disappearance?
In the docuseries, Shand and retired police detective Steve Van Aperen look into several men who have been named as persons of interest over the years.
These include convicted child killer Derek Percy, who murdered 12-year-old Yvonne Tuohy in 1969 after snatching her from a Melbourne beach, and notorious paedophile Anthony Allan Munro, who is confirmed to have been in the area at the time the Beaumonts disappeared.
They also analyse the evidence concerning millionaire businessman Harry Phipps, who lived 300 metres from where Jane, Arnna and Grant were last seen and was known to tip with £1 notes. His son, Haydn, told police his dad was an abusive paedophile.
Two workers hired to dig a hole at Phipps’ aluminium factory days after the disappearance also came forward, leading to the site being excavated in 2013
and again in 2018.
“We’ve uncovered new information showing that the second dig needed to be much deeper as the land is quite different today,” Shand says.
Although the Beaumont parents and many of the suspects have passed away, Shand still believes it is important to uncover the truth.
“In every case, law enforcement should leave no stone unturned, but there are certainly some that have been left here,” he says.
“And if a case as big as this can’t be solved, what hope do any others have?”
(The Hunters: Beaumont Children Mystery premieres Sun., Feb. 23 at 8.40 pm on Channel 7)
