The ride took about five minutes. The entire crew of a British freighter stationed there at the time was questioned in 1968, but this too yielded nothing. Around 15 minutes later, the man was viewed playing with the children as they whipped each other with their towels. The South Australian police, however, interviewed O'Neill and discounted him as a suspect. Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the world more open and connected. Why the Unsolved Disappearance of the Beaumont Children Remains One of On the morning of January 26, 1966, on the public holiday known as Australia Day, the children asked their mother to visit the beach again. In February 1975 nine-year-old Ricky John Smith (also known as Ricky Kube) was abducted and O'Neill was one of many who helped in the search for the missing boy. Nothing was found. Historically, Colley Reserve was the entire grassed area north of the jetty, including the grassed sea frontage. Though a local marina was drained when a woman reported having spoken to three children matching the Beaumont siblings descriptions there on January 26, nothing was found. Despite a huge search effort, no sign of the children has been found in over 50 years. Despite books, movies, and podcasts created about the crime, no one knows for sure what happened to the three Beaumont children. Both of them were choked to death before the sexual assaults took place: Susan with the killers bare hands, and Judith after sand was forced into her mouth and nose, blocking her airways. The postman contacted police two days after his initial statement and said that he thought he saw them in the morning, not the afternoon as he had previously said. The artist was apparently drunk at the time and had to rush the sketch due to a time deadline. It was the beginning of a search that is still unproductive 56 years later. Jane, the eldest child, was considered responsible enough to care for the two younger siblings. On 8 November 1966, Gerard Croiset, a parapsychologist and psychic from the Netherlands, was brought to Australia, to search for the children. This age discrepancy leaves a question mark next to Harry Phipps being the possible abductor- a 48 year old having to look around 35. Nancy Beaumont, mother of missing Beaumont children, dies - InDaily Around the 40th anniversary of the childrens disappearance, Tasmanian Police Commissioner Richard McCreadie suggested that a convicted child murderer named James ONeill could have been the abductor. At 7:30 p.m., they reported the Beaumont children missing. The journalists came across Harry P., a businessman. Tragically, Nancy Beaumont died in 2019 without ever reuniting with her children, as Strange Outdoors reports. The children were seen walking alone at about 3.00 pm, away from the beach along Jetty Road, in the general direction of their home. Many of the children were taken by Brown to the same dry creek bed the Mackay sisters were found in. Nancy Beaumont died without ever seeing her children again. Additionally, she had reported that the man was wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, a pair of which Brown is known to have worn, something considered by police to be another noteworthy point in the identification. . Jim and Nancy had married in December 1955. In September 2019, the mother of the three children, Nancy Beaumont, passed away in an Adelaide nursing home aged 92. Over the years, Nancy Beaumont had never given up hope that her children would return one day. Jim Beaumont, the children's father, is still alive, but the couple separated years ago. Jesse Mike Brown | Bluebonnet News A sign of how desperate and helpless the parents and the detectives were at this point. Jim and Nancy Beaumont lived a nightmare after the disappearance of their three children. "Consistent with family wishes, SAPOL have no comment to make about her passing beyond expressing our sympathy and conveying on behalf of the family that they have no wish to speak to the media.". In 1971 Bridgart was charged with 12 offences involving abductions and sexual assaults of four boys in Victoria. There have been suggestions that Derek Ernest Percy (1948-2013), Victoria's then longest-serving prisoner, had been involved in the Beaumont case. Fairfax Media A woman saw the children between 11 am and 12 noon. Jane also brought her book Little Women to the beach with her that day, despite it being a 5 minute bus drive and only a planned two hour outing. He had been sentenced to 10 years in prison, with a non-parole period of five years and five months. The True Story Of The Disappearance Of The Beaumont Children. More promising were the claims of a Perth woman who revealed that for nine months in 1966, she had lived next door to the children in a desolate railway town between West and South Australia. JOHN BEAUMONT OBITUARY. A funeral notice published on Saturday says Mr . A chance remark at home, which seemed insignificant at the time, supported this theory. The dig was prompted by two brothers who told police they had once dug a hole for the factory's owner, Harry Phipps a person of interest in the Beaumont case. He was wealthy and known to be in the habit of giving out 1 notes, was later alleged to have pedophile tendencies, and lived only 300 metres away from Glenelg Beach on the corner of Augusta Street and Sussex Street. Von Einem also told the witness that he had taken two girls from the Adelaide Oval during a football match, another infamous disappearance.In August 2007, it was reported that police were examining archival footage from the original search, shot by Channel Seven, that shows a young man resembling von Einem among onlookers. "No one could imagine the torment those parents went through," Madigan told New Idea of Nancy and Jim Beaumont, who separated in the early 1970s. Investigators excavated the site that year and then again in 2018, but found only non-human bones. Nonetheless, Phipps own son revealed that his father had sexually molested him as a child and that he believed his father was involved in the Beaumont childrens disappearance.