On the evening of December 28, 1956, two sisters left their home in the McKinley Park neighborhood of Chicago to see a movie. Barbara Grimes was fifteen. Patricia was twelve. They were going to see Elvis Presley in Love Me Tender at the Brighton Park Theater — they had reportedly seen it eleven times already and could not get enough. Their mother told them to be home by eleven. They were never seen alive again. The Grimes sisters case became one of Chicago’s most consuming mysteries, triggering the largest missing persons investigation in Cook County history and remaining unsolved nearly seven decades later.

The Night of December 28

Barbara and Patricia Grimes were two of the seven children of Joseph and Loretta Grimes, a working-class Catholic family in a close-knit Southwest Side neighborhood. The girls left their home on South Damen Avenue at around 7:30 in the evening. Witnesses placed them at the theater and reported seeing them afterward at a bus stop and at a local restaurant. They were last definitively confirmed alive near midnight — two young girls on a Chicago street in winter, trying to get home. After they failed to return, their mother waited through the night and reported them missing the following morning. A search began that would expand into a massive public effort, enlisting police, volunteers, and eventually Elvis Presley himself, who recorded a radio message pleading with the girls to come home if they were runaways, assuring them their parents would not be angry.

Twenty-Five Days of Searching

The Grimes sisters case gripped Chicago through January 1957. Police received thousands of tips and leads. There were alleged sightings across the city and the region, some of which appeared credible — so credible that for weeks, investigators believed the girls might still be alive. Loretta Grimes pleaded publicly for her daughters to come home. The Catholic community organized prayer vigils. The case dominated local news and drew national attention, in part because of the girls’ youth, their Catholicism, and the timing so close to the holidays. Chicago in 1957 was a city accustomed to neighborhood crime, but the disappearance of two sisters on their way home from a movie theater struck a particular chord of dread.

The Discovery

On January 22, 1957, a man named Leonard Prescott was driving along a stretch of German Church Road in Willow Springs, a rural area southwest of Chicago, when he saw what he thought were discarded department store mannequins by the side of the road. They were not mannequins. The nude bodies of Barbara and Patricia Grimes were found in a ditch, partially covered by snow. The Cook County medical examiner determined that both girls had died of secondary shock — a finding interpreted by most investigators to mean extreme exposure or severe trauma rather than a specific wound. The precise cause of death has been disputed by various analysts over the decades. What was clear was that the girls had been dead for some time and that their bodies had been transported to the location after death.

The Investigation and Its Failures

The investigation that followed was vast and, ultimately, fruitless. A seventeen-year-old named Edward Lee Bedwell was arrested after reportedly making incriminating statements, and he was charged briefly — but the charges were dropped when evidence against him proved insufficient and his statements were deemed unreliable. A drifter named Walter Kranz was also questioned. A semen sample was recovered from one of the girls, but that crucial piece of physical evidence was subsequently lost by law enforcement — a failure that haunts the case to this day and forecloses the possibility of any future DNA testing from the original sample. Several individuals of interest were identified over the years, but none was ever charged.

A New Thread: The Hansen Connection

In the years following the murders, retired Chicago Police detective James Hennigan became consumed by the cold case and developed a theory linking the Grimes murders to the 1955 Schuessler-Peterson murders — another notorious unsolved Chicago case in which three boys were found dead in a forest preserve. Hennigan’s research pointed to a man named Silas Jayne, a corrupt and connected horse dealer with ties to organized crime, and a man named Kenneth Hansen, who was eventually convicted in 1995 of the Schuessler-Peterson murders. According to Hennigan’s theory, Hansen was at the Brighton Theater the same night as the Grimes sisters, and the property where the girls’ bodies were found was land that Hansen leased for horse pasturing. The connection has never been prosecuted, and Hansen died in prison in 2007. Investigators have suggested that exhuming the girls’ bodies could potentially yield DNA evidence from under their fingernails — but that has not been pursued.

Why This Case Still Matters

The murder of Barbara and Patricia Grimes remains officially unsolved. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office continues to carry it as an active cold case. The lost semen evidence represents a profound institutional failure — a direct line between what could have been known and what now can never be proven. The case occupies a significant place in Chicago’s history, cited regularly as one of the city’s most emblematic unsolved crimes and as an example of how investigative failures in the mid-twentieth century locked certain cases in permanent uncertainty. In late 2024, renewed coverage of the case highlighted the Hansen theory and the continued interest among cold case researchers in applying modern forensic tools — tools that may yet yield answers if the political and institutional will to pursue them exists.

Two sisters set out on a winter night to see their favorite movie, and they never came home. Nearly seventy years later, no one has been held accountable. The evidence that might have closed the case was lost. The bodies lie in a Catholic cemetery in Chicago. In a city that has never fully let this story go — what would it take, finally, to give Barbara and Patricia Grimes the answer they deserve?