JANE Beaumont wanted to be a writer when she grew up. She could hardly have written anything as heartbreaking or haunting as the story of how she, her brother and sister vanished from an Adelaide beach one hot day more than thirty years ago.
The story of the Beaumont children, which has become a long and tangled tale, has lost none of its potency. At its heart is an act of unspeakable cruelty: of parents being robbed of their children and of never knowing their fate; of being tormented, year after year, with theories, rumors and speculation, false leads, false hopes and false prophets.
And, with each twist in the tale, with each turn of the screw for the lost children’s parents, Australia has been mesmerised by a story as mysterious as Picnic at Hanging Rock, as sinister as Silence of the Lambs. It has burned deep into the national psyche, transcending time and place in a way other crimes have not.
It marks, perhaps, an end of innocence for an old Australia when doors were left unlocked and kids went to the beach alone.
Australia’s population has grown by millions since 1966. No one under the age of thirty was born when Jane, Arnna and Grant disappeared, and few under forty actually remember it happening. But that doesn’t matter. The Beaumont children are as much a part of popular culture as Ned Kelly or Don Bradman, names that echo down the years and have become part of our mythology.
So, when a retired detective claimed in 1997 that a Canberra woman could be Jane Beaumont, it spawned yet another flurry of publicity. This says more about our preoccupation with the case than about the merit of the claim.
If Jane Natarlie Beaumont were alive when the claims were made, she would turn forty one on 10 September. Arnna Katherine would be thirty nine on 11 November, and Grant Ellis would have turned thirty six the same year.
On Australia Day, 1966, they were nine, seven and four. It was a Wednesday and one of the hottest days of a sweltering January. At the Beaumonts’ modest war-service home in Harding Street, Somerton Park, Nancy Beaumont gave in to her children’s pleas to let them go to nearby Glenelg beach straight after breakfast.
Mrs Beaumont had work to do, her husband, Jim, a travelling salesman, was away, and it seemed safer to send the children on the bus than to let them ride their bikes; more reasonable to let them go early than make them wait for her. She watched and waved as they went out the gate, holding hands, about 8.40 am.
When they failed to return at noon, as arranged, she assumed they had missed the bus and would be on the next one, at 2pm. When they were not, she worried. When Jim arrived home an hour later, they began a search that has never really ended. By next afternoon, it was the biggest story in Australia.
The police were to follow up thousands of leads in the coming months and years, but there has only ever been one firm clue.
Several witnesses had seen the children playing with a tall, thin, blond surfie wearing navy blue bathers. He was never identified.
The search spread interstate, even overseas. A Dutch clairvoyant, Gerard Croiset, arrived in late 1966 amid a huge furore, but his ‘visions’ failed. Although Croiset died in 1980, his influence has lingered. In 1996, Adelaide businessman Con Polites finally achieved his ambition of digging up a warehouse floor where Croiset thought the bodies could be buried. Stan Swaine was prosecuting a case in a country court the day the children disappeared. Like everybody else, he was interested, but it was not until he took charge of the state’s homicide squad two years later that he became involved.
Detective Sergeant Swaine, then forty-one, disagreed with other police that the children had almost certainly been murdered. He thought they might have been taken to be raised by a cult. For a while, the parents, hungry for any hope, grasped at the theory, perhaps earning it more attention than it deserved.
A letter from Dandenong in 1968 lured Swaine and the Beaumonts to drive across for a rendezvous with an unknown person who promised to hand over the children. The supposedly secret meeting had been leaked by other police, and Swaine and the Beaumonts were followed from Adelaide by two carloads of reporters. It did not matter – there was no sign of the children.
A month later, acting on a letter from New South Wales, police searched Mud Island and Swan Island, near Queenscliff, then a spot near Anglesea. In September that year, a ship’s crew was questioned and fingerprinted in New Zealand, because the ship had been in Adelaide in January 1966, and in Melbourne in August 1968, when a young girl disappeared from a St Kilda amusement park. No result.
There were many more leads. A sealed shipping container was searched for remains. A blond surfie in Tasmania was heard talking to a child about Adelaide. A Kaniva policeman overheard someone talking about the Beaumonts on a crossed phone line. A Kalgoorlie couple came under scrutiny in 1985 after former neighbors talked of old gossip alleging they had kidnapped the children. Three suitcases full of scrawled-on press clippings about the case were found at an Adelaide tip in 1986. They turned out to be the collection of an eccentric old woman and had been thrown out by relatives after her death.
Nothing indicated the children were alive. Yet, three decades on, Stan Swaine argues they probably are. This might say more about him than about the mystery.
THE man involved for three decades is not so much obsessed as enthusiastic about the case. It is Swaine’s hobby. After a lifetime as a detective, he still likes to dabble, and the Beaumont connection always gets him some attention.
In 1997 Swaine appeared at a closed Magistrates Court hearing in which a woman, forty-one, applied unsuccessfully for a restraining order to stop the ageing sleuth approaching her.
His version of events is that, eighteen months before, he was asked by a women’s magazine to check out the woman, who claimed to have been brought up by a cult and had herself suggested she might be Jane Beaumont.
He made several trips to Canberra and interviewed the woman. Eager to believe he had cracked the case at last, he seized on the slimmest of ‘evidence’ – that she has hazel eyes ‘like Jane Beaumont’s’ and that she is roughly the right age.
He says he has seen an extract of her birth certificate, under her present name, but that it was issued after 1966 and he suspects it could be a fake. He cites the bogus identifications obtained by Anne Hamilton-Byrne and others in the cult known as The Family.
The police, however, have no such misgivings, accepting the woman’s family’s assurances – and her birth certificate – as proof that she is not Jane Beaumont.
Swaine is not convinced. Cults, he shrugs, do unbelievable things. After 900 people poisoned themselves at Jonestown in Guyana, anything’s possible, he says.
And, why did intelligent, legally sane people dress in their best clothes, pack their bags and quietly kill themselves in California a few months before, convinced they were being picked up by a spaceship?
Compared with that, and other bizarre incidents, he claims, the idea of children being abducted to be brainwashed and brought up by cult ‘parents’ is quite plausible.
At first sight, Stan Swaine makes an unlikely private eye. At seventy-two, he is no Philip Marlowe; just an old bloke whose good looks have worn down to a vague kindliness, punctuated with a nervous tic that could be the legacy of being stabbed in the head by a criminal with a screwdriver in 1952, an attack which was nearly fatal for the policeman – and very fatal for the attacker, whom he shot with his service pistol.
He left the police in 1973 to become a private investigator and has been at it ever since. Along the way, he says, his marriage broke up and he lost several Adelaide properties.
Now a pensioner who plays at private eye, he lives alone in a tiny public-housing flat.
Fast chases are out. Swaine does not drive any more and walks with the aid of a stick, nursing a bad knee and juggling a mobile phone, fob watch and insulin syringe kit. He wears a comfy cardigan, sports jacket, tie over nylon shirt and brown pants with a dodgy zipper that threatens to reveal Jockey Y-fronts to match the spare pair drying on the heater in the cluttered flat.
‘You’ll have to excuse me, I’m a recycled bachelor,’ he says apologetically, waving at the books and papers on the dining table that doubles as his desk.
Thirty years after the disappearance the Beaumonts remain big news and Swaine was keen to bask in any reflected publicity.
After flying back from Canberra and an interview with Ray Martin on A Current Affair he was pleased with himself. He had been met at the airport by a Nine Network car and a producer detailed to keep him away from rival networks. Then he had been whisked to Nine’s studios for a chat with a slightly embarrassed assistant police commissioner and, finally, taken home. There, the answering machine blinked with nine fresh messages, and his mobile phone chirped with interview requests.
‘This is like when it first happened,’ he said wonderingly. ‘I’ll be the cynosure of all eyes down at the retired policemen’s club, that’s for sure.’
He still happily cites the letters sent from Dandenong in 1968 as the basis for his cult theory, ignoring or forgetting the fact that, in 1992, new forensic methods finally proved the letters were a hoax by a teenage boy and so killed any faint chance that the children had ever been held in Victoria. Five years later he was not worried about police dismissing his latest tilt at cracking Australia’s biggest case. ‘This is not the end of it, mate,’ he said conspiratorially. ‘All the police have done is look at her birth certificate and talk to people who could be mixed up in a cult, anyway.’
Meanwhile, he is off to the retired policemen’s club for lunch. It has been a big week and a most excellent adventure for a bored old man.
Not so for Jim and Nancy Beaumont, perhaps. They both had birthdays a week before the latest false lead – he turned seventy two, she seventy – but all they got was yet another faint hope extinguished.
Chances are, only one person can help them. Somewhere out there is a man who was tall and thin and blond in 1966. Somewhere, in a dusty family album, there will be a snapshot of him in navy blue bathers. Someone, somewhere, must suspect who he is.
Jim and Nancy Beaumont will be always united in grief that only their own deaths will end, but they have lived apart for many years now. They lost their children, and then they lost each other.
Postscript: A middle aged man who lives in a Melbourne psychiatric hospital has changed his name by deed poll to Grant Beaumont, convinced he was abducted with his sisters more than thirty years years ago.