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The Missing Beaumont Children

On 26 January 1966, the Beaumont children – Jane, 9, Arnna, 7, and 4-year-old Grant – disappeared from South Australia’s Glenelg Beach at about 11.15 am while on an outing alone. Their disappearance made headlines all around Australia. On that morning the weather was fine and the forecast was for a hot and steamy day, ideal conditions for a day at the beach. The Beaumonts were an average Australian family living in suburban Somerton Park, not far from the beach, and the children’s father, a travelling salesman, had decided against joining his children at the beach for the day. Instead he chose to call on a client. It was a decision that would prove fateful.

At 10 am the children took the bus to the beach, which was only a few minutes’ ride away. The eldest girl, Jane, was considered old and responsible enough to mind her two siblings. She assured her mother, Nancy, that they would be home on the midday bus. They caught the bus at the stop just 100 metres from their front door.

The bus driver confirmed later that he dropped them at Glenelg Beach five minutes later. When the children didn’t arrive home, their mother wasn’t unduly concerned. Children simply didn’t go missing in suburban Adelaide, especially from a crowded beach area. She concluded that they must have decided to walk home, having spent their bus fare money on sweets, and that she would hear the usual ruckus as they ran in the front door at any minute.

When Jim Beaumont arrived home in the mid-afternoon and his children still weren’t home, he went looking for them. When they still hadn’t been sighted four hours later, he notified police, and a massive search was launched. By morning their photographs were being circulated to every newspaper across the country, telling of every mother’s worst nightmare.

The police were left with three possibilities: the children had run away; they had drowned in the surf; or they had been abducted and were being held for ransom. The only ray of hope was the sighting of the children in the company of a tall blond- or light-brown-haired young man in blue swimming trunks.

Then another witness came forward and said that he had seen the children with the same young blond man in a park opposite the beach, then walking away with him behind the Glenelg Hotel. The local postman came forward and said that he had seen the trio walking up Jetty Road away from the beach and towards their home at about 3 pm. They were laughing and holding hands. The police received hundreds of calls about possible sightings of the Beaumont children, but they all proved fruitless.

Then in August, 1966, seven months after the Beaumont children went missing, the Adelaide News newspaper published a letter it had received from a Dutch clairvoyant named Gerard Croiset who was allegedly known throughout Europe as ‘The Man With the X-Ray Mind’.

In the letter Croiset claimed that he knew where the children were and said ‘I see an overhanging rock plateau under which there are stones of a nice colour and behind which is a cave or a hollow.’

Alongside the letter, the News published an article on how Croiset’s psychic powers and mind-pictures had allegedly solved many cases throughout Europe. His main claim to fame was that he had helped solve an axe-murder in the Netherlands by advising police that the pictures in his mind had seen the culprit throw the murder weapon in a canal, where it was eventually found.

The letter and article in the News caused a sensation and citizens formed search parties and took to the sandhills and district surrounding the children’s disappearance and dug and probed in the hope that they might put an end to the mystery. But nothing was found.

Back in Holland Croiset pored over photographs of the abduction scene and family shots of the children and came up with his next revelation. ‘There was no foul play, nor were they kidnapped’, he announced. ‘The children are dead. I am almost certain they suffocated. They were smothered alive. There was some sort of a collapse.’

After much persuasion to come to Australia and take police to the bodies of the children, Gerard Croiset arrived in Adelaide and declared that he would find them in two days. And true to his word, two days later he announced that a vision had come to him that he knew where the children were and announced that a warehouse near the Beaumont family home was where they were buried.

Back in Holland he said that he was 99.9 per cent convinced that searchers would find a tunnel beneath the warehouse and that is where they would find the children. Months passed and eventually, on 1 March the following year the Citizens Action Group was formed to finance the purchase of the warehouse and the expenses of digging.

Nothing was found, and eventually, despite Gerard Croiset’s constant urging not to give up and keep digging deeper, it was abandoned. As it was they had dug as deep as humanly possible under the circumstances and to consider that the children’s bodies could be that far in the ground was as absurd as Croiset’s claims.

All that was achieved by the whole horrible exercise was that the children’s parents had suffered more heartache and the News newspaper had sold lots of copies.

But there would be another glimmer of hope, albeit a horrific one. It would occur many years in the future, at the committal hearing of one of the most evil murderers in Australia’s history.

It would be claimed, in the trial of Bevan von Einem for his involvement in serial murders of five young men in a case that became known as the Adelaide Family Murders, that he (Einem) may have been the tall blond man seen with the Beaumont children before they disappeared. But, although von Einem was found guilty of murder and put away for 30 years, the lead would amount to nothing.

The only thing that is certain is that the Beaumont children vanished without a trace, and despite thousands of false sightings and cruel hoaxes, they have never been seen since.