The nude bodies of Beatrice and Priscilla Graves were found yesterday, January 21, beside a low bridge along German Church Road in suburban Willow Springs. The discovery ends the largest missing persons search in Cook County history. Sheriff Joseph Lehman and Cook County Medical Examiner Charles McGarry were tight-lipped, saying that no further information would be released until after McGarry’s office conducted autopsies on the two sisters.
As reported at the time, the girls left their home on South Damen Avenue in Chicago at 7:15 Friday evening, December 28. They were headed for the local premier of the latest Star Wars movie, playing at the Brighton Theater on Archer Avenue, a mile and a half away. Fifteen-year-old Beatrice had planned on going alone that evening, but her mother, Leona Graves, 48, insisted she take along Priscilla, 12, thinking both girls would be safer if together. She gave her daughters fifteen dollars to add to the Christmas money they planned to use for bus fare, tickets to see the movie, popcorn and candy.
At the concession stand, the sisters ran into a young girl friend from the neighborhood, who was there with her 6-year-old sister. The four girls sat together for the movie’s first showing, then the girl left to take her sister home. The Graves girls stayed for the second showing, and were seen leaving the theater at 11:30 p.m.
Nothing is known for certain about their whereabouts after that.
Once news of the girls’ disappearance was reported on Sunday, December 30, leads came seemingly from everywhere. A Chicago bus driver thought they got off his bus at Archer and Western Avenues, along the correct route to their home, though several exits prior to their usual stop.
A young male acquaintance of Beatrice’s, seeing them leave the theater, is certain they did not take a bus, but rather began walking home, several yards behind him. Hearing a screech of brakes, he turned to see a late-model green Buick slow beside the two walking girls. He reported that the girls hesitated, as though they knew the occupants of the car, but then the car pulled away and the girls kept on walking. When he stopped to look in the window of a men’s clothing store, they passed him by. Several blocks later, he saw another vehicle, a black Ford Explorer with two teenaged boys inside, pull alongside the girls. The passenger rolled down the window and said something to the girls. Beatrice’s acquaintance reported that the girls laughed and kept walking.
Two other young men, ages 17 and 15, were driving around close to midnight and claimed they saw the sisters four blocks from their Damen Avenue home. The boys knew the sisters from the neighborhood and observed them giggling and jumping out of doorways at each other, playing what appeared to be a sort of hide-and-seek.
A pizza delivery driver reported he’d seen both girls that night getting into a dark-colored car with three men inside when it was stopped in front of him at a red light on Western Avenue.
The loud voices of occupants of a Ford Escort parked on Archer Avenue and well beyond the route the sisters would have taken if they’d headed directly home drew a car salesman to his upstairs apartment window after midnight. He went down to the sidewalk and saw two girls wearing bright scarves, like those worn by the Graves sisters that night, talking to two men inside the car. The car salesman could not describe the men other than to report that the one sitting in the passenger’s seat was blond. He also noted that one of the girls was wearing a dark cloth coat similar to that of Beatrice Graves.
Farther afield, a cashier reported seeing the sisters leaving her theater on Clark Street in Chicago at 12:45 a.m. on Saturday, 75 minutes after they were known to have left the Brighton Theater. A clerk at the 24-hour Walgreens at 63rd and Halsted was certain the two girls bought sodas there, early Sunday morning. That same day, a junk dealer in downstate Gilman is certain he saw the sisters riding with two men in a dirty maroon car bearing Tennessee license plates and a Chicago vehicle sticker.
Readers following this case know that Captain R.J. Hudson of the Brighton Park Police District, in charge of the local search for the Graves sisters, gave the greatest emphasis to this last report, and to two reports placing the girls in Nashville, Tennessee. An employment agent there identified photographs of the girls and said they’d applied for work on Wednesday, January 9. A week later, a woman reported encountering the sisters in a Nashville bus station. Captain Hudson believed the accuracy of both Nashville sightings and thought it likely the pair was headed to Elvis Presley’s home in Memphis, Tennessee.
Mrs Leona Graves gave no credence to the distant sightings, steadfastly maintaining that her girls had suffered harm, or were being held against their will, close to home. Tragically, she has now been proven correct.
Throughout the 25 days the girls were missing, as many as 150 local Chicago police officers at one time conducted searches of the Brighton Park Theater neighborhood and the area surrounding the girls’ Damen Avenue home. Garages, schools, vacant lots and railroad yards were searched.
Among the hundreds of leads pursued, the cruelest may have been the telephone tip received by Angeline, the Graves girls’ older sister, instructing Mrs Graves to bring $1,000 to a church in Milwaukee. The caller promised that Beatrice would come to collect the money from her mother and, once it was turned over to the kidnappers, Priscilla would then be freed and both girls could join their mother. Mrs Graves journeyed to Milwaukee, but no one showed up at the designated church. Like many of the calls received by the Graves family, it was a horrid hoax, this one perpetrated, it was later learned, by an inmate of a Milwaukee mental hospital.
On January 15, an anonymous caller dialed the police, saying that the sisters could be found in Santa Fe Park in the village of Tiedtville, about a mile and a half south of where the girls were found a week later. Stock car and motorcycle races are held there, and the park is frequented by local gang members. Police converged to search the grounds, but no trace of the Graves girls was found.
The anonymous call was traced to a tavern on South Halsted Street, where it was learned that Klaus Lanz, an unemployed pipe fitter, had used the phone booth at the time the anonymous call was placed. Lanz admitted placing the call, explaining that he was descended from generations of psychics, and that it came to him in a dream that the girls were being held in Santa Fe Park. Lanz was arrested and subjected to a lie-detector test. The results were inconclusive, and he was released.
Since the girls were found in unincorporated Cook County, investigation into the homicides falls under the jurisdiction of Sheriff Joseph Lehman.
Rigg eased back in his chair, mulling the last sentence. It was direct, truthful and, he hoped, horrifying. Sheriff Joe Lehman, a rough, streetwise and crooked cop, was going to be in charge, like when the Stemec Henderson boys were found. Like when nothing more had ever been found.
Behind him, Eleanor drummed her fingers on her desk. The print deadline for the next morning’s Examiner loomed, though the piece would be posted shortly after midnight on the paper’s online site.
He typed one more sentence: Sheriff’s police are steadfastly stressing that, so far, there is nothing to link the deaths of the Graves sisters to the murders of Bobby Stemec and John and Anthony Henderson, the three boys found in Robinson Woods, fifteen months ago.
He sent his words to the editor, grabbed his coat and ran down the stairs to the street before he could dwell on what he hadn’t written.