Ep. 10 - The Murder of the Grimes Sisters

German Church Road in Chicago is haunted. At least, that's what urban legends claim. The possibility of apparitions being seen along this road is supported by the fact that a murder is connected to this road. Not just one murder, but two. And the victims were sisters. The Grimes sisters. Two all American teenagers were out for a little fun and their lives ended abruptly, shattering not only their innocence, but the innocence of the people that knew them or lived near them. The lack of justice has perhaps left their spirits at unrest.

German Church Road is like any other road out there, nondescript. This paved avenue runs between County Line Road and Willow Springs Road with a couple of creeks, Devil's and Flag, running nearby. The Healing Waters Park is not too far away. The road was named for the Trinity Lutheran Church that had been built in 1865 by the German immigrants in the area. The Grimes sisters were the typical all American teenagers. Barbara was fifteen and Patricia was twelve. Both girls had brown hair and eyes and were around the same size despite the two-year age difference. Barbara attended Thomas Kelly High School on the southwest side of Chicago and Patricia attended St. Maurice in Brighton. They loved movies and were excited that a new movie starring Elvis Presley was showing at their local Brighton Theater. This was the movie, "Love Me Tender." They had already seen the film ten times, but they decided to go see the movie one more time on December 28, 1956.

The Brighton Theater was only a mile away from the Grimes sisters' home. They set off that evening in time to catch the first movie. Dorothy Weinert was a friend of Patricia's and she and her sister sat behind the Grimes sisters during the first film. There was an intermission before the second film and the Grimes sisters went for popcorn. Dorothy and her sister decided to leave and they are the last people to have seen the Grimes still alive as they waited for popcorn at 9:30pm. The second film ended around 11:30 and the girls' mother expected them to arrive home at 11:45pm. They never did arrive home. Barbara and Patricia's mother Loretta was beside herself with worry when the girls failed to return by midnight. She sent two of her other children, an older brother and sister, to the bus stop to await their arrival on a bus or to see if something had delayed the girls along the way. Three buses came and went and the Grimes sisters were on none of them. By 2:15am, Loretta was on the phone with the Brighton Park police station to report her daughters missing. The search was made public and flyers were printed to bring the public into the hunt. People across Chicago began looking for the girls. And as always happens with such cases, people began to report sightings.

Several sightings were reported from the evening the Grimes sisters disappeared. One sighting claimed the girls got off their bus when it had reached the halfway point to their stop. Another sighting claimed the girls had been running amok in the doorways of a neighborhood. The next day, a security guard claimed the girls had asked him for directions. Several other sightings came over the next couple of weeks, many of them claiming the girls were miles from their home and appeared to be having a good time, either giggling or drunk. Some other young people who had been at the theater claimed that they saw the sisters talking to a young man who looked a lot like Elvis Presley sitting in a Mercury model car and that the girls eventually got in the car. People wondered if the girls had run away after having watched Love Me Tender. Perhaps the girls thought it would be a good idea to run to Graceland and visit Elvis Presley. Because of this, Graceland issued a statement telling the girls, "If you are good Presley fans, you'll go home and ease your mother's worries." There were dozens of sightings that continued with some people even claiming to see the girls in Nashville.

On January 22nd, the hopes of finding the girls alive in some distant city were snuffed out when the bodies of Barbara and Patricia were found. Leonard Prescott was a construction worker on his way to work driving along German Church Road when he spotted something weird along the road in a culvert near Devil's Creek. Leonard pulled his car over to get a better look. The snow was melting and it appeared that there were a couple of department store mannequins that had been discarded along the highway. He shrugged and left, but told his wife about it later that day and she insisted they return. The couple found that these weren't mannequins, but the naked bodies of two young girls. The Prescotts drove to the police station to report what he had found and the police identified the bodies as the Grimes sisters. They had been missing for nearly a month and now here, they had been tossed out as if they were trash. Barbara was on her side and her sister was laying on her back on top of Barbara's head.

The press and the police both trampled the crime scene, possibly destroying evidence. The coroner was able to figure out that the bodies had been at this location for several days leading many to wonder where the girls had been before that. Had someone kidnapped them and kept them somewhere until finally deciding to murder them? Three boys had been killed and left in a similar way in 1955 and the police wondered if the cases were connected. Three pathologists were unable to agree on a time of death and also on a cause of death. There were several bruises and marks that were unexplained. Patricia's face had been beaten on the left side and there were three ugly wounds on her abdomen. Barbara's face was beaten also and her chest had been stabbed multiple times by what appeared to be an ice pick. The final cause of death was officially secondary shock and exposure. Some of the wounds were thought to have been made by animals like rodents, but the chief investigator for the Cook County Coroner's Office, Harry Glos, disagreed. He felt the violence revealed in the girls faces indicated further violence to the body and Barbara had appeared to have been sexually assaulted. Glos also believed that the girls had been kept somewhere and tortured and assaulted for a minimum of ten days.

Clues were sparse. Police interviewed an unbelievable 300,000 people. Two thousand of those people endured serious interrogation and there were several prime suspects. Max Fleig was a seventeen year old that came under serious suspicion when he failed a polygraph test. He was told he failed and he confessed to killing the girls. But because he was a minor, it was ruled that he could not be given a polygraph so the results were thrown out. And when no evidence backed his confession, he was dropped from being a suspect. However, he did go to prison later in life for the murder of a young woman, so he apparently had the predilection to murder young girls.

Walter Kranz was another top suspect. He claimed to be a psychic and that he had a dream about the girls. He had made this call before the girls' bodies were found. He said he saw the girls' bodies in Santa Fe Park, which was one and a half miles from the actual location. The police decided to haul him in wondering if he knew more than he should , not because he was psychic, but because he was the murderer. He was released after multiple interrogations and no evidence being found that could incriminate him. Silas Jayne was connected to the earlier murder of the three boys and so he was looked at for this crime. Nothing came of that. 

Then there was Edward "Bennie" Bedwell who was an illiterate 21-year-old drifter. He was from Tennessee and wore his hair like Elvis, complete with long sideburns. He apparently even knew Elvis. Definitely something that would interest the sisters. Bennie worked as a dishwasher and at the time of the murders, he was in the employ of Ajax Consolidated Company. He had been seen in a restaurant with two girls, but he denied that they were the Grimes sisters. One of the owners of the restaurant disagreed. She claimed that she had observed the group and that the girls seemed drunk or ill, especially the taller one. And the taller one mentioned to her as they left that the other girl was her sister. However, two teenage cousins would later claim to be the girls who were with Bedwell and another man at the restaurant.

Bedwell gave three separate confessions and described a lurid tale of debauchery. The story was preposturous. Bedwell claimed to have met the girls on January 7th at Harold’s Club on West Madison Street in the company of a man named Frank. He joined their group in going to another bar where they had several drinks. They went to another bar where a bartender cut them off and they went to D & L Restaurant. They spent the night at the Crest Hotel and had sex. Bedwell claimed he slept with Patricia. For days, the group hung out at flophouses, then went for a drive and ended up at a Forest Preserve where the men attempted to rape the girls and Bedwell hit Patricia too hard and knocked her out. They did the same to Barbara, then undressed the girls and dumped their bodies on German Church Road. They weren't sure if the girls were dead.

Bedwell was booked on murder charges, but later recounted explaining that he confessed out of fear. There were many inconsistencies to his confession and no evidence to support it. Many people believed the confessions were beaten out of him in desperation. On top of that, Bedwell was considered mentally handicapped and incapable of the crime. On March 4, 1944, the charges were dropped against Bedwell. Bedwell was soon arrested again for a different crime. He was charged with the rape of a girl in Florida that had occurred before the murder of the Grimes sisters. He apparently had held her for three days and raped her. He does seem to fit the crime. He was never convicted of this other crime because too much time had passed. One of the main investigators always believed Bedwell was their man. Frank was later found and identified as William Cole Willingham and he admitted being with the girls and Bedwell on a tour of skid row, but that they had done nothing to the girls.

Chicago's Haunt Detective Ray Johnson looked into the case and he believes the killer was more than likely child killer Charles Melquist. He had killed Bonnie Leigh Scott in 1958 and was caught because he inserted himself into the investigation by claiming to be a witness to the abduction. Bonnie's body had been dumped very close to where the Grimes sisters had been left two years earlier. Melquist was never charged with the Grimes' murders.

Decades have passed and the case is more than just cold. The criminal is more than likely already deceased. Theories have abounded, but theories don't bring justice. Whatever is the truth, we'll probably never know. And that is why the spirits of these young girls may not be at rest. This patch of roadway gives off an uneasy feeling and reports of sightings of specters along this haunted highway are numerous.

There was a house that sat just a few feet from where the girls were unceremoniously dumped. The young family moved in haste and left all their belongings. Had something scared them away? A group of girls came to the property one evening to check things out in 1982. They claimed a dark car came down the path to the house, drove around the house and sped away. Only problem? There was a heavy chain that blocked the roadway down to the abandoned house and it still hung locked in place. No car could have come down the path without removing the chain. The girls reported it to the police.

People have called police at various times reporting that they see bodies on the roadway. This would be in the same place where the girls were found. Nothing is there when police investigate. One person wrote on a forum, "One Saturday morning a few years ago I was going to work driving along German Church Road in Willow Springs Illinois. It was early about 6 in the morning and just before I got to County Line Road I notice what looked like 2 people sleeping on the north side of the road. I stopped my car and got out to check on them and looked back and they were gone. This puzzled me for a few years as to what I saw and I stumbled upon an internet site about ghosts and it talked about the Grimes sisters. I believe that is what I saw."

A police sergeant had visited the house, the Werner property, near where the girls bodies were found when he was a teenager following a rite of passage and claims that he and a buddy saw a pale white face in one of the windows of the house. The face had very dark eyes. The house later burned to the ground and only the foundation remains. In the book Murder Gone Cold, author Tamara Shaffer writes, "In the early 1970s, teenagers Terry Wido and Jim Waterstrat enjoyed visiting ‘so-called spooky places’ and made several trips to the house with a group of friends. One of the guys had hear that the two girls had been murdered in the house, so to bolster their courage; they took a case of beer. ‘The lights still worked,’ he remembers, ‘and we all posed with our beers’. It was great fun until one night they were approached by dark figures, which began running towards them, prompting them to escape to their car. ‘We never did go back there,’ he says, ‘and years later, I found out that the Grimes sisters were dumped on the road near that house.’"

The creepiest spiritual activity is connected to the dump site and seems to be residual in nature with the act of dumping the bodies getting played over and over again. People walking on the road claim to hear a ghost car screeching to a halt in front of the guardrails and they hear the car doors open and the sound of something hitting the ground. Then there is the sound of car doors closing and a car speeding away. Some people even claim to actually see this happen as a ghostly scene. 

We may never know the truth, but we hope the Grimes sisters rest in peace someday. Do they haunt German Church Road? That is for you to decide!