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New Lead In South Australia’s Chilling Beaumont Case, 52 Years On

A possible burial ground has been discovered

On Australia Day of 1966, the three Beaumont children went missing from Adelaide’s Glenelg beach. Today, 52 years on, police prepare to conduct a fresh search for their remains in light of new evidence in one of Australia’s most compelling cold cases.

Investigations into the disappearance of siblings Jane, nine, Arnna, seven, and four-year-old Grant Beaumont led detectives to excavate a North Plympton factory site in 1966 following instructions from a Dutch clairvoyant, the ABC reports, and again in 2013, but both searches proved futile.

Now, five years on, police will return to a different area of the factory site to begin new excavations, following a review by SA Police’s Major Crime Investigation Branch last year, combined with fresh evidence supplied by Channel 7, which conducted its own year-long investigation using never-before-tried technology. 

The Channel 7 investigation identified an area of disturbed earth one metre wide, two metres long and two metres deep which hadn’t been discovered previously. It is thought to be the potential grave site of the Beaumont children, and has tonight been made a crime scene, 7 News reports.

The Beaumont children were assumed to be abducted and murdered, and were last seen playing with a man on the beach.

Local businessman Harry Phipps, who owned the factory in question and who died in 2004, is now the key suspect. His estranged son claims to have seen the Beaumont children in the backyard of their house the day they disappeared, 7 News reports – a home that was just 250 metres from the beach.

“He was a paedophile. He was a predatory paedophile,” Former South Australia Police Detective Bill Hayes told 7 News. “He was a dangerous man, we know that.”

Police will conduct a thorough search of the site in the coming weeks.

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