On Tuesday, January 22, 1957 the weather had been similar to the recent "Spring in January" temperatures and had thawed much of the snow that had been on the ground since the previous December. Leonard Prescott, who lived at 87th and County Line Road, was driving east along German Church Road from County Line Road on his way to a grocery when he saw what appeared to be department store mannequins lying just beyond the guard rail on the north side of the roadway. The site today is roughly only 200 feet west of the Bridle Path Subdivision in Burr Ridge.

Mr. Prescott, rather than stopping immediately, went home to get his wife Marie and returned to the spot only to discover that they were actually the nude bodies of two young girls later positively identified as 15 year old Barbara and her sister, 13 year old Patricia Grimes.

The girls had been missing for almost a month. They were last seen by their mother, Loretta, around 7:30pm on the evening of December 28th when they had left their home at 3634 S. Damen Avenue in Chicago en route to see the new Elvis Presley movie, "Love Me Tender", at the Brighton Theater on Archer Ave. It appears that the girls made it to the theater because there were friends who had seen them there. In fact they were supposedly by themselves and looked to be having fun. The girls never made it home.

At first the local authorities treated the disappearance as a couple of teenage runaways but their mother insisted that her girls had no reason to run away and that if they were planning to run away they would have at least taken money, a change of clothes or some of their treasured Christmas presents which were still in their bedroom.

After a short time, however, the case quickly escalated to one of the most publicized missing persons cases in Chicago history with Elvis Presley himself pleading with the girls on the radio to come home to their mother. Tips came in from all over the country with "sightings" of the girls coming in from as far away as Memphis, Tennessee. After Leonard Prescott's grisly discovery, the case would now become one of the city of Chicago's greatest murder mysteries.

Tens of thousands of hours of searches, interviews, interrogations and follow-ups turned up a few suspects but nothing solid. The FBI was secretly involved early on due to Loretta receiving two separate ransom notes with neither lead resulting in anything positive. Two names that surfaced early on were Walter Kranz, a pipe fitter who had called in a tip to the police that the girl's bodies would be found at Sante Fe Park based on a "dream", and the only suspect actually charged with the murders, Edward "Bennie" Bedwell". Walter Kranz was interviewed by the police and released. "Bennie" actually confessed to the murders but was later cleared when his confession was proven to be both inaccurate as far as details and coerced by the authorities. The autopsies themselves were relatively inconclusive with the only two speculated upon causes of death being exposure to the elements or suffocation.

The City of Chicago rallied behind the Grimes Family. The Back of the Yards Council raised money to pay of Loretta's mortgage and helped pay for many of the funeral expenses. The Wollschlager Funeral Home, which is to this day across the street from St. Maurice Church where the funeral services were held, donated their services as well. Mayor Daley himself attended the funeral where a picture of each girl was placed atop their white caskets. The girls were laid to rest at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery near an older sister, Leona Freck, who had died two years previous.

Loretta Grimes died in 1989 at the age of 83 without ever knowing who had killed her daughters or how they even died. The authorities promised to never give up on the case and based on personal research and conversations that I have had with Cook County and Chicago authorities the case is still very much open and solvable.