Disappearance of the Beaumont children

On 26 January 1966 (Australia Day), Jane Beaumont (9), Arnna Beaumont (7) and Grant Beaumont (4) took a short bus trip from their home in Somerton Park, South Australia, to Glenelg Beach, a popular destination they had visited the previous day with their father. They were expected home by the 12:00 noon bus but did not return. When they had also missed the 14:00 bus, their mother, Nancy Beaumont, grew concerned. Their father, Jim Beaumont, returned early from a sales trip and searched the crowded beach without success. The parents reported the children missing to Glenelg police around 17:30 that evening.

Police searches quickly expanded from the beach to nearby sandhills, the ocean, buildings, the airport, rail lines and interstate roads, reflecting fears of both accident and abduction. Within days, the Adelaide Sunday Mail was reporting fears of a "sex crime." Witnesses described the children playing at Colley Reserve, near the beach, with a tall, fair-to-light-brown-haired man in his mid-thirties, of thin-to-athletic build and sun-tanned complexion, wearing swim trunks. The children appeared relaxed and were later seen walking away from the beach with him. A shopkeeper at Wenzel's Bakery on Moseley Street reported that Jane bought food with a £1 note, an amount the children had not been given by their mother, suggesting the man had provided it. Other reported sightings, including a possibly mistaken account from a postman, continued for about a year but did not lead to the children's location.

Numerous investigative avenues were pursued over subsequent decades. In November 1966, Dutch psychic Gerard Croiset was brought to Australia and pointed to a warehouse site he believed contained the children's remains; public fundraising led to the building's demolition, but no remains were found, a result confirmed again in a further search in 1996. About two years after the disappearance, the Beaumont parents received hoax letters purporting to be from Jane and from a man holding the children; a planned meeting produced no contact, and 1992 forensic analysis identified the true, then-41-year-old author, who was not charged due to the time elapsed.

Several men have been examined by police or raised by journalists and authors as possible suspects over the decades, including a man convicted of an unrelated 1984 murder whose case included an informant's account implicating him in the Beaumont disappearance; a man convicted in relation to the 1970 murders of two Queensland sisters; a man convicted of a 1975 Tasmanian child murder who reportedly avoided directly denying involvement; a man who died in prison as Victoria's then-longest-serving inmate, whom Victoria Police sought to question about the case in 2007; a man later convicted of child sex offences whose named connection emerged from a diary and secondhand accounts; and a deceased local factory owner named publicly by his estranged son following a 2013 book. None of these leads resulted in charges relating to the Beaumont children's disappearance, and excavations at a factory site associated with the last-named suspect in 2013, 2018 and 2025 found no remains connected to the case.

The disappearance remains one of Australia's most prominent cold cases. The South Australian government has maintained a A$1 million reward since 2018. Nancy Beaumont died in 2019 and Jim (Grant) Beaumont died in 2023; the case remains officially open.