Barbara Grimes, 15, and her sister Patricia, 13, vanished after attending a December 28, 1956, screening of Love Me Tender at the Brighton Theater in Chicago. Their disappearance sparked one of Cook County’s largest searches, with hundreds of officers, volunteers, and residents involved and media appeals — even Elvis Presley reportedly asked for their return. On January 22, 1957, a passerby found the sisters’ bodies beside a guard rail along German Church Road in Willow Springs, just outside Chicago. Autopsies suggested they died within hours of their disappearance from shock and exposure to cold, but investigators also noted blunt force injuries; no obviously fatal wounds were identified.

Several suspects were questioned over the years and at least one confession — by Edward Bennie Bedwell — was later judged coerced and charges were dropped. Numerous theories, including tips about organized crime ties and suspicious phone calls to the girls’ mother after the killings, have circulated, but no one has been definitively linked to the crime and the case remains unsolved.