Patricia Grimes, 12, and her sister Barbara disappeared from their McKinley Park neighborhood in Chicago after leaving home on December 28, 1956 to see the Elvis Presley film Love Me Tender at the Brighton Theater. Their disappearance triggered one of the city’s largest searches; police canvassed widely, the FBI became involved, and Elvis Presley made a national appeal for their return.

On January 22, 1957 a local resident, Leonard Prescott, found the sisters’ bodies along German Church Road in Burr Ridge, Illinois, initially mistaking them for mannequins. The girls were lying partly covered by snow and showed blunt force trauma and puncture wounds. Autopsies reported injuries but the coroner ruled exposure to the cold as the likely cause of death, a finding that did not end suspicions of foul play.

Investigators interviewed multiple suspects; an early confession by Edward Bennie Bedwell was deemed coerced and inconsistent with evidence and he was cleared, and Walter Kranz drew attention after claiming psychic visions but was not tied to the crime by physical evidence. Despite more than 160 officers working the case, no one has been formally held responsible and the murders remain unsolved.