Jane Nartare Beaumont, Arnna Kathleen Beaumont and Grant Ellis Beaumont, collectively referred to as the Beaumont children, were three Australian siblings who disappeared from Glenelg Beach near Adelaide, South Australia, on 26 January 1966 in a suspected abduction and murder.
This is a timeline of major crimes in Australia.
Graeme Thorne was an eight year old Australian boy, who was kidnapped and murdered in 1960. A month before the kidnapping, his parents, Bazil and Freda Thorne, who lived in a modest rented flat in the Sydney beachside suburb of Bondi, had won £100,000 in the newly conceived Opera House Lottery, designed to raise money for the construction the now famous Sydney Opera House. This was a considerable amount of money in 1960, when it was customary to publish the names and addresses of lottery winners in the newspapers.
The Wanda Beach Murders, also known simply as "Wanda", were the unsolved murders of Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock at Wanda Beach near Cronulla in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, on 11 January 1965. The victims, both aged 15, were best friends and neighbours from the suburb of West Ryde, and their partially buried bodies were discovered the next day. The brutal nature of the slayings and the fact that they occurred on a deserted, windswept beach brought massive publicity to the case. By April 1966, police had interviewed some 7,000 people, making it the largest investigation in Australian history. It remains one of the most infamous unsolved Australian murder cases of the 1960s, and New South Wales' oldest unsolved homicide case.
The killing of Molly Anne Bish is a currently unsolved child murder which occurred in Warren, Massachusetts, on June 27, 2000, when 16-year-old high school student Molly Anne Bish disappeared while working as a lifeguard.
The murder of Karmein Chan is an Australian child murder case in which a 13-year-old Chinese-Australian girl was abducted at knifepoint from her Templestowe, Victoria, home during the night of 13 April 1991. Karmein's body was discovered at Edgars Creek in the suburb of Thomastown on 9 April 1992; the prime suspect for her abduction and murder is an unidentified serial child rapist known as "Mr Cruel", who had abducted and sexually assaulted a minimum of three prepubescent and adolescent girls in circumstances markedly similar to Karmein in the years prior to her abduction.
Kenneth Allen McDuff was an American serial killer from Texas. In 1966, McDuff and an accomplice kidnapped and murdered three teenagers who were visiting from California. He was given three death sentences for these crimes but avoided execution after the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Furman v. Georgia. He was resentenced to life and was paroled in 1989. Between October 1989 and March 1992, McDuff raped and killed at least six women, receiving another death sentence and was later executed in 1998.
The Family Murders is the name given to a series of five murders in Australia, speculated to have been committed by a loosely connected group of individuals who came to be known as "The Family". This group was believed to be involved in the kidnapping and sexual abuse of a number of teenage boys and young men, as well as the torture and murder of five young men aged between 14 and 25, in Adelaide, South Australia, in the 1970s and 1980s.
Christopher Bernard Wilder, also known as the Beauty Queen Killer and the Snapshot Killer, was an Australian-American serial killer who abducted at least twelve young women and girls, killing eight of them during a six-week, cross-country crime spree in the United States in early 1984. Wilder's series of murders began in Florida on February 26, 1984, and continued across the country through Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Nevada and California, with attempted abductions in Washington and New York. Wilder victimized attractive young women, most of whom he would entice by promising to take their pictures. After subduing them, he would torture and rape them before shooting, stabbing with a knife, or strangling them to death. Two or more of his victims were electrocuted using a makeshift electrical cord.
Michaela Joy Garecht was nine years old when she was abducted in Hayward, California, in broad daylight at the corner of Mission Boulevard and Lafayette Avenue. Sketches of Garecht's abductor were distributed along with missing person flyers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area within 24 hours of her disappearance, but search efforts proved fruitless. Her case was featured in national media, including profiles on the documentary series Unsolved Mysteries.
Ivan Robert Marko Milat, commonly referred to in media as the Backpacker Murderer, was an Australian serial killer who abducted, assaulted, robbed and murdered two men and five women in New South Wales between 1989 and 1992. His modus operandi was to approach backpackers along the Hume Highway under the guise of providing them transport to areas of southern New South Wales, then take his victims into the Belanglo State Forest where he would incapacitate and murder them. Milat is also suspected of having committed many other similar offences around Australia.
Brenda Sue Brown was an 11-year-old girl who was abducted and murdered. Her body was found by rescue workers in a wooded area near downtown Shelby, North Carolina. With no leads and insufficient evidence to make an arrest, the murder became a cold case.
The Texas Killing Fields is a title used to roughly denote the area surrounding the Interstate Highway 45 corridor southeast of Houston, where since the early 1970s, more than 30 bodies have been found, and specifically to a 25-acre patch of land in League City, Texas where four women were found between 1983 and 1991. The bodies along the corridor were mainly of girls or young women. Furthermore, many additional young girls have disappeared from this area who are still missing. Most of the victims were aged between 12 and 25 years. Some shared similar physical features, such as similar hairstyles.
Kylie Maria Antonia Maybury was an Australian schoolgirl from Preston, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Maybury was kidnapped, raped, and murdered on 6 November 1984, the date of the 1984 Melbourne Cup Day; and she was nicknamed in the Melbourne tabloid newspaper The Sun News-Pictorial as the Cup Day Girl.
Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Jane Gordon were two Australian girls who went missing while attending an Australian rules football match at the Adelaide Oval on 25 August 1973. Their disappearance, and presumed abduction and murder, became one of South Australia's most infamous crimes. The presumed murders are thought by South Australia Police and the media to be related to the disappearance of the Beaumont children in 1966. The case is sometimes referred to as the Adelaide Oval abductions.
Derek Ernest Percy was an Australian serial killer and convicted child killer who was also a person of interest linked to the mysterious deaths and disappearances of multiple children in the 1960s, including the Beaumont disappearances and the Wanda Beach murders.
The murders of Abigail Williams and Liberty German, also known as the Delphi murders, occurred on February 13, 2017, in Delphi, Indiana, United States. Their bodies were discovered near the Monon High Bridge Trail, part of the Delphi Historic Trails, from where the girls disappeared the previous day. The murders received extensive media coverage, in part due to video and audio recordings released by law enforcement that came from German's smartphone, which recorded an individual believed to be the killer.
April Marie Tinsley was an eight-year-old girl from Fort Wayne, Indiana, United States, who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered in 1988. Her killer left several anonymous messages and notes in the Fort Wayne area between 1990 and 2004, openly boasting about April's murder and threatening to kill again.
The killing of Aniah Blanchard occurred in October 2019. Blanchard, a 19-year-old college student, was reported missing on October 24. She had last been seen at a Chevron gas station in Auburn, Alabama, the previous night. A witness from the gas station claims to have seen Blanchard's kidnapping. Blanchard's body was found in Macon County, Alabama, one month after her disappearance.
