Murder Gone Cold

By Tamara Shaffer

Murder Gone Cold relates the double murder of Barbara and Patricia Grimes back in 1957. The work of many years, author Tamara Shaffer, has painsakingly researched this unsolved crime through actual... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0976607271
• ISBN13: 9780976607274
• Release Date: June 2006
• Publisher: Ghost Research Society
• Length: 164 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The Grimes Sisters--Unsolved Murder Mystery in Chicago

Anyone living in the Chicago area in the 1950s frightfully remembers the disappearance of these young girls, and the horror on the day their bodies were found. Tamara Shaffer has produced an excellent work covering all aspects of the story, including many details never revealed to the press. She takes you back to the neighborhoods and the people of that day as if these many years never passed. There is a chilling and eerie feeling as you read this book, and view the never before seen photos. Knowing that this crime was never solved leaves one pondering all the facts presented by Shaffer's thorough investigation.

Chicago's Who-Done-It

Rarely can a writer combine a baffling who-done-it with such a vivid restoration of time and place, which qualifies Tamara Shaffer's Murder Gone Cold as nothing less than a masterpiece. In the absence of CNN or Fox or even an effective network of television news, the killing of Barbara and Patricia Grimes in 1956 attracted only fleeting attention outside Chicago, as had the previous Schuessler-Peterson murders or that of Judith Mae Anderson a few months later. All were young, none were solved, and the city escaped what today would have made it a minor "murder capital" during an era otherwise deemed peaceful. The author, then also in her teens and living in a quiet middleclass neighborhood only ten blocks from the Grimes Sisters, rode the same buses and street cars and frequented the same stores and theaters. After years of research she now takes us back to the scene of that crime and into an age hardly remembered by many and not known to most.

Murder gone cold, but memory remains

Three days after the 1956 Christmas celebration, fifteen year old Barbara Grimes and her twelve year old sister, Patricia, left their Chicago home to see an Elvis Presley movie. They never returned. Barely a month later, after a nationwide manhunt and appeals from Presley himself, their frozen corpses were found near Willow Springs. Both girls had been sexually assaulted. Parents who were already living under a cloud of fear brought on by the recent murders of the Schuessler brothers and their friend Bobby Peterson were thrown into new depths of anxiety and terror by the Grimes slaying. Author Tamara Shaffer was sixteen years old when Barbara and Patricia Grimes were killed, and her own memories of the dread that pervaded Chicago in the aftermath make "Murder Gone Cold" a memoir as well as a murder story. She offers a solid documentation of the unsolved case from the moment the girls leave their home on South Damen Avenue right up until the present time, when she discusses the fate of the key players in the tragedy and mentions that Kenneth Hansen, currently serving 300 years for the Schuessler-Peterson murders, was questioned about the Grimes case during the 1990s. She even injects a paranormal perspective by describing how people near the area where the bodies were discovered report hearing car doors slam and tires squeal during a hasty retreat... only no car can be seen. It's not often that a True Crime manuscript can mention hauntings and get away with it, but these supernatural undertones don't detract from this book's credibility. After all, the Grimes murders haunted Chicagoans for years.

It will be 50 years in 2006

This is a very overdue book about the most mysterious disappearance of these two girls back in 1956. Tamara Shaffer has done her research in her book and it clearly shows it. The author takes us back to the years when Chicago's children freely walked their neighborhood and neighbors looked out for one another. Barbara and Patricia went out to the movies one evening like all the other children. Except, this time they didn't return home. Numerous sightings of the girls were reported to the police. Elvis, the girls icon during those times, even released a public statement asking the girls to go home to ease their mothers worries. Then one cold January day, their lifeless nude bodies were found in a ditch, along German Churuch Road. Since, jurisdiction was an issue and politics played a role, could this case have slipped through the cracks? Tamara Shaffer takes us through the events and brings to light on information that could possibly play a role on solving this case.