Beaumont Children Disappearance - Primary Suspects - Arthur Stanley Brown

Arthur Stanley Brown

Another suspect was named in 1998 as Arthur Stanley Brown. Then 86, he was charged with the murders of sisters Judith (aged 7) and Susan (aged 5) Mackay in Townsville, Queensland. They disappeared while on their way to school on 26 August 1970, and their bodies were found several days later in a dry creek bed. Both girls had been strangled. Brown's July 2000 trial was delayed after his lawyer applied for a section 613 verdict (unfit to be tried) from the jury. He was never retried as he was found to be suffering from dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Brown died in 2002.

Along with von Einem, he is considered to be the best suspect for the Beaumont children abduction as he bore a striking similarity to an identikit picture of the suspect for both the Beaumont children and Adelaide Oval cases. A search for a connection to the Beaumonts was unsuccessful as no employment records existed that could shed light on his movements at the time. Some of the records were believed lost in the 1974 Brisbane flood and it is also possible that Brown, who had unrestricted access to government buildings may have deleted his own files. Brown is considered a suspect for the Beaumont children disappearance, based on the connections that have been made between him and the Adelaide Oval abduction.

Although there is no proof that he had ever visited Adelaide, a witness recalled having a conversation with Brown in which he mentioned having seen the Adelaide Festival Centre nearing completion which places him in Adelaide in June 1973. The oval abduction occurred on 25 August 1973. However, nothing has been found to show that Brown was in Adelaide in 1966 to connect him with the Beaumont children disappearance. Another witness who reported seeing a man near the oval carrying a young girl while another older girl in distress followed, later identified Brown as the man she had seen after seeing his picture on television in December 1998 in relation to the MacKay murders. The woman who identified the abductor as Brown first saw him—only for one minute—when aged 14, and then identified him as Brown 25 years later when she saw him as an 86-year-old on television. Brown's appearance in fact had barely changed and he was still very much recognisable as the same person when compared to photographs of him taken 30 years earlier which was a factor in identifying him as matching the sketch of the suspect in the Beaumont and Adelaide Oval abductions. Brown was however in his fifties at the time of the Beaumont children disappearance, which does not match the description of the suspect seen with the children, who was reported as being in his late thirties.