This double murder was covered extensively by The Times newspaper. The slayings occurred on Oct. 17, 1975, in a house on Nelson Court in Daly City.
Philip and Cheryl Beadles had been married for six months and lived with Philip’s four children from a previous marriage in the two-story house. Both worked in the insurance field at separate companies in San Francisco. The Times quoted a neighbor as saying that the family were “nice people who kept to themselves.” They enjoyed weekend getaways and were heavily involved in their sons’ Little League teams. The neighbors stated that the children were “very well behaved.”
But there may have been a darker side concerning the children. The two oldest kids attended Westborough Middle School (called Westborough Junior High School at the time) and, as a neighbor child (now an adult) later posted on an internet bulletin board, the two were thought of as very strange and were “mercilessly” bullied by some of the other children.
Regardless, nobody expected the family to be so deeply marked for tragedy.
On the night of the 17th, the eldest boy was awakened by what he thought sounded like the pop of a light bulb blowing out. He listened briefly for further sounds but there were none, so he went back to sleep. He woke up again later that morning to prepare for his newspaper route. He went downstairs and found, to his horror, his father and stepmother slaughtered in the “rumpus room” of the house and blood all over the room. He found the front door slightly ajar. The police were quickly summoned and the preliminary investigation found that Philip had been shot in the back of the head and Cheryl had been attacked with an ax. That conclusion would later be found faulty, as it was determined that both victims had been shot. Both had been bound and gagged and The Times characterized the killings as “execution style.”
The police investigation was massive. They interviewed more than 100 people by Halloween and police chief David Hansen said two or three interviews led to leads that “look promising.” Police interviews stretched from local citizens to neighboring Oregon. In the rumpus room, they discovered an address book with about 80 names listed, which seemed like a lot. This led to the discovery that Philip and Cheryl had a very open marriage and often hosted "swinger" parties and the police wondered if this fact had anything to do with a motive for the murders. The crime scene investigation yielded no other usable clues.
The children were sent to live with their biological mother in San Francisco and, despite police officers initially working 18 hour days on the case, no suspects were ever found and the crime remains a cold case within the Daly City police department’s files.
