CHICAGO – Potter & Potter Auctions on Chicago’s Northwest Side looks like any other building in the neighborhood. But as Fox 32’s Dane Placko discovered, take a walk inside, and you’ll quickly discover it’s holding a treasure trove of some of Chicago’s darkest history.

What we know:

“This is a detailed look at the dirty underside of Cook County back during the day. About death in Cook County for a five-year period. It’s an unusual archive,” said John Binder, a Chicago crime historian.

Binder, who is also a crime writer, shared part of his personal collection that’s going on the auction block.

“We are looking at an archive put together over the years by Harry Glos, who was basically the chief investigator for the Cook County Coroner’s Office from 1952 to 1957,” Binder said.

The man behind the files

Glos was a colorful and controversial figure who kept his own files on more than 525 cases he handled during that time period, files that include newspaper headlines, police reports, autopsy records, and hundreds and hundreds of crime scene photos.

“This is all meant to be official record. This was not cleansed for the newspapers. This was the death scene,” Binder said.

Glos kept the records for a book he planned to write, but died before it ever happened. Binder bought the archive from Glos’s estate, which holds a lot of Chicago crime history.

“Especially when you have two of our most famous murder cases over the decades,” Binder said.

The backstory:

Those two cases, the disappearance and murder of the Grimes sisters, and the Schuessler-Peterson murders, continue to haunt Chicago to this day.

The Grimes sisters mystery

On Dec. 28, 15-year-old Barbara Grimes and her 12-year-old sister Patricia, disappeared after leaving a movie theater in Brighton Park where they had just watched “Love Me Tender” with Elvis Presley.

Their disappearance sparked one of the largest missing persons investigations in Chicago history and even an appeal from Elvis himself for the girls to return home.

“Here’s a wanted flyer put out there. The girls were missing for some three to four weeks,” Binder said.

Fifteen thousand flyers were distributed and police interviewed more than 2,000 people.

But on Jan. 22, the sister’s frozen bodies were discovered behind a guardrail along German Church Road in southwest suburban Willow Springs.

The bodies were unclothed and showed signs of being punctured with an ice pick.

A number of suspects were questioned, including a drifter named Edward “Benny” Bedwell, but no one was ever convicted.

“It terrified the city. Two young innocent girls can’t go out to a movie,” Binder said.

The murders, along with the Schuesler-Peterson case, shocked the city, and prompted residents to begin locking their doors at night.

The Schuessler-Peterson murders

Just one year earlier, 13-year-old John Schuessler, his 11-year-old brother Anton and their 14-year-old friend Robert Peterson also disappeared after leaving a movie theater downtown headed back to their home in Jefferson Park.

Two days later, their naked bodies were found in a ditch in the Robinson Woods Forest Preserve near Irving Park Road and Cumberland Avenue.

For decades, the shocking case went unsolved.

“It was just a gigantic series of question marks until years later, a known pedophile, Ken Hansen, shot his mouth off about various things to people he knew. And they turned around and testified against him,” Binder said.

Hansen had been working at a Northwest Side horse stable owned by the notorious criminal Silas Jayne where police believe he lured, sexually assaulted then killed the boys.

In 1995, Hansen was convicted of the murders, dying in prison in 2007.

Glos’s archive contains hundreds of documents from each of the investigations, including Glos’s own notes from the autopsies of the Grimes sisters.

What the auction includes

What’s next:

On Sept. 27, it all goes on the auction block.

“I hope it goes to a place where it’s all publicly accessible. And I hope there’s something there from Harry Glos’s notes on the Grimes sisters’ case that is the spark to, even if whoever did it is dead, reopening it as an active investigation and maybe getting to the bottom of it,” Binder said.

The auction breaks the collection into four separate pieces: the Grimes case, the Schuessler-Peterson murders, arson and fire investigations, and the largest chunk, hundreds of death investigations including the crash of a Braniff airliner at Midway Airport in 1955 that killed 22 people.

“This is an amazing look at Chicago in the 50s,” said Chad Reingold of Potter & Potter Auctions. “It’s a slice of the underbelly of Chicago. Chicago is famous for underbelly and this is one of the best looks you’re going to get.”