Australian police have announced a major breakthrough in the Madeleine McCann-style disappearance of a British three-year-old girl who was abducted in 1970.
Cheryl Grimmer was just three when she vanished from outside a beach shower block in Wollongong, New South Wales. Despite a massive search at the time, police were unable to recover the toddler, who is believed to have been murdered.
The shocking murder of three-year-old Cheryl Grimmer could finally be solved almost 47 years after detectives found a new lead in old case files
Three days after the abduction on January 12, 1970, a ransom note was sent to Cheryl’s parents demanding $10,000, but with police lying in wait, no one turned up to claim the cash. Australian police now believe the youngster was kidnapped by a teenage boy – who would now be in his early 60s. He was seen running towards bushland from the area where Cheryl vanished.
Cheryl and her family emigrated from the UK in the late 1960s. The family were living in a hostel near the beach at the time of the abduction.
Her three brothers Ricki, Stephen and Paul have called on the killer to hand himself in.
Ricki told a press conference during a re-enactment of the disappearance at Fairy Meadow Beach, where Cheryl was last seen: ‘Heartache… decisions I made on the day were wrong. I shouldn’t have left. What do you say? What do you do? It’s affected me all my life.
‘Everyone says it wasn’t my fault but come and stand where I’m standing, see what it feels like. Just let us know where she is, give us something so we can mourn. It’s cost me and my family everything. The suspect was missed on the day and though they would not reveal many details, investigators are ‘confident [they] are on the right track’.
‘We are calling this a breakthrough in the investigation. It’s something that was missed over the years,’ Detective Sergeant Damian Loone told the Daily Telegraph.
The vital clue was found by reviewing many boxes of old case files looking for leads the original investigation missed or didn’t follow up on. Their renewed interest followed a re-enactment of the Grimmer family’s day at the beach two weeks ago in a bid to convince the killer to turn themselves in.
‘It’s time to come clean and absolve yourself and tell us what happened on that day — and, more importantly, for the family. If not for yourself, do it for them,’ Sergeant Loone said.
The new suspect was described at the time as caucasian, aged between 16 and 17, about 152cm tall with a medium build, brown hair, blue eyes and fair complexion.
Cheryl was at the beach with her mother Carole and brothers Ricki, eight, Stephen, six, and Paul, five, when the four children were sent to the showers at about 1.30pm. A few minutes later Ricki ran to his mother and said Cheryl wouldn’t come out of the shower block, but by the time they got there she was gone and never seen again.
‘She was gone in just a minute or two. It’s something I still live with every day,’ Ricki, 54, said last week.
There were myriad conflicting reports of who took her and subsequent sighting and theories, none of which panned out. Some said a man in an orange swimsuit lifted a girl to drink at a fountain before running off with her, another witness saw her being driven off in a white car. A ransom note for $10,000 was sent to Cheryl’s parents after three days but no one showed up to collect the money where police dressed as council workers lay in wait.
A coronial inquest in 2011, after a reinvestigation of the case three years earlier, found Cheryl was presumed dead after being kidnapped.
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