Cheryl Grimmer

Case background and investigation

Cheryl Gene Grimmer was born in Bristol, England, in October 1966, and emigrated to Australia with her family in 1968, according to Wikipedia. The family was living at the Fairy Meadow migrant hostel near Wollongong, New South Wales, when Cheryl, then three, vanished from outside a shower block at Fairy Meadow Beach on January 12, 1970, as reported by ABC News. Her remains have never been found.

Wikipedia records that the early investigation considered drowning, misadventure and abduction, that a ransom demand received in the following days proved to be a hoax, and that a reward was offered. No one was charged at the time.

In 1971, a 17-year-old made a detailed statement to police admitting that he had taken and killed Cheryl, according to ABC News. Police at the time did not consider the account reliable enough to proceed, Wikipedia notes, and the statement was not acted on for decades. After the case was reopened, detectives charged a man in 2017 with her abduction and murder; he was arrested in Victoria and extradited to New South Wales, according to Wikipedia. He has only been identified publicly by the pseudonym "Mercury" because he was a minor at the time of the alleged offence, and he pleaded not guilty.

The case never reached trial. In 2019 Justice Robert Hulme of the NSW Supreme Court excluded the 1971 interview because it did not meet the legal safeguards required for admissions made by a child, including the presence of a supporting adult, ABC News reported. Without that evidence the Crown discontinued the prosecution. The man has not been convicted of any offence connected to Cheryl's disappearance.

On October 23, 2025, NSW upper house member Jeremy Buckingham read the 1971 statement aloud in parliament under parliamentary privilege, ABC News reported, and he secured a parliamentary inquiry into long-running unsolved murders and missing persons cases that includes Cheryl's. In February 2026 Director of Public Prosecutions Sally Dowling offered the family a review of the 2019 decision under the victims' right of review policy. The family lodged 54 submissions, but in a determination dated September 16, 2026 Dowling upheld the decision, concluding a challenge to the exclusion of the interview had no reasonable prospect of success, according to ABC News.

The family, led by Cheryl's brother Ricki Nash, criticised the brief response and on September 22, 2026 wrote to NSW Premier Chris Minns and Attorney-General Michael Daley seeking an independent audit, ABC News reported. ABC News also reported that a $1 million reward remains available and that police were separately assessing information the family says is new.