• The girl’s family welcomes possibility of reopening investigation
• Public pressure prompts prosecutor to review case

A British girl’s family, whose daughter Cheryl Grimmer vanished in Australia in 1970, welcomed a prosecutor’s decision to consider reopening her case after decades of unsuccessful searches.

Cheryl was three years old when she disappeared from Fairy Meadow Beach in Wollongong in January of that year.

Despite extensive searches, no leads emerged.

In 2017, a suspect was charged with abduction and murder, but the trial collapsed after his teenage confession was ruled inadmissible. He denies wrongdoing, and prosecutors dropped the case.

Following public pressure, including from Cheryl’s family, the New South Wales Director of Public Prosecutions announced readiness to conduct a special review of the prior decision.

Sally Dowling, in a letter to the Grimmer family, said the usual time limit for requesting a case review had expired but she agreed to consider the case anyway, either based on evidence submitted by police in 2019 or after examining new information the family claims to have found.

Cheryl’s older brother, Ricki Nash, expressed relief, saying, “It has taken many years, but we are finally happy they see our fight for justice for Cheryl.”

Nash confirmed the family formally requested NSW Police to reopen the investigation, considering new evidence emerging since 2019. “We are not asking for anything extraordinary, but when transparency guides the process, evil can no longer hide behind procedural failures or bureaucratic divisions,” he added.

The family had recently migrated from Bristol to Australia under the “Ten Pound Pom” scheme before Cheryl’s disappearance.

On the day she vanished, Nash was supervising his siblings while Cheryl ran giggling into the ladies’ changing rooms and refused to come out. Returning 90 seconds later with his mother, she was gone.

Since the trial collapsed seven years ago, the family has pushed for a fresh investigation, citing numerous errors by NSW authorities during the search.

In October, NSW Legislative Council member Jeremy Buckingham used parliamentary privilege to name the suspect, previously known only as “Mercury” to protect his identity as he was a minor at the time of the alleged crime.

A NSW parliamentary inquiry scheduled for May will examine unsolved murders and long-term missing persons, with Cheryl’s case included.