Man arrested over the abduction and murder of Cheryl Grimmer in 1970
EXCLUSIVE: POLICE have charged a Frankston man, 63, with murder after one of the most sensational cold case arrests in Australian criminal history.
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POLICE have charged a Victorian man, 63, with murder after one of the most sensational cold case arrests in Australian criminal history.
Detectives arrested the man in Frankston after a two-year cold case investigation into the disappearance of Cheryl Grimmer, 3, from Fairy Meadow beach on the New South Wales South Coast, on January 12, 1970. Cheryl has never been found.
It is the oldest cold case arrest made in Australia.
The Herald Sun understands the man, a security guard with a grown family, was 16 when Cheryl vanished from a changing room at the beach.
It is alleged that about 18 months afterwards he talked about the crime while in the Mt Penang boys’ home.
After this was reported to Sydney police, he was taken to Wollongong and interviewed.
It is alleged that the teenager, originally from the United Kingdom, provided details to investigators, who decided not to lay charges.
The man, who now goes by a different name, voluntarily went to be interviewed by detectives at Frankston police station about 10am yesterday. After several hours of questioning, he was charged with Cheryl’s murder and appeared briefly before Frankston Magistrates’ Court.
He is expected to be extradited to Sydney tomorrow.
Cheryl vanished after spending the day at the beach with her mother, Carole, and her brothers Ricki, 7, Stephen, 5, and Paul, 4.
About 1.30pm a howling wind sprang up and Mrs Grimmer told the children to get changed while she packed up towels. She was less than 100m from the changerooms.
About 10 minutes later, Ricki went to his mother and said Cheryl was refusing to come out of the girls’ changerooms. When she went to fetch her daughter, Mrs Grimmer couldn’t find Cheryl anywhere.
Despite a huge manhunt by police and locals, Cheryl was never found.
Police contacted the Grimmer brothers earlier this week to tell them they would be making an arrest.
One of the brothers, who moved to Melbourne, lives only a few kilometres from the accused man.
Two Wollongong-based detectives, Sergeant Damien Loone and Senior Constable Frank Sanvitale, began to look into the cold case last year.
They painstakingly went through boxes of statements, uncovering a number of leads which they believe the original investigators had not thoroughly followed up.
Last year with the aid of the brothers and two men, who were then boys and were also at the beach that day, they did a detailed re-enactment.
LOST ON DAY AT THE BEACH
IT was one of Australia’s most baffling cold case mysteries.
The kidnapping and presumed murder of bubbly three-year-old Cheryl Grimmer at Fairy Meadow beach, in Wollongong, 47 years ago shocked the nation.
Her disappearance from outside a shower block on the afternoon of January 12, 1970, sparked a massive search but no trace of the little girl nor her body has ever been found.
But late last year, detectives investigating the harrowing crime announced they had made a breakthrough in the case. They believed their suspect had been overlooked in the original investigation.
A review of the case led investigators to believe the little girl was abducted by a teenager who would now be in his 60s. In December, the current investigators said there were a number of reasons why they were now convinced the person most likely responsible for taking Cheryl was in fact a teenager seen running from the area towards bushland.
“As a result of that reinvestigation and examination of all the information in the files, we are looking at a particular suspect originally missed on the day little Cheryl Grimmer was taken from the beach,’’ said Det Sgt Damian Loone, who is leading the investigation.
Unlike many cold cases, the new information was not from advances in forensics, but came from going over boxes and boxes of paper to find any forgotten clues.
The New South Wales Unsolved Homicide Squad helped work on the leads.
It was a family day at the beach when the weather turned about 1.30pm and Cheryl’s mum, Carole Grimmer, sent her and her brothers — Ricki, 7, Stephen, 5 and Paul, 4 — to shower at a toilet block near the surf club.
Just minutes later, Ricki ran to his mother and said Cheryl wouldn’t come out of the shower block.
She followed Ricki back to the sheds, but by the time they got there, Cheryl was gone.
She was never seen again.
“She was gone in just a minute or two,’’ Ricki, 54, said late last year.
“It’s something I still live with every day.’’
As soon as Cheryl was reported missing by her family, a large-scale search was organised.
There were reports that a man was seen lifting a girl to drink at a bubbler before racing off with her. Another report said she was seen being driven off in a white car.
There were a number of confessions that never checked out. One particularly cruel phone call to the Grimmers was from a man saying he had strangled Cheryl the same way he claimed to have killed Vicki Barton, 8, in the Blue Mountains 18 months earlier.
A man arrested for Vicki Barton’s murder was never connected to Cheryl’s case.
There were also stories that she had been snatched to live with a childless couple.
The Grimmer family clung to the hope that she might still be alive.
But a coroner’s inquest in 2011, after a reinvestigation of the case three years earlier, found Cheryl was presumed dead after being kidnapped.
— David Hurley
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