‘I want him in the ground’: Why family will name ‘Cheryl’s killer’

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Five decades after a toddler vanished from a Wollongong beach, and five years after her murder trial collapsed, the family of Cheryl Grimmer will unmask her alleged killer in the coming days – unless he meets them in person.

This week they fired a warning shot, releasing a dossier about the alleged killer and vowing his “lost confession”, name and face would be next.

Three-year-old Cheryl Grimmer vanished from a beach in 1970. A man was charged with murder in 2017, but his confession was thrown out and the case collapsed two years later.

Cheryl was just three years old when she disappeared from a shower block at Fairy Meadow Beach after swimming with her family, who had recently emigrated from Britain, in 1970.

Her body was never found and the case went cold. But for Cheryl’s family, her loss became an albatross they could never escape.

“I’m her big brother and I left her on the beach,” Ricki Nash told the Herald on Friday.

“She’s forgiven me, but she has been pushing me for 55 years.”

Cheryl's brothers Ricki, Paul and Stephen appeal for help in December 2016 at the scene of the abduction.

An hour earlier, Nash and his brother, Paul Grimmer, had convened a press conference at the spot their sister vanished in 1970 and released a dossier 19 pages in length.

Most of those pages are dedicated to “failures” of the police investigation, centrally around a mysterious man known only as “Mercury”.

“I want to put him in the ground,” Nash said.

“I’ve got photos his colleagues have sent me, I have his wedding photos, we have everything about this guy and it will be everywhere. He’s got nowhere to hide.”

It was 10 years ago that Cheryl’s toothy grin, captured in black-and-white family photos, returned to the headlines. An inquest in 2011 had turned into a reinvestigation in 2016.

One year later, police charged a man, aged in his 60s, with Cheryl’s murder. He pleaded not guilty.

The Grimmers learnt, only then, that a teenage boy had confessed in detail to abducting and murdering their sister in 1971.

But without Cheryl’s remains, or any other evidence, the teenager was never charged, and his confession never saw the light of day.

“Mercury” was charged in early 2017 with the murder of Cheryl Grimmer and pleaded not guilty.

“When he confessed – in detail – to abducting Cheryl to have sex with a little three-year-old, and murdered her because she screamed and fought back, authorities put that confession in a box for 45 years,” Nash said.

“They didn’t even do a search of the area when [the suspect] did a walkthrough in 1971.”

The man was given the pseudonym “Mercury” following his arrest because he was not yet 18 at the time of his confession and the law prevents the naming of juveniles in the courts.

Two years after Mercury’s arrest, as the trial loomed, the Grimmers were dealt another blow: Justice Robert Allan Hulme ruled Mercury’s confession could not be used in evidence.

Mercury was unintelligent, had made his confession without an adult in the room and had endured a “very disturbed upbringing”, Hulme concluded.

A coronial inquest into Cheryl Grimmer's disappearance in May 2011 found she died some time after she disappeared, from an unknown cause.

Prosecutors knew their case was doomed to fail without the key piece of evidence, and Mercury walked free with his name hidden from the public.

“He sat in jail for two years saying nothing, then came out in 2019 saying nothing, doesn’t defend himself,” Nash said.

“The system is protecting someone who confessed to the murder of a three-year-old girl in a gruesome way and left her to rot.”

The confession, the Herald understands, details what people at the beach were wearing, where they were sitting, and goes into granular detail describing how Mercury killed and hid Cheryl’s body.

Mercury later claimed he had never been to Fairy Meadow Beach.

The Grimmers turned to MPs and the media in an attempt to flush out new evidence and new leads, or change the minds of the legal system who had let Mercury walk.

In 2024, Greens MP Sue Higginson questioned now-Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon about new informants and witnesses who had come forward.

But it led to nothing.

Nash said his family had been backed into a corner, and felt police “burned every chance” to get justice for his sister while the courts were protecting a “villain” from being named.

“They are putting Cheryl in a box and forgetting about her – again,” he said.

This month, former Greens and now Legalise Cannabis MP Jeremy Buckingham appeared in Wollongong media saying he would use parliamentary privilege to name Mercury despite the orders concealing his name.

“If anyone reads the confession, it causes immediate concern to think that person must have at least been at the scene of Cheryl’s abduction – if not responsible,” Buckingham said of Mercury’s confession.

“If someone has a tendency to do this, to abduct, sexually assault and murder a child, what else have they done or are capable of doing?”

Cheryl Grimmer with her late father, Vince.

On Friday, Nash issued an ultimatum to Mercury: meet with them and explain the confession, or he will give Buckingham the green light.

“Come out from behind whatever rock you’re hiding behind and tell us how you knew what you knew, or why you did what you did,” Nash said.

Buckingham said he would carry out the Grimmers’ wishes unless the demand was met.

Legal sources familiar with the case, but not authorised to speak publicly, said they feared naming Mercury could incite a lynch mob, but equally understood the Grimmers had been failed.

Nash says police often tell him they believe Mercury is Cheryl’s killer. But without fresh and compelling evidence, they cannot bring the murder charge against him again.

Naming Mercury, Nash told the Herald, could be the only chance at getting new evidence.

“They won’t get fresh and compelling evidence because he’s hidden behind this pseudonym ‘Mercury’,” Nash said.

“But once he’s out there, we might get information from the public, we could be inundated with fresh information. We have been pushed into a corner and have nowhere else to go.

“We will hopefully get some peace – maybe Cheryl can get some rest.”

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