NSW prosecutor agrees to review dropped case into Cheryl Grimmer’s disappearance
The NSW attorney general has agreed to investigate why the case against a teenager previously charged over the abduction of toddler Cheryl Grimmer 56 years ago was dropped.
The three-year-old child was allegedly abducted outside a shower block at Fairy Meadow Beach in Wollongong, south of Sydney, on January 12, 1970.
The case has since been the subject of numerous police investigations, and a coronial inquest in 2011 found that Cheryl was likely dead.
In 2017, a man known by the pseudonym Mercury pleaded not guilty after being accused of Cheryl’s murder.
Prosecutors later dropped the case against the man, who was a teenager when Cheryl disappeared, after the NSW Supreme Court ruled his confession was inadmissible.
The teenager was not accompanied by a parent, adult, or lawyer when he was interviewed in 1971.
The Director of Public Prosecutions refused to appeal the 2019 decision.
In a letter to Ms Grimmer’s family on February 16, NSW Director of Public Prosecutions Sally Dowling SC agreed to review the initial decision to stay the proceedings.
The Directorate of Public Prosecutions confirmed that the review will be conducted under the ODPP Victim Right to Review policy, which gives victims the power to request a review where prosecutors have not initiated or discontinued the case.
Because the ODPP has no investigative functions, an investigation under the policy can only be based on evidence available at the time the initial decision was made.
In the circumstances, Ms Dowling asked whether the Grimmer family wished to provide any new information to NSW Police ahead of the investigation.
The ODPP said it was the police’s responsibility to decide whether to investigate further.
It is reported that the family is now evaluating the letter.
They told the ABC they had “written to NSW Homicide asking them to reopen an investigation in light of significant new evidence that has emerged since 2019.”
“We believe this material requires thorough reconsideration and independent review,” brother Rick Nash said.
It comes after NSW MLC Jeremy Buckingham used parliamentary privilege to name the Mercury last year.
According to Mr Buckingham’s speech, he recounted on-record passages of an interview between Mercury and a police sergeant on April 29, 1971, in which he allegedly admitted “coming from behind the shower block and grabbing the little girl”.
NewsWire chose not to name the man, and because he was a minor at the time of Cheryl’s disappearance, he could not be legally identified at a court hearing in 2018.
It is understood the family later informed the ODPP that there were errors in the initial investigation and attempted to prosecute.
