He told police 55 years ago that he’d killed a toddler. Why the law won’t touch him

Brisbane, Australia
 — 

For decades, the Grimmer family never spoke about Cheryl.

“We weren’t allowed to mention her name,” said Paul Grimmer, who was just 4 years old when his little sister vanished.

Cheryl’s disappearance in 1970 during a family outing to an Australian beach triggered a major search, appeals for witnesses, and headlines half a world away in Britain, from where they’d recently moved. Her body has never been found.

With no answers, her parents’ intense grief settled into silence, and her three brothers grew up not knowing what happened to their 3-year-old sister.

In the last decade, the family has discovered shocking details about Cheryl’s disappearance – including that a 17-year-old confessed to killing her 15 months after she went missing but wasn’t charged.

Police reinvestigating the cold case brought him in for questioning in 2017 and charged him with murder, but the case was discontinued, and he was again freed.

Under Australian law, the man’s name can’t be published, because he was a minor at the time of the alleged crime.

Publicly, he’s known as Mercury, the alias police gave him when they identified him as the author of the confession.

He maintains his innocence, but Cheryl’s family believes he killed their sister – and they want justice.

“We want him to come forward and either plead guilty, or explain to us, why did he confess?” Paul Grimmer said.

In recent months, a local lawmaker has come to their aid, using parliamentary privilege to reveal Mercury’s real name, his confession, and the alias he’s used for years.

CNN phoned the man named in Parliament. He confirmed his name, but when asked about Cheryl Grimmer, he said he “didn’t want to talk,” and hung up.

On a hot January day in 1970, Carole Grimmer took her four young children to Fairy Meadow Beach in Wollongong, a coastal city just over an hour’s drive south of Sydney.

Carole took the children for a swim, but after lunch, a strong southerly wind swept in, so she called time and quickly started packing up their belongings.

Her eldest son, Ricki, guided his younger siblings – Stephen, Paul and Cheryl – to the shower block to wash off the salt and sand. Ricki was 7, almost 8, and kind of in charge, though his playful little sister didn’t think so.

In a scene he’s replayed countless times in his head, Ricki remembers Cheryl teasing him from inside the women’s shower block, as he stood in the doorway, imploring her to come out.

She laughed as he told her it was time to go back to their mom, and in the end, he took his brothers back to the beach, so their mother could deal with her.

But when they went back to the shower block, Cheryl was gone.

What should’ve been a fun day out has turned into a lifelong nightmare for the brothers – now adults – who question every decision of their young lives at the time, and those made in subsequent years by police, detectives, and lawyers.

Most of all, they question why a chance to see Mercury face justice in 2019 was thrown out by a judge – a decision that has led to their inconsolable anger and grief.

That day at the beach, Carole Grimmer alerted lifeguards that Cheryl was missing just after 2 p.m., and when no one could find her, they phoned police.

Within hours, according to news reports, around 1,000 people were combing thick scrub and shallow creeks for the small girl. “Height 3 feet 9 inches, small build, blonde short hair cut square around the back of the head, full fringe in front, fair complexion, blue eyes,” read the police description.

Cheryl was last seen wearing a royal blue swimsuit. The skin on her nose was said to have been peeling from the sun.

Three days later newspaper articles reported the “first real lead.” Two boys had seen a “swarthy, small man in a floppy hat” pick up a girl matching Cheryl’s description and carry her away.

The following day, a ransom note was sent to police demanding 10,000 Australian dollars for Cheryl’s safe return – or another child would be kidnapped. Police said handwriting analysis revealed it was most likely written by a teenager. They suspected it was a hoax.

Cheryl wasn’t found. The search was scaled down, and her bereft parents, Carole and Vince, went home to their three boys.

More than a year later, a teenager had a story to tell police.

Mercury confessed that he’d been at Fairy Meadow Beach on the morning Cheryl disappeared and saw a group of children near the shower block.

The teenager said he covered the girl’s mouth, tied her hands with shoelaces, took her to a secluded area, and when she started screaming, put his hands on her throat.

He said he covered Cheryl’s body with bushes, leaves and dirt, and considered taking her swimsuit home.

He said he threw her towel in a drain.

Days after making the confession, the teenager took police to the place he said he left Cheryl’s body. He told them he’d seen a cattle grid and a tubular fence – but when police made inquiries to corroborate his claims, they couldn’t match them.

Mercury was already known to police as a troubled youth who’d frequently absconded from home and detention centers. A psychological assessment in the weeks after he confessed found that his behavior was “attention-seeking” and “highly influenced by his previous experiences under drug addiction,” according to court documents.

Authorities opted not to charge him over Cheryl’s disappearance, and the case remained open.

More than 40 years after Cheryl’s disappearance, no trace of her had been found. Persons of interest were interviewed, but no credible suspects had emerged, and the missing persons cold case was referred to the coroner for an inquest.

So little was said about the confession during the 2011 inquest hearings, that Carole Grimmer didn’t realize that someone had claimed responsibility for killing her toddler.

“She was old and frail at the time and quite ill… I don’t think it totally computed with her, because it was rushed over so fast,” her son Ricki Nash said. Cheryl’s father had died years earlier, not knowing that someone had confessed.

A New South Wales Police investigator told the inquest a confession existed, but they hadn’t been able to find its author, and the information they had suggested inconsistencies remained. The coroner ultimately found that Cheryl had died the same day she was abducted but recorded an open finding on the “manner and cause” of death.

The case was referred to the unsolved homicide squad and in 2016 two NSW detectives – Detective Sergeant Damian Loone and Senior Constable Frank Sanvitale – started sifting through reams of typed pages and handwritten notes bound into books.

Though well organized, none of the material had been digitized. There were so many documents, they had to split up the work.

It was Loone who rediscovered the confession.

“It was explosive… I was at a loss as to why he hadn’t been charged,” Loone told CNN.

The two detectives then tried to prove Mercury had been lying to police, but their inquiries, which stretched to the United Kingdom, instead resulted in them concluding “that everything that he had said was the truth,” said Loone, who has since retired.

That “bloke” was Peter Goodyear, now deceased.

His wife Mavis Goodyear corroborated the 1971 confession, according to Loone, telling the detectives that she knew her late husband had been outside the changing room because she could smell the smoke from his Camel cigarettes wafting through the Besser block wall.

In his confession, the teenager also told police he saw the children drink water from a tap.

That boy was Cheryl’s brother Ricki, who had told police at the time that he remembered lifting Cheryl up to help her drink from the fountain. He repeated the same story to investigators in 2016.

While police in 1971 said they couldn’t find the cattle grid Mercury described in his confession, detectives Loone and Sanvitale identified a witness who could testify that it was there.

“We found the son of the owner of that property who actually had built that cattle grid, and he said it was there in 1970,” Loone said.

In 2011, investigators told the coroner they couldn’t find Mercury. Loone said it took “five minutes” to track him down.

During a 2017 police interview, Mercury was shown the confession and agreed that his signature was on the bottom of all “eight pages of that record of interview,” said Loone.

But when it came time to ask the “hard questions,” Loone said Mercury “categorically denied that he had anything to do with taking Cheryl.”

Mercury also denied that he’d ever been to Fairy Meadow Beach, despite having accompanied officers to the beach a few days after confessing.

“So, he was lying,” Loone told CNN.

In 2017, Mercury was extradited across state borders where he spent two years in prison awaiting trial for murder. He pleaded not guilty, then during a pre-trial hearing in 2019, the whole case fell apart.

The impending trial in what had been a cold case generated major news coverage in Australia, and media crews jostled to film Mercury, a larger man with graying hair, as he arrived at court.

Duty lawyers argued that his confession was inadmissible because of a 1987 law that stated an adult should be present during the questioning of a child.

NSW Supreme Court judge Robert Hulme then ruled that the law applied retrospectively, and without the confession to rely upon, the director of public prosecutions dropped the charge.

It left Loone grappling with a troubling question: “How do I tell the family of a legal loophole that (meant) this person – who I believe was responsible for (Cheryl’s) abduction and subsequent murder – was to walk free from court that afternoon?”

The senior detective phoned the nearest police station asking for extra officers to be assigned to the courthouse to protect Mercury from the family’s inevitable fury when he was allowed to walk free.

“As soon as it was announced that he was getting off. He just looked at me and smirked,” said Paul Grimmer, whose wife Linda had to stop him from lunging at the man in the dock.

By prior arrangement, Mercury slipped out through a side door to return to his life.

Ricki Nash was so furious that Loone took out a restraining order on behalf of Mercury to keep him safe. And when Nash was served the papers advising him to stay away from certain locations, he realized Mercury had been living in the same Melbourne suburb as him for years.

Nash told CNN he had to leave Australia to put a safe distance between him and the man who he says ruined his family’s life.

“If I didn’t move to the Philippines, he’d be dead now, and I’d be in a cell,” said Nash, on the phone from Manila.

Now 71, Mercury lives in regional Victoria, in a four-bedroom house on a neat suburban street with his wife, who he married not long before his arrest. Sources say she stood by him throughout the two-year wait for trial.

Now that his various names are all on public record, the Grimmer family says it shouldn’t take long for people to find out the untried, alleged child killer is living in their suburb.

The brothers say it didn’t need to come to this. Last October, they gave Mercury a midnight deadline to meet them to explain his confession.

When he didn’t respond, New South Wales lawmaker Jeremy Buckingham publicly named him for the first time by reading aloud the 1971 confession in state parliament.

Paul Grimmer makes a statement in October 2025

Paul Grimmer makes a statement in October 2025

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Mercury maintained his silence.

“You are a coward, a slug and a murderer, and you should do the right thing now and hand yourself in,” Buckingham said, addressing Mercury under the protection of parliamentary privilege again earlier this month.

Buckingham told CNN his intention in naming Mercury was not to trigger vigilante action but a response from lawmakers to make it possible for the confession to be submitted as evidence – even if that involves a law change.

The brothers say they don’t want Mercury to come to any harm and are begging authorities to take him back to court, so the proper process can be followed.

Loone, the retired detective, would like a coroner to call a second inquest, given Mercury’s identity was not known during the 2011 proceedings, and make a new recommendation that the case go to trial.

But a coroner can’t do that unilaterally, the NSW Coroner’s Court told CNN –– an inquest needs to be requested by police or a party with new evidence or compelled by the Supreme Court or the attorney general.

NSW Attorney General Michael Daley said in a statement that, while he empathized with the family’s “pain and suffering,” the case had been subject to careful and detailed consideration by the state’s public prosecutions office and Supreme Court.

Tim Roberts, president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, said the case highlights the problems with creating retrospective laws – in this case, one to protect children who are being grilled by police.

“If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that, despite the best intentions, we should not be passing retrospective laws, because even though it seems uncomplicated, it can produce unintended results that undermine justice in some situations,” he said.

Then last week came a small glimmer of hope.

The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions wrote to the family offering to review the decision to drop the charges – using new evidence if any is obtained by the NSW Police.

“Detectives remain committed to reviewing and assessing any new evidence or witness information that may emerge,” NSW Police told CNN in a statement.

The family had already started their own investigation in the hope that any evidence they found could be used to justify fresh charges.

In October, dogs specially trained in human remains detection scanned the area where Mercury had confessed to leaving Cheryl’s body.

The area was narrowed down using aerial mapping and landmarks mentioned in the confession – a cattle grid, farm gate and trees still standing after more than 50 years.

“It’s not only human bones that we’re looking for, but we’re also looking for the potential of human remains held in the soil itself,” said Chris D’Arcy from Search Dogs Sydney.

Two dogs showed a particular interest in one site, so soil samples were sent to the University of Technology Sydney, where Dr. Alicia Haines, a senior lecturer within the Centre for Forensic Science, is testing them for signs of human DNA.

Haines told CNN that after so many years, it’s unlikely that any trace will be found, but she said that, if her analysis helps the family to answer at least one question, “It’s worth doing.” The family is covering the basic cost of testing materials, but the time spent analyzing the soil has been offered in kind.

With few firm answers about the final moments of Cheryl’s life, her brothers keep turning back to the man who said he killed her.

They know time is not on their side.

Memories are fading, potential witnesses are dying and the main person of interest is now in his 70s.

“Time is running out. But… I want to hear what he has to say,” said Nash.

Mercury’s silence in the face of the family’s pain is “excruciating,” he said.

“It’s just ripping us apart.”

And if Mercury didn’t do it, the question remains – what happened to Cheryl?