NEED TO KNOW
- Three-year-old Cheryl Grimmer was abducted and killed in 1970
- ‘Mercury’ who confessed to her murder is still free
- Cheryl’s brother Ricki wants Mercury to tell the truth about what happened
The emotion in Ricki Nash’s voice is palpable as he tells Woman’s Day why he will never give up trying to expose the truth about what happened to his little sister, Cheryl Grimmer, and bringing her killer to justice.
“It’s Cheryl that keeps pushing me and helps me fight this,” says Ricki. “I made a terrible mistake and I’ve had to live with that, but it’s her that’s forgiven me and keeps pushing me to get the answers, not just for me, but for our family.”
A TERRIBLE MISTAKE
The “terrible mistake” Ricki alludes to was part of a series of events that led to the disappearance of three-year-old Cheryl that took place when he was just seven.
Ricki, along with his younger brothers, Paul, then four, and Stephen, five, had spent the morning of January 12, 1970, at Wollongong’s Fairy Meadow Beach with their mum, Carole, 26. When the weather turned after lunch, the children went to the shower block together to rinse off while Carole packed up on the sand.
Cheryl – who Ricki remembers with “that grin, that cheekiness, that playfulness” – went into the ladies’ changing room on her own. When she refused to come out, the boys went to get their mum. But on their return just a few minutes later, the little girl had vanished in a tragic turn of events that’s weighed heavily on him for decades.
“I wish every day it was me that was taken,” says an emotional Ricki from his adopted home of the Philippines. “It’s a nightmare every day.”
For years the Grimmer family held on to the possibility that Cheryl had been abducted and was possibly still alive. But then came the shattering call in 2016 from cold-case detective Damian Loone.
“I was driving on the Hume Highway and he asked me to pull over, then said, ‘We have a person of interest in your sister’s murder.’ This was the first time we’d ever heard murder associated with Cheryl.”
TEENAGE CONFESSION
The detective had found a confession made to police by a teenage boy a year after Cheryl vanished. The man’s identity remains legally suppressed as he was 17 years old at the time of the statement and is now known as “Mercury”.
Mercury was 16 when he allegedly abducted and murdered Cheryl. The details he gave in his police interview in April 1971 about where he’d first seen Cheryl were consistent with witness accounts and contained disturbing details about how the little girl was killed.
Four days after his confession, Mercury participated in a walk-through at Fairy Meadow Beach and showed police where he left Cheryl’s body. Despite this, police at the time didn’t follow up on Mercury’s confessions, believing he was a fantasist.
DISTURBED
“He resided at the children’s shelter and confessed to one of the minders certain information about Cheryl’s case. The carer was so disturbed, he rang the police. The two officers attended, not expecting anything, and it starts off as just a normal conversation then a few questions in, he starts to confess. They stop him and ask, ‘Are you confessing to having involvement in the disappearance of this young girl?’ And he said, ‘yes, I did it’. And then he starts to confess in detail.
“He freely gives the confession. [The] carers were there. Everybody was there that had responsibility for him. Surely that is adult supervision?”
Cheryl’s parents weren’t told about this confession and Ricki says that if they’d known, it would have changed everything.
“ \They would have fought hammer and tongue to get to the bottom of this confession. Why didn’t police charge him in 1971?”
“You didn’t need a body, you didn’t need any other evidence, the confession would have been strong enough. But just to let him walk away and then not once speak to him again in 45 years … you’ve got this confession sitting in a cardboard box just gathering dust until 2017.
TELL THE TRUTH
“It’s crucial there is renewed pressure on Mercury to clarify the truth and whether his confession was accurate or, as he now claims, fabricated,” says Ricki. “If it was fabricated, then how did he have access to the detailed information he provided?”
A Coronial Inquest conducted in 2011 found Cheryl had died but her cause and manner of death remained undetermined. Her body has not been located.
It was recommended the investigation be referred to police and a year later, a re-investigation was conducted by Wollongong Police District under Strike Force Wessel. Sadly, soon after Cheryl’s parents died without ever knowing what happened to their little girl.
After the reexamination of evidence, police made a breakthrough and turned their attention to a suspect who was by then in his late 60s but was a teenager at the time of Cheryl’s disappearance.
At the time Detective sergeant Damian Loone, headed up the investigation and went public with an appeal for the man to turn himself in for questioning.
“It’s time to come clean and absolve yourself and tell us what happened on that day – and, more importantly, for the family,” said the officer at the time. “If not for yourself, do it for them.”
In March 2017, this suspect aka Mercury was charged with murder and extradited to NSW where he was held at Silverwater Correctional Complex. He pleaded not guilty but charges were dropped in February 2019 when Justice Robert Allan Hulme ruled the 1971 confession was inadmissible because there was no parent, adult or lawyer present.
“I’m glad Mum wasn’t here, it would have killed her,” says Ricki of that moment.
REST IN PEACE
In October, MP Jeremy Buckingham used parliamentary privilege to name Mercury. The move came after Ricki and his family made another plea for Mercury to explain his 1971 confession or admit to Cheryl’s murder.
Ricki, who says the police haven’t contacted him in years, wants what happened to Cheryl revealed and the killer named so his sister can rest in peace.
“We’re fighting Mercury, we’re fighting the police, we’re fighting the authorities. I have no trust in them,” he says. “The handling of the investigation caused devastating consequences for Cheryl and us. We want transparency, accountability and the truth.”
“I’m frustrated with the legal system. [Mercury] could simply come forward and explain, ‘I was a stupid teenager, I was seeking attention,’” says Ricki, who is convinced Mercury would have been convicted if he was prosecuted in 1971.
“[My parents] would have had resolution. Maybe the hatred from my stepfather wouldn’t have been there,” says Ricki, who discovered Cheryl’s dad, Vince, wasn’t his biological father when he was 13 and said he “blamed me every day”.
Ricki’s mum never stopped hoping she’d be reunited with her youngest child.
“Not too long before my mother passed away, we were walking and a woman was approaching us from the other side of the road. And as we’ve passed her, my mother says, ‘There you go, she could be Cheryl’,” remembers Ricki.
“And I realised how close Cheryl was to my mother every second of every day. It was bubbling away, just underneath the surface with her all day, probably with every breath that she took, thinking about Cheryl.”
Ricki’s whole life has been affected by what happened to his sister, and to him, on that day in 1970.
“My eldest daughter didn’t really know [what happened] until 2016 when I did an interview and I had a total breakdown. She said, ‘Dad, I’d never realised. Why haven’t you told us?’
SAD EVERY DAY
“And I said, ‘Why? To destroy your lives as well? And she replied, ‘Maybe it explains some of the things that you’ve done throughout your life and some of the things you said to us as kids.’
“I said, ‘Well, that was me trying to protect in my way’.”
Ricki is estranged from his other three children and although he says he was a “terrible husband” to his previous wives, he hopes he was “a good father” although he commends his other chilren for “sticking together”.
“I’m really sad every day, but that’s life.”
Ricki believes his mum would have wanted to keep searching and pushing for the truth.
“I think she would have expected it.”
Would she have been proud of him? He is adamant there is “no need to be proud, no need to be anything. She would have expected this.”
At some point would she have tried to tell him that he was allowed to rest and stop fighting?
“She may have tried, but I wouldn’t have let her,” he insists.
And while sharing what happened that day on the Woollongong beach and the aftermath is upsetting and brings back the trauma every time he retells it, Ricki says he will continue.
“It’s really hard to talk about it,” he admits. “But if I don’t talk about it, if I don’t keep up the fight, if I If I hadn’t made as much noise as what I’ve made over the years, Cheryl would have just been forgotten, and I can’t allow that to happen.”
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