The family of a three-year-old girl who disappeared more than half a century ago will remain without answers after another uneventful police search.<\/p>\n
Cheryl Gene Grimmer was abducted on January 12, 1970, outside a shower block at Fairy Meadow Beach in Wollongong, on the NSW south coast.<\/p>\n
She was enjoying a day at the beach with her mother and three brothers.<\/p>\n
In the following decades, numerous searches found little to indicate what happened to her.<\/p>\n
Another search can be added to that tally after NSW Police, acting on fresh information, again failed to turn up a trace of the missing girl.<\/p>\n
Bones were found and photographed during a police search of bushland in the Wollongong suburb of Balgownie on Friday.<\/p>\n
“Following expert advice, the bones were confirmed to belong to an animal,” police said. <\/p>\n
“The search was concluded.”<\/p>\n
At the time of Cheryl’s kidnapping, witnesses reported seeing an unknown male carrying a child to a car park.<\/p>\n
In 2011, a coronial inquest found Cheryl was very likely dead, although the cause and manner of her death are undetermined.<\/p>\n
NSW Police re-investigated in 2012 and arrested a suspect who was extradited from Victoria.<\/p>\n
He was charged with her murder in 2017.<\/p>\n
But the man, who was about 15 years old when Cheryl vanished, pleaded not guilty before a pending trial.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors dropped the charges against him because a confession he made as a minor during a 1971 police interview was ruled inadmissible by the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n
This was because no parent, adult or legal practitioner was present at any stage of the interview, raising concerns about how the boy was cautioned.<\/p>\n
A AU$1 million (NZ$1.1 million) reward offered by police in 2020 for information about the abduction and likely murder of Cheryl still remains.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The family of a three-year-old girl who disappeared more than half a century ago will remain without answers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58721,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[85,67,42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-58720","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-crime-and-justice","10":"tag-headlines","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-top-news","13":"tag-top-stories","14":"tag-topnews","15":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}