- Ricki Nash, 62, says it was a mistake not to interview him until 2017
- The 1971 confession was suspended due to a retroactive law
The brother of British girl Cheryl Grimmer, who was snatched from an Australian beach 54 years ago, claims police missed key clues to solving the case.
Ricki Nash was the last person to see his youngest sibling when she disappeared from Fairy Meadow Beach, just outside Wollongong in New South Wales, in January 1970 at the age of three.
And yet, he points out, police only recorded his statement for the first time in 2017, almost five decades after the tragic day.
He told The Sun: ‘How much more pain will our family have to endure to uncover the truth?
‘It’s incredibly frustrating. The word frustrating says nothing about how I feel, let alone how my brothers feel too.”
The family, which included brothers Paul and Steve and their parents, had moved to the country from Bristol in late 1968.
Click here to change the format of this module
Cheryl disappeared just after lunch on a hot day, just yards from the hostel where they were staying.
Ricki, then seven, was tasked with making sure his siblings washed the sand off their bodies after a day at the beach, but soon noticed that Cheryl was unwilling to leave the ladies’ room.
He then decided to ask their mother to help him, but by the time they got back to the shower, Cheryl was gone.
The heartbroken brother says he has always remembered his last moments with his sister and also remembers seeing a child who was taller than him and had a “big nose.”
Three days after her disappearance, a ‘ransom note’ was sent to Bulli police station, demanding $10,000 and a pardon in exchange for the toddler.
During an interview with Chief Inspector Lynch at the time, the officer asked anyone who recognized the letter’s handwriting, which experts assessed as that of a 14- or 15-year-old, to contact detectives.
The time and place of the exchange was determined by police and broadcast on television, which Ricki, now 62, said was their first major mistake.
The result was a huge crowd of hundreds of intrigued people desperate to witness the transfer.
Click here to change the format of this module
Ricki added that the attention the potential collection received ruined the possibility of it actually happening.
In 1971, a 17-year-old suspect confessed to the kidnapping and murder of Cheryl and even showed officers the spot where he allegedly buried the toddler.
But police suspended the confession, citing inconsistencies in his story, and the case remained quiet until March 2017, when the same man was arrested and charged with the young girl’s murder in Melbourne.
Ricki believes the confession was ignored until an inquest in 2011, but he was not told about it until 2016 or 2017, meaning he and his family were not given the chance to confirm the details of the confession.
It also caused Cheryl’s father to die before he found out that someone had confessed to killing his young daughter.
A trial was subsequently scheduled for May 2019 after the suspect pleaded not guilty at the Supreme of New South Wales in September 2018.
But a judge then ruled that a new law, which declares confessions inadmissible if they are not made in the presence of a parent or guardian, can be imposed retroactively.
As a result, the charges were dropped in February 2019, and in 2020 police were once again on the hunt for new leads, offering a million dollars for more information.
Ricki claims that a high-ranking officer and a prosecutor both told him that the suspect was responsible for his sister’s disappearance more than fifty years ago.
The traumatized brother has vowed never to give up his search for the truth about his sibling’s disappearance, adding: ‘Stop the lies. Let’s hear what went wrong, let’s challenge this law retroactively.’