Chapter 16
Babe in Arms
The kidnapping of toddler Cheryl Grimmer
‘I hope someone took her ’cos they wanted a little girl. And you have to keep thinking that way, you know what I mean?’
At the beginning of the 1970s, a day at the beach was usually a pretty laid-back affair.
It was before Jaws, so hardly anyone worried about shark attacks; fewer still worried about wearing sunblock; and almost no-one worried about what was really in their Chiko roll.
Even lower on this country’s list of worries was stranger danger.
But looking back on simpler times, Carole Grimmer realises there were predators among us even then. She should know because one hot summer’s day in 1970, her three-year-old daughter, Cheryl, was kidnapped during a family outing to the seaside.
It’s been more than forty years since Carole has seen Cheryl, but she refuses to say goodbye.
Carole is convinced her daughter is still alive, and that all this time, she’s been calling another couple Mum and Dad.
•••
The mercury had already hit thirty-eight degrees by the time Carole Grimmer decided to take her four children, Rick, aged seven, Stephen, five, Paul, four, and three-year-old Cheryl, for a refreshing swim at the beach.
The Grimmers, who’d immigrated to Australia from England in 1968, loved the beach and their new life in Australia. ‘We wanted a better life for the kids ’cos we lived on a council estate in England,’ Carole Grimmer explains in a Bristol accent. ‘It was a toss-up between Australia and Canada but my husband thought Canada would be too cold.’
Carole’s husband Vince was a welder but he’d always wanted to be a soldier, a dream he was able to realise after moving to Australia.
At first the Grimmers lived in Nambour in Queensland, before moving to a migrant hostel at Fairy Meadow, near Wollongong on the New South Wales south coast.
Vince spent weekdays at the barracks at Penrith in Sydney’s outer west but looked forward to coming home to his young family every weekend. And no-one adored him more than his youngest child, Cheryl, a cheerful little girl who loved to sing and whom he called his ‘princess’.
Carole remembers how excited Cheryl became every time her dad walked through the door. ‘As soon as she’d see him in his uniform, she’d call out, “My daddy, my daddy!”’
The Grimmers were a close family and like many immigrants from the UK, never tired of Australia’s bright blue skies. ‘We really enjoyed the warm weather,’ Cheryl recalls, ‘and the children always jumped at the opportunity to go for a swim.’
But when Carole decided to take the kids for an innocent excursion to the seaside on Monday 12 January 1970, she could not have known it would turn into a living hell.
Being a weekday, Vince was at the barracks. Low on groceries, Carole had planned to go shopping until another couple from the hostel invited her and the kids to the beach. As usual, the children were excited about the prospect of cooling off in the surf, so Carole accepted the invitation. ‘I wish I’d gone to the shops now,’ she says, still haunted by memories of a day that started out so well.
At about midday, the adults all sat and watched as the children played in the water, swimming and splashing and laughing. Then at about two o’clock, a cold front blew in. ‘A really cold wind came,’ Carole says. ‘It was really strong. Blowing the sand everywhere.’ Carole sent her children to the change shed to rinse off the sand before they went home. They went to the men’s sheds where they all had a quick shower before little Cheryl stopped for a drink at the water fountain outside.
‘I never thought anything of it,’ Carole says. ‘When I was young you could go down to the woods and play without being accosted …’
But the wind had changed.
‘Rick came down without Cheryl and said, “She won’t come, Mum,” and so I went up to get her and I couldn’t find her and…it had all happened so quick.’
Cheryl was no longer at the water fountain so Carole searched inside the change sheds. Her daughter wasn’t there either. Seven-year-old Rick started panicking as he helped his mum look for his little sister – but she was nowhere to be found.
‘No-one had mobile phones in those days so I went down to the house on the corner and asked the lady who lived there to phone the police,’ Carole says. ‘I was numb,’ she recalls. ‘It was just like you were in a dream.’
Police started searching the beach and surrounds but finding Cheryl wasn’t going to be easy.
Back at the hostel, other officers interviewed Carole but the experience just added to her woes. ‘The police questioned me and made me feel like I was guilty,’ she says. Carole remembers how her good friend, Carmel, came over to offer moral support and became furious at one of the officers for upsetting Carole even more. ‘You made her cry!’ Carmel accused angrily.
‘That’s what I wanted to do,’ the officer replied, claiming that he needed to force her tears so she could let go of her grief. It was either an old-school interrogation technique or a genuine attempt at helping Carole to release her pain; either way, he’d have failed Psychology 101.
In the meantime, the rest of the police kept searching for Cheryl, determined to find her. They were joined by scores of locals, as well as Vince’s army colleagues, who wanted to do anything they could to help their mate.
Detective Sergeant James Dark, who began to prepare the brief for a coronial inquest in 2008, thirty-eight years after Cheryl disappeared, familiarised himself with every aspect of the early investigation. ‘Divers from Bulli Dive School searched the nearby lagoons and waterways but she wasn’t in the water,’ he says. ‘Scientific police took photos of the change sheds and looked for physical evidence but they too found nothing, not even any useful fingerprints.’
Early on, detectives from both Wollongong and the CIB in Sydney joined forces to help find the little blonde toddler, and extensively used the media in the hope that someone would recognise a photo of Cheryl and pinpoint where to find her. The press reported that Cheryl had been wearing a royal blue swimsuit that day, and had an unusually protruding belly button.
While the media appeals didn’t provide much help, police did have some important leads to follow.
James Dark describes the pivotal eyewitness account of another migrant from the hostel who was at the beach that day. What he saw would form the basis of the police investigation for more than four decades. ‘Cheryl had a drink and was about to go back to the beach when a male walked in the vicinity of the change sheds,’ James says. ‘He was seen to pick up Cheryl, wrap her in a towel and run back through the area bordered by the surf club and change sheds.
‘Cheryl appeared limp in the towel and as the man ran off with her, she was looking back towards the beach.’
While Cheryl’s brothers saw nothing of the broad-daylight abduction, three other little boys who knew the Grimmers also saw the man abscond with her. ‘They described him as “Continental” in appearance, possibly Italian or Spanish,’ James Dark says. ‘He was about thirty-five to forty years old, short – about five foot tall, of slim build, and wearing browny/orange–coloured swim shorts, a short-sleeved shirt, and thongs.’
Like everyone else that day, Cheryl’s kidnapper was dressed for the beach, so either he had originally planned to enjoy the sea and surf like everyone else, or he’d wanted to blend in as he left the scene with a child who was not his own.
Initially, Carole had figured Cheryl had just run off, but when she heard the stomach-churning news that a man had been seen running away with her daughter, she changed her mind. ‘I began feeling empty,’ she reports. ‘I imagined things she was going through …’
There was another clue too.
‘A car was seen leaving the car park, although the witness didn’t see the person in it,’ James reveals. The car was described as an off-white FC or FE Holden sedan, a 1956 or 1958 model. ‘The car was dirty and in a pretty rundown, rusty condition,’ James says, adding that it also had ‘black mudguards’.
In a job now carried out by the New South Wales Roads and Traffic Authority, the Police Motor Squad investigated all cars meeting that description. They identified and spoke to all owners of 1956 and 1958 Holden sedans but no suspect came to light.
Then they discovered a 1957 Holden that matched the description.
‘The owner was interviewed and he had a black mudguard, but he was eliminated because he was travelling down the south coast to Narooma from Sydney that day, and [around the time Cheryl disappeared] he was buying petrol in Bondi.’
Not surprisingly, police targeted known sex offenders from the outset. ‘The majority of those offenders provided corroborated alibis and were eliminated,’ James Dark says. ‘But when police narrowed it down, there were three main suspects.’
One of those suspects was a local travelling salesman who had a prior ‘Peep and Pry’ conviction for looking into a women’s change shed. Detectives interviewed the peeping Tom on Tuesday 13 January, the day after Cheryl disappeared. He initially told police that on the day Cheryl went missing he was nowhere near Fairy Meadow Beach, but they soon found out that the convicted peeping Tom was lying, further rousing their suspicions.
Changing his story, the suspect then told police he’d sunbathed at neighbouring North Wollongong Beach, before showering at Fairy Meadow ‘to avoid the crowds’.
Police found a towel and a pair of mustard-coloured swim shorts in the man’s car, but none of the witnesses identified the shorts as belonging to the man who kidnapped Cheryl. Investigators also showed photos of the suspect to the witnesses, but again, no-one identified him as the kidnapper. ‘At that stage,’ James states, ‘he was eliminated.’
The second suspect also lived and worked locally. ‘He owned a Holden sedan which was examined by investigators,’ James says. ‘He told police that he slept till eleven o’clock on 12 January before doing some sunbathing at Towradji Beach, the next beach to the north.
‘He participated in an identity parade but he wasn’t identified either.’
As if the disappearance of three-year-old Cheryl weren’t bad enough, there was another event that also left a lot to be desired.
Five days after she was abducted, someone delivered an anonymous letter to Wollongong police demanding $10,000 in exchange for Cheryl’s safe return. The money was to be left in a bag in a bin outside the library.
‘Police ran an operation and went down there waiting for the author of that note to turn up but they never arrived and were not identified. There weren’t even any fingerprints on the note,’ James says, still unaware whether the person who wrote the ransom note was the kidnapper or an opportunist trying to cash in on a callous crime.
The New South Wales Government also issued a $5000 reward – quite a large sum in those days – in the hope that someone would come forward with information on Cheryl’s whereabouts, but the reward went unclaimed.
Then, in April 1971, came a breakthrough…or so it seemed.
‘A man told police he was responsible for the disappearance and death of Cheryl,’ James Dark says. ‘He said that he strangled her, covered her body over and left the area.’ It was a startling confession in an investigation that was going nowhere.
‘They investigated his confession but due to some inconsistencies in his version of events, police ruled him out. ‘Not only that, but where he said he’d left her covered over, that area was extensively searched, and she wasn’t found.’
The confessor was also suffering from a mental illness, compounding the investigators’ belief that he was not involved.
Confronted with more questions than answers, the Grimmers moved away from Fairy Meadow to Villawood in Sydney, while they waited for army housing to become available. Carole couldn’t bear to be near Fairy Meadow Beach where well-meaning locals would ask her over and over again, ‘How can you cope and go on?’
‘I have to,’ Carole replied. ‘I’ve got three other kids.’
Vince, meanwhile, quietly devastated that his little princess was missing, didn’t talk too much at home about Cheryl’s disappearance but handled most of the media inquiries to spare his wife the pain of repeatedly telling their story.
Then in 1976, Vince left the army and took his family back to the UK to care for his dad, who had cataracts.
Surely, after what they’d been through, the Grimmers considered staying away from Australia for good?
‘We never thought of staying back there,’ Carole answers without hesitation.
Two years later when they returned to Australia, Vince and Carole still held onto the hope that their daughter was in the land of the living, and as the years went by, Carole even thought she saw her. ‘It seems a bit silly but when I used to travel on the train I’d see someone and think, “Are you or aren’t you Cheryl?” I couldn’t help myself.’
The disappearance of little Cheryl eventually became a cold case, and it looked like the family would never get any answers.
Things got even worse for the Grimmers in the mid-1990s, when Carole was diagnosed with emphysema, then in 2004, aged just fifty-eight, Vince passed away from lung cancer, never having found out what happened to his little girl.
It wasn’t until 2008, when James Dark relaunched the investigation into Cheryl’s disappearance, that Carole felt a renewed glimmer of hope.
James and his colleague, Detective Senior Constable Michael Bugg, travelled around New South Wales and interstate, re-interviewing the witnesses who were still living, and looking again at the suspects.
Hoping fresh media attention might bring forth new leads, an article about Cheryl’s disappearance was published in a popular women’s magazine, to a most curious response. A reader wrote to police, believing she was Cheryl Grimmer. The woman even sent police a cotton bud with a swab from the inside of her cheek and a hair sample so they could conduct DNA tests. But the forensic tests showed that the woman who believed she’d been abducted as a toddler was not Cheryl.
It was a finding that upset Carole, who felt that the woman was meddling in the investigation. ‘I don’t know why someone would do that,’ she reflects. ‘I think some people come forward because they like the limelight, but it’s very upsetting.’
There was another piece of information, almost forty years old, that James Dark and Michael Bugg couldn’t ignore either. The old files revealed a tip-off that had never been properly followed up: that Cheryl had been snatched by a couple whose own daughter had been run over around the time she disappeared. The informant claimed that little Cheryl had been given the other girl’s identity.
Unfortunately, that inquiry also came to nothing.
Poring over those old files, James also learned that a skull had washed up at Warilla, near Fairy Meadow, not long after Cheryl disappeared. With the advancements in DNA technology, he hoped to find out if it was her. But tests showed that the skull did not belong to Cheryl and to this day it remains a mystery who the child-sized skull belongs to.
After digging up what he could after so many years, James Dark developed his own theory about what happened to Cheryl Grimmer. ‘I think she was abducted from that beach, probably killed soon after wherever she was taken, and her body disposed of.’
James says that the original investigation was extremely thorough; the only problem was that forensic policing was nowhere near as advanced as it is now.
Looking over the evidence before him, James believes the first suspect in the investigation – the travelling salesman – is still the most likely offender. ‘He is the strongest suspect given the details of his interview – originally lying to police. He was on the road [as a travelling salesman] so he could’ve taken her back to his residence. It was a built-out area with lots of bushland. He had ways and means of disposing of a body.’
Ideally, James would have liked to interview the suspect again, but found out that he’d died in 1995. He spoke to the man’s family, but none of them could link him to Cheryl’s abduction.
The re-investigation wound down again in May 2011, when Coroner Sharon Freund ruled, on the basis of all the evidence, that Cheryl Grimmer had died sometime after she disappeared. And even though James Dark agrees, he still can’t put the case to rest. ‘It’d be unreal to be able to solve it,’ he says. ‘My priority hasn’t changed from putting this to rest and giving the family some peace if possible.’
In order to do so, however, James still needs that vital piece of information from the public, if not from Cheryl’s abductor, then from someone who knew him. ‘Someone’s gone to the grave with a dark secret, that’s for sure.’
While James hopes for a lead that will turn around an investigation that is older than he is, Carole Grimmer still clings onto the hope that her little girl, who’d now be in her forties, is still alive and was taken by someone desperate for a child of their own. ‘It could’ve been someone who had a daughter who died and they might’ve changed Cheryl’s name to their own name,’ she says.
‘But I just think if they’d wanted a child they could’ve gone about it another way like adoption instead of stealing.’