Animal bones found in search of a girl who disappeared 55 years ago

The “area of ​​interest” reported in a research led by volunteers for the body of a British girl who disappeared in Australia 55 years ago turned out to be a false alarm, said New South Wales police.

A volunteer team that used corpse detection dogs in search of Cheryl Grimmer had hoped that their observation would be a breakthrough in the case which remained a mystery since it disappeared in 1970, when she was three years old.

But the bones found in the region belong to an animal, said the police said in response to the BBC questions, adding that research had “concluded”.

The suspect authorities Cheryl, who had emigrated from Bristol with his family, was removed from Fairy Meadow Beach in Wollongong in January 1970.

Thursday’s search took place in Balgownie, on a small wooden pocket mentioned in a confession made by a teenager.

In 2019, a suspect trial, known only by a code name, Mercury, which had been accused of kidnapping and murder of Cheryl, collapsed. The man, in the sixties then, had denied any reprehensible act.

Prosecutors later abandoned the accusations against him while a judge refused the confession he made as a minor.

The authorities have made numerous searches during the decades since Cheryl disappeared, but found few clues about what happened to him.

NSW authorities have offered a reward of $ 1 million ($ 660,000; £ 491,000) for information on the kidnapping of Cheryl and the alleged murder.

Cheryl’s brother Ricki Nash, 62, publicly highlighted what he believes to be mistakes in the police investigation dating from the day she disappeared.

Mr. Nash was then seven years old. He saw his sister for the last time in the changing rooms of Fairy Meadow the day she disappeared.

A petition asking the State Parliament to conduct an investigation into the surveys of missing people supervised by the South New Wales police, like Cheryl, brought together more than 10,000 signatures this summer.

He was debated in the Parliament, but in a letter responding to the petitioners, the state authorities did not undertake to hold an investigation.

With report by Tiffanie Turnbull in Sydney