SYDNEY, March 23 (Xinhua) -- Australian police have made the oldest cold case arrest in the country's history, apprehending a Melbourne man over a 47-year-old murder.
The 63-year-old man was arrested in Frankston, south-east of Melbourne, late on Wednesday with police saying he would be charged with the abduction and murder of Cheryl Grimmer on Jan. 12, 1970.
Grimmer was three years old when she went missing from the public change rooms at Fairy Meadow Beach, near Woolongong in New South Wales (NSW).
At a press conference on Thursday morning police said they had come to the conclusion that she had died within an hour of being abducted.
The arrested man, who reportedly has a grown up family of his own, was just 16 years of age at the time of Grimmer's disappearance.
News Limited reported that the man told friends about the crime 18 months after the incident at a boys' home.
Police interviewed the accused man, who now goes by a different name than he did then, in 1971 but did not press charges despite the man was divulging details of the crime.
He presented himself to the Frankston police station on Wednesday where he was interviewed for the second time and subsequently arrested and charged.
The case has become one of Australia's most notorious cold cases with Cheryl's brothers, Ricki, Stephen and Paul, continuing the search for their younger sister for 47 years.
In an interview in December 2016, Stephen Grimmer, 52, said the family had never gotten over Cheryl's disappearance.
"You never get over it," he said.
"I ride past (Fairy Meadow beach) all the time and I always look... so it's always on my mind."
He said that both his mother and father died without knowing what had happened to their daughter.
