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.
Cheryl Gene Grimmer was abducted on January 12, 1970, outside a shower block at Fairy Meadow Beach in Wollongong, on the NSW south coast.
She was enjoying a day at the beach with her mother and three brothers.
In the following decades, numerous searches found little to indicate what happened to her.
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.
Bones were found and photographed during a police search of bushland in the Wollongong suburb of Balgownie on Friday.
"Following expert advice, the bones were confirmed to belong to an animal," police said.Â
"The search was concluded."
At the time of Cheryl's kidnapping, witnesses reported seeing an unknown male carrying a child to a car park.
In 2011, a coronial inquest found Cheryl was very likely dead, although the cause and manner of her death are undetermined.
NSW Police re-investigated in 2012 and arrested a suspect who was extradited from Victoria.
He was charged with her murder in 2017.
But the man, who was about 15 years old when Cheryl vanished, pleaded not guilty before a pending trial.
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.
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.
A $1 million reward offered by police in 2020 for information about the abduction and likely murder of Cheryl still remains.