It was 1971 when a 17-year-old confessed to murdering Cheryl Grimmer, who vanished more than a year earlier from a beach near Wollongong.

His confession sat in a box for decades until NSW Police charged him in 2017 with the three year-old’s murder, and the courts dubbed him “Mercury” because of his young age at the time of the alleged crime.

Two years later, a court ruled the confession was inadmissable as evidence and the murder trial collapsed.

On Thursday it was read in full by NSW MP Jeremy Buckingham , who used parliamentary privilege to name Mercury in a bid to force fresh information from the public and seek justice for Cheryl.

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