“I won’t be saying anything, I’ll just stand there and watch,” the 53-year-old said.

Mr Grimmer and his two brothers, Paul and Ricki, have been lifted by a police breakthrough on Wednesday, which saw a 63-year-old man arrested over the abduction and murder of their then three-year-old sister.

“It’s unreal after all these years, 47 years, it’s great,” Mr Grimmer, who lives at Mount St Thomas, said.

“Between the three of us, it’s really emotional at the moment for us.

“I’m a big boy, but I get emotional. I’ve been listening to the radio and I watch it on TV and I get tears in my eyes.

“I think it’s been leading up [to a breakthrough] and now they’ve finally got this guy it’s sort of hit my two brothers and myself in a big way [that] it’s really happening.”

While it offered the family some closure, Mr Grimmer said the development after almost five decades was tinged with sadness.

“Mum and dad all their life since Cheryl went missing have been hoping and praying [for] some outcome of it and they don’t get to see it now,” he said.

“That’s in the back of your mind and to me that’s sad.”

Mr Grimmer told how his mum, Carole, never gave up hope that her daughter was alive – even in the moments before she died.

“I knew it was time for her to go, but she just wouldn’t go. She wouldn’t go until I said ‘looks it’s time to go, we’ll keep looking for Cheryl’,” he said.

“As soon as I said that … she went. We said that to her and everything’s come around our way now.”

Mr Grimmer was just five years old when Cheryl disappeared from the beach on a hot January day in 1970.

Since that day, he has wondered what his sister might look like today and questioned what happened to her all those years ago.

In December, police were convinced they were closing in on Cheryl’s killer, prompting investigators to re-appeal for information.

Mr Grimmer admitted not knowing if Thursday, the day some of the family’s questions were finally answered, would ever arrive.

“It’s in the back of your mind ‘is it going to happen?’ or is it [the case] just something that’s there and they’re just chasing it up?,” he said.

“It’s great it’s happened. We’ve got a lot of relatives over in England that have been listening to it over there on social media and [in] the paper over there, people asking what’s happening.

Mr Grimmer said while he was content with letting the investigators do their job, Ricki had made contact with them on a weekly basis, in the hope of a development.

“He just wanted to keep doing that, to keep in touch,” he said, adding Ricki lived “not far” from where the accused was spoken to by Victorian police on Wednesday.

Mr Grimmer preferred not to speak about the court case, saying “I don’t want to compromise anything”, but praised the Wollongong detectives who worked tirelessly to make the breakthrough.