Former cop haunted still by murder of Cheryl Grimmer

A former detective has told of his bewilderment at the collapse of the Cheryl Grimmer murder prosecution.

Cheryl Grimmer before she went missing in 1970.

A former NSW detective has told of his shock and bewilderment at the collapse of the Cheryl Grimmer murder prosecution, revealing he is haunted by thoughts of the three-year-old victim.

“I see Cheryl every day. Every time I go to bed I have night­mares,” Frank Sanvitale told The Weekend Australian.

“Cheryl’s standing there saying, ‘Frank, it’ll happen, don’t give up’. A little blonde girl on that beach. I know it’s Cheryl.”

Two years ago Mr Sanvitale sensationally made Australia’s oldest cold-case arrest over Cheryl’s alleged 1970 abduction and murder on a day out with her family at Wollongong’s Fairy Meadow beach.

But the case collapsed in Februa­ry when a judge ruled the ­accused killer’s confession in­admissable.

Speaking publicly for the first time about the investigation, Mr Sanvitale said there was “no justice” in the ruling, which led to the murder charge being withdrawn and the accused killer walking free without facing trial.

The events contributed to the detective senior constable retiring from the NSW Police Force on medical grounds in April after more than 20 years’ service.

“You get on to cases that just stick to you,” he said. “It’s my last murder case and it’s the hardest one for me to deal with — the ­injustice. I’m upset. I’m dis­illusioned.”

Mr Sanvitale, 61, joined the police at the age of 39 after career­s as a metallurgist and gym owner.

He began reinvestigating Cheryl’s disappearance in 2016, when he returned to work followin­g a heart attack.

A senior officer asked him to have a look at the case, which had sat unsolved and gathering dust for almost 50 years.

“He jokingly said to me, ‘Have a look at it, if you can’t solve this, nobody can’. They know I’m like a dog with a bone.”

His thin file expanded after he found “eight or nine boxes” of evidence stored with the NSW State ­Archives.

Three months later he was joined by another experienced investigator, Detective Sergeant Damian Loone.

In the files, they discovered a teenage boy’s detailed confession to the murder, made 15 months after Cheryl vanished. The boy, 17, told a manager at a juvenile justice centre in 1971 that he had killed Cheryl when he was 15.

In a subsequent typed record of interview with two detectives at the centre that same year, he ­recounted snatching Cheryl with the intention of sexually assaulti­ng her, and said he strangled her when she cried out.

Police at the time decided they did not have enough evidence to charge him.

The renewed investigation took Mr Sanvitale and Sergeant Loone to Britain, where they’d tracked down witnesses.

They were assisted by Scotland Yard detectives who happened­ to be investigating the 2007 disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann while on holiday with her family in Portugal.

Police alleged in court that they were able to verify significant aspects of the confession during the reinvestigation.

However, in the years after the confession, laws were introduced requiring the presence of a parent, other adult or lawyer for child confessions to be admissible. In a pre-trial hearing in the NSW ­Supreme Court, judge Robert Allan Hulme said the laws ­applied retrospectively.

Mr Sanvitale said the detectives who took the confession complied with the laws of the day. “Everything was done by the book,” he said.