Police to speak to Primbee dunes witness, 44 years since Toni Cavanagh and Kay Docherty disappeared

Retired police officer Jeff Dakers is leading a push for police to excavate a specific part of the dunes in search of the girls' remains, after chancing upon a man who believes he saw Milat at the site around the time the girls vanished from a Warilla bus stop, in July 1979.

This week NSW Unsolved Homicide Squad Detective Chief Inspector David Laidlaw told the Mercury he had assigned a former squad investigator, now stationed at Lake Illawarra Police District, to meet with the man on Thursday, August 24.

"He's a very skilled investigator in these types of matters and he's been with us for a number of years," Insp Laidlaw said.

"He'll be doing the initial assessment and taking the information to his supervisor."

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Det Chief Insp Laidlaw said the discussion could progress to a formal police interview. From there, police could potentially obtain a crime scene warrant or a coronial investigation scene order, allowing a dig to go ahead.

Mr Dakers has told the Mercury he took his witness's claims to police more than three years ago, but that nothing eventuated from that.

Insp Laidlaw said to his knowledge, the man's claims had yet to be assessed.

"This information might have been previously canvassed some time ago, but not through this witness," he said.

"These cases are always opened; they're never closed. This is what solves a lot of our crime: the public's involvement. We can't do it on our own so we need the public and the community moreover to provide us with information so we can act."

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Police handling of the state's cold cases has come under recent scrutiny, with numerous blunders aired during a Special Commission of Inquiry into suspected gay hate deaths in Sydney.

Last month the inquiry heard of a series of failures by police to follow up key recommendations that could have led to breakthroughs in some of the hundreds of unsolved homicide cases gathering dust.

Insp David Laidlaw conceded, during the hearings, his team simply had no record of many of the cold cases being examined.

The inquiry heard a 2005 recommendation to obtain a DNA sample from a person of interest in the unsolved murder of William Dutfield was ignored and that by the time police went to obtain a sample - three years later - the person had died.

Written evidence in another case, making reference to post-mortem results, was "just plain wrong", Insp Laidlaw conceded.

In another startling admission, Insp Laidlaw said his team "quite possibly" did not look at any cases at all from 1970-2009 and agreed he had "absolutely no idea as to the dimension of the problem".

Only 76 cases were found to have been reviewed between 2009 and 2017, despite 38 full-time officers working within the NSW unsolved homicide team.

Commissioner John Sackar earlier asked Det Chief Insp Laidlaw why an urgent audit of all unsolved cases had not taken place.

"These are all people's lives and people's family's lives," Justice Sackar said.

"Am I missing something, or do I detect that the police as an institution don't rate unsolved homicide too highly in terms of priorities?"

The inquiry was told that before 2004 there was no system in place for the management or review of unsolved homicides.

Det Chief Insp Laidlaw said the official record management system used by his team since it was established in 2004 remained a work in progress when asked why no data had been recorded for the past seven years.

- with AAP

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