Last year, New South Wales police sought advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions over whether William Tyrrell’s foster mother could be charged over his 2014 disappearance.
Investigators subsequently asked the DPP to suspend their consideration of the case until after further hearings of the long-running coronial inquest into the toddler’s disappearance and presumed death.
This week, some of the evidence that detectives had gathered against the foster mother was aired for the first time in a Sydney court, as the inquest that began in 2019 resumed.
The three-year-old in a Spider-Man suit vanished in Kendall on 12 September 2014 in what is arguably Australia’s most prominent active missing person case.
A decade on, those who gathered in Lidcombe coroner’s court this week heard that police now believe William’s foster mother disposed of his body after he accidentally fell from a balcony and died.
Detectives allege he accidentally died at his foster grandmother’s house on the NSW mid-north coast and his foster mother may have disposed of his body so she wouldn’t lose custody of another foster child in her care.
They believe she may have loaded his body into her mother’s Mazda, alerted a neighbour to the boy’s disappearance and then driven down the road to dispose of his remains in some undergrowth, the deputy state coroner Harriet Grahame heard.
It was only then that the mother called triple zero, according to investigators’ latest theory of the case.
The foster mother – who can’t be named for legal reasons – has consistently denied any involvement in the boy’s disappearance. And there is still no sign of William.
‘We know where he is’
The counsel assisting the inquest, Gerard Craddock SC, opened the week’s hearings by saying that “a police officer’s belief may be right or wrong … the coroner can’t act on the express belief of a police investigator” and that there was still “no forensic evidence” and “no eyewitnesses”.
But the coroner’s court heard that when the foster mother was served a summons to appear before the NSW crime commission in late 2021, Det Sgt Scott Jamieson told her: “We’re saying we know how it happened, we know why it happened and we know where he is.”
A month later, detectives put their theory directly to the woman, grilling her during a two-day interview at the secretive commission.
“I didn’t take William, I haven’t dumped his body … I’ve not touched him,” the woman said through tears in a video played at the inquest this week.
“I don’t know where he is … if you want to dig up that entire house of mum’s, dig it up. I didn’t touch him. God, I can’t believe you guys are saying I did that.”
In the 2021 video, the foster mother was taken through the day William disappeared, including what she was thinking at the exact moment she noticed him missing.
Sophie Callan, counsel assisting the crime commission, in November 2021 focused on why the foster mother didn’t immediately call the police or her husband when she realised the three-year-old was gone.
Callan also zeroed in on a drive the foster mother took in the immediate aftermath of Tyrrell’s disappearance. The woman, in the video, said she took the Mazda because she believed looking for him by car was “quicker.”
“I don’t know,” she said when asked why there was a nearly 20-minute gap between noticing Tyrrell had vanished and calling emergency services.
“It’s a panic … all I could think was, I don’t know, I panicked. Where is he? I don’t know where he is.
“I don’t know what I was thinking. All I could think about was I have to find him. I can’t give you an answer to that. I remember driving, I remember stopping, I remember thinking I can’t see him, this is silly, so I went back.”
Callan, in 2021, played audio of a phone tap of a conversation between the foster mother and a friend earlier that year, where she mentioned that William’s body wouldn’t be found without “clearing” local bushland.
“He’ll be found in 30 or 40 or 50 or 200 years’ time when they are doing a clearing and they find the skeleton,” she said in the call played at the inquest this week.
“I don’t believe that if I had done anything to William that I would have tried to cover it up, I would own up to it. I just can’t see it in me.”
The foster mother sobbed as she rejected police assertions these details indicated she knew where William was buried. “No, no, no,” she repeated.
A search that ‘left nothing to chance’
The November 2021 interview took place just before police launched an new and intensive search of the area around the Kendall property where William was last seen.
Police believed his remains could be found off Batar Creek Road – where the foster mother had driven the day William disappeared.
The search area stretched to the intersection of Cobb and Co Road and covered parts of River Oaks Drive. NSW police created colour-coded maps of the area using GPS data from trackers worn by police.
When searching, they relied on advice from Dr Jennifer Menzies, an expert in forensic anthropology, and Prof Jon Olley, a Griffith University specialist in geomorphology.
Craddock, the counsel assisting the inquest, on Monday said the search “left nothing to chance”.
“The [earlier] 2018 forensic search was an intensive, thorough search,” he said. “By comparison, the 2021 search was at a further level of intensity.”
Vegetation and sediment was dug up and sifted through by hand, bucket by bucket. Officers combed through the area, quadrant by quadrant.
They pumped water out of a local stream, they used chainsaws, hydraulic equipment and cadaver dogs.
But despite Olley telling the inquest William’s polyester Spider-Man suit would have lasted hundreds of years if dumped in the local creek, no sign of the boy’s remains was found. All they uncovered were animal bones.
Wild dogs and deteriorating bones
Olley told the court this week that he consulted another expert on whether wild dogs could have moved the toddler’s bones if they had been within the search area.
“I wrote an email to a wild dogs expert and asked him a series of questions which related to whether, if remains were there, could they have been removed from the site by animals,” Olley said. “And he responded saying ‘Absolutely, yes’.”
On Tuesday, Menzies added to that theory, saying the boy’s remains could have been “moved or obscured by ants or termites, rain run-off, wind-blown sand, digging by rabbits, wombats, dogs or foxes”.
She said juvenile bones deteriorated faster than adult bones because they had “lower mineral and higher organic content”.
Menzies said whether human bones deteriorated or remained intact depended on various factors including the soil’s acidity, the air temperature, scavenger activity and the density of the remains.
“I cannot state with certainty whether his remains are likely to be preserved or otherwise,” she said. “I have not visited the site of deposition.”
Without a body, the search for answers continues. The inquest is scheduled to sit for a final week in December.
In the meantime, a $1m reward for information remains on offer.
