True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast was recorded on. This Sunday, May twenty five is International Missing Children's Day. While thousands of Ozzie kids do go missing every year, most of them
are found, but not all of them. On a warm Friday morning in September twenty fourteen, three year old William Tyrrel was playing with his five year old sister in the front yard of his foster grandma's home in Kendall, a quiet rural town on the New South Wales Mid North Coast. It's about a four hour drive from Sydney, where William and his foster family lived. They're driven up the night before, stopping at a Macca's halfway point for a treat and a break before continuing on to visit Grandma.
She'd placed the Kendal property on the market, so their time to spend in this idellic rural setting was running out. William is wearing his favorite outfit, a red and blue Spider Man suit. His foster mom had argued with him earlier about what to wear underneath it. Kids being kids, She'd had to negotiate a Spider Man T shirt in place of the singlet that she wanted him to wear to.
Keep him warm enough.
William was having fun running around the verandah, roaring and giggling, full of energy and imagination. His foster mother and foster grandmother sat nearby, sipping tea and watching the kids play, smiling as they listened to the sound of William's playful growls in his sister's laughter echoing across the yard. At one point, William ran around the side of the house as his foster mother headed inside to make another cup
of tea, and then the roaring stops. She pauses, waiting for the next laugh or shout, but it doesn't come.
She calls out his name. Nothing.
What started as a normal childhood game quickly turns into something else. She checks the yard, no sign of him inside the house. Still nothing. Minutes pass then more, her heart is racing. Her voice gets louder, William, where are you. When William's foster father arrives home, the search is already underway. He starts knocking on neighbor's doors, asking if anyone's seen the little boy in the Spider Man suit. After about
thirty minutes of searching, they call the police. A call that would later be scrutinized, as so many women in situations like this are. Did she sound panicked enough for did she sound too calm?
Officers arrive, Locals.
Join in, Dozens, eventually hundreds of volunteers comb through the surrounding bushland. But there's no trace of William, not that day, not in the days that followed. One moment he was there, roaring, laughing, running, the next it was just gone. I'm Claire Murphy and this is True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know
the most about them. Now, it's important to note that the identities of William Tirel's biological and foster families are legally concealed. It's due to strict a strain in laws that protect the privacy of children in foster care and their caregivers, and that there are also some aspects of this case that we are legally bound not to discuss.
We also need to make it very clear that at this point in time, no one has been charged with either the abduction or murder of William Tyrrel, that the investigation is ongoing, and that everyone connected to this story at this time is innocent until proven guilty. Those who have been accused maintained that they had nothing to do with his disappearance. William Tyrrel's start to life wasn't smooth sailing. He was born into a household with parents who loved
him fiercely, but who issues of their own. They struggled with drug abuse and violence, and it was those issues that would lead to the state taking William into their care, into another fiercely loving family, but who also had to navigate the system that officially speaks for their son. When William vanished on the morning of September twelve, twenty fourteen, we weren't initially allowed to even know that William was being fostered.
Police said they didn't want it.
To interfere in their investigation, but it would set a precedent for a case that has been shrouded in suppression and secrecy ever since. When that information did finally come to light, it changed how we looked at the situation.
But then quickly, with his biological parents ruled out of any abduction attempt, our sites moved on to who could possibly have taken that sweet little boy in his Spider Man suit, the one in the picture that all of us can immediately bring to mind when we hear his name.
Did someone take him?
Kendall had more than a dozen registered child sex offenders living in the vicinity, could have been targeted by one of them. Why were their cars parked on a street where everyone has long driveways to accommodate any locals or visitors?
Were the even cars there at all?
Why were the careers of police officers ended over this case? Why did police change their focus and zero in on the family who were looking after him? What evidence do they have to tie them to a crime. There are endless questions surrounding the disappearance of William Tyrell. In a case, it draws comparison to other missing Aussie kids, like the
Beaumont children, or Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirsty Gordon. But while they were swallowed up by the crowds around them, how could a child be taken so quickly and so quietly in a street where everyone either knew each other or
of each other. Not a sound, not a trail, not a glimpse of red and blue in the national forest that surrounded the property, and nothing ever since now, almost eleven years later, The team behind the podcast Witness William Tyrrel are uncovering evidence from the inquest that has thrown up even more unanswered questions. Dan Box is the host of Witness. He sat down with us to discuss their latest findings on the case that continues to loom over
the country like every parent's worst nightmare. I'd really like to start off with just where you feel Australian hearts and minds are on the disappearance of William Tyrell. Because thousands of kids go missing across Australia every year. Why is this disappearance so much still at the forefront of our minds? And every time the tiny little development, we're all so invested.
Why this case?
Oh you know what, Claire, I am really glad, genuinely glad to hear used to say that in those terms, that it is still at the forefront of people's minds because I think my greatest fear, and I know the greatest fear of those people close to Willie is that he may be forgotten. Because we're now at the point where you can see it starting to be forgotten. The police investigation has run for ten years more than with no result. No one has been charged over William's disappearance.
The inquest has run for round about five years and is due to report within a few months. From what I've seen of the evidence, is almost certainly going to come down and say we don't know. There's no evidence of what happened to William. And I've seen it in the last few months as a reporter working at the inquest doing this podcast, that it started to fall off the front pages, it started to get less attention. I remember a time when there were literally convoys of press,
effectively paparazzi, pursuing witnesses and suspects. I know that because I was sadly I was among them. There was that level of interest, and it's worried me that that interest might stop, because the moment that interest stops is the moment I think it's possible for those responsible to find William to stop looking. And my greatest fear is that
that will happen. So to hear you say it in those terms that he is still at the forefront of people's minds, he is still in people's hearts actually is incredibly reassuring.
It's definitely one of those cases that I would discuss in the same breath as someone like Madeline McCann's disappearance. It's that very much unknown quantity about it. Yes, and there's been other cases of missing children you only just have to say their names, like the Beaumont children and immediately everybody knows what you're talking about. This case is very much in that vein.
It's the greatest fear as a child, I think that you could be taken from what's safe, and as a parent that your child could be taken from what's sale safe. So it goes right to that kind of absolutely prime or feeler. I don't know if you're a parent, I'm sorry, but I am.
Yeah, I am.
Have you had the moment where you've lost sight of your kids, even just for like a few seconds, and suddenly it almost feels like the whole world is shaking. It's that kind of just instinct that we need to look after our children. And for this to happen, for a child to go missing for ten years later to not know what happened to him, it strikes that deep.
Well, can you take us to Kendall where this all started, because in the podcast you do go visit there and you do talk about picturing your own children in that garden that day and realizing maybe just how easy it could have been for a child to run to a certain point and potentially be snatched by somebody. Can you give this paint a picture of what that property is like and what Kendall in general is like.
Kendall is a small town. I mean, it's almost a feeling. It's got a kind of a central village green a war memory or most of the shops and houses organized around that. And then there's one road that leads out into the forest and very quickly at the time William went missing, the trees on either side just kind of closed in over it, and it became dark and it
became quiet. It's a paved road, but there's no white lines down the middle, and you followed that through the forest and then you turned right into a dead end street called Benirum Drive, and it was kind of perfect, kind of idyllic, big properties, houses set back from the road, dead quiet, the kind of place you could imagine wanting your kids to grow up, or you could imagine taking your kids to see their grandparents, which is what William's
foster parents did that day back in September twenty fourteen. There's space to play, there's quiet. I've been there now again and again over the past ten years, and the street hasn't changed. It's quiet. You notice cars coming because there's so few people around. And it's beautiful, the bushes on every side, there's flowers. It's great, except of course,
it's where this awful thing happened. And you follow that road up to the top where it stops, and there's a house on the right hand side, and the house is set slightly up on a grass bank and there's a verandah around the house at that level, and the I was going to say the theory, but really we
don't have any knowledge of what happened. But one of the first times I went there, the detective who was leading the investigation then was talking through his theory at the time of what may have happened, which was that William was out on the verandah with his foster mum foster grandmum, and he ran off around the side of the house playing It was playing a game called Daddy, which you can imagine. It involves him roaring and then
running away and running back and roaring. And he was three, so it would have been hilarious and he was off roaring, and then it went quiet, and it went quiet for just a bit too long. On the evidence of the two adult women who were.
There, Well, that's something as a parent you learned to listen out for, right, because you listen out for theselves. But the quiet often says so much more about what your child is doing. Right.
It does, doesn't it, But it's always the quiet is always the one you notice when it's been going on for just a bit too long as a parent, because that's what alerts you to it. And on the evidence of the foster mum and the foster grandmom, that's what happened. The quiet went on for just too long. And when I stood there with that detective, you can see down the grass slope of the property towards the road, and it's not fenced, so the grass leads right on past
a couple of trees to the empty road. And the theory at the time was that maybe William had around the corner and kind of kept going because it was all downhill and it's steepish, and he'd kept running and kind of ended up a bit further down the grass, and there'd been somebody there by chance or by design, there'd been someone there and that someone had said hello, and then something had happened. And I remember standing there and I still remember it now, and I I had
a three year old at home. My eldest was three then, and so when the detective was describing her, a three year old could run down the slope, I could picture it that slightly wonky way that the little kids run. Nothing quite works yet, so they were kind of walking
her way down. I could picture my daughter kind of running down their slope and I could imagine exactly that happening, and then that meeting with something at the bottom of the slope on the road, and it just because I could picture my child doing what the police thought William might have done. It was so real and so personal. And I don't get a lot of shivers or feelings doing this kind of work, because you can't allow yourself
to as a crime reporter. But on that case, it bothered me, and it bothered me the whole way home, and it bothered me into the house. And I think that is a part of the reason that I've kept going back to it over the ten years since, just that feeling of being able to fear what had happened happening to my family.
So, as you mentioned, that quite went on for a little bit too long, and William's foster mother, her instincts are pricked. She goes to investigate. She can't find him anywhere. As you've mentioned, it's a very quiet spot. There's very few people around, Like the chances of him being snatched by somebody seems completely remote. And yet she says she can't even see his Spider Man suit, which is quite bright red and blue in amongst all of that greenery,
which you'd think he would stand out pretty clearly. She starts to panic, people start to join in on the search. Her husband comes home, he joins in. What happens from that point on because it feels like if you don't find him in that short of time, in the very near vicinity, like you have to start thinking bigger pretty quickly.
Yeah, And at that moment everything becomes contested, because we've got to remember that where we are now, with the inquests preparing to report in a few months. The last few years have been dominated by the police focusing their investigation on the foster mother, and they have sent a brief of evidence against her to the States Director of Public Prosecutions asking for advice on whether to charge her.
We don't know exactly charge her with what, and the DPP hasn't as far as we know, come back and given any advice as yet. But we do know from court hearings and our work on this podcast over the past two years now that the police suspected the foster mother of being involved, but her account is completely different. Her account is William is gone. She runs runs around desperately trying to find him. She alerts the neighbors they're
out on the street. She drives up and down the road and actually a bit round the corner looking for him, calling for him, and then everything kind of changes with this case in a way that I've been doing this job reporting on crime for decades now and I've never seen anything like it in terms of the scale of the response. The police are there within minutes. It's an incredibly impressive police response. They're within minutes, and they're there
within scale with scale, huge numbers. Helicopter support messages go out on Facebook. People turn up in their hundreds to search for William. But the one thing they don't do is they don't secure a potential crime scene because the focus is on a missing boy who may have wandered off into the bush, and so no one puts tape around the house, puts tape around the garden, says don't come here. People trample that grass, they walk up and
down it, they drive up and down the road. Cars are allowed in and out of the road without anyone writing down registration plates, without being searched. It's chaotic. As not to blame the police, because I'm sure I wouldn't have done a better job.
While I hope they didn't know what they were dealing with. At the time, I.
Didn't know what they were dealing with. And the policies have changed since. But hundreds of people allowed into a potential crime scene that we now believe certainly was a crime scene. Anything forensic is gone. It's been literally trampled under foot, and as a result, there is we know this from the inquest. There's no forensic evidence. There's no eyewitness account of how William was taken away, what happened
to him. And I do think that's the fundamental that the original sin in this case, that that element of control at the start to say stop, this is a potential crime scene. Wasn't done, and we don't know what we lost as a result.
One of the things that has been brought up quite a bit from the beginning is the fact that William's foster mother said she saw two cars parked on the road, which is very unusual for that street because people have very long open driveways. And she said, you know, she saw that the windows of the driver's sides were down. They would have been able to view the property. She could see them when she opened up the veranda door that day, but no one else can corroborate.
That those cars were ever there.
Another car that was brought into question a white car that came up later where someone suggested that they saw William in a car with somebody was the same color but a different kind of car. So how do police investigate this when there's no one else to back it up? The other evidence feels like it doesn't match like and I guess they have to take into consideration that she's potentially not telling them the truth.
Yeah, that's absolutely right. And that white car you mentioned that white car haunts this investigation like a ghost. So we've we don't actually put this in the podcast or are written reporting at all. But we've gone through every single reference to that white car in all of the exhibits and the interviews we've done and the interviews the police have done everything we've been able to get hold of,
which is thousands and thousands of pages of information. And the white car is here, it's there, it's there, it's mentioned by this person that person. But you can't stitch it together. You can't say, well, that's that white car. You can't. It's always a similar description and it's always this white possibly station wagon. But there's nothing secure, nothing
you can actually say, Okay, that's that's a lead. And in terms of the foster mum's evidence about those two cars, she says she saw and I've spoken to her about this,
She didn't remember them at the time. She remembers seeing them, but I think it's a day or two days later she's driving out to the airport to pick up quite a lot of family and friends came at the time to support the family they're driving out for that, and she says she remembers the cars at that point, and that has allowed plenty of people to question her memory.
Both the police have questioned her memory about that, and I mean, you've probably got an idea of the scale of the internet interest in this, the kind of web sleuths and the people who comment on this, and journalists as well. It's always in dispute is to she really see that, because if she did, why didn't she remember it at the time. But this is where you get into People's memories aren't perfect, and I've again done this job long enough to see plenty of crimes where people's
memories are frankly all over the place. Particularly if she is telling the truth and she was going through this incredibly emotional thing, she'd lost her child, She's got fear, panic, all of that. Her memory isn't quite right. But if she did see those cars, then that is obviously potentially significant because that's basically where William would have gone if he had run down that slope, as the police initially believed.
But we've never been able to identify or pin down those cars, And I don't know what you can read into it.
Speaking of reading into things, though, you mentioned the internet saluting that's gone on alongside the actual official investigation, where people have been allowed to basically free for all their opinions on what they feel has happened in the aftermath of William's disappearance. What impact does that have on the actual official investigation Because there are suppression orders in place that means people like you and I I can't talk
about certain aspects of this case. But when that information gets leaked, the internet can do with it as it pleases, and I imagine that that doesn't always help police in their investigating and trying to get to the bottom of this. No.
I think it's a really good question, and it's a modern phenomena. It's a phenomena of our age with criminal investigations,
and you're seeing it around the world. There was a murder investigation in I think the UK recently where the police actually had to put out an appeal to internet sleuths to stop going to the crime scene because people going down there and filming themselves trying to solve the case or kind of live streaming themselves at a crime scene, and of course that doesn't help anyone for the same reason they might trample on the evidence. But in this case,
I've never seen anything like it. The like you said, just on that thing about suppression orders, this is the most secretive police investigation I've ever seen in terms of the sheer number of non publication orders, suppression orders, things that you and I can't talk about doing this work. We've got a spreadsheet of all the different court orders. It's got about forty lines on it of different court
orders saying this can't be mentioned. At times there have been suppression orders on the existence of the suppression orders, and then they've been revoked, they've been reinstated. Different courts have been unable to look at evidence because of suppression orders by other incredibly secretive, some of it for good reasons, some of it maybe not. But the Internet has broken
all of that. And what you've also seen as well as like the names of people, the identities of people, the workplaces of people splashed around the internet, which means people have gone to their homes. So people have done I've seen it online, people who are arranging to visit the foster parents' houses almost as a social thing, to take photos of themselves. People have taken photos of themselves in court, which is actually illegal and kind of posted
them online. Is like souvenirs. But where it gets damaging. To go to your question about damaging the investigation is confidential evidence from the investigation, like witness statements, police records has been leaked and posted online, so you can't remember. At the heart of this is a three year old boy, and the search to find that three year old boy, and if he is no longer with us, to bring whoever did that to justice surely the most important thing.
And yet people who surround this case, including journalists I'm not exempting us or myself from this, but particularly online, have been sharing witness statements, have been sharing police records. Some of them were posted on a website called big Footy, and that is hugely damaging because if any of those potential witnesses become suspects end up being charged, all that evidence gives them lines of defense in court that they wouldn't have otherwise, and it can reveal the police's hand.
It's a very strange kind of obsessive tendency among some people to kind of parade what they've got, and then the question comes down to who leaked this information, and why did they leak this information, and what did they think they were doing or hoping to gain from it. This case is unlike any other I've seen on a number of levels, but particularly on that.
You're listening to true crime conversations with me Claire Murphy. I'm speaking with Dan Box, host of the Witness podcast.
Up next, Dan.
Shares the original list of suspects in this case and explains why most of them were eventually ruled out.
You mentioned suspects. There are potential suspects. There's a list of.
Persons of interest, which is like it seems ludicrously long, like hundreds of people.
It was hundreds at one point.
Yeah, yeah, but then there was actually a smaller list of potential suspects, and they included people who lived in the Kendal area who were known offenders. And I mean, I'm not a local resident of Kendall. I don't know how aware they would have been of just how many people with especially sexually related crimes amongst them. But can you give us an idea of who some of these people were and how they were eventually kind of ruled
out or were they ruled out? Are they because we still don't have any kind of resolution here, we don't really know if they're still persons of interest or suspects or what.
Okay, so again, long story with all of this, but are really important still it in your right to highlight it? So persons of interest is a term the police used to basically mean someone they want to know more about. It's really broad, and the police drew up this list that eventually became hundreds of people, and then they divided them into kind of low priority, medium priority, high priority, and then in the high priority they'd never call them suspects.
But obviously the line between person of interest and suspect is permeable at that point, and some of them clearly got elevated to being a suspects by the police. But initially they drew such a wide net. You're right. Known child offenders were a huge part of this, and terrifyingly for those people who lived there. One thing that the William Tirele investigation revealed was the sheer number of known
child offenders in that area. I can't tell you the number because it's one of those things that is suppressed by different court orders. But I can tell you the number is, or the numbers that I've been told, are far higher than I would ever have expected, and far higher than those who did live there would ever have hoped to have seen. And then at one point the police basically draw one kilometer radius around Kendall on that day and say to people, you need to tell us
why you were there. If you were there, why you were there, why we should exclude you. So people come onto the list for that reason. And then there's the people with actual connections to the family, connections to the house. A couple of different tradesmen called the house that day about different jobs, straight onto the list for that reason. So the net is thrown very wide to scoop people up, and then the police start working through it. I mean,
the scale of that investigation is national. Information is sent to police forces around the country. Can you chase this person down? Can you ask these questions? It all comes back and you can imagine the kind of sheer data that comes back. It's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people generating thousands of pages of documents. This person says they were there, We've checked this alibi, we checked that.
But out of it you do start to focus on a few and then, most recently at the inquest just before Christmas, we heard this really strange testimony which bothered me at the time and hasn't been really widely reported, which is that very recently the last few years, when the police have started to focus on Williams Foster Mum, who I should say absolutely repeatedly and publicly denies any
involvement in what happened. But around this time that they start to focus on her, we heard this evidence that this list of persons of interest was getting reduced very
very quickly. Literally dozens, if not hundreds of people were being scratched off it for different reasons, to deal with whether or not they had a driver's license or this or that, And it certainly seemed to me that that list was being reduced far quicker than perhaps it should be, to a far smaller number of remaining persons of interest. And obviously we ultimately know that the police settled their attentions on Williams Foster Mum, despite the fact that the
inquest revealed no evidence against her. So there's all these questions that do still need to be resolved.
You did interview the former ly detective on this case, Gary Jubilin He was removed from the case and then later convicted of criminal charges over his conduct during this investigation. Yes, he was, Yeah, and I understand that his conduct was
will included his discussions with one of these people of interest. Yes, how did speaking to Gary about this help shape your view of how this case was being handled and how that list of persons of interest or suspects, whatever they were at the time, How did that form your opinion on how that investigation was being led.
Okay, So Gary is one of three detectives who've led this investigation over the years. He was the middle one essentially, and full disclosure, Gary and I go back a long way. So I first got to know Gary as a news reporter when he was working homicides on a different case. I reported on this case he was working on it. I subsequently ghost wrote a couple of books memoirs of his after I left the paper I was working on. And now I work with Gary because he's left the Cops.
As you said, he was effectively thrown out, and he's now got a podcast, and I cooperate on that. I kind of oversee that. So he and I have a professional and a personal relationship, and we've spoken about that publicly at length, and we both get a lot of criticism for that, particularly over whether or not I can actually report on any of this at all objectively because of that connection to Gary, to which the only answer I can give is yes, I have that connection to Gary. Yes,
it inevitably shapes the way I think. I don't agree with Gary on everything at all. And I've said this to him, and you just got to judge my reporting by looking at it and saying, has he done this fairly? Despite the connection Gary is in work on this instigation probably broke him, if I'm honest, I think he works so hard, and because it was a missing child, and he said this before, if you don't know the child
is definitely dead, then every day matters. So they were that whole task for Strikeforce, So we were throwing everything they had at it, and ultimately it destroyed his career. But in terms of talking to Gary shaping how the police went about it, I've seen the toll it's taken on the cops who worked this case, going right back to the start, and there have been dozens have worked on it over the years, and I've seen internal emails
that bear this up. You know, it's a devastatingly hard case to work on and a devastatingly hard case to let go, and that desire to solve it, to bring that boy home if possible, or at least bring justice to the families. I think that has driven the police to pursue this case so hard, and they have done that, and they have focused on certain people with such intensity that I think they have actually caused damage to those
people's lives. You can talk about different people who became suspects, whose lives have been upended, held up to media scrutiny, charged with things, accused of things. Their families have been told they're involved. The damage done by the police investigation because the police are trying to do the right thing and solve this crime, is immense to a huge number of people, and I have probably seen that closest from the time I've spent talking to Gary.
You mentioned that a brief of evidence has been sent off to the DPP to see whether charges can be laid against William's foster mother. Yeah, but you've also mentioned that the original scene here is that evidence, whatever it might have been at the time of William's disappearance, is essentially gone due to the handling of the crime scene itself.
Has there been any mention in any of the interactions you've had with anyone close to this case about why the police decided to shift to looking at William's foster mother as the main suspect because she has seemingly been very helpful in trying to find William from the very beginning, and police have gone to great lengths to try and seemingly catch her out.
They have bugged her vehicle, they have.
You know, listened in on conversations that she's had with her husband. Like, they've gone through a lot up until this point. It's been five years now since they kind of came out and said she's our main suspect. But what if any evidence are they basing this on.
Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, at this point it's probably the key question, what have they got? Because I mean you might remember I do. There was a front page on the Daily Telegraphs going back about five years now, which big front page basically said new suspect in William Tool investigation, and it said the police are confident they are going to solve this case. They are close to solving the case. And I remember seeing that and thinking, well, they must have got something. You
would not be that forthright in briefing that journalist. And I've spoken to the journalist. If you didn't know you had something good. And before this, the police were looking at the inquest, which was running at that point. We're looking very much at somebody different, a different person of interest, a guy called Frank Abbott, who is a convicted pedophar who has also denied any involvement in what happened to William.
But there's this moment, and it's in twenty twenty from the from the top of mine, remember the exact month. But there's a review of the investigation, and that review shifts the focus from where it was going, which was largely Frank Abbott at that point, onto Williams Foster Mum. But what it also coincides with is Gary Jubilin leaves the investigation. Shortly before that, Gary Jubilin was taking the investigation in a different direction. He was focusing on somebody else,
and there was surveillance operations going. There was a huge police investigation being run into that person. Gary leaves in a really bad way. Like you said, he's effectively thrown off the police. He's taken off the investigation, he retires, he's charged and convicted with I legally recording conversations with
this other person. And at that point I think the police want nothing more to do with Gary, and it's possible the police want nothing more to do with anything that Gary touched, and maybe they just say we're not going to look at that person anymore because Gary's hands are all over it, and we know Gary in their minds, Gary's bad. Gary's got a habit of falling out with people professionally, and I say that as a friend, and I think he fell out with a lot of people
in the cops. I don't think he'd dispute with that, and that may have also colored the way they thought about him leaving. So they steer away, and they look at the investigation, and they find a new person of interest, which is William's foster mum. Now the cops have looked at her before, of course, because statistically it's overwhelmingly likely if someone harms a child, it's the person closest to them.
So the first police investigation I can remember talking to a senior cop in the days after William went missing and being told they looked at the biological family and the foster family and written them out. Then Gary takes over, He does it again, writes them out. Years later, one of Gary's colleagues says, we need to look at the foster parents again, so they bring them in, interview them, put bugs in the car, everything you said, and decide
there isn't the evidence. Again, so they've been written out three times, but the police come back to them. Now. In the most recent inquest hearings, we heard a lot of what the police had got, or we heard what the inquest was prepared to make public, and I got to be honest, it didn't amount to anything. And the lawyer leading the inquest he said, there's no evidence of
what happened to William. So we don't know what, if anything, the police have got that made them change their mind, except potentially, statistically, it's most likely that it's the people closest to them, and maybe that was it.
Did we ever, then find out what led to that nude search that we saw. I believe it was in twenty twenty one where all of a sudden officers were out back around Kendall, you know, digging up areas which we presume had already been cleared in the immediate search after, because as you mentioned, there were hundreds of people out there.
They were draining dams, they were you know, clearing waterways. Like, what evidence did they have to lead them to renew that search, which we have later found out or not found out whether they found anything in that.
Search, although I think if they found something, we'd know about it. The other thing like this also came after the foster parents, and I'm not suggesting a link, but just to explain the context. This came after the foster parents started to openly and privately criticize the police for not doing enough. So there were media interviews whether Foster mum criticized the police for not doing enough to search
for William or to find him. And I've seen letters that she sent to the police commissioner saying you're not doing enough. You're not even answering our phone calls. We're going to start lobbying politicians to get more support for the investigation. So there's a real honestly, there's a fallout between the Foster family and the police at this point.
And then the police launched that massive investigation. And again this is a reason to think the police have got something because that investigate, that search would have cost millions. There were hundreds of police involved. They sieved the earth. They took out fifteen tons of earth and they sieved it. And if you go up there, you can see the bush, and you look at the photos of the time it was cleared of all vegetation and then it was dug.
The earth was dug. To do that on the scale they did was unprecedented and hugely expensive, and you can only think they would have done that because someone in the police force is saying, well, we're paying for this. You would only think they would have done that if they had something solid. And yet years and years later we've seen nothing at all either that led to that search or that was found as a result of that search.
I mean, the best they've got, thinking back to the inquest in November last year, was an argument that potentially the reason they hadn't found William was that maybe some animals had taken the bones and that lost for that reason, and the coroner didn't even want to hear it. The police tried to get it into evidence and the coroner said, I've refused to hear that before, I will refuse to hear that again. I think the coroner and the police are also not united in their view of how this
investigation should have been run. That's been made quite clear in the inquest. In quite gentlemanly, loyally, legally terms. The lawyer leading the inquest has made it quite that what the police are doing now, focusing on the foster mum and the search they've been doing most recently, is not to do with the inquest. It's being done by the police and not by the police and the coroner together. So I think where we are now is a real tangled mess and it's kind of tragic.
Next, Dan reveals new information about an original suspect who told people in his community that he knew exactly where.
William's been buried.
Well, you obviously have been following this in quest very closely, and as you mentioned, certain things have come up that you have felt have been under reported or have kind of flown under the radar. And one of those things that's really piqued your interest is Frank Abbott's role in this.
And you've mentioned him already in that he was a person of interest at one stage and fatally featured quite heavily in reporting back in the beginning when William Terrele went miss in the aftermath of that, but he kind of had a habit of sort of putting himself back in the spotlight as this investigation kind of unfolded. Can you just give us an idea of who Frank Abbott is and how he's been in and out of his investigation over the years.
Frank Abbot is I've heard so many stories about Frank Abbot over the last five months. We've been focusing on Frank for about five months now, and we've been up to where he lived. We've spoken to the people who knew him, We've spoken to family. I've heard nothing good about Frank Abbot. He's a convicted Pedophile's in jail for sexually assaulting three children, two girls and a boy. The people who lived in the town he spent a lot
of time in, which is called John's River. It felt everyone we spoke to seemed to know that Frank was a child defender. Everyone had heard stories about Frank doing things to children, being a danger to children, stories of other crimes he'd committed, from petty crimes to sexual offenses. No one had anything good to say about Frank at all. And what troubled me about Frank is is he kind of we first learned about Frank. I think when the inquest started and there were these stories, like you said,
of him putting himself forward. He called up the police and asked to be put straight through to the strike force investigating William and told them that they should be looking at someone else, another person and turns out another convicted pedophile. He would tell his neighbors that he knew where William was buried, or that he knew where he'd been in an area of the bush, and he could smell a body, and he knew the difference between a
human body and a kangaroo. Like he'd say genuinely disturbing things. He, according to evidence before the inquest, told some children that he buried William Tioell in a suitcase. Things that are genuinely unpleasant allegations. All of this is evidence before the inquest. But he's making connections between himself and what happened to William, and maybe that's just weird boasting. He wants people to
be afraid of him. He likes provoking a reaction. But there's a definite pattern, and there's evidence before the inquest that one of his close mates, a guy called Ray Porter, who was very close to death at the time, told a nurse that he had driven his mate north. I think a day or so after William disappeared with William till in the car and he didn't name the mate, but one of his close mates was Frank, and the
police definitely looked at Freim. So we've got copies of phone calls that Frank made in prison where he's now serving time for these child sex offens where he talks about how the police are looking at him and he says I had nothing to do with it, but he also says, you know that they are investigating whether he went to that backyard and tempted William out with lollies and ice cream. And you can hear Frank talking about all of this on these tapes. So the police definitely
looked at him. But then it all went quiet. And at the inquest, all this evidence about Frank, you expect Frank to be called to answer questions, and then they didn't. And if you go back to the media reports from the time, everyone thought that there's media report saying today's the day Frank is expected to answer questions, and then it stops. And part of that I think is COVID
actually shut down the inquest for a bit. Part of it might be the police around this time start looking at the foster mum, but the coroner won't say why Frank is not called. She's refused to make that decision public. We've asked them, they didn't respond. They said they were too busy. So we don't know why Frank has never answered these questions, and there were all these unanswered questions
about him. So what we've done over the past about five months now is just try and learn everything we can about Frank.
One of the episodes of your podcast, you do talk about a fairly shocking moment when a man who's living in Frank's old house that you've gone to speak to has kind of suggested that maybe Frank's brother has told people about.
Frank Abbott's involvement in William Thiol's case.
Yeah, this is one of the things that shocked me. So we were in John's River where Frank used to live, just talking to everybody, and we talked to the neighbors and eventually we think we're going to just try his house, see who's there. Two men live there now the invite us in. The younger man is talking about Frank and he's telling the same sort of stories we've heard a lot before. He talks about he'd heard that Frank took girls and boys into the forest and tied them up
to trees and did something bad out there. I don't know if that's true, but Frank has been convicted of child sex offenses, so we know that that at least is true. And then the guy's dad comes in and the younger guy says, you should sit down with my dad, and he starts talking to us, and we just say we're interested in Frank, and he says, yeah. Frank's brother,
guy called Bluie. He always used to say Frank wasn't involved in what happened to William, but just before he died he said that Frank was involved and that William was buried up on this He says, the big Bird Mountain, just by that big tree there, And we we google this later and it turns out there's a landmark there called the Bird Tree. It's this massive eucalyptus tree deep in really dark and quite spooky forest, really isolated, and the bird tree is next to another giant tree called
ben Roon. So William disappears from Benerum Drive. No one's ever searched there. But now we've got this disputed allegation that Frank's brother was telling people that that's where William was and that Frank was involved. So we go and talk to the man's son, the guy that the old person. The older man says, Bluie, Frank's brother told his son this. We're going to talk to the sun and he says, look,
I don't remember that. But Blue never had anything good to say about Frank, and Blue thought Frank deserved to be in jail for things he'd done in his past, and that wasn't explained. But at this point we think, okay, look this has come up. It's a disputed account. We don't know. But weeks later, we're back in John's River again, just talking to people, and we go back to the same house and we're going to talk to the older
man again, and he's insistent. He says that conversation definitely happened. And we say, but your son said he didn't remember, and the old guy says, ah, I know, I was told, you know, tight lipped, And it was almost as if he's being told that he was told not to talk about it. And then the younger man arrives in a fury. He drives up onto the lawn and he gets out. He's completely shirtless and he just I'm not talking about Frank Abbott. I don't want to talk about him again.
And he basically throws his off the property. So we weren't able to get a full explanation of what happened, except that there's this allegation that William is disposed of near the bird Tree. We know the police haven't searched there. From talking to other members of the Abbot family, we
know that they used to go there as children. People know that area up there, and it's the tree itself is on a mountain called Middle Brother, and there's evidence before the inquest that says Frank Abbot's mobile phone pings off the Middle Brother cell tower the next morning. Now that cell tower covers a huge area of land which includes Kendall, so it doesn't necessarily prove anything at all, but you got all the but you've got these unanswered questions.
And the one thing I do know is the police haven't looked at this. It never came up at the inquest, and I've got a stress. Frank has denied that he had anything to do with William's disappearance, but this hasn't been investigated.
Something else that we haven't really heard a lot about too is.
We know that Frank is in jail now for crimes that he committed against children, but he was implicated at least in other crimes before William's disappearance, and in fact has been tried for murder in the past.
He was tried and found not guilty for the murder of a seventeen year old girl who was found half naked buried in a shallow grave in northwest Sydney back in nineteen sixty eight, and at the time that he was put on trial, there were witnesses who said Frank had confessed to it, but it was argued in court
and the jury found that he was not guilty. Now, as part of the work we've been doing, we've spoken to two more witnesses who said that Frank has told them, or that Frank's relatives has said that maybe he was involved and maybe not in her murder, but he had sex with her. That he picked this girl up she was cycling home from work, put her bike in the
back of his ute, and had sex with her. And there was actually a witness who gave this kind of passing reference at the in to this to this girl's death, that Frank had said that someone had taken his car had sex with her. And again the police haven't investigated this either. And even though that evidence came up in the inquest about the death of this girl, Helen Harrison,
we've spoken to her family, they were never told. Five years later, the police have not contacted them to say new evidence about what may have happened to your sister has come up at this inquest. They've not contacted them to say we are looking at it. We've ruled it out because maybe it means nothing. There hasn't been any follow up by the police, and so we started looking at this and then we found a witness statement that's been tendered to the inquest, so it's in evidence at
the inquest. It's with a woman who knew Frank for years. She employed him for a while in Taree on the mid North Coast, and in that statement she links Frank to another unsolved murder of a woman called Margaret Cox. She doesn't say she knows Frank did it. There's no evidence in there that proves anything, but she says I saw Frank a few days later and he had gouge marks in his arm. A couple of days after Margaret goes missing and that Frank said they were oysters, and
she said, look, they're not oysters. That was something else, And she says there was another man who saw this woman at Frank's house very shortly before she went missing. And she told us that when she gave this evidence to the inquest, she asked that it be passed on to the unsolved Homicide team in the police and was promised it would be. It was five years ago. No one's called her. She's never heard anything from the police.
And we spoke to the other witness she named that said he saw Frank and Margaret together at Frank's house shortly before she disappeared. He's never been called by the police. And so I'm not saying that these links are proof of anything at all, but I am saying these things are known to the inquest, they're known to someone in the police, but they haven't been followed up as we can tell, because the family have heard nothing. Helen Harrison's
family have heard nothing at all. These witnesses have heard nothing from the police. The same statement mentions another unsolved murder and talks about how Frank. We were told Frank knew the girl's parents and he drove this strange, isolated back road where her body was discovered. Again, on the surface of it, those allegations prove nothing, but those allegations are contained in evidence at the inquest into William Tyrell's disappearance. And when we spoke to that girl's brother, their name
Sherrie Masters. He said, I've heard nothing from the police for years at all. So this evidence is there in the authority's hands and they don't seem to be following it up. And the families of these unsolved murder victims, who, yeah, they accept that this might prove nothing, maybe it proves absolutely nothing at all, but they want to know that the police are looking at it, that the police care
about their loved one's deaths. And the worst thing of it all, Sherley Master's brother, Tony is a lovely man and he sat down with my colleague Nina, who's the producer I've been working with, spoke at long length about his sister who died when she was seventeen, whose body was buried in a shallow grave and lost for years. And Nina told him this evidence that's before the William Tiole inquest, that nobody had told him the police had
never contacted him. And straight after that he called up the police and he said, who's handling this case now? And what are you doing? Can you give me an update. We spoke to Tony a few days ago and he's never had a callback. So that was March. It's now May, two months in which the brother of an unsolved murder victim has called the police and said, I've been told there's new evidence about my sister's death. Can you tell me who's in charge of the case, And they have never called him back.
I think that's appalling in your opinion, And I don't want to get you in trouble here at all with anyone, But in your opinion, is this a lack of resources issue? Or is this a police have got their focus on who they've got their focus on, and they're not going to be drawn into thinking of anyone else at this point.
I hope it's a lack of resources issue. One thing we do know from the work we did earlier in this series was the early episodes we took a deep dive into the unsolved homicide team. Now, the guy leading the William Toole investigation is in the Unsolved Homicide Team and so are a number of the detectives in that
strike force. And we looked at the performance of that team, and there was a public inquiry a couple of years ago that actually uncovered genuinely shocking facts about how they've lost evidence by the palette load, they have lost evidence, how there is a backlog of dozens, if not hundreds of cases, how it would take them decades to work through the backlog of unsolved cases at their present rate.
It was revealed in that public inquiry that David Laidlaw, who's the man leading the William Toole investigation and is also a senior unsolved homicide detective, has nineteen cases on his desk that he says he hasn't opened for year. So I hope that's just a resources issue, that the police don't have enough detectives, don't have enough resources, that they aren't able to look at all these cases in
the time. But if you've got nineteen cases on your desk that you haven't opened for a year, what on earth, how on earth could that happen? And my fear is that each of those cases is a family, a grieving family who have no answers, and I think that appaus me as well. It really does.
Do you feel like we are any closer today than we were, say, five years ago, before the inquest began into getting a resolution in the case of William Yol's disappearance.
You know what, I'm strangely hopeful. I am. I don't know where or how, but I am convinced that we will find out what happened, And it may be it will almost come in by chance someone in the police will look at the case and say, well what about that, or a new witness will come forward, or maybe the media attention will provoke someone to call up someone in authority and say what about this? Because that does happen
in look at the Madeline macancase. For years and years they were police were looking at the family there, and now it very much looks like the German police have identified someone who they do believe may be responsible. But it took years and it came completely out of left field. So I do remain hopeful that will happen. But when it does, I'm also sadly convinced that that name or that key fact will be somewhere in the files that the police already have, because they have tens of thousands
of pages of documents. They have literally thousands of hours of COVIT recordings of different persons of interest somewhere in that. I'm sure when they do find William and they work it back, they will say that's the moment when we could have done this sooner.
Thank you to Dan for helping us to tell this story. You can listen to all four new episodes of The Witness William Tyrrell podcast now.
There's a link to that in our show notes.
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