When I think of William, I think of a little boy who I think of his dimples. You know, when he smiled.
What if I told you everything you thought you knew about the disappearance of William Tyrrel was wrong.
This side smile that just is cheeky, m but sweet and funny and mischievous, all kind of wrapped into one.
Not the big things, those are true. A three year old boy missing from a tiny country town on the mid north coast of New South Wales, and ten years later we've still not found him.
He just shone this little smile and a bit of swagger about him, but also a bit of a shark, a shy guy as well.
But what about everything else, Like how the police say they know what happened, they know why, they know how, they know where William is. The police suspect William's foster mother is involved, But what if they're wrong. I do know there are other people with no alibi for what they were doing on the morning William vanished, who have never been asked to explain that in public, And I do know there are gaps in the evidence.
And then obviously we've watched lots of home videos and yes, he's giggle and I heard that giggle in real life, and it's dynamic, and it's beautiful and it's vibrant, and yeah, he's just a sweet boy.
I do know the police did get some things wrong going right back to the beginning, and real people's lives were damaged as a result, including the lives of children. This case has left a trail of broken lives behind it, and a lot of what you've seen in the newspapers, on TV, or social media is mistaken or misleading.
One of the challenges that I think has been a part of William's disappearance is that there are many people who have their own stories.
So where do we start with this story? Well, how about with William's parents.
William is not a post a child for somebody else. He's not a campaign, He's not a vehicle for somebody else to express their own view and disgruntledness.
One thing you might not know is, at the time William went missing, legally, his parents were not the couple who conceived him. His parents weren't the foster careers he was living with on the day he disappeared.
William has his own story. William is his own person, William's family in many ways has been exploited by other people with their own agendas of what they want to achieve.
As a foster child. There was a court order in place which meant William was under what the law called the parental responsibility of a state government minister.
And I think that that's a really sad. I think it's an indictment on ours as a society that we allow that to happen, and that we hunger for that when we go clicking through social media and all kinds of things looking for that stuff.
But of course the minister didn't do the day to day parenting. That responsibility was passed on. So the person who decided if William went on holiday, who was told if he got sick or injured, Who was responsible for his health and his safety? Whose job it was to know where William was? So his parent that was this woman, Michelle White.
William deserves to have his own story. He shouldn't be exploited for any other purpose.
I'm Dan box and from news dot com dot Au. This is witness William till.
Yeah, hi, my son.
Did you think he's three and a half?
You're this is a triple ocor where William's foster mother is reporting him missing to police. This is the twelfth of September twenty fourteen, a Friday, and it's at ten fifty six am, and that time will become important. His foster mother says William went missing around ten thirty am. And later his foster mother would get criticized for this call for being too calm. People will say that a real mother wouldn't do that.
And we hear y roaring around the garden and I haven't heard him a bit of go on him in Okay.
You can make your own mind up. When I listen to this, I wonder if I can hear a woman who's just holding it together, who's doing her best to tell the police what they need to know to help her child, because right now the stakes couldn't be higher. Thousands of children are reported missing every year in Australia, but most are found within hours or days or a week.
Wasn't anyone US in the area.
People Around a dozen children die by homicide each year, and most are killed by someone in their family. A few, and it's a very few are abducted, but it does happen. There's one US study that shows that three quarters of children who are abducted are murdered within the first three hours, and nine out of ten of them are dead within the first.
Day's probably near state borest. Okay, we've walked up and down and we can't find in.
This call is being made from William Thiol's foster grandmother's house. So that's the house of his foster mother's mum. It's a big brick house on a dead end road called Benaroon Drive. The road is quiet and it's empty. There's a few houses, each of them on big blocks, and the road doesn't lead anywhere, so you wouldn't go there if you didn't have a reason to. Benuruin Drive is a short way outside a small town called Kendall, which is on the mid north coast of New South Wales.
The town's named after a poet, Henry Kendall, and he wrote about the eucalypt forest and the sound of the bell birds in the morning, and that kind of suits the place. When you drive into Kendall, you go over the bridge, then you cross a railway line and then you go up past the village green and there's a war memorial and it's surrounded by bush there's just a
handful of shops and a few wooden houses. It's the kind of place you'd move to if you wanted to know your neighbors and you want to have them know your business too. The first time I went to Kendall,
I flew in. I was a crime reporter for a newspaper, and this was shortly after he went missing, and I remember you were right over dense forest and looking down out the plane window you could just see this thick, tangled bush and in between it pools of what looked like blackwater, and very few roads and hardly any paths, and looking down from the air, I remember thinking, if William is lost in that kind of country, we're never going to find him. It's been ten years now since
William disappeared, and he's still missing. So in this series, we're going to look at the case in a way that it hasn't been looked at before. We're not trying to find William, but what we are going to do is try to find out why it's taken police ten years to find him and they still haven't done it. We're going to look at what they've done right and what they've done wrong, and We're going to see how those decisions would come to damage the lives of so
many people in ways that no one talks about. And I don't know what answers we're going to find, at least not yet, but I do know that we are going to find some answers.
Hello, Michelle White speaking.
We're going to start at the beginning. It's me just talking with the woman you heard from at the start of this episode.
It just feels so weird when you're just doing the sound check.
Doesn't it just confirm that you are happy that this be recorded.
Yes, yeah, happy.
If you would introduce yourself in your role, what would you say?
So, my name is Michelle and my role was the director and principal officer of the non government out of home care organization that had responsibility for the care of William and the authorization of his foster cares.
What did you like about the job?
There was so much I loved about working at Young Hope. I founded the service children don't choose to come into care. Children love their families irrespective of the circumstances that bring them into care. So being able to work with their families and work with their cares to create safe places and help them to see who they are and to help them to dream big dreams for their futures.
This is the first time Michelle was given an interview to a journalist, and she and I are sitting in her house in a small office, surrounded by stacks of paper. There's a filing cabinet and outside it there's children's toys just everywhere across the floor. You can hear in her voice that Michelle is serious, She's quite intent, and that's because her job is important. Understand why it's important. You
need to understand the system she was working in. Kids get taken away from their birth families because the government thinks it needs to protect them because their families can't. But that government system has always struggled for funding. There's never been enough money. And at the time William went missing,
the system was also going through huge change. All those children that were in government care were being transferred to third party providers like the organization called Young Hope, which Michelle founded.
And that was quite an intensive transfer period and it meant a lot of new service providers came on board.
So you got this huge process of reform of change. Was it working or was problems being thrown up.
I'm not going to answer that.
Yeah, but there were problems. There were agreements over money, there was problems with the paperwork. One example of that is that the single document confirming when William Pile started foster care says that he started on the fifth of September twenty thirteen, so the year before he went missing, But the document is dated the twenty first of either October or November twenty fourteen. It's hard to read with the handwriting, but either way, that's after he disappeared, regardless
of the date on the document. Though, William's foster careers were already looking after him before Michelle took over responsibility for that placement.
So the way that William and his foster cares came to be with Young Hope is that there was a process of transition from the Department of Communities and Justice, and William's careers had identified that they would like to seider coming across to Young Hope, and so I met with them and we didn't just accept that they were fit and proper based on somebody else's assessment. We did
our own independent assessment. I think that if I am ultimately legally responsible for children under my care and ultimately signing off on decisions that impact the future lives of children that I need to be informed by some knowledge of them and get to know them to some degree.
One of the decisions that Michelle still lives with is that she gave approval for William's foster care is to take him to Kendall, which is where he went missing. It was a family trip to visit his foster grandmother. They'd made it before, they'd been given approval before, but Michelle did allow it.
William was a child who was under the care of an organization I had responsibility for. Whilst I am not responsible for William's disappearance, I had responsibility for him, and so I made a very strong commitment to myself and to him that I would not walk out on finding out what has happened to him.
Michelle's been interviewed by police more than once over the years after William went missing. She flew up to Kendall to spend time with his foster family. That was part of her job.
I expected to arrive to years that William had been found. There were masses of people looking for William, looking for him everywhere the longer William went missing, the more and more resources came to try and find him. Everything from police on motorbikes, horses, divers, They went in drains, they cleared ponds, they pumped things out, they went in dams, they went in waterways, they went through the houses in
the block multiple times. Under round about it was. I sat in the house with William's sister and it was searched multiple times. On one occasion, officers from the Public Order and Riot squad came through and we actually had to get off the lounge and they lifted up the cushions and they even took photos off the wall and looked behind the photos, and you know, it was that kind of extentive of search. I remember under the house was this big mound of dirt. I don't even know
how else to describe it. I'm not even sure what it was, but remember feeling really helpless a few times, and even I myself climbed in under there just to even look. Of course, he wasn't there, he wasn't there, he wasn't there.
Michelle also watched Williams foster parents. This is what she was trained for. Her job was to protect the welfare of the children in her care, and if something happened to one of them, her job was to ask questions. Her mind had to go to those bad places. Michelle knows the statistics that show that if a child gets hurt or worse, mostly almost always, it's those closest to them who were to blame. I asked her what she saw in Williams's foster parents.
Absolute distress, visceral distress. I remember when I first arrived and the male foster Caira collapsing into me and sobbing into my neck, the female foster Kira, collapsing at different points and having to lift her from the ground where she'd collapsed, heaving sobs of where is he?
Where is he?
You know, then getting information, oh, we might have found him.
Almost from the moment william disappeared, there was confusion. There were sightings of him, there were rumors, people said they'd seen him all over.
The and I remember, in one particular time being told, oh, we've might have found him, and the three of us separately being showed a photo of a little boy that they thought they'd found, and all of us thinking it might be him. But it constantly misses with your mind and just the ups and downs of that journey and just going it was a completely surreal world.
And at the time or looking back, did you see anything that made you doubt the foster parents or believe there might be something more than they were telling you about what happened?
Not at all, not once.
And given. Since William went missing, there have been years of police investigation. Now there's been a coronial inquest into his apparent death. Has anyone asked you about what you saw in those first few days when you were with his foster parents.
Nobody has asked me about what I observed in his foster parents those first few days.
No, Michelle did keep extensive records though, questioning what she saw in the days, weeks, and months that followed. These have since been tended in court, so were public records. Then in recent years the police came asking other questions.
Yes, I was interviewed about William's disappearance, and he became evident during that interview that happened in October of twenty twenty one that the investigation appeared to be making inquiries of the female foster care and I was very surprised about that angle, and there were questions being asked that made no sense to me.
One possible reason that their questions didn't make any sense to Michelle is that she was on heavy painkillers at the time following an operation.
They seemed to be focus on apparent different things.
This was a few years ago and the current strike force who are now working on the case, and two detectives who turned up at Michelle's door without warning saying they needed to do an interview. Michelle says she was in her pajamas. She says she told the detectives she was on this medication, but they went ahead with the interview.
I've never been asked about what I observed. I was in the home with William's foster parents. I spent all day every day with them for I think it was nine days after William disappeared. I was on the property. I walked around the property. I took photos of the property. I did all of that, and they weren't making inquiries about those things.
When you were being interviewed by them, and I think you were talking to them for five hours or thereabouts, did they give you a sense of what they were thinking William's foster mother may have done.
No, they didn't, Just that they implied that she had something to do with William's disappearance and that all would be forthcoming in a few days. Interestingly, at the time, Cleo was missing in Western Australia, and during that interview they said to me, surely you know you don't think that somebody else has come into the tent. You can't tell me that you wouldn't hear the zipper.
To understand this, you need to know about another missing child, four year old Cleosmith.
Living first tonight, a young wa family is in the middle of a nightmare ordeal. Their little girl is missing after vanishing from their tent at a remote campsite in the state's north.
Searching the fence line for fingerprints.
Forensics today examining the family home of four year old Cleo Smith.
Hurry up, my daughter's gone.
How old your daughter us?
Cleo was camping with her family in Western Australia on the sixteenth of October twenty twenty one, and she went missing from a tent in which her family was sleeping. So at the time the Western Australia Police were investigating that disappearance, the New South Wales detectives were asking Michelle questions about William going missing.
They asked me what I thought had happened to Cleo, and I said that I didn't know. They said words to the effect of, surely you'd hear somebody undoing a zipper if your child was sleeping next to you, and I took it to mean that, yeah, surely, if there's no other answers that are apparent, then it's the parent, and the implication being similar in the situation of William missing, when there's no other clear answer, it must be her.
And what did you think of that?
I became upset with them, and I said, are you telling me that, after this many years, this is the best you've got? And the interviewing officer became angry with me and began to raise his voice and said he's been working on this three year and he's focused on finding William. And he was implying to me that he was the only person who cared about finding William. I became quite upset and began to cry, and I said, quite abruptly to him, don't you dare sit in my
home and accuse me of not caring about William. And I pointed to a picture that I had sitting on a filing cabinet and said you may have been working on this for a year, but I've lived with this since Williams disappeared and he backed off.
And that's that photograph you've got on the filing cabinet there it is. In Cleo's case, it turned out it wasn't her family who abducted her.
It is one of the most extraordinary stories of the year. Four year old Cleo Smith this morning has been found.
Alive and well police breaking into a locked home in Canarvan where she was found in a room.
I can confirm that we have a man from Canarvon in custody who is currently being questioned by detectives.
Kidnapper, the doll obsessed loner Terence Kelly.
Little Cleo left locked in a room allowed radio used to conceal her cries.
He had his fantasies and he was trying to make them come to life.
It just happened to be that it was our.
Tent that he got into. The point being that in the vast majority of cases it does turn out to be the parents, but not all. In Cleo's case, her family didn't hear the tent zipper. The New South Wales Police are now focused on William's foster mother. They went to charter her. So only one of two things can
be true. Either the police are right and she's a criminal and she has misled the entire country for ten years by seeming to be an innocent grieving mother, or the police are wrong, and that matters because William is not the only child that's been taken from those foster parents.
And that someone else's house a foster home, and I want to go to your house, and I love this one.
Yes, we'll talk about this more later in the series, but I'm legally prevented from telling you who that child is. So much of this case is surrounded in secrecy. Right from the beginning, there's been almost two versions of this story. What the police and the media knew about William's disappearance and what the public were allowed to be told, and the space between them was vast. Right at the beginning, the state government even said that the fact William was
a foster child couldn't be made public. I remember getting the emails that said journalists could go to prison if we did print that. Even today, we can't name or identify William's foster cares, and so much else about this case is still secret. There's been inquest hearings behind closed doors. There's been statutory bars on what we can and can't report.
There's been court orders suppressing what we can say. I remember going to one court registry and asking to see the publicly available documents relating to William's disappearance and just being told, don't even bother filling in the form. That thing is suppressed. It's closed down. You'll never get it. All this secrecy is supposed to protect witnesses and the chance of getting a prosecution, but it also protects the police. We're just supposed to trust them.
Hello, true crimer errs.
This is the case of William Tyrrell.
And at the same time that secrecy creates speculation.
We've seen some pretty major updates in the disappearance of three year old William Tyre.
Just moments after this photo was taken, this young boy.
And the inquest so she was babysiteing two young boys.
One of them said that he knew who killed William. Seeing your detective has dropped a major bombshell in the mystery.
A spot communications session using me ap.
Who is responsible for William Tyrell's death.
Is it possible that William was spotted playing at his foster grandmother's place and he was snatched. The worst of this happens on the internet, but it also has real effects in real life.
I can't recall if the word pedophile was used, but there was certainly some suspicion.
I think this is Ben Outwood. He was William's caseworker, meaning he worked with the birth and the foster families, overseeing William's foster placement, trying to get the best for William.
Look, I can understand why they'd ask, because it's not It's not normal that you take photos of a child that's not yours and have the mon youphone.
Ben gave evidence in court about William's disappearance and he became a target for online abuse.
It is normal in the sense that that was a protocol that we had. We were issued with a work phone with a camera because part of the purpose of our visits was to document, you know, ordinary moments, so that when William turned eighteen and got his file, he would have not just case notes, which are legally necessary and tell the story of his care, but he would have just images of himself being a kid and having
a normal life. That was the purpose for which I took images of William, whether it was pictures of him with his birth mom and dad at contact, or whether it was.
You know, stupid selfies.
Where he's wearing superhero costumes. You know, it was quite normal for me, and I think my reaction when I read those sort of suggestions was, well, you just don't understand the reasoning.
Ben had those photos on his phone for a good reason. It was his job. He cared about William. People said the worst things about him online, things that just were not true. But what people said about him is just the tip of the iceberg of what's been said about others.
In this case, cocaine addict FF sold William to pedo ring.
I'm interested in seeing him in handcuffs.
Him and his wife and their mother.
Cold, cold people they are. How do they sleep at night?
Sleep?
Pedophil rapist Doc William has been murdered by his narcissistic psychopath foster mother and the corpse, then dismembered and courted for disposal by the besotted foster father motley crew of pedophile mates.
He loves little boys.
Tell me to my face, I'm wrong, You weak dog William has.
Been murdered, Name them and shame them, then send the family the bill for the bullet.
All of this stuff is false, but the courts they can't stop people publishing it. Nor can they stop them sharing the names and addresses of William's birth and foster parents. The courts can't stop them sharing images of their houses from Google Earth, or stop them making road trips to visit those houses. And when they get there, these people take photographs of the houses and then share those online.
I've seen them turn up in court taking photographs of themselves flashing V signs with the police in the background, like there's some kind of celebrities in a homicide investigation. Nor can the court stop the sharing of confidential documents about this case, including witness statements, phone records, police interview transcripts. All of these are now flying around online. I've been sent them. And at the same time as the foster parents are under all of this online surveillance, they're also
under police surveillance. They've had listening devices in their car and in their home. They've had their phone calls intercepted, surveillance cameras posted outside their house. They've been targeted by undercover detectives. We can't tell you their names or show you their photographs, but they been under almost total surveillance now for years. It's like the police, the media, the public. No one can stop talking about this case.
Good evening, We begin tonight with breaking news on one of Australia's most baffling cases, the disappearance of three year old William Tyrell. Almost a decade ago.
The final part of an inquest into the disappearance of New South Wales toddler William Tyrell has begun.
Secret recordings from inside the home of William Tyrell's faster parents have been played in court today.
You probably haven't heard of Alana Smith.
Then there's the information that for the first time tonight is being made public by police.
Well the worst case of malicious prosecution in the state.
Detectives now believe there's enough evidence to charge the toddler's foster mother.
Detectives are recommending the woman be charged with interfering with a corpse and perverting the course of justice.
Foster mother has always denied involvement in the little boy's disappearance.
So what's your impression of the foster pearance of William Tyrel.
It's the other is guilty of this. She is the greatest actor in Australian criminal history.
So if anyone out there is thinking I might have gotten away with this, what's your message?
They haven't. We will continue with this investigation as long as it takes okay.
So basically, you're saying we have no idea who killed William and we're no closer to finding that out.
The thing is, almost everyone talking about this case doesn't know much, if anything, about it. Ben Atwood is one of the few who actually knew William. Ben looked at the birth and the foster families after William disappeared. I've been through pages of Ben's documents of records he drew up when he was William's caseworker. He was looking for faults, for patterns, any sign that will might not be safe.
I want to be realistic about this as much as possible. There's so much coverage where the differences between the birth family and the foster family have really been magnified and polarized.
But the experience of being interviewed by police made Ben question if he was wrong to trust William's foster.
Family, and I'd be lying if I said that. I never looked back on that and thought, did I miss anything, Did I make a mistake?
Was I.
Inattentive to something that actually was significant? And I just can't think of anything.
My eldest daughter is the same age as William Terroon, is the same age William would be or would have been. And I can remember the first time I went to Kendall, standing outside the house where William went missing, and at the time, the police were looking at the theory that maybe he ran down the grass slope towards the road where maybe there was someone in a waiting car who picked him up and drove him away, And I can remember, I can remember being there, and I knew how a
three year old moved. I knew how my daughter could have run down that slope and been picked up and been completely helpless. And I can remember shivering and it bothering me in a way that no other story I'd ever worked on ever did. And it's ten years now. My youngest daughter is the same age William was at the time he disappeared. And I do know that if it was one of my daughters who'd gone missing, I'd
have wanted there to be a transparent investigation. I would want the media to report the truth about what had happened. I would want people shouting my daughter's name in every newspaper and every TV show and every podcast. And that is what I would have wanted to have happened.
Sorry, can I start again, Yeah, I do take I took my responsibility for William's care seriously. Part of it was also not adding to the furnace of speculation that this was generating. I did not want to become entangled in that because I wanted the investigation to be focused on what was important, which was finding William.
Like Michelle White, this is the first time Ben has spoken to a journalist. We met first in a cafe in Western Sydney and Ben was nervous, he was uncertain. And then we met again in my office and it was like Ben was determined, like he was reconciled to face this.
But in the last few years, I feel that William has almost disappeared from the public discourse about this case. I feel that he's really faded into the back ground and other things have taken his place. And I'm not
special or anything like that, but I knew him. I knew him well, and I think it's important that I wish, I wish he was alive and here and that none of this was happening, But we can't have that now, And so I think in lieu of that, I wish that he was remembered and honored for who he was. And I think I can, I can at least comment on what I knew. And we don't know what happened to him. We don't know if he's alive or not. We don't know if he was abducted, if so, who
took him. We don't know anything. But what I feel looking at the coverage is that gradually William has really become a bit of a footnote and has been replaced by conjecture. And you know, I'm not going to comment on police hypotheses, particularly matters that are in court. That's not my field, that's not my expertise. But I do have this sense that William has become an absence. He's been an absence since he was missing, but he's become
an absence in his own investigation. In a sense, looking back at it now, are you disappointed?
I feel confused.
I feel confused because I don't understand, like, what's the calculus that's driving the directions the investigation is taking. You know, as William's caseworker, my job was to be an tick it for him and for his care and so in talking about the what we've talked about, it's a kind of grief to me that we are still We don't feel any closer, and I feel that we may never really know, we may never really have an answer, we may never have a point where we can really grieve
for William because we know what happened. I have to be careful how I say this, based on everything that you know. I know from when I was in William's life and in the lives of his families. I don't feel that we're any closer now to finding out what happened. I don't think that we've made significant steps in that direction.
Yeah, talking to Michelle and Ben, I've learned their professionals with a professional responsibility to ask questions about what happened to William, and that is what they've done over the past ten years, including asking questions of themselves. They don't care who's right or wrong. Their responsibility is not to the police or William's foster parents, but to William and they've gone back searching their memories because not asking those
questions would be to fail William. That's what we're going to do over the rest of this series, going back to the beginning, asking questions, revealing what was done right in the search for William and what was done wrong and who got hurt as a result of those decisions. People get hurt in these investigations.
We all look back in hindsight on things that you know you could do better, or decisions that you make that you could have done differently.
Everyone does that, or you know, if you've got a conscience, you do that. Anyway, we're going to reinvestigate the investigation on Bill spreading. Yes, look, the reality of this is I don't think you're going to enjoy this conversation. Yeah, tell me about it. We're going to look back on what really happened.
It's the never ending nightmare. We just relive it. We just don't have our boy.
Don't hurt him.
So if I look you in the eye now and say I know you're lying, and I'm not even going to tell you why or how I know you're lying, what would just well.
I'd say you're must him the truth. William project to One. Thing I do know for certain is that things you didn't know will become known. Take one example, that time that William Tirele disappeared from Kendall on the twelfth of September twenty fourteen. That wasn't even the first time that he went missing.
HI heap them for three months.
I arranged the.
Whole you're the mastermind. Yeah, that's right.
I should have just toutten myself in the nile.
We've been able to take him off.
That's all I should have done. That's next time on Witness. A lot of people have been involved in making this series. Among them, the executive producer is Nina Young. The sound design was by Tiffany Dimack. The producers have been Emily Pigeon, Nicola Adams, Jazzbar and Phoebe Zakowski Wallace. Research by Aidan Patrick, music by Rory O'Connor. Our lawyer is Stephen Coons, and the editor at news dot com dot au is Kerry Warren. I'm Dan Box