Speaker 1: When I think of William, I think of a little
Speaker 1: boy who I think of his dimples. You know, when
Speaker 1: he smiled.
Speaker 2: What if I told you everything you thought you knew
Speaker 2: about the disappearance of William Tyrrel was wrong.
Speaker 1: This side smile that just is cheeky, m but sweet
Speaker 1: and funny and mischievous, all kind of wrapped into one.
Speaker 2: Not the big things, those are true. A three year
Speaker 2: old boy missing from a tiny country town on the
Speaker 2: mid north coast of New South Wales, and ten years
Speaker 2: later we've still not found him.
Speaker 1: He just shone this little smile and a bit of
Speaker 1: swagger about him, but also a bit of a shark,
Speaker 1: a shy guy as well.
Speaker 2: But what about everything else, Like how the police say
Speaker 2: they know what happened, they know why, they know how,
Speaker 2: they know where William is. The police suspect William's foster
Speaker 2: mother is involved, But what if they're wrong. I do
Speaker 2: know there are other people with no alibi for what
Speaker 2: they were doing on the morning William vanished, who have
Speaker 2: never been asked to explain that in public, And I
Speaker 2: do know there are gaps in the evidence.
Speaker 1: And then obviously we've watched lots of home videos and yes,
Speaker 1: he's giggle and I heard that giggle in real life,
Speaker 1: and it's dynamic, and it's beautiful and it's vibrant, and yeah,
Speaker 1: he's just a sweet boy.
Speaker 2: I do know the police did get some things wrong
Speaker 2: going right back to the beginning, and real people's lives
Speaker 2: were damaged as a result, including the lives of children.
Speaker 2: This case has left a trail of broken lives behind it,
Speaker 2: and a lot of what you've seen in the newspapers,
Speaker 2: on TV, or social media is mistaken or misleading.
Speaker 1: One of the challenges that I think has been a
Speaker 1: part of William's disappearance is that there are many people
Speaker 1: who have their own stories.
Speaker 2: So where do we start with this story? Well, how
Speaker 2: about with William's parents.
Speaker 1: William is not a post a child for somebody else.
Speaker 1: He's not a campaign, He's not a vehicle for somebody
Speaker 1: else to express their own view and disgruntledness.
Speaker 2: One thing you might not know is, at the time
Speaker 2: William went missing, legally, his parents were not the couple
Speaker 2: who conceived him. His parents weren't the foster careers he
Speaker 2: was living with on the day he disappeared.
Speaker 1: William has his own story. William is his own person,
Speaker 1: William's family in many ways has been exploited by other
Speaker 1: people with their own agendas of what they want to achieve.
Speaker 2: As a foster child. There was a court order in
Speaker 2: place which meant William was under what the law called
Speaker 2: the parental responsibility of a state government minister.
Speaker 1: And I think that that's a really sad. I think
Speaker 1: it's an indictment on ours as a society that we
Speaker 1: allow that to happen, and that we hunger for that
Speaker 1: when we go clicking through social media and all kinds
Speaker 1: of things looking for that stuff.
Speaker 2: But of course the minister didn't do the day to
Speaker 2: day parenting. That responsibility was passed on. So the person
Speaker 2: who decided if William went on holiday, who was told
Speaker 2: if he got sick or injured, Who was responsible for
Speaker 2: his health and his safety? Whose job it was to
Speaker 2: know where William was? So his parent that was this woman,
Speaker 2: Michelle White.
Speaker 1: William deserves to have his own story. He shouldn't be
Speaker 1: exploited for any other purpose.
Speaker 2: I'm Dan box and from news dot com dot Au.
Speaker 2: This is witness William till.
Speaker 1: Yeah, hi, my son.
Speaker 3: Did you think he's three and a half?
Speaker 2: You're this is a triple ocor where William's foster mother
Speaker 2: is reporting him missing to police. This is the twelfth
Speaker 2: of September twenty fourteen, a Friday, and it's at ten
Speaker 2: fifty six am, and that time will become important. His
Speaker 2: foster mother says William went missing around ten thirty am.
Speaker 2: And later his foster mother would get criticized for this
Speaker 2: call for being too calm. People will say that a
Speaker 2: real mother wouldn't do that.
Speaker 3: And we hear y roaring around the garden and I
Speaker 3: haven't heard him a bit of go on him in Okay.
Speaker 2: You can make your own mind up. When I listen
Speaker 2: to this, I wonder if I can hear a woman
Speaker 2: who's just holding it together, who's doing her best to
Speaker 2: tell the police what they need to know to help
Speaker 2: her child, because right now the stakes couldn't be higher.
Speaker 2: Thousands of children are reported missing every year in Australia,
Speaker 2: but most are found within hours or days or a week.
Speaker 4: Wasn't anyone US in the area.
Speaker 2: People Around a dozen children die by homicide each year,
Speaker 2: and most are killed by someone in their family. A few,
Speaker 2: and it's a very few are abducted, but it does happen.
Speaker 2: There's one US study that shows that three quarters of
Speaker 2: children who are abducted are murdered within the first three hours,
Speaker 2: and nine out of ten of them are dead within
Speaker 2: the first.
Speaker 3: Day's probably near state borest. Okay, we've walked up and
Speaker 3: down and we can't find in.
Speaker 2: This call is being made from William Thiol's foster grandmother's house.
Speaker 2: So that's the house of his foster mother's mum. It's
Speaker 2: a big brick house on a dead end road called
Speaker 2: Benaroon Drive. The road is quiet and it's empty. There's
Speaker 2: a few houses, each of them on big blocks, and
Speaker 2: the road doesn't lead anywhere, so you wouldn't go there
Speaker 2: if you didn't have a reason to. Benuruin Drive is
Speaker 2: a short way outside a small town called Kendall, which
Speaker 2: is on the mid north coast of New South Wales.
Speaker 2: The town's named after a poet, Henry Kendall, and he
Speaker 2: wrote about the eucalypt forest and the sound of the
Speaker 2: bell birds in the morning, and that kind of suits
Speaker 2: the place. When you drive into Kendall, you go over
Speaker 2: the bridge, then you cross a railway line and then
Speaker 2: you go up past the village green and there's a
Speaker 2: war memorial and it's surrounded by bush there's just a
Speaker 2: handful of shops and a few wooden houses. It's the
Speaker 2: kind of place you'd move to if you wanted to
Speaker 2: know your neighbors and you want to have them know
Speaker 2: your business too. The first time I went to Kendall,
Speaker 2: I flew in. I was a crime reporter for a newspaper,
Speaker 2: and this was shortly after he went missing, and I
Speaker 2: remember you were right over dense forest and looking down
Speaker 2: out the plane window you could just see this thick,
Speaker 2: tangled bush and in between it pools of what looked
Speaker 2: like blackwater, and very few roads and hardly any paths,
Speaker 2: and looking down from the air, I remember thinking, if
Speaker 2: William is lost in that kind of country, we're never
Speaker 2: going to find him. It's been ten years now since
Speaker 2: William disappeared, and he's still missing. So in this series,
Speaker 2: we're going to look at the case in a way
Speaker 2: that it hasn't been looked at before. We're not trying
Speaker 2: to find William, but what we are going to do
Speaker 2: is try to find out why it's taken police ten
Speaker 2: years to find him and they still haven't done it.
Speaker 2: We're going to look at what they've done right and
Speaker 2: what they've done wrong, and We're going to see how
Speaker 2: those decisions would come to damage the lives of so
Speaker 2: many people in ways that no one talks about. And
Speaker 2: I don't know what answers we're going to find, at
Speaker 2: least not yet, but I do know that we are
Speaker 2: going to find some answers.
Speaker 1: Hello, Michelle White speaking.
Speaker 2: We're going to start at the beginning. It's me just
Speaker 2: talking with the woman you heard from at the start
Speaker 2: of this episode.
Speaker 1: It just feels so weird when you're just doing the
Speaker 1: sound check.
Speaker 2: Doesn't it just confirm that you are happy that this
Speaker 2: be recorded.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, happy.
Speaker 2: If you would introduce yourself in your role, what would
Speaker 2: you say?
Speaker 1: So, my name is Michelle and my role was the
Speaker 1: director and principal officer of the non government out of
Speaker 1: home care organization that had responsibility for the care of
Speaker 1: William and the authorization of his foster cares.
Speaker 2: What did you like about the job?
Speaker 1: There was so much I loved about working at Young Hope.
Speaker 1: I founded the service children don't choose to come into care.
Speaker 1: Children love their families irrespective of the circumstances that bring
Speaker 1: them into care. So being able to work with their
Speaker 1: families and work with their cares to create safe places
Speaker 1: and help them to see who they are and to
Speaker 1: help them to dream big dreams for their futures.
Speaker 2: This is the first time Michelle was given an interview
Speaker 2: to a journalist, and she and I are sitting in
Speaker 2: her house in a small office, surrounded by stacks of paper.
Speaker 2: There's a filing cabinet and outside it there's children's toys
Speaker 2: just everywhere across the floor. You can hear in her
Speaker 2: voice that Michelle is serious, She's quite intent, and that's
Speaker 2: because her job is important. Understand why it's important. You
Speaker 2: need to understand the system she was working in. Kids
Speaker 2: get taken away from their birth families because the government
Speaker 2: thinks it needs to protect them because their families can't.
Speaker 2: But that government system has always struggled for funding. There's
Speaker 2: never been enough money. And at the time William went missing,
Speaker 2: the system was also going through huge change. All those
Speaker 2: children that were in government care were being transferred to
Speaker 2: third party providers like the organization called Young Hope, which
Speaker 2: Michelle founded.
Speaker 1: And that was quite an intensive transfer period and it
Speaker 1: meant a lot of new service providers came on board.
Speaker 2: So you got this huge process of reform of change.
Speaker 2: Was it working or was problems being thrown up.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to answer that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but there were problems. There were agreements over money,
Speaker 2: there was problems with the paperwork. One example of that
Speaker 2: is that the single document confirming when William Pile started
Speaker 2: foster care says that he started on the fifth of
Speaker 2: September twenty thirteen, so the year before he went missing,
Speaker 2: But the document is dated the twenty first of either
Speaker 2: October or November twenty fourteen. It's hard to read with
Speaker 2: the handwriting, but either way, that's after he disappeared, regardless
Speaker 2: of the date on the document. Though, William's foster careers
Speaker 2: were already looking after him before Michelle took over responsibility
Speaker 2: for that placement.
Speaker 1: So the way that William and his foster cares came
Speaker 1: to be with Young Hope is that there was a
Speaker 1: process of transition from the Department of Communities and Justice,
Speaker 1: and William's careers had identified that they would like to
Speaker 1: seider coming across to Young Hope, and so I met
Speaker 1: with them and we didn't just accept that they were
Speaker 1: fit and proper based on somebody else's assessment. We did
Speaker 1: our own independent assessment. I think that if I am
Speaker 1: ultimately legally responsible for children under my care and ultimately
Speaker 1: signing off on decisions that impact the future lives of
Speaker 1: children that I need to be informed by some knowledge
Speaker 1: of them and get to know them to some degree.
Speaker 2: One of the decisions that Michelle still lives with is
Speaker 2: that she gave approval for William's foster care is to
Speaker 2: take him to Kendall, which is where he went missing.
Speaker 2: It was a family trip to visit his foster grandmother.
Speaker 2: They'd made it before, they'd been given approval before, but
Speaker 2: Michelle did allow it.
Speaker 1: William was a child who was under the care of
Speaker 1: an organization I had responsibility for. Whilst I am not
Speaker 1: responsible for William's disappearance, I had responsibility for him, and
Speaker 1: so I made a very strong commitment to myself and
Speaker 1: to him that I would not walk out on finding
Speaker 1: out what has happened to him.
Speaker 2: Michelle's been interviewed by police more than once over the
Speaker 2: years after William went missing. She flew up to Kendall
Speaker 2: to spend time with his foster family. That was part
Speaker 2: of her job.
Speaker 1: I expected to arrive to years that William had been found.
Speaker 1: There were masses of people looking for William, looking for
Speaker 1: him everywhere the longer William went missing, the more and
Speaker 1: more resources came to try and find him. Everything from
Speaker 1: police on motorbikes, horses, divers, They went in drains, they
Speaker 1: cleared ponds, they pumped things out, they went in dams,
Speaker 1: they went in waterways, they went through the houses in
Speaker 1: the block multiple times. Under round about it was. I
Speaker 1: sat in the house with William's sister and it was
Speaker 1: searched multiple times. On one occasion, officers from the Public
Speaker 1: Order and Riot squad came through and we actually had
Speaker 1: to get off the lounge and they lifted up the
Speaker 1: cushions and they even took photos off the wall and
Speaker 1: looked behind the photos, and you know, it was that
Speaker 1: kind of extentive of search. I remember under the house
Speaker 1: was this big mound of dirt. I don't even know
Speaker 1: how else to describe it. I'm not even sure what
Speaker 1: it was, but remember feeling really helpless a few times,
Speaker 1: and even I myself climbed in under there just to
Speaker 1: even look. Of course, he wasn't there, he wasn't there,
Speaker 1: he wasn't there.
Speaker 2: Michelle also watched Williams foster parents. This is what she
Speaker 2: was trained for. Her job was to protect the welfare
Speaker 2: of the children in her care, and if something happened
Speaker 2: to one of them, her job was to ask questions.
Speaker 2: Her mind had to go to those bad places. Michelle
Speaker 2: knows the statistics that show that if a child gets
Speaker 2: hurt or worse, mostly almost always, it's those closest to
Speaker 2: them who were to blame. I asked her what she
Speaker 2: saw in Williams's foster parents.
Speaker 1: Absolute distress, visceral distress. I remember when I first arrived
Speaker 1: and the male foster Caira collapsing into me and sobbing
Speaker 1: into my neck, the female foster Kira, collapsing at different
Speaker 1: points and having to lift her from the ground where
Speaker 1: she'd collapsed, heaving sobs of where is he?
Speaker 2: Where is he?
Speaker 1: You know, then getting information, oh, we might have found him.
Speaker 2: Almost from the moment william disappeared, there was confusion. There
Speaker 2: were sightings of him, there were rumors, people said they'd
Speaker 2: seen him all over.
Speaker 1: The and I remember, in one particular time being told, oh,
Speaker 1: we've might have found him, and the three of us
Speaker 1: separately being showed a photo of a little boy that
Speaker 1: they thought they'd found, and all of us thinking it
Speaker 1: might be him. But it constantly misses with your mind
Speaker 1: and just the ups and downs of that journey and
Speaker 1: just going it was a completely surreal world.
Speaker 2: And at the time or looking back, did you see
Speaker 2: anything that made you doubt the foster parents or believe
Speaker 2: there might be something more than they were telling you
Speaker 2: about what happened?
Speaker 1: Not at all, not once.
Speaker 2: And given. Since William went missing, there have been years
Speaker 2: of police investigation. Now there's been a coronial inquest into
Speaker 2: his apparent death. Has anyone asked you about what you
Speaker 2: saw in those first few days when you were with
Speaker 2: his foster parents.
Speaker 1: Nobody has asked me about what I observed in his
Speaker 1: foster parents those first few days.
Speaker 2: No, Michelle did keep extensive records though, questioning what she
Speaker 2: saw in the days, weeks, and months that followed. These
Speaker 2: have since been tended in court, so were public records.
Speaker 2: Then in recent years the police came asking other questions.
Speaker 1: Yes, I was interviewed about William's disappearance, and he became
Speaker 1: evident during that interview that happened in October of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one that the investigation appeared to be making inquiries
Speaker 1: of the female foster care and I was very surprised
Speaker 1: about that angle, and there were questions being asked that
Speaker 1: made no sense to me.
Speaker 2: One possible reason that their questions didn't make any sense
Speaker 2: to Michelle is that she was on heavy painkillers at
Speaker 2: the time following an operation.
Speaker 1: They seemed to be focus on apparent different things.
Speaker 2: This was a few years ago and the current strike
Speaker 2: force who are now working on the case, and two
Speaker 2: detectives who turned up at Michelle's door without warning saying
Speaker 2: they needed to do an interview. Michelle says she was
Speaker 2: in her pajamas. She says she told the detectives she
Speaker 2: was on this medication, but they went ahead with the interview.
Speaker 1: I've never been asked about what I observed. I was
Speaker 1: in the home with William's foster parents. I spent all
Speaker 1: day every day with them for I think it was
Speaker 1: nine days after William disappeared. I was on the property.
Speaker 1: I walked around the property. I took photos of the property.
Speaker 1: I did all of that, and they weren't making inquiries
Speaker 1: about those things.
Speaker 2: When you were being interviewed by them, and I think
Speaker 2: you were talking to them for five hours or thereabouts,
Speaker 2: did they give you a sense of what they were
Speaker 2: thinking William's foster mother may have done.
Speaker 1: No, they didn't, Just that they implied that she had
Speaker 1: something to do with William's disappearance and that all would
Speaker 1: be forthcoming in a few days. Interestingly, at the time,
Speaker 1: Cleo was missing in Western Australia, and during that interview
Speaker 1: they said to me, surely you know you don't think
Speaker 1: that somebody else has come into the tent. You can't
Speaker 1: tell me that you wouldn't hear the zipper.
Speaker 2: To understand this, you need to know about another missing child,
Speaker 2: four year old Cleosmith.
Speaker 5: Living first tonight, a young wa family is in the
Speaker 5: middle of a nightmare ordeal. Their little girl is missing
Speaker 5: after vanishing from their tent at a remote campsite in
Speaker 5: the state's north.
Speaker 2: Searching the fence line for fingerprints.
Speaker 4: Forensics today examining the family home of four year old
Speaker 4: Cleo Smith.
Speaker 2: Hurry up, my daughter's gone.
Speaker 6: How old your daughter us?
Speaker 2: Cleo was camping with her family in Western Australia on
Speaker 2: the sixteenth of October twenty twenty one, and she went
Speaker 2: missing from a tent in which her family was sleeping.
Speaker 2: So at the time the Western Australia Police were investigating
Speaker 2: that disappearance, the New South Wales detectives were asking Michelle
Speaker 2: questions about William going missing.
Speaker 1: They asked me what I thought had happened to Cleo,
Speaker 1: and I said that I didn't know. They said words
Speaker 1: to the effect of, surely you'd hear somebody undoing a
Speaker 1: zipper if your child was sleeping next to you, and
Speaker 1: I took it to mean that, yeah, surely, if there's
Speaker 1: no other answers that are apparent, then it's the parent,
Speaker 1: and the implication being similar in the situation of William missing,
Speaker 1: when there's no other clear answer, it must be her.
Speaker 2: And what did you think of that?
Speaker 1: I became upset with them, and I said, are you
Speaker 1: telling me that, after this many years, this is the
Speaker 1: best you've got? And the interviewing officer became angry with
Speaker 1: me and began to raise his voice and said he's
Speaker 1: been working on this three year and he's focused on
Speaker 1: finding William. And he was implying to me that he
Speaker 1: was the only person who cared about finding William. I
Speaker 1: became quite upset and began to cry, and I said,
Speaker 1: quite abruptly to him, don't you dare sit in my
Speaker 1: home and accuse me of not caring about William. And
Speaker 1: I pointed to a picture that I had sitting on
Speaker 1: a filing cabinet and said you may have been working
Speaker 1: on this for a year, but I've lived with this
Speaker 1: since Williams disappeared and he backed off.
Speaker 2: And that's that photograph you've got on the filing cabinet
Speaker 2: there it is. In Cleo's case, it turned out it
Speaker 2: wasn't her family who abducted her.
Speaker 7: It is one of the most extraordinary stories of the year.
Speaker 7: Four year old Cleo Smith this morning has been found.
Speaker 8: Alive and well police breaking into a locked home in
Speaker 8: Canarvan where she was found in a room.
Speaker 2: I can confirm that we have a man from Canarvon
Speaker 2: in custody who is currently being questioned by detectives.
Speaker 1: Kidnapper, the doll obsessed loner Terence Kelly.
Speaker 3: Little Cleo left locked in a room allowed radio used
Speaker 3: to conceal her cries.
Speaker 8: He had his fantasies and he was trying to make
Speaker 8: them come to life.
Speaker 1: It just happened to be that it was our.
Speaker 2: Tent that he got into. The point being that in
Speaker 2: the vast majority of cases it does turn out to
Speaker 2: be the parents, but not all. In Cleo's case, her
Speaker 2: family didn't hear the tent zipper. The New South Wales
Speaker 2: Police are now focused on William's foster mother. They went
Speaker 2: to charter her. So only one of two things can
Speaker 2: be true. Either the police are right and she's a
Speaker 2: criminal and she has misled the entire country for ten
Speaker 2: years by seeming to be an innocent grieving mother, or
Speaker 2: the police are wrong, and that matters because William is
Speaker 2: not the only child that's been taken from those foster parents.
Speaker 4: And that someone else's house a foster home, and I
Speaker 4: want to go to your house, and I love this one.
Speaker 2: Yes, we'll talk about this more later in the series,
Speaker 2: but I'm legally prevented from telling you who that child is.
Speaker 2: So much of this case is surrounded in secrecy. Right
Speaker 2: from the beginning, there's been almost two versions of this story.
Speaker 2: What the police and the media knew about William's disappearance
Speaker 2: and what the public were allowed to be told, and
Speaker 2: the space between them was vast. Right at the beginning,
Speaker 2: the state government even said that the fact William was
Speaker 2: a foster child couldn't be made public. I remember getting
Speaker 2: the emails that said journalists could go to prison if
Speaker 2: we did print that. Even today, we can't name or
Speaker 2: identify William's foster cares, and so much else about this
Speaker 2: case is still secret. There's been inquest hearings behind closed doors.
Speaker 2: There's been statutory bars on what we can and can't report.
Speaker 2: There's been court orders suppressing what we can say. I
Speaker 2: remember going to one court registry and asking to see
Speaker 2: the publicly available documents relating to William's disappearance and just
Speaker 2: being told, don't even bother filling in the form. That
Speaker 2: thing is suppressed. It's closed down. You'll never get it.
Speaker 2: All this secrecy is supposed to protect witnesses and the
Speaker 2: chance of getting a prosecution, but it also protects the police.
Speaker 2: We're just supposed to trust them.
Speaker 5: Hello, true crimer errs.
Speaker 4: This is the case of William Tyrrell.
Speaker 2: And at the same time that secrecy creates speculation.
Speaker 6: We've seen some pretty major updates in the disappearance of
Speaker 6: three year old William Tyre.
Speaker 2: Just moments after this photo was taken, this young boy.
Speaker 1: And the inquest so she was babysiteing two young boys.
Speaker 2: One of them said that he knew who killed William.
Speaker 2: Seeing your detective has dropped a major bombshell in the mystery.
Speaker 4: A spot communications session using me ap.
Speaker 1: Who is responsible for William Tyrell's death.
Speaker 2: Is it possible that William was spotted playing at his
Speaker 2: foster grandmother's place and he was snatched. The worst of
Speaker 2: this happens on the internet, but it also has real
Speaker 2: effects in real life.
Speaker 6: I can't recall if the word pedophile was used, but
Speaker 6: there was certainly some suspicion.
Speaker 2: I think this is Ben Outwood. He was William's caseworker,
Speaker 2: meaning he worked with the birth and the foster families,
Speaker 2: overseeing William's foster placement, trying to get the best for William.
Speaker 6: Look, I can understand why they'd ask, because it's not
Speaker 6: It's not normal that you take photos of a child
Speaker 6: that's not yours and have the mon youphone.
Speaker 2: Ben gave evidence in court about William's disappearance and he
Speaker 2: became a target for online abuse.
Speaker 6: It is normal in the sense that that was a
Speaker 6: protocol that we had. We were issued with a work
Speaker 6: phone with a camera because part of the purpose of
Speaker 6: our visits was to document, you know, ordinary moments, so
Speaker 6: that when William turned eighteen and got his file, he
Speaker 6: would have not just case notes, which are legally necessary
Speaker 6: and tell the story of his care, but he would
Speaker 6: have just images of himself being a kid and having
Speaker 6: a normal life. That was the purpose for which I
Speaker 6: took images of William, whether it was pictures of him
Speaker 6: with his birth mom and dad at contact, or whether
Speaker 6: it was.
Speaker 2: You know, stupid selfies.
Speaker 6: Where he's wearing superhero costumes. You know, it was quite
Speaker 6: normal for me, and I think my reaction when I
Speaker 6: read those sort of suggestions was, well, you just don't
Speaker 6: understand the reasoning.
Speaker 2: Ben had those photos on his phone for a good reason.
Speaker 2: It was his job. He cared about William. People said
Speaker 2: the worst things about him online, things that just were
Speaker 2: not true. But what people said about him is just
Speaker 2: the tip of the iceberg of what's been said about others.
Speaker 1: In this case, cocaine addict FF sold William to pedo ring.
Speaker 8: I'm interested in seeing him in handcuffs.
Speaker 2: Him and his wife and their mother.
Speaker 1: Cold, cold people they are. How do they sleep at night?
Speaker 7: Sleep?
Speaker 2: Pedophil rapist Doc William has been murdered by his narcissistic
Speaker 2: psychopath foster mother and the corpse, then dismembered and courted
Speaker 2: for disposal by the besotted foster father motley crew of
Speaker 2: pedophile mates.
Speaker 1: He loves little boys.
Speaker 2: Tell me to my face, I'm wrong, You weak dog
Speaker 2: William has.
Speaker 3: Been murdered, Name them and shame them, then send the
Speaker 3: family the bill for the bullet.
Speaker 2: All of this stuff is false, but the courts they
Speaker 2: can't stop people publishing it. Nor can they stop them
Speaker 2: sharing the names and addresses of William's birth and foster parents.
Speaker 2: The courts can't stop them sharing images of their houses
Speaker 2: from Google Earth, or stop them making road trips to
Speaker 2: visit those houses. And when they get there, these people
Speaker 2: take photographs of the houses and then share those online.
Speaker 2: I've seen them turn up in court taking photographs of
Speaker 2: themselves flashing V signs with the police in the background,
Speaker 2: like there's some kind of celebrities in a homicide investigation.
Speaker 2: Nor can the court stop the sharing of confidential documents
Speaker 2: about this case, including witness statements, phone records, police interview transcripts.
Speaker 2: All of these are now flying around online. I've been
Speaker 2: sent them. And at the same time as the foster
Speaker 2: parents are under all of this online surveillance, they're also
Speaker 2: under police surveillance. They've had listening devices in their car
Speaker 2: and in their home. They've had their phone calls intercepted,
Speaker 2: surveillance cameras posted outside their house. They've been targeted by
Speaker 2: undercover detectives. We can't tell you their names or show
Speaker 2: you their photographs, but they been under almost total surveillance
Speaker 2: now for years. It's like the police, the media, the public.
Speaker 2: No one can stop talking about this case.
Speaker 7: Good evening, We begin tonight with breaking news on one
Speaker 7: of Australia's most baffling cases, the disappearance of three year
Speaker 7: old William Tyrell. Almost a decade ago.
Speaker 3: The final part of an inquest into the disappearance of
Speaker 3: New South Wales toddler William Tyrell has begun.
Speaker 7: Secret recordings from inside the home of William Tyrell's faster
Speaker 7: parents have been played in court today.
Speaker 1: You probably haven't heard of Alana Smith.
Speaker 7: Then there's the information that for the first time tonight
Speaker 7: is being made public by police.
Speaker 3: Well the worst case of malicious prosecution in the state.
Speaker 7: Detectives now believe there's enough evidence to charge the toddler's
Speaker 7: foster mother.
Speaker 3: Detectives are recommending the woman be charged with interfering with
Speaker 3: a corpse and perverting the course of justice.
Speaker 1: Foster mother has always denied involvement in the little boy's disappearance.
Speaker 2: So what's your impression of the foster pearance of William Tyrel.
Speaker 3: It's the other is guilty of this. She is the
Speaker 3: greatest actor in Australian criminal history.
Speaker 5: So if anyone out there is thinking I might have
Speaker 5: gotten away with this, what's your message?
Speaker 2: They haven't. We will continue with this investigation as long
Speaker 2: as it takes okay.
Speaker 3: So basically, you're saying we have no idea who killed
Speaker 3: William and we're no closer to finding that out.
Speaker 2: The thing is, almost everyone talking about this case doesn't
Speaker 2: know much, if anything, about it. Ben Atwood is one
Speaker 2: of the few who actually knew William. Ben looked at
Speaker 2: the birth and the foster families after William disappeared. I've
Speaker 2: been through pages of Ben's documents of records he drew
Speaker 2: up when he was William's caseworker. He was looking for faults,
Speaker 2: for patterns, any sign that will might not be safe.
Speaker 6: I want to be realistic about this as much as possible.
Speaker 6: There's so much coverage where the differences between the birth
Speaker 6: family and the foster family have really been magnified and polarized.
Speaker 2: But the experience of being interviewed by police made Ben
Speaker 2: question if he was wrong to trust William's foster.
Speaker 6: Family, and I'd be lying if I said that. I
Speaker 6: never looked back on that and thought, did I miss anything,
Speaker 6: Did I make a mistake?
Speaker 2: Was I.
Speaker 6: Inattentive to something that actually was significant? And I just
Speaker 6: can't think of anything.
Speaker 2: My eldest daughter is the same age as William Terroon,
Speaker 2: is the same age William would be or would have been.
Speaker 2: And I can remember the first time I went to Kendall,
Speaker 2: standing outside the house where William went missing, and at
Speaker 2: the time, the police were looking at the theory that
Speaker 2: maybe he ran down the grass slope towards the road
Speaker 2: where maybe there was someone in a waiting car who
Speaker 2: picked him up and drove him away, And I can remember,
Speaker 2: I can remember being there, and I knew how a
Speaker 2: three year old moved. I knew how my daughter could
Speaker 2: have run down that slope and been picked up and
Speaker 2: been completely helpless. And I can remember shivering and it
Speaker 2: bothering me in a way that no other story I'd
Speaker 2: ever worked on ever did. And it's ten years now.
Speaker 2: My youngest daughter is the same age William was at
Speaker 2: the time he disappeared. And I do know that if
Speaker 2: it was one of my daughters who'd gone missing, I'd
Speaker 2: have wanted there to be a transparent investigation. I would
Speaker 2: want the media to report the truth about what had happened.
Speaker 2: I would want people shouting my daughter's name in every
Speaker 2: newspaper and every TV show and every podcast. And that
Speaker 2: is what I would have wanted to have happened.
Speaker 6: Sorry, can I start again, Yeah, I do take I
Speaker 6: took my responsibility for William's care seriously. Part of it
Speaker 6: was also not adding to the furnace of speculation that
Speaker 6: this was generating. I did not want to become entangled
Speaker 6: in that because I wanted the investigation to be focused
Speaker 6: on what was important, which was finding William.
Speaker 2: Like Michelle White, this is the first time Ben has
Speaker 2: spoken to a journalist. We met first in a cafe
Speaker 2: in Western Sydney and Ben was nervous, he was uncertain.
Speaker 2: And then we met again in my office and it
Speaker 2: was like Ben was determined, like he was reconciled to
Speaker 2: face this.
Speaker 6: But in the last few years, I feel that William
Speaker 6: has almost disappeared from the public discourse about this case.
Speaker 6: I feel that he's really faded into the back ground
Speaker 6: and other things have taken his place. And I'm not
Speaker 6: special or anything like that, but I knew him. I
Speaker 6: knew him well, and I think it's important that I wish,
Speaker 6: I wish he was alive and here and that none
Speaker 6: of this was happening, But we can't have that now,
Speaker 6: And so I think in lieu of that, I wish
Speaker 6: that he was remembered and honored for who he was.
Speaker 6: And I think I can, I can at least comment
Speaker 6: on what I knew. And we don't know what happened
Speaker 6: to him. We don't know if he's alive or not.
Speaker 6: We don't know if he was abducted, if so, who
Speaker 6: took him. We don't know anything. But what I feel
Speaker 6: looking at the coverage is that gradually William has really
Speaker 6: become a bit of a footnote and has been replaced
Speaker 6: by conjecture. And you know, I'm not going to comment
Speaker 6: on police hypotheses, particularly matters that are in court. That's
Speaker 6: not my field, that's not my expertise. But I do
Speaker 6: have this sense that William has become an absence. He's
Speaker 6: been an absence since he was missing, but he's become
Speaker 6: an absence in his own investigation. In a sense, looking
Speaker 6: back at it now, are you disappointed?
Speaker 2: I feel confused.
Speaker 6: I feel confused because I don't understand, like, what's the
Speaker 6: calculus that's driving the directions the investigation is taking. You know,
Speaker 6: as William's caseworker, my job was to be an tick
Speaker 6: it for him and for his care and so in
Speaker 6: talking about the what we've talked about, it's a kind
Speaker 6: of grief to me that we are still We don't
Speaker 6: feel any closer, and I feel that we may never
Speaker 6: really know, we may never really have an answer, we
Speaker 6: may never have a point where we can really grieve
Speaker 6: for William because we know what happened. I have to
Speaker 6: be careful how I say this, based on everything that
Speaker 6: you know. I know from when I was in William's
Speaker 6: life and in the lives of his families. I don't
Speaker 6: feel that we're any closer now to finding out what happened.
Speaker 6: I don't think that we've made significant steps in that direction.
Speaker 2: Yeah, talking to Michelle and Ben, I've learned their professionals
Speaker 2: with a professional responsibility to ask questions about what happened
Speaker 2: to William, and that is what they've done over the
Speaker 2: past ten years, including asking questions of themselves. They don't
Speaker 2: care who's right or wrong. Their responsibility is not to
Speaker 2: the police or William's foster parents, but to William and
Speaker 2: they've gone back searching their memories because not asking those
Speaker 2: questions would be to fail William. That's what we're going
Speaker 2: to do over the rest of this series, going back
Speaker 2: to the beginning, asking questions, revealing what was done right
Speaker 2: in the search for William and what was done wrong
Speaker 2: and who got hurt as a result of those decisions.
Speaker 2: People get hurt in these investigations.
Speaker 1: We all look back in hindsight on things that you
Speaker 1: know you could do better, or decisions that you make
Speaker 1: that you could have done differently.
Speaker 2: Everyone does that, or you know, if you've got a conscience,
Speaker 2: you do that. Anyway, we're going to reinvestigate the investigation
Speaker 2: on Bill spreading. Yes, look, the reality of this is
Speaker 2: I don't think you're going to enjoy this conversation. Yeah,
Speaker 2: tell me about it. We're going to look back on
Speaker 2: what really happened.
Speaker 1: It's the never ending nightmare. We just relive it. We
Speaker 1: just don't have our boy.
Speaker 4: Don't hurt him.
Speaker 1: So if I look you in the eye now and
Speaker 1: say I know you're lying, and I'm not even going
Speaker 1: to tell you why or how I know you're lying,
Speaker 1: what would just well.
Speaker 2: I'd say you're must him the truth. William project to One.
Speaker 2: Thing I do know for certain is that things you
Speaker 2: didn't know will become known. Take one example, that time
Speaker 2: that William Tirele disappeared from Kendall on the twelfth of
Speaker 2: September twenty fourteen. That wasn't even the first time that
Speaker 2: he went missing.
Speaker 1: HI heap them for three months.
Speaker 2: I arranged the.
Speaker 1: Whole you're the mastermind. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2: I should have just toutten myself in the nile.
Speaker 1: We've been able to take him off.
Speaker 2: That's all I should have done. That's next time on Witness.
Speaker 2: A lot of people have been involved in making this series.
Speaker 2: Among them, the executive producer is Nina Young. The sound
Speaker 2: design was by Tiffany Dimack. The producers have been Emily Pigeon,
Speaker 2: Nicola Adams, Jazzbar and Phoebe Zakowski Wallace. Research by Aidan Patrick,
Speaker 2: music by Rory O'Connor. Our lawyer is Stephen Coons, and
Speaker 2: the editor at news dot com dot au is Kerry Warren.
Speaker 2: I'm Dan Box