Speaker 1: True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
Speaker 1: waters that this podcast was recorded on. This Sunday, May
Speaker 1: twenty five is International Missing Children's Day. While thousands of
Speaker 1: Ozzie kids do go missing every year, most of them
Speaker 1: are found, but not all of them. On a warm
Speaker 1: Friday morning in September twenty fourteen, three year old William
Speaker 1: Tyrrel was playing with his five year old sister in
Speaker 1: the front yard of his foster grandma's home in Kendall,
Speaker 1: a quiet rural town on the New South Wales Mid
Speaker 1: North Coast. It's about a four hour drive from Sydney,
Speaker 1: where William and his foster family lived. They're driven up
Speaker 1: the night before, stopping at a Macca's halfway point for
Speaker 1: a treat and a break before continuing on to visit Grandma.
Speaker 1: She'd placed the Kendal property on the market, so their
Speaker 1: time to spend in this idellic rural setting was running out.
Speaker 1: William is wearing his favorite outfit, a red and blue
Speaker 1: Spider Man suit. His foster mom had argued with him
Speaker 1: earlier about what to wear underneath it. Kids being kids,
Speaker 1: She'd had to negotiate a Spider Man T shirt in
Speaker 1: place of the singlet that she wanted him to wear to.
Speaker 2: Keep him warm enough.
Speaker 1: William was having fun running around the verandah, roaring and giggling,
Speaker 1: full of energy and imagination. His foster mother and foster
Speaker 1: grandmother sat nearby, sipping tea and watching the kids play,
Speaker 1: smiling as they listened to the sound of William's playful
Speaker 1: growls in his sister's laughter echoing across the yard. At
Speaker 1: one point, William ran around the side of the house
Speaker 1: as his foster mother headed inside to make another cup
Speaker 1: of tea, and then the roaring stops. She pauses, waiting
Speaker 1: for the next laugh or shout, but it doesn't come.
Speaker 2: She calls out his name. Nothing.
Speaker 1: What started as a normal childhood game quickly turns into
Speaker 1: something else. She checks the yard, no sign of him
Speaker 1: inside the house. Still nothing. Minutes pass then more, her
Speaker 1: heart is racing. Her voice gets louder, William, where are you.
Speaker 1: When William's foster father arrives home, the search is already underway.
Speaker 1: He starts knocking on neighbor's doors, asking if anyone's seen
Speaker 1: the little boy in the Spider Man suit. After about
Speaker 1: thirty minutes of searching, they call the police. A call
Speaker 1: that would later be scrutinized, as so many women in
Speaker 1: situations like this are. Did she sound panicked enough for
Speaker 1: did she sound too calm?
Speaker 2: Officers arrive, Locals.
Speaker 1: Join in, Dozens, eventually hundreds of volunteers comb through the
Speaker 1: surrounding bushland. But there's no trace of William, not that day,
Speaker 1: not in the days that followed. One moment he was there, roaring, laughing, running,
Speaker 1: the next it was just gone. I'm Claire Murphy and
Speaker 1: this is True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's
Speaker 1: most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know
Speaker 1: the most about them. Now, it's important to note that
Speaker 1: the identities of William Tirel's biological and foster families are
Speaker 1: legally concealed. It's due to strict a strain in laws
Speaker 1: that protect the privacy of children in foster care and
Speaker 1: their caregivers, and that there are also some aspects of
Speaker 1: this case that we are legally bound not to discuss.
Speaker 1: We also need to make it very clear that at
Speaker 1: this point in time, no one has been charged with
Speaker 1: either the abduction or murder of William Tyrrel, that the
Speaker 1: investigation is ongoing, and that everyone connected to this story
Speaker 1: at this time is innocent until proven guilty. Those who
Speaker 1: have been accused maintained that they had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with his disappearance. William Tyrrel's start to life wasn't smooth sailing.
Speaker 1: He was born into a household with parents who loved
Speaker 1: him fiercely, but who issues of their own. They struggled
Speaker 1: with drug abuse and violence, and it was those issues
Speaker 1: that would lead to the state taking William into their care,
Speaker 1: into another fiercely loving family, but who also had to
Speaker 1: navigate the system that officially speaks for their son. When
Speaker 1: William vanished on the morning of September twelve, twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: we weren't initially allowed to even know that William was
Speaker 1: being fostered.
Speaker 2: Police said they didn't want it.
Speaker 1: To interfere in their investigation, but it would set a
Speaker 1: precedent for a case that has been shrouded in suppression
Speaker 1: and secrecy ever since. When that information did finally come
Speaker 1: to light, it changed how we looked at the situation.
Speaker 1: But then quickly, with his biological parents ruled out of
Speaker 1: any abduction attempt, our sites moved on to who could
Speaker 1: possibly have taken that sweet little boy in his Spider
Speaker 1: Man suit, the one in the picture that all of
Speaker 1: us can immediately bring to mind when we hear his name.
Speaker 2: Did someone take him?
Speaker 1: Kendall had more than a dozen registered child sex offenders
Speaker 1: living in the vicinity, could have been targeted by one
Speaker 1: of them. Why were their cars parked on a street
Speaker 1: where everyone has long driveways to accommodate any locals or visitors?
Speaker 2: Were the even cars there at all?
Speaker 1: Why were the careers of police officers ended over this case?
Speaker 1: Why did police change their focus and zero in on
Speaker 1: the family who were looking after him? What evidence do
Speaker 1: they have to tie them to a crime. There are
Speaker 1: endless questions surrounding the disappearance of William Tyrell. In a case,
Speaker 1: it draws comparison to other missing Aussie kids, like the
Speaker 1: Beaumont children, or Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirsty Gordon. But while
Speaker 1: they were swallowed up by the crowds around them, how
Speaker 1: could a child be taken so quickly and so quietly
Speaker 1: in a street where everyone either knew each other or
Speaker 1: of each other. Not a sound, not a trail, not
Speaker 1: a glimpse of red and blue in the national forest
Speaker 1: that surrounded the property, and nothing ever since now, almost
Speaker 1: eleven years later, The team behind the podcast Witness William
Speaker 1: Tyrrel are uncovering evidence from the inquest that has thrown
Speaker 1: up even more unanswered questions. Dan Box is the host
Speaker 1: of Witness. He sat down with us to discuss their
Speaker 1: latest findings on the case that continues to loom over
Speaker 1: the country like every parent's worst nightmare. I'd really like
Speaker 1: to start off with just where you feel Australian hearts
Speaker 1: and minds are on the disappearance of William Tyrell. Because
Speaker 1: thousands of kids go missing across Australia every year. Why
Speaker 1: is this disappearance so much still at the forefront of
Speaker 1: our minds? And every time the tiny little development, we're
Speaker 1: all so invested.
Speaker 2: Why this case?
Speaker 3: Oh you know what, Claire, I am really glad, genuinely
Speaker 3: glad to hear used to say that in those terms,
Speaker 3: that it is still at the forefront of people's minds
Speaker 3: because I think my greatest fear, and I know the
Speaker 3: greatest fear of those people close to Willie is that
Speaker 3: he may be forgotten. Because we're now at the point
Speaker 3: where you can see it starting to be forgotten. The
Speaker 3: police investigation has run for ten years more than with
Speaker 3: no result. No one has been charged over William's disappearance.
Speaker 3: The inquest has run for round about five years and
Speaker 3: is due to report within a few months. From what
Speaker 3: I've seen of the evidence, is almost certainly going to
Speaker 3: come down and say we don't know. There's no evidence
Speaker 3: of what happened to William. And I've seen it in
Speaker 3: the last few months as a reporter working at the
Speaker 3: inquest doing this podcast, that it started to fall off
Speaker 3: the front pages, it started to get less attention. I
Speaker 3: remember a time when there were literally convoys of press,
Speaker 3: effectively paparazzi, pursuing witnesses and suspects. I know that because
Speaker 3: I was sadly I was among them. There was that
Speaker 3: level of interest, and it's worried me that that interest
Speaker 3: might stop, because the moment that interest stops is the
Speaker 3: moment I think it's possible for those responsible to find
Speaker 3: William to stop looking. And my greatest fear is that
Speaker 3: that will happen. So to hear you say it in
Speaker 3: those terms that he is still at the forefront of
Speaker 3: people's minds, he is still in people's hearts actually is
Speaker 3: incredibly reassuring.
Speaker 1: It's definitely one of those cases that I would discuss
Speaker 1: in the same breath as someone like Madeline McCann's disappearance.
Speaker 1: It's that very much unknown quantity about it. Yes, and
Speaker 1: there's been other cases of missing children you only just
Speaker 1: have to say their names, like the Beaumont children and
Speaker 1: immediately everybody knows what you're talking about. This case is
Speaker 1: very much in that vein.
Speaker 3: It's the greatest fear as a child, I think that
Speaker 3: you could be taken from what's safe, and as a
Speaker 3: parent that your child could be taken from what's sale safe.
Speaker 3: So it goes right to that kind of absolutely prime
Speaker 3: or feeler. I don't know if you're a parent, I'm sorry,
Speaker 3: but I am.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I am.
Speaker 3: Have you had the moment where you've lost sight of
Speaker 3: your kids, even just for like a few seconds, and
Speaker 3: suddenly it almost feels like the whole world is shaking.
Speaker 3: It's that kind of just instinct that we need to
Speaker 3: look after our children. And for this to happen, for
Speaker 3: a child to go missing for ten years later to
Speaker 3: not know what happened to him, it strikes that deep.
Speaker 1: Well, can you take us to Kendall where this all started,
Speaker 1: because in the podcast you do go visit there and
Speaker 1: you do talk about picturing your own children in that
Speaker 1: garden that day and realizing maybe just how easy it
Speaker 1: could have been for a child to run to a
Speaker 1: certain point and potentially be snatched by somebody. Can you
Speaker 1: give this paint a picture of what that property is
Speaker 1: like and what Kendall in general is like.
Speaker 3: Kendall is a small town. I mean, it's almost a feeling.
Speaker 3: It's got a kind of a central village green a
Speaker 3: war memory or most of the shops and houses organized
Speaker 3: around that. And then there's one road that leads out
Speaker 3: into the forest and very quickly at the time William
Speaker 3: went missing, the trees on either side just kind of
Speaker 3: closed in over it, and it became dark and it
Speaker 3: became quiet. It's a paved road, but there's no white
Speaker 3: lines down the middle, and you followed that through the
Speaker 3: forest and then you turned right into a dead end
Speaker 3: street called Benirum Drive, and it was kind of perfect,
Speaker 3: kind of idyllic, big properties, houses set back from the road,
Speaker 3: dead quiet, the kind of place you could imagine wanting
Speaker 3: your kids to grow up, or you could imagine taking
Speaker 3: your kids to see their grandparents, which is what William's
Speaker 3: foster parents did that day back in September twenty fourteen.
Speaker 3: There's space to play, there's quiet. I've been there now
Speaker 3: again and again over the past ten years, and the
Speaker 3: street hasn't changed. It's quiet. You notice cars coming because
Speaker 3: there's so few people around. And it's beautiful, the bushes
Speaker 3: on every side, there's flowers. It's great, except of course,
Speaker 3: it's where this awful thing happened. And you follow that
Speaker 3: road up to the top where it stops, and there's
Speaker 3: a house on the right hand side, and the house
Speaker 3: is set slightly up on a grass bank and there's
Speaker 3: a verandah around the house at that level, and the
Speaker 3: I was going to say the theory, but really we
Speaker 3: don't have any knowledge of what happened. But one of
Speaker 3: the first times I went there, the detective who was
Speaker 3: leading the investigation then was talking through his theory at
Speaker 3: the time of what may have happened, which was that
Speaker 3: William was out on the verandah with his foster mum
Speaker 3: foster grandmum, and he ran off around the side of
Speaker 3: the house playing It was playing a game called Daddy,
Speaker 3: which you can imagine. It involves him roaring and then
Speaker 3: running away and running back and roaring. And he was three,
Speaker 3: so it would have been hilarious and he was off roaring,
Speaker 3: and then it went quiet, and it went quiet for
Speaker 3: just a bit too long. On the evidence of the
Speaker 3: two adult women who were.
Speaker 1: There, Well, that's something as a parent you learned to
Speaker 1: listen out for, right, because you listen out for theselves.
Speaker 1: But the quiet often says so much more about what
Speaker 1: your child is doing. Right.
Speaker 3: It does, doesn't it, But it's always the quiet is
Speaker 3: always the one you notice when it's been going on
Speaker 3: for just a bit too long as a parent, because
Speaker 3: that's what alerts you to it. And on the evidence
Speaker 3: of the foster mum and the foster grandmom, that's what happened.
Speaker 3: The quiet went on for just too long. And when
Speaker 3: I stood there with that detective, you can see down
Speaker 3: the grass slope of the property towards the road, and
Speaker 3: it's not fenced, so the grass leads right on past
Speaker 3: a couple of trees to the empty road. And the
Speaker 3: theory at the time was that maybe William had around
Speaker 3: the corner and kind of kept going because it was
Speaker 3: all downhill and it's steepish, and he'd kept running and
Speaker 3: kind of ended up a bit further down the grass,
Speaker 3: and there'd been somebody there by chance or by design,
Speaker 3: there'd been someone there and that someone had said hello,
Speaker 3: and then something had happened. And I remember standing there
Speaker 3: and I still remember it now, and I I had
Speaker 3: a three year old at home. My eldest was three then,
Speaker 3: and so when the detective was describing her, a three
Speaker 3: year old could run down the slope, I could picture
Speaker 3: it that slightly wonky way that the little kids run.
Speaker 3: Nothing quite works yet, so they were kind of walking
Speaker 3: her way down. I could picture my daughter kind of
Speaker 3: running down their slope and I could imagine exactly that happening,
Speaker 3: and then that meeting with something at the bottom of
Speaker 3: the slope on the road, and it just because I
Speaker 3: could picture my child doing what the police thought William
Speaker 3: might have done. It was so real and so personal.
Speaker 3: And I don't get a lot of shivers or feelings
Speaker 3: doing this kind of work, because you can't allow yourself
Speaker 3: to as a crime reporter. But on that case, it
Speaker 3: bothered me, and it bothered me the whole way home,
Speaker 3: and it bothered me into the house. And I think
Speaker 3: that is a part of the reason that I've kept
Speaker 3: going back to it over the ten years since, just
Speaker 3: that feeling of being able to fear what had happened
Speaker 3: happening to my family.
Speaker 1: So, as you mentioned, that quite went on for a
Speaker 1: little bit too long, and William's foster mother, her instincts
Speaker 1: are pricked. She goes to investigate. She can't find him anywhere.
Speaker 1: As you've mentioned, it's a very quiet spot. There's very
Speaker 1: few people around, Like the chances of him being snatched
Speaker 1: by somebody seems completely remote. And yet she says she
Speaker 1: can't even see his Spider Man suit, which is quite
Speaker 1: bright red and blue in amongst all of that greenery,
Speaker 1: which you'd think he would stand out pretty clearly. She
Speaker 1: starts to panic, people start to join in on the search.
Speaker 1: Her husband comes home, he joins in. What happens from
Speaker 1: that point on because it feels like if you don't
Speaker 1: find him in that short of time, in the very
Speaker 1: near vicinity, like you have to start thinking bigger pretty quickly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And at that moment everything becomes contested, because we've
Speaker 3: got to remember that where we are now, with the
Speaker 3: inquests preparing to report in a few months. The last
Speaker 3: few years have been dominated by the police focusing their
Speaker 3: investigation on the foster mother, and they have sent a
Speaker 3: brief of evidence against her to the States Director of
Speaker 3: Public Prosecutions asking for advice on whether to charge her.
Speaker 3: We don't know exactly charge her with what, and the
Speaker 3: DPP hasn't as far as we know, come back and
Speaker 3: given any advice as yet. But we do know from
Speaker 3: court hearings and our work on this podcast over the
Speaker 3: past two years now that the police suspected the foster
Speaker 3: mother of being involved, but her account is completely different.
Speaker 3: Her account is William is gone. She runs runs around
Speaker 3: desperately trying to find him. She alerts the neighbors they're
Speaker 3: out on the street. She drives up and down the
Speaker 3: road and actually a bit round the corner looking for him,
Speaker 3: calling for him, and then everything kind of changes with
Speaker 3: this case in a way that I've been doing this
Speaker 3: job reporting on crime for decades now and I've never
Speaker 3: seen anything like it in terms of the scale of
Speaker 3: the response. The police are there within minutes. It's an
Speaker 3: incredibly impressive police response. They're within minutes, and they're there
Speaker 3: within scale with scale, huge numbers. Helicopter support messages go
Speaker 3: out on Facebook. People turn up in their hundreds to
Speaker 3: search for William. But the one thing they don't do
Speaker 3: is they don't secure a potential crime scene because the
Speaker 3: focus is on a missing boy who may have wandered
Speaker 3: off into the bush, and so no one puts tape
Speaker 3: around the house, puts tape around the garden, says don't
Speaker 3: come here. People trample that grass, they walk up and
Speaker 3: down it, they drive up and down the road. Cars
Speaker 3: are allowed in and out of the road without anyone
Speaker 3: writing down registration plates, without being searched. It's chaotic. As
Speaker 3: not to blame the police, because I'm sure I wouldn't
Speaker 3: have done a better job.
Speaker 2: While I hope they didn't know what they were dealing with.
Speaker 2: At the time, I.
Speaker 3: Didn't know what they were dealing with. And the policies
Speaker 3: have changed since. But hundreds of people allowed into a
Speaker 3: potential crime scene that we now believe certainly was a
Speaker 3: crime scene. Anything forensic is gone. It's been literally trampled
Speaker 3: under foot, and as a result, there is we know
Speaker 3: this from the inquest. There's no forensic evidence. There's no
Speaker 3: eyewitness account of how William was taken away, what happened
Speaker 3: to him. And I do think that's the fundamental that
Speaker 3: the original sin in this case, that that element of
Speaker 3: control at the start to say stop, this is a
Speaker 3: potential crime scene. Wasn't done, and we don't know what
Speaker 3: we lost as a result.
Speaker 1: One of the things that has been brought up quite
Speaker 1: a bit from the beginning is the fact that William's
Speaker 1: foster mother said she saw two cars parked on the road,
Speaker 1: which is very unusual for that street because people have
Speaker 1: very long open driveways. And she said, you know, she
Speaker 1: saw that the windows of the driver's sides were down.
Speaker 1: They would have been able to view the property. She
Speaker 1: could see them when she opened up the veranda door
Speaker 1: that day, but no one else can corroborate.
Speaker 2: That those cars were ever there.
Speaker 1: Another car that was brought into question a white car
Speaker 1: that came up later where someone suggested that they saw
Speaker 1: William in a car with somebody was the same color
Speaker 1: but a different kind of car. So how do police
Speaker 1: investigate this when there's no one else to back it up?
Speaker 1: The other evidence feels like it doesn't match like and
Speaker 1: I guess they have to take into consideration that she's
Speaker 1: potentially not telling them the truth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's absolutely right. And that white car you mentioned
Speaker 3: that white car haunts this investigation like a ghost. So
Speaker 3: we've we don't actually put this in the podcast or
Speaker 3: are written reporting at all. But we've gone through every
Speaker 3: single reference to that white car in all of the
Speaker 3: exhibits and the interviews we've done and the interviews the
Speaker 3: police have done everything we've been able to get hold of,
Speaker 3: which is thousands and thousands of pages of information. And
Speaker 3: the white car is here, it's there, it's there, it's
Speaker 3: mentioned by this person that person. But you can't stitch
Speaker 3: it together. You can't say, well, that's that white car.
Speaker 3: You can't. It's always a similar description and it's always
Speaker 3: this white possibly station wagon. But there's nothing secure, nothing
Speaker 3: you can actually say, Okay, that's that's a lead. And
Speaker 3: in terms of the foster mum's evidence about those two cars,
Speaker 3: she says she saw and I've spoken to her about this,
Speaker 3: She didn't remember them at the time. She remembers seeing them,
Speaker 3: but I think it's a day or two days later
Speaker 3: she's driving out to the airport to pick up quite
Speaker 3: a lot of family and friends came at the time
Speaker 3: to support the family they're driving out for that, and
Speaker 3: she says she remembers the cars at that point, and
Speaker 3: that has allowed plenty of people to question her memory.
Speaker 3: Both the police have questioned her memory about that, and
Speaker 3: I mean, you've probably got an idea of the scale
Speaker 3: of the internet interest in this, the kind of web
Speaker 3: sleuths and the people who comment on this, and journalists
Speaker 3: as well. It's always in dispute is to she really
Speaker 3: see that, because if she did, why didn't she remember
Speaker 3: it at the time. But this is where you get
Speaker 3: into People's memories aren't perfect, and I've again done this
Speaker 3: job long enough to see plenty of crimes where people's
Speaker 3: memories are frankly all over the place. Particularly if she
Speaker 3: is telling the truth and she was going through this
Speaker 3: incredibly emotional thing, she'd lost her child, She's got fear, panic,
Speaker 3: all of that. Her memory isn't quite right. But if
Speaker 3: she did see those cars, then that is obviously potentially
Speaker 3: significant because that's basically where William would have gone if
Speaker 3: he had run down that slope, as the police initially believed.
Speaker 3: But we've never been able to identify or pin down
Speaker 3: those cars, And I don't know what you can read
Speaker 3: into it.
Speaker 1: Speaking of reading into things, though, you mentioned the internet
Speaker 1: saluting that's gone on alongside the actual official investigation, where
Speaker 1: people have been allowed to basically free for all their
Speaker 1: opinions on what they feel has happened in the aftermath
Speaker 1: of William's disappearance. What impact does that have on the
Speaker 1: actual official investigation Because there are suppression orders in place
Speaker 1: that means people like you and I I can't talk
Speaker 1: about certain aspects of this case. But when that information
Speaker 1: gets leaked, the internet can do with it as it pleases,
Speaker 1: and I imagine that that doesn't always help police in
Speaker 1: their investigating and trying to get to the bottom of this. No.
Speaker 3: I think it's a really good question, and it's a
Speaker 3: modern phenomena. It's a phenomena of our age with criminal investigations,
Speaker 3: and you're seeing it around the world. There was a
Speaker 3: murder investigation in I think the UK recently where the
Speaker 3: police actually had to put out an appeal to internet
Speaker 3: sleuths to stop going to the crime scene because people
Speaker 3: going down there and filming themselves trying to solve the
Speaker 3: case or kind of live streaming themselves at a crime scene,
Speaker 3: and of course that doesn't help anyone for the same
Speaker 3: reason they might trample on the evidence. But in this case,
Speaker 3: I've never seen anything like it. The like you said,
Speaker 3: just on that thing about suppression orders, this is the
Speaker 3: most secretive police investigation I've ever seen in terms of
Speaker 3: the sheer number of non publication orders, suppression orders, things
Speaker 3: that you and I can't talk about doing this work.
Speaker 3: We've got a spreadsheet of all the different court orders.
Speaker 3: It's got about forty lines on it of different court
Speaker 3: orders saying this can't be mentioned. At times there have
Speaker 3: been suppression orders on the existence of the suppression orders,
Speaker 3: and then they've been revoked, they've been reinstated. Different courts
Speaker 3: have been unable to look at evidence because of suppression
Speaker 3: orders by other incredibly secretive, some of it for good reasons,
Speaker 3: some of it maybe not. But the Internet has broken
Speaker 3: all of that. And what you've also seen as well
Speaker 3: as like the names of people, the identities of people,
Speaker 3: the workplaces of people splashed around the internet, which means
Speaker 3: people have gone to their homes. So people have done
Speaker 3: I've seen it online, people who are arranging to visit
Speaker 3: the foster parents' houses almost as a social thing, to
Speaker 3: take photos of themselves. People have taken photos of themselves
Speaker 3: in court, which is actually illegal and kind of posted
Speaker 3: them online. Is like souvenirs. But where it gets damaging.
Speaker 3: To go to your question about damaging the investigation is
Speaker 3: confidential evidence from the investigation, like witness statements, police records
Speaker 3: has been leaked and posted online, so you can't remember.
Speaker 3: At the heart of this is a three year old boy,
Speaker 3: and the search to find that three year old boy,
Speaker 3: and if he is no longer with us, to bring
Speaker 3: whoever did that to justice surely the most important thing.
Speaker 3: And yet people who surround this case, including journalists I'm
Speaker 3: not exempting us or myself from this, but particularly online,
Speaker 3: have been sharing witness statements, have been sharing police records.
Speaker 3: Some of them were posted on a website called big Footy,
Speaker 3: and that is hugely damaging because if any of those
Speaker 3: potential witnesses become suspects end up being charged, all that
Speaker 3: evidence gives them lines of defense in court that they
Speaker 3: wouldn't have otherwise, and it can reveal the police's hand.
Speaker 3: It's a very strange kind of obsessive tendency among some
Speaker 3: people to kind of parade what they've got, and then
Speaker 3: the question comes down to who leaked this information, and
Speaker 3: why did they leak this information, and what did they
Speaker 3: think they were doing or hoping to gain from it.
Speaker 3: This case is unlike any other I've seen on a
Speaker 3: number of levels, but particularly on that.
Speaker 1: You're listening to true crime conversations with me Claire Murphy.
Speaker 1: I'm speaking with Dan Box, host of the Witness podcast.
Speaker 2: Up next, Dan.
Speaker 1: Shares the original list of suspects in this case and
Speaker 1: explains why most of them were eventually ruled out.
Speaker 2: You mentioned suspects. There are potential suspects. There's a list of.
Speaker 1: Persons of interest, which is like it seems ludicrously long,
Speaker 1: like hundreds of people.
Speaker 3: It was hundreds at one point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, but then there was actually a smaller list
Speaker 1: of potential suspects, and they included people who lived in
Speaker 1: the Kendal area who were known offenders. And I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not a local resident of Kendall. I don't know
Speaker 1: how aware they would have been of just how many
Speaker 1: people with especially sexually related crimes amongst them. But can
Speaker 1: you give us an idea of who some of these
Speaker 1: people were and how they were eventually kind of ruled
Speaker 1: out or were they ruled out? Are they because we
Speaker 1: still don't have any kind of resolution here, we don't
Speaker 1: really know if they're still persons of interest or suspects
Speaker 1: or what.
Speaker 3: Okay, so again, long story with all of this, but
Speaker 3: are really important still it in your right to highlight it?
Speaker 3: So persons of interest is a term the police used
Speaker 3: to basically mean someone they want to know more about.
Speaker 3: It's really broad, and the police drew up this list
Speaker 3: that eventually became hundreds of people, and then they divided
Speaker 3: them into kind of low priority, medium priority, high priority,
Speaker 3: and then in the high priority they'd never call them suspects.
Speaker 3: But obviously the line between person of interest and suspect
Speaker 3: is permeable at that point, and some of them clearly
Speaker 3: got elevated to being a suspects by the police. But
Speaker 3: initially they drew such a wide net. You're right. Known
Speaker 3: child offenders were a huge part of this, and terrifyingly
Speaker 3: for those people who lived there. One thing that the
Speaker 3: William Tirele investigation revealed was the sheer number of known
Speaker 3: child offenders in that area. I can't tell you the
Speaker 3: number because it's one of those things that is suppressed
Speaker 3: by different court orders. But I can tell you the
Speaker 3: number is, or the numbers that I've been told, are
Speaker 3: far higher than I would ever have expected, and far
Speaker 3: higher than those who did live there would ever have
Speaker 3: hoped to have seen. And then at one point the
Speaker 3: police basically draw one kilometer radius around Kendall on that
Speaker 3: day and say to people, you need to tell us
Speaker 3: why you were there. If you were there, why you
Speaker 3: were there, why we should exclude you. So people come
Speaker 3: onto the list for that reason. And then there's the
Speaker 3: people with actual connections to the family, connections to the house.
Speaker 3: A couple of different tradesmen called the house that day
Speaker 3: about different jobs, straight onto the list for that reason.
Speaker 3: So the net is thrown very wide to scoop people up,
Speaker 3: and then the police start working through it. I mean,
Speaker 3: the scale of that investigation is national. Information is sent
Speaker 3: to police forces around the country. Can you chase this
Speaker 3: person down? Can you ask these questions? It all comes
Speaker 3: back and you can imagine the kind of sheer data
Speaker 3: that comes back. It's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
Speaker 3: people generating thousands of pages of documents. This person says
Speaker 3: they were there, We've checked this alibi, we checked that.
Speaker 3: But out of it you do start to focus on
Speaker 3: a few and then, most recently at the inquest just
Speaker 3: before Christmas, we heard this really strange testimony which bothered
Speaker 3: me at the time and hasn't been really widely reported,
Speaker 3: which is that very recently the last few years, when
Speaker 3: the police have started to focus on Williams Foster Mum,
Speaker 3: who I should say absolutely repeatedly and publicly denies any
Speaker 3: involvement in what happened. But around this time that they
Speaker 3: start to focus on her, we heard this evidence that
Speaker 3: this list of persons of interest was getting reduced very
Speaker 3: very quickly. Literally dozens, if not hundreds of people were
Speaker 3: being scratched off it for different reasons, to deal with
Speaker 3: whether or not they had a driver's license or this
Speaker 3: or that, And it certainly seemed to me that that
Speaker 3: list was being reduced far quicker than perhaps it should be,
Speaker 3: to a far smaller number of remaining persons of interest.
Speaker 3: And obviously we ultimately know that the police settled their
Speaker 3: attentions on Williams Foster Mum, despite the fact that the
Speaker 3: inquest revealed no evidence against her. So there's all these
Speaker 3: questions that do still need to be resolved.
Speaker 1: You did interview the former ly detective on this case,
Speaker 1: Gary Jubilin He was removed from the case and then
Speaker 1: later convicted of criminal charges over his conduct during this investigation. Yes,
Speaker 1: he was, Yeah, and I understand that his conduct was
Speaker 1: will included his discussions with one of these people of interest. Yes,
Speaker 1: how did speaking to Gary about this help shape your
Speaker 1: view of how this case was being handled and how
Speaker 1: that list of persons of interest or suspects, whatever they
Speaker 1: were at the time, How did that form your opinion
Speaker 1: on how that investigation was being led.
Speaker 3: Okay, So Gary is one of three detectives who've led
Speaker 3: this investigation over the years. He was the middle one essentially,
Speaker 3: and full disclosure, Gary and I go back a long way.
Speaker 3: So I first got to know Gary as a news
Speaker 3: reporter when he was working homicides on a different case.
Speaker 3: I reported on this case he was working on it.
Speaker 3: I subsequently ghost wrote a couple of books memoirs of
Speaker 3: his after I left the paper I was working on.
Speaker 3: And now I work with Gary because he's left the Cops.
Speaker 3: As you said, he was effectively thrown out, and he's
Speaker 3: now got a podcast, and I cooperate on that. I
Speaker 3: kind of oversee that. So he and I have a
Speaker 3: professional and a personal relationship, and we've spoken about that
Speaker 3: publicly at length, and we both get a lot of
Speaker 3: criticism for that, particularly over whether or not I can
Speaker 3: actually report on any of this at all objectively because
Speaker 3: of that connection to Gary, to which the only answer
Speaker 3: I can give is yes, I have that connection to Gary. Yes,
Speaker 3: it inevitably shapes the way I think. I don't agree
Speaker 3: with Gary on everything at all. And I've said this
Speaker 3: to him, and you just got to judge my reporting
Speaker 3: by looking at it and saying, has he done this fairly?
Speaker 3: Despite the connection Gary is in work on this instigation
Speaker 3: probably broke him, if I'm honest, I think he works
Speaker 3: so hard, and because it was a missing child, and
Speaker 3: he said this before, if you don't know the child
Speaker 3: is definitely dead, then every day matters. So they were
Speaker 3: that whole task for Strikeforce, So we were throwing everything
Speaker 3: they had at it, and ultimately it destroyed his career.
Speaker 3: But in terms of talking to Gary shaping how the
Speaker 3: police went about it, I've seen the toll it's taken
Speaker 3: on the cops who worked this case, going right back
Speaker 3: to the start, and there have been dozens have worked
Speaker 3: on it over the years, and I've seen internal emails
Speaker 3: that bear this up. You know, it's a devastatingly hard
Speaker 3: case to work on and a devastatingly hard case to
Speaker 3: let go, and that desire to solve it, to bring
Speaker 3: that boy home if possible, or at least bring justice
Speaker 3: to the families. I think that has driven the police
Speaker 3: to pursue this case so hard, and they have done that,
Speaker 3: and they have focused on certain people with such intensity
Speaker 3: that I think they have actually caused damage to those
Speaker 3: people's lives. You can talk about different people who became suspects,
Speaker 3: whose lives have been upended, held up to media scrutiny,
Speaker 3: charged with things, accused of things. Their families have been
Speaker 3: told they're involved. The damage done by the police investigation
Speaker 3: because the police are trying to do the right thing
Speaker 3: and solve this crime, is immense to a huge number
Speaker 3: of people, and I have probably seen that closest from
Speaker 3: the time I've spent talking to Gary.
Speaker 1: You mentioned that a brief of evidence has been sent
Speaker 1: off to the DPP to see whether charges can be
Speaker 1: laid against William's foster mother. Yeah, but you've also mentioned
Speaker 1: that the original scene here is that evidence, whatever it
Speaker 1: might have been at the time of William's disappearance, is
Speaker 1: essentially gone due to the handling of the crime scene itself.
Speaker 1: Has there been any mention in any of the interactions
Speaker 1: you've had with anyone close to this case about why
Speaker 1: the police decided to shift to looking at William's foster
Speaker 1: mother as the main suspect because she has seemingly been
Speaker 1: very helpful in trying to find William from the very beginning,
Speaker 1: and police have gone to great lengths to try and
Speaker 1: seemingly catch her out.
Speaker 2: They have bugged her vehicle, they have.
Speaker 1: You know, listened in on conversations that she's had with
Speaker 1: her husband. Like, they've gone through a lot up until
Speaker 1: this point. It's been five years now since they kind
Speaker 1: of came out and said she's our main suspect. But
Speaker 1: what if any evidence are they basing this on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, at this
Speaker 3: point it's probably the key question, what have they got?
Speaker 3: Because I mean you might remember I do. There was
Speaker 3: a front page on the Daily Telegraphs going back about
Speaker 3: five years now, which big front page basically said new
Speaker 3: suspect in William Tool investigation, and it said the police
Speaker 3: are confident they are going to solve this case. They
Speaker 3: are close to solving the case. And I remember seeing
Speaker 3: that and thinking, well, they must have got something. You
Speaker 3: would not be that forthright in briefing that journalist. And
Speaker 3: I've spoken to the journalist. If you didn't know you
Speaker 3: had something good. And before this, the police were looking
Speaker 3: at the inquest, which was running at that point. We're
Speaker 3: looking very much at somebody different, a different person of interest,
Speaker 3: a guy called Frank Abbott, who is a convicted pedophar
Speaker 3: who has also denied any involvement in what happened to William.
Speaker 3: But there's this moment, and it's in twenty twenty from
Speaker 3: the from the top of mine, remember the exact month.
Speaker 3: But there's a review of the investigation, and that review
Speaker 3: shifts the focus from where it was going, which was
Speaker 3: largely Frank Abbott at that point, onto Williams Foster Mum.
Speaker 3: But what it also coincides with is Gary Jubilin leaves
Speaker 3: the investigation. Shortly before that, Gary Jubilin was taking the
Speaker 3: investigation in a different direction. He was focusing on somebody else,
Speaker 3: and there was surveillance operations going. There was a huge
Speaker 3: police investigation being run into that person. Gary leaves in
Speaker 3: a really bad way. Like you said, he's effectively thrown
Speaker 3: off the police. He's taken off the investigation, he retires,
Speaker 3: he's charged and convicted with I legally recording conversations with
Speaker 3: this other person. And at that point I think the
Speaker 3: police want nothing more to do with Gary, and it's
Speaker 3: possible the police want nothing more to do with anything
Speaker 3: that Gary touched, and maybe they just say we're not
Speaker 3: going to look at that person anymore because Gary's hands
Speaker 3: are all over it, and we know Gary in their minds,
Speaker 3: Gary's bad. Gary's got a habit of falling out with
Speaker 3: people professionally, and I say that as a friend, and
Speaker 3: I think he fell out with a lot of people
Speaker 3: in the cops. I don't think he'd dispute with that,
Speaker 3: and that may have also colored the way they thought
Speaker 3: about him leaving. So they steer away, and they look
Speaker 3: at the investigation, and they find a new person of interest,
Speaker 3: which is William's foster mum. Now the cops have looked
Speaker 3: at her before, of course, because statistically it's overwhelmingly likely
Speaker 3: if someone harms a child, it's the person closest to them.
Speaker 3: So the first police investigation I can remember talking to
Speaker 3: a senior cop in the days after William went missing
Speaker 3: and being told they looked at the biological family and
Speaker 3: the foster family and written them out. Then Gary takes over,
Speaker 3: He does it again, writes them out. Years later, one
Speaker 3: of Gary's colleagues says, we need to look at the
Speaker 3: foster parents again, so they bring them in, interview them,
Speaker 3: put bugs in the car, everything you said, and decide
Speaker 3: there isn't the evidence. Again, so they've been written out
Speaker 3: three times, but the police come back to them. Now.
Speaker 3: In the most recent inquest hearings, we heard a lot
Speaker 3: of what the police had got, or we heard what
Speaker 3: the inquest was prepared to make public, and I got
Speaker 3: to be honest, it didn't amount to anything. And the
Speaker 3: lawyer leading the inquest he said, there's no evidence of
Speaker 3: what happened to William. So we don't know what, if anything,
Speaker 3: the police have got that made them change their mind,
Speaker 3: except potentially, statistically, it's most likely that it's the people
Speaker 3: closest to them, and maybe that was it.
Speaker 1: Did we ever, then find out what led to that
Speaker 1: nude search that we saw. I believe it was in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one where all of a sudden officers were
Speaker 1: out back around Kendall, you know, digging up areas which
Speaker 1: we presume had already been cleared in the immediate search after,
Speaker 1: because as you mentioned, there were hundreds of people out there.
Speaker 1: They were draining dams, they were you know, clearing waterways. Like,
Speaker 1: what evidence did they have to lead them to renew
Speaker 1: that search, which we have later found out or not
Speaker 1: found out whether they found anything in that.
Speaker 3: Search, although I think if they found something, we'd know
Speaker 3: about it. The other thing like this also came after
Speaker 3: the foster parents, and I'm not suggesting a link, but
Speaker 3: just to explain the context. This came after the foster
Speaker 3: parents started to openly and privately criticize the police for
Speaker 3: not doing enough. So there were media interviews whether Foster
Speaker 3: mum criticized the police for not doing enough to search
Speaker 3: for William or to find him. And I've seen letters
Speaker 3: that she sent to the police commissioner saying you're not
Speaker 3: doing enough. You're not even answering our phone calls. We're
Speaker 3: going to start lobbying politicians to get more support for
Speaker 3: the investigation. So there's a real honestly, there's a fallout
Speaker 3: between the Foster family and the police at this point.
Speaker 3: And then the police launched that massive investigation. And again
Speaker 3: this is a reason to think the police have got
Speaker 3: something because that investigate, that search would have cost millions.
Speaker 3: There were hundreds of police involved. They sieved the earth.
Speaker 3: They took out fifteen tons of earth and they sieved it.
Speaker 3: And if you go up there, you can see the bush,
Speaker 3: and you look at the photos of the time it
Speaker 3: was cleared of all vegetation and then it was dug.
Speaker 3: The earth was dug. To do that on the scale
Speaker 3: they did was unprecedented and hugely expensive, and you can
Speaker 3: only think they would have done that because someone in
Speaker 3: the police force is saying, well, we're paying for this.
Speaker 3: You would only think they would have done that if
Speaker 3: they had something solid. And yet years and years later
Speaker 3: we've seen nothing at all either that led to that
Speaker 3: search or that was found as a result of that search.
Speaker 3: I mean, the best they've got, thinking back to the
Speaker 3: inquest in November last year, was an argument that potentially
Speaker 3: the reason they hadn't found William was that maybe some
Speaker 3: animals had taken the bones and that lost for that reason,
Speaker 3: and the coroner didn't even want to hear it. The
Speaker 3: police tried to get it into evidence and the coroner said,
Speaker 3: I've refused to hear that before, I will refuse to
Speaker 3: hear that again. I think the coroner and the police
Speaker 3: are also not united in their view of how this
Speaker 3: investigation should have been run. That's been made quite clear
Speaker 3: in the inquest. In quite gentlemanly, loyally, legally terms. The
Speaker 3: lawyer leading the inquest has made it quite that what
Speaker 3: the police are doing now, focusing on the foster mum
Speaker 3: and the search they've been doing most recently, is not
Speaker 3: to do with the inquest. It's being done by the
Speaker 3: police and not by the police and the coroner together.
Speaker 3: So I think where we are now is a real
Speaker 3: tangled mess and it's kind of tragic.
Speaker 1: Next, Dan reveals new information about an original suspect who
Speaker 1: told people in his community that he knew exactly where.
Speaker 2: William's been buried.
Speaker 1: Well, you obviously have been following this in quest very closely,
Speaker 1: and as you mentioned, certain things have come up that
Speaker 1: you have felt have been under reported or have kind
Speaker 1: of flown under the radar. And one of those things
Speaker 1: that's really piqued your interest is Frank Abbott's role in this.
Speaker 1: And you've mentioned him already in that he was a
Speaker 1: person of interest at one stage and fatally featured quite
Speaker 1: heavily in reporting back in the beginning when William Terrele
Speaker 1: went miss in the aftermath of that, but he kind
Speaker 1: of had a habit of sort of putting himself back
Speaker 1: in the spotlight as this investigation kind of unfolded. Can
Speaker 1: you just give us an idea of who Frank Abbott
Speaker 1: is and how he's been in and out of his
Speaker 1: investigation over the years.
Speaker 3: Frank Abbot is I've heard so many stories about Frank
Speaker 3: Abbot over the last five months. We've been focusing on
Speaker 3: Frank for about five months now, and we've been up
Speaker 3: to where he lived. We've spoken to the people who
Speaker 3: knew him, We've spoken to family. I've heard nothing good
Speaker 3: about Frank Abbot. He's a convicted Pedophile's in jail for
Speaker 3: sexually assaulting three children, two girls and a boy. The
Speaker 3: people who lived in the town he spent a lot
Speaker 3: of time in, which is called John's River. It felt
Speaker 3: everyone we spoke to seemed to know that Frank was
Speaker 3: a child defender. Everyone had heard stories about Frank doing
Speaker 3: things to children, being a danger to children, stories of
Speaker 3: other crimes he'd committed, from petty crimes to sexual offenses.
Speaker 3: No one had anything good to say about Frank at all.
Speaker 3: And what troubled me about Frank is is he kind
Speaker 3: of we first learned about Frank. I think when the
Speaker 3: inquest started and there were these stories, like you said,
Speaker 3: of him putting himself forward. He called up the police
Speaker 3: and asked to be put straight through to the strike
Speaker 3: force investigating William and told them that they should be
Speaker 3: looking at someone else, another person and turns out another
Speaker 3: convicted pedophile. He would tell his neighbors that he knew
Speaker 3: where William was buried, or that he knew where he'd
Speaker 3: been in an area of the bush, and he could
Speaker 3: smell a body, and he knew the difference between a
Speaker 3: human body and a kangaroo. Like he'd say genuinely disturbing things. He,
Speaker 3: according to evidence before the inquest, told some children that
Speaker 3: he buried William Tioell in a suitcase. Things that are
Speaker 3: genuinely unpleasant allegations. All of this is evidence before the inquest.
Speaker 3: But he's making connections between himself and what happened to William,
Speaker 3: and maybe that's just weird boasting. He wants people to
Speaker 3: be afraid of him. He likes provoking a reaction. But
Speaker 3: there's a definite pattern, and there's evidence before the inquest
Speaker 3: that one of his close mates, a guy called Ray Porter,
Speaker 3: who was very close to death at the time, told
Speaker 3: a nurse that he had driven his mate north. I
Speaker 3: think a day or so after William disappeared with William
Speaker 3: till in the car and he didn't name the mate,
Speaker 3: but one of his close mates was Frank, and the
Speaker 3: police definitely looked at Freim. So we've got copies of
Speaker 3: phone calls that Frank made in prison where he's now
Speaker 3: serving time for these child sex offens where he talks
Speaker 3: about how the police are looking at him and he
Speaker 3: says I had nothing to do with it, but he
Speaker 3: also says, you know that they are investigating whether he
Speaker 3: went to that backyard and tempted William out with lollies
Speaker 3: and ice cream. And you can hear Frank talking about
Speaker 3: all of this on these tapes. So the police definitely
Speaker 3: looked at him. But then it all went quiet. And
Speaker 3: at the inquest, all this evidence about Frank, you expect
Speaker 3: Frank to be called to answer questions, and then they didn't.
Speaker 3: And if you go back to the media reports from
Speaker 3: the time, everyone thought that there's media report saying today's
Speaker 3: the day Frank is expected to answer questions, and then
Speaker 3: it stops. And part of that I think is COVID
Speaker 3: actually shut down the inquest for a bit. Part of
Speaker 3: it might be the police around this time start looking
Speaker 3: at the foster mum, but the coroner won't say why
Speaker 3: Frank is not called. She's refused to make that decision public.
Speaker 3: We've asked them, they didn't respond. They said they were
Speaker 3: too busy. So we don't know why Frank has never
Speaker 3: answered these questions, and there were all these unanswered questions
Speaker 3: about him. So what we've done over the past about
Speaker 3: five months now is just try and learn everything we
Speaker 3: can about Frank.
Speaker 1: One of the episodes of your podcast, you do talk
Speaker 1: about a fairly shocking moment when a man who's living
Speaker 1: in Frank's old house that you've gone to speak to
Speaker 1: has kind of suggested that maybe Frank's brother has told
Speaker 1: people about.
Speaker 2: Frank Abbott's involvement in William Thiol's case.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is one of the things that shocked me.
Speaker 3: So we were in John's River where Frank used to live,
Speaker 3: just talking to everybody, and we talked to the neighbors
Speaker 3: and eventually we think we're going to just try his house,
Speaker 3: see who's there. Two men live there now the invite
Speaker 3: us in. The younger man is talking about Frank and
Speaker 3: he's telling the same sort of stories we've heard a
Speaker 3: lot before. He talks about he'd heard that Frank took
Speaker 3: girls and boys into the forest and tied them up
Speaker 3: to trees and did something bad out there. I don't
Speaker 3: know if that's true, but Frank has been convicted of
Speaker 3: child sex offenses, so we know that that at least
Speaker 3: is true. And then the guy's dad comes in and
Speaker 3: the younger guy says, you should sit down with my dad,
Speaker 3: and he starts talking to us, and we just say
Speaker 3: we're interested in Frank, and he says, yeah. Frank's brother,
Speaker 3: guy called Bluie. He always used to say Frank wasn't
Speaker 3: involved in what happened to William, but just before he
Speaker 3: died he said that Frank was involved and that William
Speaker 3: was buried up on this He says, the big Bird Mountain,
Speaker 3: just by that big tree there, And we we google
Speaker 3: this later and it turns out there's a landmark there
Speaker 3: called the Bird Tree. It's this massive eucalyptus tree deep
Speaker 3: in really dark and quite spooky forest, really isolated, and
Speaker 3: the bird tree is next to another giant tree called
Speaker 3: ben Roon. So William disappears from Benerum Drive. No one's
Speaker 3: ever searched there. But now we've got this disputed allegation
Speaker 3: that Frank's brother was telling people that that's where William
Speaker 3: was and that Frank was involved. So we go and
Speaker 3: talk to the man's son, the guy that the old person.
Speaker 3: The older man says, Bluie, Frank's brother told his son this.
Speaker 3: We're going to talk to the sun and he says, look,
Speaker 3: I don't remember that. But Blue never had anything good
Speaker 3: to say about Frank, and Blue thought Frank deserved to
Speaker 3: be in jail for things he'd done in his past,
Speaker 3: and that wasn't explained. But at this point we think, okay,
Speaker 3: look this has come up. It's a disputed account. We
Speaker 3: don't know. But weeks later, we're back in John's River again,
Speaker 3: just talking to people, and we go back to the
Speaker 3: same house and we're going to talk to the older
Speaker 3: man again, and he's insistent. He says that conversation definitely happened.
Speaker 3: And we say, but your son said he didn't remember,
Speaker 3: and the old guy says, ah, I know, I was told,
Speaker 3: you know, tight lipped, And it was almost as if
Speaker 3: he's being told that he was told not to talk
Speaker 3: about it. And then the younger man arrives in a fury.
Speaker 3: He drives up onto the lawn and he gets out.
Speaker 3: He's completely shirtless and he just I'm not talking about
Speaker 3: Frank Abbott. I don't want to talk about him again.
Speaker 3: And he basically throws his off the property. So we
Speaker 3: weren't able to get a full explanation of what happened,
Speaker 3: except that there's this allegation that William is disposed of
Speaker 3: near the bird Tree. We know the police haven't searched there.
Speaker 3: From talking to other members of the Abbot family, we
Speaker 3: know that they used to go there as children. People
Speaker 3: know that area up there, and it's the tree itself
Speaker 3: is on a mountain called Middle Brother, and there's evidence
Speaker 3: before the inquest that says Frank Abbot's mobile phone pings
Speaker 3: off the Middle Brother cell tower the next morning. Now
Speaker 3: that cell tower covers a huge area of land which
Speaker 3: includes Kendall, so it doesn't necessarily prove anything at all,
Speaker 3: but you got all the but you've got these unanswered questions.
Speaker 3: And the one thing I do know is the police
Speaker 3: haven't looked at this. It never came up at the inquest,
Speaker 3: and I've got a stress. Frank has denied that he
Speaker 3: had anything to do with William's disappearance, but this hasn't
Speaker 3: been investigated.
Speaker 2: Something else that we haven't really heard a lot about
Speaker 2: too is.
Speaker 1: We know that Frank is in jail now for crimes
Speaker 1: that he committed against children, but he was implicated at
Speaker 1: least in other crimes before William's disappearance, and in fact
Speaker 1: has been tried for murder in the past.
Speaker 3: He was tried and found not guilty for the murder
Speaker 3: of a seventeen year old girl who was found half
Speaker 3: naked buried in a shallow grave in northwest Sydney back
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty eight, and at the time that he
Speaker 3: was put on trial, there were witnesses who said Frank
Speaker 3: had confessed to it, but it was argued in court
Speaker 3: and the jury found that he was not guilty. Now,
Speaker 3: as part of the work we've been doing, we've spoken
Speaker 3: to two more witnesses who said that Frank has told them,
Speaker 3: or that Frank's relatives has said that maybe he was
Speaker 3: involved and maybe not in her murder, but he had
Speaker 3: sex with her. That he picked this girl up she
Speaker 3: was cycling home from work, put her bike in the
Speaker 3: back of his ute, and had sex with her. And
Speaker 3: there was actually a witness who gave this kind of
Speaker 3: passing reference at the in to this to this girl's death,
Speaker 3: that Frank had said that someone had taken his car
Speaker 3: had sex with her. And again the police haven't investigated
Speaker 3: this either. And even though that evidence came up in
Speaker 3: the inquest about the death of this girl, Helen Harrison,
Speaker 3: we've spoken to her family, they were never told. Five
Speaker 3: years later, the police have not contacted them to say
Speaker 3: new evidence about what may have happened to your sister
Speaker 3: has come up at this inquest. They've not contacted them
Speaker 3: to say we are looking at it. We've ruled it
Speaker 3: out because maybe it means nothing. There hasn't been any
Speaker 3: follow up by the police, and so we started looking
Speaker 3: at this and then we found a witness statement that's
Speaker 3: been tendered to the inquest, so it's in evidence at
Speaker 3: the inquest. It's with a woman who knew Frank for years.
Speaker 3: She employed him for a while in Taree on the
Speaker 3: mid North Coast, and in that statement she links Frank
Speaker 3: to another unsolved murder of a woman called Margaret Cox.
Speaker 3: She doesn't say she knows Frank did it. There's no
Speaker 3: evidence in there that proves anything, but she says I
Speaker 3: saw Frank a few days later and he had gouge
Speaker 3: marks in his arm. A couple of days after Margaret
Speaker 3: goes missing and that Frank said they were oysters, and
Speaker 3: she said, look, they're not oysters. That was something else,
Speaker 3: And she says there was another man who saw this
Speaker 3: woman at Frank's house very shortly before she went missing.
Speaker 3: And she told us that when she gave this evidence
Speaker 3: to the inquest, she asked that it be passed on
Speaker 3: to the unsolved Homicide team in the police and was
Speaker 3: promised it would be. It was five years ago. No
Speaker 3: one's called her. She's never heard anything from the police.
Speaker 3: And we spoke to the other witness she named that
Speaker 3: said he saw Frank and Margaret together at Frank's house
Speaker 3: shortly before she disappeared. He's never been called by the police.
Speaker 3: And so I'm not saying that these links are proof
Speaker 3: of anything at all, but I am saying these things
Speaker 3: are known to the inquest, they're known to someone in
Speaker 3: the police, but they haven't been followed up as we
Speaker 3: can tell, because the family have heard nothing. Helen Harrison's
Speaker 3: family have heard nothing at all. These witnesses have heard
Speaker 3: nothing from the police. The same statement mentions another unsolved
Speaker 3: murder and talks about how Frank. We were told Frank
Speaker 3: knew the girl's parents and he drove this strange, isolated
Speaker 3: back road where her body was discovered. Again, on the
Speaker 3: surface of it, those allegations prove nothing, but those allegations
Speaker 3: are contained in evidence at the inquest into William Tyrell's disappearance.
Speaker 3: And when we spoke to that girl's brother, their name
Speaker 3: Sherrie Masters. He said, I've heard nothing from the police
Speaker 3: for years at all. So this evidence is there in
Speaker 3: the authority's hands and they don't seem to be following
Speaker 3: it up. And the families of these unsolved murder victims, who, yeah,
Speaker 3: they accept that this might prove nothing, maybe it proves
Speaker 3: absolutely nothing at all, but they want to know that
Speaker 3: the police are looking at it, that the police care
Speaker 3: about their loved one's deaths. And the worst thing of
Speaker 3: it all, Sherley Master's brother, Tony is a lovely man
Speaker 3: and he sat down with my colleague Nina, who's the
Speaker 3: producer I've been working with, spoke at long length about
Speaker 3: his sister who died when she was seventeen, whose body
Speaker 3: was buried in a shallow grave and lost for years.
Speaker 3: And Nina told him this evidence that's before the William
Speaker 3: Tiole inquest, that nobody had told him the police had
Speaker 3: never contacted him. And straight after that he called up
Speaker 3: the police and he said, who's handling this case now?
Speaker 3: And what are you doing? Can you give me an update.
Speaker 3: We spoke to Tony a few days ago and he's
Speaker 3: never had a callback. So that was March. It's now May,
Speaker 3: two months in which the brother of an unsolved murder
Speaker 3: victim has called the police and said, I've been told
Speaker 3: there's new evidence about my sister's death. Can you tell
Speaker 3: me who's in charge of the case, And they have
Speaker 3: never called him back.
Speaker 1: I think that's appalling in your opinion, And I don't
Speaker 1: want to get you in trouble here at all with anyone,
Speaker 1: But in your opinion, is this a lack of resources issue?
Speaker 1: Or is this a police have got their focus on
Speaker 1: who they've got their focus on, and they're not going
Speaker 1: to be drawn into thinking of anyone else at this point.
Speaker 3: I hope it's a lack of resources issue. One thing
Speaker 3: we do know from the work we did earlier in
Speaker 3: this series was the early episodes we took a deep
Speaker 3: dive into the unsolved homicide team. Now, the guy leading
Speaker 3: the William Toole investigation is in the Unsolved Homicide Team
Speaker 3: and so are a number of the detectives in that
Speaker 3: strike force. And we looked at the performance of that team,
Speaker 3: and there was a public inquiry a couple of years
Speaker 3: ago that actually uncovered genuinely shocking facts about how they've
Speaker 3: lost evidence by the palette load, they have lost evidence,
Speaker 3: how there is a backlog of dozens, if not hundreds
Speaker 3: of cases, how it would take them decades to work
Speaker 3: through the backlog of unsolved cases at their present rate.
Speaker 3: It was revealed in that public inquiry that David Laidlaw,
Speaker 3: who's the man leading the William Toole investigation and is
Speaker 3: also a senior unsolved homicide detective, has nineteen cases on
Speaker 3: his desk that he says he hasn't opened for year.
Speaker 3: So I hope that's just a resources issue, that the
Speaker 3: police don't have enough detectives, don't have enough resources, that
Speaker 3: they aren't able to look at all these cases in
Speaker 3: the time. But if you've got nineteen cases on your
Speaker 3: desk that you haven't opened for a year, what on earth,
Speaker 3: how on earth could that happen? And my fear is
Speaker 3: that each of those cases is a family, a grieving
Speaker 3: family who have no answers, and I think that appaus
Speaker 3: me as well. It really does.
Speaker 1: Do you feel like we are any closer today than
Speaker 1: we were, say, five years ago, before the inquest began
Speaker 1: into getting a resolution in the case of William Yol's disappearance.
Speaker 3: You know what, I'm strangely hopeful. I am. I don't
Speaker 3: know where or how, but I am convinced that we
Speaker 3: will find out what happened, And it may be it
Speaker 3: will almost come in by chance someone in the police
Speaker 3: will look at the case and say, well what about that,
Speaker 3: or a new witness will come forward, or maybe the
Speaker 3: media attention will provoke someone to call up someone in
Speaker 3: authority and say what about this? Because that does happen
Speaker 3: in look at the Madeline macancase. For years and years
Speaker 3: they were police were looking at the family there, and
Speaker 3: now it very much looks like the German police have
Speaker 3: identified someone who they do believe may be responsible. But
Speaker 3: it took years and it came completely out of left field.
Speaker 3: So I do remain hopeful that will happen. But when
Speaker 3: it does, I'm also sadly convinced that that name or
Speaker 3: that key fact will be somewhere in the files that
Speaker 3: the police already have, because they have tens of thousands
Speaker 3: of pages of documents. They have literally thousands of hours
Speaker 3: of COVIT recordings of different persons of interest somewhere in that.
Speaker 3: I'm sure when they do find William and they work
Speaker 3: it back, they will say that's the moment when we
Speaker 3: could have done this sooner.
Speaker 1: Thank you to Dan for helping us to tell this story.
Speaker 1: You can listen to all four new episodes of The
Speaker 1: Witness William Tyrrell podcast now.
Speaker 2: There's a link to that in our show notes.
Speaker 1: To see archival images and footage of the cases we
Speaker 1: cover on this podcast. Follow us on TikTok at True
Speaker 1: Crime Conversations.
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Speaker 1: Murphy and produced by Tarlie Blackman, with audio designed by
Speaker 1: Jacob Brown. Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back
Speaker 1: next week with another True Crime Conversation.