The foster mother of the missing New South Wales toddler William Tyrrell believes the three-year-old was “taken” by someone, despite her now being the subject of a renewed police investigation into the three-year-old’s disappearance.
William vanished on the morning of 14 September 2014 from Kendall on the state’s mid north coast and, despite extensive searches and a decade-long police investigation, no clues to his whereabouts or fate have been found.
On Monday, as the inquest into William’s disappearance reopened for a fifth round of evidence, the counsel assisting Gerard Craddock SC said the focus would be on a theory the foster mother was involved in unlawfully disposing of the child’s body after his accidental death.
As part of the evidence presented to support that theory, police on Thursday played a video of an interview with the foster mother conducted by the NSW Crime Commission in October 2021.
In the video, she is taken through the minute details of her recollection of the day William disappeared, including what she was thinking at the exact moment she noticed him missing.
Asked if it had been minutes between when she had last heard him and when she had formed the view he had been “taken”, she said she wasn’t sure.
“I wouldn’t say it was minutes,” she said. “When I stood up, and went around the corner, I just looked and I couldn’t see him.
“All I could think was that someone had taken him.”
Asked if the view that William had been taken altered the way she immediately searched for him, she said no: “I just needed to find him.”
Asked then if she could exclude the possibility he had walked off, she said she wasn’t sure in the moment: “All I could think was I can’t see him. I can’t see where he is.”
She said William had come into her care in March 2012. She was unable to recall how often the family visited the property in Kendall, where her mother lived and William vanished from.
On the day he disappeared, she said William had been playing games in the morning after breakfast.
She recalled him “doing laps” along the veranda on the property and “playing a tiger game”, which included “roaring and jumping”.
She then said she had made a cup of tea and sat down, before thinking she could not hear him any more.
“He was running in front of us, he was roaring. I was talking with Mum, he goes towards the patio, and I can hear him roaring, and I am still talking to Mum. And then I don’t hear a sound, and I tell Mum, ‘That’s too quiet.’
“That’s when I get up and walk around the corner, and couldn’t see him.”
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The foster mother has always denied having anything to do with William’s disappearance.
According to the inquest, police now believe she had found William dead after a fall from the balcony.
They suspect the foster mother might have then loaded the body into her mother’s Mazda, the court has heard.
Detectives believe she then alerted a neighbour to William’s disappearance before driving down the road to dispose of his remains in some undergrowth. It was only then that she called triple zero, according to the police theory.
As part of the renewed investigation based on that theory, police seized the Mazda and conducted a forensic search of Batar Creek Road, where they believe the body was placed.
The current round of the inquest will examine the 2021 search of the Kendall property and surrounds – the third by police into William’s whereabouts.
The inquest started in March 2019 and was adjourned in October 2020.
In looking for William, police followed through on tip-offs from prison inmates and clairvoyants claiming to have information.
One lead involved a car that was heard doing a U-turn in the street outside the foster grandmother’s home about the time of the disappearance, Craddock said on Monday. But police had been unable to verify that information or track down the vehicle.
The inquest continues.
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