Mystery of 3yr Old Australian William Tyrrell-Kidnapped or Murdered?

[Ladybbird]

Nine Years, No Answers in Australias’ Most High Profile Disappearance: The Search For Justice For William Tyrrell

William Tyrrells' Foster Father Found Not Guilty of Lying to NSW Crime Commission

The missing child has not been far from the headlines since he disappeared from a small Australian town in 2014. Nearly a decade on, he has still not been found

The Guardian Australia 25 NOV 2023




William Tyrrell was three years old when he disappeared in 2014 from a home in Kendall, NSW.

Since his disappearance, an intense focus has been put on his foster mother and father, NSW police officers have been admonished by the court of appeal, and there have been multiple searches for his remains.




NSW police search an area of bush, 1km from the former home of William Tyrrell’s foster grandmother in Kendall on the NSW mid-north coast on 18 November 2021.




The missing child has not been far from the headlines since he disappeared from a small Australian town in 2014. Nearly a decade on, he has still not been found


In early spring 2014, three-year old William Tyrrell went missing from a house in Kendall, a seemingly typical Australian regional town on the mid-north coast of New South Wales.

He has not been seen since, and yet everyone in Australia seems to know what he looks like: William is the boy with light brown hair, with wide eyes, his mouth agape as if mid-roar, who wears a Spiderman suit.

What almost nobody knows is what happened to him.

The nine years since he disappeared in one of the most prominent missing persons cases this century seem to have been filled with a dizzying number of developments.

Alleged prime suspects were named publicly only to be discounted later, NSW police officers were admonished by the court of appeal, and there were multiple searches for William’s remains.

A former lead detective in the investigation claimed in his memoir that Kendall, the town where William disappeared, was far from normal, and instead home to so many known sex offenders that “it’s as if they’ve settled on this quiet, overlooked backwater like mosquitos”.

Earlier this month, William’s foster father, who was previously eliminated as a suspect and has always denied wrongdoing, was cleared of lying to the NSW Crime Commission in relation to a separate matter during an investigation into William’s disappearance. In June this year, police alleging William’s foster mother had covered up his death reportedly recommended she be charged with perverting the course of justice and interfering with a corpse.

In response she called on police to disclose the evidence against her, her lawyer adding: “The foster mother has always, and maintains, she has nothing to do with William’s disappearance. She desperately urges the police to resume the investigation into finding out what happened to William.” The foster mother has never been charged for William’s death and there is no suggestion of her guilt.

Both the NSW police and NSW Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions declined to comment on the current status of the investigation. Prosecutors are reportedly expected to advise in January whether they believe there is enough evidence to charge anyone over William’s suspected death. The inquest into William’s disappearance will resume early next year.

Until then, there is no telling what could come next in a case that resembles a pastiche of airport crime novels, albeit lacking one thing they all have: an ending.

In the early stages of the investigation, police focused on a man they claimed was one of the “mosquitos” in Kendall: William Spedding.

But the washing machine repair man, who happened to have been called to William’s foster grandparents’ house in the days before he vanished, was not a sex offender. He had been falsely accused of offending against children in the 1980s, in the context of a vicious marital breakup in which a judge found the children were coached to make the allegations.

Detectives involved in the Tyrrell case pursued Spedding nonetheless over the historical 1980s allegations, despite knowing about the previous limitations in the case, in the hope they could put enough pressure on Spedding or his wife to crack his alibi in the case of the disappearance of William Tyrrell: that he had been at his grandchildren’s primary school.

To do this, he was publicly revealed by police as the prime suspect in the case, with the NSW supreme court finding that detectives involved in the investigation also tipped off the media that Spedding was about to be arrested for historical child sex offences, leading to his image being plastered across newspapers and TV news bulletins.

As this played out publicly, police listened to recordings captured from devices planted in Spedding’s home and prison cell, hoping for an utterance that would reveal his guilt.

No such utterance ever came, because as police would later conclude, Spedding had nothing to do with William’s disappearance. His alibi was airtight, with Spedding able to prove he was nowhere near William when he was reported missing, including by providing eyewitness accounts and a receipt from a nearby coffee shop.

Spedding was acquitted of the offences in 2018, but the damage had been done.

As the NSW supreme court found, Spedding was physically assaulted in the street, was refused service at a pathology laboratory because of who he was, and was forced to move house because people were tooting their horns in the street and calling out to him in the years after his arrest.

From mid-2015, when he was granted bail, until his acquittal in March 2018, he was unable to attend weddings, funerals, birthday parties, Christmases and other significant events in his social life, as his bail conditions prevented any contact with children.

Four children who he had been caring for were taken out of his custody. He lost his business.

“The high-handed, self-serving, grandstanding undermining of the criminal justice system by the relevant police officers in arresting, charging, opposing bail and maintaining the prosecution against Mr Spedding has no relevant comparator in the reported cases in New South Wales,” the court of appeal found in August this year.