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.
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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.
“One can only hope that its standing as the worst case is never repeated and is never superseded by conduct that is even worse.”
The pursuit of Spedding, given the limited resources at police disposal, resulted in other leads being missed which damaged the investigation into William’s disappearance, Spedding’s lawyer Peter O’Brien said.
These included sightings of children in cars near Kendall about the time William went missing.
Jarryd Bartle, an associate lecturer at RMIT university, said switching to confession-oriented techniques, as occurred during the pursuit of Spedding, comes at the cost of searching for facts that could have helped police solve the disappearance.
Bartle, who is also a consultant at the Bridge of Hope Innocence Initiative and a former lawyer, said given the high-profile nature of the case, police likely had a significant amount of information to wade through that had been provided by the public, but this too would likely have been put on the backburner once Spedding was the prime suspect.
“They develop tunnel vision, they specifically have in mind a certain scenario that has happened and … there was a narrow focus on building that particular case to the exclusion of looking at other options,” he said.
“There’s a real human element here that needs to be taken into account, [police] have their own cognitive bias, and can be led down roads that don’t go anywhere.”
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In the years since Spedding was cleared, the police investigation into William’s disappearance has circled back to his foster parents.
As detectives had done while investigating Spedding, police obtained warrants to plant listening devices in their home, hoping to record evidence that could lead them to William. So far, the devices have failed to do so.
Police have made public their theory about what happened to William: that he fell from a first-floor balcony and that his foster mother disposed of his body.
She has denied this happened, or any involvement in his disappearance, and urged police instead to focus on finding the real culprits.
Lawyers for the foster parents were contacted for comment.
In an earlier, separate court proceeding it was revealed that Sergeant Scott Jamieson told the foster mother during a police interview more than two years ago: “We know why, we know how, we know where he is.
“We aren’t guessing, we aren’t bluffing.
“We are saying we know what happened and why it happened and where [his body] is.”
But like so much else in the matter of William Tyrrell’s disappearance, the case appears far more complex. And the boy who has at times been everywhere is still nowhere to be found.
