A truck driver has testified that he saw a car that was “acting suspiciously” when William Tyrrell disappeared on the mid-north coast of New South Wales on 12 September 2014.
The inquest into the disappearance of the toddler on Wednesday heard from Peter Bashkurt who said he saw a dark Toyota Camry twice on the day the three-year-old vanished.
Bashkurt was due to pick up a yellow excavator from the outskirts of Kendall that day. He said he stopped in the neighbouring town of Kew in the morning, where he first saw the Camry.
He said the car “caught my attention” because it was being driven erratically, at one point parking “too closely” in front of him.
“Something must have triggered [the woman driving the car] to do that. I actually pulled out from behind her, because she was so close, I had to back up a bit. That was a bit odd for me,” Bashkurt told the court on Wednesday.
“I don’t know what triggered her to move from the location she was at. She didn’t need to come and park in front of me.”
He saw the car again in Kendall, where he watched the woman exit a shop, saying he believed she was “killing time” there.
“You had been in Kendall that day and you had seen a car that you thought was acting suspiciously?” counsel assisting Gerard Craddock SC asked.
“Correct,” Bashkurt replied.
His observation of the car does not match up with the police theory outlined on Monday, which alleged Tyrrell’s foster mother used her mother’s grey Mazda 3 to dispose of the boy’s body.
The foster mother has always denied having anything to do with William’s disappearance.
Craddock on Monday opened the fifth round of the inquest by stating police now believed the boy’s foster mother found him dead after falling from the balcony of his foster grandmother’s Kendall property.
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 investigators’ theory.
The inquest has heard from experts throughout the week, including from forensic anthropologist Dr Jennifer Menzies, who said she was not certain if Tyrrell’s bones could have been preserved if they were in the police search areas.
“I cannot state with certainty whether his remains are likely to be preserved or otherwise,” she told the court on Tuesday “I have not visited the site of deposition.”
The court also heard from dog handlers on Tuesday, who testified that it would have been impossible for a three-year-old child to have navigated through the vegetation surrounding the Kendall property where he was last seen.
Police conducted an intensive search of targeted areas in 2021, downstream from the property, in the hopes of finding any clues about what happened to Tyrrell.
But despite a decade-long investigation involving hundreds of persons of interest and dozens of searches, no trace of the boy has been found.
The inquest continues.
- With AAP
