Caroline Overington - Missing William Tyrrell

For Gideon

Contents

T he sun rose over the village of Kendall at 5.52 a.m. on Friday, 12 September 2014. William Tyrrell a child aged three slept an hour past the dawn.

Daddy?

William rolled across the bed and sought the floor with his small feet. It was just six degrees outside, but he was snug in pyjamas and pull-ups.

Daddy? Can we watch Fireman Sam?

Yes. Of course the answer was yes, and so began the last known hours of Williams life. He sat up in bed, watching cartoons on the iPhone. He pulled toys from a cupboard, and got dressed into a Spider-Man suit. He had toast and Weet-Bix for breakfast and raced around the garden, and then he was gone. But where?

Logically we know that children do not simply evaporate. Something must have happened. But what?

Talk to people who know a little about the case, and some will say: Oh, well, its been so long now, he must be dead.

There is, in fact, no evidence for that. No trace of William not a shoe, not a hair has ever been found, and we should therefore allow for the possibility that he is alive, but even so, he still needs to come home. He does not belong with those who have him. He belongs with those he loved. And even if that is not right, if Williams life has been taken from him, we still need to find him.

He does not belong in a bush grave, or a suitcase by the side of the road. He belongs with those who love him still.

Oh, but theyve been looking for years, and nobody knows what happened.

That is something else that people say, and that is not right, either.

Somebody knows exactly what happened. They do not want to tell, and it is for us to make them. And yes, there have been some miscalculations during the investigation, some maddening missteps, tunnel vision and flaring passions. Dead leads have been followed too long; the memories of witnesses have eroded; evidence has disintegrated; police have at times dropped the ball. People have lied, or else they have refused to talk, and others have grown sick and died but why should any of that matter?

Williams most pressing problem is not the difficulties experienced to date. It is being found. The NSW Police Force and their colleagues all over the world are still trying.

Why wouldnt they be? All anyone wants is to find him.

What, then, do we know?

We know for certain that William, when he disappeared, was wearing a Spider-Man suit. It was two-piece, not one-piece, and it has been described as red, but it wasnt just red, it was fire-engine red. We know also that the property from which William disappeared was by contrast muted like a Drysdale painting all fallen leaves and faded fence posts and William should by rights have stood out like a post box on that landscape, and yet nobody heard so much as a twig snap.

There was no slam of a car boot, no squeal of tyres, he did not scream, he was simply there one minute and gone the next. So, what happened?

There is a problem-solving principle known as Ockhams Razor. In essence, it states: the simplest explanation is usually the right one or, as the US physician Dr Theodore Woodward once said: When you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras.

The simplest explanation for Williams disappearance, at least in the early hours, was that he was lost. He had been playing outside, he did not live in Kendall, and the property upon which he was playing was surrounded by state forest, so it made sense that he had followed something a bird, or maybe a butterfly? and then, like a child in a fable who turns to find the trail of breadcrumbs has vanished, he could not find his way back to the house.

The alarm went out, and in the days that followed, hundreds of volunteers came out to search for William, and we have reason to feel proud of them, for they came by foot and they came by car, they came by quad bike and on horseback, they pushed through bramble that tore their clothes, calling out until their voices were hoarse, and what did they want? Nothing other than for one of their number to burst free of the bush with William aloft and alive in their arms.

Ive found him!

Ive got him! Hes here!

It was not to be.

William was not found, because he was not lost. William is missing because he was taken. It is a rare crime in the western world, the snatching of a child. It just doesnt happen, except of course that it does.

It happened to ten-year-old Benjamin Ely from Baltimore in the United States, who was crossing the road on his skateboard tic-tac one minute and was gone the next, the only clue a car moving too fast over a speed bump.

In Britain, they mourn Madeleine McCann, also aged three, taken from her hotel room in Praia da Luz, Portugal.

In Australia, we are haunted by the memory of the Beaumont children Jane, Arnna and Grant who disappeared from Glenelg Beach near Adelaide in 1966. Their mother has only just died. For fifty years she lived with trauma, of never knowing what happened to her children.

Then, too, there is Eloise Worledge, taken from her home in Victorias Beaumaris in 1976; there is Quanne Diec, last seen by her father leaving her home in Granville, New South Wales in 1998; there is Rahma El-Dennaoui, who was just nineteen months old when she disappeared from the bed she was sharing with two of her sisters in south-west Sydney in 2005; and there was, for many years, Daniel Morcombe, taken from a bus stop on 7 December 2003 on his way to the shops to buy his mum a Christmas present.

Of that group, only Daniels killer has been brought to justice.

The person or people who took William? He or she or they remain in our community. Probably they feel emboldened.

How are we to respond? We know the answer. A child is missing and needs to be found, and so we dont admit defeat. We go back now, and we start again. We look to see what maybe we missed the first time. We try all the old leads and we find new ones. We press on until we bring him home.

W illiam Tyrrells family circumstances are complex. We need to acknowledge that, or else nothing that follows will make sense. William has biological parents his mum and dad who are from Sydneys west. He also has foster parents, in whose care he had been since he was nine months old. They live in Sydneys north.

It is against the law in New South Wales to reveal the identity of anyone in either family, primarily to protect the privacy of Williams older sister, Lindsay, who was in the care of the same foster parents, and who was only four when William went missing. (Lindsay is not her real name, but a pseudonym given to her by the Childrens Court.)

This secrecy has tended to deepen the mystery. Gossip, rumour, innuendo: you will find all this in Williams case. The Australian public good people, not generally given to cruel suspicion wondered for many years what was being hidden from them. Providing the honest explanation William was at the time of his disappearance a foster child was until recently an offence punishable by prison time.

Some of the secrecy has, by court order, been lifted, and here is what we can now say:

William, his sister Lindsay, and their foster parents a well-educated, professional couple were visiting Kendall when William went missing. Kendall is a small village on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. It is four hours north of Sydney via the Pacific Highway and, according to the 2016 Census, it has a population of 1141 people. Kendall is inland, not coastal. It is surrounded by state forest. There is a sign on the outskirts of town saying, Welcome to Kendall: The Poets Village, and that is because Kendall is named not for Englands old market town thats Kendal but for the Australian bush poet Henry Kendall.