NSW Coroner releases trove of William Tyrrell investigation documents
New documents released by the NSW coroner show the complex tactics used by detectives determined to find missing boy William Tyrrell.
NSW
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The NSW coroner has released a trove of documents from the William Tyrrell investigation including a previously unseen haunting image of the boy in the Spider-Man suit’s final known minutes and a superhero outfit rotting in bushland.
Also among the pages of interviews and evidence are traffic camera images of a car owned by a man who claimed he helped in the abduction and a paedophile who told a friend police were telling him to plead guilty.
The documents, released on Tuesday morning, had only partly seen the light of day at the inquest into the three-year-old’s disappearance earlier this year.
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One image released on Tuesday shows William playing on the deck of his foster grandmother‘s Benaroon Drive home the morning he vanished.
He is wearing the now infamous superhero outfit and playing with crayons. A white Spider-Man logo is visible on the back of the costume, the picture has not been seen by the public before.
His foster mother previously told the NSW Coroner she‘d been playing games with William and his sister on the back deck and snapping their photo with her camera on September 12, 2014.
The missing boy, in his final documented hours, was playing a game with her he called “daddy tiger” and roaring like a fearsome beast.
Minutes later he walked around the side of the house and was never seen again.
The documents also reveal the full scope of the surveillance and shadowy tactics used by NSW Police’s Strikeforce Rosann to try and gain evidence against former person of interest Paul Savage.
Mr Savage, who has never been charged in relation to William’s disappearance, lives across the road from the Kendall home from where the boy vanished in September 2014.
He and washing machine repairman William Spedding were both thoroughly investigated by Strikeforce Rosann but no evidence was ever found connecting either man to the suspected crime and they have both been ruled out as suspects.
Mr Spedding has also vigorously denied having anything to do with Wiliam‘s disappearance and according to evidence presented to the coroner was in the audience of a local school assembly at the time the boy disappeared.
According to the documents released by the coroner Mr Savage, in July 2017, set out on his morning bushwalk in the dense scrub that surrounds the mid-north coast hamlet.
Next to the dirt track, among the leaves, police documents allege he stopped and bent over near scrunched up blue and red material - it was a Spider-Man suit nearly identical to the one worn by William when he vanished three years prior.
He kept walking and ran into another local, John Casimir. They chatted, Mr Savage waved his hands about and Mr Casimir walked down toward the suit - he would later tell police it would like a blue “piece of rag”.
Neither men knew it had been planted by a specialist covert police team who were monitoring Mr Savage to feed information back to the strikeforce’s then commander - Detective Chief Inspector Gary Jubelin.
The next morning the covert team watched Mr Savage return to the area near the Spider-Man suit - he nudged it with his foot and then hurried home.
The covert police watched him run down his driveway and take out his mobile, an hour later plain clothed officers arrive and Mr Savage took them to the suit in the bush.
That day the septuagenarian wrote in his diary “went for my walk again but found a Spider-Man outfit as I walked up the hill. It was about the right size for William. Hope it helps the police find the little bloke.”
Three weeks later Mr Savage was interviewed by Mr Jubelin and Detective Sergeant Laura Beacroft at Port Macquarie where Mr Savage claimed he reported the discovery to police immediately.
“So if I look you in the eye now and say, I know you‘re lying… what would you say to me?” Mr Jubelin said.
“Well, l‘d say you’re badly mistaken,” Mr Savage responded. “I am telling you the truth.”
Mr Jubelin continued to prod Mr Savage, the documents reveal planting the suit and the interview were just a fraction of the police attention he was receiving in 2017.
The senior detective put it to Mr Savage his late wife, Heather, may have run William over the day he vanished.
“You‘re covering up for Heather because there was an accident… You would do anything for Heather,” Mr Jubelin said.
“If she had hit him or something like that, she would‘ve been screamin’ the roof down,” Mr Savage protested.
“She‘d never have got over it. You didn’t know my wife, she was someone special, believe me.”
The documents also allege Mr Savage found and removed a police surveillance camera from a tree near his home but made no enquiries about who it belonged to.
The documents include transcripts of conversations between convicted paedophile Frank Abbott and his friend, a local priest Martin Parish, recorded from prison phones.
In one document Abbott, who is currently locked up, tells Mr Parish police took him to Newcastle to interview him for hours in November last year.
“They talked to me ... asking me questions, like if you plead guilty and that now we can help you... and Martin will forgive you now. I said what, for something I didn‘t do?” Abbott told Mr Parish.
Abbott told his friend police said they’d found a Spider-Man suit and children’s clothes. The paedophile concluded it was “all garbage” and police were “trying to frighten” him or elicit a confession.
Abbott has long denied involvement in William’s disappearance, has never been charged and the inquest is yet to hear evidence from him.
Other documents include traffic camera images of a white Holden Commodore station wagon belonging to Wauchope man Raymond Porter.
Mr Porter, now deceased, made headlines earlier this year when a nurse recounted what appeared to be a deathbed confession in April last year.
“All I did was give my best mate and a boy a lift,” she recalled him saying.
The nurse said Mr Porter tearfully told her he’d picked up William and his “mate” in Kendall.
The dying Mr Porter did not explain who his mate was but the inquest heard Mr Porter was a known close associate of Abbott.
The traffic camera images reveal Mr Porter’s car was moving around the region on the days before and after William vanished but September 12 - the day William vanished - the car did not appear on any traffic cameras.
Hospital records reveal Mr Porter was at Port Macquarie for dialysis between 9am and 3pm that day and there are no traffic cameras on the main route between his home and the hospital.
A $1 million reward remains unclaimed for information about William‘s disappearance.