Has the search for William Tyrrell lost momentum?
The William Tyrrell case shocked the nation but six years later we don’t seem to be getting any closer to finding out what happened, writes Claire Harvey.
Opinion
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What on earth is going on in the William Tyrrell investigation?
We have a homicide case that has apparently stalled, after the lead investigator was pulled off the case and convicted of a local-court offence because he’d failed to fill out the correct paperwork relating to warrants.
There’s a coronial inquiry that appears to have gone quiet.
Every so often a battalion of cops in overalls is sent out to walk through the bush looking for something – what? – that might have been overlooked in the scores of previous searches, and might have survived the intervening six years of weather.
And this week the coroner released a dump of documents packed with what appear to be cold leads and red herrings.
A jailed paedophile’s conversations with his priest which don’t appear to go anywhere.
Traffic camera evidence proving – well, not much.
There was even a suggestion that William’s foster father somehow raised eyebrows by leaving the house while police searched for the little boy.
I doubt any dad would sit meekly on the sofa while his child was in peril.
The foster father is not considered a suspect and it would seem to me more suspicious if he hadn’t joined the frantic search.
And now, every time there’s a news story about this case, William’s foster parents and biological family, deep in their grief, have to confront afresh the knowledge that whomever took their little boy is still out there.
William would be nine now, having celebrated his birthday in June. He’d be halfway through Year 3, becoming a confident reader, obsessing over superheroes, mastering his shoelaces. He’d still be finding farts hilarious and running to his Mum for comfort over a stubbed toe or a grazed knee.
So what’s gone wrong?
I’m not suggesting the matter was easy to solve: if it were straightforward, we wouldn’t still be talking about it six years on.
Each generation in turn is haunted by its own harrowing real-life story of childhood shattered: the disappearance of the Beaumont children, whose Mum sent them to the beach for a picnic in 1960s Adelaide; Daniel Morcombe, who was lured from a bus-stop on his way to buy Christmas presents for his family; the Madeleine McCann case, where an innocent parental mistake – going to dinner and leaving the kids asleep in a holiday unit – triggered a decade of anguish and horror.
Three-year-old children don’t just disappear.
Somebody took William – or somebody knows what happened to him.
If the investigation’s been derailed, someone needs to get it back on track.
Who’s going to do that? The coroner? The cops?
All of Australia has felt the trauma of William’s disappearance. And we all deserve an answer.