Potential witnesses in William Tyrrell case come forward with shocking claims
Several people who believe they saw William Tyrrell in the days after his disappearance have claimed their tip-offs were not taken seriously by police.
EXCLUSIVE
A woman who tried to report seeing William Tyrrell near Uluru a year after he disappeared says she was turned away by police and her repeated calls to Crime Stoppers were never followed up.
She is one of five people news.com.au has spoken to who say police failed to respond to potentially credible tips, including alleged sightings of a car and driver about which detectives had previously appealed for information.
It raises questions about what other potential evidence may have been overlooked during the investigation, and if detectives can now be certain they have ruled other explanations of what happened to William.
A second of the five potential witnesses said she “felt sick” after being mistakenly told she must be wrong when trying to report another possible sighting of William, while a third said he was “pissed off with Crime Stoppers not taking me seriously”.
“I thought, ‘What a joke. No one seems to care’,” he said.
NSW Police were inundated with information after William was reported missing from his foster grandmother’s home in Kendall on the state’s Mid North Coast on September 12, 2014.
In the following two years, there were around 2800 calls to Crime Stoppers, which allows people to report tips, and more than 1000 possible sightings of William.
Many of these tips were followed up at the time.
In 2015, detectives responded to one reported sighting on a flight bound for New Zealand, meeting the plane at the airport and confirming the child in question was not the missing toddler.
But news.com.au’s podcast investigation Witness: William Tyrrell has uncovered worrying claims suggesting a pattern of information being either not passed on to detectives, or not followed up on by police.
One potential witness, Lois Barry, believed she saw William travelling with a group of four adults and several young children when she was on a trip to Australia’s red centre in 2015.
She said she had an encounter with a blonde woman at a petrol station in Marla, South Australia, who told Ms Barry she was from the east coast of NSW.
As soon as Ms Barry went into a free cubicle, she claimed the woman said: “You can come out now, Will.”
Ms Barry said she saw the group again at a campsite later that night, and recognised one of the group from media reports of William’s disappearance.
The boy was younger than the other children in the group and she felt he was being “hidden” by them, she said.
One of the adults with the group was the blonde woman, Ms Barry said.
She took a photo of the group’s vehicle and noted down their registration numbers.
Independently, another potential witness told police he saw a blonde woman driving fast through Kendall on the morning William was reported missing, with a child wearing a Spider-Man suit in the back of her car.
William was wearing a Spider-Man suit on the morning he was last seen, although the reported age of this female driver does not match that of the woman in Ms Barry’s photograph.
Ms Barry told news.com.au she tried to report her potential sighting at the time by visiting a local police station, only to be cut off by an officer who said he was busy, and told her “don’t worry about it”.
She then called Crime Stoppers “two or three times” to report what she had seen.
“Crime Stoppers rang me back and said it was nothing,” she said.
Ms Barry said she has never heard directly from police.
“For all those years … that was just eating at me,” she said, breaking down as she described her fears of what might have happened to William.
Another potential witness, Matilda Polanetz, said she called Crime Stoppers days after William was reported missing after seeing a boy matching his description and wearing a Spider-Man suit on a bus trip in NSW.
She said the phone operator mistakenly dismissed the sighting, saying William’s hair was blond – not brown, like that of the boy Ms Polanetz said she had seen on the bus.
William’s hair colour was brown.
“I think I just noticed him more so because he had that Spider-Man outfit, that’s what I really do remember,” Ms Polanetz said, describing the boy as travelling with an unknown woman on the Albury to Sydney route.
Ms Polanetz said she called Crime Stoppers on September 15, 2014 – three days after William was reported missing – but was quickly rebuffed by the person who answered.
“She asked me if he had blond hair. And of course I said ‘no’,” she said.
“And then she just said ‘No, that’s not the boy. It wasn’t Tyrrell’.
“That’s definite. That’s 100 per cent. She definitely said that.”
An emotional Ms Polanetz said she now wished she had pushed harder to have her story taken seriously, and “felt sick” to think the boy she saw could have been William.
A third potential witness, Richard Brindle, said he contacted Crime Stoppers shortly after police appealed for information about two cars “parked strangely with the driver windows down” outside the house where William was reported missing.
The lead detective on the case at the time, Gary Jubelin, told 60 Minutes in 2019 the vehicles were “suspicious” and “we’re interested in finding out who these people are and what they were doing there at the time”.
Mr Brindle told news.com.au he saw a white station wagon matching the description of one of these cars in Central Queensland before this program went to air.
The car’s driver had flagged his truck down, Mr Brindle said, and in hindsight he realised the driver matched the description of someone publicly identified as a “person of interest” to police.
Despite multiple reports to Crime Stoppers, Mr Brindle said he never heard back.
“I had some fresh information at the time, and I rang Crime Stoppers twice. And they must have thought I was some nut job or whatever,” he said.
“I was a bit pissed off with Crime Stoppers not taking me seriously.
“It’s very serious stuff, it’s a boy’s life. And they didn’t even bother to interview me.
“I thought, ‘What a joke. No one seems to care’.”
A fourth potential witness, who asked to remain anonymous, said she called Crime Stoppers only a few days after William went missing to suggest police investigate a local person.
She also never heard back from detectives – despite that man subsequently being publicly identified as a person of interest to police.
He has since been cleared of any wrongdoing.
A fifth potential witness, Jodie Huntley, said she emailed Crime Stoppers in 2019 to report her suspicions about a man who lived near Kendall, where William was reported missing.
These included allegations of deeply unpleasant behaviour by the man, Frank Abbott, and the discovery of a Spider-Man sleeping bag in a caravan he used to live in.
Abbott, who has denied any involvement in William’s disappearance, has since been convicted of sexually assaulting three young children unrelated to the Tyrrell case.
At the time Ms Huntley reported her suspicions to Crime Stoppers, Abbott was also known to authorities, having been found not guilty of the murder of a 17-year-old girl.
Despite this, Ms Huntley did not hear back from police for weeks, writing online, “The police obviously have leads and don’t need the information?”
Eventually, she decided to make the report in person at a local police station, telling news.com.au detectives came to speak to her either weeks or months later, after her online comments were passed on to police by someone else
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“It was a bit frustrating,” said Ms Huntley, who described having sleepless nights over what she knew about Abbott.
Ms Huntley was ultimately called to give evidence at the ongoing inquest into William’s fate.
NSW Police are now focusing their investigation on William’s foster mother, who has strongly denied any involvement in what happened and has not been charged with any offences relating to William.
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