A sister’s devotion must drive us to find William Tyrrell

His sister’s devotion must drive us to find William Tyrrell. For the sake of this brave little girl, someone must speak up now.

Missing boy William Tyrrell, with his sister in the background, on the day he disappeared. Picture: Supplied

William Tyrrell is to most Australians the little boy in the ­Spider-Man suit. But he was also, at the time of his perplexing ­disappearance, somebody’s little brother.

His sister, who cannot be named to protect her privacy, was playing right there beside him on a timber deck at the back of the house at 48 Benaroon Drive in the village of Kendall, about four hours north of Sydney, on September 12, 2014.

She was then four years old, and she had her head down, scribbling on a card for her Opa. William was three years old, ­running around the garden like a tiger, saying “Raar”.

And then the was gone.

Six years on, there is still no sign of him. And although she’s still only 10, William’s sister has decided to do something about it.

She was not present in the NSW Coroner’s Court, above the shiny new morgue in the western Sydney suburb of Lidcombe, on Thursday. It was the last day of the exhaustive, yet somehow far from comprehensive inquest into her brother’s disappearance. But she wanted to say something.

She wrote her little speech herself, and recorded it onto a mobile phone so NSW deputy state coroner Harriet Grahame could hear it. And so it was that her voice rang out, clear and beautiful as the chime of a bell.

“I hope this speech makes you solve the case,” she said. “If it doesn’t, when I’m officially an adult, I will be a police officer, a ­detective specifically, and I will find my brother and I won’t give up until he’s found.”

And oh, how poised she sounded. There was not a waver. No dry eyes, either. Because, of course, it can’t be left to a little girl to solve this monstrous crime.

William went missing from a street with just 22 houses on it at about 10.30 in the morning on a clear September day. It cannot be beyond our combined intelligence to figure out what happened.

There has been a great deal of criticism of the NSW Police for their handling of the case in the early hours. Some of it is unfair; many have given their all. But it is true that hundreds of big-hearted volunteers, including mums with prams and boys on bikes and girls on horseback, tramped through the scene when William first went missing.

Cars came and went without being searched, and it seems that whatever evidence may have ­existed was lost in the process.

Why didn’t police set up a ­cordon? Why didn’t they establish a crime scene? Those questions have not been satisfactorily answered, but we know it will never happen again.

Just two weeks ago, a little boy went missing from a rural property in Western Australia. And because the universe is a mysterious place, by chance he, too, was wearing not a Spider-Man suit, exactly, but Spider-Man pyjamas. And what did local police do? They threw the tape up. That is William’s legacy. Never again will a boy go missing and be presumed lost. Always in police minds will be the idea that he may have been taken.

The investigation into William’s disappearance was, after the first few months of dead leads, handed to one of NSW’s most ­famous cops, Gary Jubelin. He ran it with energy and passion, and the mistakes he made cost him his ­career. It is now in the hands of ­another veteran police officer, David Laidlaw, who is close to ­retirement.

It’s fair to say that William’s foster parents have little faith in the new leadership. They think NSW Police want the case off their books. In giving a final wrap of the evidence on Wednesday, Detective Laidlaw insisted that this was not so. He made the point that no one has been ruled out, meaning everyone is still a potential suspect.

That statement directly contradicts those made by Jubelin, who repeatedly ruled out William’s foster parents, who had him in their care when he went missing; and his biological parents, who were in Sydney, but had taken him once before.

Laidlaw strove to assure the court everything that could have been done to find William had now been done. Police have tried to identify every car in the vicinity of Benaroon Drive that morning, by taking CCTV from the Kendall Tennis Club, and by looking at footage from speed and mobile phone cameras on the nearby freeway — and calling on every owner of the registration plates asking them to explain themselves.

A DNA profile of William has been created from William’s toothbrush, and that is now part of the Missing Persons database, which performs a continuous, looping search of all available records.

A picture of William’s face, both as it was when he went missing, and as it might look today, has been lodged with those international agencies that scan and search facial images across all media — football games and airport terminals, to use some examples — and it will continue to be scanned lest it turn up a match.

Facial recognition technology has been used to search the Border Force database to establish if an Australian passport has ever been issued featuring the image of a child that might be William. The process produced “galleries of potential matches” all of which have since been searched manually, but again, there has been no result.

Police search the area opposite the house in Bennaroon Drive where William Tyrrell went missing. Picture: Nathan Edwards

There has also been a so-called “dump” of all mobile phone data captured by the Telstra, Vodafone and Optus towers in and around Kendall on the morning of William’s disappearance. It’s a tiny town of fewer than 1500 people, but still no clues emerged. Some people were in town because they live in or near the town. It doesn’t prove they took William.

Beyond that, a $1m reward for information — the largest for a missing person — still stands.

Towards the end of proceedings, a blunt question was put to Laidlaw: “Have you given up?”

“No. We never will,” Laidlaw replied. But the truth is that the investigation is winding down. Where once there were 26 detectives on the case, there are now only five, and not all are full-time. The matter is indeed becoming a dreaded “cold case”.

That is gutting for his loved ones, but then the entire inquest has been frustrating. Counsel ­assisting Gerard Craddock ad­op­ted far too ponderous an approach to the evidence. He was slow to the get to the point, or else there seemed to be no point.

The NSW Police have often seemed a touch too cute, meaning too keen to be seen to be doing something in the face of immense public pressure. At least half a dozen reprobate sex offenders from around the Kendall area were hauled to court and forced into questioning over the lamentable state of their lives, including that of their busted families. As shows go, it was suitably macabre, but did any of them have anything to do with William’s disappearance? There’s no evidence for it.

And so, where from here?

William’s families have indicated they would at this point of sheer desperation take “peace over punishment” — meaning, look, nobody has to be charged, nobody even has to go to jail, but please, if you know something, won’t you come forward?

Just tell them what happened. Because they need an answer. For six years and 28 days, they have been waking screaming and thrashing from this nightmare. Where is William? How did he die? They are broken.

And then to have a little girl boldly stating that if we can’t solve it, she will? That shouldn’t be her burden. We have to bring him home.