William Tyrrell: fear in Kendall where little boy disappeared

Two years after a three-year-old disappeared, dark rumours abound.

A mother and child in Kendall, on the NSW mid-north coast, this week.

They all know the void, that dark and hollow space the size and shape of a three-year-old boy in a Spider-Man suit. In the days after William Tyrrell vanished from his grandmother’s yard on September 12, 2014, the people of Kendall and its surrounding towns on the NSW mid-north coast filled that void with hope, a unifying faith that the beautiful boy was just beyond the next ridge, just hiding behind the next blue gum.

As the second anniversary of his disappearance nears and the increasingly complex web of suspects in William’s alleged abduction expands, those same townspeople can’t help but fill that void with fear.

“So much suspicious stuff,” says Andrew Copelin, a father of three standing by the brick canteen of the Kendall Sports Ground, watching his young children sidestep and weave through a regional school touch football competition that has attracted young families from the neighbouring towns of Laurieton, Bonny Hills, North Haven, Wauchope, Kew, Beechwood and the more bustling Port Macquarie, 30km away.

“You’re always taking second looks at things. Really, really aware, especially a day like today where you’ve got young ones playing around here. We’re watching out not only for our ones but you’re always kinda watching out for other kids.”

Nobody wants to say the words because they’re acid on the tongue. Say it aloud and you may make it true. Pedophile ring: those words have been whispered around here since April last year, when NSW police announced they had “uncovered and received information that leads us to a line of people we suspect of being involved in pedophile activity”.

Reports followed about clusters of convicted pedophiles relocating to the NSW mid-north coast. Hearsay and rumour met anger and confusion, and met 11-year-old Emelia Copelin in the back seat of the family car as the Copelins took a scenic detour through the old logging village of Kendall to their home in Beechwood, 20km north. “Don’t stop here,” she said, anxiously. “As soon as they got here, they just said they wanted to get out,” says Emelia’s mum, Alison Copelin. “They still talk about it all the time.”

“There’s a lot of underlying factors that you hear about,” says Emelia’s dad, a youth worker in a local 24/7 crisis centre who is more attuned than most to the region’s “underlying factors”.

“It’s there,” he says, matter-of-factly. “The element is there. When you hear about it you kind of only hear what the media portrays and then, when you actually work in the industry and talk to people who you know, there’s a lot more stuff that’s under that which the media doesn’t get to. Confidentiality and privacy and all that comes into play with it, but you look at it and you just go, ‘What did happen?’ ”

What happened? A boy and his older sister played chase in their nanna’s garden. William’s mother heard her son making tiger growls, trying to scare his sister. Then she heard no noise coming from the boy at all. She frantically circled the yard at the end of Benaroon Drive, Kendall, scoured every corner of a sprawling and unfenced lawn that sloped down 70m or so through tall trees to a dead-end street with only 13 houses on it. “You need to talk to Mummy, William,” she called desperately. “Tell me where you are.” She has known nothing but the void ever since.

Everybody here knows Benaroon Drive now. They’ve all felt the shade fall as their cars hummed past the Kendall Showground through the gallery of trees that adds to the sense of foreboding already created by the void. They’ve all reached the top of Benaroon Drive and seen, first-hand, how unlikely it is that a three-year-old boy would wander off into the lantana-thick scrub that walls the street. They’ve all seen how detached the street is from the rest of town; how utterly unfeasible it is that anyone would find themselves drawn to the end of Benaroon Drive by chance.

“We never thought for a minute it was someone from town,” says Judy Wilson.

Like William’s grandmother, she has since moved out of Benaroon Drive, but in September 2014 Wilson lived in the house that adjoins William’s grandmother’s back yard. In the days after he vanished, she couldn’t shake the thought that William’s potential abductor had waited for her to go into town to run errands before activating a plan too dark for Wilson to dwell on.

“We think about William every day,” she says. “And when we think of him we think of him alive.”

From his house directly opposite William’s grandmother’s former home, an elderly man named Paul (surname withheld for privacy reasons) and his son, Sean, have watched long-time friends and neighbours slowly drift away from Benaroon Drive.

“A lot of them have moved,” he says. “One bloke left because he felt intimidated by the police. He had a few problems. He wasn’t a crook or a bad bloke, just a bit of a loner. He wanted out.”

“A recluse,” says Sean. “I think all of the attention sort of frightened him.”

“They were coming around checking everything and he got scared,” Paul says. “Just the fear of that.” He shrugs his shoulders. “You got to let them do their job and they’re still following up on everything. They’re doing a good job.”

There’s a grandmother of 10 who lives towards the bottom of the street who slowly drags her black bin filled with fallen leaves out to the kerbside. She speaks of how, every single day, she pads up her long driveway to her letterbox. When she reaches the letterbox, she looks left, then right, up and down her street, not knowing what exactly she is hoping to see. “But it’s always just like this,” she says, raising her palms to the sky. Total stillness. Total silence but for a bird or two singing.

She remembers when William’s grandmother knocked frantically on her door on September 12, 2014. She ran straight to her husband and said in disbelief, “She’s lost her f..king grandson.”

“We were one of the few — I’ll say unfortunate people now — that were here when it happened,” she says. “We were just witnesses but the police are on our case a lot now and it’s frustrating.

“My two littlest (grandchildren) are here all the time. I cannot leave them. They used to run up and down here on the bikes. They could run up and down on the road. It was idyllic. But now there’s that stigma. You can’t leave your kids to do that.

“If my kids want to ride their bike, I’m right beside them. I can’t take my eyes off them.

“It’s changed. It’s like you can’t trust the place any more. People are scared. But I cannot, personally, believe that pedophiles roam this place looking for …” She doesn’t finish the sentence. “I’ve lived here for 11 years and I’ve not seen anything like that. It’s just not feasible. But we also know William could not have gone walking into the bush around here. It’s too thick. It’s just not easy to do that.”

Around the corner from Benaroon Drive, a young mum hovers over her daughter, almost three. She never leaves her side. The mother works in Port Macquarie, but she and her partner moved here to be closer to her partner’s son, who was living with his mother across the street from William’s grandmother’s house when the boy vanished. She had heard all the pedophile rumours before moving in.

“The rental price was good and it’s a great place to raise a kid,” she says.

Will she ever let her child play outside by herself? “Never, ever, ever, ever,” she says.

This is the glorious region called Camden Haven. Green grass, hills and cows so content they moo only to satisfy passing tourists. Old red-iron rail bridges straight out of a Steinbeck novel. Whimsical eateries such as Miss Nellie’s Cafe with wooden boxes of “Tangy tangelos, 10 for $1”.

Linda Hoffman is a 38-year-old single mother of three from Bonny Hills, 10km west of Kendall. She works in childcare.

“When I first heard about it my brother and I both came and searched bushlands around the home,” she says. During the night search, by chance, she ran into her father, Gordon Hutchison, a dedicated State Emergency Service volunteer.

“That night you just had a sense of urgency to get out there and try to locate him sooner rather than later,” she says. “If he was out there on his own, you know, in the bush, how scared would he be. It’s a rough sort of bush, very cold at night. You feel bad leaving to go home, knowing that he’s not found yet … So I got back up the next morning and went back out, sort of always thinking, ‘Maybe just over this gully.’

“We would have kept searching for two or three weeks if we had to,” Hutchison says. “There’s always a vacancy there when you get back and there’s nothing. Especially when you end the search. It will always be in our mind all the time now. Then you think, ‘Did we search every area?’

“As the search scaled back, it was disbelief that he wasn’t found,” says Hoffman. “That was such a strange thing to have happened in a dead-end street. This wasn’t someone just driving past a main road and grabbing a child, it was the little town of Kendall, up a street of just family homes, and he’s been taken. That’s scary.

“Then you start hearing about a lot of the pedophiles that are in the area, known pedophiles that have been relocated to the area.”

The woman who set out on that search for William was different, she says, to the woman who came back. That search changed Hoffman. She lost an easy trust in a world where parents waited for their children outside their suburban front door.

That search made Hoffman consider the dark recesses of her home town, Bonny Hills; made her dwell on the void.

Bill Spedding lives on a street in Bonny Hills similar to Benaroon Drive, low-set brick homes on sprawling leafy blocks running upwards to a dead end flanked by bushland. His lawn is covered in handyman supplies: heavy tools, planks of wood, utility vehicles.

This home was searched by police in January last year when Spedding became a highly publicised “person of interest” after it was discovered he had visited William’s grandmother’s house to repair a washing machine three days before the boy’s disappearance.

Spedding fiercely denied any connection to William’s disappearance. The 65-year-old was subsequently charged with indecent assault and sexual offences against a child under 10 in Victoria dating back to the 1980s.

Spedding says he can’t talk publicly about William. His lawyers advised him not to around the time he posted a video on YouTube correcting media reports that suggested he was due to make his washing machine repairs on the day William vanished.

He has a local mate, a knockabout, gun-barrel-straight bloke named Colin Youngberry, who has become his reluctant spokesman. “I believe what I say and I say what I believe,” Youngberry says. He believes in Spedding. He says when his friend is legally able to make an official statement on William’s disappearance, there will be “fireworks”.

He doesn’t believe the pedophile ring rumours. “I think (police) are following any comment that’s made to keep filling in the picture, mate,” he says.

“Not one person has been hit with anything from a pedophile ring, have they?

“But it’ll come out that Bill’s totally innocent of the lot. You follow that angle, mate, and you’ll be spot-on. I guarantee you that one.”

Back at the Kendall Sports Ground, a local dad tells you a story about a chat he had with a local cop friend. The fear, said this cop, was that potential pedophiles in these towns on the mid-north coast acted as out-of-town scouts for other out-of-town scouts. A network develops where, the dad says, “they don’t shit in their own back yard”.

Just a story, but the look on his face says it means more to him than that. “What do you do about that as a parent?”

Close to lunchtime, touch footy kids rush another local dad, Steve Long, manning the barbecue in the sportsground canteen.

“This morning on Facebook there was an alert in Kempsey (an hour’s drive away) for a white van going around with men in it trying to pick up kids,” he says.

“The teachers approached the van and they took off. That went all over Facebook so everyone in the public knows. Since William, things go right round the entire community and everyone is watching everyone, everyone has an eye out.”

He shrugs his shoulders, gripping a pair of barbecue tongs. Such hyper-awareness is neither good nor bad, he says. It’s just life now in Kendall.

Along the touch football field sideline, a five-year-old boy named Benjamin hangs like a monkey from the metal pole of a sideline marquee shade. The boy’s mum, Cindy Bell, sits with school-mum friends along a wood fence, smiling at her son.

In the wake of William’s disappearance, police officers knocked urgently on Bell’s front door.

“Someone had actually told the police that they saw a little boy through the window of my house in a Spider-Man uniform,” she says. She looks at Benjamin. “He was asleep at the time and they actually had to come into my house and double check that he wasn’t William.

“Yeah, that was pretty full-on. He never had a Spider-Man shirt on and or anything like that. For someone to go past my house and think they saw William through the window was a bit weird.”

It showed Bell how on edge the community was. Bell’s friends, fellow mums Lisa Martin and Karen Millward, mention two recent police alerts warning parents of suspicious pedophile behaviour in the mid-north coast.

“The idea of safety is on everybody’s mind now,” Bell says. “It’s a concern all the time now. It always will be.”

The mention of Spider-Man has put superhero thoughts in young Benjamin’s head. He leaps along the sideline, joyously.

You can almost understand why someone thought he was William two years ago. Same beaming smile, same irrepressible energy. He’s five years old, the same age as William. A little older now than he was back then, yet still so young.