Police on verge of arresting suspect in William Tyrrell mystery: FBI-trained criminal profiler

An FBI-trained criminal profiler believes NSW police may soon have enough information to make an arrest in the case of William Tyrrell.

William Tyrrell on the day he went missing in Kendall in 2014. Picture: Supplied

An FBI-trained criminal profiler believes NSW police may soon have enough information to make an arrest in the case of missing foster child William Tyrrell.

Kris Illingsworth, one of a handful of Australians to have trained at the FBI’s Behaviour Analysis Unit, made famous by the movie The Silence of the Lambs and TV show Mind Hunter, believes the suspect was initially overlooked by police who converged on the mid-north coast of NSW in the days and weeks after William went missing in 2014.

A former NSW homicide detective who was on taskforce that solved the so-called “Granny” murders on Sydney’s north shore in the 1990s, Ms Illingsworth is an independent criminal behavioural analyst and investigator.

On the 7News Investigates program The Disappearance of William Tyrrell on Sunday night, Ms Illingsworth said vital evidence was likely to have been lost in the initial confusion about whether William had wandered off and become lost or had been taken.

“Unfortunately, the crime scene wasn’t preserved,” she said.

“Benaroon Drive (where William was last seen in Kendall) is such an unusual location. It’s not a thoroughfare. There’s nothing to come and look at. There are no facilities.

“If you keep going on the road it connects to, it’s ultimately a dead-end … you go for kilometres through farmlands and you reach bushland and then you’ve just got to come back.”

It makes sense, she said, that the person who took William was either there already; there for no reason other than take him; or somebody who was able to “turn on a dime” and decide to coolly take a child without anyone hearing anything.

William was unsupervised on the lawn of the house, out of the eyesight of his foster mother and his sister, when he went missing.

“We know he was running around and he apparently had been quite boisterous and he’d been told that his (foster) father was on his way home,” Ms Illings­worth said.

Nobody heard a cry, or the slam of a car door.

Police ability to solve the case was complicated by William’s status as a foster child. No family member was able to come out to appeal for help, leaving the public with the impression they were being kept in the dark about key aspects of his disappearance.

A former Australian Federal Police commander Grant Edwards said police had likely become overwhelmed by the large number of suspects, in particular pedophiles living around the mid-north coast, and many of their neighbours were oblivious to their status as career criminals.

“Because of the way they present, you struggle in your mind to rationalise that they could be pedophiles,” he said.

“The are across the spectrum from saints to absolute nastiest people in the world. You have those people, you look at them and the way they present, you wouldn’t believe it.”

The disappearance of William is one of the nation’s longest-­running and most vexing police ­inquiries.

A million-dollar reward for information leading to the boy’s recovery has never been claimed.

Police returned to the scene of the crime on the seventh anniversary of William’s disappearance, on September 14.

Just three years old when he went missing in his red Spider-Man suit, he would now be 10.

Homicide detectives have confirmed that they have been looking at the potential involvement of a person previously ruled out of the investigation.

“Further in­formation has come forward during our review of this matter,” Chief Inspector David Laidlaw said last week.

“The team is committed to finding out what happened to William and bringing William home to both families.”

Caroline Overington will host the second show of the two-part 7News Investigates documentary The Disappearance of William Tyrrell on September 26.