Shock Tyrrell evidence: ‘I saw William in car’

Police took 1000 days to interview a man who may be the only credible witness to likely abduction.

Kendall resident Ronald Chapman is seen in a Police video where he recounts seeing a car pass his home with a boy resembling missing child William Tyrrell.

NSW police took almost 1000 days to conduct a formal, recorded interview with the man who may be the only credible witness to the likely abduction of William Tyrrell.

William’s family, who cannot be named, sat thunderstruck in the public gallery yesterday as Kendall resident Ronald Keith Chapman told the NSW Coroner’s Court he was “100 per cent certain” he had seen William, in his Spider-Man suit, standing in the back of a car being ­driven erratically down the street, on the morning of the boy’s ­disappearance.

He said William was unrestrained, had his hands to the glass and was peering out.

He said the driver was a woman aged in her mid-20s to mid-30s with blonde hair piled into a bun on the top of her head.

“Do you think in fact you saw William Tyrrell?” counsel ­assist­ing, Gerard Craddock, asked.

“I do, yes,” Mr Chapman replied.

William’s family was then dealt a second blow when the inquest was suddenly — without explanation — adjourned for seven months. It is unclear whether that decision was taken to allow further investigations into Mr Chapman’s claims.

The next hearings will now be in March 2020.

Deputy State Coroner Harriet Grahame has been trying to pick her way through the five-year investigation into William’s dis­appearance, which has been bedevilled by police missteps, false witness statements and confirmation bias, as detailed in The Australian’s podcast series Nowhere Child.

Ron Chapman. Picture: John Feder

William’s grandmother, who cannot be named, wept as she listened to Mr Chapman, who is now 80, try to explain why he didn’t immediately tell police what he had seen.

He didn’t know about William being missing until later that night, when he heard a detective on the news say they planned to interview everyone who lived in a 1km radius of Benaroon Drive, where William disappeared.

He waited patiently for them to knock on the door, but police were in fact focused on searching for William, scouring dams and fighting their way through thick lantana. It would be weeks, months, even years before they got around to interviewing neighbours. “I was waiting for a knock on the door,” Mr Chapman said.

When nobody came after several weeks, he decided to try to find Kendall police officer Wendy Hudson, who he had known “since she was a babe in arms”, at the social club on a Friday night. He found her sister-in-law, Allison, instead, and asked her to pass on a message: he’d seen William in the back of a fast-moving car.

The message somehow wasn’t passed on, but The Australian understands Mr Chapman told 12 other people, including his five sisters, what he had seen, and word did eventually make its way to police, who talked to him in 2015 and 2016 before taking a formal statement in April 2017.

T Y R R E L L

William went missing on September 12, 2014.

In clearly worded evidence, Mr Chapman, wearing slacks and a cardigan, told the Coroner’s Court he was particularly alert to movement outside his house on Laurel Street that morning because, as a flower judge and pot plant aficionado, he was expecting a delivery of delicate plants from Garden Express in Victoria.

It was a Friday and he wanted to make sure they didn’t get stuck in the post office across the weekend. He heard what he thought was the lid of the mailbox about 10.45am, and went outside to see whether his package had arrived.

He stepped on to the veranda, and had his hand on the rail at the top of the stairs when he saw a car coming and “what made me look was the car was being driven around the corner at speed”.

“There was an eight-foot drain in front to the house, and I heard gravel running … she was almost in the drain,” he said.

“It was a woman (driver). She was almost off the tar. In the back seat was a young boy with his hands up on the window … his face was sort of in between.”

Asked about the boy’s age, he said: “I would say three or four. He was standing. He wasn’t crying. He was wearing a Spider-Man suit. It was an old box-type 4WD. I couldn’t tell you what the make was. Fawn colour. Beige is a bit light.

William Tyrrell.

“(The driver) was a woman in her late 20s to late 30s, blonde hair, very fair complexion. She wore a white, short-sleeved blouse.”

Asked by Mr Craddock: “You could see his hands, and his face?”

“Clearly,” Mr Chapman said.

He said he was sure the boy was wearing a Spider-Man suit because of the red top, the blue sleeves and the black pattern. A boy who lived next door had one just like it. “He was looking out the window, and he wasn’t restrained, he didn’t have a seat belt on,” he said.

“I did utter (a) profanity under my breath for the woman being stupid for not having the kid ­restrained. (She) almost lost control­ as she come around the corner, at a wide angle.”

He said the boy had “light blondey-browney colour hair” and “he was fair”.

Moments later, a second car “came around and cut the corner, it was virtually two wheels on the grass”. When Mr Chapman saw William’s picture on the news, he ­realised it was the same boy.

“Why didn’t you call the police?” Mr Craddock asked. “When you saw that thing on the news, why wasn’t your next action to pick up the phone and call the police? As you sit here today, are you in two minds?”

Mr Chapman replied: “I’m 100 per cent sure it was William in the back of the car … no doubt.”

He told the court he spoke to police in about March or April 2015, and again in 2016, but no formal interview was done until 2017. In that statement, he said he hadn’t come forward because he was worried that he’d get in trouble, or make trouble for police. “It just gave me that big a shock to think that something like that, William being taken, had happened in Kendall,” he said. “For a moment I thought whether I had dreamt or imagined the car going past,” he added, because it seemed so unlikely but he was now “100 per cent sure”.

Mr Chapman said he knew William’s foster grandmother, who was at the house on Benaroon Drive when William went missing, “but I didn’t get on very well with her”.

The Australian understands they had an argument many years ago about the correct propagation of flowers, but that wasn’t why Mr Chapman didn’t approach police.

“I know in hindsight I should have,” he said, “but I was waiting for the detective to come and visit me at home. It was said several times, police were going to interview everyone.”

Mr Chapman’s evidence led Mr Craddock to implore the public: “If there is a lady out there who was driving with a child, whether or not it was William Tyrrell, in the car, we want that person to come forward.”

The inquest also heard yesterday from a distant relative of a local sex offender, Tony Jones, formerly of Wauchope, saying he had come home drunk on the day of William’s disappearance.