William Tyrrell inquest: ‘I know the difference between a dead kangaroo and a human smell’

Convicted pedophile Frank Abbott said he could detect odour coming from bush around time William Tyrrell vanished.

Missing boy William Tyrrell. Picture: AAP

Convicted pedophile Frank Abbott, 79, told neighbours that he could detect a “bad smell” coming from the bush around the time William Tyrrell disappeared, according to evidence given on Thursday, during an inquest into the boy’s disappearance.

The smell was “not a kangaroo” he insisted.

Neighbours urged him to go to police, but he refused. He bragged instead of once “getting off” on a murder charge, and told them: “If there’s something up there, I’ll get blamed for it.”

Evidence was on Thursday taken from three members of the Anderson family that once owned a general store at John’s River, on the NSW mid-north coast.

Mr Abbott lived in a caravan opposite the store, and sometimes did odd jobs for the family.

He was in 2014 living in a caravan about eight kilometres from the street in Kendall where William was playing before he went missing but no evidence has placed him at the scene of the boy’s disappearance, on 12 September 2014.

Jan Anderson, who formerly owned the John’s River general store, told the inquiry that “Frank would tell you about a crime that was committed in Sydney, how he’d been acquitted of it”.

He was acquitted of the murder of a 17-year-old girl, Helen Mary Harrison, in the 1990s. She had been raped and bludgeoned, and nobody has ever been held to account.

“We had a feeling … we didn’t trust him around children,” Mrs Anderson said.

“We made a particular point of never having him near a child or grandchildren.”

She said Mr Abbott also “talked quite a bit about” William’s disappearance after it happened, “and he would tell us about the smell on the hillside, not far from where he turned off to go down his road to home”.

“He used to go on and on about a peculiar smell,” she said. “We said, it’s probably a dead animal, a kangaroo.

“He said, ‘no it’s not that’. We said, ‘why don’t you go and tell the police’, ‘no, no, no, I’m not going to do that … because if there’s something up there, I’ll get blamed for it’.”

Mrs Anderson’s daughter Sherie Hamilton told the court that Mr Abbott had bragged to her about “getting off on the murder charge”.

Her son, Dean Anderson, described Mr Abbott as “a dirty old man.”

“He used to just constantly go on about how he’d beat a murder charge in Sydney,” he agreed. “He would bring it up like a badge of honour.”

He said Mr Abbott also talked about William’s disappearance.

“There was an occasion when they were searching (local washing machine repairman) Bill Spedding’s property .. he felt they were searching in the wrong spot, which seemed a very strange comment to make,” he said.

“There were other comments, the smell one was another strange one, he kept going on about the bad smell around Logan’s Crossing.

“We said it’s probably a dead kangaroo and he said, ‘I know the difference between a dead kangaroo and a human smell’.

“I said how would you know what a dead human smells like, because I certainly didn’t.”

The inquest is continuing.