William Tyrrell inquest: ‘I didn’t want Frank Abbott near my kids’

The neighbour of a key person of interest in the disappearance of William Tyrrell has told an ­inquest she didn’t want him around her chidren.

Missing boy William Tyrrell. Picture: NSW Police

The neighbour of a key person of interest in the disappearance of William Tyrrell has told an ­inquest she didn’t want him around her chidren.

A former neighbour of Frank Abbott, 79, a convicted pedophile, said she didn’t want him around her children.

Abbott is serving a prison sentence­ for sex ­offences against three boys, and is watching proceedings on CCTV from a cell at the Cessnock prison.

Jodie Huntley, asked about living near Abbott in 2015, said: “I didn’t want him in my car, I didn’t want him around my children.”

Abbott was living 12 minutes’ drive from the village of Kendall when William went missing from outside a house on Benaroon Drive in 2014.

He had a caravan on a bush block, and Ms Huntley suspected him of using bones to lure her dog, Buddy, inside.

She told the court she had tried to get him to stop but he persisted, and she had followed the dog one day to see what was going on.

The counsel assisting the coroner, Robert Craddock, asked Ms Huntley: “Did you see anything happen between Mr Abbott and Buddy?” “Yes,” she replied.

“What did you see?”

She replied that she was horrified to see Abbott “had him sort of the end of the bed, with legs up, and tail up”.

Mr Craddock said: “Did you actually see whether anything was happening?”

“I don’t know if he had his pants up or penis out,” she said. Outside court, she said she thought Abbott was having sex with her dog.

Even before the incident with the dog, she said she would see him around the neighbourhood, and he’d wave his walking cane and try do get her to give him a lift but she ­always refused.

Ms Huntley and her husband, Peter, are two of 38 witnesses ­expected to give evidence this week and next. Abbott faced trial in the mid-1990s for the murder of Helen Mary Harrison, 17, whose body had been found semi-naked in a forest 26 years earlier. He was acquitted of her murder.

Detectives investigating William’s disappearance have been searching for possible links ­between the unsolved murders of three young women over three decades.

The inquest took evidence from Iris Northam, who was ­Abbott’s boss when he was charged with Harrison’s murder. He had to stop working to attend his trial, she said.

Iris Northam attends the inquest into William Tyrrell's disappearance at Taree Local Court on Wednesday. Picture: AAP

Detectives have looked for possible links between the murder of Harrison and that of Margaret Cox, a young mother who went missing from an Old Bar service station on the mid-north coast in 1996.

Ms Northam told the inquiry she had lived in Old Bar for more than 60 years, and Abbott had done some work around the house for one of her neighbours. She said she saw him a day or so after Cox’s body was found and had some concerns about scratches on his arm.

“My husband said, ‘What happened to your arm, Frank?’ ” she told the court.

“She said he told her: ‘It’s just oysters.’

“But they didn’t look like oyster scratches to me,” she said. “These were probably seven or eight marks on his arm, more like finger marks had gouged skin off.”

Cox’s body was found in Mud Bishops Reserve near Old Bar in 1996. Police have revealed no evidence to link her death to ­Abbott. She was last seen near the local Big Oyster service station on ­December 19, 1996.

They are also looking into the unsolved murder of a Morisset woman, Susan Isenhood, who was last seen hitchhiking near the Stag and Hunter Hotel at Mayfield on October 2, 1986.

Again, no link to Abbott has been established.

The inquest is continuing.