William Tyrrell podcast: foster parents requested tracking device search

William Tyrrell’s foster parents requested a search of their car amid tracking concerns | NEW EPISODE

Police near to the entrance of Benaroon Drive in Kendall. Picture David Moir

William Tyrrell’s foster parents asked detectives to check their car for tracking devices, concerned that somebody had followed them from Sydney to the sleepy village of Kendall with the aim of kidnapping the boy.

A transcript of a police interview, obtained by The Australian for its new podcast series, Nowhere Child, shows police testing the theory that William’s disappearance was the result of a targeted abduction, not a random kidnap.

Detectives told William’s foster father they were looking into “who could possibly follow you” but had found no tail on the foster family’s car.

The transcript shows the couple being quizzed: “Is there anyone that would want to target you … anyone in the family?”

“Not in our family,” the foster dad replied.

“You haven’t had any fallings out?”

“No.”

“Any debts owing?

“A mortgage.”

“Other than the mortgage, any personal loans to individuals?”

“No.”

“Anyone that would want to do you harm?”

“No.”

“Can you offer any explanation other than random why William might want to be targeted?”

William’s foster Dad, who had the boy in his family’s care for a touch over two years, says he can’t think of a single reason why anyone would want to do him harm.

He tells police that he had been praying that William was taken by somebody he knew, as opposed to a stranger, because he might then be alive.

The Kendall house where William Tyrrell went missing from. Picture: Nathan Edwards

He said he kept thinking back to the day William went missing from outside the property at 48 Benaroon Drive, wondering why the little boy didn’t make a sound.

William’s foster mum says he was out of sight for just a few moments when he suddenly went missing.

“So that means, either hand over the mouth, or he knows them, that’s why he didn’t scream,” the foster dad said.

“The other likelihood is that, you know, sliding doors, where an opportunist has seen him, found him, taken him, and going back to the two cars, does that mean the intention was to take both children?”

William’s foster mum has told police that she saw two suspicious cars parked too close together in the street outside her mum’s house in Kendall, between 7am and 7.30am on the morning of William’s disappearance.

The street is isolated, and practically a dead-end, and she wondered what they were doing there.

She saw the cars again at around 9am.

William disappeared in September, 2014. Picture: David Moir

The interview transcript shows the foster dad being interviewed about those cars.

“Sometimes I can be very observant,” he says. “Sometimes I cannot notice things, and I don’t recall any cars being in the street, but that’s not to say they weren’t there.”

Asked if he believes his wife’s account, he’s adamant, saying: “I believe her. I believe her.”

William’s foster parents have told police that hardly anyone knew they were travelling to Kendall on Thursday 11 September 2014 because it was a surprise decision to leave Sydney a day earlier than they had originally planned.

In the interview, William’s foster dad asks police if they had remembered to search his car for tracking devices after William went missing, saying he’d been wondering if “someone, you know, put a bug on my car, a tracking device.”

Detectives replied that they had looked “but not from a bug point of view … from a camera point of view. We’ve looked at cameras, and there was no-one, nothing there.”

Detectives examined footage from cameras around a Sydney cattery after the foster mum told them she dropped the cats off for weekend boarding before heading up to Kendall.

They also quizzed staff at the children’s crèche, after the foster parents said they stopped there to collect William and his sister, Lindsay, just ahead of the four-hour drive north.

Police checked CCTV around the McDonald’s in Raymond Terrace to see if the family was maybe followed out of the carpark.

William’s foster dad said he hadn’t told anyone he was going up to Kendall.

He said his wife’s mum sometimes talked in an open and friendly way with the people, and he wondered if she had maybe said: “My daughter and her husband and the kids are coming up.”

“But no one from my side, my family, or my friends or anyone knew we were even going up here … the amount of people who knew we were there was minimal,” he said.