William Tyrrell’s family urged to hire PR firm to lobby for reward cash

William Tyrrell’s foster parents were encouraged to engage a PR firm to lobby for more police resources, including more money.

Lost boy William Tyrrell.Picture: AAP

William Tyrrell’s foster parents were encouraged to engage a public­ relations firm to lobby for more police resources, including more money, as they fought to stop the case from going “cold”.

That firm, Insight Communic­ations, has worked pro bono for more than four years to keep William’s name in the news.

Costs to Insight’s business have been offset by donations through the Where’s William? website, and by selling William-themed merchandise.

More than $182,000 has been raised and spent, mainly distributing Where’s William? stickers and posters; media monitoring; and keeping the Facebook page active.

The public relations campaign behind William’s disappearance is the subject of this week’s episode of Nowhere Child, the podcast series from The Australian about William, a foster child who was three when he went missing from outside a house in Kendall, on the NSW mid-north coast, on September 12, 2014.

The team from Insight worked with the former head of the investigation, Gary Jubelin, to lobby NSW politicians to get the state’s first $1 million reward for a missing person.

“When we were talking … Gary discussed that a certain amount had been offered for (a) reward,” said Insight’s managing director and co-founder, Clare Collins.

“And William’s (foster) dad just said: ‘That is not enough. It’s not enough for my boy.’

“And there was strat­egic thinking in that. The concept was that if somebody — like a partner of somebody who might have been responsible for William going missing — if they needed to get away from that situation, the initial amount that was mentioned would not be enough.”

The campaign has been highly effective, both in securing the $1m reward, and in keeping William’s name in the news.

It put pressure on police, some of whom took umbrage at the ­involvement of private lobbyists.

“We didn’t like it, but you can’t blame them. If it was your son, what would you do? You’d do everything,” said one detective who worked on the case.

The mother-daughter team behind Insight, Alice and Clare Collins, told The Australian they understood why William’s foster parents wanted desperately to keep his name in the news.

Most missing person cases peter out after a year or so. The foster parents believed William might still have been alive and with the right approach, could have been returned. “In this situation, you want to do everything within your power to find your child,” Clare Collins said.

She said she heard about William being missing from friends of the foster parents, who emailed her while she was abroad collecting a campaign award, to say: “Have you seen about this little boy in the Spider-Man outfit who was abducted? His family are very good friends of mine, and they want to do a campaign.”

Mr Jubelin, removed as head of the Tyrrell investi­gation at the start of the year, agreed to engage with Insight as “he was very much aware of the public sentiment, and the fact that people weren’t coming forward with information’’, Ms Collins said.

“So the key piece that police wanted was people (to) come forward with information, but also, for people who think that he could still be alive, not to automatically assume that he was dead.

“That was really, really important for Gary, because the general public’s perception was — well, we can’t see the face of parents, we can’t, you know, we don’t know anything. He’s probably dead — which was very much not the case in Gary’s eyes.

“I remember Gary saying that: we don’t know. And I know that we couldn’t have done the campaign­ at that point, had we ­believed that there was a possibility that William had been killed.”

The Insight team still believes William is alive. “I like to think that he’s … somewhere being loved. Because to think of the alter­native, I couldn’t keep doing this. It’s too hard,” Ms Collins said.

The NSW coroner is conducting a formal inquest into ­William’s disappearance.