Explosive new documents from the William Tyrrell case have shed new light on the toddler’s troubled final days with his foster family, his violent behaviour and a ‘distressing’ accident before he vanished.
Exclusively obtained by Daily Mail Australia, the interviews with William’s foster family reveal troubling details about the three-year-old’s short life.
They include an accident where William fell off a stool and couldn’t get up, how he was made to change his own dirty nappy on the day he vanished and queries about the foster father mysteriously deleting six weeks of texts with his wife.
William’s foster mother – who is currently facing assault and stalking charges of a child who isn’t William – admitted that initially William ‘had personal issues …. particularly towards me’.
‘We had to deal (with) things such as William hitting me, biting me and him being basically furious’ with another child in the foster parents’ house.
The foster mother, who said the other child would ‘hide under the table and not come out, throw tantrums’ blamed William’s violent and ‘very erratic’ behaviour on his birth parents, who still had access visits.
‘The initial period when William first started living with (us) was very difficult. William had … disrupted attachment issues back to his birth parents.
William Tyrrell’s foster mother (above) said when the boy came to live with her he was ‘hitting me, biting me’ and was ‘basically furious’ and she blamed William’s birth parents for his unsettling behaviour
The foster father was interviewed by police at Port Macquarie two days after William vanished from Kendall, and again in 2016 when he theorised that mystery abductors might have bugged his car
William hit and bit his foster mother when he went to live at the foster couple’s North Shore home where in the days before he vanished he fell off a stool and ‘couldn’t get back up’
‘(William was) very unsettled, particularly the time immediately following contact with (his) birth parents. The unsettled behaviour after visits would last months.’
This was despite, as the foster father revealed in a police interview, that immediately before taking in William they had wanted to ‘help a family’ and then ‘there was a scenario that came up and the Department even said “you’d be perfect for”.’
‘It all fitted into place, I mean the ink wasn’t even on the paper. It’s like going from zero to hero.
‘It was very, very tough but we managed it .. and when I met William, you know, it was like he was mine.
‘I was his world, he was mine.’
But Daily Mail Australia can reveal for the first time the contents of the foster father’s first police interview, conducted just two days after the toddler vanished, in which he admits a ‘distressing’ incident.
The foster mother’s markings of where she, the foster grandmother and William Tyrrell were on the driveway of the house just after 9am on the morning the boy vanished
William Tyrrell’s foster mother blamed the toddler’s disruptive behaviour and ‘personal issues … particularly towards me’ on the fact he was still having contact with his birth mother (left) and father (right)
William was a ‘non-stop’ child and the foster father told detectives at Port Macquarie police station on September 14, 2014 about a recent incident at home on Sydney’s North Shore.
‘Only in the last week or so he was, you know when you’ve got the little stools that they stand on.
‘So he was sitting next to one or on one in the kitchen in our place. And he’d somehow managed to sit awkwardly and fell back.
‘But he couldn’t get back up, which is something that has distressed me a bit.
‘If he’s fallen and he’s fallen backwards, that seemed to indicate to me that he had a problem with getting back up.
The foster parents stop with William at McDonalds on the evening before he vanished from his foster grandmother’s house at Kendall the following morning
William Tyrrell was ‘non-stop’ active and around a week before he vanished from Kendall he fell over and the foster parents’ Sydney home and was lying ‘awkwardly’ and ‘couldn’t get back up’
The foster father, (above) with a detective on a ‘walk through’ of the property where William was last seen, told police abductors in two cars could have targeted the toddler
‘You’ve got the stool like that. And he was lying over it so it, it’s quite and awkward thing.
‘And I think for a boy that size and age would find that a little bit awkward… I mean if eventually I wasn’t there he probably would have got himself out of it by just rolling.
‘But they don’t think about those sorts of things. They think oh, I’m in a position I can’t get out of – and daddy, daddy’s here and daddy, daddy.
‘So you know you help them up and he’s all fine.’
In the interview, the foster father describes waking up on the morning of the day William would go missing, Friday, September 12, 2014.
He said both he and William stirred inside the room they were sleeping in together at about 5.50am.
‘He always wakes up and he says, oh, you know I’ve had an accident, you know, he wets his… because he still wears … pull ups.
‘But for some reason he always manages to fill them. And I said are you wet and all that sort of stuff and I said, okay well then you need to go , get up first and you need to get changed first okay and then we know and we can have a cuddle.
Police use luminol and a blue light to look for blood traces at the front garden of the former home of William Tyrrell’s foster grandmother in Kendall in November last year
The foster grandmother’s home (above, being searched by police last November) was being readied for sale and that was the reason for William’s foster parents’ fateful visit
‘And then he wants to watch a show … and then we watched …. Bananas in Pyjamas’.
In a later interview, two years after William disappeared, the foster father says William ‘woke up and then, you know, he’s giggling, he’s all over me’.
The foster father also gives a lengthy explanation of his behaviour after returning home to find William was missing.
Neighbours who witnessed him in the street at Kendall that morning later described his demeanour as ‘hysterical’.
The foster father said he was ‘off like a rabbit. I just started to go into meltdown mode. I immediately started bolting into action.
‘I’ve also, um, placed myself in, in with the SES and, um, made myself very, um, involved, with all parties wherever possible, I want to know what’s going on.
‘Even to making suggestions and recommendations about what to do and where to go.
‘But also you know, hearing advice from say Paul or Kim or you know, who else was running it. Tim, Mark Steve (These were the names of the police officers on the scene).
”All the team. To at all times of the night and morning to find out, suggest, recommend.’
The foster mother’s photo of her mother on the verandah with William and another child roughly an hour before the three-year-old vanished without trace
The foster father says in a 2016 interview with then task force commander Gary Jubelin that William was ‘a flamboyant little boy … full of beans’ and ‘a tough little kid’ but ‘wary of strangers’.
‘He’d cower behind you, so … we taught him, you know like stranger danger. If there’s someone that came in that they’d never met or they’d met only maybe once or twice before, they’d shy away.
‘He’d always stay well within, you know, eyesight. He wanted to see where you were.
‘He’d certainly be checking over his shoulder just to make sure that you were there or you weren’t far away.’
Asked if William would ‘wander into a bush’, the foster father said ‘he’d never do it, never, ever.
‘He had this sense about him, he knew where there was danger.’
In the Jubelin interview, the foster father explains a couple of bizarre theories about what possibly happened to William, and hints at washing machine repair man Bill Spedding and William’s birth parents – all of whom have been ruled out as persons of interest.
One theory included that ‘someone … put a bug on my car , a tracking device’.
‘So there were two cars, does that mean the intention was to take both children?
‘If it was that would lead me, my suspicion to say, that (the abductors) definitely knew the kids.
‘They’d have two cars, they knew there were two kids, taken them at the same time, take them in different directions.
‘The washing machine, (the foster grandmother) she wanted to get that fixed and there was someone coming into there to fix that.
William was a ‘very unsettled’ child to care for his foster mother said and although he bonded with his foster father his ‘behavioural issues’ with her continued for some time
‘I keep thinking and hoping that there is an element of someone who from the family.’
The foster father is asked whether he means the biological family and he agrees and says, ‘someone who knows something who knows something.
‘There’s always a connection you know … and I keep thinking back – why didn’t he make a noise when he was taken.
‘So that means one of two things, they had a hand over his mouth or he knows them.
‘That’s why he didn’t scream.’
At that point, 727 questions into the interview Jubelin interrupts and asks the foster father if William might not have ‘hurt himself accidentally’ and the foster mother and grandmother ‘panicked and covered it up with fear of losing’ the family’s other child.
The foster father says, ‘never likely’ and ‘no way’ and apparently starts laughing because Jubelin asks, ‘so you’re laughing at it and dismissing it’.
‘Yep absolutely … ’cause they’d never do it, even if he hurt himself, they’d never do anything like that. ever,’ the foster father says, and agrees with the Jubelin the suggestion is ‘outrageous’.
When the detective suggests another scenario of the foster father hitting William when he came home in ‘ a classic case of driveway tragedy’ he says ‘no’ and also denies another of Jubelin’s theories that the foster grandmother accidentally injured William and the foster mother was ‘covering for’ her.
The foster father says the theories are ‘laughable … just completely laughable’ and agrees it’s ‘absolutely’ inconceivable.
He says he didn’t see the cars the foster mother claims were on the street at 7am on the morning in question but ‘I believe her’.
He said although he and his wife to a certain extent ‘blame ourselves’ because William wasn’t ‘always in sight’, that ‘she doesn’t blame herself, she blames the person that has most likely got him’.
The foster mother marked on the top of the aerial photo of the house where she saw two vehicles on the morning of the day that William disappeared
The foster father is also questioned about apparently deleted text messages on his phone for more than than six weeks preceding William’s disappearance.
‘It’s noticed that during the period of (June 19 to August 3, 2014) there are no SMS messages contained in your SMS log. Why would you delete that?,’ Jubelin asks.
‘Is it a practice for you to delete SMS messages?’
Foster father: ‘Occasional yeah’.
Asked if he recalled ‘deleting a block of messages’, the man replied ‘no’ and was told the messages were ‘specifically for the foster mother’.
‘There’s ones before and there’s ones after but it’s just that time period there … and we know that there were from call charge records.
‘Just wondering if there’s you know a reason you might have got rid of a bulk number of messages, and if that’s the case there’s personal messages between you and (the foster mother) you think it’s appropriate to delete.’
The foster father said: ‘I don’t know I can’t recall’, and Jubelin changed his line of questioning.
In 2021 police charged both the foster mother and the foster father with assaulting a child, and then this year charged both with stalking a child.
Both foster parents are also charged with allegedly lying to the NSW Crime Commission.
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