I reckon the pressure is on. I think WA police handling of CS case and amazing police work has put spotlight on this case. I remember reading references to William Tyrrell still missing whilst they were still looking for CS
Looks like I am not alone in my thinking… Caroline Overington from the Australian has stated this
“Three things have happened this year to bring the police investigation to this point, including the discovery – or rediscovery – of these emails…
First, a new team of detectives was assigned to the case, after the departure of high-profile former homicide detective Gary Jubelin. They have been working their way through all the old evidence. And it doesn’t come by the boxful. It comes by the roomful.
They looked at all the old photographs of William, and they re-read everyone’s statement, from before and after he went missing. They found one photograph, taken just a few weeks before he disappeared, in which he appears to have a black eye.
The foster mother years ago explained that he’d fallen against a table, and she’d taken him to hospital as a precaution. But his biological family – who didn’t think he needed to be in foster care in the first place – were upset when they saw him with the bruise, and they wanted an investigation.
Police then found an email dated September 9, 2014 – three days before William disappeared – in which social workers described William’s foster mother as being concerned about his behaviour.
She was at the time trying to adopt William. He had started calling her Mummy. In her triple-0 call, she called him “my son”.
This was causing tension between the two families, who were still tussling over who would get to raise him.
According to the social workers, William’s foster mother said she was “close to giving up or giving in”. She was concerned about William being “emotional” after contact visits with his biological mother and father.
He was also having difficulty sleeping.
The social workers talked among themselves about “a certain amount of distress” and “dysfunction” being normal in foster children.
One then said the foster mother had told them she was “heading to her mother’s house this weekend” – and it was, of course, from her mother’s house, in the quiet village of Kendall on the NSW mid-north coast that very weekend, that he went missing.
So, that’s the first thing that happened to trigger this week’s new search.
Fresh eyes, you could call it.
Next – and this seems random at first – a little girl called CS, 4, went missing from a campsite in Western Australia, and after 18 days she was found alive and well. The WA police, the Prime Minister, the public – everyone was elated, and everyone agreed the search for CS was gold-standard, perfect policing.
Of course, there is a degree of professional rivalry between the state police forces. How come the WA cops could solve the CS case so quickly, while William was still missing after seven years?
NSW police chief Mick Fuller, who is about to retire, put a rocket under the strike force working on William’s case. Like everyone, he knows that the coronial inquiry into William’s disappearance, which is due to report in February, is likely to be critical of the NSW police: why didn’t they immediately seal the area when William went missing, as happened in the CS case?
Why didn’t they put up police tape? Why didn’t they check every car, look under every tarp, peek into every roof cavity? Why didn’t they collect all the rubbish in the street and DNA-test it? Download data from the mobile phone towers? Why did they let so many people come and go without checking their bona fides?
Why did they spend so long so publicly looking at certain “suspects”, at least one of whom is now suing for having his life destroyed in the process?
The search near Kendall less than 1km from where William Tyrrell was last seen. Picture: Peter Lorimer
William’s foster parents have been savagely critical of police, too. His foster mother told the inquiry that the new team of detectives, who replaced Gary Jubelin, wanted to turn it into a “cold case” because nobody believed it could be solved.”
