William Tyrrell’s foster mother heard a short, sharp, high-pitched scream like the sound of a child being hurt as she searched for the three-year-old immediately after he vanished.
She said the noise came from within reeds and tall grass near where she was frantically looking for William in his Spider-Man suit.
“It was like a scream when child hurts themselves unexpectedly,” she told the court on the second day of the inquest into the missing toddler’s disappearance.
“There’s a scream. It was quick, it was high-pitched and it was sharp.
“The noise came from the direction of the reeds and that really tall grass.
“I went walking through, went on top of that grassy knoll.
“I got into the bush and I thought I can’t see any red.
“I thought, maybe I imagined it. Maybe it was a bird.”
The foster mother again broke down in the witness box, this time as she described searching for him with neighbours.
She also revealed that her first thought when he vanished was that he had been abducted.
“My immediate thought was somebody has taken him,” she said.
Wearing cream trousers and shirt and a “Where’s William” ribbon in red and blue Spider-Man suit colours, her voice broke and she wiped tears away as she described suddenly not being able to see or hear her son.
She told the court that William had been “getting very bored” just before he vanished and they were waiting for his foster father to return from the nearby town of Laurieton.
She had been expecting her husband to return from a visit to the chemist and a telephone conference meeting between 10.15am and 10.30am that morning.
“William’s sister was still drawing,” she said.
“He was getting very bored with the game. He was running up and down.
“I said to William (and his sister) ‘you know what? Why don’t we go down and see if Daddy’s car is here yet’.”
When William vanished she embarked on a frantic search before her husband arrived home, sometime after 10.30am.
After running to his car in the driveway, the foster mother said she asked her husband, “is William with you?”
“And he looked at me and said ‘why would he be with you’,” she told the court.
“I said ‘he’s missing’ and he said ‘what do you mean he’s missing’.
“And I said ‘I can’t find him, he’s gone’.”
Her husband then “just bolted. He went running for William.
“I didn’t see him for ages after that. We were all calling out.”
William Tyrrell vanished from his foster grandmother’s house on Benaroon Drive in the NSW Mid North Coast town of Kendall between 10 and 11am on September 12, 2014.
He was three years old at the time and no trace of him has ever been found despite NSW Police launching a nationwide manhunt.
The foster mother said in the immediate aftermath of William vanishing she went “up and down the street, racking my brains”.
“I went into every single property. I went all the way around those houses, evefy single houses,” she said.
Yesterday, on the inquest’s opening day, the foster mother broke down as she described two strange cars in the street opposite her mother’s home that she later feared had been there to abduct both William and his older sister.
Asked by Counsel Assisting the inquest, Gerard Craddock, SC, at today’s hearing if she noticed the cars after William disappeared, she said the cars had gone too.
“I know in hindsight that they weren’t there,” the foster mother told the court.
“I can’t tell you how much I rack my brain and I beat myself up over not looking at number plates.”
After searching a bus stop in Benaroon Drive and fences on the perimeters of houses in the street, the foster mother said she dismissed the idea William could have run off into the thick scrub or up a steep path into bushland.
“Mum said there’s no way he’d be in the bush. His clothes would be torn,” the foster mother said.
“He wouldn’t have done it. It’s too steep.”
Asked by the lawyer representing local washing machine repairman, Bill Spedding — Peter O’Brien — if she had called him on the morning of William’s disappearance she said she had.
Phone records obtained by police confirm the call was made at 9.03am on the day in question.
The foster mother said she had become annoyed when her mother told her that she had been waiting two weeks for a washing machine repair part.
“I said ‘Mum it’s crazy, it doesn’t take two weeks’,” she told the court.
“And she said ‘oh dear, you don’t understand, this is how things are done in the country’.”
But asked if her mother could have exaggerated the two-week wait, given that Spedding had visited the Benaroon Drive house just days before William vanished, the foster mother agreed.
“Yes, she’s an elderly woman. She does tend to under-exaggerate, over-exaggerate at different times,” she said.
The inquest conducted by NSW Deputy State Coroner, Harriet Grahame, heard on Monday the foster mother had seen a “thick-necked” man in an old green-coloured car with spoke style wheels drive up the street on the same morning.
Due to apear before the inquest this week are the foster father, and William’s birth parents.
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