November 3, 2024 • 16 mins
What to expect at today’s inquest into William’s disappearance.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool is it recording?
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Okay, okay, Nina. In a few hours, the inquest into
William Tull's disappearance is going to resume and we're going
to be there, well you will, I'll be there. We'll
do daily reports on what's happening in court for news
dot com dot Au and we will do a full
episode of this podcast saying what's happened in court and
(00:25):
released on Friday evening. So that's the end of the
week's hearings. Yeah, but to make sense of what's happening,
we thought it was worth doing this bonus episode, which
is going to be short and sharp, just setting out
what this inquest is and what it's heard so far.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
That's right, because it's been going on for a long time.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
When did a start twenty nineteen twenty and going on
four five years. It's older than my youngest daughter, which
is extraordinary.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
So where we're at now, we know that the police
suspect the foster mother. Yeah, and they've been very clear,
but they suspect the foster mother.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
It's been on the front page of the newspaper saying
we have a suspect and we think we are close
to cracking this case. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
And it's been said in court as well.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
They've said in court explicitly we think William's foster mother
was involved in his disappearance.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
And all of that sort of started to come out
in the media and within the courts I think about
twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
One, after the last hearing of the Inkling Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
So we were looking back over the in quest and
what it covered, and it's a really sharp difference I think.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
I think the key thing was in the context of
the fact that police are now saying they have a suspect,
and that suspect is William's foster mother. The key thing
is that if you go through the records of the
inquest to date, there's no suggestion the foster parents are suspects.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
It's really not framed that way.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
In fairness, the senior lawyer who's working on this inquest
said investigators have not positively identified that no relatives were
involved in William's disappearance, so he's leaving it open. But
he also said, I suspect the evidence will show that
William was likely taken, that William's disappearance was likely the
(02:20):
result of human intervention.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Worldwide, these cases have proven to be the most difficult
to solve.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
This is counsel assisting the coroner, Gerard Craddock, sc who
was speaking at the opening of the inquest in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
If William was murdered, and that's a big give so.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
He said, Statistically, most murdered children turn out to have
been harmed by someone who knew them, and only very
few are harmed by strangers, and it's about maybe three
percent of cases. But he does say William might be
one of those cases.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
It may be one of those rare three percent of cases.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
And there's no suggestion in anything that he says or
the evidence of the inquest that he thinks will Mother
is responsible.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
The offender in such primes is a sneaky, complex offender
who has hidden his or her desires for some time
and has chosen to act on those desires.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
So that is strange. The police seem to be looking
at it one way, the inquest is looking at it another,
or at least they were. It's worth saying at this
point what an inquest is. An inquest is a court hearing,
but it's not a criminal court hearing. So in a
criminal court someone is found not guilty or guilty, and
the way it works is you basically have two sets
(03:35):
of lawyers, one prosecuting the case saying this person is guilty,
and one defending it saying this person is not guilty.
An inquest doesn't work like that at all. An inquest
is an attempt to find out what happened to somebody
who died, and it will have lawyers, but their job
is to investigate the case and represent the different people
(03:56):
involved in it. No one is found guilty, but the
idea is we find out what happened.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Can a coroner recommend that someone be charged.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
A coroner can recommend that a case goes to the
state's director of Public Prosecutions, who will decide if someone
is charged. And I've seen that happen. You have inquests
that start it becomes pretty clear that there's a lot
of evidence against one person in the coroner says I'm
going to stop this here and refers it off for
possible charge, and then it can end up in a
(04:27):
criminal court with a murder trial and someone can be
found guilty.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Now, I haven't been to many. I haven't been to any.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Inquests, I'll be honest. In quests as a journalist are fascinating.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
I've read through you know, findings of red through transcripts.
I've never actually been to one. There was a few
things I thought were unusual that. Yeah, and I just
wanted to run this by you because you've been to more.
It seemed to run for quite a long time.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
It's run for years, and it's been really stoped start.
The inquest seemed to have finished up. Yeah, it started
in March twenty nineteen, and it seemed to stop in
October twenty twenty and the coroner at the time said
she was going to hand down her findings in June
of twenty twenty one. And then it seems like the
(05:21):
police shifted focus and it seems like after that point
they started looking at William's foster parents. And that is
unusual because the police and the inquest normally work closely together.
So it would be good at this hearing that's starting
today if we can have someone explain what has happened
in the years since we last had a hearing. But
(05:43):
we don't know if that's going to happen because we
don't know which witnesses are going to be called. I
know that lists of witnesses have been drawn up and
sent to the different lawyers involved, and I've asked to
see that list to see who is going to give evidence.
I've asked more than once and it's not been provided.
The reason they say is that that list still hasn't
been finalized. Wow, so it's still uncertain.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
So the police of the inquest, they're normally working together.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Yeah, I tell you what is strange about this inquest
is who's not been called to give evidence. So three
different detectives have overseen the investigation to William's disappearance over
the past ten years. There was hands Rup, there was
Gary Jubil, and there's currently David Laidlaw. Now none of
them have been called to give evidence, and that's despite
(06:41):
different people asking for that to happen. So William's birth family,
William's foster family, and at least one of the other
lawyers have asked for those detectives to be called.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
And that's standard in an inquest generally.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
I would have thought it was almost the first witness
you call is the police officer in charge of the
investigation to say how the investigation went down.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Did they give a reasoning why? No, hands Rup, They.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Didn't really give a reasoning why any of them weren't called,
and you've ended up in a strange place in that.
The most senior cop who's been called to give evidence
was a detective sergeant called Laura Beecroft. She was on
the Strikeforce for about three years out of the ten
it's been running. She joined in September twenty fifteen, the
(07:26):
year after William went missing. Now, I've met Laura a
couple of times a long time ago when she was
working in the sex crime squad, and she struck me
as a dedicated, serious detective. But she was only on
the case for three years, and she wasn't the boss,
nor was she the second in command of the strike force.
She acted up in the role of second in command
(07:48):
at times, but she wasn't in charge, So why not
call her bosses?
Speaker 3 (07:54):
Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
It was really unusual. And there was parts of the
inquest where they were asking her questions like why do
you think this decision was made.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
More than that? So she was asked why her boss,
Gary Jubilin, may have made decisions he made, and the
lawyers were arguing whether she was able to answer that,
whether she could speculate about what was going on in
Gary Jubilin's mind. But Gary Jubilin was sitting in the
room at the time, so he went to watch the
inquest as a member of the public, and she was
(08:29):
asked what he was thinking. She was told, you can't speculate,
and what Gary's thinking. Gary is sitting there in the room.
He has publicly said he would like to give evidence
and has been not given the opportunity to do so.
So no one is asking Gary what Gary thought, but
they're asking Laura what Gary might have thought.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Yeah, very strange.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Something else that was strange was the way it seemed
to start and stop, and you'd have hearings and then
they'd stop for months without any explanation. Now you have
looked at this recently, and you've looked at there seems
to be a kind of a correlation between when different
leads are being pursued by the inquest or different witnesses
(09:10):
are coming forward. And we do know in the first
couple of years the police and the inquest team were
running an investigation because you had new people coming forward
we'd never heard about before, and the police and the
inquest seem to be working together.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Yes, they definitely did, and you can see the correlation
of timings where the police have obviously decided they want
to pursue some new leads or a suspect, and they've
obviously paused the inquest to give them space to do that.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
At least we assume that, well, I mean.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
We assume that, but the timings definitely do line up
for that, and.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
We don't have any better explanation because no explanation is given.
No explanation.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Yeah, and in some cases, you know, they'd say this
has been suspended for a very good reason.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
She's kind of a wink of it or a nod
that we are doing something in the background.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah, so you have to assume at that point, yes
they are working together.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
But I'm not sure it is the case that now
they are working together. So in June of last year,
the police sent a brief of evidence to the States
Director of Public Prosecution seeking advice on whether they could
charge William's foster mother, and Jeryard Craddock, who's the lead
lawyer working with the inquest, he said publicly, I should
make as clear as possible that this request for advice
(10:24):
has nothing to do with the inquest. It's not a
coronial referral. It did not come from the council assisting team.
That's his team. It's not a request for advice by
this court or anyone associated with this court, which is
all very gentlemanly and loyally, but I've never seen anything
like that where an lawyer will publicly say this thing
(10:48):
that's going on on this case we're working on that's
nothing to do with us. It struck me as very strange.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
So what we've said so far is the first in quest,
or at least the first part of it, very focused
on the search evidence from the foster parents, and then
the sort of second half of the inquest they start
looking into other persons of interest and presumably we're going
to come back to a very different scene because the
(11:18):
police have obviously got a new focus now. So it's
going to be interesting are they going to address that,
how quickly are they going to address that, and are
the police going to explain that well?
Speaker 2 (11:30):
For me, this is the big question about today's hearing,
is the sudden stop to the inquest. The last hearing
was in twenty twenty and the findings were due in
twenty twenty one, but now more than three years later,
the police are still investigating and the inquest is about
to start back up with no public explanation why so
(11:53):
we have to assume it's because the police have been
off investigating. So you're right. When it was today, we'd
expect the police to say what they have or have
not found, but we'd also expect answers. Have they ruled
out other persons of interest? And there have been those
(12:13):
other names which will go into later in this series
in some detail. I know you've done a lot of
work on that, but the reason those other persons of
interest are important are that if the police have got
evidence to back up their suspicion of William's foster mum
being involved, if they've got direct evidence of that, then
(12:34):
great they've solved the case. But if they haven't, if
they've only got a circumstantial case, then they have to
be able to rule out anyone else who may have
been involved. So those other names we've heard in the inquest,
they have to have an answer as to whether or
not those people can be ruled out.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
Do we have any inkling of what the inquest is
set to focus on.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
I think there's a few things we can expec So
the first of those is closed court looking at the
way the inquest has run over the years, It's had
a lot of times when the court has been emptied,
no media, no members of the public, and it's been
done behind closed doors. And that's previously been done at
the request of the police, and the idea is is
(13:18):
to protect their investigation or to protect the discussion of
police techniques, and that's all well and good, but we
have to trust them that it is being done for
the right reasons. Another thing we can expect is non
publication orders suppression orders where the coroner says, you cannot
say what this evidence is publicly, so in the media,
(13:41):
we can't do anything with it, and there have been
a lot of those to date. This case is surrounded
by secrecy, and again it's the same thing that can
be for really good reasons to protect people, to protect
the police investigation. But it means we do have to
trust that those orders being put in place for the
right reason and are being used in the right way.
(14:04):
It means that justice is being done behind closed.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Doors and those orders. The media can challenge them, right
and they have in the.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Past, Yes, not often with much success.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
Okay, so what else are you expecting to say?
Speaker 2 (14:21):
I'm expecting to see human moments, like when a few
years ago the inquest is being held in Sydney, but
it went up to Taree near Kendall, where William went missing,
and at the time, William's biological father said he couldn't
afford to stay there because it was miles away from home,
and William's foster mother offered to pay. So it's a
(14:44):
really simple human moment or at the end of the inquest.
So back in twenty twenty one, there was another human
moment where a ten year old girl a statement was
played in court on a video screen. And again because
of this secrecy, I can't say who that girl is,
and this is not her voice, but these are her words.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
I hope this speech makes you half the case. If
it doesn't, when I'm officially adult, I will be in
the police force, an detective specifically, and I will find
my brother and not give up until he is found.
Please help my family, most of all meet find our
precious William. In my mind, no one's trying. So I've
(15:27):
made the decision to do something about that, to talk.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
So again it shows you what's really at stake here,
which is people's lives, people's emotions.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
It's nice to have that reminder too, that that humanity
kind of exists within that system. That's so like, you know, regimented,
You've got to go here at this time, you have
to do this out of the judge.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Yeah, that humanity exists within the system that is quite inhumane.
But the one thing that is good about the coroner's
court is that they really focus on that. The coroner
will usually always say we are here because of the
person who died and their family are in the room,
and they will always concentrate on that, and that is
(16:11):
hugely important. So that, I think is what we will
see this week will be there for this podcast. News
dot com dot au will also be covering the inquest
daily on their site. I'm expecting to see something we
don't expect. Okay, mate, this is witness William Tyrell.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
I'm Dan Box and I'm Nina Young.
Cool is it recording?
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Okay, okay, Nina. In a few hours, the inquest into
William Tull's disappearance is going to resume and we're going
to be there, well you will, I'll be there. We'll
do daily reports on what's happening in court for news
dot com dot Au and we will do a full
episode of this podcast saying what's happened in court and
(00:25):
released on Friday evening. So that's the end of the
week's hearings. Yeah, but to make sense of what's happening,
we thought it was worth doing this bonus episode, which
is going to be short and sharp, just setting out
what this inquest is and what it's heard so far.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
That's right, because it's been going on for a long time.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
When did a start twenty nineteen twenty and going on
four five years. It's older than my youngest daughter, which
is extraordinary.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
So where we're at now, we know that the police
suspect the foster mother. Yeah, and they've been very clear,
but they suspect the foster mother.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
It's been on the front page of the newspaper saying
we have a suspect and we think we are close
to cracking this case. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
And it's been said in court as well.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
They've said in court explicitly we think William's foster mother
was involved in his disappearance.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
And all of that sort of started to come out
in the media and within the courts I think about
twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
One, after the last hearing of the Inkling Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
So we were looking back over the in quest and
what it covered, and it's a really sharp difference I think.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
I think the key thing was in the context of
the fact that police are now saying they have a suspect,
and that suspect is William's foster mother. The key thing
is that if you go through the records of the
inquest to date, there's no suggestion the foster parents are suspects.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
It's really not framed that way.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
In fairness, the senior lawyer who's working on this inquest
said investigators have not positively identified that no relatives were
involved in William's disappearance, so he's leaving it open. But
he also said, I suspect the evidence will show that
William was likely taken, that William's disappearance was likely the
(02:20):
result of human intervention.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Worldwide, these cases have proven to be the most difficult
to solve.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
This is counsel assisting the coroner, Gerard Craddock, sc who
was speaking at the opening of the inquest in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
If William was murdered, and that's a big give so.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
He said, Statistically, most murdered children turn out to have
been harmed by someone who knew them, and only very
few are harmed by strangers, and it's about maybe three
percent of cases. But he does say William might be
one of those cases.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
It may be one of those rare three percent of cases.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
And there's no suggestion in anything that he says or
the evidence of the inquest that he thinks will Mother
is responsible.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
The offender in such primes is a sneaky, complex offender
who has hidden his or her desires for some time
and has chosen to act on those desires.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
So that is strange. The police seem to be looking
at it one way, the inquest is looking at it another,
or at least they were. It's worth saying at this
point what an inquest is. An inquest is a court hearing,
but it's not a criminal court hearing. So in a
criminal court someone is found not guilty or guilty, and
the way it works is you basically have two sets
(03:35):
of lawyers, one prosecuting the case saying this person is guilty,
and one defending it saying this person is not guilty.
An inquest doesn't work like that at all. An inquest
is an attempt to find out what happened to somebody
who died, and it will have lawyers, but their job
is to investigate the case and represent the different people
(03:56):
involved in it. No one is found guilty, but the
idea is we find out what happened.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Can a coroner recommend that someone be charged.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
A coroner can recommend that a case goes to the
state's director of Public Prosecutions, who will decide if someone
is charged. And I've seen that happen. You have inquests
that start it becomes pretty clear that there's a lot
of evidence against one person in the coroner says I'm
going to stop this here and refers it off for
possible charge, and then it can end up in a
(04:27):
criminal court with a murder trial and someone can be
found guilty.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Now, I haven't been to many. I haven't been to any.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Inquests, I'll be honest. In quests as a journalist are fascinating.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
I've read through you know, findings of red through transcripts.
I've never actually been to one. There was a few
things I thought were unusual that. Yeah, and I just
wanted to run this by you because you've been to more.
It seemed to run for quite a long time.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
It's run for years, and it's been really stoped start.
The inquest seemed to have finished up. Yeah, it started
in March twenty nineteen, and it seemed to stop in
October twenty twenty and the coroner at the time said
she was going to hand down her findings in June
of twenty twenty one. And then it seems like the
(05:21):
police shifted focus and it seems like after that point
they started looking at William's foster parents. And that is
unusual because the police and the inquest normally work closely together.
So it would be good at this hearing that's starting
today if we can have someone explain what has happened
in the years since we last had a hearing. But
(05:43):
we don't know if that's going to happen because we
don't know which witnesses are going to be called. I
know that lists of witnesses have been drawn up and
sent to the different lawyers involved, and I've asked to
see that list to see who is going to give evidence.
I've asked more than once and it's not been provided.
The reason they say is that that list still hasn't
been finalized. Wow, so it's still uncertain.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
So the police of the inquest, they're normally working together.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Yeah, I tell you what is strange about this inquest
is who's not been called to give evidence. So three
different detectives have overseen the investigation to William's disappearance over
the past ten years. There was hands Rup, there was
Gary Jubil, and there's currently David Laidlaw. Now none of
them have been called to give evidence, and that's despite
(06:41):
different people asking for that to happen. So William's birth family,
William's foster family, and at least one of the other
lawyers have asked for those detectives to be called.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
And that's standard in an inquest generally.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
I would have thought it was almost the first witness
you call is the police officer in charge of the
investigation to say how the investigation went down.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Did they give a reasoning why? No, hands Rup, They.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Didn't really give a reasoning why any of them weren't called,
and you've ended up in a strange place in that.
The most senior cop who's been called to give evidence
was a detective sergeant called Laura Beecroft. She was on
the Strikeforce for about three years out of the ten
it's been running. She joined in September twenty fifteen, the
(07:26):
year after William went missing. Now, I've met Laura a
couple of times a long time ago when she was
working in the sex crime squad, and she struck me
as a dedicated, serious detective. But she was only on
the case for three years, and she wasn't the boss,
nor was she the second in command of the strike force.
She acted up in the role of second in command
(07:48):
at times, but she wasn't in charge, So why not
call her bosses?
Speaker 3 (07:54):
Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
It was really unusual. And there was parts of the
inquest where they were asking her questions like why do
you think this decision was made.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
More than that? So she was asked why her boss,
Gary Jubilin, may have made decisions he made, and the
lawyers were arguing whether she was able to answer that,
whether she could speculate about what was going on in
Gary Jubilin's mind. But Gary Jubilin was sitting in the
room at the time, so he went to watch the
inquest as a member of the public, and she was
(08:29):
asked what he was thinking. She was told, you can't speculate,
and what Gary's thinking. Gary is sitting there in the room.
He has publicly said he would like to give evidence
and has been not given the opportunity to do so.
So no one is asking Gary what Gary thought, but
they're asking Laura what Gary might have thought.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Yeah, very strange.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Something else that was strange was the way it seemed
to start and stop, and you'd have hearings and then
they'd stop for months without any explanation. Now you have
looked at this recently, and you've looked at there seems
to be a kind of a correlation between when different
leads are being pursued by the inquest or different witnesses
(09:10):
are coming forward. And we do know in the first
couple of years the police and the inquest team were
running an investigation because you had new people coming forward
we'd never heard about before, and the police and the
inquest seem to be working together.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Yes, they definitely did, and you can see the correlation
of timings where the police have obviously decided they want
to pursue some new leads or a suspect, and they've
obviously paused the inquest to give them space to do that.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
At least we assume that, well, I mean.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
We assume that, but the timings definitely do line up
for that, and.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
We don't have any better explanation because no explanation is given.
No explanation.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Yeah, and in some cases, you know, they'd say this
has been suspended for a very good reason.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
She's kind of a wink of it or a nod
that we are doing something in the background.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah, so you have to assume at that point, yes
they are working together.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
But I'm not sure it is the case that now
they are working together. So in June of last year,
the police sent a brief of evidence to the States
Director of Public Prosecution seeking advice on whether they could
charge William's foster mother, and Jeryard Craddock, who's the lead
lawyer working with the inquest, he said publicly, I should
make as clear as possible that this request for advice
(10:24):
has nothing to do with the inquest. It's not a
coronial referral. It did not come from the council assisting team.
That's his team. It's not a request for advice by
this court or anyone associated with this court, which is
all very gentlemanly and loyally, but I've never seen anything
like that where an lawyer will publicly say this thing
(10:48):
that's going on on this case we're working on that's
nothing to do with us. It struck me as very strange.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
So what we've said so far is the first in quest,
or at least the first part of it, very focused
on the search evidence from the foster parents, and then
the sort of second half of the inquest they start
looking into other persons of interest and presumably we're going
to come back to a very different scene because the
(11:18):
police have obviously got a new focus now. So it's
going to be interesting are they going to address that,
how quickly are they going to address that, and are
the police going to explain that well?
Speaker 2 (11:30):
For me, this is the big question about today's hearing,
is the sudden stop to the inquest. The last hearing
was in twenty twenty and the findings were due in
twenty twenty one, but now more than three years later,
the police are still investigating and the inquest is about
to start back up with no public explanation why so
(11:53):
we have to assume it's because the police have been
off investigating. So you're right. When it was today, we'd
expect the police to say what they have or have
not found, but we'd also expect answers. Have they ruled
out other persons of interest? And there have been those
(12:13):
other names which will go into later in this series
in some detail. I know you've done a lot of
work on that, but the reason those other persons of
interest are important are that if the police have got
evidence to back up their suspicion of William's foster mum
being involved, if they've got direct evidence of that, then
(12:34):
great they've solved the case. But if they haven't, if
they've only got a circumstantial case, then they have to
be able to rule out anyone else who may have
been involved. So those other names we've heard in the inquest,
they have to have an answer as to whether or
not those people can be ruled out.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
Do we have any inkling of what the inquest is
set to focus on.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
I think there's a few things we can expec So
the first of those is closed court looking at the
way the inquest has run over the years, It's had
a lot of times when the court has been emptied,
no media, no members of the public, and it's been
done behind closed doors. And that's previously been done at
the request of the police, and the idea is is
(13:18):
to protect their investigation or to protect the discussion of
police techniques, and that's all well and good, but we
have to trust them that it is being done for
the right reasons. Another thing we can expect is non
publication orders suppression orders where the coroner says, you cannot
say what this evidence is publicly, so in the media,
(13:41):
we can't do anything with it, and there have been
a lot of those to date. This case is surrounded
by secrecy, and again it's the same thing that can
be for really good reasons to protect people, to protect
the police investigation. But it means we do have to
trust that those orders being put in place for the
right reason and are being used in the right way.
(14:04):
It means that justice is being done behind closed.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Doors and those orders. The media can challenge them, right
and they have in the.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Past, Yes, not often with much success.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
Okay, so what else are you expecting to say?
Speaker 2 (14:21):
I'm expecting to see human moments, like when a few
years ago the inquest is being held in Sydney, but
it went up to Taree near Kendall, where William went missing,
and at the time, William's biological father said he couldn't
afford to stay there because it was miles away from home,
and William's foster mother offered to pay. So it's a
(14:44):
really simple human moment or at the end of the inquest.
So back in twenty twenty one, there was another human
moment where a ten year old girl a statement was
played in court on a video screen. And again because
of this secrecy, I can't say who that girl is,
and this is not her voice, but these are her words.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
I hope this speech makes you half the case. If
it doesn't, when I'm officially adult, I will be in
the police force, an detective specifically, and I will find
my brother and not give up until he is found.
Please help my family, most of all meet find our
precious William. In my mind, no one's trying. So I've
(15:27):
made the decision to do something about that, to talk.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
So again it shows you what's really at stake here,
which is people's lives, people's emotions.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
It's nice to have that reminder too, that that humanity
kind of exists within that system. That's so like, you know, regimented,
You've got to go here at this time, you have
to do this out of the judge.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Yeah, that humanity exists within the system that is quite inhumane.
But the one thing that is good about the coroner's
court is that they really focus on that. The coroner
will usually always say we are here because of the
person who died and their family are in the room,
and they will always concentrate on that, and that is
(16:11):
hugely important. So that, I think is what we will
see this week will be there for this podcast. News
dot com dot au will also be covering the inquest
daily on their site. I'm expecting to see something we
don't expect. Okay, mate, this is witness William Tyrell.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
I'm Dan Box and I'm Nina Young.
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