Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Caroline Overington, HarperCollins Publishers, $34.99.
The bright red and blue coloured Spider-Man outfit happily worn by the lively three-year-old William Tyrrell will forever be etched in our memory.
Missing William Tyrrell is a poignant and convincing consideration of one of Australia’s most inexplicable and sorrowful mysteries.
One minute the little boy is playing outside his foster grandmother’s house, near Kendall, NSW, and the next minute — he’s gone. How could he simply vanish?
On Friday, 12 September 2014, William disappeared from a quiet street in broad daylight. It was assumed he’d got lost in nearby bushland. Police suspected he’d been abducted. Despite an intensive search he has not been found. Even a $1 million reward has gone uncollected.
According to Walkley Award-winning journalist Caroline Overington, some people say it has been a long time now, so he “must be dead”.
“There is, in fact, no evidence for that. No trace of William — not a shoe, not a hair — has ever been found, and we should therefore allow for the possibility that he is alive, but even so, he still needs to come home.”
Overington’s rational observation is: “logically we know that children do not simply evaporate. Something must have happened. But what?”
William was not found, because he was not lost. He is missing because he was taken. It is a rare crime in the western world, the snatching of a child. It just doesn’t happen, except of course that it does. Here are some documented cases: the Beaumont children (Jane, Arnna and Grant) and Eloise Worledge in Australia; Benjamin Ely in the US; and Madeleine McCann who was taken from her hotel room in Portugal.
“The person or people who took William? He or she or they remain in our community. Probably they feel emboldened.”
How do we respond? The answer is clear: we don’t admit defeat. We go back now, and we start again … we press on until we bring him home.
One of Australia’s most prominent unsolved crimes, this is a disconcerting story of a disappearance, a family tragedy, a driven detective and a long and immensely frustrating police case.
Overington believes the book might jog the memory of readers on vital clues about the case. Fervently hope so.
