EXCLUSIVE
The man once considered the prime suspect in the disappearance of William Tyrrell has described how the three-year-old boy’s adoptive grandmother harassed him over the case.
Paul Savage, who was attacked by Task Force Tyrrell commander Gary Jubelin before being dismissed from the role, described the strange behavior of the woman whose home was the last place William was last seen alive.
Savage remembers going to the foster grandmother’s house after the alarm sounded on Sept. 12, 2014, when neighbors helped in the desperate search.
He still lives opposite the house in Benaroon Drive, Kendall, on the New South Wales north coast, where William disappeared while wearing his blue and red Spider-Man suit.
Savage told Daily Mail Australia that when he and other residents arrived at the house, the foster grandmother “kept saying William had been there on the terrace and then gone,” he recalled.
He said William’s adoptive father was in the house, but his adoptive mother was not. None of the host family members can be identified for legal reasons.
Savage, now 80 but still fit, said he quickly headed to the bush verges beyond the top of the road, which he knew from his daily walks, to look for William.
William’s adoptive grandmother, up with a police officer during a crime scene tour of the home where the boy disappeared from, was never called to testify at the investigation into the boy’s disappearance.
Paul Savage said that on the morning William disappeared, neighbors were called to the grandmother’s house to help in the search for the three-year-old boy who is still missing.
Police searched the foster grandmother’s home in late 2021 as the task force rejuvenated investigations into what has become Australia’s highest-profile missing child case.
He said some neighbors remembered William from a previous stay at his foster grandmother’s house, when the boy had attended a street party celebrating the 90th birthday of a local resident.
“The boy just wouldn’t let his adoptive father out of his sight, he followed him around like he was stuck to him like glue,” Savage said.
He said it wasn’t evident that first weekend that William was anything more than a lost child, until more sinister theories emerged, such as kidnapping by a pedophile or a cover-up after a misadventure.
Savage later endured the look of suspicion on him when it was leaked to the media that he was a “person of interest” in the case.
Detective Chief Inspector Jubelin ruled out Mr Savage as a possible criminal and illegally recorded a telephone conversation with him from police headquarters in November 2017, then three in-person conversations on Benaroon Drive between May and December 2018.
No evidence has ever been presented to suggest Savage was involved and he was exonerated by Strike Force Rosann investigators who took over the case from now-ex-policeman Jubelin.
William’s adoptive grandmother (left) points out to a policewoman during a crime scene tour where William might have gone. Paul Savage (right) says the lady intentionally questioned him even before he was mistakenly declared a suspect.
But Savage said that in the months after William disappeared, while she was still living in the house in question, the foster mother would come and ask him questions that suggested she was suspicious of him.
Known to William Tyrrell’s inquest as ‘nanna’ who was having ‘cups of tea’ with the foster mother at the time William disappeared from her terrace, the woman was never called to testify at the coroner’s inquest into the disappearance and suspicion of William’s death.
“I don’t know who could have told her, oh he could have, but she would come up and face me and say clearly: ‘How are you, Paul?’, ‘What’s wrong?’, ‘You?’ “I want to talk about anything,” “what’s going on,” and he looks at me somehow,” Mr. Savage said.
“I tried to ignore her, but she kept doing it.”
The adoptive grandmother sold the house just weeks after William disappeared and moved out, later dying in 2021.
Eight months later, the police dropped the bombshell that they were now considering the daughter of the adoptive grandmother, William’s adoptive mother, as a suspect in William’s case.
Detectives recommended that the 59-year-old be charged with perverting the course of justice and interfering with a dead body, and a brief of evidence was handed over to prosecutors.
At a later hearing in local court on a different matter, a Tyrrell task force detective alleged that police told the foster mother “we know why, we know how” William disappeared and his body was disposed of.
“I have formed the opinion that (the foster mother) knows where William Tyrrell is,” Detective Sergeant Andrew Lonergan told Downing Center Local Court in 2022.
The adoptive mother has strenuously denied any involvement and the investigation will resume next month.
SF Rosann detectives have asked the New South Wales Director of Public Prosecutions’ Office to suspend its review of alleged evidence against William Tyrrell’s adoptive mother until after the next inquest hearings.