P: I’d like to have a chat about William himself, because he’s such a vibrant kid, every parent like myself has seen that photo of him in the Spiderman outfit and it just tears at the heartstrings, like you not knowing, what do you see when you look at that photo?
M: I took the photo, I took three photos, I do photo books, of what we do as a family every year. So every time we go somewhere I have my camera and I just take pictures of what they’re doing, and I thought Mum’s getting old, be really good for William and his sister to have memories of being at Mum’s. And my Dad passed away in February that year so that was really the first time we’d been back since Dad passed away, and we were going to go visit Dad’s grave, they were drawing some pictures to put on his grave, they were sending messages to Opa and things like that. I just thought, I want to just take some pictures of that.
So I look at that picture and I remember what we were doing and why we were doing it. I remember William just being absolutely beside himself with happiness at being at Nanna’s house, I remember the discussion with William about putting on his Spiderman clothes because I wanted him to wear a singlet, he didn’t want to wear a singlet, so the compromise was he’d wear a Spiderman t-shirt underneath his Spiderman clothes, so he was Spidermanned out, completely.
All these little things that I just remember, it was just, a normal family, doing normal family things, with their grandmother. D had an appointment which is not unusual, he works remotely. We were going to wait for him to come home and then we were going to go and visit Dad’s grave, then we were going to go out, so we’d planned the day. And I look at that picture and I just think, minutes, minutes, and our world has changed. His sister no longer has a brother, we no longer have a son, we no longer have a child, we no longer have our boy. My Mum is coping with her own grief because it happened at her house, it’s just awful.
P: She can’t blame herself.
M: No she doesn’t, well I hope she doesn’t, no she can’t.
IN THEIR WORDS: William Tyrrell's parents talk of the day their boy went missing and the 'living nightmare' they endure