Bombshell as William Tyrrell inquest is suddenly SHUT DOWN before the its final hearing

The inquest into the disappearance of three-year-old William Tyrrell has been cancelled.

The final week of evidentiary hearings was due to resume on Monday, but will no longer go ahead.

A spokesperson said on Tuesday: ‘I can confirm that the coroner has closed the evidence in the Tyrrell inquest and cleared the hearing dates of December 16 to 20, 2024.’

It is not known when Deputy State Coroner Harriet Grahame will announce her findings.

William Tyrrell was last seen at his foster grandmother’s home in Kendall on September 12, 2014.

The mystery of the toddler’s disappearance has been forgotten for more than a decade when Lidcombe Coroner’s Court heard the NSW Police Strike Force in November. Rosann had not discovered any forensic or eyewitness evidence.

Several theories were put forward during the inquest, including that William’s foster mother hid his body after he ‘died from a fall’ out of fear she would lose access to another child in her care.

The foster mother, who cannot be identified, has repeatedly denied any involvement in William’s disappearance.

The abrupt closure by coroner Grahame comes after she refused the Tyrrell task force commander’s request to testify, and rejected the police’s request to re-examine William’s foster mother.

The coroner criticized the submission from Chief Inspector David Laidlaw, the boss of Strike Force Rosann, when the inquest briefly resumed in early November, saying it contained opinions rather than facts.

The document was submitted in a heavily redacted form.

Ms Grahame was also reluctant to hear further evidence in the week of hearings before Christmas, which she has now cancelled.

These include the testimony of a scientific expert about the removal of remains from the bush by predators such as wild dogs or foxes.

A video of the missing toddler’s foster mother being questioned by the NSW Crime Commission in 2021 after being identified as a person of interest was played last month during what are now the final hearings of the long-running inquest.

In the NSWCC interview, the foster mother was warned that she faced a prison sentence if she lied.

The 59-year-old answered “I don’t know” more than seventy times in more than two hours of questioning.

Crime Commission adviser Sophie Callan asked the foster mother why she had not immediately called Triple-0 or called the foster father when she realized William was gone.

Callan also asked why the foster mother took her mother’s Mazda onto the street immediately after the three-year-old girl’s disappearance. The foster mother said searching for William by car was “faster.”

When asked why it took almost 20 minutes between noticing Tyrrell’s disappearance and calling emergency services, she replied: ‘I don’t know.

“It’s panic… all I could think was, I don’t know, I was panicking. Where is he? I don’t know where he is.

‘I don’t know what I was thinking. All I could think about was that I had to find him. I can’t give you an answer to that. I remember driving, I remember stopping, I remember thinking I couldn’t see him, this is stupid, so I turned back.”

Callan played a phone conversation between the foster mother and a friend, recorded through a legal wiretap in 2021, in which the woman said William’s body would be found by ‘clearing’ local bushland.

“He will be found in thirty, forty, fifty or two hundred years when they do a clean-up and find the skeleton,” she said in the call played at the inquest.

‘I don’t think if I had done something to William and tried to cover it up, I would admit it. I just don’t see it in me.’

In the interview with the Crime Commission, the foster mother cried and denied that the phone call showed she knew where William was buried. “No, no, no,” she said.

There’s more to come.