William Tyrrell’s foster mum has big legal win

William Tyrrell’s foster mother has had her conviction for assaulting and intimidating a child quashed on appeal after a judge found that she was under extraordinary stress at the time amid a heartbreaking set of circumstances surrounding the toddler’s disappearance.

The 59-year-old woman, who cannot be identified, appeared before the Downing Centre District Court on Friday where she learned her convictions would be quashed and her sentence would be reduced over a series of incidents which were captured on secret police recordings.

The foster mother was convicted for a number of incidents which relate to a child, who is not William, inside her family home in 2021.

She appeared before an appeal hearing in April, arguing that her sentence and convictions should be quashed for charges of intimidation and assault.

She was found guilty in the local court of intimidation relating to threats to slap the child during an argument inside her family home over the unloading of a dishwasher in 2021.

As part of the investigation into William’s disappearance, police planted surveillance devices in the home and car of William’s foster parents.

In a recording previously played to the court, the woman repeatedly admonished the child, saying at one point: “I’m going to slap you” and “I’m sick to death of it”.

The woman was also convicted in the Local Court for two counts of assault after she pleaded guilty to kicking the child and hitting the child with a wooden spoon.

She was sentenced to a 12-month community corrections order.

The court heard the incidents occurred in January and October 2021 but she was not charged until November that year because police were waiting for her to appear at a secretive NSW Crime Commission hearing.

Her legal team argued the wooden spoon incident was a case of “excessive lawful correction”, pointing out she had shown remorse immediately to the child and a friend.

Judge Miiko Kumar found while the intimidation and assault offences were proven, she said they should have been dealt with without proceeding to conviction,

She quashed the woman’s convictions and ordered that she serve a 12-month conditional release order, which require her to be of good behaviour.

Judge Kumar took into account the woman’s mental health, that she had led a “blameless” life, had no criminal record and had been a person who had fostered many children.

She said the incidents occurred against a “unique” and “heartbreaking” set of circumstances and her subjective case was “about as powerful… as could be imagined”.

“At the time she had been under an extraordinary degree of emotional distress in the shadow of the disappearance of a foster child without knowing what had been his fate,” Judge Kumar said.

The woman did not speak to media outside court on Friday as lengthy court proceedings against the woman and her husband came to an end.

The court previously heard she was considered by police to be a person of interest and that she was suspected of having disposed of William’s body.

It’s an allegation she was repeatedly denied and her barrister John Stratton SC earlier this year described them as “unfounded suspicions”.

William was three when he vanished from his foster grandmother’s home at Kendall on the NSW Mid-North Coast in September 2014.

No one has ever been charged with William’s disappearance and an inquest into his suspected death is due to hand down its findings in the near future.

The woman was charged with lying to the Crime Commission after being asked about the wooden spoon incident.

And she was in November 2022 acquitted after a magistrate found it could not be found beyond a reasonable doubt that she had knowingly lied.

In February, William’s foster father also had his conviction quashed for intimidating a child relating to an incident during which he yelled and swore at the child as he took them to school in November, 2020.