William Tyrrell medical report reveals missing child had chronic health problems

One of missing toddler William Tyrrell’s final medical reports show he had chronic physical and emotional problems, including speech and hearing issues, and was often an unhappy, solitary child.

Four months before he disappeared, then two-and-a-half year old William had a ‘chronic cough’, ‘mild hearing loss’ and ‘difficulty with speech production’, Daily Mail Australia can exclusively reveal.

He also had an allergic rash called ‘geographic tongue’, and problems with pronouncing the letters ‘s’ and ‘t’.

William had also been assessed with ‘some deficits in gross motor function and emotional wellbeing’.

The teachers at the childcare centre he attended three days a week observed that he ‘often engages in solitary play’, but he was ‘beginning to initiate co-operative play’.

It is this childcare centre on Sydney’s lower north shore where William had his final play session on the afternoon before being collected by his foster parents, known only as SD and JS, the day before he disappeared without trace.

The centre is a short drive from Chipmunks Play Centre at Macquarie Park, where William’s biological parents saw him for the last time on a contact visit on August 21, 2014.

During that visit, as Salvation Army Young Hope supervisor Ben Attwood had warned the birth mother that William had a black eye.

His mother also worried her son was ‘a bit too skinny’.

The birth mother said in a police statement after William disappeared that she was told William fell while clambering onto his foster mother.

‘[The case worker] said that William was climbing on the female foster carer and he had lost his balance and fell and that was how he got a black eye,’ the mother’s statement read.

‘Apparently it had happened on a Saturday but I don’t know how long it had happened before this visit.’ 

There is no suggestion whatsoever that the black eye was the result of anything but a typical accident of a toddler. 

It was later revealed that William was forbidden from eating chocolates or sweets and not frequently served takeaway food by the foster parents and that their stop at McDonald’s on his fateful last trip was ‘a treat meal’.

Some of the last images of William, aside from him wearing  a Spider Man suit on his foster mother’s verandah immediately before his disappearance are at McDonald’s near Heatherbrae, NSW, at about 6.25pm on Thursday, September 11, 2014.

The Macca’s stop was just under 16 hours before he was reported missing from Kendall on the NSW Mid North Coast to police. Searches for William have since found nothing.

Daily Mail Australia previously revealed how about a week before he vanished on September 12, 2014, that William fell over and and ‘couldn’t get back up’.

William’s foster father told a Port Macquarie detective two days later about how the child had recently fallen over at the foster parents’ North Shore home and had lain ‘awkwardly’ in a concerning way ‘for a boy that size and age’.

‘Only in the last week or so he was… you know when you’ve got the little stools that they stand on,’ JS told police.

‘So he was sitting next to one or on one in the kitchen in our place. And he’d somehow managed to sit awkwardly and fell back.

‘But he couldn’t get back up, which is something that has distressed me a bit.

‘He’s fallen backwards. That seemed to indicate to me that he had a problem with getting back up.’

The foster father believed had the boy been alone, he might eventually ‘have got himself out of it by just rolling’.

‘But they don’t think about those sorts of things. They think oh, I’m in a position I can’t get out of – and daddy, daddy’s here and daddy, daddy.

‘So you know you help them up and he’s all fine.’

In one of her police statements, William’s foster mother admitted that when they had taken William in, he had been violent and bitten her.

‘[William] had personal issues… particularly towards me, ‘ she said. ‘

‘We had to deal [with] things such as William hitting me, biting me and him being basically furious [that another child was at the foster parents’ house].’

The foster mother, who said the other child would ‘hide under the table and not come out, throw tantrums’ blamed William’s violent and ‘very erratic’ behaviour on his birth parents, who still had access visits.

‘The initial period when William first started living with [us] was very difficult. William had… disrupted attachment issues back to his birth parents.’