HOW POLICE CAUGHT A CHILD KILLER
A TOY box sits on a desk in the offices of the Gold Coast Child Protection Investigation Unit.
It’s a sturdy wooden box, adorned with painted rocket ships flying through space, in which a little boy put all his favourite toys.
It would have been his whole world.
The adventures conjured up by the four-year-old owner would have been an amazing insight into his young life – one that was horrifically cut short.
The toy box has been with police for almost 10 years since Tyrell Cobb was killed by his mother Heidi Strbak. The child suffered a fatal injury at some point in the days leading up to his death and died while in the care of her boyfriend, Michael Ian Anthony Scown.
Strbak had left her young son with Scown while she left the Biggera Waters home for hours. Scown called an ambulance about 9.30pm, 20 minutes after Strbak left, when Tyrell stopped breathing, before carrying his lifeless body to paramedics.
The toybox remains a heartbreaking reminder of a child denied a chance to experience what life could offer.
Tyrell would have been 14 now – maybe a young surfie kid, a footy star in the making, or a boy genius dreaming of being an astronaut like those flying the rocket ships on his toy box.
A life of possibilities was brutally cut short by those who were supposed to protect and care for him.
In the days leading up to his death in May 2009, the toy box would have scared him. He may have been too afraid to touch it.
Claims were made that Tyrell cut his finger on the toy box and he was taken to hospital where he is given antibiotics for the wound. It was May 14, 2009.
Two days later his finger injury worsened and when he was taken to hospital for treatment, he had a broken finger.
It was claimed the toy box lid fell on his finger as he was pulling a toy from it, but this well-loved toy box had a safety hinge on it that made the lid fall slowly.
Ten years later the lid still falls at a pace that would barely bruise, let alone break the finger of a small child.
Ten days after the cut finger, on May 24, 2009, little Tyrell was dead at just four years old.
It has been almost a decade since his death, but police officers working the case are still affected by it. Seasoned cops who have seen the darkest side of humanity say it is the worst case of child abuse they have seen.
And it is.
A scale is used to determine whether injuries sustained by a child are abuse or not.
It is called the Dunstan Scale. Injuries rated between 0 and 40 can be considered accidental, or just part of being a kid with bruised shins, cuts and scrapes. Anything over 40 raises concerns.
Little Tyrell Cobb, a small boy who loved the beach and going to kindy, had a Dunstan score of 268. He was literally covered in bruises, head to toe – injuries so horrendous that the Bulletin will not print their details. IT was not an easy road to convictions against Michael Ian Anthony Scown and Heidi Strbak.
Investigations took years after an initial murder charge against Scown was thrown out of court in 2009.
The officer in charge of the Gold Coast Child Protection Investigation Unit, Detective Senior Sergeant Troy Penrose, has been there through it all.
“The doctors’ initial evidence (in 2009) was that there was a time frame so short (in which Tyrell’s fatal blows were delivered) that it could have only been one person,” Det Sen-Sgt Penrose said.
“In the witness box at committal, that (time frame) was blown out, a number of people who could have potentially caused the harm, which went against the initial investigation.”
The case, which hinged on the medical evidence, was tossed at committal and Scown walked.
“There was hysteria around it at the time on all fronts, on the community and certainly on ours, because we had to backtrack then.
“That doubt, that evidence doesn’t go away, it stays part of the investigation and the brief forever and a day.”
The Regional Crime Co-ordinator, Detective Superintendent Kerry Johnson, said detectives went back to the drawing board and started over.
“It’s not like a TV show where these things are solved in an hour,” he said.
“There was a full review and the detectives went out and sought more medical evidence.
“There were a number of experts.”
Det Sen-Sgt Penrose said they sought medical experts from not only Australia, but across the globe.
“Essentially what we were doing was trying to discredit our own initial expert, which sounds bizarre, but we had to source information from across the world to build a stronger medical brief that
THERE WAS HYSTERIA AROUND IT AT THE TIME ON ALL FRONTS … BECAUSE WE HAD TO BACKTRACK THEN
TROY PENROSE