Bill Carter, 25, tanned and quiet after three weeks chasing lions in Zambia, kisses his mum goodbye in a final time outside Perth Airport’s Terminal 3. Jenny O’Byrne snaps one last photo: her boy in a clean navy polo, forcing a half-smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. 12:42 p.m. – she drives away. 2:40 p.m. – he is seen walking straight into the sea at Trigg Beach, shoes in hand, phone already dead. By sunset, the Indian Ocean has swallowed every trace.
Western Australia Police have now released the chilling timeline that has turned a routine FIFO swing into one of the state’s most baffling disappearances.
12:20 p.m. – Brunch at Dome Café, Kelmscott. Jenny says Bill was “distant, but gentle.” He ate half his eggs, stared out the window a lot, and kept repeating, “I just need the noise to stop.”
12:40 p.m. – Dropped at Departures for Qantas flight QF1432 to Karratha.
12:55 p.m. – CCTV shows him checking in, collecting his boarding pass… then freezing in front of the security queue.
1:10–2:10 p.m. – For ninety excruciating minutes he wanders the terminal like a ghost. Past the bookshop. Past the bar. Past the gate where his colleagues are already boarding. He sits, stands, paces, sits again. No phone calls. No texts.
2:11 p.m. – He walks out of the terminal, hails the first available taxi, and gives one destination: “Trigg Beach, please.”
2:39 p.m. – The cab drops him at the northern car park. The driver later tells police Bill paid in cash, said “Thanks, mate” in a flat voice, and walked toward the dunes without looking straight ahead, as if pulled by an invisible rope.
2:45 p.m. – Multiple witnesses watch a tall man matching Bill’s description wade into the water fully clothed. One surfer swears he kept walking until the waves hit his chest… then simply disappeared under a set. No struggle. No cry for help.
His phone last pinged a tower 400 metres offshore before going dark forever.
Bill was due on site at Rio Tinto’s Cape Lambert iron-ore mine that night. When he didn’t show, his camp boss raised the alarm. By Monday morning, half of Perth’s FIFO community was sharing Jenny’s tear-streaked selfie with the caption: “Have you seen my son?”
The search has been relentless and heartbreaking. Helicopters with infrared. Jet skis. Drone teams. Dive squads combing the notorious Trigg rips. Cadaver dogs working the high-tide line. Nothing. Not a shoe. Not a wallet. Not even the navy polo.
Those who knew him best say the signs were there, just too quiet to hear over the roar of haul trucks and helicopters. A mate from the mines told 7News: “He came back from Africa different. Said the silence out there in the bush was the first time his head had been quiet in years. Then he got home and the noise rushed back in.” Another former girlfriend posted on Facebook: “He used to joke that the ocean was the only thing bigger than the hole inside him. I never thought he meant it literally.”
Jenny O’Byrne has barely slept. She keeps replaying that café photo on her phone, zooming in on his eyes, searching for a clue she missed.
“I told him, ‘Call me when you land, love.’ He never landed. He just… walked into the water instead.”
Police have not ruled out misadventure, but they are treating Bill’s disappearance as life-threatening. They urge anyone who was at Trigg Beach that Saturday afternoon to come forward – even the smallest detail could bring a mother’s son home.
Until then, every tide that rolls in at Trigg carries the same whispered question:
Did Bill Carter finally find the silence he was looking for… or did the sea simply take what the mines had already broken?
WA Police: 131 444 Crime Stoppers: 1800 333 000 Or just look at the horizon and say his name. Someone, somewhere, might still hear.
