Investigator's comment: Attached are two photos, with respect to the affidavits re the hole in the wall at Yalleroi State School. The scale drawings show how tiny that school building was with its classroom and tiny backroom with storage cupboard which was probably a back verandah enclosed at some time prior to Bill's arrival. The top photo is from the classroom looking into the back room (Prosecution deliberately tried to make out it was a library or headmaster's office when it wasn't. All work was done in the classroom. No teacher would closet himself away where he couldn't see the students who were all grades, the entire school population). The bottom photo is the reverse - the back room looking into the classroom with the front verandah visible in the background.

The Hole in the Wall

One of the great farces of the campaign against Bill D'Arcy, and the rumours that gained credence in the press, was the myth of the Hole in the Wall.

It received great currency in the newspapers (photos of where the Hole was) and where D'Arcy was supposed to have been watched in his sexual exploitations. Anyone who thinks this sort of publicity woiuld not have prejudiced his trial, would have to be living on another planet.

If you don't want to read any further just be assured of this - there wasn't ever any hole in the wall.

No hole in the wall ever existed
Mr Kevin Keegan, caretaker / carpenter at the Yalleroi school issued a signed statement saying how "the police came about the middle of 1998" "to look for a hole in the wall". Keegan recalls how he had "just cleaned the building down at the time but it had not been painted".

He recounts further that he had had not "puttied up any holes because there were non to putty up. There might have been a few nail holes and the like but there were definitley no holes you could look through.

The building material was VJ, the old white pine, perhaps three quarters of an inch thick.

The police were there for a couple of hours on their own."

Original "reports" quoted students as saying that they had made a hole in the wall with their compasses!

In another signed statment, the painter of the wall, Mr John Carolan, stated that there were no substantial holes in the wall . . no holes consistent with being caused by a compass".

The myth perpetuated during the trial (to the jury of course)
The story of the Hole in the Wall was still current at the time of D'Arcy's trial. A Mr Rodney Alexander Russell ( a former pupil at the Yalleroi school) was cross-examined under oath by the prosecutor Mr Bullock -

"Mr Russell, do you know anything about a hole between the back of the classroom and the library?"

Rodney Russell: "Not that I recall."

Bullock: "Do you remember looking through one at any stage?"

Rodney Russell: "No"

(More to come)