Yunta, South Australia – October 9, 2025. The red dust of the Flinders Ranges still clings to the boots of those who scoured the endless scrub for traces of a four-year-old boy who slipped away like a whisper on the wind. August “Gus” Lamont vanished on September 27 from the sprawling 24,000-hectare sheep station at Oak Park, a remote outpost 300 kilometers north of Adelaide where the horizon blurs into eternity. What began as a frantic rescue mission—hundreds of volunteers, soldiers, helicopters, and sniffer dogs tearing through the arid terrain—has curdled into a somber recovery effort. Ten days of exhaustive searches yielded nothing: no clothing, no cries, not even a reliable footprint. Now, as the case shifts to South Australia’s Missing Persons Investigation Section, a voice from one of the nation’s most infamous child disappearance sagas cuts through the silence. Gary Jubelin, the former lead detective on the William Tyrrell case, has broken his relative quiet on the matter with a stark theory: the South Australian police, in their zeal to treat this as a simple case of a lost child, may be barreling down the wrong path entirely. “They’re learning from our mistakes,” Jubelin told reporters in a candid interview this week, “but if they don’t pivot fast, this could become another Tyrrell—endless questions, no answers, and a family shattered beyond repair.”

The disappearance of Gus Lamont unfolded with the cruel simplicity of a child’s game gone awry. It was a balmy late-afternoon on the station, the kind where the sun hangs low and golden over the saltbush, casting long shadows across the homestead’s weathered verandas. Gus, a shy yet spirited toddler with tousled blond hair and a penchant for exploring the dirt mounds that dotted the yard like ancient barrows, was last seen at around 5 p.m. His grandmother, Kerrie-Ann Lamont, had glanced out from the kitchen window, watching him clamber over a pile of red earth just 20 meters from the back door. She turned away for mere minutes—to tend to dinner or wrangle a sibling, accounts vary—before realizing the yard was empty. “Gus? Gus!” Her calls echoed unanswered across the paddocks. By 8 p.m., after three agonizing hours of family-led searches through the woolshed, the shearing quarters, and the nearby creek beds, police were summoned. What followed was a mobilization of unprecedented scale for such a isolated spot: 30 State Emergency Service (SES) volunteers daily, 50 Australian Defence Force personnel for two grueling days, infrared-equipped helicopters slicing the night sky, and even Aboriginal trackers with generations of bush knowledge combing the gidgee groves.

The property, a working sheep station owned by Gus’s extended family for decades, is a labyrinth of extremes—rolling dunes of ochre soil giving way to jagged rocky outcrops, dotted with salt pans and ephemeral waterholes that vanish in the heat. At 24,000 hectares, it’s larger than some small countries, yet intimately familiar to the Lamonts, who raise merino sheep and hardy cattle in this unforgiving frontier. Gus, the son of a local shearer and his partner, was no stranger to the land; family lore paints him as an “adventurous little walker,” content to toddle after his elders but never straying far. “He’s our quiet explorer,” a cousin shared in early appeals, her voice thick with the raw edge of hope. Yet the outback’s perils are legion: flash floods that swallow whole gullies overnight, venomous brown snakes coiled in the spinifex, dingoes prowling the fringes with pups in tow. Dehydration strikes swift in temperatures that swing from 30 degrees Celsius by day to near-freezing nights, and without water or shelter, a child’s odds plummet after 48 hours. Police Superintendent Mark Syrus, leading the Yorke Mid North response, captured the grim calculus on day five: “A four-year-old doesn’t disappear into thin air. He has to be somewhere. But the odds… they’re fading fast.”

Hope flickered briefly with a solitary clue: a small footprint etched in the dust, unearthed on September 30 about 500 meters from the homestead, near a cluster of mallee trees. It was the size of a child’s sneaker—Gus’s, perhaps?—trampled lightly in the soft earth, pointing vaguely eastward toward a dry riverbed. Searchers knelt in the dirt, hearts pounding, as casts were made and photographs snapped under the relentless sun. “It gave us direction,” one SES volunteer recalled, wiping sweat from his brow. “For a moment, we thought we’d track him from there.” But forensic experts dashed the spark within days. The print, upon closer analysis, belonged to an adult—likely a searcher’s boot, contaminated in the frenzy. A second mark, spotted midweek, met the same fate: unrelated, irrelevant. By October 5, Assistant Commissioner Ian Parrott delivered the gut punch: the ground search was suspended, the operation pivoting to recovery. “We’ve covered every inch we could with the resources at hand,” he said, his tone heavy with the weight of finality. “No tangible evidence of direction. The family has our full support, but we must be realistic.” Emotions boiled over at the press conference—volunteers in high-vis vests weeping openly, locals from Yunta’s tiny population of 60 murmuring prayers under their breath. Yellow ribbons, tied to fence posts in solidarity, fluttered like flags of surrender in the hot wind.

Enter Gary Jubelin, the grizzled veteran whose name evokes both reverence and regret in Australian true-crime circles. At 63, with a salt-and-pepper beard framing a face etched by 25 years in homicide, Jubelin led the initial probe into William Tyrrell’s 2014 vanishing—a three-year-old foster boy who evaporated from his grandmother’s backyard in the sleepy NSW Mid North Coast town of Kendall. What started as a presumed abduction—witnesses spotting a man in a red sedan, sniffer dogs alerting to scents leading off-property—morphed into a decade-long odyssey of infighting, leaked tapes, and a coronial inquest that exposed police biases. Jubelin, once hailed as a “cop’s cop,” resigned in 2019 amid allegations of unauthorized recordings, earning a $10,000 fine in 2020. Undeterred, he reinvented himself through the podcast I Catch Killers, dissecting cases with unflinching candor. Tyrrell’s file remains open, the boy’s Spider-Man suit-clad image a haunting fixture on milk cartons and missing posters, his fate presumed a tragic accident covered up by those closest to him.

From his Sydney base, Jubelin has watched the Gus Lamont saga unfold with a detective’s eye, drawing parallels that chill the spine. In a series of interviews culminating in a Today show appearance on October 8, he laid out his theory: South Australian police, scarred by Tyrrell’s early missteps, are at risk of repeating history in reverse—clinging too rigidly to the “wandered off” narrative while sidelining darker possibilities. “In William’s case, we fixated on abduction from the jump,” Jubelin explained, leaning forward in his chair, eyes sharp as a hawk’s. “We chased ghosts—suspicious cars, phantom sightings—while ignoring the basics: family dynamics, accident cover-ups, the human element. It blinded us for years.” For Gus, he argues, the inverse trap looms. “They’re treating this like a bush misadventure: a kid gets lost in the scrub, simple as that. But look at the evidence—or lack of it. No continuous tracks, no discarded shoes, no signs of distress. A good walker like Gus? He’d leave a trail, even in that terrain. This screams intervention—human or otherwise.”

Jubelin’s “otherwise” nods to the outback’s feral underbelly: dingoes, known to snatch livestock and, in rare horrors, unattended toddlers. Packs roam the station’s fringes, emboldened by drought-scarce prey, their howls a nightly requiem. Yet he doesn’t stop at wildlife. “Police are ‘looking at other possibilities,’ as they say,” he continued, air-quoting with a wry smile. “That’s code for foul play. Strangers? Unlikely in Yunta’s isolation—the nearest road sees more roos than rigs. But intervention? It could be internal: a family secret, a momentary lapse escalating into panic. Or external—a drifter, a poacher passing through unseen.” He points to the Lamonts’ full cooperation—no arguido status, no withheld interviews—as a green light, but urges deeper dives: phone records from the homestead, CCTV from the single petrol station in town, even cadaver dogs redeployed for hidden graves. “Tyrrell taught us: don’t assume happy endings. Explore every vector—wandering, accident, abduction, worse. SA cops seem open, using drones and tech we dreamed of back then. But if they tunnel on ‘lost boy,’ they’ll miss the turn.”

The Lamonts, a clan as rugged as the land they till, have borne the brunt with stoic grace. Gus’s father, a shearer named Trent, joined volunteers on foot, his calls hoarse by day’s end. Grandmother Kerrie-Ann, a pillar of the station’s daily rhythm, released the first family photo on October 2—a beaming Gus in a sunhat, dirt-smudged cheeks alight with mischief—pleading for tips. “He’s our light,” she said in a halting TV interview, flanked by relatives under the homestead’s tin roof. “We know this country like our veins, but Gus… he’s out there, or he’s…” Her voice trailed into the vastness. Community vigils light up Yunta’s pub and post office, porch lights left burning in a statewide chain of solidarity. Conspiracy whispers—stolen by traffickers, buried in a family feud—have been quashed by locals like indigenous elder Marlene Tiver, who slammed online trolls as “despicable.” “The Lamonts are good folk,” she insisted. “Kind, truthful. This isn’t some plot—it’s heartbreak.”

As October’s chill seeps into the ranges, the investigation simmers under the Missing Persons Section, a repository for Australia’s unresolved ghosts. Jubelin’s words hang heavy: a call to arms, or a harbinger of futility? In Kendall, William Tyrrell’s foster family still awaits closure, their home a shrine of faded posters. Will Oak Park become another? The outback, indifferent and immense, guards its secrets well. But for Gus Lamont, that shy adventurer with the boundless curiosity, one truth endures: somewhere in the red dust or the endless sky, a little boy’s story waits to be told. And if history rhymes, it may fall to voices like Jubelin’s to steer the search from the wrong direction—before the trail goes cold forever.