As a child, William Chapman dreamed of becoming famous. Charming, gifted, intelligent and determined, he appeared to have all the qualities needed for a successful acting career.
By the age of 10, he had already secured small roles in several BBC and ITV productions. For a time, his path seemed to mirror that of fellow Jackie Palmer Stage School alumni Eddie Redmayne and James Corden, who went on to achieve international fame.
His former teacher at the High Wycombe stage school remembers him as a “vibrant, talented and popular” boy from a “lovely family” who seemed to possess every quality needed to become a household name.
Tragically, that prediction came true in circumstances no one could have imagined.
William is now known around the world not for his early acting promise, but as the 24-year-old who, during a mental health crisis, entered the tiger enclosure at Yorkshire Wildlife Park near Doncaster and was fatally mauled.
Since his death, his grieving relatives have also been confronted with the cruelest side of online culture.
Videos purporting to show William’s final moments were shared online alongside vicious jokes and memes, including one that was reportedly created by United States President Donald Trump.
As the family mourns, they are also trying to understand how the tragedy unfolded and whether William’s contact with mental health services played any part in what happened.
William Chapman (pictured) was a talented young actor and attended the same stage school as Eddie Redmayne and James Corden
Altai, the tiger that killed William at Yorkshire Wildlife Park
The news struck his former drama teacher particularly hard.
Marylyn Phillips, 76, who taught William for more than 10 years, told Our News Outlet this week: “It was very difficult when I heard the news. It is just so sad when someone is young, talented and has everything going for them.
“It is heartbreaking when they leave the school, let alone something like this. They are a lovely family and they are devastated.
“They were always very, very nice and never pushy at all. Whatever their children needed, they had it. If he needed to be taken somewhere, he would be taken somewhere.
“They were just really lovely, honourable people. That is what makes it so sad. It is incredibly difficult.”
The events of last Saturday have been extensively documented. William was standing on a long footbridge above the tiger enclosure, where Altai—a 200kg Amur tiger that arrived at the wildlife park last year—was resting on a wooden platform.
He reportedly asked a stranger among the visitors to take a photograph of him with the tiger visible behind him.
Minutes later, horrified witnesses said he climbed or jumped into the enclosure in an apparently unhurried manner. The tiger attacked him, and although emergency crews arrived quickly, his injuries were fatal. William died at the scene.
At seven, William (pictured far left) appeared in ITV comedy-drama series May Contain Nuts alongside Harry Potter actor Shirley Henderson (pictured second from left)
At the opening of his inquest this week, William’s family questioned the support he received from mental health services in Doncaster. William had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and experienced periods of psychosis while living and working in the area as a self-employed online trader.
It is not the first time questions have been raised about Rotherham, Doncaster and South Humber NHS Trust, which has been pulled up on several failings in recent years, including within its mental health department.
Questions are also being asked about the role William’s online gaming habit might have played in his declining mental state.
Like many young men his age, he was an active gamer. Specifically, he appeared to be a big fan of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a fantasy game that sees players armed with crossbows and axes, slaying monsters and wild predators, such as large sabre cats.
Could William have been living out a fantasy, or become caught between the blurred lines of his online and real worlds?
A chilling thought for everyone – most of all for those who loved and cared for him. For William was loved, deeply. One of four, he was born in Chichester, West Sussex, into a creative family.
His mother, Virginia Burges, 56, is a published author and violinist. His sisters are also musically talented.
It is unclear what, if any, relationship William had with his biological father Gary Chapman, the owner of a letting agents in Chichester where he lives with his second wife.
Just 24 hours before his death, William shared a number of startling pictures, including two topless selfies from a gym
William spent most of his childhood living with his mother, stepfather and siblings in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, where, on their relocation 17 years ago, his mother signed him up for stage school.
She’d often share updates on William’s acting career on social media, posting pictures of him studying scripts on the train to London or beaming at auditions alongside his sisters.
Aged seven, William landed a role on ITV’s comedy drama series May Contain Nuts alongside Harry Potter star Shirley Henderson.
Three years later he landed another role playing a young Edward Jenner in the BBC series True Stories.
‘He was very talented and very good, so this came across in all his auditions,’ Mrs Phillips remembers.
‘He might have been fighting against everyone else for roles, but he always seemed to come out on top.
‘He cared about what he did. If I gave him a script, it would be learned by the next time I saw him.
‘We always stayed in touch and our agency represented him for a time, but then he went on to college.’
As William entered his later teenage years his loved ones started to notice a marked change in his behaviour. He began suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a mental health issue known to co-occur with schizophrenia.
At 15, he then stopped going to his lessons at stage school and Ms Burges worried that her boy was slowly disappearing.
‘When my younger son, now 15, hit his early teens, my lovely, polite, happy and kind boy transformed into a being unrecognisable to me,’ she wrote in November 2017, on one of her parenting blogs on the ‘cure for troubled teenagers’.
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‘It must have been hard, he had all that testosterone circulating round his still relatively childlike body and it made him angsty, aggressive and confused.
‘At this time his OCD became a real problem and he stopped going to his extra-curricular dance and drama. I was worried. I didn’t want him to get stuck into a gaming obsession.’
For a while, with the help of attending martial arts lessons at the local leisure centre, William slowly started to re-emerge.
By the time he was studying for GCSEs, he’d started travelling, going away with friends to Greece and on a school trip to Uganda. He made a return to stage school and his academic work was soon back on track.
His mother was so proud and relieved that she shared her joy on social media.
‘I am in awe of his work ethic. William is a self-starter, has a healthy self-esteem and is well on his way to building a bright future,’ she wrote.
Those hopeful words, penned almost a decade ago, are painfully poignant now.
What happened in the years between this young man finishing his GCSEs, starting college locally to study drama, and moving to Doncaster are unclear.
Yet his family have insisted that while he was a patient under the care of mental health services in Doncaster, he was ‘highly functioning and independent with no care requirements’.
One neighbour, who lived across from William in a city centre block of flats, told Our News Outlet: ‘He was living there a long time. He was a lovely, lovely man.
‘He was absolutely harmless but he would struggle to speak to more than two people. He was very shy when I first got to know him but he soon opened up and was always polite and well-spoken.
‘For the past six months or so, he became very approachable and friendly. I usually saw him on a daily basis and I probably saw him about a week before he died. He did not seem his regular self when I last saw him.’
Just 24 hours before his death, William shared a number of startling pictures. These included two topless selfies from a gym, a picture of Sheffield Grand Mosque and an image from inside his Doncaster flat.
He then went on to share a picture of a helmet used by warriors in Ancient Greece on his pillow and a picture of a model SAS soldier brandishing the Ugandan flag.
Most concerningly, however, was an image of William sitting with a vacant stare, with an arrow in his mouth, holding a large crossbow in one hand and a copy of the Bible in the other.
It is an undoubtedly troubling image, yet in the background, sat on the shelf, is a card written to a much-loved grandson – a heartbreaking reminder of how loved William was.
Hours after posting this disturbing image, he travelled from his flat to the wildlife park where witnesses would later say they saw him dancing with headphones on as he walked through the car park.
He continued to walk through the zoo until he reached the tiger enclosure where he was also seen dancing on the bridge before scaling the fence and dropping to the ground.
In the moments that followed, witnesses described William dropping down on all fours, ‘praying and bowing down’ to the tiger, as people shouted at him to come back.
‘It looked like a performance,’ one zoo-goer, Anthony Hunt, 22, said later. ‘He got down where everyone could see him in the main viewing area.
‘He had his arms wide open like he was saying: ‘Come here, tiger. Kill me’. Then the tiger came and started to attack him.
‘He started to fight back and screamed. It was like he was just detached from reality.’
In the days that followed, the internet was flooded with hundreds of harmful AI-generated videos of William’s final moments, which his family have called ‘deeply offensive media’.
Yet even after the family called for an end to the painful videos, US President Donald Trump proceeded to share an AI video making light of the man’s death, which was dubbed ‘appallingly tasteless’.
Former neighbour Kim Bradley, told Our News Outlet: ‘William’s mother is a very good friend of mine, they are a lovely family.
‘It’s absolutely awful how people with mental health problems are treated generally. It’s an awful situation. The whole energy of it is really awful.’
On Thursday, an inquest into William’s death was opened at Doncaster Coroners Court, with the full hearing expected to take place in March next year.
The inquest heard that William had a history of mental illness and a diagnosis of schizophrenia, as well as sometimes suffering from psychosis.
Coroner’s officer Caitlin Brookes said that his family had expressed ‘a number of concerns’ about the care William had received while living in Doncaster under Rotherham, Doncaster and South Humber NHS Trust.
The healthcare service has since launched an investigation into William’s death, yet it is not the first time it has come under fire for its mental health service provisions.
Only two years ago, Cheswold Park mental health hospital in Doncaster was pulled out of special measures and was told by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) its overall rating remained inadequate.
Meanwhile, a survey from Rotherham Healthwatch in 2024 found 70 per cent of respondents rated the crisis service ‘unhelpful’, while half said that staff were not ‘caring, compassionate or understanding’.
Despite this, the trust has been pushing to improve its provisions for mental health, with Clerkenwell Health, an NHS research facility in Doncaster, being at the forefront of trialling the use of psychedelics to treat depression.
The specific concerns William’s family had over his care remain vague yet they remain ‘hopeful that the relevant authorities will do their utmost to get to the bottom of why our amazing son did what he did’.
In a statement released earlier this week, his loved ones said: ‘William was a bright, warm and engaging young man whom his family dearly loved – and William loved them back.
‘Sadly, William suffered from significant mental illness over a number of years and was consequently prescribed strong medicine.
‘It will be for the coroner to decide what played a part in his death. We would ask everybody to respect this process.’
A health and safety inquiry into the zoo will also be carried out by the City of Doncaster Council over the coming weeks.
And while Yorkshire Wildlife Park reopened its doors on Friday, including to the Land of the Tigers exhibit, William’s family are left picking up the pieces of a young life that had held so much promise.
