When Terence Darrell Kelly went to the remote Blowholes campsite in Western Australia in the middle of the night, he was looking to steal a handbag. But he ended up taking a child. Emboldened by methamphetamine and masked by the noise of crashing waves, Kelly unzipped the front of a family tent between 2.40am and 4.40am on 16 October 2021, scooping up four-year-old Cleo Smith, sleeping bag and all, and vanishing into the night.
It wasn't until mum Ellie Smith woke at 6am that the horror set in – the tent was wide open and her daughter was missing. Within hours, one of the nation's biggest ever search operations had begun from the remote campsite on the state's midwest coast, about 10 hours' drive north of Perth. Horses, helicopters and drones were deployed while an army of police and rescue personnel spent days and nights scouring inhospitable terrain.
But it would be 18 days before Cleo would see her family again. At Kelly's sentencing on Wednesday, a Perth court heard the extraordinary details of Cleo's abduction and laid bare the dysfunctional life of her kidnapper. Most child abductions by strangers don't end like this one. As time ticked on, hope was fading that Cleo would be found alive. Abduction experts say that typically, children taken by strangers are killed within days, if not hours. But Cleo was found looking healthy, in a house filled with dolls and not far from her own home in Carnarvon.
University of Newcastle criminologist Xanthe Mallett described the case as an outlier. 'I was frankly astonished. It is an outlier in my experience – I've never heard of a case quite like it,' she said. The court heard that for nearly three weeks, Cleo was held captive at Kelly's nondescript state housing duplex. Locked in a room with a mattress on the floor, her captor would turn the bathroom radio on loudly to drown out her cries. Despite her young age, Kelly left Cleo alone in the house for hours while he attended meetings, went shopping, and visited relatives.
During his police interview, Kelly said there were times when he smacked Cleo or 'roughed her up' for being 'bossy' and asking for chocolate – but that he had not wanted to hurt her badly. He told police he tried to restrain Cleo's hands, feet and mouth with sticky tape and to tie her to a chair, but his attempts failed because 'she was a bit of a fighter'. On social media, while Ellie Smith made anguished calls for her daughter's safe return, Kelly cruelly befriended the frantic mother on the same platform.
WA district court chief judge Julie Wager said during sentencing: 'The fear and distress caused to them [Cleo's parents] over those 18 days was immeasurable. The child's life and that of her family has been permanently impacted, and that impact will never go away.' Ellie Smith told Channel Nine after Cleo's ordeal: 'As a parent you want to make sure that they stay as a child for as long as they can. She lost that; that was taken from her.'
